Daily News

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) and the attorneys general (AGs) of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia are suing EPA for the agency’s alleged failure to enforce the terms of the Chesapeake Bay’s landmark cleanup agreement and ensure Pennsylvania and New York meet their cleanup targets.

Major oil sector groups are suing EPA in a bid to weaken the agency’s national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants (NESHAP) for liquid storage tanks used at refineries, and they are also petitioning EPA to administratively reconsider the regulation to relax several provisions including a push for easier compliance terms.

In a case challenging EPA’s listing of a New Jersey industrial site to Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL), a three-judge federal appeals court panel during Sept. 9 oral argument questioned whether EPA inadequately disclosed data on nearby wetlands to the point where it prejudiced the agency’s ultimate decision on the listing.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and the Department of Energy (DOE) are suspending state and federal air pollution rules for power plants and generators to help ensure the state is able to maintain grid reliability, adding to multiple ongoing strategies to avoid blackouts amid a major heat wave and a series of raging wildfires.

California is seeking to overturn a federal district court judge’s potentially precedent-setting decision blocking the state from requiring companies to provide Proposition 65 cancer warning labels on products containing glyphosate, the active ingredient in many herbicides, because it violated their First Amendment rights.

EPA has issued a final rule extending by more than three years the deadline for electric utilities to comply with its requirement for a single “streamlined” electronic compliance reporting system for the mercury and air toxics standards (MATS) for power plants.

The California Supreme Court is denying a petition by Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) to review a state appellate court ruling upholding an air permit for a refinery-expansion project, ending the group’s bid for greater clarity on how agencies must establish emissions baselines when considering pollution limits.

In a precedential ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit has found limits to the liability shield a potentially responsible party (PRP) obtains under the Superfund law when settling cleanup recovery actions brought by states, saying other PRPs may still pursue cost-recovery at the same site if those costs relate to separate, federal claims.