EPA’s Office of Enforcement & Compliance Assurance (OECA) has completed a major update to its decades-old guidance documents that address its approach to enforcing the Clean Air Act ban on engine tampering and installation of aftermarket parts, adding detail to the policy and updating it to reflect new technology.
A federal district court has dismissed a Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) citizen suit filed by New Orleans residents aiming to require the city to bolster cleanup actions related to a city landfill beyond what has been prescribed under an EPA-sanctioned cleanup plan, with the court saying the suit has no merit under RCRA.
Environmentalists say EPA’s approval of the exemptions is unlawful and harmful to public health, and the incoming Biden administration could drop the Trump administration’s policy.
Growth Energy is threatening to sue EPA to force issuance of renewable fuel standard biofuel blending volumes, but others in the biofuels sector advocate waiting for the Biden administration to decide the issue.
Top Hill Democrats, former White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) officials and over four dozen law professors are backing environmentalists’ challenge to the Trump CEQ’s rewrite of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing rules, filing rare amicus briefs in a federal district court challenge to the rule.
The gas services company argues that an earlier consent decree with EPA excluding some of its equipment from regulation should also extend the exclusion to its Clean Air Act operating permit.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit stayed the use of a Clean Water Act (CWA) general permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline last month because the Army Corps of Engineers likely erred in approving the use of the permit for the pipeline, although environmentalists’ broader challenges to the permit are unlikely to succeed.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) is urging a federal district to vacate a pair of Trump administration rules that narrowed an Obama-era Clean Water Act (CWA) approach to determining the law’s scope, arguing the rules unlawfully “misapplied controlling Supreme Court precedent and ignored available science.”
Groups representing major industries have dropped their long-running suit against EPA over an Obama-era rule governing hazardous waste generators, even as companies continue to harbor concerns over potential penalties that could result if generators fail to comply with conditions for exemption from storage permitting requirements.
A new report by EPA’s enforcement office estimates that 550,000 diesel trucks have been tampered with over the past decade in violation of the Clean Air Act, and the emissions from those vehicles are equal to the lawful emissions from roughly 9 million trucks, signaling the area is ripe for additional enforcement.
