On July 15, 2020, President Trump announced a "top to bottom overhaul" of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations, deriding what he characterized as the "mountains and mountains of bureaucratic red tape in...more
On October 19, President Trump issued a “Memorandum Promoting the Reliable Supply and Delivery of Water in the West.” The memorandum calls for streamlining federal water infrastructure development and operations, apparently...more
Last Friday, the D.C. Circuit torpedoed a hydroelectric license issued in 2013 to Alabama Power Company because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) “declined to...more
In an unpublished opinion released August 24th, the Ninth Circuit rejected a long waged effort to upend the City of Bend’s water planning by forcing it to abandon its vested surface water rights in favor of an all-groundwater...more
While the Trump Administration has struggled overall to develop and implement coherent policies, the Administration has had some success in the environmental sphere. Through a series of presidential memoranda, executive...more
In companion cases, on June 28 the DC Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in its environmental impacts analysis of two Gulf Coast LNG terminals, need not assess the potential for...more
A federal court in Washington, D.C. gave some encouragement to transmission line developers—not to mention sponsors of other linear projects, like gas or water pipelines....more