Republican attorneys general from 20 U.S. states sued the Biden administration on Tuesday, seeking to block new reforms to the U.S. environmental review process for major projects such as transmission lines and wind and solar farms. The review process was included in a rule, finalized in April by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which would expand analysis of a project’s impacts to include potential impacts on climate change and environmental justice. The lawsuit, filed in North Dakota federal court, argues that the new reforms exceed the agency's legal authority, would increase project costs, and would unfairly favor clean energy projects. The reforms aim to streamline analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires environmental reviews for major projects that receive federal permits or funding.
Three California companies pushing back against state emergency regulations and water curtailment orders saw most of their claims dismissed by a federal judge this Tuesday. Los Molinos Mutual Water Company, Stanford Vina Ranch Irrigation Company, and Peyton Pacific Properties challenged the restrictions, which were in response to 2021 and 2022 drought conditions, naming State Water Resources Control Board members and board staff as defendants. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Drozd dismissed almost all the claims, in most cases without leave to amend. A single claim under the Endangered Species Act remains.
A statewide coalition has reached a multimillion-dollar settlement of its lawsuit against a global freight and shipping company accused of violating California laws related to the storage and handling of hazardous materials. XPO Inc. and XPO Logistics, which has two facilities in the city of Los Angeles, will pay $7.9 million in penalties, according to a statement from Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. The accord reached in San Bernardino Superior Court was entered in conjunction with 20 district attorneys’ offices.
The Kings County Farm Bureau and two landowners filed a lawsuit last week challenging a decision by the State Water Resources Control Board in April to place the Tulare Lake Subbasin on so-called probationary status. The move puts state officials, instead of local officials, in charge of tracking how much water is pumped from the ground in a region that state officials deemed had failed to come up with a plan to sustainably manage the resource. The lawsuit alleges the decision exceeds the board’s authority in “an act of State overreach” that could devastate the largely agricultural county of about 150,000 people halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A 3.5-million-acre swath of Mojave Desert between Ridgecrest and the Morongo Basin has received a new federal designation that advocates hope will help protect vulnerable wildlife like the Mojave desert tortoise. The area has been named a sentinel landscape, a federally led effort to promote sustainable land-use practices near military installations. The sentinel landscapes program was established in 2013 as a partnership between the departments of Agriculture, Defense, and the Interior.
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