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On Monday, which seems like a millennium ago, the newly constituted Supreme Court heard its first environmental case — which was a case about the secrecy of government deliberations. In this case, those deliberations involve the science behind endangered species protections.
Why This Matters: The case has ramifications beyond endangered species — it goes to scientific integrity and government transparency.
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This week we want to recognize former EPA Administrators Christine Todd Whitman and Bill Reilly for speaking out about the Trump Administration’s dereliction of duty when it comes to protecting the public from environmental harms. They are members of a group called Republicans and Independents for Biden and are vocally supporting the former Vice President because […]
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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Andrew Wheeler appeared at the Nixon Presidential Library in California last week and outlined his vision for a second Trump term — with promises to continue efforts to undermine agency science and climate change regulation.
Why This Matters: Wheeler claimed that he would focus on environmental justice and “revitalizing minority communities” while also explaining that “strict enforcement of national air pollution rules had hampered struggling regions such as the industrial Midwest.”
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Cartoon by Alex Bowman for Our Daily Planet As we wrote earlier this week, the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era rule that had forced coal plants to treat wastewater with more modern, effective methods in order to curb toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury from contaminating lakes, rivers, and streams near their facilities. […]
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The internal watchdog (Inspector General or IG) of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced they had opened an investigation into the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman reported in the New York Times last week.
Why This Matters: As Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the NYT, “this is really serious…It’s rare for E.P.A.’s inspector general to conduct an investigation of the agency’s rule-making.”
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The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to roll back a key regulation put in place by the Obama Administration that had plugged a loophole in the Clean Air Act — under the Trump Administration proposal, methane leaks in the transmission and storage of natural gas would no longer be controlled by the Act.
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