Whenever faced with the decision to declare a “healthful environment” or freedom from harmful contaminants as fundamental rights, federal courts have invariably rejected those claims.
Environmental groups and the State of California are up in arms over an EPA memo scrapping a decades-old Clean Air Act policy. Will the DC Circuit weigh in on the EPA’s use of “guidance” to drastically shift US regulatory policy?
While some companies celebrate the EPA’s deregulation efforts, other companies are starting to understand that economic and environmental efficiencies can run hand-in-hand. The Carbon Disclosure Project helps companies see the connection.
Twenty-one children are suing the federal government over its failure to address climate change. But does the public have a fundamental right to the environment and is climate change an appropriate issue for courts to address?
It has now been just over 3 years since the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) first informed the public that Volkswagen, at the time the world's largest automaker, had installed ‘cheat devices’ designed to evade U.S. regulators in hundreds of thousands of their cars. Ultimately, the automaker paid a $2.8 billion criminal fine, and 9 executives and employees were charged with violating the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) and Title 18 of the United States code (the main criminal code of the federal government). Interestingly, though, no one was actually held criminally liable for the pollution itself.
