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On January 9, 2019, President Donald Trump informed the U.S. Senate that he was nominating Andrew Wheeler to take over as administrator of the EPA. Wheeler has been filling in as the Agency’s acting administrator since early July 2018 when Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned under the weight of ethics controversies. The president announced that he […]
The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for development of oil and gas (O&G) resources on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Coastal Plain. The DEIS is required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and would cover leasing only; actual development would be […]
Permit writing, rulemaking, data collection and analysis, issuing policy statements and guidance documents, holding public hearings, maintaining community liaisons and other communication with the public and, of course, conducting compliance inspections—these are some of the critical EPA functions that ground to a halt on December 28, 2018, when the Agency’s funding ran out because of […]
One week into the partial shutdown of the federal government, the Senate approved by voice vote three of President Donald Trump’s selections for top environmental posts. Mary Bridget Neumayr was voted in to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ); Alexandra Dapolito Dunn was approved as assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of […]
Nine of the 12 states plus the District of Columbia comprising the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) announced that over the next year they will collaborate on forming a regional low-carbon transportation policy. According to the TCI, the intent of the policy is to cap and reduce carbon emissions from the combustion of transportation fuels […]
Hours before the EPA put almost all of its 14,000 workers on furlough because of the government shutdown, the Agency announced its latest measure to preserve coal-fired power in the United States.
Several federal lawmakers continue to press the EPA for information about the impact of its proposal (October 15, 2018, Federal Register (FR)) to weaken the Obama administration’s New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) governing air emissions from the oil and natural gas (O&G) sector (June 3, 2016, FR).
In a letter, Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) asked the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a division of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to resist any action by the EPA to withdraw or otherwise diminish its 2012 Mercury Air Toxics Standards (MATS).
The Trump administration’s new Federal Action Plan to Reduce Childhood Lead Exposures and Associated Health Impacts comprises four goals that will be pursued by many of the 17 federal agencies that make up the President’s Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children, which was formed in 1997 by Executive Order.
The world’s nations took another step toward addressing the perils of climate change at the latest Conference of the Parties (COP24), which concluded December 15, 2018, in Katowice, Poland. The most important product of COP24 appears to be a “rulebook” that will govern the implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Under the Paris agreement, […]