Sometimes the Supreme Court's silence can be just as powerful as a decision. Or as James Joyce said about "absence" - it's the "highest form of presence."The effect of the Court's declining to grant certiorari in the case of Chubb Custom Insurance Company v. Space...
Federal Environmental Law
Environmental Disaster Highlights the Need for TSCA Reform
Love Canal, New York; Cuyahoga River, Ohio; Times Beach, Missouri; Hopewell, Virginia; Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. These are the sites of some of the worst environmental contamination in our nation's history. Each of these disasters drew significant public...
Community Struggling to Recover from Chemical Spill in West Virginia
For much of West Virginia, the start of the New Year brought anything but "good tidings."On January 9, 2014, approximately 10,000 gallons of the hazardous chemical substance 4-methylcyclohexane methanol ("MCHM") leaked from a storage tank and flowed into the Elk...
Supreme Court Broadly Construes EPA’s Clean Air Act Authority
Confounding its critics for the seeming intrusion of politics into all of its decisions, on April 29, 2014, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the EPA v. EME Homer City Generation and American Lung Assn. v. EME Homer City Generation matters. In a 6-to-2...
U.S. Supreme Court to Review EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act
Go to the head of the class if you know the difference between CAFE standards and CAFO standards: in January of 2011, new corporate average fuel economy ("CAFE") standards went into effect, requiring all automobile manufacturers to curb the amount of greenhouse gases...
Soil Vapor Intrusion Concern Prompts EPA to Support Revision to Phase I Environmental Site Assessment Protocol
The health threats posed by physical contact with contaminated soil or groundwater are well known. But increasingly, state and federal regulators are recognizing that harmful vapors from such contamination can be drawn into nearby buildings and pose a threat to the...
EPA Excludes Certain Solvent-Contaminated Rags from RCRA Regulation
In a move that has made industry insiders "ecstatic," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy signed a final rule on July 22, 2013 which will exclude certain solvent-contaminated industrial rags or wipes from regulation under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery...
What does the President’s Climate Action Plan mean for New York City?
After the cap and trade program died in Congress in 2009, and the successor to the Kyoto Protocol never appeared at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, climate change stagnated on the national agenda of the United States. With a hyper-partisan Congress, it became...
When Does the Discovery of Historic Contamination Qualify as a “Sudden and Accidental” Release?
Many insurance policies contain a "pollution exclusion" which seeks to exclude coverage for losses arising from pollution, except in the case of a "sudden and accidental" release. "Sudden and accidental" may bring to mind a burst pipe or overturned tanker truck, but a...
EPA Announces New Tenant Protections Under Superfund
EPA has just extended to tenants the Bona Fide Prospective Purchaser ("BFPP") protection, by which Congress previously exempted certain prospective owners from harsh Superfund liability. Even where the landlord loses its BFPP protection, the new EPA enforcement...