The Ninth Circuit held that BLM complied with NEPA and FLPMA when it allowed a uranium mine to resume operations, after a 17-year hiatus, under a plan of operations the agency approved in 1988. Environmental groups argued that the 1988 plan of operations became ineffective after the mine closed in t...

A California court rejected a challenge to the emissions offset component of California's greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade program promulgated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Under the program, all offsets must be additional, meaning tha...

A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated its travel management rule, but not NEPA, when it issued its record of decision approving the Stanislaus National Forest Motorized Travel Management EIS. The agency looked at a reasonable range of alternatives to the proposed action, proper...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the U.S. Forest Service's adoption of the Idaho Roadless Rule, which creates different categories of land within Idaho's 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas. The court affirmed and adopted as its own a lower court ruling that also approved the rule. FWS's biologi...

The D.C. Circuit denied a petition for rehearing of an earlier decision in which it upheld four EPA rulemakings governing greenhouse gases. EPA issued the rules following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497, 37 ELR 20075 (2007), in which the Court clarified that g...

A California court held that the environmental impact report (EIR) San Diego prepared for its regional transport plan and accompanying sustainable communities strategy violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it failed to adequately address greenhouse gas emissions. The EIR i...