A New Jersey appellate court held that the state's Department of Environmental Protection violated the New Jersey APA when it withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program. In 2011, the state posted a notice on the Department's website that is was withdrawing from the RGGI prog...

An Alaska court held that state law impliedly preempts a ballot initiative that would allow a local borough to prohibit the issuance of a permit for large-scale mines that would have a significant adverse impact on salmon-bearing waters. The court rejected the state's claim that the initiative, loca...

The Ninth Circuit held that BLM did not violate NEPA or FLPMA when it approved the expansion of a gold mine near Nevada's Mount Tenabo. Native American tribes claimed that BLM failed to address mitigation measures specific to groundwater in situ, failed to propose new mitigation measures relating to...

A district court vacated a 2008 rule issued by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) that governs the operation of coal mining activities near and through streams. The 2008 rule revised a 1983 rule, retaining the previous rule's stream buffer zone requirement, but establishi...

The Ninth Circuit refused to rehear a case in which it previously ruled that environmental groups lacked standing to compel the Washington State Department of Ecology and other regional agencies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the state's five oil refineries under the CAA. One of the judge...