A district court dismissed a county's lawsuit against a railroad company for allowing its locomotive engines to idle in violation of state air pollution law. This case involves railcars, the fumes they emit, and the tracks they use. Accordingly, its falls under the umbrella of federal regulatory aut...

The Eighth Circuit upheld as moot a lower court decision denying a hunting club's motion to preliminarily enjoin a power company from constructing a 600-megawatt pulverized coal-fired power plant in Hempstead County, Arkansas, without first obtaining a prevention of significant deterioration permit ...

The D.C. Circuit denied an environmental group's petition for review of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality regulations governing the exclusion of emissions data from state reporting requirements during exceptional events such as natural disasters. The rule allows states to list s...

A district court set aside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS') decision not to designate critical habitat or to prepare a recovery plan for the jaguar. The FWS' critical habitat designation determination was not based on the best scientific evidence available and was inconsistent with the st...

A district court held that environmental groups' citizen suit against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for violating the Clean Air Act, the Tennessee state implementation plan, and related regulations in conjunction with its operation of coal-fired power plant in Bull Run, Tennessee, must procee...

A district court enjoined an energy company from building additional wind turbines at a wind farm project in West Virginia until it obtains an incidental take permit under the ESA for the Indiana bat, an endangered species. Indiana bats are present at the project site and the project is reasonably c...

A district court granted environmental groups’ motion for summary judgment finding that the NMFS and the FWS (collectively, the Services) acted arbitrarily and capriciously in failing to consider a mining company’s preexisting reclamation obligations as part of their environmental baseline analy...

A district court denied environmental groups’ motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the use of genetically engineered sugar beets. On the likelihood of success on the merits, the court has already found that defendants, the USDA and its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, viola...

A district court entered judgment for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) with respect to environmental groups’ claims that the TVA violated the CAA and the Tennessee SIP in its operation of a fossil fuel-fired electricity generating facility. The groups argued that two projects, the economiz...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the FWS' designation of critical habitat for the Mexican Spotted Owl. A cattle growers' association argued that the FWS unlawfully designated areas containing no owls as "occupied" habitat. But the FWS' interpretation of the word "occupied" in the ESA was permissible. The FW...