The Office of Management and Budget, on behalf of the Interagency Policy Working Group on Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions, announced the availability of a finalized strategic plan on statistics for environmental-economic decisions.
USDA announced phase two of the Emergency Relief Program, which provides assistance to producers who suffered crop losses due to wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, winter storms, freeze (including a polar vortex), smoke exposure, excessive moisture, and qualifying droughts occurring in calendar years 2020 and 2021.
EPA proposed to issue regulations restricting the use of hydrofluorocarbons in specific sectors or subsectors in which they are used, establishing a process for submitting technology transitions petitions, establishing recordkeeping and reporting requirements, and addressing certain other elements related to the effective implementation of the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act; the Agency also seeks advance information on certain topics that may be helpful to developing a future proposed rule, including on restrictions on the use of hydrofluorocarbons for certain other sectors and subsectors and on a third-party auditing program to verify substances used in products.
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System seeks comment on draft principles that would provide a high-level framework for the safe and sound management of exposures to climate-related financial risks for Board-supervised financial institutions with over $100 billion in assets.
Over two dozen U.S. states and municipalities have filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, seeking abatement orders and compensation for climate damages based on theories such as public nuisance, negligence, and failure to warn, and alleging these companies knew about the dangers of their products, intentionally concealed those dangers, created doubt about climate science, and undermined public support for climate action.
This Article examines the nature of the threats that climate change poses and will continue to pose for salmon recovery, as well as possible legal responses to combat these threats. It also considers the future prospects of Pacific salmon in a world that will include significant climate change and other threats to preserving and equitably apportioning the salmon resource, whose environmental sensitivity and expansive life cycle will continue to pose substantial challenges for the foreseeable future.
Underregulation is a common and persistent environmental law problem, with recent scholarly focus on individual contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), whose harm is not fully known. But little attention has been given to the general trend of underregulation with respect to these chemicals, or explaining why this systematic underregulation occurs. This Article posits that federal agencies have been unacceptably slow to initiate protective regulations, and even once regulations are promulgated, they leave regulatory gaps that continue to expose populations to harmful effects.
The field of environmental law has seen many changes over the years, with demonstrable legal and policy victories for cleaner air and water. While the face of the environmental movement in its beginnings was predominantly male, women have become more prominent and influential within environmental law and policy over the decades.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service seeks input for the Service to use to inform how it will implement funds received under the Inflation Reduction Act to fund the deployment of climate-smart practices on U.S. farms, ranches, and forestlands through four Farm Bill conservation programs and on funding to quantify carbon sequestration and carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions at the field scale.
NOAA, on behalf of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, announced the availability of a draft Fifth National Climate Assessment report for public comment.