A California appellate court reversed a lower court decision ordering a city to set aside its approval of a permit to demolish an historic building and to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) before considering reissuance of the permit. CEQA does not apply to the demol...

A California appellate court affirmed a lower court decision denying a petition challenging a city's approval of a project to build 560 residential units on a 200-acre site long used for agricultural purposes. A citizens group filed a petition, claiming that the environmental impact report (...

A district court denied various states' motion to issue a preliminary injunction compelling the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take all available measures to prevent the emigration of invasive silver and bighead carp through the Chicago Area Waterway System into Lake Michigan. In the face of multia...

The Ninth Circuit held that FWS' biological opinion addressing a hatchery project's impact on the bull trout in the Columbia River violates the ESA. Although the hatchery project is intended to mitigate a dam's impacts on Chinook salmon, it has seriously disrupted the migration and spawning activity...

The Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court's grant of summary judgment in favor of an environmental group requiring the USDA, under FOIA, to disclose the GPS coordinates of wolf depredations to which it had responded. The district court held that the coordinates were not exempt from disclosure...

A district court dismissed a motion to dismiss environmental groups' citizen suit against five coal companies alleging thousands of violations of the CWA and SMCRA in West Virginia. Because EPA entered into a consent decree with the companies, the defendants argued that the groups' CWA claim...

The Fifth Circuit held that a pollution exclusion clause contained in an oil well operator's insurance policy bars coverage for cleanup costs of an oil leak on leased land. The operator argued that the exclusion did not apply because the operator leased only mineral rights and that the surfa...

The Fifth Circuit held that a "farmout agreement," under which the owner of a federal offshore oil and gas lease transferred its rights to drill to another drilling operator, does not require the operator to bear a proportionate share of the costs of decommissioning an oil platform at the le...

A district court remanded the FWS' final rule listing the polar bear as a “threatened” species under the ESA. Shortly after FWS issued the rule, several groups filed suit, some arguing that the polar bear should have been listed as endangered, and others arguing that the bear does not qu...

The Tenth Circuit held that the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste allows its member states to exclude low-level radioactive waste from disposal at a Utah site. A disposal facility in Utah, a member state, sought permission from the compact to import and dispose of l...