DOI, acting through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, proposed to modify its criteria for determining whether oil, gas, and sulfur lessees, right-of-use and easement grant holders, and pipeline right-of-way grant holders may be required to provide bonds or other financial assurance above the current regulatorily prescribed base bonds to ensure compliance with their Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act obligations.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration proposed amendments to its hazardous materials regulations to require all railroads to generate in electronic form, maintain, and provide to first responders, emergency response officials, and law enforcement personnel, certain information regarding hazardous materials in rail transportation to enhance emergency response and investigative efforts.
FERC directed the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to develop a new or modified reliability standard to address reliability concerns pertaining to transmission system planning for extreme heat and cold weather events that impact the reliable operation of the bulk-power system.
EPA seeks comment on implementation of a plan to ensure that farmworkers have access to bilingual pesticide labeling by December 2025 under the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act of 2022.
EPA seeks comment on the draft Cumulative Risk Assessment (CRA) Guidelines for Planning and Problem Formulation, which describe steps for the planning and problem formulation of CRAs and offer guidelines for when they could be appropriate.
EPA announced a proposed consent decree that resolves Center for Food Safety v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 4:22-cv-6001-JST (N.D. Cal.), alleging the Agency unreasonably delayed responding to a petition for rulemaking, submitted to EPA on or around July 10, 2017, relating to the revision of testing requirements of pesticides prior to registration.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy notified the Earth Observations community that a draft of the congressionally-mandated National Plan for Civil Earth Observations will be released for a short national review period in Summer 2023.
The Inflation Reduction Act and Federal Buy Clean Initiative have each inspired states and municipalities to regulate embodied carbon (Scope 3) using “Buy Clean” policies and legislation. Reducing embodied carbon has become mainstream, and environmental product declarations (EPDs) have surfaced as the tool. Are EPDs alone enough? Is the compliance timeline sufficient? On February 1, 2023, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts that provided an update on Buy Clean policy, green funding, the status of carbon emissions, and a primer on EPDs.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office expanded the Climate Change Mitigation Pilot Program to include innovations in any economic sector that are designed to make progress toward achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, increased the filing limitations for petitions under the program, and extended the duration of the program.
FEMA seeks input on implementation of the Community Disaster Resilience Zones Act of 2022, including updates to the methodology and data used for the National Risk Index and any other hazard assessment products; potential improvements to FEMA’s provision of hazard data; the process used to designate community disaster resilience zones; financial and technical assistance for resilience or mitigation projects primarily benefitting community disaster resilience zones; and the community disaster resilience zone project application and certification process.