Climate Law Blog

By Hillary Aidun and Claire Hodges,  As Senior Fellow Amy Turner documented last year, a number of local governments around the country have moved to prohibit natural gas hookups in buildings. These prohibitions are part of cities’ broader effort to participate in the transition away from fossil fuels. However, some state governments have blocked those […]

By Amy Turner Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a long-awaited decision in California Restaurant Association v. City of Berkeley. The decision essentially – and subject to possible appeals – answered in the negative the question of whether Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation prohibition on natural gas hookups to newly-constructed buildings (often […]

By Jennifer Danis In a major decision, Environmental Defense Fund v. FERC, et. al (here) the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of the Environmental Defense Fund in its challenge to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s decision making on the Spire Pipeline, holding that FERC requires more than private, self-dealing contracts to find public need to […]

By Amy Turner   This week marked significant growth for the building electrification movement, as the legal pathways in use by local governments to catalyze electrification doubled in number. Previously, local governments had pursued building electrification through building code provisions requiring or incentivizing electrification expressly, or through affirmative “bans” on natural gas hookups to new […]

By Hillary Aidun On January 20 of this year we launched the Climate Reregulation Tracker to follow the Biden-Harris administration’s progress in undoing its predecessor’s assault on climate change policy by reinstating, expanding and building upon previous climate actions. Three months into the new administration, what has been accomplished so far? Key priorities are addressed […]

By Romany Webb Last Thursday, December 3, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced that it will conduct a sale of oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on January 6. President-Elect Biden, who has long opposed oil and gas development in ANWR, will take office two […]

By Romany Webb On Thursday, August 13, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a final rule rescinding the new source performance standards for methane emissions from facilities used in the production, processing, transmission, and storage of oil and natural gas. At the same time, EPA also rescinded the standard for volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions […]

By Amy Turner Earlier this year, I published on this blog about the wave of municipal natural gas bans enacted by municipalities in California and Massachusetts. At that time, two legal frameworks for these policies — which generally prohibit or restrict natural gas infrastructure in new buildings — had emerged. First, Berkeley, California used its […]

By Jennifer Danis On Tuesday, June 30, 2020, the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling en banc, held that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s use of “tolling orders” could not block judicial review of its gas infrastructure certifications. The Commission created “tolling orders” to grant itself additional time to answer landowners’ pleas for rehearing.  But […]

By Romany Webb and Hillary Aidun On Monday, June 1, the Sabin Center submitted comments opposing a Department of Energy (DOE) proposal to categorically exclude natural gas export approvals from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA’s implementing regulations allow federal agencies to categorically exclude actions if, and only if, they “do […]