ELI In the News
In short, Trump’s administration can better protect against losses in court if the agencies seek to enact watered-down regulations that look like actual regulations, rather than trying to opt out of regulation altogether. During one roundtable, for instance, Scott Fulton, president of the Environmental Law Institute, said among developments to watch closely would be the Trump administration’s effectiveness and speed of response to any significant environmental crises (think BP oil spill).
Water managers in 40 out of 50 states anticipate water shortages within the coming years, according to a 2013 Government Accountability Office survey. Communities in some water-stressed areas already face limits to their development caused by insufficient water supplies.
Marchers carried tiny wind model turbines to the White House on Saturday, along with banners supporting solar energy, carbon taxes and pipeline resistance.
Long-sought Republican bills setting new limits on the science driving EPA regulations could mark the first shot in a broader campaign to rein in the agency’s authority, scientists told Bloomberg BNA... “Requiring that the underlying data be made public is not always possible,” Jay Austin, senior attorney at the Environmental Law Institute, told Bloomberg BNA.
Robert R. Twilley, executive director of the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program and a professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at LSU, is being presented the 2017 National Wetland Award in the science research category from the Environmental Law Institute for helping protect wetlands.
An internationally renowned researcher, he has produced 148 highly cited peer review publications, including the first global carbon budget of mangroves and work on the blue carbon value of mangroves. He also has pioneered a variety of research partnerships, collaborations and outreach projects. In addition to his work in the Mississippi River Delta, he has researched mangroves in Florida, Colombia and Ecuador.
Jeffrey Wood, the acting head of the Justice Department's environmental branch, is having to step aside from dozens of cases facing the government, both because of his past work for an Alabama law firm and Trump administration ethics restrictions, newly released documents show... While a fair number of recusals is not unusual for an ENRD chief, it can pose complications, "particularly in circumstances like this where a new administration has a different policy take on some of the matters that are captured by the recusals," said Scott Fulton, a former Justice Department and EPA attorney who is now president of the nonpartisan Environmental Law Institute.
Connecticut is ready for battle. But no guns, no grenades, no things that go boom here. Just a platoon of lawyers armed with the Clean Air and Water acts and a lot of guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the people I spoke with was Kathleen Rogers, the president of Earth Day Network, an organization taking a lead role in staging the march. (Earth Day is also April 22 this year.) Rogers is an attorney who has spent 20 years focusing on environmental public policy and law.
I thought it would be good to ask Rogers — who has held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic organizing committees — about the links between Saturday's event and Earth Day in general, as well as economics and the angry state of U.S. scientists.
What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
I’ve spent many years fighting to protect people from pollution, including agricultural pollution, but I’ve also spent years managing farms. I’m familiar with some of the challenges of farming, as well as the opportunities. For example, the farms I help manage have become model-certified and are more sustainable and profitable than when they were conventionally run.
President Trump's rhetoric has left many of the nation's top environmental lawyers wondering what will come of the Justice Department's environmental arm under his administration... Scott Fulton of the nonpartisan Environmental Law Institute noted that Trump's budget proposal would have not only slashed EPA's budget by a third, but also cut 45 percent of state grants — a major source of funding for state-led environmental enforcement.