Virginia Albrecht (explore the Clean Water Timeline), dressed in a black double knit pantsuit and wearing small gold earrings, makes her way to the dais at the front of a large room in the law offices of Hunton & Williams, where she works. She is one of the last to arrive and has missed most of the small talk but waves to half a dozen colleagues as she crosses the front of the room, where she will lecture on the complexities of getting permits for building and other industry projects under the Clean Water Act.
Before the conference begins, Albrecht, 69, leans into the woman next to her as though she is consoling her. Fifteen minutes later, “Ginna,” as her friends call her, seems surprised when she is called on to talk, as though she does not think it is her turn yet. But she breezes through her lecture, in a plainspoken, this-really-isn’t-as-complicated-as-it-seems manner. Continue reading Virginia Albrecht: Undermining the Clean Water Act – Drop by Drop
A unanimous Supreme Court ruling yesterday in favor of Mike and Chantell Sackett marks a significant victory for private property advocates. It also represents one of the biggest wins for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) in its 30-year history as a nonprofit law firm working to rollback environmental laws and advance a broad conservative agenda.
For the PLF, the story of an Idaho couple getting strong-armed by the Environmental Protection Agency while trying to build their dream home represented far more than the interests of a single family and their dashed American dream. It was textbook PLF. Continue reading EPA Loses Major Supreme Court Decision on Wetland Enforcement
Reversing his agency’s previous position, New York State’s chief environmental regulator now recommends an outright ban on high-volume hydrofracking within the New York City and Syracuse watersheds.
Joseph Martens, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, made the announcement July 1 just before the agency released major portions of its heavily revised rules for the controversial natural gas drilling technique.
Martens, who was appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in January, also said the DEC would drop its recommendation to allow drilling within state forests, wildlife areas and parklands. It also seeks for the first time a ban on fracking in primary aquifers.
The proposed new fracking bans represent a major departure from the DEC’s 2009 supplemental generic environmental impact statement.
A recent TEEB for Business report estimated that the world’s 100 largest corporations do $7.3 trillion in damages each year to the global environment. These “externalized” costs are not borne by the business itself, but by society as a whole. Changing the way that corporations do business is critical to solving global environmental crises such as climate change. In the book Corporation 2020, Pavan Sukhdev presents a vision of how » read more
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On DCBureau are a story and timeline about the history of the Clean Water Act and the efforts to undermine it. Together they show an incremental, well-funded, organized campaign to weaken the law. On the 40th Anniversary of the Act, it is important to remember that environmental laws enjoyed bipartisan support for years. Weakening environmental regulations through the Congress and courts will have lasting, irreversible results.
Read in The New York » read more
A new web documentary quotes security experts as saying the Savannah River Site, where massive amounts of weapons-grade plutonium and other dangerous substances are stored, is vulnerable to a terrorist attack that could have dire consequences for the entire southeastern United States. The documentary reveals the Site is guarded by a foreign-owned firm with a checkered security record. The radioactive material is stored in aging buildings. The small private guard force » read more
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