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Recent announcements by the EPA provide some insight into its administration of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund

Environmental Justice (“EJ”) continued to prove a major focus of the Biden administration in 2022. With wide-ranging initiatives across several federal agencies, the administration worked to strengthen enforcement, release new tools and data, issue new guidance policies and memoranda, and create national offices, among other key actions.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it will continue to prioritize enforcement of, and compliance with, the Safe Drinking Water Act and federal drinking water regulations through Fiscal Year (“FY”) 2027, according to a January 12, 2023 notice.

In a move that could have far-ranging implications for projects that require federal permits and rulemaking across the entire federal government, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) published interim guidance on January 9, 2023, to assist federal agencies in assessing the greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions and climate change effects of their proposed actions under the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”).

New guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) sheds light on how the agency intends to incorporate environmental justice (“EJ”)¹ into air permitting programs across the country.

The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (“Army Corps”) delivered on their commitment to issue a new rule defining “waters of the United States” (“WOTUS”) by the end of 2022, releasing a pre-publication version on the final business day of 2022.

The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) has launched a new national office tasked with enforcing EPA-related civil rights laws in disadvantaged communities and overseeing billions of dollars earmarked for environmental justice (“EJ”) from the Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”).

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) represents one of the most sweeping pieces of climate policy legislation ever enacted in the United States.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (“PHMSA”) recently released the final rule in a rulemaking trilogy collectively known as the “Mega Rule” — a set of regulations designed to improve pipeline safety by reducing the frequency of pipeline failures.

Since 2021, the Administration has released several mapping tools addressing environmental and health impacts on environmental justice (“EJ”) communities.

On Sunday, August 7 the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (the Act) as part of the FY 2022 Budget Reconciliation bill.

The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) has recently finalized volumes for compliance years 2020, 2021, and 2022 under the Clean Air Act (“CAA”)’s renewable fuel standard (“RFS”) program and took several other related regulatory actions.