Insights Search

On June 17, 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published its proposed “Set 2” rule under the Renewable Fuel Standard (“RFS”) program (the “Set 2 Rule”).

On June 17, 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published a proposed rule that, if finalized, would repeal all greenhouse gas (“GHG”) standards for the power sector.

On June 17, 2025 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published a proposed rule to repeal the amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (“MATS”) adopted by the Biden administration in 2024.

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took the penultimate step to granting Texas the authority to directly issue Class VI permits under the Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control (UIC) program for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects when it proposed to approve the State’s primacy application.

On May 1, 2025, the federal government brought separate suits against both New York and Vermont alleging that these state’s “climate Superfund” statutes are unconstitutional on multiple grounds.

On April 8, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach” (the “Executive Order”), which directs the United States Attorney General to identify and halt the enforcement of state laws and civil actions that burden energy production and may be preempted by Federal law or are otherwise unconstitutional.

A series of recent actions undertaken by President Biden, near the end of his term, and President Trump, in the early days of his presidency, have called into question a key issue under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (“OCSLA”) — whether the President can revoke a previous President’s withdrawal of areas of the United States Outer Continental Shelf (“OCS”) from oil and gas leasing.

The past few years have seen concerted efforts — both domestically and globally — advancing the reporting and disclosure of various climate- and sustainability-related metrics by businesses and investors.

If past is prologue, while the second Trump administration is expected to take a number of actions that could lead to increased volatility with respect to renewable identification number (“RIN”) prices just as the first did, there are signals that the administration may take a more deliberate approach this time to reduce shocks to the RIN market, all the more given the interest in supporting renewable fuel production as a domestic fuel source. And while the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”) took steps last year that impact the ability of biogas projects to generate Low Carbon Fuel Standard (“LCFS”) credits, state legislative headwinds could eventually result in the opening of new environmental credit markets to shore up demand for renewable natural gas (“RNG”). Overall, while significant uncertainty and risk of RIN volatility remains, there continue to be signals from both the federal executive and legislative branches in support of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (“RFS”).

Despite the Biden administration’s public support for carbon capture and sequestration (“CCS”), we saw neither faster CCS permit approvals from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) nor a significant push towards state primary enforcement authority (“primacy”) during the former president’s tenure.

On February 19, 2025, the Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) released a pre-publication version of an interim final rule (the “Interim Rule”) to rescind all of CEQ’s previous and current regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) alongside a memorandum (the “Memo”) to federal agencies providing guidance on how agencies should revise their individual NEPA regulations and how they should manage NEPA reviews in the meantime.

In his first two days in office, newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump signed a flurry of Executive Orders, including several aimed at supporting the traditional energy industry.