Monitoring the Environmental, Health & Safety and Energy Landscape
Week of August 31, 2026
Labor Day may mark the unofficial end of summer, but environmental and energy regulators, courts, and policymakers show no signs of slowing down. Last week’s developments focused on several familiar themes, including federal permitting reform, the ongoing evolution of Clean Water Act jurisdiction, state climate initiatives, the impact of Congressional…
Week of August 24, 2026
This week’s developments highlight the increasingly close relationship among energy security, emerging technologies, and environmental constraints. Nuclear deployment, grid resilience, data center growth, water demand, and chemical regulation are all creating new opportunities and new legal and operational risks.
Army Plans Major Microreactor Deployment
The U.S. Army plans to invest…
Week of August 3
This was another week where the courts were as active as the regulators. Decisions involving EPA authority, climate liability, renewable energy development, and grid modernization continued to shape the legal and regulatory landscape, while states and regulators wrestled with the growing demand that AI and data centers are placing on the…
Week of July 27
From restricting exports of critical minerals, nuclear waste lifecycle plans, climate change liability, OSHA’s structure, and clean energy tax credits to leaf blowers and politically motivated grant cancellations, regulators and courts spent another busy week reshaping the environmental and energy landscape. Reach out to connect with me or to discuss these…
Week of July 20
This week’s stories highlight how regulators, courts, industry groups, and policymakers are grappling with grid reliability, environmental compliance, workplace safety, and emerging technologies. Whether you are evaluating data center projects, navigating environmental permitting issues, assessing workplace health and safety obligations, or following evolving energy infrastructure policies, I would be happy to…
Week of July 6, 2026
As summer moves into full swing, federal and state regulators continue to reshape key areas of energy infrastructure, environmental compliance, and climate policy. Below are several developments that caught my attention this week.
Whether you are navigating PFAS compliance obligations, tracking permitting and infrastructure developments, evaluating energy transition issues, or…
This post kicks off a new series that we hope to put out every Monday. The goal is to highlight a few notable environmental and energy stories from the past week that we found interesting and that you may have missed. As you will see below, this is truly meant to highlight the story with…
On December 5, 2025, Craig J. Pritzlaff, Acting Assistant Administrator of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA), issued an internal memorandum instituting a “Compliance First” approach, immediately effective for all civil enforcement and compliance activities. This memo claims to introduce a policy shift: prioritizing timely and effective compliance over punitive enforcement and…
On November 20, 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Army published their proposed rule to revise the definition of “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Following more than a decade of litigation and WOTUS “repeal and replace” rulemaking, the current administration promotes…
