Insights

Washington – August 15, 2024: The 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 42 Crowell & Moring lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 29 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – August 17, 2023: The 2024 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 47 firm lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 41 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – August 18, 2022: The 2023 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 54 firm lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 32 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

In a November 15, 2021 Federal Register notice, EPA described a new policy under which the Agency will use “discretionary authority” to require reporting by facilities that are not subject to the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program. TRI reporting is governed by Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which requires facilities primarily in the manufacturing sector that handle threshold quantities of listed toxic chemicals to estimate and report the release of those chemicals into the environment “to help communities plan for chemical emergencies.” EPA has never before invoked its “discretionary authority” under Section 313, but is doing so now as part of its broader environmental justice initiative. In brief, based on application of “environmental justice screening” tools, the Agency is concerned that certain communities may be exposed to heretofore unreported releases of the carcinogen ethylene oxide (EtO) from facilities that are not otherwise subject to Section 313. Although EPA’s current exercise of discretionary authority under Section 313 appears to be limited to EtO, it is foreseeable that EPA could broaden its use of this discretionary authority to advance the Agency’s environmental justice initiative.

On February 27, 2021, the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (Working Group) published interim values for the Social Cost of Carbon (S-CO2), Social Cost of Nitrous Oxide (S-N2O) and Social Cost of Methane (S-CH4) (collectively referred to as the Social Costs of Greenhouse Gases (S-GHG)). As we predicted in our prior client alert, the Working Group reinstated the values that had been established for these parameters immediately before the Trump Administration disbanded the Working Group in 2017. To that end, for 2021 the Working Group set S-CO2 at $51 a ton, S-N2O at $18000 a ton and S-CH4 at $1500 based on a 3% discount rate. These rates will replace the Trump Administration’s calculation of the Social Cost of Carbon, which included values as low as $1 based on a 7% discount rate. The new figure will be used on an interim basis while a Working Group readies the final values, which are expected in early 2022.

Potentially the most consequential, yet least noticed, part of President Biden’s Day 1 Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle Climate Change (Jan. 20, 2021) (“EO 13990”) is the directive to re-establish the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (“Working Group”), which President Trump disbanded during his administration.  See E.O. 13990, Sec. 5.  One of the Working Group’s primary mandates is to calculate what is referred to as the “Social Cost of Carbon,” which measures the cost to society of emitting one additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  These include the costs associated with sea level rise and extreme weather events, and adverse effects on water and agricultural resources and human health.  Section 5 directs the Working Group to publish an interim Social Cost of Carbon within 30 days of the date of the Executive Order, and to publish a final value by January 2022.  (The Executive Order also directs the Working Group to publish Social Costs for two other global warming chemicals, i.e., nitrous oxide and methane.)  The Working Group has not yet published the interim value, but it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to predict at least interim reinstatement of the values used by the Obama Administration.  One signal is the Council on Environmental Quality’s decision to rescind the Trump Administration’s “Draft National Environmental Policy Act Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions” and directive that until a replacement is adopted “agencies should consider all available tools and resources in assessing GHG emissions and climate change effects of their proposed actions, including, as appropriate and relevant, the 2016 GHG Guidance.”  (86 Fed. Reg. 10252.)

The Household and Commercial Products Association’s (HCPA’s) Pesticide Regulation Workshop, organized, hosted, and co-presented by Crowell, is the oldest and largest annual event dedicated to pesticide regulation, compliance, and enforcement under federal and state pesticide laws. This year’s workshop will feature guest speakers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs and Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance and from the Natural Resources Defense Council. This year’s workshop will focus on practical information, including what companies need to know in order to get their pesticide products onto the market, keep them there, and avoid business disruptions and penalties. Knowledgeable and experienced presenters will cover the following topics:

Please join Crowell & Moring LLP on Thursday, April 7, 2022 at The Umstead Hotel in Cary, North Carolina for a one-day workshop on pesticide data compensation and protection under the laws of the United States, Canada, and the European Union. 

Pesticide Data Compensation and Protection in a Global Marketplace will focus on pesticide data compensation and protection under the laws of the United States, Canada and the European Union. The course will emphasize practical approaches to data compensation. It is designed for those who work in pesticide product development, marketing, regulatory, or legal departments and who want to incorporate data compensation into the company’s business strategies. 

As regulated industries continue to confront mounting disruptions and, in some cases, temporary shutdown as a consequence of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, they face the added challenge of managing a range of unrelenting environmental compliance obligations at both the federal and state levels.   

An August 2017 letter from seven US Senators to the House Appropriations Committee urged the Committee to support programs that addressed per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that are being detected in drinking water sources across the nation. The letter went on to indicate the DoD was conducting preliminary site inspections and that “DoD officials had suggested that clean up costs could reach as high as $2 billion.” In a March 2018 DoD report, one DoD official noted that there are more than 400 military sites with known or suspected PFAS contamination. And in the most recent Defense Appropriations bill, Congress authorized up to $20 million for the Air Force to make payments to reimburse local communities for the cleanup of PFAS contamination due to Air Force- and National Guard-related activities.