Justia U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Three environmental organizations petitioned for review of the EPA's promulgation of a final rule where the "conformity determinations" referred to in the rule's title were approvals needed under the Clean Air Act (CAA), 42 U.S.C. 7506(c)(1), for federally funded transportation projects in an area that was designated "nonattainment" or "maintenance" with respect to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Petitioners principally argued that the 2010 Rule still failed to embody subsection (B)(iii)'s requirements that the project not "delay timely attainment on any standard or any required interim emission reduction or milestones in any area." The court held that, given the EPA's clarification that (B)(iii) applied to local projects and its persuasive explanation of how the substance of the "delay" condition was met, the court was satisfied that the 2010 Rule was not arbitrary, capricious, or inconsistent with law for the reasons raised in Environmental Defense, Inc. v. EPA. In particular, it was clear that a project giving rise to the "counterbalance" hypothetical the court described in Environmental Defense would not be deemed conforming. Accordingly, the petition was denied. View "NRDC, et al. v. EPA" on Justia Law

Petitioners challenged the FAA's issuance of 130 Determinations of No Hazard for each of the proposed wind turbines in the area of Nantucket Sound. Petitioners argued that the FAA violated its governing statute, misread its own regulations, and arbitrarily and capriciously failed to calculate the dangers posed to local aviation. The FAA claimed that petitioners lacked standing to challenge the FAA's determinations and that their merits claims were faulty. The court found that petitioners had standing and that the FAA misread its regulations, leaving the challenged determinations inadequately justified. Accordingly, the petitions for review were granted and the FAA's determinations were vacated and remanded. View "Town of Barnstable, MA v. Federal Aviation Admin." on Justia Law

Appellants challenged a plan to manage the elk and bison populations in the National Elk Refuge and Grand Teton National Park pursuant to the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act (Improvement Act), 15 U.S.C. 668dd-668ee. At issue was whether the plan's failure to commit to a deadline for ending supplemental feeding was arbitrary and capricious under the Improvement Act. Also at issue was whether the plan unlawfully gave the Wyoming Fish and Game Department a veto over whether supplemental feeding would end. The court held that the record amply demonstrated that the agencies collected the relevant data, identified the dangers posed by supplemental feeding, and adopted a plan to mitigate those dangers. They also determined that the many objectives of the Improvement Act, including conservation, would be best met without implementation of a fixed deadline for stopping supplemental feeding was not arbitrary or capricious. The court took the Secretary at his word that Wyoming had no veto over the Secretary's duty to end a practice that was concededly at odds with the long-term health of the elk and bison in the refuge. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was affirmed.

Trade associations representing commercial ship owners and operators petitioned for review of a nationwide permit issued by the EPA for the discharge of pollutants incidental to the normal operation of vessels. Petitioners raised a number of procedural challenges, all related to the EPA's decision to incorporate into the permit conditions that states submitted to protect their own water quality. The court held that because petitioners had failed to establish that the EPA could alter or reject state certification conditions, the additional agency procedures they demanded would not have afforded them the relief they sought. Accordingly, the court denied the petition for review.

This case concerned the San Diego fairy shrimp, an aquatic animal found in southern California, that was designated as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, 16 U.S.C. 1533. Plaintiffs, companies that owned land along the California-Mexico border, sued to challenge the designation of 143 acres of their property as critical habitat for the San Diego fairy shrimp. The court held that because the Fish and Wildlife Services had not reasonably explained how one isolated observation, involving a single 2001 sighting of four ant-sized San Diego fairy shrimp on the property at issue, demonstrated that plaintiffs' property was "occupied" by the San Diego fairy shrimp in 1997 (the relevant statutory date), the court reversed the judgment of the district court and remanded. On remand, the court ordered the district court to vacate the designation of plaintiffs' property as critical habitat for the San Diego fairy shrimp.

Oceana, Inc. brought this suit against the National Marine Fisheries Service challenging as unlawful the methodology it used to track bycatch in the fisheries of the Northeastern coast of the United States. At issue was whether the district court properly concluded that the methodology satisfied applicable law and properly entered summary judgment for the Fisheries Service. The court held that because the Fisheries Service had merely described but had not, as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, as amended by the Sustainable Fisheries Act, 16 U.S.C. 1801-1884, required, "established" a "standardized reporting methodology" to assess bycatch in the Northeastern fisheries, the court reversed the judgment and instructed the district court to vacate the ruling adopting the methodology and to remand the matter to the agency for further proceedings.

This case stemmed from a challenge to the EPA's regulation of ozone under the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S.C. 7409(a). At issue was an EPA "guidance document" addressing obligations of regions still in nonattainment of a now-revoked ozone air quality standard. The court held that the Guidance qualified as a legislative rule that the EPA was required to issue through notice and comment rulemaking and that one of its features, the so-called attainment alternative, violated the Clean Air Act's plain language. Therefore, the court granted the petition for review and vacated the Guidance.

This case stemmed from petitioner's rates filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for its Michigan oil pipeline where petitioner agreed with two of its three shippers to restrict rate increases for a three-year moratorium period. At issue was the initial rate petitioner must use to calculate its new annual ceiling levels. Petitioner argued that after the end of the moratorium period, its ceiling levels should be calculated as if its maximum rates had been set under FERC's indexing methodology all along. In contrast, FERC would simply pick up the rates where the settlement agreement left off, using the last rate under the agreement as the initial rate for the period after the agreement. The court held that neither the agreement nor the relevant regulations clearly laid out how to determine the rates petitioner could charge now that the three-year period had past. Therefore, finding both the agreement and the regulations ambiguous, the court deferred to the reasonable views of FERC and denied petitioner's petition for review.

Three state and local governmental units, along with individual citizens, petitioned the court for review of and other relief from two "determinations" made by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the other respondents: the DOE's attempt to withdraw the application it submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a license to construct a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada; and the DOE's apparent decision to abandon development of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository. The court concluded that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. 10101-270, set forth a process and schedule for the siting, construction, and operation of a federal repository for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. At this point in that process, the DOE had submitted a construction license application for the Yucca Mountain repository and the NRC maintained a statutory duty to review that application. Therefore, the court held that unless and until petitioners were able to demonstrate that one of the respondents had either violated a clear duty to act or otherwise affirmatively violated the law, petitioners' challenges to the ongoing administrative process was premature. Accordingly, the court held that it lacked jurisdiction over petitioners' claims and dismissed the petitions.

Appellants, nonprofit environmental organizations, appealed from a judgment of dismissal entered by the district court in an action against the EPA under the citizen suit provision of the Clean Air Act (CAA), 42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq., challenging the EPA Administrator's failure to take action to prevent the construction of three proposed pollution-emitting facilities in Kentucky. The court held that the validity of the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permits issued under the noncompliant State Implementation Plan (SIP), and the possible invalidity of the amended SIP, sufficiently raised a current controversy to save the litigation from mootness. The court also held that the Administrative Procedures Act, 5 U.S.C. 500 et seq., did not provide a cause of action to review the EPA Administrator's failure to act under section 7477 of the CAA because her decision was an agency action "committed to agency discretion by law." Therefore, the EPA Administrator's decision was discretionary and not justiciable and thus, appellants failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. Although the district court dismissed the case pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1) for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, the court affirmed the district court's action because dismissal would otherwise have been proper under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6).