On December 20, 2016, in a Presidential Memorandum to the Secretary of the Interior, President Obama withdrew certain areas off the Atlantic Coast on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from mineral and oil and gas leasing:  Consistent with principles of responsible public stewardship entrusted to this office, with due consideration of the critical importance of canyons along the edge of the Atlantic continental shelf for marine mammals, deep water corals, […]

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The American Farm Bureau Federation and other industry groups have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Sixth Circuit decision to assert exclusive jurisdiction to review the controversial Clean Water Rule concerning the new definition of “waters of the United States.”  On Friday, October 8, 2016, the AFB filed a brief in the following case petitioning for writ of certiorari. In its brief, the AFB argue that the Clean […]

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Deep groundwater aquifers, developed for oil and gas extraction, could yield important sources of water in California and elsewhere. Assessing groundwater quantity and quality requires baseline data and a monitoring framework for evaluating impacts. Stanford researchers have found that California’s Central Valley alone has close to three times the volume of fresh groundwater than previously estimated. The Stanford study is the first to measure California’s groundwater below 300 meters (the […]

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On August 22, 2016, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began construction on the Tujunga Spreading Grounds, a project that is expected to capture about 5 billion gallons of stormwater per year. The Tujunga Spreading Grounds construction will reconfigure the 20 spreading basins into 9 deeper basins through the removal of soil and sediment from the site. After completion, the Tujunga Spreading Grounds enhancement project will recharge the […]

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