Phillips 66 Company fined $200,000 for violating California’s gasoline regulation

[Source: California Air Resources Board] The Phillips 66 Company has agreed to pay $200,000 in penalties for violations of California’s reformulated gasoline regulations. Phillips “sold, offered for sale, supplied, offered for supply, or transported for eight days” gasoline in violation of state regulations. Phillips 66 is an American multinational energy company headquartered in Houston, Texas. Read More…

Now Oracle’s exiting California for Texas. Will the last one in Silicon Valley, please turn out the lights?

[Source: FOX Business] If the outbound migration from Silicon Valley to Texas continues at its current clip, we may soon see a sign on southbound Highway 101 “Will the Last One in Silicon Valley, Please Turn Out the Lights?” (although California’s frequent blackouts might render the sign redundant). Just 11 days after Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Read More…

Trump EPA finalizes rollback making it harder to enact new public health rules

[Source: The Washington Post] The Trump administration finalized a rule Wednesday that could make it more difficult to enact public health protections, by changing the way the Environmental Protection Agency calculates the costs and benefits of new limits on air pollution. The new cost-benefit requirements, which apply to all future Clean Air Act rules, instruct Read More…

The profusion of notices stemming from Prop. 65 leaves shoppers potentially unprotected

[Source: Los Angeles Times] Vermont Soap’s feel-good natural products came with everything a California consumer had come to expect: an organic certification, a non-GMO seal of approval, a “cruelty free” bunny silhouette. And a warning that it harbored a “chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm.” Confused? Read More…

Trump looks to scale back environmental reviews for projects

[Source: Associated Press] President Donald Trump is ready to roll back a foundational Nixon-era environmental law that he says stifles major infrastructure projects, but that environmentalists say has served for decades as a safeguard for low-income and minority communities. Trump was traveling to Atlanta on Wednesday to formally announce changes to the National Environmental Policy Read More…

As EPA steps back, states face wave of requests for environmental leniency

[Source: NPR] Some of the country’s most polluting industries have flooded state regulators with requests to ease environmental regulations, according to an NPR review of hundreds of state environmental records. Companies across the country say the pandemic is interfering with their ability to comply with laws that protect the public from pollution. State environmental authorities Read More…

White House readies push to slash regulations as major part of its coronavirus economic recovery plan

[Source: The Washington Post] Senior White House and Trump administration officials are planning to launch a sweeping effort in the coming days to repeal or suspend federal regulations affecting businesses, with the expected executive action seen by advisers as a way to boost an economy facing its worst shock in generations, two people familiar with Read More…