Environment & Natural Resources

Our lawyers and policy professionals regularly provide leadership on how best to develop environment and natural resource policy. Members of the firm have been centrally involved in developing and implementing legislation governing land, water, and natural resources, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the CWA, and the ESA, among others.

Air Quality Policy

Clients rely on Van Ness Feldman to represent their interests in congressional debates on air quality-related issues. Van Ness Feldman is active on Capitol Hill, representing electric utilities, automakers, and manufacturers in various matters related to Clean Air Act implementation and on global climate change issues.

Attorneys from Van Ness Feldman played key roles in the development of the original Clean Air Act in the 1970s and have represented clients in every major legislative initiative related to the Act and other air laws since that time. Most recently, the firm has participated in the debate over the use of methyl tertiary butyl ether and the future of the reformulated gasoline program. We also have played a central role in the development of key provisions in energy and tax legislation that affect clients’ environmental compliance planning.

Van Ness Feldman is poised to work on emerging air quality policy issues. Many interests now believe that the Clean Air Act’s pollutant-by-pollutant approach and piecemeal regulatory development are hampering planning by companies and a range of industries. In the next few years, there are likely to be new initiatives to reform the Act, establish new market-based and incentive-based approaches, and introduce controls on carbon dioxide. With the firm’s policy analysis and design experience — and with its pioneering global climate change practice group — Van Ness Feldman is ideally situated to represent clients’ interests in what will be a complicated, high-stakes legislative process.

Water Policy & Water Rights

Van Ness Feldman attorneys have played crucial roles in the development of significant water-related legislation, including the most recent efforts to reauthorize the Clean Water Act and to implement legislation authorizing and funding water resource development projects. In addition, the firm has been able to use this knowledge to take a leadership role in the creation and administration of coalitions on major water-related national issues such as wetlands, endangered species, and risk assessment. The firm also regularly assists clients with the development and execution of a comprehensive legislative strategy to achieve specific business and policy objectives.

Endangered Species Act

Our firm has represented clients before Congress on matters such as obtaining federal appropriations to assist in compliance with ESA requirements, lobbying for amendments to address specific aspects of the ESA or its application to specific fact situations, and participating in major debates over the reauthorization of the Act itself. For example, our firm has been instrumental in establishing the Pacific Salmon Restoration Fund and achieving substantial multi-year appropriations to assist the four Pacific Coast states in their effort to conserve threatened and endangered salmonids.