Court Battles

When President Trump issued his alarming “2-for-1” executive order, NRDC and our partners quickly sued. We’ll continue to fight the administration’s attempts to steamroll public health and environmental safeguards.

In 2015, BLM opened hundreds of thousands of acres in the Colorado River Valley to oil and gas development without ever analyzing and disclosing the environmental impacts. So we sued.

The California WaterFix project was no fix at all. In a victory for the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, California abandoned its two-tunnel project in May 2019.

Fighting a proposed dam in eastern Montana, NRDC and our partners offered a win-win alternative for farmers and the Yellowstone River ecosystem.

In defending New York State’s authority to regulate utilities, NRDC is helping to preserve states’ ability to combat climate change and pollution from power plants.

The EPA’s flawed definition of a “natural event” under the Clean Air Act could allow preventable pollution, like power plant emissions, to be excused. So we took them to court.

When the Federal Highway Administration suspended a commonsense rule to better manage greenhouse gas emissions from highway vehicles, we sued—and the FHA backed down.

Thanks to legal action taken by NRDC and our partners, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is taking the necessary steps to permanently ban five harmful phthalates from children’s products.

NRDC wasted no time in the fight to stop Trump’s attacks on endangered species. That quick action paid off in one of our first legal victories against the new administration.

By sanctioning imports of elephant and lion trophies from Zimbabwe, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ignored concerns about illegal poaching. NRDC and partners are fighting for these majestic animals.