For decades, the phrase “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) has dictated whether a wetland, stream, or pond falls within federal jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Two years and a change in administration later, EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have returned with a new proposal aimed at aligning the rulebook with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA and restoring a degree of predictability to one of the most litigated terms in environmental law.
On November 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an injunction temporarily halting the implementation of California’s SB 261, the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act, just weeks before the law’s first mandated disclosures on January 1, 2026. The court declined to stay California’s companion climate emissions disclosure bill, the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB 253), due to that bill’s less immediately pressing compliance deadline of August 2026.
On November 12, 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved Texas’s request for primacy over Class VI underground injection control (UIC) wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act, authorizing the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) to issue and oversee permits for carbon capture and storage (CCS) injection projects. The final rule makes Texas the sixth state to secure primacy over Class VI wells—following North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, Arizona and West Virginia—and marks EPA’s third such approval in the last several months.
In our latest roundup, turnover rate for US homes drops to a 30-year low, global data center real estate funding struggles to keep pace, industrial real estate space surges, and more!
In our latest roundup, government shutdown affects contractors, hotel construction stays flat, and more!
In our latest roundup, lab space real estate faces challenges, demand for data creates power brokers, the cost burden of sports stadiums, and more!
Most private construction contracts executed on or after January 1, 2026, must limit progress payment retention to five percent or less under a new law that goes into effect on the first of the year in California. This requirement applies to retention withheld by an owner from the direct contractor, by the direct contractor from any subcontractor, and by any subcontractor from any lower-tier subcontractor.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) released a preliminary list of companies it believes may be subject to the state’s new climate disclosure regime, which imposes significant disclosure duties on large United States entities “doing business in California”—even if the business they do in California is not itself large. CARB’s list comes after a federal trial court declined to stay the rules, with the first compliance deadline set to go into effect January 2026 even as the agency’s implementing regulations remain under development.
On September 8, 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a Request for Applications (RFA) seeking proposals from U.S. companies to develop AI data centers co-located with advanced energy projects at the Idaho National Laboratory. This RFA follows the Administration’s July Executive Order on accelerating AI data center infrastructure and DOE’s designation of four federal sites for such projects. At the Idaho National Laboratory, DOE is specifically looking for proposals to potentially enter into long-term leasing agreements at the site. Applications that integrate innovative energy generation and storage with AI data centers will receive priority consideration, including technologies such as advanced nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, and cold underground thermal energy storage.
Coalitions of Republican-led states, industry associations led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and, most recently, the U.S. Department of Justice are testing “climate superfund” laws that aim to recover billions from carbon majors for climate adaptation costs. Recent rulings in lawsuits challenging the New York and Vermont statutes have split cases across courts and reached opposite outcomes on intervention: In New York, cases are being split between the Northern and Southern Districts and intervention efforts by nonprofits have been blocked, while in Vermont, the district court has allowed environmental organizations to join the defense of the statutes in two cases.
