Wrigley v. EPA

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the North Dakota Attorney General against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seeking documents and communications regarding “EPA’s power sector climate strategy” and related topics, the federal district court for the District of North Dakota dismissed as moot the Attorney General’s motion for a preliminary injunction and set a schedule for EPA’s response based on information provided by EPA as to its anticipated rate of production. EPA reported that its search for records responsive to three of the Attorney General’s four requests had returned 9,269 potentially responsive records, and that additional records might be identified in response to the fourth request. The court directed EPA to continue with review of at least 825 records per month and directed the parties to confer to attempt to narrow the search. The court ordered the parties to provide the court with written status reports every two months.

The North Dakota Attorney General filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the federal district court for the District of North Dakota to compel EPA to produce records in response to the Attorney General’s April 2024 request for documents regarding “EPA’s role in implementing the current administration’s climate agenda and how EPA was advancing that agenda by promulgating a variety of rules targeting coal-fired power plants with retirement-inducing costs under a variety of different statutory authorities that are unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.” The FOIA request asked for documents and communications between June 30, 2022 and April 3, 2023 that fell within four categories, including documents and communications regarding “EPA’s power sector climate strategy” and documents and communications that included both climate change-related search terms and search terms related to other regulatory programs (e.g., coal ash, air toxics, regional haze, and particulate matter) or shutdown or retirement of coal facilities. The complaint alleged that the complaint “concerns EPA’s motivations and bases for using its various regulatory authorities to impose retirement-inducing costs on coal-fired power plants for putative climate change reasons, in an apparent attempt to end-run the West Virginia v. EPA decision.”