President Barack Obama’s proposed 2016 fiscal budget comes with some exciting news for the coal miners of Kentucky. In the budget is a proposed plan that includes a $1 billion fund to be distributed over a period of roughly five years to “redevelop abandoned coal mines" in about ten states, including Kentucky. This new proposal is called the “Power+ Plan. “Power” stands for Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization.

Kentucky is a region of almost 26 million acres of land, and of that land a little less than half is covered in woodlands owned by roughly 467,000 private landowners. That is a vast amount of land to look after, and almost too much for anyone to monitor completely. Today, woodland property owners face the problem of unauthorized property entry and unapproved timber cutting on their land.

In September 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (hereinafter “EPA”), armed with data independently obtained by a group of researchers at West Virginia University, accused Volkswagen Corporation of “cheating” on emissions tests. Specifically, the allegation charged that Volkswagen had equipped certain models of their diesel engine vehicles with “defeat devices” – software on the vehicles that could detect when the vehicle was undergoing emissions tests, and subsequently regulate the amount of emissions that would be produced during the testing phase.

One state is helping cleaner fuel standards become the norm across the country, supported by a recent federal court ruling.  In 2009, Oregon authorized the Clean Fuels Program to combat climate change caused by automobile emissions. The goal was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels by ten percent over a ten-year period by requiring oil companies to gradually reduce their carbon pollution. The companies have a few options to meet this goal: blend lower-carbon fuels, or simply invest in a variety of other clean fuels.

Recently, in the case of Appalachian Land Co. v. EQT Production Co., the Supreme Court of Kentucky considered a certified question of law from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, namely: Does Kentucky's "at-the-well" rule allow a natural-gas processor to deduct all severance taxes paid at market prior to calculating a contractual royalty payment based on "the market price of gas at the well," or does the resource's at-the-well price include a proportionate share of the severance taxes owed such that a processor may deduct only that portion of the severance taxes attributable to the gathering, compression and treatment of the resource prior to calculating the appropriate royalty payment?