Boston, MA – The Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organization, recently named NELC senior attorney Josh Kratka one of its “legal heroes.”
The Sierra Club recognized Josh, along with NELC cooperating attorney David Nicholas, for his work on a series of groundbreaking lawsuits seeking to hold the world’s largest oil and chemical companies accountable for millions of pounds of illegal air pollution along Texas’s Gulf Coast.
Josh and NELC stepped into the fray after EPA and state regulators failed to crack down on these polluters.
The Clean Air Act authorizes individual citizens and environmental groups to enforce air pollution standards by suing violators as private “attorneys general,” and Josh has taken the lead on enforcement cases against Shell, ChevronPhillips, and ExxonMobil.
Josh, a graduate of Harvard University and the Northeastern University School of Law, has been with NELC since 1994. His work has helped secure record-setting environmental citizen suit penalties in both Pennsylvania and Texas.
Prior to joining NELC, Josh was a staff attorney with the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, where he worked on environmental and consumer protection issues.
