In an article in the most recent issue of The Abell Report, the newsletter of The Abell Foundation, CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analysts Aimee Simpson and Yee Huang take a look at what ails the Chesapeake Bay (Spoiler Alert: it involves years of inaction on pollution), and offer up a number of practical steps the state of Maryland could take to make good on its commitments to clean up this most precious of natural resources.
The article draws on a day-long forum CPR co-sponsored this past October with the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, an event that gathered federal and state officials, as well as leading environmental activists from around the region.
Steinzor, Simpson and Huang make the case that the reason efforts to clean up the Bay have largely failed to date is that the Bay states are fundamentally unaccountable. They write:
Full textFor more than two decades, the primary Bay states (the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) have engaged in a series of round-robin consultations held under the auspices of the Chesapeake Bay Program. Progress was made in diagnosing the causes and implications of dead zones; diminishing crab and fish populations; algal blooms; and pollution that made rivers, lakes, creeks, and streams unusable for drinking, swimming, and boating. Individual states implemented innovative and effective pollution-control programs; glossy reports were produced; and every year, governors and the administrator of the EPA gathered for a photo op on the banks of picturesque Bay waterbodies. Despite the analyzing, meeting, planning, and talking, the Bay’s health remains tenuous, and the Bay states have repeatedly failed to meet the pollution-reduction goals set during these appearances.
The White House announced Tuesday a legislative agenda it is sending Congress as part of its Startup America initiative to foster the growth of new businesses.
The White House was under some pressure to do wrong here: the President’s “Jobs Council” – a group mostly of CEOs – issued a report last month that included a perhaps unsurprising pile of old anti-regulatory proposals. And Senators Mark Warner and Jerry Moran were pushing the White House to endorse their bill, the Startup Act, which includes anti-regulatory measures that would weaken our existing environmental, health, and safety laws.
But here’s a bit of good news: the White House didn’t include any anti-regulation measures in the Startup America legislative agenda. The document gives just a polite nod to Warner-Moran:
The Administration looks forward to working with sponsors of similar initiatives including S. 1965 (Warner-Moran), S. 1866 (Coons-Rubio), S. 1544 (Tester-Toomey), S. 1933 (Schumer-Toomey), S. 1970 (Merkley-Bennet), H.R. 2930 (McHenry), H.R. 1070 (Schweikert), as well as with leaders from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committees, including Chairwoman Landrieu, Senator Snowe, Chairman Graves and Representative Velazquez.
Too often this White House has tried to appease big business on the regulatory front, even adopting anti-regulation rhetoric. This has hurt, not helped, the White House politically. And it does nothing to create jobs. So it’s worth noting that the Administration got this one right.
A new poll out Wednesday shows that small business owners’ top concern is lack of demand (echoing previous polls). Weakening health and safety protections, on the other hand, is not popular with most of the electorate, and it hurts the public. Stalling the establishment of badly needed public safeguards and undermining federal agencies will not create new jobs. The Administration should keep that in mind, and resist pressure to endorse any anti-regulatory initiatives as it continues to work with Congress on these bills.
Full textIn its public meeting records, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) frequently misspells the names or affiliations of the attendees. Senator Jon Kyl was once listed as “Sen. Rul.” And John Ikerd, affiliated with the University of Missouri (MO) and the Sierra Club, was listed as “John Ikend, University of MD/Siemen Club.”
Sometimes the misspelled names or affiliations are easy to figure out; other times they aren’t (see page 77 of our OIRA white paper from November for more examples). The public is supposed to be able to tell who these people are – that’s the whole point, transparency.
The misspellings are troublesome, but a new OIRA meeting record I just noticed takes the cake for leaving the public uninformed:
Why list the affiliation of the attendees at all?!
The occasional typo is one thing, but when OIRA gets it wrong so regularly – or now simply leaves out the affiliations of individuals seeking to influence the outcome of public health and environmental safeguards – it’s a mission-defeating problem.
Full textToday CPR releases Protecting the Public from BPA: An Action Plan for Federal Agencies (press release), outlining steps the FDA, EPA, and OSHA can take to use existing authorities to warn the public about the dangers of the chemical, and prepare longer-term regulatory controls. The paper was written by CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity, Noah Sachs, and Rena Steinzor, and Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz and myself.
Bisphenol A (BPA) makes me want to cry. Not in the sad or mournful way, but in the “I want to kick and scream on the floor and throw a tantrum like my toddler” kind of way. I didn’t always feel this way. These feelings concerning BPA (an endocrine-disrupting chemical added to plastics to increase clarity and durability, and used in myriad other sources such as can linings, kitchen appliances, and water bottles) began to arise when I started working with CPR Member Scholars and fellow staff on BPA policy. The more I learned about BPA, the more I felt like its presence in my life was like mosquitoes in D.C.—a summer BBQ killjoy.
Then I became a parent, and the frustration and concern escalated, because the more I found out about BPA, the more I recognized that the industries using it did not truly understand how it affected my health, but more importantly, the health of my child. Even worse, the new approaches to testing its “safety” and potential adverse health effects were churning out new evidence of its dangers. Evidence that did not fit the traditional “risk assessment” model used by health and safety regulators and thus spurred no change in protective standards.
Full textLast week, a reporter asked me, “How’s science doing these days?,” “Science” is an impossibly big category, of course, but the answer was easy: “Badly,” I said.
Exhibit number one is climate change. The frightening truth is that no fewer than 84 percent of scientists in this country surveyed by Pew say that the earth is warming because of human activity; 70 percent describe the problem as “very serious.” Although much is made of the supposed “dissenters” on the issue, no one with any educated familiarity with the subject doubts that the vast—and I mean virtually all—scientists with meaningful credentials to understand the subject agree that precipitous climate change is happening and that curbing human-generated carbon emissions must be done to avert disasters so grave we can barely imagine them. Human beings have a hard time making sacrifices today to avert problems that seem remote, but the public’s ambivalence on this subject is reinforced by a steady and effective public relations campaign by fossil fuel companies to make the science of climate change seem fraught with doubt.
I am not willing to argue here that if we could only get the scientific truth straight, we could gallop across the tundra and solve this problem. How to apportion responsibility for sharply decreasing emissions between the developed and developing world is a challenge that may be the toughest we have ever faced. Not only do we lack the policymaking framework for negotiating such changes, but decades of flawed energy policies have hindered and continue to hinder the development of available and affordable solutions. But as long as we are stuck on the science—denying the consensus, elevating the few deniers to a position of equal authority as the well-informed—the short-term, self-serving concerns of a few trump the urgency of the problem for the many.
What leadership can we expect from politicians of both parties as we embark on contentious, high-stakes electoral season?
Full textA new study underscores the wisdom of reducing the risks of mercury and other pollutants rather than relying on risk avoidance measures such as fish consumption advisories. Mercury’s adverse effects are not limited to human health; its harms are felt throughout our ecosystems. According to this most recent study, released today by the Biodiversity Research Institute, mercury harms a broader swath of wildlife than previously recognized, including many bird species that are not piscivorous. This finding echoes those of studies in the Great Lakes published this fall, which concluded that a larger number of species were adversely affected by mercury contamination than previously understood by scientists.
From a regulatory perspective, the harms of mercury contamination might be addressed by risk reduction – measures that require the sources of mercury pollution to reduce or prevent mercury releases into the environment – or by risk avoidance – measures that leave it to those who are exposed to protect themselves from mercury permitted to enter or remain in the environment. The EPA’s recent rule regulating coal-fired power plants’ mercury emissions is an example of the former approach. An example of the latter approach was the George W. Bush administration’s suggestion, upon proposing an exceedingly lax rule for power plants (ultimately vacated by the D.C. Circuit), that people protect themselves from the continued mercury contamination by consulting national and local fish consumption advisories.
I have elaborated the many perils of relying on risk avoidance in lieu of risk reduction elsewhere. Among the limitations of depending on risk avoidance measures such as fish consumption advisories, ozone alerts, and “keep out” signs, are the facts that these measures are unjust and ineffective in practice. They simply don’t result in “the same amount” of protection for human health, as proponents of such measures hope.
Full textFor more than a century, the United States took the lead in organizing responses to international environmental problems. The long list of environmental agreements spearheaded by the United States extends from early treaties with Canada and Mexico on boundary waters and migratory birds to global agreements restricting trade in endangered species and protecting against ozone depletion. In the last two decades, however, U.S. environmental leadership has faltered.
The best-known example is the lack of an effective response to climate change, underscored by the U.S. decision not to join the Kyoto Protocol. But the attention climate change receives should not obscure the fact that the United States has also failed to join a large and growing number of treaties directed at other environmental threats, including marine pollution, the loss of biological diversity, persistent organic pollutants, and trade in toxic substances.
Today CPR publishes Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties. My co-authors and I show the importance of ten treaties and urge the Obama Administration and Congress to work together to ratify them. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, these treaties do not generally raise difficult partisan issues. They were all negotiated with substantial U.S. input, and they all provide clear benefits to the United States – or they would if only the United States belonged to them.
Full textThe Clean Air Act’s potential to address the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions is slowly being unveiled. EPA’s expected announcement of highly-anticipated new source performance standards for power plants by the end of January will reveal whether the agency has the political will to use its existing authority to re-shape the United States’ dependence upon high-carbon power. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act is a potentially potent tool. It arguably allows EPA to re-direct new investment away from heavily-polluting coal-fired power and toward less polluting alternatives. It also gives the agency the authority to address on-going emissions from existing power plants. Weaning the nation from its dependence on coal-fired power is essential to a new energy future. While EPA may fear the political storm generated by the prospect of change, it has the opportunity to begin a positive transformation to a more sustainable energy infrastructure.
The current rulemaking initiative arose out of a lawsuit brought by states and environmental groups, who argued that EPA was required to develop nationwide performance standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and existing stationary sources. In December 2010, EPA and the plaintiffs reached a settlement that required EPA to propose performance standards for power plants and for oil refineries. Although both rulemakings have been delayed, EPA sent proposed standards for new power plants to the White House Office of Management and Budget in November 2011, and now estimates that it will be authorized to release that proposed rule in late January.
We will not know the full picture of how aggressively EPA plans to use its Section 111 authority to shape the future of fossil fuel use in the electricity sector until EPA actually publishes all of the rules. In the meantime, however, the following is a guide to the issues at stake. The first critical issue is the recent decision to proceed with new source rules and delay proposals for existing sources. Critical issues for the new source rules are whether they will force a switch away from coal and whether the agency will allow facilities flexibility in meeting the new standards, through mechanisms such as emissions trading.
Full textA panel of business leaders comprising President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness today published a “Road Map to Renewal,” including proposals for expanded oil and gas drilling, and, of particular interest, five pages of policy recommendations related to regulation. Among them were procedural proposals aimed at further hamstringing regulatory agencies in their effort to promulgate badly needed safeguards for health, safety, and the environment.
For example, the Council proposes:
It’s worth noting that several of the proposals from the Jobs Council are ideas industry and its Republican allies have been pushing for a while; the cost-benefit requirement for independent agencies, for example, was included in the Regulatory Accountability Act and CURB Act, two bills popular in the GOP. The comments-on-comments concept, meanwhile, has been touted by the anti-regulation Center for Regulatory Effectiveness.
All in all, the recommendations start from a false premise – that environmental, health and safety safeguards are the economy’s problem – and proceed toward an unwise conclusion – building in further layers of review by economists. In fact, the regulations that industry is most distressed by already undergo a cost-benefit analysis at the agencies and then endure an industry-friendly second review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As a recent CPR report demonstrates, OIRA’s review is the gateway to a gross politicization of the process, one that commonly results in weaker safeguards. Further review by another team of economists will only serve to slow and weaken needed protections.
Full textCross-posted from Legal Planet.
Clearly I need to slow down Rick’s internet connection to get him to stop scooping me.
Rick reported earlier that the President has floated a proposal to reorganize the Commerce Department and related agencies which would apparently include moving NOAA (all of NOAA, according to OMB’s Jeffrey Zeints, not just its ESA functions) into the Department of Interior.
Actually, although that’s the way the story is being spun out in the media, it’s not exactly what’s going on. What the President has really proposed is that Congress give him the authority that presidents routinely enjoyed before 1984 to reorganize and streamline government agencies. That proposal makes all kinds of sense, both substantively and politically. Substantively, of course as circumstances and societal priorities shift, government agencies should not permanently remain static. But the current Congress is so shameless and so obsessed with micromanaging the executive branch that it refuses to confirm presidential appointees if a minority objects to the agency those appointees will oversee and holds sham sessions at which no business may be conducted to try to prevent the President from making recess appointments. This Congress is not going to give President Obama what he’s asking for, which makes the proposal a smart political move. It gives Obama a concrete way to campaign against the Congress, and to put the Republicans on the defensive.
No doubt to maximize that political benefit, or perhaps just to tweak his most dedicated congressional opponents, the example the President is offering is the merger of a number of agencies, including many functions of the Department of Commerce, focused on business and trade. Those, of course, are typically viewed as higher Republican than Democratic priorities. Obama asserted in his remarks today that the changes he wants authority to make respond directly to feedback that what businesses really hate in dealing with government is not the fact of regulation but “a system that [is] too much of a maze.”
Full text
