The Capital of Annapolis reported recently on the alarmingly low penalties assessed by the Maryland Department of Environment for massive spills of raw sewage—containing a mix of untreated human, residential, agricultural, and industrial wastewater—into the state's waters. This article supports one of the key findings from CPR’s report, Failing the Bay: Clean Water Act Enforcement in Maryland Falling Short, released earlier this year. These low penalties, sometimes “about the same as a speeding ticket,” do not and cannot serve as the basis of an effective, deterrence-based enforcement program—precisely what is needed to compel compliance with the Clean Water Act and state water quality laws.
Full textAccording to the egg industry, the thousands of people sickened by eggs contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis have only themselves to blame. As USA Today reported:
"Consumers that were sickened reportedly all ate eggs that were not properly or thoroughly cooked. Eggs need to be cooked so that the whites and yolks are firm (not runny) which should kill any bacteria," says Mitch Head, spokesperson for the United Egg Producers.
"Some people may not think of an egg as you would ground beef, but they need to start," says Krista Eberle of the United Egg Producers' Egg Safety Center. "It may sound harsh and I don't mean it to sound that way. But all the responsibility cannot be placed on the farmer. Somewhere along the line consumers have to be responsible for what they put in their bodies."
With more than 500 million eggs to date subject to recall for contamination, this effort to shift the focus to consumers’ behavior deserves scrutiny. Implicit in this shift is an attempt to absolve producers – and the government agencies charged with overseeing these producers and ensuring the health of our food supply – of responsibility. But there are many good reasons for our government to ensure the safety and security of the food we eat. Indeed, Congress has assigned this task to protector agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration precisely because most Americans want to go to their local grocery stores and know that the food sold there will be fit for human consumption.
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On July 9, 2010, following more than 10 years of interference and delay, the Food and Drug Administration’s rule to prevent salmonella contamination in eggs finally went into effect. FDA officials have argued that this rule—which, among other things, requires farms to test eggs and facilities for salmonella, protect feed and water from contamination, and buy chicks and young hens from suppliers that monitor for salmonella—would have likely prevented the massive salmonella outbreak that has sickened 1,470 individuals and resulted in one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history, with more than half a billion eggs being pulled off stores’ shelves. It’s hard to know whether this is necessarily true or not, but if adequately enforced, the rule certainly would have driven very significant changes to the facilities we've learned about in the past weeks. Tragically, the salmonella outbreak stretches back to at least May, just a few months before the salmonella rule’s effective date.
What accounts for this policy “near miss”? By all accounts, this rule was recognized as a necessary step for closing a big gap in our food safety system—namely, ensuring the safety of eggs. So, why did it take more than 10 years—10 years!!—for the rule to be developed and finalized?
Unsurprisingly, it looks like the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—a bureau in the White House Office of Management and Budget that through Democratic and Republican administrations alike has assumed the role of squashing or diluting needed environmental, health, and safety regulations—played a role in delaying the FDA’s rule, back in 2008. It appears that without OIRA’s interference, the rule could have been in effect by at least the end of 2009—well before the massive salmonella outbreak began.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Douglas Kysar has an opinion piece in the Guardian making the case for Carbon Upsets. Upsets, you ask? That is:
Full textRather than award credits based on development that moves us toward a cleaner but still very dirty future, why not award credits to legal and political actions that have more dramatic impact? For instance, rather than bribe fossil fuel companies to stop flaring natural gas, why not reward indigenous groups that entirely block new exploration activities? Rather than transfer money to logging operations for incremental replanting programs, why not award credits to forest-dwelling communities that successfully fight to stop logging altogether?
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Eager to blame the state of the economy on the Administration, House Minority Leader John Boehner recently tried to argue that Administration's regulatory agenda is standing in the way of recovery. Sadly for Boehner, he tried to make that case shortly before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and while the smell of the BP oil spill still lingers in the Gulf. By any reasonable measure those two incidents are among the costliest and most devastating examples of the human and monetary costs of lax regulation.
In a letter to President Barack Obama, Boehner criticized the Administration's plans to implement 191 rules with potential economic costs greater than $100 million, arguing that "uncertainty" in the business community about the fate of the regulations is "contributing significantly to the ongoing difficulty our economy is facing." Apparently, Boehner and other opponents of regulation are betting that we'll forget the cost of regulatory failure as they repeat their mantra that regulation costs a lot of money, and that it cannot be good for the economy.
This claim is false on two counts. First, it ignores the reality that the costs associated with regulatory failure usually far outweigh the expense of effective regulation. Various federal agencies failed to protect the Gulf Coast region - first from the impact of Katrina, and then in the case of the BP Oil Spill. The Katrina failure cost billions of dollars, and more than 1,800 lives, to say nothing of the massive disruption to thousands of dislocated families, costs that cannot be measured.
Full textThe below is testimony (PDF) given today by CPR President Rena Steinzor at the EPA's public hearing on coal ash regulation. The hearing, in Arlington, VA, is the first of seven; the public comment period has been extended to November 19. See CPR on Twitter for updates from the hearing.
We are all familiar with the psychological studies that have become a cottage industry at American universities. Consider this one. A presumably dead cockroach is “medically sterilized”—and I honestly do not know what that means—and then dipped into a glass of juice in front of a group of people. The purpose: to gauge the test subjects’ willingness to drink the juice after the cockroach is removed. To the researchers apparent surprise, the people—all victims of an irrational phenomenon known as “stigma effect”—would not drink the juice, although they were willing to take a sip if the cockroach was merely laid to rest peacefully beside the glass, as opposed to dunked inside it. As amazing, they refused to drink the dunker juice, even if it was placed in a freezer for one year or the cockroach was dipped in the juice very, very quickly. So, conclude the researchers, “while shunning may have evolved from an adaptive response to avoid contaminated food, it can be triggered in inappropriate circumstances.”
Now why on earth am I bringing up this bizarre experiment in the context of this perfectly staid hearing on a hyper-technical EPA rulemaking proposal, which covers—count ‘em—138 pages in the Federal Register, leaving many supposedly more relevant points to be addressed by witnesses today? I am telling you the cockroach story because it is at the root of the reasons why the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) mangled this rulemaking, constructing a fanciful but deadly cost-benefit analysis that predicts negative net benefits of as much as $239 billion if EPA regulates coal ash appropriately, as a special waste under subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Or, to put it more bluntly, electric utility executives who generate 136 million tons of coal ash annually will squander $239 billion of the nation’s resources over the next 50 years because, suffering from the stigma effect, they will send millions of tons of the stuff to lined landfills rather than dumping it in road beds and mine shafts.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Frank Ackerman had an op-ed in the Des Moines Register the other day, "Atrazine ban would not ruin the Corn Belt."
The chemical in question is a weed-killer, and also a known endocrine disruptor. The Bush Administration's EPA determined that atrazine does not cause negative effects to human health. The Obama Administration's EPA is currently conducting a review of that assessment (stay tuned).
Ackerman responds to arguments that banning atrazine would cause huge economic harm, writing:
How great is the economic benefit of using atrazine? Several studies have estimated that atrazine boosts average corn yields by 6 percent or less. A database of field trials, maintained by consultant Richard Fawcett and relied on by atrazine supporters, shows that it increases corn yields by an average of 3 to 4 percent. The most comprehensive national study, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, estimated that banning atrazine would lower corn yields by 1.2 percent.
In fact, atrazine might have no effect at all on corn yields. Two corn-growing countries, Germany and Italy, both banned atrazine in 1991. I compared the trends in corn yields per acre, and in corn acreage, in the United States, Germany and Italy for 1981-2001. Both Germany and Italy did as well or better in corn production after banning atrazine as they did in the 10 years before the ban. And both countries did as well or better than the United States after banning atrazine.
Ackerman's full article on the subject is "The Economics of Atrazine."
Full textCross-posted from The Pump Handle.
The Iowa-based company Wright County Egg is recalling 380 million eggs, which were sold to distributors and wholesalers in 22 states and Mexico, due to concerns about salmonella contamination. The eggs have been sold under several different brand names, so if you've got eggs in your fridge you can check FDA's page for info. Salmonella-infected eggs traceable to this producer may have caused as many as 1,200 cases of intestinal illness in at least 10 states over the past several weeks. A second producer, Hillandale Farms, has also issued a recall 170 million eggs that have been shipped to 14 states.
Before getting into what's wrong with our food-safety system, I want to note the recall might not have happened at all if it weren't for surveillance and investigation activities at the state and national levels.
Officials identified the problem because CDC's PulseNet network (whose participant labs perform molecular subtyping of foodborne disease-causing bacteria) identified a much larger than usual number of Salmonella Enteritidis isolates in the samples it received. Ordinarily, CDC gets an average of 50 reports of SE illnesses weekly, but it started receiving approximately 200 reports per week during late June and early July. Public health officials in California, Colorado, and Minnesota conducted epidemiologic investigations and found that shell eggs were the likely source of infection. FDA, CDC, and state partners then conducted traceback investigations and found that many of the restaurants and events where multiple people became ill with SE got their eggs from Wright County Egg.
Full textThe past year has certainly had disappointments for people who care about protecting the environment. A major international conference on global climate change yielded no sweeping agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States Senate declined to pass comprehensive climate change legislation, and residents of Louisiana and other states bordering the Gulf of Mexico suffered the ill effects of a long-running, disastrous offshore oil spill. One recent—far more sanguine—development development should not be overlooked, however: the decision of a special district in Florida, the South Florida Water Management District, to purchase a large tract of land for use in the treatment and storage of surface water. The deal was approved by the District earlier this month and cleared one of its final legal challenges on Monday.
The “sugar deal,” as it is known to many Floridians, represents a significant victory for the environmentalists and scientists who seek to protect the fragile, endangered Everglades. Under the plan, the Water Management District will pay $197 million for 26,800 acres of land owned by U.S. Sugar Corporation, a major sugar grower in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) situated south of Lake Okeechobee and north of the “river of grass.” The District was also given an option to purchase the remainder of U.S. Sugar’s EAA property—more than 100,000 additional acres--if and when the District’s property tax revenues increase.
To understand the significance of this major land purchase, one must consider the history of its evolution. In the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists drew up plans to restore the Everglades, they noted the critical importance of converting some of the farmland in the EAA to use as a water treatment and storage area. The problem, as those scientists saw it, was that the water flowing into the Everglades from EAA agricultural operations contained such excessively high levels of nutrient contaminants that it had to be captured and treated. Moreover, under the prevailing arrangement, there was frequently a need to divert oversupplies of water into nearby rivers and the Everglades itself. This situation did (and continues to do) considerable damage to the Calusa and St. Lucie estuaries and to the natural systems of the Everglades themselves.
Full texta(broad) perspective
No single substance is more necessary to humans than water. For people in developed countries, clean, potable water arrives with the simple turn of a faucet knob. For much of the world’s population, however, getting access to clean water is much more complex, if not impossible, and not having clean water leads to a host of diseases and conflict and is intimately tied to poverty.
In late July, the 192-member General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, without opposition (though not unanimously), a resolution on the human right to water. Specifically, the General Assembly declared that “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”. The resolution notes that approximately 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water and that more than 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, approximately 1.5 million children under the age of 5 years old die and miss 443 million school days each year.
The United States was one of 41 countries that abstained from voting. In doing so, U.S. deputy representative to the U.N Economic and Social Council John Sammis cited ongoing work of other U.N. bodies to increase access to water and asserted that the resolution “was not drafted in a transparent, inclusive manner” with no thought to the legal implications of establishing this right.
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Guest Blogger: Liz Borkowski