Cross-posted from ThinkProgress.
“Election over, administration unleashes new rules,” trumpeted an Associated Press story this week.
What are these newly unleashed rules? Perhaps the big food safety rules that have been stalled for more than a year have gone through? Rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants? Long-awaited rules to protect coal miners’ safety?
Not quite. In fact, the AP strained to come up with just tiny examples: “The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules to update water quality guidelines for beaches and other recreational waters and deal with runoff from logging roads.”
The recreational waters standard was a welcome development, but not particularly consequential or abrupt. EPA was required by law to issue the recreational water standards by 2005; it has issued them now only after being ordered by a court to do so. And as the agency explained in its press release, “The criteria released today do not impose any new requirements; instead, they are a tool that states can choose to use in setting their own standards.”
As for the rule earlier this month on runoff from logging roads, it’s not what you might imagine: it says that EPA will not be regulating pollution from logging roads. That regulation was issued in an incredibly short period of time; it took only three months from the agency proposing a rule to issuing its final “rule.” If only the Administration were so aggressive with protective rules.
The AP next points to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s proposal to require event data recorders (black boxes) in cars. Also a welcome requirement, but again not evidence of the regulatory deluge that conservatives quoted in the article bemoan. In reality,96 percent of new cars already have the devices, and the auto industry is not opposing the requirement.
In truth, the administration has made little apparent progress on environmental, health and safety since the election. Given that the administration essentially stopped regulating for a period of months in the run-up to Election Day, we might have expected more activity. Some progress is possible later today, when the EPA is under court order to finally issue a rule on soot pollution. But a host of key rules still hang in the balance.
The administration needs to finalize rules reducing greenhouse gas emissions from refineries and lowering the sulfur content in gasoline. It needs to finish rules to finally protect miners from black lung disease, and it needs to publish a rule to protect construction workers from deadly silica dust — a proposal that has languished at the White House for nearly two years.
Where can you hear about those? In the AP article, remarkably. They’re buried down there at the bottom, below all the GOP’ers complaining about some fictitious “regulatory onslaught.”
The article chronicles Republican and big business complaints that the administration will indeed eventually issue these and other significant environmental, health and safety regulations. That remains to be seen, and I’m hopeful that it does, since those rules would deliver huge benefits to the public. But contrary to the AP’s headline and opening paragraphs, no such thing has happened just yet.
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Amy Sinden | December 14, 2012
Cross-posted from ThinkProgress. “Election over, administration unleashes new rules,” trumpeted an Associated Press story this week. What are these newly unleashed rules? Perhaps the big food safety rules that have been stalled for more than a year have gone through? Rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants? Long-awaited rules to protect coal miners’ safety? […]
Holly Doremus | December 14, 2012
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco has announced that she will leave her post at the end of February. Her letter to NOAA employees, reprinted in the Washington Post, cites the difficulty of maintaining a bi-coastal family life. Dr. Lubchenco, a distinguished marine biologist, has put in four years at the helm of […]
Daniel Farber | December 13, 2012
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Mayan apocalypse: panic spreads as December 21 nears Fears that the end of the world is nigh have spread across the world with only days until the end of the Mayan calendar, with doomsday-mongers predicting a cataclysmic end to the history of Earth. That’s from a British newspaper, the Telegraph, but […]
Rena Steinzor | December 10, 2012
After the last of the applause lines has been delivered, and while the crowd that gathered for his historic second inauguration is still filing out of town, President Obama will once again sit at his desk in the Oval Office and begin the tough policy work that will define his second term in office and […]
Elizabeth Grossman | December 7, 2012
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle. The good news is that in 2011 there were 53 fewer reported refinery accidents in Louisiana than there were in 2010. The bad news is that the 301 refinery accidents reported to the state in 2011 released nearly 50,000 pounds more air pollutants and nearly 1 million gallons more contaminants […]
Thomas McGarity | December 5, 2012
The saga of the missing FDA food safety regulations continues with a new government filing in a lawsuit challenging FDA’s failure to promulgate regulations implementing three critical programs that Congress established in the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. As I noted in a previous posting, the three sets of regulations are currently bottled up […]
David Hunter | December 4, 2012
The World Bank has started a process that appears likely to weaken its environmental and social safeguard policies. Although the Bank has repeatedly stated there will be no “dilution” of the policies, the Bank’s scoping paper released in October and its ongoing consultations clearly reveal a desire to replace clear standards with discretion and deference […]
Robert Verchick | December 3, 2012
Property lawyers in the United States love the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD). There’s such a rich history. The doctrine, which holds that important resources must be held “in trust” for public use, originated in Roman law. Centuries later it was forced on King John through the Magna Carta. During America’s industrial revolution, our Supreme Court […]
Holly Doremus | November 30, 2012
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. This coming Monday, Dec. 3, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the logging roads case. The case involves two consolidated petitions, Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Georgia Pacific v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center , both challenging the same decision of the Ninth Circuit, Northwest Environmental Defense […]