CPR Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies has a piece on the Atlantic's food website today -- "Saving Seafood From Extinction" -- on how the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is making a last-ditch effort to overhaul the nation's devastated fisheries. The agency's new regulations -- including lower catch limites -- have faced some opposition, but the choice is clear, writes Bratspies:
Allowing this overfishing to continue means abandoning all hope of either stock recovery or a healthy fishery. Such a tactic doesn't do anybody any favors. Overfishing is disastrous not only for the fish but also for broader marine ecosystems, and ultimately for the fishing communities themselves. Those communities are already hurting, and the new restrictions will definitely cause more pain. But, business as usual is simply not an option. Current management practices have not only failed to restore fish stocks to sustainable levels but have often allowed them to deteriorate further. We have to do something or this generation of fisherfolk will be the last--because there won't be any more fish.
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Ben Somberg | November 4, 2009
CPR Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies has a piece on the Atlantic’s food website today — “Saving Seafood From Extinction” — on how the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is making a last-ditch effort to overhaul the nation’s devastated fisheries. The agency’s new regulations — including lower catch limites — have faced some opposition, but the choice […]
Daniel Farber | November 3, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Apparently, substantially safer designs for nuclear reactors are now available. But the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste is a significant challenge and a yet unresolved problem. Presently, waste is stored at over a hundred facilities across the country, within seventy-five miles of the homes of 161 million people. The […]
Matthew Freeman | November 2, 2009
A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas […]
Matthew Freeman | October 30, 2009
One of the great political communications successes of the past 30 years has been the right wing’s relentless assault on the American regulatory system. Think of the words and images that have come to be associated with “regulation” in that time: red tape, bureaucrats, green eye shades, piles of paper stretching to the ceiling, and more. And the […]
Ben Somberg | October 30, 2009
This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU. In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen […]
Ben Somberg | October 29, 2009
Today the Consumer Product Safety Comission released three draft reports on its findings so far regarding contaminated Chinese drywall. Here’s how the Sarasota Herald-Tribune puts the development: In what is sure to inflame lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the federal government issued a report on Thursday about Chinese drywall that stopped short of linking the material […]
Daniel Farber | October 29, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories Wednesday on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts: In anticipation, groups on the left […]
Ben Somberg | October 27, 2009
Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book’s methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking. But yesterday brought a new […]
Catherine O'Neill | October 26, 2009
Three recent developments in the saga of efforts to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired utilities are significant. Early last week, Michigan became the twenty-third state to require coal-fired utilities within its jurisdiction to reduce their mercury emissions. Michigan’s regulation requires these sources to cut mercury emissions by 90% by 2015. Then, on Thursday, the EPA […]