(Cross-posted by permission from LegalPlanet)
EPA finished September with a flourish. In addition to proposing New Source Review rules for greenhouse gas emissions and pushing for TSCA reform, the agency took the next step toward a crack-down on mountaintop removal. On September 11, EPA announced preliminary plans to review all 79 pending permit applications. This week, after considering public comment, it finalized that list, concluding that indeed all 79 require further review, based on concerns that the projects could more fully avoid or minimize impacts on aquatic resources; that they threaten to violate water quality standards; that their cumulative impacts have not been fully assessed; and that proposed mitigation efforts may not be effective.
Under the coordinated review procedures announced by EPA and the Corps in June, the next step is for the issuing Corps district and the appropriate regional office of EPA to review the permit applications together. That review is supposed to take no more than 60 days for any individual application, but does not have to being right away — the Corps will let EPA know when it is ready to deal with each permit application, based on workload, availability of information, and other factors.
The individual permit review process will give EPA a chance to fully air its concerns, and the Corps a chance to revise the permit conditions or even decline to issue the permit. The acid test will come at its conclusion. The Corps may still decide to issue a permit over EPA objections, but must provide a written explanation of its response to EPA’s concerns. At that point, EPA can either back off or exercise its § 404 veto power.
That EPA has decided to pursue further review of all 79 permit applications suggests that the agency is serious about fulfilling its statutory role of overseeing the Corps’ permitting decisions to make sure the nation’s waters are adequately protected. And it may soon have some added scientific tools for doing that job — Ken Ward’s Coal Tattoo blog reports that EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment is preparing a review of existing studies on the ecological impacts of mountaintop removal. A draft of the report is expected to be made public by the middle of November.
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Holly Doremus | October 2, 2009
(Cross-posted by permission from LegalPlanet) EPA finished September with a flourish. In addition to proposing New Source Review rules for greenhouse gas emissions and pushing for TSCA reform, the agency took the next step toward a crack-down on mountaintop removal. On September 11, EPA announced preliminary plans to review all 79 pending permit applications. This […]
Alice Kaswan | October 1, 2009
This post is the second in a series from CPR Member Scholars examining different aspects of the Boxer-Kerry bill on climate change, which was released September 30. Wednesday was a big day for advocates of traditional regulation. While the Waxman-Markey bill proposed exempting greenhouse gases (GHGs) from key Clean Air Act (CAA) provisions, the Boxer-Kerry bill […]
Ben Somberg | September 30, 2009
The full 821-page bill is up here. That’s not to be confused with the 801-page pre-draft everyone was checking out yesterday, or the 684-page one earlier yesterday. They’ve also got a section-by-section outline of the bill. We’ll have much more soon.
Yee Huang | September 30, 2009
This post is part of CPR’s ongoing analysis of the draft reports on protecting and restoring the Chesapeake Bay. See Shana Jones’ earlier “EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Reports: A First Look“ One of the continuing obstacles to cleaning up the nation’s waterways, including the Chesapeake Bay, is the pollution caused by non-point sources (NPS). In the […]
Victor Flatt | September 30, 2009
This post is first in a series from CPR Member Scholars examining different aspects of the Boxer-Kerry bill on climate change, which was released today. With respect to offsets, the Boxer-Kerry bill is a distinct improvement over the ACES. It allows a relatively strong approach to offset integrity, avoiding negative social or environmental effects, and […]
Shana Campbell Jones | September 29, 2009
Today PennFuture released a report finding that the amount of liquid manure applied to farms in Pennsylvania’s Octoraro watershed has increased by 40 percent over the past five years to 108 million gallons annually. The amount of nitrogen produced by livestock in the watershed is equal to the amount generated by approximately 370,000 people each […]
Ben Somberg | September 29, 2009
Much of the battle to preserve and protect water resources happens at the state and local levels – in any number of policy choices advocated and made by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments. In recent years, water activists have begun to deploy a new tool geared to shape these decisions. Long-established in legal jurisprudence, the […]
Ben Somberg | September 28, 2009
This just in: trying to stop climate change will cost the world about $50 trillion a year, but the impacts of climate change will only cost about $1 trillion a year, so the choice is clear! That’s the thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post. Presumably the flooding of much of Bangladesh doesn’t […]
James Goodwin | September 25, 2009
Issues of national security have always enjoyed a free pass when it comes to the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the primary form of making decisions. For example, no military official or politician interested in keeping his job would ever dare publicly question whether the additional money spent on extra armor for tanks to […]