CPR’s 2018 Op-Eds

As we prepare to tie a bow on 2018, it’s worth looking back at the various op-eds CPR’s Member Scholars and staff penned over the course of the year. You can find and read every single one of them on our op-ed page. But here are some highlights for quick(er) perusal:

• In February, CPR’s Founding President, Tom McGarity had a piece in The American Prospect, reviewing the damage done by the GOP congressional majority by means of the Congressional Review Act.
• Lisa Heinzerling had a March piece in The Washington Post pointing out that, on at least one front, the President is losing his war on sensible safeguards, because, as it turns out, the courts sometimes insist that regulatory agencies follow the Administrative Procedure Act, even when the President is eager to ignore it.
• In June, CPR President Rob Verchick was in the Los Angeles Times with a column on then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s efforts to distort the regulatory process by putting a heavy, industry-friendly thumb on the cost-benefit scale.
• In May (and with a July update), Bill Buzbee took Pruitt to task in a CNN piece, focusing on the ways he was forcing EPA to cut legal corners.
• Once Pruitt resigned under cloud of scandal, Joel Mintz warned in the Miami Herald that there wasn’t much in the record to suggest his replacement, Andrew Wheeler, would pursue more environmentally friendly policies.
• In August, Mintz also placed a piece in The Revelator, on the Trump attack on the Clean Power Plan.
• Victor Flatt’s August piece in the Houston Chronicle focused on the ways that the Trump EPA was undercutting efforts to clean up Houston’s air pollution.
• Alice Kaswan’s October op-ed in The Fresno Bee addressed the Trump EPA’s efforts to roll back auto emissions standards and how it would worsen air pollution.
• In January, Alejandro Camacho and a colleague argued in The Conversation against efforts to devolve some Endangered Species Act enforcement to the states.
• McGarity had a piece in The Waco Tribune-Herald on the Trump administration’s rollback of safety rules written after the West, Texas, chemical plant disaster.
• Sandra Zellmer and Alexandra Klass had a July piece in The Duluth News-Tribune on efforts by Trump’s Department of the Interior to pave the way for a Chilean company to set up a sulfide-ore copper-nickel mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.
• In May, Heinzerling published a column in the San Jose Mercury-News highlighting efforts by cities to sue Big Oil into a measure of accountability for climate change.
• David Flores had several pieces in The Bay Journal on various aspects of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup – one with Rena Steinzor in January, another in June, and a third in November.
• Steinzor and Katherine Tracy both had pieces in The Baltimore Sun on worker safety – Steinzor’s in June, Tracy’s in April.
• In the run-up to the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, two scholars authored pieces examining his views on a variety of regulatory issues: Joel Mintz in July in the South Florida Sun Sentinel and Joseph Tomain in The Cincinnati Enquirer in August.
• Sandra Zellmer and Emily Hammond each placed two articles in SCOTUSBlog previewing and then analyzing arguments in environment cases before the Supreme Court. Zellmer looked at Sturgeon v. Frost, before and after; Hammond at Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, before and after.
• Wendy Wagner shared a byline with two colleagues in a December piece on the escalating wars over clean science in the regulatory process, placed in Science magazine.
• Finally, CPR Member Scholars placed 10 pieces in The Hill, covering a range of issues:
  • Steinzor in February on Justice Department enforcement policies;
  • Laurie Ristino in March on the environmental failings of the then-current version of Farm Bill;
  • Richard Pierce in April on a then-pending Supreme Court case and whether it held a clue as to whether the Court would countenance a decision by the President to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller;
  • Mintz in April on EPA enforcement failings and their implications for climate change policy;
  • Sid Shapiro in May on the Trump EPA’s distortion of science;
  • Robert Glicksman in July on Trump’s 19th century approach to public lands;
  • Mintz in August on proposed vehicle emission standards rollbacks;
  • Steinzor on Brett Kavanaugh’s corner-cutting in his opinions from the bench;
  • Camacho and a colleague in October on Trump efforts to undermine the Endangered Species Act;
  • Martha McCluskey and Shapiro in October on the role civil courts play in ensuring a measure of justice for low-income victims of industrial pollution let loose by natural disasters.

For these and all other CPR op-eds this year, in years gone by, and (soon) next year, visit our op-ed page.