CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus and fellow UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Eric Biber have penned an op-ed in today's LA Times arguing that the Administration's plan to split the Minerals Management Service in two in response to the BP oil spill disaster falls short of what's needed.
Write Doremus and Biber:
The political pressure to prioritize rapid development over safety won't evaporate if the MMS is split. The new safety agency would still be under the supervision of the Department of Interior, where it would have to compete with its bureaucratic sibling. Environmental and safety interests have been losing that competition for years. Giving them a new name and logo won't automatically change that outcome.
Second, environmental protection is not just a matter of enforcing a clear set of regulations as wells are being drilled or operated. The key environmental questions come much earlier, when the MMS decides where to offer leases, sells those leases and approves permits for exploration and development. That's when the fateful decision was made to allow oil production in ultra-deep waters, on the basis of what turned out to have been absurdly rosy predictions about the likelihood and magnitude of spills and about the efficacy of response measures. Under the administration's plan, those key decisions would remain with the leasing agency, not with the newly independent enforcement arm.
Showing 2,830 results
Ben Somberg | May 20, 2010
CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus and fellow UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Eric Biber have penned an op-ed in today’s LA Times arguing that the Administration’s plan to split the Minerals Management Service in two in response to the BP oil spill disaster falls short of what’s needed. Write Doremus and Biber: The political […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | May 19, 2010
Cross-posted from ACSblog. The Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) today released a white paper examining “plausibility pleading”-the Supreme Court’s heightened pleading standard that plaintiffs must satisfy in order to bring their claims in federal court. The paper, Plausibility Pleading: Barring the Courthouse Door to Deserving Claimants, comes after the Court’s decision one year ago this […]
Dan Rohlf | May 19, 2010
As millions of gallons of oil continue to pour into the Gulf of Mexico, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – the agency within the U.S. Department of Interior that oversees offshore oil and gas leasing and development – mostly ignored some of the country’s most important […]
Matt Shudtz | May 17, 2010
In the year since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced a new process (pdf) for updating chemical risk assessments in EPA’s IRIS database, agency scientists have succeeded in getting some stalled assessments moving through the system. Since the May 21, 2009 announcement, EPA staff have competed nine new and updated assessments. Two others are in the final stages […]
Alejandro Camacho | May 14, 2010
Though in many respects similar to provisions in the House-approved American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) bill and the prior Boxer-Kerry bill in the Senate, the adaptation program proposed in the newly released Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act substantially decreases funding for federal and state adaptation programs and eliminates provisions establishing a public health adaptation […]
Yee Huang | May 12, 2010
Today marks the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Executive Order on Chesapeake Bay Restoration and Protection, which commits federal agencies to a new leadership role in Bay restoration. This morning the Federal Leadership Committee, headed by EPA and comprised of many of the major federal agencies, released its final Strategy for Restoration and Protection of […]
Victor Flatt | May 12, 2010
While Kerry and Lieberman (and before two weeks ago, Graham) have tried to pitch the proposed new Senate climate and energy draft legislation as a “game-changer” the truth is that, aside from the stronger preemption language limiting the states, its effect is not terribly different from what has come before. Sure, there are sweeteners for the […]
Victor Flatt | May 12, 2010
The Kerry-Lieberman bill’s provisions on offsets are largely similar to those in the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer bill, but include a number of changes that make more specific policy choices in the use of offsets. First, the proposal enumerates a specific lengthy list of eligible offset categories (whereas Waxman-Markey didn’t list specific categories, instead giving instruction […]
Alexandra Klass | May 11, 2010
A federal task force of the EPA and a host of federal agencies are currently working on a proposal, due to President Obama by June, on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) policy; they’re now holding a series of public meetings (for background on CCS generally, see the CPR Perspective I wrote examining some of the arguments […]