Blog

OSHA’s pending rule on construction crane and derrick safety cleared OIRA review yesterday. The cranes rule has been a long, long time in the making and was featured as a case study in our white paper last year on the Costs of Regulatory Delay. It’s good news that this life-saving rule is finally almost set. […]

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is getting more and more attention. Here’s some of the reporting out this week. The documentary Gasland premiered Monday on HBO. Here’s the Daily Show interview and the Science Friday interview. Vanity Fair: A Colossal Fracking Mess Scranton Times-Tribune: Little oversight, looming problems for Pa. gas industry, Impact of natural gas drilling […]

The latest from ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: At least a half-dozen homebuilders, installers and environmental consultants knew as early as 2006 that foul smells were coming from drywall imported from China – but they didn’t share their early concerns with the public, even when homeowners began complaining about the drywall in 2008.  

ProPublica teamed with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to put out an important investigative piece on drywall a few days ago — “Tainted Chinese Drywall Concerns Went Unreported for Two Years.” The article, by Joaquin Sapien and Aaron Kessler, reports that: A leading East Coast homebuilder learned four years ago that the Chinese-manufactured drywall it had installed […]

The Albany Times Union had a nifty, if depressing, scoop over the weekend in “Paterson bottling up mercury ban at plant“: Efforts by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to ban mercury-tainted coal fly ash used by a Ravena cement plant have been bottled up for more than 19 months in a special regulations review […]

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 […]

CPR President Rena Steinzor has issued this statement on today’s coal ash news.  She says: Because EPA is actively considering these two very different approaches, it has not actually proposed anything from a regulatory perspective. The EPA will almost certainly have to go back and get another round of public comment before making a final […]

EPA is making an announcement right now. We’ll have more soon. Update: EPA’s announcement is up.

The EPA had projected an April announcement on the next step in regulating coal ash. But April came and went. The EPA now lists “05/2010” as the projected time for publication of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register.