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Cross-posted from Triple Crisis. Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs […]

The recent horrific events in the Gulf of Mexico have presented immense challenges to the Obama administration and many of the federal career officials who are responsible for regulating the safety of offshore oil extraction and responding to spills like the one that continues to gush from the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig […]

BP CEO Tony Hayward has been careful to say his company will pay for the "clean-up" from the oil spill — meaning, not the damages. But if past disasters are any guide, the clean-up will be just a small fraction of the damages from the spill (the deaths, the damage of the oil to natural […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]