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James Goodwin | January 21, 2010
This post is the third in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the biggest and most powerful of the protector agencies. Consequently, it has also become the agency that was most decimated by regulatory opponents in recent decades. Thus, when President Obama […]
Ben Somberg | January 21, 2010
The EPA announced yesterday that they’re changing the way they treat manufacturers’ claims that certain information about toxic chemicals should be kept secret. Richard Denison of EDF has a useful explanation and analysis of this good news. Rena Steinzor and Matt Shudtz explored the dangers of secrecy in chemical science in a 2007 CPR white […]
Frank Ackerman | January 19, 2010
Bjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize […]
Ben Somberg | January 19, 2010
Two developments to note on coal ash from recent days: OIRA extended its review of EPA’s not-yet-publicly-proposed regulation on coal ash. That gives it an additional 30-days from the previous Jan 14 deadline. Matthew Madia explains at The Fine Print. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson mentioned coal ash in an appearance Thursday, saying, “There has been […]
Sandra Zellmer | January 13, 2010
My family has gotten a lot smaller lately. My mother died in 2004, my father in 2007, and my uncle in 2008. I’ve done the five stages of grief, as introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, but not exactly as she described. It’s true that I initially felt denial: “I’m a lucky person; this can’t […]
Holly Doremus | January 12, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Last Monday, EPA signed off on the Corps of Engineers’ issuance of a Clean Water Act § 404 permit to Hobet Mining for a mountaintop removal coal mining project in West Virginia. The decision is important because it’s the first product of the process announced last fall for joint EPA / […]
Ben Somberg | January 7, 2010
A few months ago Rena Steinzor wrote skeptically here about state (as opposed to federal) regulation of hydraulic fracturing: … the idea that after doing all this research, EPA should stand back and let the gas-producing states take the lead, stepping in only after much more delay, would amount to a rollback of environmental protection […]
Holly Doremus | January 5, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. As I pointed out three months ago, the federal government has awakened from its 8-year Bush administration slumber to notice that the SF Bay-Delta is an important environmental and economic resource whose management requires federal input. On December 22, the Obama administration issued an Interim Federal Action Plan for the California […]
Ben Somberg | January 4, 2010
A group of organizations who work to eliminate health hazards in housing have sent a letter to OMB chief Peter Orszag expressing concern over the “detailing” of Randall Lutter to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The letter focuses on Lutter’s writings on the economics of lead poisoning: Mr. Lutter’s statement, “…the children […]