Blog

Editor’s Note: Following is the second of several posts focused on federal preemption issues and featuring CPR Member Scholars Thomas McGarity and William Buzbee.  In December, both published books on the issue.  (The first blog post in the series includes some background on the issue.)  McGarity’s book is The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump […]

Within the last 45 days, CPR Member Scholars have published two books focused on the question of federal preemption. The issue has arisen in two forms in recent years. During the Bush Administration, various regulatory agencies of the federal government – with leadership from Bush appointees – sought to use federal regulations to undercut citizens’ […]

If you’re a consumer of health and environmental news, you’ve almost certainly heard it said that “children are not just little adults.” The warning comes up a lot in the context of medical research, because children’s bodies metabolize some things differently than do adults. That’s particularly important because somewhere in the vicinity of 80 percent […]

The reporters of ProPublica continue their impressive coverage of the Bush Administration’s midnight regulations. Most of the rest of the media behaves as if the nation’s 43rd President is already out of power. But the nonprofit, wave-of-the-future-if-we’re-lucky investigative outfit has built an impressive, and frankly distressing, list of last-minute regulations – in the process driving […]

The January 3 issue of The Economist Magazine offers a special report on the challenges confronting the world’s oceans.  The nine-part package of stories covers a range of topics, including global warming, dying coral reefs, bottom trawling, dumping of sewage and trash, oxygen-choking algae blooms resulting from too many nutrients (often from fertilizer runoff), overfishing, […]

The Environmental Working Group is out with a new guide to Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), and they warn that not all CFLs are environmentally equal.   CFLs offer huge energy-consumption and length-of-use advantages over traditional incandescent bulbs, but they introduce one noteworthy environmental problem: each CFL has a tiny amount of mercury inside the […]

The Fresno Bee’s Mark Grossi ran a piece this weekend about local deaths caused by air pollution. It must have left readers shaking their heads; indeed, that seems to have been the point. Here’s the lede: The more than 800 people who died prematurely this year from breathing dirty San Joaquin Valley air are worth […]

David Fahrenthold had a powerful article in Saturday’s Washington Post on the failures of Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts. The lede: Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the […]

The Mercatus Center is out with a new report focused on midnight regulations — the last-minute regs pushed through by Presidents even as their successor’s inaugural parade reviewing stand is being constructed on the front stoop of the White House. President Bush and his political appointees at regulatory agencies are making considerable use of their […]