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Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Wyeth v. Levine protected consumers’ longstanding right to take pharmaceutical companies to court for failing to properly warn patients and their doctors about the risks posed by the drugs they market.  Unfortunately, people injured by faulty medical devices don’t have the same right following last year’s Riegel v. Medtronic […]

Monday was a good day for our nation’s science policy.  At the same time he announced that the federal government will abandon misguided restrictions on stem cell research, President Obama unveiled an effort to promote a sea change in the way political appointees will treat the science that informs so many federal policies.   In […]

Last Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Bureau of Land Management is going to “review and reconsider” the oil shale leases proposed in the waning days of the Bush Administration.  The Bush proposal would have potentially opened 1.9 million acres of land in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming for oil shale development […]

More evidence that EPA is starting to find its bearings after eight years of hibernation: in an interim report on the year-old Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program, EPA admits that asking companies who work on nanomaterials to voluntarily conduct and disclose research on health and environmental hazards isn’t producing much useful information. As a result, the […]

After years of study and analysis on the public health implications of regulating perchlorate in drinking water, EPA has come to the conclusion that … it needs to do more study and analysis.   In fact, that is the conclusion of two different EPA offices. Within a two-week span, EPA’s Office of Water and its […]

Last week, the New York Times ran two stories that present a fascinating dichotomy in people’s response to rising home-heating costs.   On Friday, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from the central German town of Darmstadt about “passive houses” that employ high-tech designs to provide warm air and hot water using incredibly small amounts of energy – […]

Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an outstanding series on Stephen Johnson’s (or, George Bush’s) EPA. Among many other insightful points, John Shiffman and John Sullivan note that for much of the last eight years EPA has shut environmentalists out of the regulatory process, prompting many national environmental organizations to rethink their advocacy strategies. Some […]

Sometime this month, EPA is expected to reach a final determination on regulating perchlorate in Americans’ drinking water. Every indication is that the agency will conclude, despite ample advice to the contrary, that there’s no need for a national standard for the chemical – a component of rocket fuel and munitions. That, even though, by […]

Dan Rosenberg of NRDC has an excellent new post up on Switchboard that lays out some ideas for reforming U.S. chemical policies in the wake of the Bush Administration. The ideas include improving the risk assessment process EPA uses to develop its IRIS database, strengthening chemical security measures, re-invigorating right-to-know policies under the Toxic Release […]