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The Obama Administration is expected to issue revisions to Executive Order 12,866, which specifies how the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) supervises federal regulatory agencies as they develop regulations to protect health, safety, the environment, and more (see the full comments on the matter submitted by CPR's board members in March). CPR […]

“Interior increases oversight of mountaintop mining” trumpets the AP, and “U.S. boosts coal mining oversight to fight pollution” says Reuters. That’s in response to an announcement from Interior on Wednesday. But on Coal Tattoo, and from NRDC and Sierra Club, one learns of a pretty different story. Says NRDC’s Rob Perks: Why in the world […]

For an analysis of the news from California this week — where the legislature passed a group of bills Wednesday on water protection — do check out Richard Frank on Legal Planet, who looks at the good and the less-than-good. It commits substantial public funding and commitment to  desperately needed Delta ecosystem restoration. The bill […]

CPR Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies has a piece on the Atlantic’s food website today — “Saving Seafood From Extinction” — on how the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is making a last-ditch effort to overhaul the nation’s devastated fisheries. The agency’s new regulations — including lower catch limites — have faced some opposition, but the choice […]

This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU. In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen […]

Today the Consumer Product Safety Comission released three draft reports on its findings so far regarding contaminated Chinese drywall. Here’s how the Sarasota Herald-Tribune puts the development: In what is sure to inflame lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the federal government issued a report on Thursday about Chinese drywall that stopped short of linking the material […]

Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book’s methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking. But yesterday brought a new […]

CPR President Rena Steinzor and board member Robert Glicksman sent a letter today to White House Science Adviser John Holdren and OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein regarding OMB's role in EPA science decisions. The letter concerns two recent episodes involving OMB that we wrote about this week: one regarding the EPA's Endocrine Disrputor Screening Program (EDSP) […]

The EPA today released a 15-page Clean Water Act Enforcement Action Plan prepared by the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Back in early July, Lisa Jackson had directed the enforcmeent office to develop a plan, and to “report back to me within 90 days with your recommendations.” The EPA seems to be saying […]