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The Chesapeake Bay watershed covers 64,000 square miles, measuring 200 miles in length and 35 miles at its widest point. The watershed is one of the most beautiful and economically productive in the world. Tourism, which depends to a large extent on the preservation of pristine environmental conditions, contributes billions of dollars to the economies […]

The drywall debacle continues. Inez Tenenbaum, President Obama’s nominee for head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, got a number of drywall questions from senators at her nomination hearing earlier this month.  They said the government response seemed too slow. Tenenbaum pledged she’d work on the problem, and was subsequently confirmed by a voice vote […]

Waxman-Markey passed the House.  Was it the right thing to do?  What’s the outlook from here?  Here are a few views from around the web. Dan Farber: The concerns about measuring and enforcing offsets are genuine (and increased because of Waxman-Markey’s reliance on USDA to do the job.)  But those problems aren’t insurmountable either.  Instead […]

The House Agriculture Committee yesterday released the language of an amendment by Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN), which Rep. Waxman has agreed to accept as part of the final House climate change bill in order to secure support from Peterson and other farm-state representatives. Peterson represents a large, heavily ag-dependent district in central and […]

Wednesday, I explored the various ways that the USDA takeover of bio-sequestration offsets could affect how well the offsets provision of the Waxman-Markey Climate Security Act would work. Today, we have legislative language in the form of an amendment offered by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), which fills in some of the details.  While some of […]

Last night, House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman announced that he had agreed with Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson that the USDA could have jurisdiction over agricultural offsets in the massive American Clean Energy and Security Act, which the House may vote on this Friday. In agreeing to what had been one of the […]

Cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. In an opinion by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court decided two issues in this case, over a dissent by Justice Ginsburg.  The first was whether the Clean Air Act gives authority to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, or instead to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to issue […]

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled in Coeur Alaska, Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council that the United States EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers could interpret the Clean Water Act to exempt water pollution sources from pollution control requirements if the pollution was accompanied by fill material. This legal feat was accomplished because the […]

Andrew Freedman of washingtonpost.com’s Capital Weather Gang has a nifty catch: the Heartland Institute, the people cluttering up my newspaper this week with climate-change-denying ads, have officially changed tack on their lobbying policy. Back in March, the group told Freedman: “Our purpose is to bring scientists, economists, and policy experts together to address issues overlooked […]