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Rena Steinzor | December 12, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama seems close to naming Lisa Jackson, now head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson, or whoever ends up getting the appointment, will surely get a raft of advice from friends and closet enemies alike. Most of it will have to do with regulations […]
James Goodwin | December 9, 2008
One of many areas in which the Bush Administration has sought to throw sand in the gears of the regulatory process is by tampering with the methods of risk assessment used by regulatory agencies as part of their process of gauging how much regulation, if any, is needed in a certain area. More specifically, […]
Matt Shudtz | December 5, 2008
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 […]
James Goodwin | December 3, 2008
Perhaps no other consequence of global climate change kindles the public’s fears like the prospect of catastrophic sea-level rise. For years now, climate scientists have recognized the potential for increasing global surface temperatures to produce certain kinds of feedback loops that would accelerate the collapse of massive ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica, leading to […]
Shana Campbell Jones | December 2, 2008
Chief Justice Earl Warren once said he always turned to the sports section of the newspaper first. “The sports page records people’s accomplishments,” he explained. “The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” The Chesapeake Bay has been in the news a lot lately, and its fans aren’t cheering. When it comes to Bay cleanup […]
Margaret Clune Giblin | December 1, 2008
The “land disposal” laws line up on the pages of U.S. history books, reminders of a bygone era when the government of a young nation was striving to find ways to encourage people to move west by giving away public lands at bargain-basement prices. The Homestead Act of 1862, for example, gave settlers title to […]
Matt Shudtz | November 25, 2008
Every time energy prices spike, oil companies (and their allies in Washington) start talking up oil shale. It happened just before World War I, it happened after the 1973 oil embargo, and it’s happening again now. Oil shale, the hucksters tell us, is the answer to America’s energy problems. Huge deposits of the stuff lie […]
Matthew Freeman | November 21, 2008
In January, “committed environmentalist” Henry Waxman will take the chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, the body through which environmental legislation – and most significantly, climate change legislation – will pass on its way to the floor of the House of Representatives next year. As it happens, Representative Waxman is a charter […]
Margaret Clune Giblin | November 20, 2008
One important environmental challenge facing soon-to-be-President Obama is how to reinvigorate the National Forest System’s environmental protections. The system encompasses 192 million acres of land, which – to the constant amazement of those of us on the East Coast – represents about 8 percent of the total land area of the United States (roughly equivalent […]