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President-elect Obama has a lot on his plate. No doubt the financial crisis is foremost on his mind. But as he ticked off his to-do list in his victory speech Tuesday night, I heard our new president mention another global crisis as well: “a planet in peril.” The worst economic crisis since the great depression […]

You can never step in the same river twice, the saying goes. According to a new report about how climate change is expected to affect the Chesapeake Bay, that saying may become truer than ever.   In Climate Change and the Chesapeake Bay, a group of scientists and water quality experts found that, because of […]

Climate change is such an unprecedented challenge that sometimes it can seem overwhelming to think through its full range of impacts, let alone develop policy solutions to address them. Yet as policymakers delve into the details of the many ways in which climate change will impact global societies and the environment, the most promising solutions […]

In CPR’s recent white paper, Saving Science from Politics, Rena Steinzor, Wendy Wagner and I proposed reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to strengthen the Act’s “adverse effects” reporting requirements.  Under TSCA, registration of a chemical with EPA triggers a continuing obligation on regulated firms to submit to EPA any information they obtain that […]

Next year, Congress is all but certain to try to tackle climate change legislation again, and the stakes are higher than ever. Further delay in federal action would only compound the problem. But while Congress has been sitting on its hands for more than a decade, many states have taken action, seeing climate change not […]

The battle over bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic baby bottles took another interesting turn today when the FDA’s own scientific advisory panel issued a stinging rebuke of the agency for its determination that the toxic substance is not harmful.   According to the Washington Post, FDA did not take into consideration scores of studies that […]

Earlier this month, and after six years of delay, EPA announced that it had decided not to regulate perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel and munitions that has leached into water supplies in various parts of the country, often near military bases. As it happened, the announcement came just a few days before the release […]

One recurrent theme of the Bush Administration’s regulatory approach has been the weakening of protective regulations – not just by weakening standards, but by erecting bureaucratic barriers to progress. In mid-August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) provided another example of the later approach, proposing changes to rules implementing the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—changes […]

I share Wendy’s concerns but also believe that there is room for optimism, although on different grounds than Rena and John.  Much of the debate over the use of science to support regulation of public health and the environment has focused on the most challenging contexts.  Toxics regulation, as we all know, rests on relatively […]