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On September 17th, 2013, US EPA released a massive 331 page draft report distilling peer reviewed science regarding “connectivity” of various sorts of American water bodies with larger bodies of waters, such as rivers and lakes.   It also sent to the White House for review a draft proposed rule about how it and the Army […]

Call it buyer’s remorse. The Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration (SBA) is publicly—albeit meekly—tiptoeing away from a now-infamous report that it commissioned, in which economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain purported to find that federal regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion in 2008. After being roundly criticized by CPR, the Congressional Research Service, and […]

Executive Order 12866 may be twenty years old, but formal, centralized review of agency rulemaking by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is more than thirty years old, having been instituted by President Ronald Reagan in Executive Order 12291 in 1981. Since then, this centralized review has been carried out without significant change over […]

This coming Friday marks the 20th anniversary of a little-known but remarkably important document: Executive Order 12866, issued by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Executive Order 12866 replaced an order issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Both of these documents set out a process whereby the White House – acting through the Office of Information and […]

Today, the Hill published an op-ed by CPR Vice President Sid Shapiro entitled, “In Defense of Regulation.” According to the piece: The responsible scholarly literature — as opposed to calculations cooked by business-friendly think tanks — has refuted the opponents’ claims of regulatory costs far in excess of the benefits of regulation. The same literature reminds […]

As we noted on the day of the announcement, OSHA has – at long last – released a proposal to better protect workers from respirable silica. We didn’t have much to say about the substance at the time because we simply hadn’t had the opportunity to read through the massive proposal. (It’s over 750 pages, with almost […]

Last week, E&E News reported a breakdown in talks over EPA’s long- delayed stormwater rule. In 2009, in a settlement with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, EPA promised a new rule by November, 2012. That deadline has long since passed, and apparently EPA and environmental groups are at an impasse in their negotiations over a  new timeline. The […]

On September 20, 2013 the EPA proposed new source performance standards for greenhouse gas emissions for new power plants.  Although the agency repackaged and fine-tuned an earlier proposal, issued in April 2012, it continues to hold the coal industry’s feet to the fire.  The proposal makes clear that new coal-fired power capacity cannot be built […]

Almost every new power plant that the electric utility industry has built in recent years has been a natural gas powered plant. Industry rarely builds new coal-fired power plants anymore because gas has become much cheaper than coal. That is a very good thing. Absent rather expensive carbon capture and storage, new coal-fired power plants […]