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Cross-posted from Triple Crisis. Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs […]

The recent horrific events in the Gulf of Mexico have presented immense challenges to the Obama administration and many of the federal career officials who are responsible for regulating the safety of offshore oil extraction and responding to spills like the one that continues to gush from the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig […]

“Although the 1976 RCRA Resource Conservation and Recovery Act statute does not require benefit-cost justification of RCRA regulations, this RIA regulatory impact analysis presents a qualitative benefit analysis for compliance with OMB’s 2003 ‘Circular A-4: Regulatory Analysis’ best practices guidance.” This statement comes from the executive summary to the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that EPA sent to […]

BP CEO Tony Hayward has been careful to say his company will pay for the "clean-up" from the oil spill — meaning, not the damages. But if past disasters are any guide, the clean-up will be just a small fraction of the damages from the spill (the deaths, the damage of the oil to natural […]

Today, the Senate appropriations subcommittee chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) will discuss “Investing in Mine Safety: Preventing Another Disaster” and hear testimony from the notorious Don Blankenship, chief executive officer of Massey Energy, owner of the Upper Big Branch disaster where 29 miners lost their lives on April 5.  Workers safety and health advocates […]

CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus and fellow UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Eric Biber have penned an op-ed in today’s LA Times arguing that the Administration’s plan to split the Minerals Management Service in two in response to the BP oil spill disaster falls short of what’s needed. Write Doremus and Biber: The political […]

Cross-posted from ACSblog. The Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) today released a white paper examining “plausibility pleading”-the Supreme Court’s heightened pleading standard that plaintiffs must satisfy in order to bring their claims in federal court. The paper, Plausibility Pleading: Barring the Courthouse Door to Deserving Claimants, comes after the Court’s decision one year ago this […]

As millions of gallons of oil continue to pour into the Gulf of Mexico, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – the agency within the U.S. Department of Interior that oversees offshore oil and gas leasing and development – mostly ignored some of the country’s most important […]

In the year since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced a new process (pdf) for updating chemical risk assessments in EPA’s IRIS database, agency scientists have succeeded in getting some stalled assessments moving through the system. Since the May 21, 2009 announcement, EPA staff have competed nine new and updated assessments. Two others are in the final stages […]