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It’s a frackin’ mess out there in the world of natural gas extraction – exploding houses and water wells, dying cattle, and curious rashes.  The Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the House Natural Resources Committee recently held a hearing to explore the risks of hydraulic fracturing, or fracing (sometimes spelled, “fracking”), which is […]

This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had a terrific piece by Matt Bai on the Obama White House and how it is “taking” Capitol Hill, one battle at a time. After extolling the team of congressional insiders Obama has assembled, and emphasizing the importance of their attentiveness to key players on the issue du […]

This week, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources held a hearing on the problem of waste pharmaceuticals ending up in the nation’s waterways. The issue sounds trivial – does Congress really need to spend its time worrying about people with a few left-over prescription pills flushing them down the toilet? The answer […]

Over the past few months, the Obama Administration has sent mixed signals on mountaintop mining, the practice of blowing the tops off mountains containing coal and piling the left-over rubble in valleys and streambeds. Early on, things seemed to be going well for the environment. First, EPA objected to the issuance of two specific permits […]

This afternoon, Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC), Chairman of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, will hold a hearing on recent revisions to the IRIS assessment process. IRIS (the Integrated Risk Information System) is EPA’s premier database of toxicological profiles for dangerous chemicals. The profiles are used for everything from setting cleanup standards […]

This afternoon, Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC), Chairman of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, will hold a hearing on recent revisions to the IRIS assessment process. IRIS (the Integrated Risk Information System) is EPA’s premier database of toxicological profiles for dangerous chemicals. The profiles are used for everything from setting cleanup standards […]

Cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. In a decision that shows the power of Chevron deference, Friends of the Everglades v. South Florida Water Management District, the 11th Circuit has upheld EPA’s water transfers rule, which provides that the act of moving water from one waterway to another does not require a National Pollutant Discharge […]

The first line of defense against climate regulation was that climate change didn’t exist. The next line of defense was that maybe it was real, but it wasn’t caused by humans. Now we’re up to the third line of defense: it does exist and it is caused by humans, but it’s too expensive to fix. […]

When President Obama launched his open government initiative on his first full day on the job, few assumed that the ambitious endeavor it contemplated would be easy.  After all, lack of transparency and even active efforts to conceal information had become almost an inextricable feature of the federal government’s internal operations and decision-making—especially during the […]