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Within the last 45 days, CPR Member Scholars have published two books focused on the question of federal preemption. The issue has arisen in two forms in recent years. During the Bush Administration, various regulatory agencies of the federal government – with leadership from Bush appointees – sought to use federal regulations to undercut citizens’ […]

President Bush’s designation of 195,000 square miles of marine monuments last week drew praise from a wide constituency—including many environmentalists, who have so often been at odds with the Bush Administration over the past eight years.  Without a doubt, President Bush’s use of the Antiquities Act to preserve the Marianas, Pacific Remote Islands and Rose […]

If you’re a consumer of health and environmental news, you’ve almost certainly heard it said that “children are not just little adults.” The warning comes up a lot in the context of medical research, because children’s bodies metabolize some things differently than do adults. That’s particularly important because somewhere in the vicinity of 80 percent […]

After years of study and analysis on the public health implications of regulating perchlorate in drinking water, EPA has come to the conclusion that … it needs to do more study and analysis.   In fact, that is the conclusion of two different EPA offices. Within a two-week span, EPA’s Office of Water and its […]

Environmentalists are not usually accustomed to having industry allies in their efforts to address climate change.  However, behind the scenes large private insurance companies have long advocated for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and ultimately threaten these companies’ bottom line.   Recently, reinsurance giant Munich Re attributed significant human and […]

Thursday’s big news on the regulatory front was that President-elect Obama plans to nominate Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein to be the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) – the so-called “regulatory czar” of the federal government. The appointment means that those of us expecting […]

The reporters of ProPublica continue their impressive coverage of the Bush Administration’s midnight regulations. Most of the rest of the media behaves as if the nation’s 43rd President is already out of power. But the nonprofit, wave-of-the-future-if-we’re-lucky investigative outfit has built an impressive, and frankly distressing, list of last-minute regulations – in the process driving […]

The January 3 issue of The Economist Magazine offers a special report on the challenges confronting the world’s oceans.  The nine-part package of stories covers a range of topics, including global warming, dying coral reefs, bottom trawling, dumping of sewage and trash, oxygen-choking algae blooms resulting from too many nutrients (often from fertilizer runoff), overfishing, […]

A story in the Washington Post over the holidays offers up a nice case study in how regulated industries and federal agencies charged with regulating them have grown far too cozy. The story drew back the curtain on how the manufacturer of a toxic metal called beryllium managed to defeat efforts by the Occupational Safety […]