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This past week, many national newspapers picked up the story from Utah, where the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) just approved a spate of resource management plans that clear the way for a massive oil/gas lease sale next month. Some of the tens of thousands of acres slated for leasing are near the boundaries of […]

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 […]

Joining Thomas McGarity in this post are CPR Policy Analysts Margaret Clune Giblin and Matthew Shudtz.  This entry is cross-posted on ACSBlog, the blog of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. In the wake of the meltdown in the US financial sector, federal regulation has attracted renewed public support as a vehicle for […]

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 […]

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could give a boost to the Bush Administration’s backdoor “tort reform” efforts – an increasingly transparent effort to shield industry from litigation over defective products. The issue in Wyeth v. Levine is whether the Food and Drug Administration’s labeling requirements preempt […]

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 […]

Halloween—a day on which not everything is as it seems—offers a fitting occasion to ponder the possible effects of globalization on the U.S. regulatory system and its ability to protect Americans.    Globalization is a complex subject, and, like the bandages of a reanimated mummy, its ramifications could probably be unwound indefinitely.  Its proponents wax […]