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In a sweeping display of judicial activism the Supreme Court has made it much harder for the EPA to protect Americans from the dangers of exposure to mercury emissions. The Supreme Court today tossed out EPA’s regulations protecting the American public from mercury and other hazardous emissions of power plants.  Justice Scalia refused to defer […]

The Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell is, of course, most important for its central holding that the Affordable Care Act’s federal subsidies are available even on federally established health exchanges. The decision preserves health insurance subsidies for millions of people who have begun to benefit from them and avoids the ridiculous spectacle of taking the […]

TMDL.  The first four posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.  Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining three jurisdictions.                 So far, we have evaluated progress of the three core jurisdictions in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in reducing nutrient and […]

Editors’ Note:  This is the fourth in a series of posts on measuring progress toward the 2017 interim goal of the Bay TMDL.  The first three posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania and Virginia. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining four jurisdictions.              […]

ROME—On my first visit to Vatican City, before my meeting with Michelangelo, I greeted the Pope via the city’s ubiquitous souvenir stands. I love this stuff. You can try on the “Papa Francisco” kitchen apron and imagine the pontiff’s smile beaming over your Spaghetti Bolognese. Or gently joggle the pate of a Pope Francis bobble-head. […]

We recently explored how Virginia’s progress toward meeting the 2017 interim goal for the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL) is mostly the product of decades’ old financial commitments.  So, we might hope to see much of the same from Pennsylvania, a fellow member of the Chesapeake Bay Commission since 1985.  Unfortunately, despite […]

This is the second in a series of posts to explore progress in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, as reflected in recent data from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s elaborate computer model of the Bay, which accounts for what the states are actually doing to reduce pollution. Read the first post, taking a look at the […]

In the shadow of the upcoming Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage is an important environmental case that has important implications for the health of women of childbearing age in America.  The Court will decide whether to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s stringent limitations for emissions of the toxic metal mercury from the […]

The State of Maryland released a long overdue report on Monday regarding the state’s plan to finance its implementation of the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL) requirements.  The report was prepared by the Environmental Finance Center at the University of Maryland on behalf of the Maryland Department of the Environment, the Department […]