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It turns out there’s more than one way an offshore oil rig can kill a fish. Even when they’re not spewing oil into the ocean, oil rigs kill vast numbers of fish and other aquatic organisms in their daily operations by sucking them up into their cooling water intake systems, where they get squashed against screens […]

The Minerals Managements Service’s coziness with an industry it was supposed to be monitoring has brought attention back to an all-too-pervasive problem: regulatory agencies becoming “captured” by the regulated industries. This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts is holding a hearing on “Protecting the Public Interest: Understanding the Threat […]

Now that Congress has passed legislation creating a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Treasury Department, attention has shifted to how the Obama Administration will implement the new law. The issue of who President Obama should appoint to head the new agency is now front and center. Consumer groups and many members of Congress […]

The EPA released a guidance document on Monday that promises to integrate environmental justice considerations into the fabric of its rulemaking efforts. Titled the Interim Guidance on Considering Environmental Justice During the Development of an Action, EPA’s Guidance sets forth concrete steps meant to flag those instances in which its rules or similar actions raise environmental […]

Cross-posted from Legal Planet. A key figure in behavioral economics recently issued a warning about over-reliance on its findings.  In a NY Times op. ed, Dr. George Lowenstein raised questions about some uses of behavioral economics by government policymakers: As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked […]

The second segment of last night’s Daily Show interview with David Axelrod featured a couple minutes on the broken regulatory system and questions of trust in government competence in the wake of the BP disaster. Axelrod: “I think we’ve tested the proposition of what no regulation means, and what you get is .. the leak, […]

There is plenty of environmental despair right now . . . spreading oil in the Gulf, legislative inaction on climate change and a host of other issues, and the sense that for every step forward, there is a special interest that will take the nation two steps back.  So, in this downward spiral of disappointments, […]

Across the full spectrum of outside cognoscenti who are focused on the reality that a small office at the White House has final authority over the agencies charged with preventing catastrophes like the BP oil spill and the Big Branch mine disaster, one threshold assumption is sacrosanct. This tiny Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, now […]

With characteristic audacity, the Wall Street Journal editorial page today is arguing against the precautionary approach to environmental policy that undergirds our system of environmental laws, even as the oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, they want to shift the burden of proof and only allow regulators to restrain corporate greed when […]