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Update: Verchick’s testimony is here. On Thursday, August 22, CPR Member Scholar Robert R.M. Verchick will testify before California’s “Little Hoover Commission” about land-use planning to address the threat of climate change. The Commission is conducting a study of climate-change-adaptation efforts in the state, and Verchick, a professor at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and […]

Like no other mammoth corporation that did very bad things—not Enron, not WorldCom, not Exxon, and not even HSBC (which, after all, laundered money for the Mexican drug cartel and was allowed to pay a fine without pleading guilty!)—BP has not lost its arrogant swagger. In a fit of high dudgeon it filed a lawsuit last […]

A Nebraskan activist?  Wait, you say, isn’t that an oxymoron?  But the typically stoic, non-litigious citizens of Nebraska are indeed standing up and taking notice, and the nation is starting to take notice of them. A few days ago, a Washington Post headline predicted, “Nebraska trial could delay Keystone XL pipeline.”  As you may already know from […]

Tomorrow, a new panel in the Senate Judiciary Committee—the Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights, and Agency Action—will bring some much-need sanity to the discussion of federal regulatory policy when it holds a hearing entitled “Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis.” What’s so refreshing about this hearing is that it starts from the premise that […]

Today, Senator Boxer’s Environment and Public Works committee will hold a hearing to discuss the best ways to fix the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the badly outdated law governing some 80,000 chemicals used in commerce in the United States. Communities across the country are not aware of the dangers present in chemicals in everything […]

Last week, The Hill published an opinion piece by Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Robert Verchick. The piece entitled, “Politics and progress: Will the White House stall its own climate change plans?” can be read here. According to Verchick: Under its statutory authority, EPA has ample power to write rules limiting power plant emissions, […]

Three years after the EPA proposed a rule to protect communities from coal ash—a byproduct of coal-power generation that’s filled with toxic chemicals like arsenic, lead, and mercury—a final rule is still nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, power plants are dumping an additional 94 million tons of it every year into wet-ash ponds and dry landfills […]

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, or review of  EME Homer City Generation v. EPA, 696 F.3d 7 (D.C. Cir. 2012), reh’g en banc denied, 2013 WL 656247 (D.C. Cir. Jan. 24, 2013). This is a welcome development, as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals got many things wrong in its tossing out of […]

When you say “small business,” most people probably imagine a mom-and-pop corner grocery.  Actually, the federal Small Business Administration’s concept of small goes well beyond that.  For instance, it includes a computer business that does up to $25 million per year in business. A convenience store can do $27 million and still be considered “small,” […]