What Are 'Ag-Gag' Law Proponents Trying to Hide?
At a time when consumers are demanding greater transparency in the food system – and some food companies are delivering by means of genetically modified organism labeling and removal of artificial food dyes — a troubling North Carolina law that runs counter to that goal has recently gone into effect. The state’s so-called “ag-gag” law prohibits whistleblowers from making audio or video recordings inside industrial agricultural facilities. Following the success of a similar suit in Idaho last year, consumer protection advocates and government watchdog groups have brought a constitutional challenge to the law in a North Carolina federal district court.
The public has been benefitting from undercover documentation of conditions inside food production facilities since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle at the turn of the last century. In recent years, undercover videos at animal agriculture facilities have exposed horrific instances of animal abuse — sick turkeys thrown into grinding machines still alive, “downer” cows (too sick to walk on their own and often associated with disease) with chains wrapped around their necks being dragged by a tractor, and filthy conditions at a facility where chickens produced eggs (an indicator of possible salmonella contamination), to name very few. As noted, these alarming incidents …
On May 12, 2009, the federal government finally got serious about protecting the Chesapeake Bay. That’s when President Obama signed Executive Order 13508 on Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration, which declared that the federal government would put its shoulder into the multi-state effort to restore the Bay. Taking turns at a podium perched on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, the Governors of Maryland and Virginia and the Mayor of Washington D.C. praised the President that day for ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies to take on this new leadership role that would culminate in the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL) the following year.
When it was EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s turn at the microphone, she pledged that EPA would take a tough stance when necessary to compel states to finally follow through with their …
Scalia's decisions were almost unremittingly anti-environmental.
Over the past three decades, Justice Scalia did much to shape environmental law, nearly always in a conservative direction. Because of the importance of his rulings, environmental lawyers and scholars are all familiar with his work. But for the benefit of others, I thought it might be helpful to summarize his major environmental decisions. The upshot was to restrict EPA’s authority to interpret environmental statutes, make property rights a stronger bulwark against environmental protection, restrict the ability of environmental groups to go to court, and limit federal authority over rivers and wetlands.
Administrative law. The Chevron test says that an agency’s interpretation of a statute is entitled to deference. It can be set aside only if it is contrary to an unambiguous statute or if it is an unreasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. There are only three …
In case you didn’t get the memo: President Obama is entering the last year of his final term in office, so now we’re all supposed to be panicking over a dreaded phenomenon known as “midnight regulations.” According to legend, midnight rulemaking takes place when outgoing administrations rush out a bunch of regulations during their last few days in order to burnish their legacy or make concrete several of their policy priorities in ways that would be difficult for a successor—presumably from a different party—to undo. The legend further holds that because the rules are “rushed,” they are somehow of inferior quality.
Over the last few days, several antiregulatory commentators have issued dire warnings about midnight regulations (see here and here), and even the House Science Committee went to the trouble of holding a hearing on the subject just the other day.
Scared yet …
Last month, Politico’s Michael Grunwald published what I suspect is going to be a first draft of history’s judgment of Barack Obama’s presidency. He writes that “a review of his record shows that the Obama era has produced much more sweeping change than most of his supporters or detractors realize.”
Grunwald runs a long list of the President’s achievements, including Obamacare, the automobile industry bailout, the stimulus bill that kept the economy from falling off of a cliff, an overhaul of the boondoggle that was the federal student loan program, rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, serious (at last!) steps to combat climate change paving the way for an international agreement that could actually make a difference, an energy revolution that has significantly reduced U.S. reliance on dirty coal and foreign oil while boosting production and use of renewables, the end of …
In a surprising moves to legal experts, the Supreme Court yesterday in a 5-4 ruling stayed the implementation of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) supporting greenhouse gas reductions at fossil fuel fired power plants. The move was surprising because the Supreme Court rarely involves itself in the determinations of whether or not a temporary stay of legal implications is warranted, largely leaving that to lower courts. The D.C. Circuit, two weeks ago, refused to grant a stay, meaning that the balance of harms against the likelihood of prevailing in the case did not weigh in favor of stopping the implementation of the rule.
What does all of this mean? Well, one could explain this very unusual action by the fact that the Clean Power Plan is itself very unusual. No case before, including litigation over the Affordable Care Act, has had so many state …
The Supreme Court’s February 9 stay of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan may have removed the states’ immediate compliance obligations, and it will undoubtedly remove some pressure for action in states resistant to change. Nonetheless, the extensive data and fundamental state and regional planning processes generated by the Clean Power Plan (the Plan) may continue to bear fruit even as the Plan remains in legal limbo.
The Clean Power Plan has already triggered progress. To determine feasible reductions on existing power plants, EPA spearheaded extensive analyses of regional capacities to shift to less-polluting natural gas and to develop renewables. In addition, EPA gathered detailed information on the demographics around existing power plants to help states assess the environmental justice implications of their energy choices. EPA’s research and the resulting data can provide essential information for state and federal policies regardless of the Plan …
NEWS RELEASE: Analysis of EPA TMDL Data Documents Looming Failure by Chesapeake Bay States to Meet 2017 Pollution-Reduction Goals
In Report & Letters to EPA and Governors, CPR Authors Call on Bay States to Step Up, and on EPA to Begin Enforcement Actions
A new analysis from the Center for Progressive Reform concludes that the efforts of the U.S. Environmental Protect Agency (EPA) to restore the Chesapeake Bay to health is veering off course because of state failures to reduce pollution and EPA’s reluctance to compel state compliance. “Countdown to 2017: Five Years in, Chesapeake Bay TMDL at Risk Without EPA Enforcement” examines progress by the six Bay watershed states and the District of Columbia as they work to reach an EPA-mandated overall “Total Maximum Daily Load” (TMDL) for the Bay, a sort of “pollution diet,” as well as many TMDLs for local waters. The …
The value of some goods like wilderness today depends on their futures.
Normally, economists imagine, equal experiences become less valuable as they recede further into the future. But some types of goods don’t have that kind of relationship with future experiences. They can become more valuable as they extend farther into to the future.
Take this blog post, for example. I’m really happy that you’re reading it today. But it will be even cooler if someone reads it ten years from now. And it would be super cool if someone would read it a century from now. It’s also true that some people are more valuable because of their past histories – something owned by your grandparents might mean more to you than an otherwise identical object without that history. Or both could be true — an heirloom might mean more because it belonged to …
Still just a few weeks into the new year, both chambers of Congress are making it clear that attacks on our system of regulatory safeguards will remain a top priority in 2016. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has already passed—along partisan lines—two antiregulatory measures, and the Senate appears poised to follow suit with their own antiregulatory package expected to drop sometime this week.
CPR Member Scholars and staff are tracking all of these developments, working to educate policymakers about how these bills would make it all but impossible for protector agencies like the EPA and the FDA to fulfill their statutory mission of safeguarding people and the environment against unacceptable risks. (A summary of their criticisms of the two House bills can be found in a series of letters that were sent to House leadership—see here and here.)
Yesterday, the New York Times joined …
