President Obama devoted his final state-of-the-union speech to highlighting his administration’s considerable accomplishments, and, more importantly, to articulating a surprisingly robust progressive vision for the future.

And that vision properly included a large role for federal regulation. 

Noting that “reckless Wall Street,” not food stamp recipients, caused the financial meltdown of 2008-09, the President predicted, “working families won’t get more opportunity or bigger paychecks by letting big banks or big oil or hedge funds make their own rules at the expense of everyone else.” 

The obvious corollary is that the federal government must maintain a strong regulatory system to prevent companies from imposing risks to the financial and physical health of the American people and to their shared environment. We must therefore design and maintain a regulatory system that is impervious to capture by the companies that it is designed to regulate.

The President did …

Last September, the Environmental Integrity Project put a spotlight on the dramatic increase in the number of industrial scale poultry houses being established on the Delmarva Peninsula.  In its report, More Phosphorus, Less Monitoring, the organization found that more than 200 new chicken houses had been permitted on the peninsula since November 2014, including 67 in just one Maryland county (Somerset County, on the state’s lower Eastern Shore). Shortly thereafter the Maryland Clean Agriculture Coalition, supported by the Center for Progressive Reform and other allies, as well as other groups like the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, called on Maryland to issue a temporary moratorium on new chicken houses.  The Delmarva Poultry Industry and its allies fired back, and for a few weeks the two sides sparred through the media over the call for a moratorium. 

While the two sides were presenting …

Here are seven of the most important developments affecting the environment.

2015 was a big year for agency regulations and international negotiations. In 2016, the main focal points will be the political process and the courts. Here are seven major things to watch for. 

The Presidential Election. The election will have huge consequences for the environment. A Republican President is almost sure to try to roll back most of the environmental initiatives of the Obama Administration, undoing all the progress that has been made on climate change and other issues – and we might also see efforts to undo earlier environmental legislation.

The Senate. No one seems to think that control of the House of Representatives is at issue in this year’s election, but control of the Senate is potentially in play. If Republicans win the Presidency and keep both houses of Congress, we’re likely to …

This afternoon, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it was sending its final version of a long-awaited rule on silica dust in the workplace to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for final review. CPR Executive Director Matthew Shudtz responded to the news with the following statement:

Workers across the United States have been waiting for this day for a long time. But don’t overlook the fact that this announcement simply marks a procedural accomplishment in a decades-long administrative process. This rule has been to OIRA before, and the last time it sat with the White House bean counters for two and a half years. By Executive Order, this review should be complete in a matter of weeks. That’s what millions of silica-exposed workers expect and what the White House needs to deliver.

We won't know the full …

As we seek to understand and assess the Paris Agreement over the coming months and years, we will continue to contemplate the critical underlying political and ethical question: who should be responsible?  And to what degree should that responsibility take the form of direct action versus providing support in the form of financing, technology transfer, and capacity-building?  As my Center for Progressive Reform colleague Noah Sachs has observed, the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) has been a consistent theme in all of the climate negotiations. But, what CBDR means – why and when responsibilities should be common, and why and when they should be differentiated -- is continually contested and continually shifting.  I briefly highlight the allocation of responsibility in the Paris Agreement.  Drawing upon two recent articles on adaptation justice, I then provide a short roadmap to the theories of justice at play in the international …

A few months ago, I recounted the recent history of budget cuts to Maryland environmental agencies and their effect on the state of environmental inspections and enforcement in the state over the last two decades.  Fortunately, it appears that an opportunity to change this situation has presented itself to policymakers in Annapolis. 

Recently, at the annual November meeting of the legislative Spending Affordability Committee, key lawmakers from the budget committees and House and Senate Leadership heard from the top legislative budget analysts that the state’s fiscal picture finally looks “good.”  In fact, for the first time in a decade the state general fund budget is forecasted to be in a structural surplus, not only for the current fiscal year (2016), but the following year (2017) as well.  Then this week, we received more good news about the state’s budget. Revenue estimates were revised up again …

This week appears to mark the end of an extraordinary period in the history of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the shadowy bureau charged with reviewing and revising pending agency rules, which too often ensures they are not overly inconvenient for affected industries.  For the last month and a half, a Mos Eisley-esque mélange of characters has streamed through the front doors to lobby OIRA’s gang of economists and political operatives over a pending rule that would establish the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) authority to regulate non-traditional tobacco products including e-cigarettes and flavored cigars the same way it does with more traditional tobacco products, such as cigarettes and smokeless tobacco.  OIRA’s review of the rule, which comes at the end of a rulemaking process that has already stretched more than five years, provides these groups with one last …

If we're serious about keeping warming "well below" 2 degrees C, geoengineering may be necessary.

The Paris agreement establishes an aspirational goal of holding climate change to 1.5 degrees C, with a firmer goal of holding the global temperature decrease “well below” 2 degrees C. As a practical matter, the 1.5 degrees C goal almost certainly would require geoengineering, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere or solar mirrors. Even getting well below 2 degrees C is likely to require steps of that kind or a technological breakthrough for another kind of geoengineering, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. None of this has to happen soon, but sometime between now and the end of the century, something along these lines would probably be required.

It's always good to begin with the actual text of the agreement. Here’s the language of the agreement …