Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has been dazzling the American people with a series of colorfully named “solutions:” the dome; top hat, junk shot, top kill. However, as the days turned into week, and the weeks turned into months, one thing has become crystal clear. None of these fanciful solutions had ever been tried in deep water, and BP was making things up as it went along.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that BP was actually engaged in an elaborate theatre designed to divert attention from the fact that the only real hope of stopping the blowout leak is a relief well—a solution that is by no means guaranteed and is still two months away.

BP knew it had no way to stop this leak on April 20, the day Deepwater …

In the little-followed but hugely important “joint federalism” system through which our environmental laws are implemented, a seismic change may be afoot that could vastly improve environmental compliance and environmental quality in the future.

Last week, Al Armendariz, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region VI, indicated that unless significant changes are made by July 1, 2010, the EPA will take over Texas’s Clean Air Act program because of failures to follow the requirements of the Clean Air Act. The EPA last week already took control of an important Title V permit in Corpus Christi, and noted specific and severe deficiencies in 39 other Texas permits, indicating that it would take over them as well. This is significant in and of itself since it shows that the EPA is willing to use its over-filing powers as much as necessary to try and correct permit …

ProPublica teamed with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to put out an important investigative piece on drywall a few days ago -- "Tainted Chinese Drywall Concerns Went Unreported for Two Years."

The article, by Joaquin Sapien and Aaron Kessler, reports that:

A leading East Coast homebuilder learned four years ago that the Chinese-manufactured drywall it had installed in several Florida homes was emitting foul odors, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

The company, WCI Communities, was so concerned that it started planning to tear out the material and rebuild the houses. But it never disclosed the problem to the bulk of its customers or to government authorities.

The evidence comes mainly through a series of emails between several companies in the building process. The article said the documents were from ongoing lawsuits; subsequent articles have said explicitly that the documents have been released by Victor Diaz …

EPA and a coalition of environmental groups recently settled ongoing litigation related to the regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The litigation dates back to 2003, when EPA finally proposed comprehensive regulation of CAFOs, and it centers on what actually constitutes a CAFO. The original Clean Water Act labeled CAFOs as point sources that require a permit to discharge pollution into water, but EPA dragged its feet not just on regulating CAFOs, but on deciding what was and wasn’t a CAFO. In 2003, EPA published a final rule that required all CAFOs to apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit unless they could demonstrate that they have no potential to discharge pollution. In 2005, a federal court invalidated this rule, and the EPA reissued a rule in 2008 that was promptly challenged by environmental groups and industry. That’s the case that …

In following the oil spill disaster, it can be hard to think beyond the control effort du jour to the bigger picture. I was riveted by the latest of BP’s seven failed efforts to stop the flow of oil, hoping it would succeed and that the underwater tornado of oil devastating the Gulf, the coast, and the people whose livelihoods depend on these natural resources, would be contained, at least. And now that the top kill has failed, we’re all holding our breath for the next containment dome, hoping against all odds that this one will work.  Even if we do think a little more broadly beyond the control and response efforts, the most immediate question seems to be how to reform MMS, the agency whose oversight of BP and other oil companies was so compromised and inadequate. 

But it’s crucial that we wrench …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

We’ve known all along that offshore drilling in the Gulf placed at risk exceptionally valuable and sensitive coastal areas.  We need look no further than a forty-year-old court decision on Gulf oil drilling, which made the dangers abundantly clear.

In 1971, President Nixon announced a new energy plan involving greatly expanded offshore drilling.  In a landmark early NEPA decision, the D.C. Circuit held that the environmental impact statement gave insufficient consideration to alternative energy strategies.  The opinion begins with a discussion of the risks of oil spills, drawn largely from the EIS.  The language is startlingly relevant today:

Adjacent to the proposed lease area is the greatest estuarine coastal marsh complex in the United States, some 7.9 million acres, providing food, nursery habitat and spawning ground vital to fish, shellfish and wildlife, as well as food and shelter for migratory …

The Albany Times Union had a nifty, if depressing, scoop over the weekend in "Paterson bottling up mercury ban at plant":

Efforts by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to ban mercury-tainted coal fly ash used by a Ravena cement plant have been bottled up for more than 19 months in a special regulations review office of Gov. David Paterson.

The DEC request to yank permission from Lafarge North America for ash use at its Route 9W plant has been sitting in the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform since October 2008, according to records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act by the Times Union.

This isn't the first time we've heard about questionable regulatory review maneuvers in the Paterson administration; last August, the governor issued an executive order seeking to "eliminate unnecessary regulatory requirements" by "removing needless and excessive rules." Here in …

EPA today announced (pdf) that it will begin a general practice of reviewing – and likely rejecting – confidentiality claims regarding chemical identities and supporting data in health and safety studies submitted to the agency under TSCA.  The news is long overdue, but very welcome.

One of Congress’s primary goals in drafting TSCA was to create regulatory mechanisms through which EPA would gather information about the human health and environmental effects of toxic chemicals. Recognizing the societal benefits of broad disclosure of that information, Congress created an exemption for “health and safety studies” from TSCA § 14’s general prohibition on EPA’s disclosure of information submitted to the agency and claimed to be trade secrets or confidential business information (CBI). Health and safety information, in other words, was too important to be hidden from the public.

But despite the plain language of the statute, EPA for years simply …

Even if a climate change bill like Kerry-Lieberman were to become law, the effects of climate change will still be dramatic, making adaptation a crucial complement to mitigation activities for addressing climate change. As specialists on local conditions with the capacity to innovate at a smaller scale, state and local authorities need to retain the authority to adopt adaptation strategies that prevent, reduce, and manage the effects that climate change will have on vulnerable natural resources under their jurisdiction. Though a federal role in adaptation planning is indispensable, it would be unwise to excessively tie the states’ hands in promoting natural resource adaptation. Unfortunately, Kerry-Lieberman and Waxman-Markey (ACES) risk doing just that by centralizing adaptation in a new federal authority.  The bills should be written to encourage robust state and local action to formulate and implement natural resource adaptation measures.

Kerry-Lieberman and ACES, adopted in the House …