Peer Review Slams Corps's New Flood-Control Study in the Gulf
A new report from the National Research Council on Friday slams a long-delayed Army Corps of Engineers hurricane protection study, saying it fails to recommend a unified, comprehensive long-term plan for protecting New Orleans and the Louisiana coast.
You know the story: as Hurricane Katrina swept across New Orleans, the city’s levee system broke apart and billions of gallons of water poured into the city. Two independent forensic engineering reports (here and here) found the levee failures were caused by a series of design and construction flaws, stretching back over decades, which were overseen, in all details, by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps has never refuted that basic point.
Congress ordered the Corps to develop plans for a more aggressive flood-control system for the Louisiana coast, insisting the Corps present “a final technical report for Category 5 protection.” (The surge associated with a Category 5 storm has about a 0.2% chance of occurring in any given year. A Katrina-level surge has about a 0.25% chance of occurring in any given year.)
According to the NRC:
Despite being given authority from the U.S. Congress for this project over three years ago, the Army …
This is the third of four posts on the application of the public trust doctrine to water resources, based on a forthcoming CPR publication, Restoring the Trust: Water Resources and the Public Trust Doctrine, A Manual for Advocates, which will be released this summer. If you are interested in attending a free web-based seminar on Thursday, July 30, at 3:00 pm EDT, please contact CPR Policy Analyst Yee Huang, or register here.
Water advocacy groups and environmental attorneys have used a myriad of creative tools to protect water resources, including establishing minimum stream flows and lake levels, purchasing or acquiring in-stream water rights for environmental and recreational purposes, and using federal regulations to restore water for fish. While each of these strategies may be an effective microscopic solution, a macroscopic, overarching duty to manage water resources sustainably for both people and the environment is missing.
One …
This is the second of four posts on the application of the public trust doctrine to water resources, based on a forthcoming CPR publication, Restoring the Trust: Water Resources and the Public Trust Doctrine, A Manual for Advocates, which will be released this summer. If you are interested in attending a free web-based seminar on Thursday, July 30, at 3:00 pm EDT, please contact CPR Policy Analyst Yee Huang, or register here.
As described in this earlier post, the public trust is similar to any legal trust. In the public trust framework, the state is the trustee, which manages specific natural resources – the trust principal – for the benefit of the current and future public – the beneficiaries. To date, the greatest and most consistent successes of the public trust doctrine involve cases of public access rather than resource protection – emphasizing the beneficiaries of the trust rather than …
This is the first of four posts on the application of the public trust doctrine to water resources, based on a forthcoming CPR publication, Restoring the Trust: Water Resources and the Public Trust Doctrine, A Manual for Advocates, which will be released this summer. If you are interested in attending a free web-based seminar on Thursday, July 30, at 3:00 pm EDT, please contact CPR Policy Analyst Yee Huang, or register here.
While the United States has a strong private property system, that system is a product of common property ownership of certain resources. Doubtful? For centuries, people have enjoyed public access to resources such as the ocean, certain bodies of water, tidewaters and tidal lands, shorelines, and most sensibly the air. Much of the commerce during the foundational years of the United States depended on common, public access to rivers for transportation of goods. Imagine …
In a memo sent to EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance on July 2nd, Lisa Jackson, the Agency’s Administrator, observed that “the level of significant non-compliance with Clean Water Act permitting requirements is unacceptably high and the level of enforcement activity is unacceptably low.” She directed Agency officials to develop a new plan for improving Clean Water Act enforcement at the federal and state levels.
Although the details of such a plan are yet to emerge, Administrator Jackson’s memo is certainly welcome news. States have varied considerably in their approaches to environmental enforcement. Some states have put considerable emphasis on deterring environmental violations by taking timely, appropriate enforcement actions when significant instances of non-compliance come to their attention. In contrast, other states have relied upon informal, “cooperative” enforcement practices that have often proven ineffective in coaxing industries and municipalities to meet their environmental …
This item cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
Greenwire reports that one issue in the confirmation hearing may be a case involving climate change. The plaintiffs sued under the federal common law of nuisance for injunctive relief against public utilities for their carbon emissions. The case has now been pending before a panel including Judge Sotomayor for several years.
It’s definitely an interesting case. The district court held that the case presented a “political question” and hence was not justiciable. This was a somewhat peculiar application of the political question doctrine, which applies when a case lacks any legal standards (like the reasonableness of the period required to ratify a constitutional amendment), or the Constitution assigns an issue to another branch of government (like impeachment), or the court would be interfering with the conduct of foreign affairs (like deciding the date on which a war has …
Bowing to right-wing political pressure, Cass Sunstein, nominee for “regulatory czar” in the Obama Administration, broke months of official silence to plead his case with the cattle ranchers and agribusiness lobby who have engineered a hold on the nomination by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). Sunstein’s move was all the more troubling because his absence from the public eye has included an across-the-board refusal to meet with or respond to any inquiries from a wide range of progressive groups and mainstream news reporters. Everyone who has tried to approach Sunstein has been shunned—from reporters at several top news outlets to representatives of labor unions and advocacy groups. The strict wall of “no comment until I am confirmed” has persisted despite the fact that Sunstein has been working at OMB for months, actively participating in a series of decisions by the Obama Administration on regulatory matters.
Don …
Perhaps – as a byproduct of a recent, revealing report by the Government Accountability Office and the economic downturn – the bubble of market growth for the bottled water industry may finally deflate, if not outright burst. Pop! The report, released last Wednesday, further debunks the myth that the quality of bottled water is better than tap water (see also CPR Member Scholar Christine Klein's exploration of this myth).
According to the GAO, regulation of bottled water is generally weaker than regulation of municipal drinking water (tap water). The two types of water are regulated under different agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency regulates tap water under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) while the Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water as a food product under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA). The EPA sets national maximum contaminant levels for tap water according to the use …
In this month’s Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling “catch shares”), and has committed her agency to “ transitioning to catch shares ” as a solution to overfishing. Would that the solution to overfishing were so easy!
Today, fisheries managers set a "total allowable catch" (TAC) for open-access fisheries. A fishery is open until that TAC is reached. Not surprisingly, there is often a mad scramble to capture as large a share of fish as quickly as possible. Sometimes fisheries, like the pre-ITQ Alaskan halibut fishery, are only open for a few days, or even a few hours.
Catch shares work to eliminate this incentive to catch all of the fish today. Thus …
On March 9, President Obama announced a science integrity initiative aimed at taking the politics out of science. In his memorandum that day, he laid out the broad principles and instructed the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to “develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” - and to have the recommendations within 120 days. John Holdren has since been confirmed as OSTP Director.
Yesterday, Tuesday July 7, was 120 days after March 9. But there’s been no announcement of what Holdren is recommending.
CPR scholars have written extensively about the clean science initiative, lauding the initial announcement, sending initial ideas to Holdren and asking him to open the process to public comment, and lauding the White House when they did just that. In May, we submitted our comments to OSTP with our full recommendations on …
