How to Diss A Book Without Reading It
When you write a book, particularly one that has something to do with matters political, you have to expect criticism. So when I wrote Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants (Harvard, 2011), I fully expected it to take a shot or two – not just from some of my colleagues in academia, but also from allies of the chemical industry.
In fact, since this book isn’t exactly my first rodeo, I’ve grown accustomed to reviewers who sometimes misstate some of the specifics of what I’ve written or mangle an idea or two. But they’re usually mistakes made in good faith, or at least that’s been my impression.
So it came as a surprise to me to read the review of Legally Poisoned written by Henry Miller, M.S., M.D., of the Hoover Institution and adjunct fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Miller’s got a long history of working to defend potential hazards from regulation, including formerly as a trustee for the corporate funded American Council on Science and Health, so it’s no surprise he didn’t care for my book. What surprised me was that his review suggests …
In April, CPR released a paper that looked at 12 critical rulemaking activities that we urged the Obama administration to finish by June 2012. The new regulatory agendas released by the agencies earlier this month show that instead of moving forward, the agencies are often slowing down. Contrary to the “tsunami” of regulations that the Chamber of Commerce claims is hampering economic recovery, this is a molasses flow that will delay life-saving public protections for workers, air breathers and water drinkers.
One rule that was on track in April is now definitely off track: an update to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate matter. Another rule that was on track is now probably off track: the Power Plant New Source Performance Standards for limiting greenhouse gases were pushed back from May 2012 to Jun 2012, which is the deadline we identified to complete rules …
The House Energy & Commerce sub-committee on Environment and the Economy held a hearing yesterday on “regulatory chaos” (yikes!). One figure seemed popular: $1.75 trillion. That’s how much regulations cost the U.S. economy each year, sub-committee vice-chair Tim Murphy said in his opening statement. Two of the four witnesses made the same claim in their testimony (William Kovacs of the Chamber of Commerce and Karen Harned of the National Federation of Independent Business). The committee’s briefing memo on the hearing featured, you guessed it, the same number.
The number, of course, comes from a September 2010 study sponsored by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. In February, a CPR white paper showed that the SBA study was severely flawed. Most notably, more than 70 percent of the total cost estimated had been based on public opinion polling about the perceived regulatory …
Editor's Note: This morning, CPR President Rena Steinzor will testify at a House hearing regarding EPA's Integrated Risk Information System chemical database (full testimony). This post by NRDC Senior Attorney Daniel Rosenberg, cross-posted from Switchboard, explains the importance of IRIS and how the program is under attack.
Thursday morning, the House Science Committee’s Investigation and Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on EPA’s premier program for assessing the dangers of chemicals. It is called the IRIS program, (which stands for Integrated Risk Information System). The IRIS program looks at the science available on the potential dangers of a chemical and determines what hazard that chemical may pose – such as causing cancer, birth defects, diseases, etc., and what level of exposure, if any, is likely to be without an appreciable risk of harm. The IRIS program doesn’t issue regulations; it is focused on …
The nation’s capital is all but intolerable these days, even for those of us who have lived here for decades and are used to excessive histrionics and gross summer weather. A pall of bad, hot, wet air has settled over the place, and serves as a backdrop to the slow-motion car wreck that is the debt ceiling negotiations—in every sense a crisis of political creation. In the midst of this misery, a small spark of comic relief was provided yesterday by the spectacle of hundreds of top-level business executives, led by the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, pleading with their Tea Party allies not to run the economy into a ditch by provoking a default on the country’s financial obligations to institutions and governments across the globe. Having hitched its political wagon to a team of wild horses, big business has gone …
On Monday, the White House announced that President Obama had signed a new executive order on federal regulation to supplement January’s executive order to executive branch regulatory agencies. The new executive order is aimed at the “independent agencies,” so named because the heads of those agencies do not serve at the pleasure of the president. By statute, they serve for a term of years and can be removed from office only “for cause,” which usually means misbehavior unrelated to the exercise of the agency’s policymaking functions.
The new executive order urges the independent agencies to use cost-benefit analysis in promulgating new regulations, to adopt “flexible” approaches to regulation, and to engage in retrospective analyses of existing regulations with an eye toward modifying or withdrawing regulations that are “outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome.”
As Professor Rena Steinzor argued in this blog in January, the original …
Last week, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the Office of Management and Budget released the semiannual regulatory agenda. I pointed out that the agenda, which contains the regulatory agencies’ planned actions, was quite late. Although the plans share problems from past years, like simply pushing back the target dates for regulatory actions, there are some pleasant surprises. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is moving forward with some proactive regulatory responses to the Toyota recalls of 2009, and the EPA plans to propose or finalize updates to National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs) for 30 sources. Here’s an overview of some highlights (not covering everything) from the regulatory plans. More information about each individual rulemaking can be found by following the links.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- OSHA has eight occupational standards working through the arduous pre-rule …
Cross-posted from Environmental Law Prof Blog.
Do you realize that the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency last week represents the end of the famed Acid Rain Program? It's a good thing because the Acid Rain Program had outlived its usefulness by several years and its allowance market had collapsed.
Legislated into existence by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the Acid Rain Program (ARP) was a major experiment with cap-and-trade regulation. It began in 1995, and its first few years were quite a success. With the ability to bank allowances for future years when they might be quite valuable, the power plants included in the program reduced their pollution by more than they had to. In the first five years of the program, EPA’s annual caps allowed them to emit a total of 38 million tons of sulfur dioxide …
Last month, the American Chemistry Council sent a letter to Jacob Lew, Director of the Office of Managmenet and Budget, calling on OMB to “take greater responsibility in the coordination and review of chemical safety assessments” and to “require EPA to submit all ongoing EPA IRIS assessments to the NAS for independent review.” The letter was the latest industry attack on the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the EPA’s primary toxicological database. IRIS assessments of chemicals are used in regulatory decisions to protect the public, safety decisions by industry, and as evidence offered in litigation.
Today CPR President Rena Steinzor and Member Scholar Wendy Wagner wrote to Lew to rebut the ACC’s arguments, and to urge OMB not to take an inappropriate role in scientific assessments:
ACC’s request that OMB play a larger role in the scientific work of conducting IRIS assessments is a …
The Administration has been busy promoting President Obama’s new approach to regulatory review, which required federal regulatory agencies to produce plans for how they would review existing regulations and look for regulations to cut. But while the mad dash to find regulations the administration can trot out as misguided or outdated continued, the agencies were delayed in releasing plans about what they want to do proactively to protect workers, children, and the environment.
As our friend Celeste Monforton over at The Pump Handle pointed out a couple of weeks ago, advocates have been waiting on these plans for quite some time. The Regulatory Flexibility Act requires agencies to submit the agendas each April and October. Monforton said OMB told her to expect the plans in early July. And so the new agenda was published today.
The agencies’ regulatory plans give advocates, business, and everyone else a …
