CPR Announces New Executive Director: Jake Caldwell
It’s my great pleasure to announce that the Board of Directors of CPR has selected Jake Caldwell to serve as our new executive director. He succeeds Shana Jones, who earlier this year announced she would be leaving CPR to teach environmental policy at Old Dominion University.
Jake comes to CPR after six years at the Center for American Progress, where he was the Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade and Energy. His research and writing in that capacity frequently focused on environmental issues, including climate change regulation, renewable energy financing, clean energy and conservation, biofuel production and more. From November 2008 to January 2009, Jake served as a member of President Obama’s Transition Team, in the Energy and Natural Resources Section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agency Review. He has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, teaching a course on International Environmental Law and Trade. Jake has also worked with the Clinton Global Initiative’s Global Poverty Working Group and the National Wildlife Federation, among others.
Jake brings a wealth of experience to CPR with the environmental and regulatory issues that are the core of our …
The Obama Administration is sending mixed messages.
On the one hand, several top economic officials have noted the extensive evidence that a lack of demand, rather than regulation, is the cause of a slow economic recovery and low job creation. Yet the President himself has contradicted his economic advisers on the issue in a misguided effort to pander to industry concerns, leaving the Administration’s message confused.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, hardly the most progressive force in the Administration, said in October: “I don’t think there's good evidence in support of the proposition that it's regulatory burden or uncertainty that's causing the economy to grow more slowly than any of us would like.” Jan Eberly, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, laid out a significant batch of evidence in support of Geithner’s argument in a subsequent blog post.
Austan Goolsbee, Chair …
Booth Goodwin, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, and Attorney General Eric Holder announced today a landmark settlement with Alpha Natural Resources, the coal company that bought out its rival Massey Energy after a catastrophic explosion deep within the Big Branch mine killed 29 miners. Alpha recently announced that its third quarter 2011 profits had more than doubled in the wake of its purchase of Massey, up to $66 million in the quarter. The settlement requires the company to fork over $209 million to pay fines, reimburse families of miners killed and injured, and to fix the chronic safety problems that produced this tragedy. The announcement had no news on efforts to hold individuals accountable—most notably, Don Blankenship, the rogue CEO who constantly harassed his employees to “dig coal” faster, and faster, and faster, at the expense of routine safety precautions …
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of Obama Administration regulatory excess is somehow at the root of the nation’s economic distress. In fact, almost any economist will tell you that we got into this mess because of under-regulation, and that the current challenge is depressed consumer demand, not regulation.
From there, Brooks gets a little lost in the sauce. Most significantly, he displays a sort of man crush on Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the President’s “regulatory czar.” Sunstein’s small office of economists plays an outsized role …
When former Harvard Law Professor and eclectic intellectual Cass Sunstein was named administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conservative, industry-oriented Wall Street Journal editorial writers enthused that his appointment was a “promising sign.” A slew of subsequent events has proved their optimism well placed, as we have noted repeatedly in CPRBlog.
But nothing beats hard, empirical evidence. In a report released today, CPR announces the results of an exhaustive six-month analysis of the barebones information OIRA has eked onto the web regarding 1,080 meetings held over a ten-year period (October 2001-June 2011) with 5,759 outside lobbyists, 65 percent of whom represented industry and 12 percent of whom represented public interest groups. The results were shocking even to us, long-time and admittedly jaded observers of OIRA’s one-way ratchet toward weakening public health and other protections.
- Obama’s OIRA changes more rules …
In perhaps the most profoundly embarrassing development yet for the U.S. government’s star-crossed efforts to police offshore drilling, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement announced last week that it was asking BP, Transocean, and Halliburton to pay a total of up to $45.7 million in fines for 15 violations arising out of the catastrophic failure of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s million, not billion, by the way, and a total for all three companies, not each. The $15 million or so that they might each pay is so small in comparison to their annual profits that they might just go ahead and put the sum on an expense account. Meanwhile, as if their humiliation was not enough, the Department of Justice remains strangely silent on its criminal investigation of BP, more than a year after …
Proving the old adage that you must be careful what you wish for, conservative officials in 25 states have done their best to hoist the Obama Administration on its own petard by running off to court to oppose the EPA rule that would curb toxic emissions from power plants. They argue, among other things, that the agency had not itemized the “cumulative” costs of this and all other electric-utility-oriented regulations under Executive Order 13,563 and needed at least another year to get this burdensome task done.
Issued this January, EO 13,563 is the leading edge of the Obama Administration’s effort to persuade polluting industries that it has their best interests at heart. Like every other executive order on the books, it says on its face that it “does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by …
The residents of Kingston, Tennessee had no inkling that the Christmas of 2008 would be any different than another year. In the wee morning hours three days before the holiday, an earthen dam holding back a 40-acre surface impoundment at a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant burst, releasing 1 billion gallons of inky coal ash sludge across Kingston, Tennessee. The sludge flood crossed a river, destroying 26 houses. One had a man inside, and was lifted off its foundation and moved 40 feet downhill. In the end, the spill covered 300 acres in four to five feet of sludge and mud. Estimated cleanup costs are more than $1.2 billion.
On Friday, inspired by relentless electric utility industry lobbying, House Republicans and some three dozen Democrat colleagues voted to gut a proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that had the potential to get a grip on …
This post was co-authored by CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst Aimee Simpson.
In what at first glance seemed to be a startlingly uncharacteristic move, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to update and strengthen its food additive regulation that sets out the approved uses for polycarbonate resins. For those who don’t speak plastic, “polycarbonate resin” refers to plastic that contains bisphenol-A or “BPA”—an endocrine-disrupting chemical with significant health risks, especially for babies. Polycarbonate resin is found in everything from reusable food and beverage containers, to tin can linings and thermal receipt paper.
While usually a staunch defender of unbridled BPA use in all things plastic, the ACC actually asked the FDA to remove approval for the use of BPA in “infant feeding bottles and certain spill-proof cups.” If this request has you scratching you head …
The blog post was co-authored by Rena Steinzor and James Goodwin.
When President Obama issued his new Executive Order 13563 this past January – the one calling on agencies to “look-back” at existing regulations –speculation abounded as to what, if any effect, it would have on agencies’ rulemaking. Setting aside the look-back plan provisions (and the President’s unproductive anti-regulation rhetoric in the Wall Street Journal), the new Order didn’t seem to add much to the 18-year-old Executive Order 12866, save for a few broad platitudes relating to regulatory policy. But the President’s decision to kill EPA’s new ozone standard suggests that the new Order can and will be used to weaken regulations.
Last Thursday, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress that the Obama Administration would revert to the ozone standard set by the Bush Administration: 75 parts per billion (ppb) in ambient air. Of …
