At Coal Ash Hearing, Poisoned Waters and the 'Stigma Effect' on the Agenda
The below is testimony (PDF) given today by CPR President Rena Steinzor at the EPA's public hearing on coal ash regulation. The hearing, in Arlington, VA, is the first of seven; the public comment period has been extended to November 19. See CPR on Twitter for updates from the hearing.
We are all familiar with the psychological studies that have become a cottage industry at American universities. Consider this one. A presumably dead cockroach is “medically sterilized”—and I honestly do not know what that means—and then dipped into a glass of juice in front of a group of people. The purpose: to gauge the test subjects’ willingness to drink the juice after the cockroach is removed. To the researchers apparent surprise, the people—all victims of an irrational phenomenon known as “stigma effect”—would not drink the juice, although they were willing to take a sip if the cockroach was merely laid to rest peacefully beside the glass, as opposed to dunked inside it. As amazing, they refused to drink the dunker juice, even if it was placed in a freezer for one year or the cockroach was dipped in the juice very, very quickly. So, conclude …
This post was written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Michael Patoka, a student at the University of Maryland School of Law and research assistant to Steinzor.
Last October, the EPA proposed to regulate, for the first time, the toxic coal ash that sits in massive landfills and ponds next to coal-fired power plants across the nation. The 140 million tons of ash generated every year threaten to contaminate groundwater and cause catastrophic spills, like the 1-billion-gallon release that devastated Kingston, Tennessee in 2008. The EPA recommended that coal ash be listed as a subtitle C “hazardous waste,” making it subject to federally enforceable disposal requirements under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). But by the time that the Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis (OIRA) was through “reviewing” the agency’s proposal, the rule had been watered down to suggest a choice of three alternatives …
Desperate to move a funding bill for Chesapeake Bay restoration out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, progressive Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) went into the scrum with one of the body’s most conservative members, James Inhofe (R-OK). After a struggle of uncertain intensity and duration, the two emerged, with Inhofe, who openly ridicules the idea of global climate change, firmly in control of the ball.
Cardin agreed to put his name on a dispiriting proposal that misses a crucial opportunity to enforce a central requirement of the Clean Water Act. The Act began cleaning up the nation’s waters by requiring those who discharge pollution into rivers, lakes, and streams to install the “best available control technology” – for example, equipment that removes the pathogens in raw sewage. This primary approach worked well for years, but as the population and industrial development grew exponentially, and …
Across the full spectrum of outside cognoscenti who are focused on the reality that a small office at the White House has final authority over the agencies charged with preventing catastrophes like the BP oil spill and the Big Branch mine disaster, one threshold assumption is sacrosanct. This tiny Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, now headed by former Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, ought to operate in bright sunshine, disclosing fully its communications with the agencies so the public can see its impact on rules and other administrative activities. We have insisted on this point, our loyal opposition at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness agrees with it, and no less a bipartisan body than the Government Accountability Office has found that such transparency is too often lacking. As a matter of fact, the goal is not at all abstract: the Executive Order authorizing OIRA, 12866 contains …
Today, the Senate appropriations subcommittee chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) will discuss "Investing in Mine Safety: Preventing Another Disaster" and hear testimony from the notorious Don Blankenship, chief executive officer of Massey Energy, owner of the Upper Big Branch disaster where 29 miners lost their lives on April 5.
Workers safety and health advocates have posted calls over the past months to “send Blankenship to jail,” perhaps under federal racketeering laws, and the FBI opened an inquiry into potential criminal charges against company officials who may have bribed federal inspectors to keep the mines running despite these repeated violations. The relevant law is in fact remarkably straightforward, and even the evidence amassed in press accounts, by definition much less than the FBI could and should uncover, provides ample support for a strong case against Don Blankenship under the Mine Safety Act itself, which incorporates the “responsible …
Our loyal opposition at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness has engaged in some very creative reading of legal opinions in order to breathe new life into a discredited anti-regulatory tool of the George W. Bush era: the Information Quality Act. This pesky little statute instructs the Office of Management and Budget to “provide policy and procedural guidance to Federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal Agencies.”
Enacted as an appropriations rider in 2001, the seemingly innocuous restatement of the goal that the government should always strive to be accurate was the brainchild of Jim Tozzi, a former Reagan Administration OMB official, who has since used it to force internal reviews of EPA pesticide and sewage sludge regulations, among other items. Tozzi’s colleague William Kovacs of the Chamber of Commerce pronounced the statute “the …
This post is written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst James Goodwin.
President Obama appointed Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on December 15, 2008. Confirmed by the Senate on January 22, 2009, she is a Cabinet-rank member of the Administration and the first African American to serve as the public face of environmental protection for any administration. Whether she wears an EPA baseball cap and windbreaker to tour the waterfront of her native New Orleans, now threatened by the BP oil spill, or she sits in the witness chair with television lights in her face to testify before any one of the dozen congressional committees claiming a piece of her agency, Jackson rises or falls on her own merits. And she has mostly been rising, driving her 18,000 member staff to new levels of activity and invention.
How lamentable …
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was in a tough position on coal ash. If you are African American and low-income, you have a 30 percent greater chance of living near a big pit of this toxic brew than a white American, so Jackson correctly decided that such an important environmental justice issue should be at the forefront of the Obama Administration’s agenda. But Jackson was also taking on Big Coal, a special interest historically near and dear to swing voters in Ohio and Illinois. Nevertheless, this sturdy “eco-warrior,” as she was recently dubbed by Rolling Stone, marched forward, right into the basement of the White House and the chilling influence of Cass Sunstein and the economists at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Jackson’s tough, but as yet secret, regulatory proposal arrived in crisp fall weather, only to be greeted by a tsunami of industry …
The system of checks and balances devised by the Framers of the Constitution 220 years ago was all about the sharing of power. In practice, it makes for a messy flow chart, and lends itself to lots of inside-the-Beltway conversation about who’s in, who’s out, who’s winning and who’s losing. But as messy as the how-a-bill-really-becomes-a-law flow chart is, the structure within the White House itself usually features one constant: When the President says jump, staffers ask how high.
Every now and again, however, things get turned on their head, and the forces of bureaucracy manage to thwart Presidential will. That dynamic appears to be at work right now in the White House Office of Management and Budget, where Obama appointees Peter Orszag and Cass Sunstein, the director of OMB and Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, respectively, seem to …
In a rare public appearance at the Brookings Institute Wednesday, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein is quoted by BNA’s Daily Report for Executives saying that his ambitious plans for revamping Executive Order 12,866 – the document that governs much of the process of regulating, and particularly OIRA’s role in it –have been tabled for the time being as he and his staff study the lengthy comments presented by a broad range of industry and public interest groups. “So what we’ve been doing under the existing framework is working to implement the President’s agenda in a way that is also alert to the content of the comments we’ve gotten,” he explained.
Meanwhile, outside the event, a small group of demonstrators, including one dressed as Sesame Street character Oscar the Grouch, demonstrated against “Ash Sunstein,” whom they accused of …
