CPR Scholars and Staff Call on EPA to Abandon Proposed Attack on Mercury Rule
One of the most successful environmental regulations in U.S. history is under attack from the Trump EPA – and its demise might be accomplished by shady bookkeeping. That is the conclusion of comments filed by Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholars and staff on April 17.
Since it was issued in 2011, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS), which establishes rigorous technology-based standards to limit hazardous air pollution from fossil-fueled power plants – has reduced electric utilities' emissions of neurotoxic mercury by 81 percent. Significantly, the rule has achieved these reductions at less than a third of its projected costs while delivering public health savings estimated at billions of dollars each year.
The attack has come in the form of a proposal to undo what is known as the "appropriate and necessary" finding that undergirds the rule. In the provision of the Clean Air Act that authorized the MATS rule, Congress included a special requirement that EPA first find that controlling electric utilities' emissions of these pollutants would be "appropriate and necessary," a precondition the Obama administration had formally met. The Trump EPA now claims that the Obama administration's finding was based on a flawed analysis and seeks to …
During her confirmation hearing, Neomi Rao – then the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and President Trump's pick to fill Justice Kavanaugh's vacant seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit – attracted a lot of controversy. Much of it surrounded the outrageous student newspaper commentaries she wrote as an undergrad, in which she casually passed judgment on date rape victims and the scourge of creeping multiculturalism. Now that Rao has been sworn in to a lifetime appointment of passing judgment with the full effect of the law, it's worth looking at another dispute that arose during the hearing – namely, how she should approach her legal and ethical responsibility to recuse herself from cases involving rules she worked on as OIRA administrator.
In an exchange with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) during the hearing, Rao pointedly refused to …
Today, the Center for Progressive Reform and 46 other environmental, labor, and public health organizations sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler calling on him to withdraw the agency's pending "benefits-busting" rule. Wheeler was recently confirmed as the official agency head, and, as the letter notes, he can begin his tenure on the right track by abandoning this dangerous rulemaking. The proposal is a vestige of the disastrous Scott Pruitt era that would radically overhaul how the agency performs "cost-benefit analysis" on the environmental and health safeguards it is developing so as to make the results even more biased against public protections.
The broad range of public interest groups signing on to the letter confirms just how far-reaching a threat the benefits-busting rule poses, not just at EPA, but all agencies charged with protecting the public interest. Indeed, the changes it …
To this point, much of the focus in the discussion over the Green New Deal has been on the substance of the vision it lays out for a better society – and why shouldn't it be? There's some really exciting stuff included in the Green New Deal's toplines, which are by now well-rehearsed: a full-scale mobilization plan put in place over the next 10 years to get the United States to net zero carbon emissions; major government investments in clean energy infrastructure, energy efficiency upgrades for all buildings, and public transportation systems; ensuring a just transition for communities and workers reliant on the fossil fuel-based economy; guaranteed jobs with family-supporting wages; universal health care; and universal higher education.
Receiving scant, if any, attention, though, are the kinds of processes and institutions that will be necessary for implementing the Green New Deal's substantive vision. While these kinds of first-order …
The return of divided government promises to bring with it a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from the unprecedented abuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that we witnessed during the 115th Congress. As I argue in an article featured in the March/April edition of The Environmental Forum, published by the Environmental Law Institute, the CRA has become far too dangerous a law – and the happenstance of divided government should not be the only thing protecting the public interest from future abuses. Rather, recent experience has provided us with all the evidence we need to repeal the CRA – for the good of public health, safety, and the environment, as well as the integrity of our democratic institutions.
During the 115th Congress, anti-safeguard lawmakers demonstrated the full destructive potential of CRA, with Republicans working with President Donald Trump to deploy the law to repeal 16 different regulatory safeguards …
For affected indigenous communities in the United States and Canada, new oil and gas pipelines snaking across their lands represent a new kind of attack. Dirty, polluting, dangerous, and built without the communities' consent, these pipelines are the inevitable outcome of North America's hydraulic fracturing and tar sands oil "revolutions" that have played out in recent decades. These indigenous frontline communities must bear the disproportionate costs brought about by developed nations' continued addiction to fossil fuels, all without seeing most of the benefits. In a special preview episode of Season 2 of the Connect the Dots podcast, CPR President Rob Verchick explores this poignant case study of environmental injustice with the guidance of Rachel Rye Butler, the head of the Democracy Campaign at Greenpeace.
As Rachel tells Rob, the First Nations people in Canada and Native Americans in the United States have been protesting the development of …
Tomorrow morning, Neomi Rao, the current administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. If confirmed, she would fill the open seat once occupied by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Administrator Rao's nomination has prompted intense media and public scrutiny of her background, and appropriately so, given the high stakes involved. Her long history of controversial writings, combined with a troubling record as President Donald Trump's "regulatory czar" (or de-regulatory czar, in this case) will give the committee's members much to ponder when deciding whether to promote her to what is widely regarded as the second-most powerful court in the United States.
Rao, as it turns out, has long been a lightning rod of controversy, and …
During his tenure, former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt launched multiple assaults on environmental and public health safeguards. His attacks on clean air standards and water quality regulations made so little sense in our reality that he went to the absurd and extreme lengths of creating an alternative reality to make them look legitimate. That alternative reality is rendered in the "benefits-busting" rule, which would systematically distort the analyses EPA economists conduct to assess the economic impacts of the agency's pending rulemakings. With Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler's Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for January 16, lawmakers will have the opportunity to learn more about this dangerous rulemaking – and hopefully call upon Wheeler to abandon it altogether.
As I explained in a previous post, the Trump EPA's benefits-busting rule is all about denying the real, positive impacts that environmental safeguards are making in our communities. Specifically, it …
As I documented in my most recent post, 2018 was an active year for regulatory policy, bringing several notable controversies, milestones, and developments. For those who follow this area, 2019 promises to be just as lively and momentous. Indeed, it appears that the dynamics that spurred much of the regulatory policy-related action in 2018 – namely, the high priority that the Trump administration has placed on corrupting our system of regulatory safeguards, and the accompanying political polarization around the issue more generally – will continue and perhaps even intensify in the new year. Here are 10 of the biggest stories I’m looking to following in 2019, in no particular order:
- What will happen to longstanding doctrines of judicial deference to agencies? Seemingly out of nowhere in the last few years, conservative opponents of regulatory safeguards set their sights on the once relatively uncontroversial deference doctrines applicable to judicial …
While regulatory policy developments might not lead evening news broadcasts or dominate newspaper headlines, they can have an enormous impact on our day-to-day lives. Regulatory policy has been a particular hotbed of activity during the Trump administration, which swept into office determined to undermine or corrupt the institutions responsible for keeping Americans and their environment secure against unacceptable risks of harm. So, it is no surprise that 2018 was another busy year in regulatory policy. Here are 10 of the biggest stories I’ve followed, in no particular order:
- First full year of the Executive Order 13771 “regulatory budget.” The single most significant step that the Trump administration has taken on regulatory policy was its issuance of Executive Order 13771, which required executive branch agencies to eliminate at least two existing regulatory actions for each new one they issued. It further required agencies to ensure that the …
