Michigan v. EPA: Still Hope for the Mercury Rule
Today the Supreme Court blocked a key effort by the Obama administration to keep unsafe levels of mercury and other toxins from spilling into our air. The ruling, issued in Michigan vs. EPA, is a loss for the EPA and public health advocates. But the damage can be contained and will hopefully not prevent the agency from re-issuing its so-called Mercury Rule under a rationale that can satisfy the Court’s newly divined decision-making standards.
At issue was whether the Clean Air Act required the EPA to consider costs to industry when it made the decision to regulate mercury, a known neurotoxin. Because the Act does not mention cost considerations at this early stage of rulemaking, the EPA reasoned such review was unnecessary. At any rate, the EPA had explicitly considered costs in the second stage of analysis when it chose the actual numeric pollution limit. And what it found was that the benefits of the Mercury Rule would exceed the costs by tens of billions of dollars.
Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia found that the EPA’s failure to consider costs in the early stage of the rule doomed the whole enterprise. The EPA’s decision-making process …
Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2576, an update to the long-outdated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs regulation of toxic chemicals.
CPR Member Scholar and University of Richmond Law School professor Noah Sachs and CPR Executive Director Matthew Shudtz wrote a piece for The Hill, highlighting some crucial problems with the bill the House passed.
They note:
Both bills, for example, require EPA to move through the backlog of untested chemicals and make safety determinations. A safety determination is a ruling by the agency about whether the chemical poses ‘unreasonable risk’ to human health or the environment – a first step for further regulatory action.
But astoundingly, the House bill requires the agency to initiate only 10 chemical evaluations per year ‘subject to the availability of appropriations,’ and the Senate bill requires EPA to make these safety determinations for only 25 chemicals …
The Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell is, of course, most important for its central holding that the Affordable Care Act's federal subsidies are available even on federally established health exchanges. The decision preserves health insurance subsidies for millions of people who have begun to benefit from them and avoids the ridiculous spectacle of taking the subsidies away based on four words ("established by the State") in a lengthy and complicated statute.
But for those who, like me, are not health care experts but teach and write in environmental law, the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts is principally worth studying for its approach to statutory interpretation. Especially for those following EPA's impending regulation of greenhouse gases from power plants under section 111 of the Clean Air Act, which has already drawn attacks based on a purported lack of statutory authority, the Court …
Anyone who cares about the development of sound public policy has grown distraught over congressional gridlock. The House and Senate are dysfunctional to an extent not seen in modern times. Neither is able to develop bipartisan legislation to deal with a slew of urgent social problems, from immigration and the minimum wage to the strengthening of outdated health and safety laws. But the kneejerk glee that accompanies any bipartisan action regardless of content is just as dangerous. Take, for example, the bill to “reinvigorate” the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that just passed the House by a vote of 398 to 1.
The sad truth is that we don’t require enough testing on toxic chemicals before chemical manufacturers market them in this country, and public health has paid a heavy price for this omission. It’s difficult to think of more than a very small handful …
TMDL. The first four posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining three jurisdictions.
So far, we have evaluated progress of the three core jurisdictions in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in reducing nutrient and sediment pollution under the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL). These “big three” states and members of the Chesapeake Bay Commission are the biggest contributors to the pollution problem affecting the Bay and, at least in the case of Maryland and Virginia, appear to have the most at stake if the Bay itself is finally restored. But we now turn to the region’s periphery, where the big challenge may be how to motivate the people and policymakers in the Bay’s hinterlands – such as Upstate New York.
Whatever their motivation, officials in New York State must …
When your public approval rating has hovered at or below 20 percent for the last several years, maybe the last thing you should be doing is maligning other government institutions. That didn’t stop a group of Senators from spending several hours doing just that today during a joint hearing involving the Senate Budget and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees. The joint hearing was nominally about a nonsense regulatory reform proposal called “regulatory budgeting” (for more on that, see here), but it quickly devolved into a no-holds-barred hate session directed at federal agency employees, as the upright and honorable members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” repeatedly attacked the prevailing “culture” at agencies.
The term “culture” was repeated dozens of times throughout the hearing, as the conservative members of the committee waxed patronizingly about the need to change the “culture” at agencies. The Republican Senators …
Every day, millions of consumers endure Walmart’s crowded parking lots and cramped aisles for the chance to buy retail goods and groceries at low prices. Perhaps some visitors find value in the prospect of starring in the next caught-on-camera video like last week’s hit filmed at a store in Beech Grove, Indiana. But the lower prices Walmart offers come at a high cost elsewhere.
According to a new report by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, Walmart’s low cost strategy induces poor labor and environmental practices throughout its food supply chain, and these hidden costs are passed back to workers, suppliers, the environment, and communities. “Walmart’s business model . . . . creates the conditions to force suppliers to cut costs, which often means cutting wages for workers, lowering prices to farmers, and externalizing costs on to the environment and the communities surrounding the suppliers’ business,” the report …
Editors’ Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on measuring progress toward the 2017 interim goal of the Bay TMDL. The first three posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania and Virginia. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining four jurisdictions.
Judging from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s modeling of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland is a tale of two states when it comes to reducing its polluting emissions. On the one hand, the state is clearly lagging in reducing nitrogen pollution, one of two main contributors to the algal blooms that lead to “dead zones” in the Bay. On the other hand, it has made some progress. Indeed, Maryland’s experience appears to be quite similar to that of Virginia, a leader in reducing nitrogen to date, in that it owes most of its success to significant …
For decades, so-called regulatory “reformers” have backed up their sales pitches with the same basic promise: Their goal is not to stop regulation per se but to promote smarter ones. This promise, of course, was always a hollow one. But it gave their myriad reform proposals—always involving some set of convoluted procedural or analytical requirements designed to surreptitiously sabotage the rulemaking process—some shred of legitimacy, while insulating the proponents against any public backlash that might follow from such cynical attacks on broadly popular public health, safety, and environmental programs.
If the real motivation behind the “regulatory reform” movement wasn’t clear before, then tomorrow’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs and Budget Committees on “regulatory budgets” ought to peel away the last of any lingering doubts. The idea behind “regulatory budgeting” (or “regulatory pay-go,” as it is sometimes known) is that …
Last week, OSHA issued noteworthy citations against a poultry slaughtering facility in Delaware. The agency is using its General Duty Clause to hold Allen Harim Foods in Harbeson, Delaware responsible for ergonomic hazards that plague the entire industry—hazards involving the repetitive cutting and twisting motions that lead to musculoskeletal disorders like tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome.
This case follows another from October of last year, when, in response to a complaint by workers and their advocates from the Southern Poverty Law Center, OSHA cited Wayne Farms in Jack, Alabama for General Duty Clause violations, also related to ergonomic hazards. As it turns out, the Wayne Farms case was a shot across the bow for an industry that subjects its workers to punishingly repetitive work in a variety of situations. Today’s announcement may be evidence of a trend developing in OSHA enforcement.
It’s a trend …
