Senate's Confirmation of Gina McCarthy as Head of EPA a Welcome Development
The Senate's confirmation of Gina McCarthy as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is a welcome development and a signal that Congress and the President are willing to get serious about the Agency's role in protecting the health of all Americans and the affects of climate change on the environment. It won't be easy. Lawmakers seem divided on nearly every issue in this debate. In the past EPA's efforts to protect the environment and public health and safety have sometimes been delayed by the White House's own Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Cutting through such bureaucracy should be on the short list of the new administrator's priorities. Climate change knows no political ideology and it follows its own timeline. Administrator McCarthy is well equipped to meet the challenges we face. We are lucky to have her fighting for us all.
One day in May, climate change got a lot more expensive. The price tag on emissions – the value of the damages done by one more ton of CO2 in the air – used to be a mere $25 or so, in today’s dollars, according to an anonymous government task force that met in secret in 2009-2010. Now it’s $40, according to an anonymous government task force that met in secret in early 2013.
Anyone who cares about combating climate change would have to applaud the result: a higher carbon price means that cost-benefit analyses will place a greater value on policies that reduce emissions.
And anyone who cares about democracy should be appalled at the process: are we entering an era in which major regulatory decisions are made anonymously, in secret, with no opportunity for review?
The work of the anonymous task force is a …
Environmentalists know about the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Transfer Rule. See 40 CFR § 122.3(i). It states in essence that discharging polluted water from one body of water to another unpolluted body of water is not a discharge of a pollutant under the Clean Water Act. According to the EPA, this action would not be regulated by the Act, because no pollutant is being “added” to the “waters of the United States.” There may be an addition of a pollutant to a particular body of water, but that is not enough, the EPA says. There must be an addition to the “waters of the United States” as a whole. This is also known as the “unitary waters” approach.
This issue has arisen in a number of different cases, perhaps most notably in South Fla. Water Mgmt. Dist. v. Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, 541 U.S …
Last week brought big news in the water quality world. On July 10, American Rivers, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and several other environmental groups filed “residual designation authority” petitions for stormwater discharges across EPA Regions 1 (New England), 3 (mid-Atlantic), and 9 (southwestern states and California). That may sound like an obscure and technical act, but here’s why it’s actually a very big deal.
For years, urban stormwater runoff has been one of the United States’ greatest unsolved water quality challenges. Urban runoff is second only to agricultural runoff as a source of water quality impairment, and on a per-acre basis, urban development is generally more damaging to water quality than agricultural use. But EPA has struggled to regulate urban stormwater runoff. For years, EPA barely regulated urban stormwater runoff at all. The 1987 Clean Water Act amendments compelled EPA …
This morning, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee is expected to advance the "Energy Consumer Relief Act" for consideration. The Act would allow the head of the Department of Energy to veto any rules promulgated by the EPA with estimated "costs" of over $1 billion.
Center for Progressive Reform President Rena Steinzor testified against the bill in April at a Legislative Hearing.
Below is Steinzor's reaction to the Committee's movement of the Act:
The deceptively named, "Energy Consumer Relief Act" would effectively subsidize billion-dollar energy companies for their contamination of the environment at the expense of consumers suffering with pollution-related diseases like heart disease and asthma. The EPA has repeatedly been hamstrung by a regulatory process focused on cost-benefit analysis that estimates the lives of Americans in dollars and cents. This Act would effectively kneecap the Agency's remaining ability to protect citizens against damaging …
“April showers bring May flowers.” To that well-known spring-related proverb one might soon add “the Spring Regulatory Agenda brings new groundless complaints from corporate interests and their anti-regulatory allies in Congress about so-called regulatory overreach.” Last Wednesday, the Obama Administration issued the 2013 edition of the Spring Regulatory Agenda, one of two documents the President must issue every year (the other is published in the fall) that compiles and summarizes the various regulatory actions that the Administration expects to take in the near future. Over the past few years, regulatory opponents have grown fond of pointing to the Spring and Fall Regulatory Agendas as still further evidence of the so-called “regulatory tsunami” that is allegedly hindering the economy and to support their campaign to “reform” our regulatory system. I expect that these same groups will waste little time in the coming days to misrepresent the latest regulatory …
Welcome aboard, Administrator Shelanski. You’re already well into your first week on the job as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). You’ve already received plenty of valuable advice—during your confirmation hearing and from the pages of this blog, among other places—on how you can transform OIRA’s role in the regulatory system so that it’s not a continued impediment to effective government. For example, many have urged you to end the pattern of long-overdue reviews at OIRA (at last count, 72 of the 137 rules undergoing review are past the 90-day limit provided for in Executive Order 12866), to improve transparency of OIRA’s reviews so that decision-makers can be held publicly accountable for changes they make to pending safeguards, and to restrict the use of cost-benefit analysis as a means for justifying the dilution …
Lost among the high-profile opinions that the Supreme Court issued during the past two weeks was a case that attracted little media attention, but is of great importance to the millions of Americans who take generic drugs.
Karen Bartlett, a secretary for an insurance company filed the lawsuit against generic drug manufacturer Mutual Pharmaceutical Company. When Karen visited her doctor complaining of shoulder pain, he prescribed Clinoril, one of many non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) that are commonly used to treat arthritis, bursitis, and other painful conditions. When Ms. Bartlett’s pharmacist filled the prescription, however, he gave her the generic version of the drug sulindac, rather than the brand-name drug.
Soon after taking the drug, Ms. Bartlett developed a horrific disease called SJS/TEN, which caused massive burns on over 60-65 percent of her body. For the next year, her life was, in the words of her …
CPR Member Scholar John Echeverria has an op-ed in Wednesday's New York Times on the Supreme Court's end-of-term decision in a land-use case, Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District. Although the case has been somewhat overlooked amidst the Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and its landmark decisions on same-sex marriage, it has long-term and critical implications. Echeverria warns that the decision will:
result in long-lasting harm to America’s communities. That’s because the ruling creates a perverse incentive for municipal governments to reject applications from developers rather than attempt to negotiate project designs that might advance both public and private goals — and it makes it hard for communities to get property owners to pay to mitigate any environmental damage they may cause.
The majority opinion in the case, written by Justice Alito, reverses a ruling by the Florida Supreme …
Last night, the Senate confirmed Howard Shelanski as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the Office of Management and Budget.
As we've written about before, the confirmation of Shelanski as head of OIRA comes at a criticial juncture. OIRA is tasked with reviewing rules proposed by federal agencies. Presently, of the 139 rules under review at OIRA, 71 are well beyond the 90-day review limit imposed by Executive Order 12866. Below is Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro's reaction to the confirmation:
Now that he's been approved, Administrator Shelanski must begin the critical task of reinvigorating our calcified regulatory system. From clearing the backlog of overdue regulations stuck at OIRA in violation of the required deadline for finishing review to working with other Administration officials to identify ways to help implement President Obama's climate plan, thenew …
