Before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and before the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, there was the TVA coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee. It was at Kingston, during the early morning hours on December 22, 2008, that an earthen dam holding back a 40-acre surface impoundment burst, releasing one billion gallons of inky sludge. The Kingston coal ash spill taught the American public about the catastrophic costs that can accompany so many types of large scale energy development; its aftermath continues to teach us that instituting the necessary reforms for protecting people and the environment against similar catastrophes in the future doesn’t come easy or quick.

Today marks the one-year anniversary since the EPA released its proposed rule for controlling the disposal of coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal to produce energy that …

This great country of ours is quite fond of its enduring myths: poor kids are able to become rich kids by working hard, the family farm feeds us a nutritious bounty, and small business is the engine that makes our economy sing. When most of us hear that musical phrase—smaaaall business—we think of the local florist, ice cream shop, or shoemaker. How startling, then, to discover that according to the Small Business Administration (SBA) a petroleum refinery employing 1,500 workers is also “small,” although of course not nearly so beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago in this space, I explained the plan Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) had concocted to hold existing health and safety rules hostage by allowing the chief counsel of the SBA Office of Advocacy, an independent bureau within the SBA best known for its militant attacks on …

During the past decade, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions that greatly reduced the extent of waters protected by the Clean Water Act (CWA). These cases upset the clearly articulated regulatory definition of “waters of the United States” that had been consistently applied and widely accepted as valid for many years.   Not only did the decisions threaten millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of headwaters with destruction and unregulated pollutant discharges, but the most significant of the two was issued by a badly fractured Court, producing a great deal of confusion over which waters are regulated and which ones are not.  

In the SWANCC case (2001), the Supreme Court held that CWA jurisdiction could not be based on the presence of migratory birds at isolated, non-navigable, intrastate ponds.  In the second case, Rapanos (2006), the Court addressed the CWA’s application to wetlands …

We noted earlier this month that a U.S. Small Business Administration official had claimed that the danger of workplace noise was solved just as well with earplugs as it is with reducing the noise at its source -- despite extensive research to the contrary ("Presidential Appointee at SBA Maligns OSHA's Industrial Noise Proposal; Claims Ear Plugs 'Solve' the Problem").

The official, Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has since given a slightly different line. From BNA's Occupational Safety and Health Reporter (4/28):

We strongly support regulations that protect worker safety and health," Sargeant said. "But with regard to the noise rule, we were unable to evaluate whether this proposal was necessary, as a matter of safety, or whether it was economically feasible.

If SBA has indeed not evaluated the safety necessity, it's troubling that Sargeant had previously made such a …

Robert R.M. Verchick recently completed a two-year stint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and returned to his work at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, happily, to the rolls of active CPR Member Scholars. While at EPA, he published Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, and just a few days after returning to CPR, he's published two op-eds on disaster preparedness and recovery.

In the Christian Science Monitor on April 13, he asked whether Japan's recovery from the recent tsunami and nuclear disaster would be "heavy-handed or hands-off"? He goes on to contrast the recovery efforts in Japan after a 1995 earthquake laid waste to the city of Kobe with the ongoing post-Katrina recovery in Verchick's home town of New Orleans. In Kobe, Verchick says, strong-willed Mayor Kazutoshi Sasayama developed a master plan for reconstructing the city, and pursued …

Right about this time a year ago, Americans were learning about a massive explosion aboard an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico called the Deepwater Horizon that had occurred the day before. Video footage of the flame-engulfed rig began splashing across television screens, and we were told that 11 workers on the rig were “missing.” (In fact, those workers had been killed.)

Also unclear or unrevealed was the extent of the environmental harm that was being done. In the day-after stories, BP and the federal government expressed the view that pollution was not much of a concern. Here’s what the New York Times article said,

Officials said the pollution was considered minimal so far because most of the oil and gas was being burned up in the fire. “But that does have the potential to change,” said David Rainey, the vice president …

The Supreme Court arguments in American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut on Tuesday raised profound issues about the respective role of the courts and administrative agencies in controlling greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources, emissions that remain uncontrolled notwithstanding their significant climate impacts. As my CPR colleague Doug Kysar has noted, at times the Court appeared reluctant to embrace industry’s political question and prudential standing arguments, arguments that would undermine the courts’ traditional common law powers. If the Court rejects these jurisdictional arguments, the central issue would be whether EPA’s GHG regulatory actions under the Clean Air Act have “displaced” the federal common law of interstate nuisance.

If displacement is the critical issue, did the Court ask the right questions? For example, Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer addressed the issue of institutional competence.  Directly and indirectly, their comments suggested that the plaintiff states were asking …

Cross-posted from ACSblog.

In one of the most, er, hotly anticipated cases of its term, the Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments in the climate change nuisance suit of Connecticut v. American Electric Power. From the beginning of this litigation, pundits have questioned the plaintiffs’ decision to seek injunctive relief gradually abating the defendants’ greenhouse gas emissions. To critics, this form of relief – as opposed to, say, monetary damages – seems to highlight the complex and value-laden aspects of climate change as a policy problem, making judges more likely to dismiss the suit as lying beyond the ken of the judicial branch.

Tuesday's argument confirmed the pundits’ view, as even reliably liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg greeted the plaintiffs’ claims with palpable skepticism. Justice Ginsburg’s money quote, which is being cited around the blogosphere, came when she told the plaintiffs that their prayer for relief “sounds …