Coronavirus Pandemic Reinforces the Need for Cumulative Impacts Analysis
UPDATE: The Center for Progressive Reform signed a March 31, 2020 letter in support of federal funding for programs aligned with the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform in the COVID-19 stimulus legislation. Among a variety of environmental justice priorities, the request includes cumulative impacts analysis.
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread around the globe, the inequalities in American society have come into even sharper relief. People with low incomes who are unable to work from home risk being exposed to the virus at work or losing their jobs altogether. Their children may no longer have access to free or reduced-price meals at school. They are also less likely to have health insurance, receive new drugs, or have access to primary or specialty care, putting them at a greater risk of succumbing to the illness. As with any shock to the system – natural disaster, conflict, and now a pandemic – vulnerable populations are hit hardest and have a harder time bouncing back.
In addition to socioeconomic risk factors, a less obvious but often inescapable hazard puts poor people in a literal and figurative chokehold: pollution. People with underlying health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and lung disease, face a …
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) sweeps the planet, it threatens billions of people and all but promises a global economic recession of uncertain magnitude. As I'm sure you are, I’m deeply concerned about what this means for my family, my neighbors, and my broader community.
I’m particularly concerned about working people who frequently interact with the general public and provide essential services, and thus cannot work from home. At the forefront of my mind are custodial and janitorial workers, grocery clerks, bank tellers, gas station attendants, bus drivers, garbage and refuse collectors, pharmacists, health care workers, and law enforcement officers. These workers are our new first responders in this time of crisis, and it’s our responsibility, personally and as a nation, to do everything within our power to protect them and their families from a potentially deadly virus.
I’m also concerned about protecting from …
In my previous post, I explored five essential elements of an effective response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. They included closure of all nonessential businesses, paid sick leave and family medical leave, health and safety standards for infectious diseases, hazard pay, and workers' compensation. Here are five more things we need to protect workers and our economy from the crisis.
Universal Basic Income: To help prevent economic collapse, the federal government should provide a minimum monthly wage to all U.S. workers while the COVID-19 emergency continues. Suggested dollar amounts have ranged from $500 to $2,000 per adult and child, but the result should be no less than $2,000 per individual per month to help families sustain rent and mortgage payments, prescriptions, health insurance premiums, food costs, and other household expenses until the COVID-19 crisis ends.
A March 19 Republican proposal, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief …
Earlier this week, a group of 25 Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) Board Members, Member Scholars, and staff signed a joint letter urging Russell Vought, Acting Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to direct federal agencies to hold open active public comment periods for pending rulemakings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter further urges Vought to extend comment periods for at least 30 days beyond the end of the crisis.
Meaningful public participation is one of the bedrock principles upon which our regulatory system is based. Among other things, by enlisting the dispersed expertise of the public, it ensures higher-quality regulatory decision-making, and it imbues the process and its results with a crucial measure of credibility and legitimacy.
This goal of meaningful public participation is most notably enshrined in the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement that agencies provide members of the public …
This post is part of a series related to the March 12 Conference on Public Lands and Energy Transitions that was hosted by the George Washington University Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program.
Offshore wind holds huge promise as a renewable electricity source. Using existing turbine technologies, the U.S. potential is 2,058,000 megawatts (MW), enough to generate double the electricity demand of the entire United States in 2015. About 80 percent of that electricity demand is along the coasts, so getting the power to the public could prove easier than transmitting it from wind-rich midwestern states. Utilities from eight states up and down the East Coast from Maine to Virginia have committed to procuring 22,500 MW of offshore wind so far, and wind power appeared poised to take off when the Department of the Interior awarded 11 commercial offshore leases in 2016 …
This post is part of a series related to the March 12 Conference on Public Lands and Energy Transitions that was hosted by the George Washington University Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program.
Our vast public lands and waters are both a major contributor to the global climate crisis and a potential solution to the problem. The extraction and use of oil and gas resources from public lands and waters produce 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If the public lands were its own nation, it would be the fifth largest global emitter of GHGs.
The scale of this problem has been exacerbated by the current administration. Since the start of the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior – the primary federal agency charged by Congress with managing the use of public lands and waters – has used its statutory authority to …
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Now that President Trump has belatedly declared a national emergency, what powers does he have to respond to the coronavirus pandemic? There has been a lot of talk about this on the Internet, some of it off-base.
It's important to get the law straight. For instance, there's been talk about whether Trump should impose a national curfew, but I haven't been able to find any legal authority for doing that so far. The legal discussion of this issue is still at an early stage, but here are some of the major sources of power and how they might play out.
The Stafford Act (major disasters and national emergencies). Trump has specifically invoked the emergency provisions of the Stafford Act. The Stafford Act, which is mostly administered by FEMA, covers federal responses for two categories of events: major disasters and …
"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.
Although anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have disrupted the planet's climate system in ways that have already caused and will continue to cause massive harms all over the world, the IPCC warned, we still have time to prevent a level of disruption that …
On March 4, I joined community members and advocates from Assateague Coastal Trust, Center for a Livable Future, Environmental Integrity Project, Food and Water Watch, and NAACP to testify in favor of Maryland's House Bill 1312. The bill, introduced by Delegate Vaughn Stewart (D-Montgomery County), would place a moratorium on permits for new or expanding concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) in the state. The legislation would apply to "industrial poultry operations," defined as operations that produce 300,000 or more broiler chickens per year. It was introduced with strong support from community members and environmental and public health advocates hoping to pump the brakes on the seemingly unmitigated growth of poultry CAFOs, especially on the Eastern Shore.
The environmental and public health harms from CAFOs are nothing new to Eastern Shore residents. As stated in CPR's testimony, the expansion of CAFOs on the Delmarva Peninsula is …
Originally published by NYU Press. Reprinted with permission.
The flood season is upon us once again. Beginning in February, parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were deluged by floods described as "historic," "unprecedented," even "Shakespearean." At the same time, Midwestern farmers are still reeling from the torrential rains of 2019 that destroyed billions of dollars' worth of crops and equipment, while wondering whether their water-ravaged farmland can ever be put back into production. All this while the Houston area continues to recover from three so-called "500-year floods" in as many years, back-to-back in 2015, 2016, and, most notably, Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
As one tragedy follows another, they barely qualify as national news anymore. Instead, record-breaking floods and destruction are becoming commonplace. Why do the sequels barely warrant top billing? How have our national policies failed us, and why do they continue to fail us …
