One Stat That May Help Us Understand Why Bay Progress Continues to Lag
The Chesapeake Bay Program has just compiled its annual data assessing progress toward the watershed-wide pollution reduction target under the Bay restoration framework known as the "Bay TMDL." The bottom line is that recent gains in Bay health could soon be eclipsed by the lagging pace of pollution reductions, with the likely result that the region will fall well short of the Bay TMDL 2025 target date to achieve the reductions needed to restore the Bay's health.
One of the primary causes of this slow pace of progress is that the agencies primarily responsible for Bay restoration simply aren't doing their jobs the way they used to. For example, the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) recently released its annual report showing the level of activity enforcing environmental laws. In 2018, the agency reported just 25 actions to enforce the federal Clean Water Act's core regulatory program and the state laws protecting surface waters from illegal pollution.
That's a record low, worse even than the 36 actions in 2017, which itself was a record low after dropping from 61 actions in 2016 and 98 in 2015. It doesn't take complex statistical analysis to see the pattern here. The number …
Originally published on Legal Planet.
EPA pollution regulations are based on an assessment of the risks posed by pollutants. This can be a complex scientific judgment. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), the agency's scientific advisory board, is pushing for major changes in the way that EPA approaches this analysis. The effect would be to make it much harder for EPA to prove that a risk exists.
Currently, risk assessment is based on a "weight of the evidence" approach that considers all of the peer-reviewed literature, rather than limiting itself to studies using specific methodologies. Tony Cox, the industry consultant who now heads CASAC after Scott Pruitt purged most academic scientists, has been pushing for a radical change. He wants to limit risk assessment to studies that use a specific set of methods to establish that a substance actually causes harm. In particular, he rejects studies …
Originally published on Legal Planet.
The Washington Post has a list of false statements by Trump, which turns out to be searchable by topic. They've found, "In the first eight months of his presidency, President Trump made 1,137 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day." As of March 17, he was up to 9,179 false statements. There were 200 false statements about the environment – that's about one every four days, which compares favorably to the number of misrepresentations on some other topics. They're quite repetitive, but I've picked out some of the most frequent ones. By the way, if you're interested, the Post also explains why each of these statements is wrong. I shudder to think what people who follow him on Twitter are picking up in the way of misconceptions.
Air and Water
- "Some of the best farmland in the …
This post was originally published on SCOTUSblog. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US).
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week in favor of Alaskan John Sturgeon, who waged a 12-year battle against the National Park Service over its ban on hovercraft in park preserves. As a result of the decision, Sturgeon can once again "rev up his hovercraft in search of moose" on the Nation River in the Yukon Charley Preserve. This is the second time this fight has come before the Supreme Court. On one hand, it involves important legal issues affecting public lands, federalism, and water rights. But on the other, it is a narrow case over the special circumstances of federal lands in Alaska.
As a quick recap, Sturgeon was navigating the Nation River on his hovercraft in 2007 when Park Service officials stopped him and …
Michigan. Minnesota. New Jersey. North Carolina. West Virginia. These are just some of the hotspots of water contamination caused by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS. Linked to a number of cancers and other illnesses, PFAS chemicals have been used in everything from nonstick cookware to stain-resistant clothing and carpets. Until recently, the substances have gone largely unregulated, exposing millions of Americans to toxic contamination.
Earlier this month, CPR Member Scholar and UC-Riverside Professor Carl Cranor spoke with UCR News about PFAS and the dangers the chemicals pose to human health and the environment.
PFAS' carbon-fluorine bonds are some of the strongest in organic chemistry. They're so stable, in fact, that PFAS have been widely referred to as "forever chemicals" because of their indestructability, said Carl Cranor, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.
"These chemicals are going to be part …
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 …
Originally published on Legal Planet.
What is EPA’s mission? To what extent is minimizing regulatory costs part of the core mission, as the Trump Administration seems to believe? Does the Trump-Pruitt/Wheeler view comport with original intent? History makes it clear that the answer is “no.”
The title of the agency itself suggests that the core mission is protecting the environment, just as the core mission of the Defense Department is presumably national defense (though cost isn’t irrelevant in either setting). It’s worthwhile, however, to take a closer look at the marching orders given to the agency when it was formed. As it turns out, we do have clear evidence of what Congress and the President had in mind.
EPA wasn’t established by a statute. It was established through a special process that no longer exists for government reorganization, which allowed the President …
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 …
Originally published on Legal Planet.
The possibility of declaring a national emergency to address climate change will probably remain under discussion for the next couple of years, particularly if the courts uphold Trump's "wall" emergency. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to pull together the series of blog posts I've written on the subject. I want to emphasize three key points at the beginning:
- Declaring a climate emergency should be off the table if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.
- An emergency declaration is not a magic wand that gives presidents a blank check. A declaration would allow some constructive steps to be taken, but within limits.
- The ultimate goal has to be congressional action, and an emergency declaration should only be considered as part of a larger legislative and administrative agenda.
Even if the Court upholds Trump, using this precedent to fight climate …
This post is based on a recent article published in the University of Missouri—Kansas City Law Review.
Congressional oversight and the public's impeachment discussion tend to focus on deep dark secrets: Did President Trump conspire with the Russians? Did he cheat on his taxes? Did he commit other crimes before becoming president? The House Committee on Oversight and Reform (or the Judiciary Committee), however, should also focus on a more fundamental and less hidden problem: Trump has systematically sought to undermine the rule of law in the United States. He has done the opposite of what his oath of office requires by taking care that the law be faithlessly executed. I am not just talking about some illegal actions, but rather about a systematic effort to direct government employees to do the opposite of what the Constitution requires. For this reason, there is a need for …
