Let a Hundred (Municipal) Flowers Bloom
In the era of Trump, one bright spot remains what's happening in cities across the nation. Here are some numbers: 402 U.S. mayors have endorsed the Paris Agreement and announced their intention of meeting its goals, while 118 have endorsed the goal of making their cities 100 percent renewable. A bit of quick research provides a sample of what some major cities are already up to:
Atlanta. Atlanta's city council has set ambitious goals: 100 percent renewable energy for city operations by 2025 and for the entire city a decade later.
Chicago. Chicago commissioned climate scientists to report on how climate change would impact the city. The report cites more heat waves and heavier rains and snows. The mayor has announced a plan to power city buildings with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. The city has adopted an elaborate climate change adaptation plan.
Houston and Dallas. Houston's city government now gets 89 percent of its power from wind and solar, while Dallas gets 100 percent from wind. Austin is also at 100 percent.
Los Angeles. LA Metro, the LA Department of Transportation and LA City Council committed to using only electric buses by 2030. A new community choice …
CPR President Rob Verchick recently sat down to talk with one of our newest Member Scholars, Professor Laurie Ristino of Vermont Law School, about the connections between climate change, food security, and policymaking tools like the Farm Bill that could be better used to promote sustainable agricultural practices.
We’re excited to share an audio recording of that conversation here as a “soft launch” of a new product at CPR – our “Connect the Dots” podcast. It’s a work in progress. Our first mini-series will focus on climate change adaptation, with episodes coming soon that explore issues related to climate-driven displacement, migration, and relocation; occupational health and safety protections; and water quality restoration in the United States.
In this first episode, Verchick and Ristino:
- Define food security (0:50)
- Discuss the ways climate change affects food security, including changing rainfall, shifting growth seasons and crop yields, pests …
The White House released its Spring 2018 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions on May 9 with little fanfare. A close examination of the agenda for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) shows that protecting worker health and safety is anything but a priority for the Trump administration. Rather, the agency will continue to focus on weakening worker protections.
OSHA's spring agenda lists 20 planned activities – 15 carryovers from the fall agenda, four agenda items moved from the agency's list of long-term actions to now in play, and one new activity.
The 15 carryover items include 14 announcements of delays, ranging from one to seven months. For example, one carryover on the agenda is the agency's plan to weaken the 2017 beryllium standard by easing safety requirements on the construction and maritime industries. The standard protects workers from chronic disease and lung cancer, but the …
Texas and Puerto Rico both got hit very hard last year by major hurricanes. But the federal government moved a lot more quickly to get help to Texas. In a new paper, I document the difference and explore the reasons. Although I won't go into all the details here, this is a situation people need to know about.
This table gives a sense of the difference, though there's a more extensive table in the paper.
FEMA says it poured just as many resources into Puerto Rico as Texas and that the response was hindered because they were already stretched thin by other disasters and had to contend with difficult logistic problems. I am willing to believe they made an equal effort. But an equal effort really wasn't enough — not when Puerto Rico's needs were so much greater. For instance, although the number of …
Yesterday, six senators, led by Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, criticized Trump administration "regulatory czar" Neomi Rao and her office for what appears to have been a slapdash review of a highly controversial Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft policy designed to stifle the agency's progress on advancing environmental and public health protections. Rao is the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a small but powerful bureau located within the Executive Office of the President. For nearly four decades, OIRA has enjoyed broad and largely unchecked authority to interfere in pending rulemakings and to secretly quash or water down those measures that might be politically inconvenient for the president.
In a letter to Administrator Rao, the senators identified several irregularities with OIRA's review of EPA's proposed rule on the use of science to inform regulatory policy. Taken together, these irregularities suggest …
Over the last couple of weeks, conservatives in Congress have continued their assault on public safeguards using the once-obscure and once-dormant Congressional Review Act (CRA). If their latest adventure succeeds, it will be the 16th public protection that these members, working with in concert with President Donald Trump, have obliterated over the last year, laying waste to a broad and diverse range of measures related to public health, safety, the environment, and consumer financial protection.
The anti-safeguard lawmakers behind these CRA-fueled attacks have already demonstrated what a dangerous law the CRA is, especially in the wrong hands, but this latest action would take the law to an unprecedented and even more extreme level. It targets a 2013 "bulletin" by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) aimed at discriminatory auto lending practices. As such, this would be the first time the CRA has been used to wipe out …
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA/FSIS) proposed a rule on Feb. 1 to alter inspection procedures for hog slaughter plants by revoking the existing cap on maximum line speeds and transferring key inspection tasks from USDA inspectors to private plant workers. These changes to current practices raise numerous concerns for worker health and safety, all of which the agency fails to address in the proposal.
Because of these concerns, Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) Member Scholars Martha McCluskey, Tom McGarity, Sid Shapiro, Rena Steinzor, and I sent comments to the agency on April 30, urging it to go back to the drawing board and account for the considerable worker health and safety risks its proposal creates before moving forward.
Meatpacking workers endure some of the most dangerous working conditions in the nation. Workers are exposed to cold, wet, noisy, and …
"They sat at the Agency and said, 'What can we do to reimagine authority under the statutes to regulate an area that we are unsure that we can but we're going to do so anyway?'"
When he said those words, Scott Pruitt was talking about the Obama administration. But it seems to be a pretty accurate description of the "transparency" proposal he issued last week.
Everyone agrees that it would be good to increase the public availability of scientific information for independent validation. But Pruitt's proposal is designed to provide EPA with a license to ignore studies that it views as insufficiently transparent – for example, when it cannot agree with investigators over how to protect patient confidentiality if health data is made public. This would allow it to ignore inconvenient evidence about the dangers of various forms of pollution. The proposal cites a string of …
Last week, the House Agriculture Committee passed a pock-marked, micro-legislated Farm Bill along strict party lines. It's a shameful goody bag of legislative delights for a few that comes at the expense of the majority of the American people.
Some lowlights: The bill holds our hungriest Americans hostage by conditioning SNAP benefits (food stamps) on job training (what kind of country withholds food from its citizens?); reduces conservation dollars that are critically needed given the pitiful state of soil health and our waterways; and provides commodity supports to producers who are wealthy and don't need the help.
Fortunately, unlike the old days, Americans are starting to pay attention to the Farm Bill. Given the opaque and highly consolidated nature of our food system, people are increasingly concerned about how and where their food is produced. And for good reason. The United States is plagued by …
On Saturday, April 28, CPR will observe Workers' Memorial Day by remembering fallen workers whose lives were taken from this world too soon and by renewing our pledge to fight for all working people.
Every day in this country, 14 workers leave for work, never to return home. One worker is killed on the job every two hours in the United States. In 2016, 5,190 workers died earning a living, the highest number on record in eight years. That doesn't account for the hundreds of lives lost daily to occupational diseases from exposures to toxic chemicals and substances. Nor does it include the thousands of hard-working Americans who incur severe injuries or contract illnesses on the job each day.
When I think about what each of these workers and their families endure, I struggle to see why politics so often stands in the way of obvious …
