The Grand Tradition of Harassing Researchers -- Virginia Edition
Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli II has taken his climate change vendetta to a new low, announcing that he will use Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to force officials at UVA to spend months digging through a decade of university records in search of evidence that Dr. Michael Mann "defrauded" the Commonwealth by seeking funds to explore the boundaries of climate science.
Tuesday's article in the Washington Post gave the attention-seeking politician all that he needed from the civil investigative demand issued to Dr. Mann's former employer. Now Cuccinelli will move on to his next headline-grabbing venture without a care for the disruptions he's left in his wake.
As others have pointed out, threatening academics with legal penalties sets a terrible precedent that will stifle the innovation and progress that are the hallmarks of the United States' great research universities. It was bad enough when Rep. Joe Barton first started harassing Dr. Mann over his work, signaling to all climate scientists that they'd better be careful what they researched or the full force of a congressional investigation might be in their future. Now that Cuccinelli has set the precedent of making onerous demands on the universities …
Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls.
Today's New York Times update on the Deepwater Horizon disaster opens with BP’s failed efforts to control the remaining two leaks via concrete, or remote control robots. Strangely, the article makes no mention of the missing remote shut-off valve called an acoustic switch. This $500,000 device might well have prevented this whole catastrophe. But, the United States does not require that deepwater oil rigs install an acoustic switch, and BP and Transocean decided to forego it. The United States considered requiring these switches in 2000, but Bush administration nixed the idea after industry pushback. My guess is that Vice President Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force had a hand in that, but since the Task Force operated entirely behind closed doors, we may never know the truth of how the United States made this ill-considered choice. Apparently, the Times does not …
EPA is making an announcement right now. We'll have more soon.
Update: EPA's announcement is up.
CPR President Rena Steinzor has issued this statement on today's coal ash news. She says:
Because EPA is actively considering these two very different approaches, it has not actually proposed anything from a regulatory perspective. The EPA will almost certainly have to go back and get another round of public comment before making a final decision, which is not what Jackson wanted when she walked into OIRA’s door. ... The White House has met with industry representatives on this issue literally dozens of times, and it's no surprise those meetings netted a delay. The administration could and should have moved ahead months ago with one strong proposal to tackle toxic coal ash.
Monday April 26 was supposed to be the day that the much anticipated Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate change bill was to be proposed in the Senate. Hopes had gone up that there could be a legislative solution to putting a price on carbon. The carbon markets themselves had responded, pushing up the price of allocations on RGGI in the hopes that these would be allowed to qualify for the expected federal cap and trade. Then over the preceding weekend, it fell apart. Senator Graham criticized the call from Majority Leader Reid to also take up a comprehensive immigration reform bill, claiming that it was driven by Senator Reid’s own political needs to increase his chances of retaining his Nevada Senate seat.
There is no doubt that this played an important piece in the very difficult political dance that has surrounded the emergence of the KGL plan. Senator Graham …
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was in a tough position on coal ash. If you are African American and low-income, you have a 30 percent greater chance of living near a big pit of this toxic brew than a white American, so Jackson correctly decided that such an important environmental justice issue should be at the forefront of the Obama Administration’s agenda. But Jackson was also taking on Big Coal, a special interest historically near and dear to swing voters in Ohio and Illinois. Nevertheless, this sturdy “eco-warrior,” as she was recently dubbed by Rolling Stone, marched forward, right into the basement of the White House and the chilling influence of Cass Sunstein and the economists at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Jackson’s tough, but as yet secret, regulatory proposal arrived in crisp fall weather, only to be greeted by a tsunami of industry …
Cross posted from Legal Planet.
A couple of key observations about the oil rig blowout, based on my work on disaster issues.
First, “human error” is a cop-out when you’re dealing with major technology. It’s not like human fallibility is a surprise. Training, good management, and smart design should be the responses, not whining after the fact that the workers weren’t perfect. Or, if human error is unavoidable and the outcome would be catastrophic, you’d better rethink the project.
Second, it’s probably true that this was a very unlikely way for an oil rig to go wrong, but that doesn’t mean much. Suppose this was an eight-thousand-year event at any given oil rig. That is, you’d expect to have such an accident at that rig once in eight thousand years, or to put it another way, the odds in any …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the nation’s look-before-you-leap environmental law, intended to make sure that we understand what environmental problems we might result before we act. To that end, federal agencies must prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) before they take, authorize, or provide funding for actions that may have significant adverse environmental impacts. Useful as NEPA analysis is, the Deepwater Horizon disaster vividly illustrates the need to fix one of its shortcomings.
The White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) oversees NEPA compliance. It has issued regulations prescribing how agencies should prepare EISs and what should be in those documents. The regulations are almost unchanged since they were originally issued during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, with one conspicuous exception. Where the impacts are uncertain or unknown, the regulations used to require that the EIS “include a worst case …
As the Obama Administration ought to know by now, open government isn't easy. There are a lot of constituent elements in the wall that separates the American people and their government. Getting open government right requires planning and dedication. Moreover, resource and legal constraints can thwart even the best-intentioned efforts by government agencies to operate in a more open fashion.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced a number of new developments related to its Open Government Initiative, suggesting that the Administration is taking seriously many of the important barriers to open government.
First, all of the Cabinet agencies released their open government plans, detailing steps they'll take to make “transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration part of the way they work.” The EPA's plan says it will make more of the data it uses available to the public. For example, the agency has committed …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Libertarians are, of course, deeply suspicious of government regulation. This may lead to a reflexive rejection of climate change mitigation. But Jonathan Adler, who provides a refreshingly distinctive view of environmental law from the Right, argues otherwise. In a forthcoming article (only the abstract is available on SSRN), he contends that libertarians are making a mistake in opposing climate mitigation:
Even if anthropogenic climate change is decidedly less than catastrophic – indeed, even if it net beneficial to the globe as whole – human-induced climate change is likely to contribute to environmental changes that violate traditional conceptions of property rights. Viewed globally, the actions of some countries – primarily developed nations (such as the United States) and those nations that are industrializing most rapidly (such as China and India) – are likely to increase environmental harms suffered by less developed nations – nations that have not (as of …
