This post is the third in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the biggest and most powerful of the protector agencies. Consequently, it has also become the agency that was most decimated by regulatory opponents in recent decades. Thus, when President Obama assumed office in January of 2009, he inherited an EPA with its confidence severely dented, but otherwise eager to get back to the important work of protecting people and the environment. As CPR found in its new report, EPA’s performance this past year reflected this disposition: the agency steamed ahead on many important issues, but approached certain controversial issues with visible trepidation.

Looking back, it’s hard not to be impressed by the breadth of EPA’s accomplishments this past year. The agency took protective actions in several areas including …

Two developments to note on coal ash from recent days:

• OIRA extended its review of EPA's not-yet-publicly-proposed regulation on coal ash. That gives it an additional 30-days from the previous Jan 14 deadline. Matthew Madia explains at The Fine Print.
• EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson mentioned coal ash in an appearance Thursday, saying, "There has been a lot of hullabaloo over coal ash, and I'm disappointed that some of the folks, especially on the industry side, haven't taken the time to wait and let us try to craft rulemaking."

Bjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize the temperature would have astronomical costs, according to Lomborg, while the benefits would be small.

This is par for the course for Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who has gained international notoriety for his repeated attacks on environmental protection. His source for his climate policy skepticism is a very selective reading of economics, described grandly and inaccurately as what all economists think. For instance, do “all the major climate economic models” agree on a specific, extreme forecast of carbon taxes, as asserted by Lomborg? Not a chance; major models tend to disagree somewhat …

My family has gotten a lot smaller lately. My mother died in 2004, my father in 2007, and my uncle in 2008.

I’ve done the five stages of grief, as introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, but not exactly as she described. It’s true that I initially felt denial: “I’m a lucky person; this can't be happening.” Then I was angry and felt sorry for myself. Then, at least during my mother’s struggle with pancreatic cancer, I hit the bargaining table. Mom was a Sunday school teacher when I was little, so I pleaded with God: “Please let the diagnosis be wrong, please let the chemo work, please don’t let the good die young.” To hedge my bets, I occasionally promised, “if she can beat the odds, I’ll volunteer at the local cancer center and I’ll donate my life …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

Last Monday, EPA signed off on the Corps of Engineers’ issuance of a Clean Water Act § 404 permit to Hobet Mining for a mountaintop removal coal mining project in West Virginia. The decision is important because it’s the first product of the process announced last fall for joint EPA / Corps review of a large number of pending permit applications. It’s troubling for several reasons. First and most simply, it allows a major mountaintop mining project to go ahead, and suggests that more will follow. Second, despite EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s repeated public statements about bringing clarity to the process, this decision offers essentially no window into the principles EPA thinks should guide these decisions. Third, it promises an environmental outcome that can’t be assured through the adaptive management provisions included in the approval.

NRDC’s Rob Perks makes a …

A few months ago Rena Steinzor wrote skeptically here about state (as opposed to federal) regulation of hydraulic fracturing:

... the idea that after doing all this research, EPA should stand back and let the gas-producing states take the lead, stepping in only after much more delay, would amount to a rollback of environmental protection to the dark days of the 1950s and 1960s, before modern environmentalism and federal regulation began.

Last week ProPublica had a useful article on a key aspect of this ("State Oil and Gas Regulators Are Spread Too Thin to Do Their Jobs"). Reporter Abrahm Lustgarten put together the numbers and found:

While the number of new oil and gas wells being drilled in the 22 states each year has jumped 45 percent since 2004, most of the states have added only a few regulators.

It's a troubling read.

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

As I pointed out three months ago, the federal government has awakened from its 8-year Bush administration slumber to notice that the SF Bay-Delta is an important environmental and economic resource whose management requires federal input. On December 22, the Obama administration issued an Interim Federal Action Plan for the California Bay-Delta.

The best news about the plan is simply that it was issued. It’s one more sign that the feds are serious about joining in the task of dealing with the Bay-Delta’s collapsing ecosystem and navigating the tricky intersections of water supply and environmental protection. That’s essential to any progress. Federal agencies are key players both on the water management side (the Bureau of Reclamation operates the Central Valley Project) and on the regulatory side (the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service implement the federal Endangered …

A group of organizations who work to eliminate health hazards in housing have sent a letter to OMB chief Peter Orszag expressing concern over the "detailing" of Randall Lutter to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The letter focuses on Lutter's writings on the economics of lead poisoning:

Mr. Lutter's statement, "...the children who would benefit from reduced lead hazards are living in the care of their parents, and their parents have control of such hazards" profoundly ignores the realities of the housing market and the extent to which families are able to identify and select housing that is free from hazards.

...

Although Mr. Lutter's contributions to the literature appropriately belong in an academic discussion of cost-benefit and regulatory analysis, we cannot understand why the Administration, given its public commitment to pursuing many of the very goals and policies viewed as ill-advised …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes had a long story on the California water crisis, featuring Lesley Stahl interviewing (among others) Arnold Schwarzenegger and UC Davis professor Jeff Mount. On the positive side, the story accurately portrayed the vulnerability of California’s fragile through-Delta water delivery system to a major earthquake or catastrophic levee break. But CBS News flubbed the overall storyline.

In typical media fashion, it oversimplified the story to “Delta smelt versus farmers,” with barely a mention of the two-year closure of the coastal salmon fishery or the crash of the Bay-Delta ecosystem as a whole. Worse, 60 Minutes swallowed whole a tall tale concocted by anti-regulatory interests: that protecting the Delta smelt has economically crippled California agriculture.

That story is demonstrably false on at least two different levels. First, while the San Joaquin valley has had a tough economic year, its woes …