CPRBlog asked some of our regular bloggers to give us some suggestions for the high and low points of the regulatory year. We began by taking the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations” off the table, so that we could focus in on the Obama Administration’s impact to date. CPR President Rena Steinzor begins.

The high point of the year on the regulatory front was EPA’s endangerment finding on climate change, issued December 7, 2009, finally giving the seventh day of December a positive symbolic role in history, beyond the more memorable one as a day that will “live in infamy.” We endured eight solid years of stonewalling by the Bush Administration on climate change – a saga that included everything from suppressing EPA reports because the facts were inconvenient, to the downright juvenile step of refusing to open an email from EPA because it contained a …

 cross-posted from Legal Planet

On December 9, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) introduced S. 2856, a one paragraph bill that would quietly gut a key portion of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) by dramatically expanding a narrow exception to one of the Act’s central mandates. Were it to pass, the bill would mark a significant step in the wrong direction for United States fisheries policy. The bill, the "International Fisheries Agreement Clarification Act," is co-sponsored by interim Senator Paul Kirk (D-MA).

The MSA requires fisheries managers to impose scientifically defensible annual catch limits (ACLs). For fisheries identified as overfished, the Act immediately ends overfishing, and requires that the fish stocks be rebuilt as rapidly as possible (with 10 years as the outside limit.)

Section 304(e)(4)(A)(ii) of the MSA creates an exception for fisheries covered by international treaties from this “rebuild in 10 years” requirement. If enacted, Senator Snowe …

NOAA issued a draft of its new catch share policy last week. Despite Director Jane Lubchenco’s clear support for the concept, the draft policy stops short of requiring that fisheries managers implement catch shares. This is a good thing. Instead of mandating catch shares, the draft policy focuses on education, cooperation, and transparency. The agency commits itself to “reducing technical barriers and administrative impediments” to implementing catch shares. Those are exactly the roles that NOAA should be playing.

Too often, proponents of catch shares imply that all we need do is wave a private property wand and the problems besetting fisheries will magically solve themselves. If only it were that easy. The basic idea is to set a firm cap on how much of each kind of fish can be captured in a fishery. This cap, the Annual Catch Limit (ACL) is supposed to be set …

While the EPA announced Thursday that it was delaying a decision on issuing a proposed rule for coal ash, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has already hosted 10 meetings with industry representatives in recent months on the issue.

The 10 meetings -- the most on any topic at OIRA so far in the Obama Administration, according to records on its website -- were completely outside of EPA's rulemaking process. In that process, once a proposed rule is issued, industries have ample opportunity to give comment and present their case. The EPA is required by law to examine and respond to those comments. No law requires the White House to hear industry pleas, let alone before the notice and comment period has begun.

Coal ash comprises all the solid waste from the burning of coal to generate power. Chock-full of toxic substances, coal ash …

As we move into the last days of climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the chances of securing a binding agreement of all countries continues to look less and less likely. The primary culprit, according to the New York Times, is the G77, a group of 130 developing countries that have negotiated as a block since arriving. But as the Times notes, since they have very different needs and incomes, the main thing they have in common is their ability to rail against the rich developed world and hold up negotiations. Indeed, it seems that the main impediment to progress (at least from the perspective of the organizers) has been the continued focus on process rather than substance.

As any progressive knows, the G77 countries certainly have a lot to rail against, in terms of unfairness in many arenas, including climate change. Unfortunately, being right doesn’t always mean …

In his speech in Copenhagen Tuesday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger applauded international leadership on climate change, but said that national or international agreements alone will not address the issue. He said that the "scientists, the capitalists and the activists" across the world have and will play an important role. And he talked about the job for subnational governments, like his own:

While national governments have been fighting over emission targets, subnational governments have been adopting their own targets and laws and policies.

...

In California, we are proceeding on renewable energy requirements and a cap and trade system for greenhouse gases. We are moving forward. As a matter of fact, we are making great progress. If hydro is included, we will get 45 percent of our energy from renewables in ten years from now and we are already at 27 percent.

We are proceeding on the world's …

Environmental negotiations have long set the standard for transparency and participation. The relationship between environmental organizations (of all kinds) and the negotiators has always been one tempered by a shared vision that the negotiations would succeed (in contrast to negotiations at the WTO or World Bank where “success” for many activists was often defined as the failure of the negotiations). The history of transparency and participation in environmental negotiations is taking a huge hit this week in Copenhagen—not because of a loss of a shared vision of success—but because the sheer scale of these negotiations has led to increasing security and a tightening noose around non-governmental participation.

It started on Monday morning. Literally thousands of participants arrived to pick up their registration badges and found instead large, slow-moving lines. In the end, some people stood in the cold for 10 hours and never got into …

There are two separate meetings going on here in Copenhagen, really. The one that everyone is focused on is the official negotiations between the countries to reach a new binding agreement on climate change (or extend Kyoto in some form). The other “meeting” is the interaction of the observer organizations inside and outside of the side event meetings and their informal reports to the official delegations. This second “meeting” is more amorphous, and more subject to chaos (the security clearance for credentialed observers has required more than seven hours of waiting in the cold and this morning (Wednesday) was suspended indefinitely). Nevertheless, it appears to me that there is some significant progress being made.

While here, I've focused on the intersecting issues of the carbon market, offsets and adaptation assistance to affected countries. From the official reports, it appears that little has happened in these areas …