CPR's Mendelson in NYT 'Debate' on CO2 Regulation
CPR Member Scholar Nina Mendelson has a piece today in The New York Times's "Room for Debate" feature on the news that EPA is working its way toward regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. As The Times quite directly and correctly puts it, "Under orders from the Supreme Court, which the Bush administration ignored, President Obama’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to determine" whether CO2 should be regulated. Among those joining the Times debate is John Graham, former Bush administration "regulatory czar." (He's opposed to regulating, not surprisingly.) Mendelson writes:
The announcement by Lisa Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, that she will determine whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare seems a welcome signal that the agency will respond to the urgency of global warming. As a legal matter, Ms. Jackson probably has little choice. The E.P.A. has been charged for decades with regulating air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As the Supreme Court recognized in Massachusetts v. the Environmental Protection Agency, greenhouse gases are such air pollutants. An endangerment determination would confirm the agency’s power, but also its obligation, to regulate greenhouse …
Almost two years after the Supreme Court declared, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that CO2 is an “air pollutant” for purposes of the Clean Air Act, this announcement, paired with the decision to reconsider California’s request for permission to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars (see Rick’s post and the Federal Register notice), shows that the Obama administration is serious about applying the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gases.
That’s a good thing. Although it would be awkward to develop and implement a National Ambient Air Quality Standard for CO2, as Michael Hanemann and I have explained, the technology-based and planning provisions of the Clean Air …
Over on Legal Planet, CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus of UC-Davis and -Berkeley posted a blog Sunday on an upcoming decision on whether to introduce the Suminoe oyster, native to China and Japan, to the Chesapeake Bay. She writes:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a draft EIS last fall considering the impacts of several alternatives, including release of fertile Suminoe oysters and confined aquaculture of sterile oysters.You might wonder why federal agencies are involved at all. Virginia and Maryland proposed the introduction, prodded by the Virginia Seafood Council, which has conducted its own experiments with Asian oysters in tributaries to the Bay.
A Clean Water Act NPDES permit would seem to be required to introduce these organisms into the Bay, but until recently EPA was busy denying that it had any duty to regulate the discharge of living organisms into waterways. The Corps …
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: climate change is different from traditional environmental problems. It’s global, for one thing. Carbon dioxide isn’t a traditional pollutant, for another. It doesn’t cause cancer. It doesn’t kill fish. Plants use it in photosynthesis; every human and animal emits it. The problem is that combustion creates it, too, which is why our modern, engine-loving world has too much.
CO2 is also fungible. One ton of CO2 is as good or bad as any other. So, the thinking goes, trading greenhouse gas emissions makes good sense: under such a program, sources will either reduce their emissions or pay to emit, but as long as the cap is stringent enough, emissions will decrease overall. And those localized concentrations of pollution that environmentalists ordinarily worry about when it comes to trading regimes, those …
From the airspace over the Indonesian gold mine Batu Hijau, it might seem as though the mythical King Midas has been resurrected in a modern, and twisted, form. Where King Midas of Greek lore was granted the touch of gold, the modern King Midas assumes the form of a global mining company that, in a myopic and endless search for gold, turns everything it touches into a dull, deserted, and toxic wasteland.
The National Geographic’s January issue investigates the modern gold rush, undertaken not by pioneers headed out to the North American west but by thousands of individuals in mostly developing countries, hoping to eke out a better existence. With the current financial market in shambles, investors are turning to gold as a safe investment, driving up prices and exacerbating the frenetic pursuit. In 2007, India purchased 20 per cent of the world gold market at …
Both versions of the economic stimulus package – that passed by the House and by the Senate – include funding for the National Park Service. The bill the House passed last month would allocate $1.7 billion to the National Park Service for “projects to address critical deferred maintenance needs within the National Park System, including roads, bridges and trails,” operation of the National Park System, and for “projects related to the preservation and repair of historical and cultural resources” in the parks. The bill passed by the Senate includes $747 million for the Park Service to use for operation and construction, after $55 million for historic preservation in the parks was cut from a previous version of the bill as part of a compromise amendment.
The discrepancy in the amount of funding will have to be revisited in conference committee, but whether the ultimate amount is $1.7 …
About thirty miles from my front door, heavy barges are dumping rocks into Louisiana's Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO), hoping to permanently plug the de-commissioned shipping channel before the end of the next hurricane season. It's a big plug. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that the structure will weigh 430,000 tons, "with a base 450 feet wide, tapering to 12 feet wide at the top." The rock wall "will jut 7 feet from the water's surface and be 950 feet long. It will cover 10 acres of the channel bottom." The MRGO--or as locals say, "Mr. Go"-- opened some 45 years ago as a shipping shortcut – sort of like a highway bypass that, in this case, allows commercial river barges to avoid a winding part of the Mississippi and instead zip straight to New Orleans. Activists have been trying to close it down for …
One logical response to the constant news of the economic recession is cutting back on discretionary purchases and developing a household budget. That is, if we know that times are tough and that we may encounter difficulties sustaining the lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to, we take stock of our circumstances and plan for the future. We look at our current income and expenses, project our future income as best as we are able, and adjust future expenses in the budget to match future income.
What if, instead, in the face of all the economic indicators that tough times are ahead, we stuck our heads in the sand, continued spending as always (or even increased spending) and hoped for the best? Most would probably agree that at best, it would seem a risky path to tread.
And yet, that’s the path we’ve chosen to take …
More evidence that EPA is starting to find its bearings after eight years of hibernation: in an interim report on the year-old Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program, EPA admits that asking companies who work on nanomaterials to voluntarily conduct and disclose research on health and environmental hazards isn’t producing much useful information. As a result, the agency is going to start considering how to use its powers under the Toxic Substances Control Act to require data submission.
The Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program “was developed to help provide a firmer scientific foundation for regulatory decisions by encouraging submission and development of information for nanoscale materials.” It is comprised of two parts: the Basic Program (which asks companies to voluntarily report any information they have about the nanomaterials with which they work); and the In-Depth Program (which asks for volunteer companies to sponsor research into the health and environmental …
Tarlock and Doremus are co-authors of Water War in the Klamath Basin: Macho Law, Combat Biology, and Dirty Politics, published by Island Press in 2008.
Last week, the Oregon Supreme Court agreed to decide whether irrigators in the Klamath Basin "own" water delivered by the federal Klamath Reclamation Project. This latest development is one more twist in an ongoing property rights case that illustrates both how difficult it can be to determine who holds precisely what rights in western water and how property rights claims, even spurious ones, can frustrate ecosystem restoration efforts.
Usually, claims of ownership are made to recover a resource from someone else. But that's not the issue here. The United States agrees that when the Project has water available it must deliver that water to these irrigators rather than to anyone else. But the irrigators want more than that. They want the United …
