CPR President Rob Verchick on BP's Settlement Today
Today’s BP settlement is great news for the Gulf Coast economy, which still suffers mightily from the damage BP and its contractors caused. The President and his Department of Justice deserve credit for hammering out this deal, and keeping their focus on the victims of what the President rightly calls the "worst environmental disaster America has ever faced."
If the settlement is to have the impact on the region that we all hope it will, we’ll need to be sure that the money is well spent, not siphoned off for political favors or otherwise misused.
It’s important to remember that this money will flow to the region, and not simply into federal coffers, as a result of a hard-won battle to pass the RESTORE Act. That law is applicable only to this spill, so were another catastrophe of this sort to occur, God forbid, there’s no guarantee that civil penalties would end up going to the states and people that were harmed.
Finally, a word of caution: $18 billion is a lot of money, but the damage this spill caused was similarly vast. Workers died, livelihoods were lost, and the impact on the ecosystem was and …
Editors’ Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts on measuring progress toward the 2017 interim goal of the Bay TMDL. The first five posts cover the region as a whole, and then Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, Future posts will explore the progress of the two remaining jurisdictions.
Like New York, the State of West Virginia can seem a bit distant from the Chesapeake Bay and the process of implementing the Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL). But, even though most of the state’s waterways drain into the Ohio River rather than to the Bay, some of the fastest growing counties in West Virginia are those surrounding the Potomac headwaters, and a short drive to the Bay itself. West Virginia has experienced at least some success to date in reducing nutrient and sediment pollution under the Bay TMDL, but recent information …
Yesterday, the Supreme Court in Michigan v. EPA threw out EPA’s regulations protecting the American public from mercury and other hazardous emissions of power plants.
In another instance of judicial activism by the Roberts court, the majority refused to defer to EPA’s decision to ignore costs in deciding whether to regulate power plant emissions.
The decision turned on the meaning of the word “appropriate” in a section of the Clean Air Act that addressed hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Before EPA subjected HAPs emissions from power plants to stringent technology-based regulations, it had to decide whether regulating those emissions was “appropriate and necessary,” given the other controls that the statute imposed on power plants to reduce acid rain.
If EPA made the “appropriate and necessary” finding, the statute required EPA to subdivide power plants into various categories and promulgate emissions …
In Michigan v. EPA, the Supreme Court reviewed the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate power plants under section 112 of the Clean Air Act. Section 112 is the provision regulating toxic air pollutants, such as mercury. The question before the Court was whether EPA reasonably interpreted the Clean Air Act to allow EPA to decline to consider costs in deciding whether to regulate power plants under section 112. The Court held that it was not reasonable to interpret the Act in this way. Thus, from the Court's decision, we know that EPA must consider costs in deciding whether to regulate power plants under section 112. There are, however, important questions that remain:
1. We do not yet know what happens to EPA's rule while EPA does the analytical work the Court has required of it. The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the …
In a sweeping display of judicial activism the Supreme Court has made it much harder for the EPA to protect Americans from the dangers of exposure to mercury emissions.
The Supreme Court today tossed out EPA’s regulations protecting the American public from mercury and other hazardous emissions of power plants.
Justice Scalia refused to defer to EPA’s decision to ignore costs in deciding whether to regulate power plant emissions.
Unfortunately, this means that EPA will have to go back to the drawing board and make a fresh determination whether it is appropriate to regulate mercury emissions from power plants after considering the costs of the regulations.
Fortunately, EPA has already determined that the benefits of the regulations far outweigh the costs. The agency just needs to formalize that determination after allowing public comment on it.
The Supreme Court’s decision will not have much …
The Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell is, of course, most important for its central holding that the Affordable Care Act's federal subsidies are available even on federally established health exchanges. The decision preserves health insurance subsidies for millions of people who have begun to benefit from them and avoids the ridiculous spectacle of taking the subsidies away based on four words ("established by the State") in a lengthy and complicated statute.
But for those who, like me, are not health care experts but teach and write in environmental law, the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts is principally worth studying for its approach to statutory interpretation. Especially for those following EPA's impending regulation of greenhouse gases from power plants under section 111 of the Clean Air Act, which has already drawn attacks based on a purported lack of statutory authority, the Court …
TMDL. The first four posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining three jurisdictions.
So far, we have evaluated progress of the three core jurisdictions in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in reducing nutrient and sediment pollution under the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL). These “big three” states and members of the Chesapeake Bay Commission are the biggest contributors to the pollution problem affecting the Bay and, at least in the case of Maryland and Virginia, appear to have the most at stake if the Bay itself is finally restored. But we now turn to the region’s periphery, where the big challenge may be how to motivate the people and policymakers in the Bay’s hinterlands – such as Upstate New York.
Whatever their motivation, officials in New York State must …
Editors’ Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on measuring progress toward the 2017 interim goal of the Bay TMDL. The first three posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania and Virginia. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining four jurisdictions.
Judging from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s modeling of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland is a tale of two states when it comes to reducing its polluting emissions. On the one hand, the state is clearly lagging in reducing nitrogen pollution, one of two main contributors to the algal blooms that lead to “dead zones” in the Bay. On the other hand, it has made some progress. Indeed, Maryland’s experience appears to be quite similar to that of Virginia, a leader in reducing nitrogen to date, in that it owes most of its success to significant …
ROME—On my first visit to Vatican City, before my meeting with Michelangelo, I greeted the Pope via the city’s ubiquitous souvenir stands. I love this stuff. You can try on the “Papa Francisco” kitchen apron and imagine the pontiff’s smile beaming over your Spaghetti Bolognese. Or gently joggle the pate of a Pope Francis bobble-head. Postcards are everywhere, of course. And for €10 you can score the annual “Hot Priests Calendar,” featuring hunky young men of the cloth. In this “G-rated” feature, priests from all over the world help promote the Eternal City and breathe into the Catholic brand a wisp of hipness, to say nothing of hotness..png)
But back to the Pope. This week Pope Francis released the much anticipated encyclical on the environment and climate change. And there’s a connection between that, the souvenir aprons, and even the hot priests. I …
This is the second in a series of posts to explore progress in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, as reflected in recent data from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s elaborate computer model of the Bay, which accounts for what the states are actually doing to reduce pollution. Read the first post, taking a look at the overall region’s progress, here.
Judging solely from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Watershed Model, the Commonwealth of Virginia is doing a pretty good job of reducing its pollution “contribution” to the Bay. The most recent data (2014) from the Model indicate that the Commonwealth has achieved 97.6 percent of its nitrogen reduction goal for 2017 and 150.4 percent of its phosphorus reduction goal, three years ahead of schedule.
Virginia’s experience exemplifies two themes common among the Bay jurisdictions: (1) the Bay has reaped the benefits of actions …
