CPR is on the hunt for an energetic, organized, and dedicated advocate to join our staff as a Policy Analyst. The focus of this position is restoring the Chesapeake Bay through strong implementation of the Bay TMDL. We are especially interested in candidates who have a background in the legal and policy issues related to both clean water and climate change adaptation. Expertise in GIS and other mapping software is a plus. For a full job description, please see our website.

We are anxious to fill this position quickly, so the deadline for applications is midnight on December 21, 2014. Please submit a cover letter, resume, and brief writing sample to chesbayanalystjob@progressivereform.org.

CPR Policy Analysts work closely with our network of more than 60 Member Scholars to promote strong regulation and progressive policies that will protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment …

Today, the Supreme Court agreed to review a challenge to an EPA rule to reduce mercury pollution. 

The Utility Air Regulatory Group and the National Mining Association, and twenty-one states, appealed an April 2-1 federal appeals court ruling that upheld EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.

According to Center for Progressive Reform President and University of Maryland School of Law professor Rena Steinzor:

The Supreme Court’s decision to grant review is lamentable. It’s no surprise that the coal-fired power plants want to overturn EPA’s carefully crafted controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants.  But this rule was mandated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments because mercury, in very small quantities, damages brain and nervous system development in children and babies in utero.  The rule would control, for the first time, not just mercury but acid gases and heavy metals such as chromium …

The House of Representatives has passed legislation (H.R. 1422) that prohibits academic scientists on EPA’s Scientific Advisory committee from participating in “activities that directly or indirectly involve review of evaluation of their own work,” but allows scientists who work for industry to serve on the Board as long as they reveal their respective conflicts of interest. To understand the House’s real motives, it is necessary to appreciate how industry seeks to use scientific uncertainty as an excuse not to act on environmental problems.  Senator Inhofe’s claim that global climate change is a hoax is a well-known example of this tactic.  Less visible is a decades long public relations, litigation, and advocacy campaign by corporate interests to manufacturer doubt about the science that supports environmental regulation.

A common feature of environmental legislation is legislative authorization to act on the basis of anticipated harm, making …

Today, the Third Circuit will hear arguments in a case to determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overstepped its authority when it established a pollution diet for the Chesapeake Bay. After decades of failed attempts to clean up the Bay, the pollution diet imposes strong, enforceable deadlines for cleanup. Even without distracting and misguided legal challenges from out-of-state lobbying groups, the restoration battle won’t be easy. The plan has been in place since 2010 and still the Bay experienced the eighth largest dead zone in its history this past summer.

The pollution diet, technically known as the “total maximum daily load” (TMDL), places a science-based cap on the total amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment that can enter the Bay from the six watershed states and Washington, DC. The TMDL controls “point” sources of pollution—the end of a pipe, for example—as well as …

The commentary following last week’s elections has largely been a variation on either of two themes:  (1) how strong Republicans are now that they have secured majorities in both houses of Congress or (2) how correspondingly weak the Obama Administration will be for the remainder of its time in office when it comes to advancing its policy goals.  This commentary may be true insofar as it relates to new legislation.  (Even there, nothing will really change as the prospects for new legislation that the President can sign will be not much worse now than they have been in recent Congresses.)  But when it comes to enforcement of laws that already on the books, President Obama holds the undisputed upper hand, and congressional Republicans remain effectively impotent.

Last night’s agreement between the United States and China to undertake significant cuts in greenhouse gas emission by 2030 …

Ebola’s natural reservoirs are animals, if only because human hosts die to too quickly. Outbreaks tend to occur in locations where changes in landscapes have brought animals and humans into closer contact.  Thus, there is considerable speculation about whether ecological factors might be related to the current outbreak. (See here).  At this point, at least, we don’t really know.  Still, it’s clear that outbreaks of diseases like ebola strengthen the case for forest conservation.  Which is also, obviously good for the environment.  But that’s not what I want to focus on here.

The Ebola outbreak also highlights the importance of the public health system.  In the places where the disease is worst in Africa, the health infrastructure is extraordinarily weak.  Obviously that’s not true here.  But we’re also seeing the importance of the public health infrastructure in the U.S., as …

If you own a car, you’re used to paying a registration fee every two years. It may not be your favorite activity, but you do it. And you recognize that the fees and others like it help offset the cost of making sure vehicles on Maryland's roads are safe, that their polluting emissions are within acceptable limits, and that the people who drive them are licensed to do so.

But, in a report issued last fall (and an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun), CPR President Rena Steinzor and I pointed out that Maryland was not taking that same no-nonsense, even-handed approach to all pollution sources. Instead, state officials have given more than 500 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) a free ride since state oversight began in 2010, waiving more than $400,000 in legally mandated fees in 2013 alone.

The report also revealed that Maryland …

Today CPR Member Scholar and Indiana University School of Law professor Robert Fischman is testifying today for the House Committee on Natural Resources on potential amendments to the Endangered Species Act.

According to the testimony:

I. THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT SHOULD BE A LAST RESORT FOR CONSERVATION, NOT THE PRINCIPAL TOOL.

Though Congress intended the ESA to conserve “the ecosystems upon which” imperiled species depend,1 the act almost exclusively focuses on preventing species from going extinct. By the time species are listed for protection under the ESA, populations are already so depleted that there remains little flexibility for further declines. The famous inflexibility of the Act, to “halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost,”2 is borne of the emergency situation facing a species when it declines to the very brink of extinction. Isolated fragments of habitat, low genetic diversity, and …

Monday’s Washington Post article on the massive oxygen-depleted areas in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico promised to uncover how “faltering” “pollution curbs” were contributing to the dead zones. Instead, the article focused almost exclusively on the dead zones themselves, providing nothing on the vital, yet stalled, regulatory solutions.

The article mentioned that fertilizer and manure washed from farms helped form the Chesapeake Bay dead zone, which was the eighth largest since record-keeping began. Yet it failed to mention that state and federal efforts to curb pollution from farms have faltered over and over again.

Strong state regulations are critical to curbing agricultural pollution since federal law does not touch the majority of farms. The Post could have mentioned that right now Maryland Gov. O’Malley is struggling to implement a rule that would limit the use of manure as fertilizer before he leaves office …