In a much-anticipated opinion, a district court judge on Friday upheld the Bay TMDL, or pollution diet, against a challenge brought by the American Farm Bureau. The decision affirms that EPA’s Chesapeake Bay efforts have been squarely within its authority under the Clean Water Act (CWA), not to mention the various consent decrees, memoranda of understanding (MOU), and a presidential executive order.

The Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) is a cap on the total amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment that can enter the Bay from the District of Columbia and the six Bay Watershed states: Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. The plan is the largest and most complex of all such pollutant limits to date, and jurisdictions across the country are paying close attention to it because they consider it a possible model for efforts to clean up their …

Last week,  the Court of Appeals of Texas, Fourth District handed down Bragg v. Edwards Aquifer Authority, a decision that anyone interested in takings or water law ought to read (the Lexis cite is 2013 Tex. App. LEXIS 10838).  The Braggs had brought a takings claim alleging that the Edwards Aquifer Authority’s regulatory restrictions on the Braggs’ groundwater use amounted to a regulatory taking.  The appellate court agreed and remanded for an assessment of damages.  But I suspect—and hope—the case will first be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.  It is a deeply flawed and harmful decision with mistakes that additional appellate review hopefully will fix.

Understanding those problems requires a little bit of factual context.  The Edwards Aquifer is a large and highly productive aquifer in central Texas.  It provides an important source of water for municipal and agricultural users, and its discharges …

Update: Verchick's testimony is here.

On Thursday, August 22, CPR Member Scholar Robert R.M. Verchick will testify before California's "Little Hoover Commission" about land-use planning to address the threat of climate change. The Commission is conducting a study of climate-change-adaptation efforts in the state, and Verchick, a professor at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and a former EPA official, will bring his expertise in environmental regulation, climate change adaptation and disaster law to the table.

We'll post his testimony to our website on Thursday, here. But you can also watch the session live. It'll be streamed at http://www.calchannel.com/. (Look for a link to the Little Hoover Commission.) The panel begins at 10:30 Pacific Time (1:30 ET).

Like no other mammoth corporation that did very bad things—not Enron, not WorldCom, not Exxon, and not even HSBC (which, after all, laundered money for the Mexican drug cartel and was allowed to pay a fine without pleading guilty!)—BP has not lost its arrogant swagger. In a fit of high dudgeon it filed a lawsuit last week challenging the one step the federal government has taken that could actually hurt the company over the long run: the long-overdue debarment of this chronic scofflaw from receiving contracts to supply fuel to the U.S. military. 

Despite the semi-hysterical, every-argument-known-to-humans tone of its 127-page legal filing, Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive officer, has been blithe about the effect of the debarment on its bottom line: “We have largest acreage position in Gulf of Mexico, more than 700 blocks…that’s plenty, we have a lot (sic …

A Nebraskan activist?  Wait, you say, isn’t that an oxymoron?  But the typically stoic, non-litigious citizens of Nebraska are indeed standing up and taking notice, and the nation is starting to take notice of them.

A few days ago, a Washington Post headline predicted, “Nebraska trial could delay Keystone XL pipeline.”  As you may already know from the news and my previous blogs, the State Department released a draft supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS) on the pipeline in March.  It initiated this supplemental review to take into account a revised pipeline route through Nebraska (around 200 miles of the pipeline’s 1,179-mile route would be situated there).

The draft EIS concluded that Alberta’s oil sands would be developed with or without Keystone XL; as such, it indicated that the pipeline’s impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change would be minimal. The Environmental …

Today, Senator Boxer’s Environment and Public Works committee will hold a hearing to discuss the best ways to fix the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the badly outdated law governing some 80,000 chemicals used in commerce in the United States. Communities across the country are not aware of the dangers present in chemicals in everything from baby bottles to face creams, with little to no regulation because of weak TSCA legislation passed over 40 years ago. Strong toxic chemical regulation is needed that protects the rights of consumers to go to court, that strengthens the ability of states to regulate toxics, and streamlines the EPA’s process for reviewing chemicals instead of bogging it down with repeated analysis and procedures that focus on the profitability of the chemical industry instead of the health and safety of the public. CPR Board Member Thomas McGarity will testify …

Tomorrow, a new panel in the Senate Judiciary Committee—the Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights, and Agency Action—will bring some much-need sanity to the discussion of federal regulatory policy when it holds a hearing entitled “Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis.” What’s so refreshing about this hearing is that it starts from the premise that blocked and delayed safeguards are a problem that needs to be solved. 

Crucially, this hearing will provide an opportunity to shine a light on the costs that are imposed on the public when regulations aimed at protecting people and the environment are unnecessarily delayed. These costs represent real harm to real people—and they are by definition preventable.

 Previously, in this space, I examined the costs to the public that would result from the new delays to three rules that were announced in the Spring 2013 Regulatory Agenda …

Last week, The Hill published an opinion piece by Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Robert Verchick.

The piece entitled, "Politics and progress: Will the White House stall its own climate change plans?" can be read here.

According to Verchick:

Under its statutory authority, EPA has ample power to write rules limiting power plant emissions, for example. But since the Reagan administration, all “major” rules—those seen as important to national policy—have been funneled into a little-known process of review, conducted by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). It may be the most important government office you've never heard of —the depot through which all regulatory freight must pass, the ganglia of the president’s rulemaking.

By executive order, OIRA is required to review submitted agency proposals within 90 days. For the most part, past administrations have kept up the pace …

Three years after the EPA proposed a rule to protect communities from coal ash—a byproduct of coal-power generation that’s filled with toxic chemicals like arsenic, lead, and mercury—a final rule is still nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, power plants are dumping an additional 94 million tons of it every year into wet-ash ponds and dry landfills that are already filled to capacity.

Seemingly untouched by this sense of looming disaster, the Obama Administration continues to dawdle in the face of resistance from the coal industry and perennial attempts from House Republicans to deprive the EPA of its authority over the issue. As the EPA fiddles with new power-plant data and reassesses the rule ad nauseam, the next coal ash catastrophe is waiting to happen. As we examine the wreckage, we’ll have to remember how this rule gathered dust on the Administration’s desk.

A …