Summer is Here, and With it Another Missed Deadline for a Key Regulation
The EPA has quietly missed another deadline on issuing the final revised “boiler MACT” rule. The agency had pledged for many months that the rule would be finalized in April. Then, in an April 30th “status report” filing with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the agency said: “EPA intends to take final action on this proposed rule in the Spring of 2012.” Wednesday was the first official day of summer.
The revised version of the rule will provide less pollution reduction than the original version, but is still expected to prevent thousands of deaths each year. James Pew, of Earthjustice, told E&E News last week that the rule has been made “illegally weak.”
The rule has been under review at OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) since May 17. OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein wrote in a Chicago Tribune op-ed in March that this administration believes in “maximizing net benefits.”
Michael Livermore, of the Institute for Policy Integrity, has argued that “in order to maximize net benefits and get the most bang for taxpayers’ buck, standards from the 2010 proposal would have to be more stringent, not less.”
a(broad) perspective
Today’s post is the fifth in a series on a recent CPR white paper, Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties. Each month, this series will discuss one of these ten treaties. Previous posts are here.
1996 Protocol to the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter Adopted by the Parties to the London Convention (including the United States) and Opened for Signature on November 7, 1996
Entered into Force on March 24, 2006 Number of Parties: 42
Signed by the United States on March 31, 1998 Sent to the Senate on September 4, 2007 Reported favorably by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 29, 2008
The world’s oceans have long served as the world’s toilet. For decades, nations allowed ships bearing their flags to …
This is not your father’s Earth Summit. This week’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development is meant to assess how far we’ve come from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (ambitiously named the Earth Summit). And the 1992 Earth Summit was ambitious, featuring the largest gathering of world leaders in history as well as thousands of civil society and private sector participants whose presence heralded the emergence of a global environmental movement. The original Earth Summit endorsed sustainable development as the conceptual framework for the future balancing of environment and development. It also reshaped international environmental governance, completing binding treaties on climate change and the conservation of biodiversity; the Rio Declaration, with its overarching principles of sustainable development; a set of non-binding forest management principles; Agenda 21, a five-hundred page blueprint for achieving sustainable development; and establishing the UN Commission on Sustainable Development …
CPR President Rena Steinzor and Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this morning concerning the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). From the letter:
We are concerned that the recent establishment of the SAB Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee (CAAC) institutionalizes yet another opportunity for potentially regulated parties to disrupt the smooth development of new IRIS profiles. We are writing to encourage you to pay special attention to the nominees’ actual and perceived conflicts of interest as you sign off on the final membership list for the subcommittee. Of the 116 nominees, we count only four individuals who work for environmental NGOs. By contrast, five individuals from the Dow Chemical Company alone have been nominated, as have five other people employed by potentially regulated parties and 21 individuals whose consultancy firms stand to gain or lose significant business depending on …
California environmental justice groups filed a complaint last week with the federal Environmental Protection Agency arguing that California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade program violates Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibits state programs receiving federal funding from causing discriminatory impacts. They allege that the cap-and-trade program will fail to benefit all communities equally, and could result in maintaining and potentially increasing GHG emissions (and associated co-pollutant emissions) in disadvantaged neighborhoods that already experience disproportionate pollution.
While the complaint reflects real concerns about the distributional impact of a GHG cap-and-trade program on associated co-pollutants, it’s important to keep the complaint in perspective. Neither it, nor previous lawsuits, present the multi-faceted set of environmental justice arguments on GHG cap-and-trade. An earlier suit challenged the sufficiency of the state agency’s alternatives analysis under California’s environmental review law, and this claim raises potential disparate …
Rep. Joe Barton, speaking at a hearing last week, stuck it to President Obama’s EPA (at 39:00):
In Idaho, just recently, the Obama Administration went against a family called the Sacketts on a wetlands issue. Again, Mr. Chairman, the Congress sets the rules, and the Administration enforces them. This Obama Administration, in the case of the EPA, doesn’t want to play by the rules, they want to set their own rules.
At issue is the case of Mike and Chantell Sackett, decided this year by the Supreme Court. The Sacketts planned to build a house on land they had purchased in Idaho. The EPA said they could not because the land was a wetlands area; it issued the Sacketts an administrative compliance order, which they challenged in court. (See our coverage of the case, by Nina Mendelson, Holly Doremus, and Joel Mintz, and analyses …
The natural gas industry’s campaign against increased federal oversight of shale gas development has recently produced a spurt of “dirty science” minimizing the environmental risks of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
The University at Buffalo, the branch of the State University of New York where I teach, recently launched its new “Shale Resources and Society Institute” (SRSI) by issuing a report last month giving the “first quantitative data review of Pennsylvania’s regulation of hydraulic fracturing.” The report examined state environmental law violations during 2008-2011, a period when drilling in Pennsylvania shale increased substantially. A press release from the university – widely quoted in the national news – quoted the lead author’s description of the findings: “now we have comprehensive data that demonstrates, without ambiguity, that state regulation coupled with improvements in industry practices result in a low risk of an environmental event occurring in shale development, and …
Today CPR releases Manure in the Bay: A Report on Industrial Animal Agriculture in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The paper provides a snapshot of the federal Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) permit program under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and how these states are implementing this program. The report provides recommendations for strengthening these programs to curb pollution to the Chesapeake Bay and provides a brief glimpse at the broader animal agricultural and manure management programs work in these states. The report was written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and me.
Congress specifically identified CAFOs as sources of pollution to be regulated four decades ago, but regulations at the federal and state levels have only begun to be developed and seriously implemented. In the meantime, the dramatic rise in the number of animals in fewer and fewer facilities has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
The en banc 9th Circuit issued its opinion Friday in Karuk Tribe v. US Forest Service. This opinion brings a welcome reversal of a panel opinion from last April which had ruled in a split decision that the Forest Service did not have to consult with the wildlife agencies before authorizing suction dredging on the Klamath River. Judge Milan Smith wrote for the majority in the panel decision, with Judge William Fletcher in dissent. Those roles were reversed in the en banc opinion, with Judge Fletcher writing for the majority of the 11-judge en banc panel and Judge Smith writing a sharp dissent joined by 3 others.
I want to make two points about this opinion. First, substantively, it is unquestionably correct. The panel’s decision badly misinterpreted the context, potentially allowing federal mission agencies to escape the review by wildlife agencies the …
a(broad) perspective
Today’s post, co-authored by CPR Member Scholar Sandra Zellmer and Policy Analyst Yee Huang, is the fourth in a series on a recent CPR white paper, Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties. Each month, this series will discuss one of these ten treaties. Previous posts are here.
Biodiversity is the range of variations in all forms of life, from the genetic level to the species level to the ecosystem level. This diversity of life sustains all processes on the planet, built up …
