Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Sidney Shapiro and Asbestos Disease Awareness Association President Linda Reinstein published a piece in Mint Press News on toxic chemical reform legislation.
They note:
Imagine a chemical that every public health organization in the United States and around the world knows to cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. You might think that such a chemical would probably be banned from commercial use in the United States, or at least not allowed to be used in a host of commercial products that people use every day. But think again.
According to the U.S. surgeon general, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to asbestos is unsafe at any level, but the substance still used in the U.S. in automobile brake pads, vinyl floor tiles and many other commercial goods. Despite its dangers, the EPA is powerless in regulating it, and 30 people across the country die needlessly from asbestos-related diseases every single day.
Because the federal law governing toxic chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, is woefully inadequate, the EPA’s attempt to ban asbestos was overturned in court. In fact, of the 80,000 chemicals in commercial use, only five have been banned, even though many — like asbestos — can be very dangerous. The problem is that the Toxic Substances Control Act requires the EPA to prove that a chemical is dangerous before regulating it, rather than requiring manufacturers to establish the safety of potentially lethal products before they are marketed. Since the EPA is usually forced to rely on manufacturers for safety data about chemicals, if the manufacturer doesn’t produce data demonstrating a chemical’s danger, the EPA has no information upon which to act.
To read the entire piece click here.
Full textThe Supreme Court today upheld, by a 6-2 vote, the EPA's cross-state air pollution rule.
Below are reactions from Center for Progressive Reform scholars Thomas O. McGarity and Victor Flatt.
According to McGarity:
After two decade's worth of litigation, the Supreme Court has finally held that EPA may require polluters in one state to protect air quality in downwind states through a sensible combination of emissions thresholds, cost-effective pollution reduction technologies, and emissions trading.
While this is good news to residents of downwind states, they cannot yet breathe easy. Much time has passed since EPA promulgated the "cross-state" rule in 2011, and both EPA and the states must now make up for lost time in putting the rule's protective provisions into place.
To achieve a successful implementation, EPA must resist the inevitable demands for exceptions, exemptions, and time extensions from upwind states that have thus far successfully forestalled the Clean Air Act's "good neighbor" policy.
According to Flatt:
The majority got it exactly right in reversing the DC Circuit Court and upholding the EPA's painstakingly crafted cross state air pollution rule. The majority was correct that the formula promulgated by the EPA was well within its statutory grant of authority and that the DC Circuit Court's opinion would have put an impossible burden on the EPA.
The majority was also correct in striking down the Circuit Court's requirement that the EPA give states guidance before overturning deficient state implementation plans. The Clean Air Act is clear that the EPA's promulgation of joint plans was required when EPA finds the state plans to be inadequate.
Most important is the effect of this opinion. It finally brings teeth to the requirement that states not allow their own pollution to cause other state air pollution violations. This will do more for clean air compliance than EPA's requirement to tighten NAAQS standards. Standards mean nothing unless they can be enforced. By controlling these criteria pollutants effectively, the program should also assist with greenhouse gas reduction.
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Yesterday, The Hill published an opinion piece by CPR scholars Christine Klein and Sandra Zellmer.
According to the piece:
President Obama recently signed a controversial bill that will directly affect the safety of millions of Americans. The fine print is so complicated, though, that it’s hard to predict exactly how our safety will be affected.
Some say that the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 brings desperately needed relief to property owners who face ruinous increases in their premiums for federal flood insurance. To supporters like Senator Schumer (D-N.Y.), the law preserves the American dream of homeownership from ill-conceived intervention by “an irrational Washington force.”
Others see the new law as election-year pandering and a cowardly reversal of course. Just two years ago, Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 in direct response to catastrophic damage from Superstorm Sandy. The 2012 law prescribed strong medicine to salvage the solvency of the flood insurance program from a shortfall of some $25 billion caused by insurance payouts after Sandy and Hurricane Katrina. Before its rollback on Friday, the 2012 law would have quickly phased out federal subsidies until owners of flood-prone properties paid the true actuarial costs of their insurance.
To read the piece, "Natural Floods, Unnatural Disasters," click here.
Klein and Zellmer are the authors of the recently released, "Misssippi River Tragedies, A Century of Unnatural Disaster."
Today, CPR Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz will be testifying at OSHA’s hearing on the proposed silica rule.
According to Shudtz:
The testimony raises some concerns about how OSHA arrived at its proposal to provide limited medical surveillance for silica-exposed workers. It also covers issues related to enforcement and small business impacts. But most importantly, the testimony reiterates the need to get this rule finalized quickly. As we have noted many times in this space, millions of workers are exposed to silica dust at levels that cause high rates of silicosis, lung cancer, renal disease, COPD, and other health problems. The faster this rule is put in place and enforced, the faster these workers will be able to breath safer air.
To read the testimony in full click here.
Full textToday, Center for Progressive Reform analyst Michael Patoka testified at a Maryland Senate Finance Committee Hearing in support of SB 774, which would require construction companies contracting with the state to be prequalified based on their worker health and safety performance measures.
The widely supported legislation would ensure unscrupulous employers do not receive contracts funded by taxpayer dollars.
In his testimony Patoka notes:
Currently, construction firms are screened on a number of factors prior to bidding, but worker-safety considerations are not included. As a result, agencies can easily end up financing companies that operate hazardous worksites and endanger Maryland workers. Indeed, the current system encourages firms to cut corners on worker safety, since by doing so they may be able to offer lower bids than their more responsible competitors and thus have a better chance at winning lucrative contracts.
The construction industry is responsible for a disproportionately high number of fatalities and injuries. From 2008 and 2010, between 25 and 33 percent of all workplace deaths in Maryland were in the construction industry, and each of those years saw between 5,800 and 6,900 construction-related injuries. These incidents impose unbearably high costs on individuals and families in Maryland, as well as burden the local economy. Between 2008 and 2010, construction deaths and injuries cost Maryland $712.8 million in medical services, lost productivity, administrative expenses, and lost quality of life. Public agencies are among the largest purchasers of construction services in Maryland, so they are in a unique position to improve worker protections through the use of their considerable buying power. The impact of this bill would reach far beyond public contracts, since any companies hoping to remain eligible for bidding would have to maintain a good safety record in all their work.
The prequalification system that this bill would establish is particularly well-designed. The bill instructs the Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation to develop a standardized questionnaire and rating system. The Department would consult with a broad range of stakeholders, including unions, safety experts, and contractors, to ensure that the resulting system is fair and effective.
To read the testimony in full click here.
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Climate change and pollution affects everyone. Global warming-induced hurricanes pummel our coasts and droughts ravage our farmland. Our neighbors, friends, and children develop asthma and heart attacks because of air pollution and our favorite parks and hunting grounds are withering away.
The science is conclusive and polls reflect the concern of many Americans about global warming and its related pollution. So what can account for the lack of government action on the issue? The answer has a lot to do with our broken campaign finance system and the ability of individuals committed to denying the existence of climate change to dump huge amounts of money (much of it secret) into elections and in the political process.
During the 2012 election, outside spending groups, many of them newly created in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, reported spending more than $1.28 billion to influence voters and politicians. Of the amount disclosed, just 132 individuals who contributed over $1 million each were responsible for the bulk of Super PAC spending. Significant amounts were dumped into the campaign coffers of members of Congress by regulated industries that have taken an active role in opposing any new efforts by the President to move forward on greenhouse gas regulations.
Full textToday, Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar and University of Texas law professor Thomas O. McGarity published an op-ed in theNew York Times entitled,"What Obama Left Out of His Inequality Speech: Reguation."
In a speech last week, the President highlighted the problems associated with extreme socio-economic disparity.
But, as McGarity notes in his piece:
[T]here’s a crucial dimension the president left out: the revival, since the mid-1970s, of the laissez-faire ideology that prevailed in the Gilded Age, roughly the 1870s through the 1910s. It’s no coincidence that this laissez-faire revival — an all-out assault on government regulation — has unfolded over the very period in which inequality has soared to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.
History tells us that in periods when protective governmental institutions are weak, irresponsible companies tend to abuse their economic freedom in ways that harm ordinary workers and consumers. The victims are often less affluent citizens who lack the power either to protect themselves from harm or to hold companies accountable in the courts. We are in such a period today.
The laissez-faire revival of the past 35 years was no accident. The protective statutes and liberal common-law doctrines of the late 1960s and early 1970s — what can be called the Public Interest Era — had a profound impact in such areas as occupational safety and health, environmental protection, consumer finance and the safety of food, drugs and consumer products. This legislative and judicial activism placed far more constraints on the economic freedom of corporate America than had any legal regime preceding it.
McGarity concludes:
But Mr. Obama’s failure to examine (or even mention) the laissez-faire revival was a missed opportunity. Deregulation may not be the central cause of the soaring inequality of recent decades, but it has certainly magnified its consequences, making it ever more difficult for workers and consumers to resist the rapacious predations of abusive employers and companies. The weakening of what used to be the great American middle class cannot be understood without also considering the embrace free-market theology. By omitting this critical factor in the rise of inequality, Mr. Obama left unchallenged the argument, recited by business like a mantra, that regulation and economic expansion are inherently in tension.
Sadly, the crises resulting from deregulation will almost certainly continue until political forces realign themselves and a new social bargain is struck under which the business community’s economic freedoms are once again constrained by a government that is more willing to impose greater responsibilities on powerful economic actors and a legal system that is capable of holding them accountable for the harm that they cause. Until then, a crucial check on the seemingly inexorable advance of economic inequality will be missing.
Full textToday, Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar and law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Wendy Wagner will testify at a House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment Hearing entitled, "S. 1009, Chemical Safety Improvement Act."
Wagner's testimony can be read in full here.
According to her testimony:
My testimony will focus on the various good science provisions in S.1009 and how they are likely to impact EPA’s use of science. I will make the following points in my remarks:
1. The Senate bill contains dozens of unprecedented requirements that limit the scientific evidence EPA can consider when developing regulations and how this evidence can be used. Yet despite the detailed level of scientific prescription in the Bill, it is not clear what problem the Bill is trying to fix. While there have been many failures associated with the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) over the years, they are generally not connected to EPA’s failure to make use of the best available science when promulgating regulations.
2. By contrast, there is broad consensus that the primary problem crippling EPA’s regulatory efforts under TSCA is the dearth of information about chemicals. The Senate Bill not only appears oblivious to the scarcity of toxicity and related information on most chemicals, but may aggravate the problem by preventing EPA from considering research that has the potential to inform EPA’s assessments in scientifically acceptable ways.
3. The various good science requirements and procedures are also loaded with ambiguities, creating numerous “attachment points” that present opportunities for a steady stream of legal challenges to EPA’s rules. If history is any guide, entities with the most at stake (e.g., manufacturers of the least effective and least safe chemicals) will use these attachment points to delay EPA’s implementation or force EPA into negotiations before, during, or after a rule is published. Senate Bill 1009 also lacks enforceable legislative deadlines to counteract this inevitable delay for most provisions. The Bill also makes fails to provide procedural protections that will prevent or at least illuminate these compromises that fall outside the formal processes and out of the public eye.
4. Protracted delays in implementation, with corresponding, potentially high costs to protection of the public health, seem inevitable from the cumulative problems with the good science provisions in S. 1009.
5. Chemical regulation will be effective only if it provides incentives for the manufacture of safer and more effective chemicals. The Senate Bill does not provide these incentives.
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Today, Center for Progressive Reform board member and University of Texas School of Law professor Thomas O. McGarity will testify at aHearing hosted by the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled, "Justice Delayed II: the Impact of Nonrule RuleMakiing in Auto Safey and Mental Health."
McGarity's testimony can be read in full here.
According to the testimony, some possible solutions to the problems created by nonrule rulemaking include:
Agencies that are conscientiously committed to carrying out their statutory missions will continue to employ informal rulemaking with all of its burdensome accoutrements if they have no other alternative. For example, EPA’s statutes typically require it to use informal rulemaking to fill in the necessary implementation details, and they often specify precise deadlines for EPA action. Its heavy rulemaking output during the past few years is a testament to the ability of a very determined agency to employ even a broken system to achieve important statutory goals. But those efforts consumed scarce resources that are unlikely to be available in such quantities in the future. The agency has on many occasions made policy through less formal devices like guidance documents that are not subject to many of the requirements that afflict informal rulemaking. And it will no doubt continue to do so as the resources available to the agency dwindle.
Full textYesterday, the Hill published an op-ed by Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Joel A. Mintz entitled, "The Government Shutdown and the EPA: the Environmental Dangers of Congressional Recklessness."
It can be read in full here.
According to Mintz:
The indefinite close down of EPA’s operations poses major risks, some imminent and others long term, to the health and natural environment of millions of Americans.
The EPA’s enforcement of existing regulations provides vital protections against the emission of toxic air and water pollutants and the contamination of public drinking water supplies. The EPA works to prevent the exposure of school children to asbestos, the ingestion of toxic lead paint by infants, and the release of poisonous chemicals from long-abandoned hazardous waste dumps. The Agency also works to guard against the destruction of fish, shellfish and other aquatic life. In addition, the EPA supplies much-needed grant money to state and local environmental agencies—entities that (in many cases) are already starved of the financial resources necessary to carry out their tasks. Due to the government shut down, nearly all of the important EPA work of enforcing these safeguards, and the channeling of federal funds to the states, is now at a standstill.
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