It’s my great pleasure to announce that the Board of Directors of CPR has selected Jake Caldwell to serve as our new executive director. He succeeds Shana Jones, who earlier this year announced she would be leaving CPR to teach environmental policy at Old Dominion University.
Jake comes to CPR after six years at the Center for American Progress, where he was the Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade and Energy. His research and writing in that capacity frequently focused on environmental issues, including climate change regulation, renewable energy financing, clean energy and conservation, biofuel production and more. From November 2008 to January 2009, Jake served as a member of President Obama’s Transition Team, in the Energy and Natural Resources Section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agency Review. He has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, teaching a course on International Environmental Law and Trade. Jake has also worked with the Clinton Global Initiative’s Global Poverty Working Group and the National Wildlife Federation, among others.
Jake brings a wealth of experience to CPR with the environmental and regulatory issues that are the core of our work, and knows how to make scholarship influential in the political and policymaking process. I know CPR will grow and flourish with his leadership. He will assume his new position next week.
I’ll end with the warmest farewell to Shana Jones. Shana presided over a period of significant growth for the organization, in its resources, its base of Member Scholars, and its staffing. Significantly, that growth came at a time when many nonprofits were forced by the recession to make cutbacks. She’s done wonderful work for the organization, and we’re stronger, smarter and faster for her leadership. We all appreciate her hard work and know she will excel in the work that awaits her.
Full textThe Obama Administration is sending mixed messages.
On the one hand, several top economic officials have noted the extensive evidence that a lack of demand, rather than regulation, is the cause of a slow economic recovery and low job creation. Yet the President himself has contradicted his economic advisers on the issue in a misguided effort to pander to industry concerns, leaving the Administration’s message confused.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, hardly the most progressive force in the Administration, said in October: “I don’t think there's good evidence in support of the proposition that it's regulatory burden or uncertainty that's causing the economy to grow more slowly than any of us would like.” Jan Eberly, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, laid out a significant batch of evidence in support of Geithner’s argument in a subsequent blog post.
Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors until August, appeared to hold a similar position. Asked in his final days whether regulations were hindering the economy, he said that there were certainly “individual things that could be done different and streamlined, where, you know, they have to submit paper forms, they can’t do it on the web, you know, things of this nature.” But: “as a general matter, no.” (He indeed gave a spirited defense of regulations).
So it’s frustrating to see that in other instances, the Administration sends a message that is in direct contradiction with the assessments of Geithner, Eberly, and Goolsbee. In an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week, President Obama declared:
Full text… we’re ramping up our effort to get rid of outdated, unjustified regulations that stifle trade and job creation.
Booth Goodwin, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, and Attorney General Eric Holder announced today a landmark settlement with Alpha Natural Resources, the coal company that bought out its rival Massey Energy after a catastrophic explosion deep within the Big Branch mine killed 29 miners. Alpha recently announced that its third quarter 2011 profits had more than doubled in the wake of its purchase of Massey, up to $66 million in the quarter. The settlement requires the company to fork over $209 million to pay fines, reimburse families of miners killed and injured, and to fix the chronic safety problems that produced this tragedy. The announcement had no news on efforts to hold individuals accountable—most notably, Don Blankenship, the rogue CEO who constantly harassed his employees to “dig coal” faster, and faster, and faster, at the expense of routine safety precautions.
As I explained here in May 2010, Blankenship monitored production as often as every two hours, deliberately creating an atmosphere in which workers feared for their jobs if they protested routine and egregious safety violations. The proximate cause of the explosion was methane build-up in an old coal shaft that was never properly sealed—instead, miners stuffed it with garbage and rags. “Every single day, the levels were double or triple what they were supposed to be,” a foreman who remained unnamed because he was afraid of losing his job told the New York Times. Blankenship ultimately retired from Massey Energy, and is now enjoying a well-heeled retirement.
Attorney General Holder pledged today that “we continue to investigate individuals associated with this tragedy.” DOL Secretary Hilda Solis said “Anyone determined to have violated a criminal statute in connection with Upper Big Branch should be brought to justice." Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette’s immensely useful Coal Tattoo blog thinks it’s indeed possible that Goodwin is not finished with this case, and I surely hope that insight is correct. The U.S. attorney certainly knows how to put people in jail: he brags on his website about a sentence of 57 months in prison his office achieved for an oxycodone dealer who sold between $36,000 and $50,000 worth of the drug out of his home. Surely the deaths of 29 people as a result of willful negligence in avid pursuit of corporate profits should reap a harsher penalty – or some penalty that goes beyond corporate fines.
Full textNew York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of Obama Administration regulatory excess is somehow at the root of the nation’s economic distress. In fact, almost any economist will tell you that we got into this mess because of under-regulation, and that the current challenge is depressed consumer demand, not regulation.
From there, Brooks gets a little lost in the sauce. Most significantly, he displays a sort of man crush on Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the President’s “regulatory czar.” Sunstein’s small office of economists plays an outsized role in the regulatory process, watering down protective regulations, particularly those proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Brooks generously describes the OIRA Sunstein leads as an “incredibly wonky” office of “career number-crunchers of no known ideological bent.” (In Brooks parlance, that’s a real Valentine!)
In point of fact, whatever the political leanings of the economists in Sunstein’s stable, OIRA is, as our report so accurately describes it, a one-way ratchet for weakening regulations. Brooks no doubt prefers that, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that OIRA is merely deploying the tools of wonkery. As Behind Closed Doors amply demonstrates, the agency frequently holds court for industry lobbyists, all of whom have had ample opportunity to weigh in on proposed regulations while the agencies themselves – the ones charged by law with conducting such processes – were drafting the regulations. OIRA insinuates itself into the process under the guise of enforcing requirements for a cost-benefit analysis, but in fact weighs the evidence anew and second-guesses agency expertise – but only after giving industry lobbyists free access, which we found results in four times as much face time as nonprofit advocates under this Administration.
OIRA’s been doing that pretty much since it opened its doors several decades ago, so it’s not an Obama creation. But we had good reason to expect more from this President on the regulatory front, because he promised better.
Full textWhen former Harvard Law Professor and eclectic intellectual Cass Sunstein was named administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conservative, industry-oriented Wall Street Journal editorial writers enthused that his appointment was a “promising sign.” A slew of subsequent events has proved their optimism well placed, as we have noted repeatedly in CPRBlog.
But nothing beats hard, empirical evidence. In a report released today, CPR announces the results of an exhaustive six-month analysis of the barebones information OIRA has eked onto the web regarding 1,080 meetings held over a ten-year period (October 2001-June 2011) with 5,759 outside lobbyists, 65 percent of whom represented industry and 12 percent of whom represented public interest groups. The results were shocking even to us, long-time and admittedly jaded observers of OIRA’s one-way ratchet toward weakening public health and other protections.
In perhaps the most profoundly embarrassing development yet for the U.S. government’s star-crossed efforts to police offshore drilling, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement announced last week that it was asking BP, Transocean, and Halliburton to pay a total of up to $45.7 million in fines for 15 violations arising out of the catastrophic failure of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s million, not billion, by the way, and a total for all three companies, not each. The $15 million or so that they might each pay is so small in comparison to their annual profits that they might just go ahead and put the sum on an expense account. Meanwhile, as if their humiliation was not enough, the Department of Justice remains strangely silent on its criminal investigation of BP, more than a year after the companies managed somehow to close the benighted well that had spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for two solid months in 2010.
The whole point of fining companies for violations of environmental laws is to deter future violations. Despite pledging to pay $20 billion in Gulf Coast relief, as well as cleanup costs and natural resources damages of an as-yet undetermined several billion more, BP reported second quarter profits of $5.6 billion—that’s billion, not million—this year. The company has already demonstrated itself immune to the publicity surrounding the typical penalties assessed for regulatory violations, amassing such a dreadful track record of environmental and occupational safety violations at its Texas City refinery and land-based drilling sites on Alaska’s North Slope that it should have been notorious long before the Gulf Spill. The company pled guilty to criminal violations and kept right on doing business as usual.
Only dramatically more damaging punishment will ever succeed in inspiring the creation of the safety culture needed to ensure that BP workers don’t continue to die on the job (11 died in the Gulf and 15 died at Texas City). One solution would be to prosecute individual BP executives criminally, rather than letting the corporate shield protect them from accountability no matter what they do. A second would be to bar BP from lucrative U.S. government contracts and offshore leasing agreements until it corrects its company-wide disdain for safety and routine maintenance.
Full textProving the old adage that you must be careful what you wish for, conservative officials in 25 states have done their best to hoist the Obama Administration on its own petard by running off to court to oppose the EPA rule that would curb toxic emissions from power plants. They argue, among other things, that the agency had not itemized the “cumulative” costs of this and all other electric-utility-oriented regulations under Executive Order 13,563 and needed at least another year to get this burdensome task done.
Issued this January, EO 13,563 is the leading edge of the Obama Administration’s effort to persuade polluting industries that it has their best interests at heart. Like every other executive order on the books, it says on its face that it “does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States.” The proposed power-plant rule has not yet been identified by the White House as a candidate for post-election length delay, but the utility industry and its state allies are hoping a federal district court judge will overlook this technicality and force the Administration to do a cost-benefit analysis that accounts for the proposed rules costs and benefits in the context of other existing regulations.
Under a consent decree approved in 2010 by the same judge that will hear this case, EPA is slated to produce the final rule no later than November 16, 2011. That decree settled a lawsuit in which the American Nurses Association and other organizations, alleged—correctly as it turns out—that the 1990 Clean Air Act required the agency to have dealt with this last, major source of mercury emissions many years ago. Most definitely not a product of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson imagination, the rule was but one of many authorized by Congress in a statute that was enthusiastically supported by a Republican President George H.W. Bush. In fact, so many states were disgusted with EPA foot-dragging, that they adopted their own mercury control rules years ago, and today 56 percent of power plants already meet the standards. The outliers are plants so old and so dirty that they should have been retired years ago. In fact, they’re known in the industry as “the old dirties.”
The residents of Kingston, Tennessee had no inkling that the Christmas of 2008 would be any different than another year. In the wee morning hours three days before the holiday, an earthen dam holding back a 40-acre surface impoundment at a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant burst, releasing 1 billion gallons of inky coal ash sludge across Kingston, Tennessee. The sludge flood crossed a river, destroying 26 houses. One had a man inside, and was lifted off its foundation and moved 40 feet downhill. In the end, the spill covered 300 acres in four to five feet of sludge and mud. Estimated cleanup costs are more than $1.2 billion.
On Friday, inspired by relentless electric utility industry lobbying, House Republicans and some three dozen Democrat colleagues voted to gut a proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that had the potential to get a grip on the dangerous state of affairs at similar dumps across the country. With luck, the Senate will not take up the bill because although President Obama issued a statement opposing it, he stopped short of the veto threat that is the only way to build a firewall against such initiatives. The President’s weak knees on this are no surprise. As we have observed previously in this space, his Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which serves as a perpetual barrier to protective EPA rules that inconvenience industry more than it cares to be inconvenienced, had already compromised the EPA proposal by forcing the agency to propose a strong rule alongside a weak rule, signaling the Administration’s lack of commitment to the initiative.
Just how dangerous and how ubiquitous are Kingston’s brother facilities? In one bizarre twist, in June 2009, the Obama Administration refused to disclose the location of 44 such sites for fear that terrorists would target them for sabotage, causing grave damage and even death in surrounding communities. It’s easy to see why the sites prompt such concerns.
In 2008, some 495 electric plants generated 136 million tons of ash. Utilities disposed of about 34 percent (46 million tons) in so-called “dry” landfills that, at least in theory, cover deposits so that rainfall cannot infiltrate them. But another 22 percent (29.4 million tons) went into “surface impoundments” like the one at Kingston—the term, of course, is a euphemism for a big, waterlogged pit in the ground, shored up by planks, walls, fences, or any other “structure” the companies thought was appropriate as long as five decades ago. The threat of collapse is particularly acute for surface impoundments: some 186 of the 584 estimated to be operating in the United States were not designed by a professional engineer. Fifty-six of these units are older than 50 years, 96 are older than 40 years, and 340 are between 26-40 years old.
The dumps also cause long-term environmental damage. Thirty-one percent of landfills and 62 percent of surface impoundments lack liners to contain leaching of hazardous constituents like mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic into underground aquifers. Half of the American people rely on groundwater for their drinking water supplies.
Full textThis post was co-authored by CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst Aimee Simpson.
In what at first glance seemed to be a startlingly uncharacteristic move, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to update and strengthen its food additive regulation that sets out the approved uses for polycarbonate resins. For those who don’t speak plastic, “polycarbonate resin” refers to plastic that contains bisphenol-A or “BPA”—an endocrine-disrupting chemical with significant health risks, especially for babies. Polycarbonate resin is found in everything from reusable food and beverage containers, to tin can linings and thermal receipt paper.
While usually a staunch defender of unbridled BPA use in all things plastic, the ACC actually asked the FDA to remove approval for the use of BPA in “infant feeding bottles and certain spill-proof cups.” If this request has you scratching you head, you are not alone. Could it be that the ACC has finally surrendered to the mounting scientific evidence concerning BPA’s low-dose endocrine-disrupting effects and accepted that, at the very least, BPA should not be permitted in beverage vessels meant for children? Has the chemical industry beaten its swords into plowshares and made a small but progressive gesture toward better BPA regulation? Unfortunately, a look at the petition and its potential implications shows that the answer to these questions is “no.”
Thanks to consumer pressure and state and municipal legislative bans, major manufacturers of BPA no longer sell their products to the manufacturers of baby bottles and sippy cups. The ACC bases the petition on a portion of the FDA regulation that invites people to point out when manufacturers have abandoned old uses. But the ACC emphatically denies that BPA in baby products raises health concerns.
Instead, the ACC follows the by-now familiar route of blaming the victim—a.k.a. the consumer—for BPA’s removal. Under this rationale, manufacturers did not make these decisions on the basis of “scientific evidence or safety,” but rather were forced to remove the chemical because consumers are consumed by mass hysteria and forced the poor, beleaguered companies to do it. If it is able to rewrite the record in this way, the FDA will make a decision long desired by public health experts for all the wrong reasons, and the ACC will be able to claim that voluntary-abandonment-in-a-hostage-situation is the only real reason for the agency’s action.
Full textThe blog post was co-authored by Rena Steinzor and James Goodwin.
When President Obama issued his new Executive Order 13563 this past January – the one calling on agencies to “look-back” at existing regulations –speculation abounded as to what, if any effect, it would have on agencies’ rulemaking. Setting aside the look-back plan provisions (and the President’s unproductive anti-regulation rhetoric in the Wall Street Journal), the new Order didn’t seem to add much to the 18-year-old Executive Order 12866, save for a few broad platitudes relating to regulatory policy. But the President’s decision to kill EPA’s new ozone standard suggests that the new Order can and will be used to weaken regulations.
Last Thursday, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress that the Obama Administration would revert to the ozone standard set by the Bush Administration: 75 parts per billion (ppb) in ambient air. Of course, EPA’s expert, blue ribbon scientific advisory board had unanimously recommended that the agency lower this standard to somewhere between 60 and 70 ppb. A 60 ppb standard for ozone would have prevented up to 12,000 premature deaths, 5,300 non-fatal heart attacks, 2,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, 420,000 lost work days, and 2,100,000 missed school days every year. A 70 ppb standard would have prevented up to 4,300 premature deaths, 2,200 non-fatal heart attacks, 880 cases of chronic bronchitis, 170,000 lost work days, and 600,000 missed school days. Under the 75 ppb standard, those benefits will effectively be cut in half. The Bush standard, now apparently the Obama standard, is projected to prevent only 2,100 premature deaths, 1,300 non-fatal heart attacks, 470 cases of chronic bronchitis, 88,000 lost work days, and 190,000 missed school days.