Ordinarily, if an organization with the word “recycling” in its name said unkind things about the Center for Progressive Reform, I’d worry. But the other week, we got dinged by a newly launched outfit called “Citizens for Recycling First,” and I’m thinking it’s a badge of honor.
Before proceeding, let’s dwell for a moment on the mental images the group’s name conjures up. I’m thinking about plastic bins with recycling logos on their sides, filled by conscientious Americans with soup cans, beer bottles, and aluminum foil.
Perhaps you pull up a different mental image. But whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s not a big hole in the ground with toxic coal ash in it. That little bit of misdirection is probably just what the marketing types of the coal and coal ash industry had in mind when this latest front group went on line. And no doubt when John Ward, past President of the American Coal Council, became its chairman, it wasn’t to build a grassroots movement aimed at getting more Americans to turn over their yogurt containers to see what the recycling number is.
Full textThe Obama Administration struck a blow for transparency last week with the launch of an online dashboard allowing users to keep track of what the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is working on. Good for OIRA for making such information so readily available. CPR plans to put it to good use.
This month we began an initiative of our own, CPR’s Eye on OIRA project. As the name suggests, we plan to keep careful tabs on what OIRA’s doing, what regs it has before it, how long they’ve been there, which lobbyists are meeting with which OIRA staff, whether OIRA is sticking to its deadlines, and what the end result of OIRA’s involvement turns out to be. The hard truth is that, even in the Obama Administration, OIRA is where industry focuses its efforts to weaken needed regulations. OIRA seems to think that’s appropriate, which is why CPR intends to apply heightened scrutiny.
One example of the value of such efforts is the recent and ongoing dust-up over EPA’s effort to regulate coal ash. We’ve written a lot about it on CPRBlog, but the essential facts are that the coal power plant industry and coal ash reuse industries have been lobbying OIRA night and day for the last few months, trying to head off an EPA regulation on how to deal with coal ash that is not safely recycled. Right now the toxic stuff is stored in large outdoor “containment areas,” which sounds a lot better than “holes in the ground,” which is what they basically are. EPA sent a draft of a proposal to OIRA in October, and OIRA was supposed to spend no more than 90 days working it over. But OIRA extended its review period by 30 days – something the controlling Executive Order allows it to do. Then OIRA appears to have missed that deadline, too, something the Executive Order does not allow it to do, at least not without EPA asking it to hold the proposal hostage for a while longer.
During the Bush Administration, OIRA got in the habit of sitting on regulations just as long as it pleased, regardless of deadlines. That muscle memory persists, now 13 months into the Obama Administration. The coal ash deadline long gone, OIRA and EPA appear to be locked in negotiation over the proposal – a proposal that has not yet seen the light of day, by the way, an indication of why the push for transparency and scrutiny is both important and incomplete.
We know as much as we do about the coal ash saga because we’ve been keeping track, piecing together tidbits of information. OIRA doesn’t send out a lot of press releases announcing that it’s delaying action, watering down regs, meeting with industry lobbyists and so on. It usually does that sort of thing in the dark. CPR’s Eye on OIRA project is intended to focus a little more light on the agency.
Full textNew in movie theaters this past weekend was a horror flick called, “The Box,” starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple given a disturbing choice. They are presented with a mysterious box, equipped with a button. If they press the button, they’ll get $1 million, but someone they do not know will die.
The premise is striking, but it’s not quite so fictional as we’d like to think. Every day in the United States and across the globe, manufacturers produce products that cause unnecessary injury and death. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but there it is. Our lives are full of products that increase our risk of cancer or other deadly diseases – not just cigarettes, the harm from which is widely known and understood, but other products, including certain nonstick cookware, some kinds of paint, discarded computers and more. Manufacturers use production methods that pollute the air and water, doing violence to the environment and causing a broad range of public health problems. And then there’s the big one: carbon emissions from power plants and automobiles that are causing global climate change that will cause a variety of harms across the globe.
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A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas faculty in the previous year.
Published by Harvard University Press, Bending Science takes a hard look at the ways and extent to which scientific data are misused and abused in regulatory and tort law, focusing in on misdeeds by corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, and government agencies. Using case studies, the authors dissect the techniques by which perpetrators create research tailored to their commercial or political needs, conceal unwelcome data, spin public perception about matters of science, discredit legitimate but “inconvenient” research, and bully the scientists who produce it. McGarity and Wagner propose a series of reforms, as well, including forcing “bent” science into the sunlight and providing more vigorous oversight for the use of science in policymaking. The book was inspired in part by McGarity and Wagner's participation in various "clean science" conversations at gatherings of CPR's Member Scholars.
The award is sponsored by the University Co-operative Society and is considered the highest honor of literary achievement given to published authors at The University. McGarity is the immediate past President of the Center for Progressive Reform and the Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law. Wagner is the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor in Law at The University of Texas at Austin.
There’s more on the book here. Or you can just break down and buy it from Amazon or Harvard. A paperback edition is on its way in the spring.
Full textOne of the great political communications successes of the past 30 years has been the right wing’s relentless assault on the American regulatory system. Think of the words and images that have come to be associated with “regulation” in that time: red tape, bureaucrats, green eye shades, piles of paper stretching to the ceiling, and more. And the approach has worked – remarkably well, in fact, given the compelling imagery on the other side of the ledger: children left to play in unregulated polluted waterways, power plants belching smoke into the air we breathe, foods that poison and drugs that induce heart attacks. Imagine if the producers of campaign commercials decided to dig into that Pandora’s Box of images!
Most of the attention that the regulatory system draws focuses on individual skirmishes – a fight over how and to what extent to regulate mercury, for example. Many of those are important fights, to be sure. But if it were possible to draw the camera back and take a snapshot of the entire regulatory structure in the context of its statutory mandate to protect Americans from health and safety hazards, and to protect the environment from abuse, the dynamic would look very different.
Viewed from that distance, each of the recent incidents of large-scale regulatory breakdown – peanut butter, spinach, Vioxx, rollover-prone SUVs, excessive air pollution, inaction on the very real challenge of mercury pollution, and only now the beginnings of action on climate change – each of these examples contributes to a much larger and often untold story: The regulatory system isn’t really working all that well. It’s had prominent successes – removing lead from gasoline, for example, and forcing automobile safety measures on a reluctant industry, to name just two.
But if we believe Congress meant what it said in the various “protective” statutes that the regulatory agencies enforce, we must conclude that the agencies are earning mediocre grades at best.
Full textCPR's Dan Rohlf had an op-ed in The Oregonian on Friday, taking the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to task. Faced with news that the nation's largest emitter of mercury pollution is a cement plant in the state, DEQ moved quickly to...defend the polluter. Rohlf writes:
The biggest mercury polluter in the entire United States is a cement factory in eastern Oregon. This fact has not escaped notice of the state's environmental watchdog, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The very day the federal government released [a] disturbing report on mercury's widespread threat, DEQ officials announced that the agency would work hard to make sure that the cement company could continue to release mercury at a level 60 times greater than new federal emissions limits.
Huh? While it may be hard to believe, the agency that describes its job as "to protect the quality of Oregon's environment" has decided that the cold cash from one cement plant should trump pollution caps set by the federal government to protect humans and wildlife across the country.
Well worth the read.
Full textCPR's Sid Shapiro is interviewed in this week's edition of Living On Earth, the environment-focused public radio show heard in 300 markets around the nation. The subject is David Michaels's nomination to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Says Shapiro: "David Michaels has his job cut out for him. I think it's fair to say that OSHA is one of the most dysfunctional agencies in Washington. For example, Congress had a plan how to regulate toxic chemicals in the workplace. And OSHA has been almost unable in the last ten years or so to fulfill that plan. In fact, it's only issued three health regulations in roughly the last 10 to 15 years."
Text of the interview is here. It's downloadable, here. And streamed, here.
Full textCPR Member Scholars William W. Buzbee and Victor Flatt have an op-ed in this morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution offering a critique of the "discussion draft" of the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. Several CPR Member Scholars have blogged extensively about the bill here on CPRBlog, and with this op-ed, and a similar piece published the week before last in the Houston Chronicle, Professors Buzbee and Flatt take that discussion to the opinion pages of two important regional newspapers. In the Atlanta J-C piece, they write: "The [Waxman-Markey] bill is smart and comprehensive, covering energy, fuels, cars and more. Despite some shortcomings, it's nevertheless a good place to start the congressional discussion about how to fix the most serious environmental problem the planet has ever faced. Polluting industries have mounted a scare campaign to persuade us that it's too severe, will cost jobs, choke the economy, and more -- the same complaints we hear every time industry worries about being inconvenienced. But the truth is that in important ways, the bill doesn't go far enough." Full text
This morning, the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor testifies before the House Science and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. In her remarks, she calls on the White House to reshape the role of the director of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs -- the so-called regulatory czar. All too frequently OIRA has been the place where protective regulations go to get weakened or killed, and Steinzor argues forcefully that there's a better role for the OIRA director: a defender of federal regulatory agencies and their missions, rather than an impediment to regulation. Full text
The Bush Administration earned its reputation for being contemptuous of science. From suppressing an EPA global warming report so as not to put the federal government's imprimatur on the scientific consensus that climate change was real and human-caused, to simply refusing to open an email containing formal scientific findings inconvenient to its policy objectives, the Bush crowd took manipulation of science to previously unknown extremes. But as CPR President Rena Steinzor points out, the Bush Administration didn't invent the practice. Science and scientists have been under political pressure from a variety of sources and in a variety of ways for quite some time now. Full text