The below item is written by Celeste Monforton and cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
The first regulatory agenda under OIRA chief Cass Sunstein was published [Monday] in the Federal Register (link to its 237 pages.) The document includes a narrative of Labor Secretary Solis’ vision for worker health and safety, mentioning these specific hazards: crystalline silica, beryllium, coal dust, airborne infectious agents, diacetyl, cranes and dams for mine waste. The document purports to “demonstrate a renewed commitment to worker health,” yet the meat of the agenda tells a different story for particular long-recognized occupational health hazards.
Take, for example, MSHA’s entry on respirable coal mine dust, a pervasive hazard associated with reduced lung function, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, progressive massive fibrosis, and more. Despite an announcement last week by Labor Secretary Solis and MSHA Asst. Secretary Joe Main saying they want to “end new cases of black lung among the nation’s coal miners,” they aren’t planning to PROPOSE any regulatory changes for 10 months. That’s a ”renewed commitment to worker health”? Hardly.
Since 1995, public health science tells us that reducing miners’ risk of coal dust-related lung disease and impairment will REQUIRE a substantially lower respirable coal mine dust limit. Period. Why then will it take MSHA 10 months to merely propose such a change?
Full textA few notes on the Chinese drywall issue from the past weeks:
The CPSC announced that it was expanding its investigation to include some American-made drywall, following some reports of similar problems -- bad odors and pipe corrosion. But meanwhile, the Bradenton Herald asked "Is scope of Chinese drywall problem exaggerated?" Reporter Duane Marsteller notes that "100,000" has become an often-repeated number for how many homes are affected, but that in fact it's quite unclear.
About 300 people rallied in Florida over the weekend calling for a stronger response to the issue. Floridians and Louisianans, and their members of Congress, remain upset over the speed of CPSC's response. Last week, a deadline passed for joining the big class action suit against Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Co. -- set to be heard in a U.S. Circuit Court in New Orleans in February. The judge ordered the complaint to be filed by today.
Full textCPR Member Scholars Victor Flatt and David Hunter, along with several guest contributors, will be writing for CPRBlog from the climate talks in Copenhagen. Stay tuned.
Full textThe Obama Administration is expected to issue revisions to Executive Order 12,866, which specifies how the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) supervises federal regulatory agencies as they develop regulations to protect health, safety, the environment, and more (see the full comments on the matter submitted by CPR's board members in March).
CPR President Rena Steinzor and Board Member Rob Glicksman have issued a backgrounder on the coming Executive Order -- explaining the context and setting out six specific criteria on which to judge the Order. They are:
- Does the new EO continue to require agencies to justify proposed rules by quantifying “benefits” in dollar terms only – thus inviting agencies to ignore benefits that defy such monetization?
- Does the new EO continue to apply a “discount rate” to benefits of regulatory protections that won’t be realized for several years to come? And if it does apply a discount rate, is it set at the current rate of 7 percent, a number so high that future benefits from, for example, efforts to slow climate change essentially drop out of the equation after a couple of decades?
- Does the new EO explicitly disavow the “senior death discount” or other versions of lowering the value of a year of life if people are sick or handicapped?
- Does the new EO embrace – and to what extent – Sunstein’s attachment to “behavioral economics”? In particular, does it substitute warnings to citizens about potential harms for actual regulatory protection from harms? And does it rely on “willingness to pay” studies that peg the “benefits” of regulation to suspect data on how much people say, in the abstract, they are willing to pay to avoid certain harms.
- Does the new EO preserve OIRA’s power to “return” proposed regulations it does not like to agencies for time-consuming additional evaluation rather than simply advise agency heads that it disagrees with their judgments?
- Does the new EO impose transparency on OIRA’s activities, most significantly by ending OIRA’s practice of forcing regulatory agencies to meet with it behind closed doors and using those meetings to kill ideas for proposed regulations even before they are made public?
We'll have more, of course, when the Order is issued.
Full text"Interior increases oversight of mountaintop mining" trumpets the AP, and "U.S. boosts coal mining oversight to fight pollution" says Reuters. That's in response to an announcement from Interior on Wednesday.
But on Coal Tattoo, and from NRDC and Sierra Club, one learns of a pretty different story.
Says NRDC's Rob Perks:
Why in the world would I have a problem with this? As I previously posted on the apparent "slow-walk" on this issue by the Interior Department, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar knows full well that President Bush's 'midnight regulation' loosened protections to allow coal companies to dump mining waste directly into streams, and he favors revoking that rule change to restore original "stream buffer zone" protections that were enacted back in 1983. But rather than having his agency propose that change right away and proceed straight to public input, the Interior Department's chosen course of action is a brand new rulemaking process that won't result in any changes to the rule until at least 2011.
Regarding one of the "immediate actions" pledged by Interior, Coal Tattoo author Ken Ward writes:
Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement says it is going to publish an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking” to gather views on how it should rewrite the federal stream buffer zone rule.But wait … we already knew that — and we knew that this move by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar essentially delays any action to overturn the Bush administration’s weakening of the buffer zone rule until at least early 2011.
And, according to this release, the advance notice of proposed rulemaking still hasn’t been published … the news release says it “will be sent to the Federal Register shortly.”
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For an analysis of the news from California this week -- where the legislature passed a group of bills Wednesday on water protection -- do check out Richard Frank on Legal Planet, who looks at the good and the less-than-good.
It commits substantial public funding and commitment to desperately needed Delta ecosystem restoration. The bill package fundamentally re-organizes the state governance system that will oversee Delta regulatory, planning and restoration efforts. And it reflects long-overdue and necessary steps to address water rights enforcement and water conservation efforts on a statewide basis.
But, he says:
The water conservation mandates contained in the legislation are largely aspirational, and lack strong means of enforcement. The water rights reform provisions were greatly weakened in the course of the legislative debates, and it’s questionable at best whether they will have much long-term effect in reforming California’s dysfunctional water rights system. Finally–and most importantly–it is far from certain that California voters will be willing to approve the major, new public indebtedness needed to fund Delta ecosystem restoration and related projects.
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CPR Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies has a piece on the Atlantic's food website today -- "Saving Seafood From Extinction" -- on how the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is making a last-ditch effort to overhaul the nation's devastated fisheries. The agency's new regulations -- including lower catch limites -- have faced some opposition, but the choice is clear, writes Bratspies:
Allowing this overfishing to continue means abandoning all hope of either stock recovery or a healthy fishery. Such a tactic doesn't do anybody any favors. Overfishing is disastrous not only for the fish but also for broader marine ecosystems, and ultimately for the fishing communities themselves. Those communities are already hurting, and the new restrictions will definitely cause more pain. But, business as usual is simply not an option. Current management practices have not only failed to restore fish stocks to sustainable levels but have often allowed them to deteriorate further. We have to do something or this generation of fisherfolk will be the last--because there won't be any more fish.
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This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU.
In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, make the following claim: (p. 138-139)
As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence… Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was intended to safeguard disabled workers from discrimination. A noble intention, yes? Absolutely--but the data convincingly show that the net result was fewer jobs for Americans with disabilities. Why? After the ADA became law, employers were so worried they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire bad workers who had a disability that they avoided hiring such workers in the first place.
We reject this argument. It is a simplification of the literature that undermines civil rights legislation for individuals with disabilities.
The starting point for this narrative is an article by Tom DeLeire (Journal of Human Resources, 2000). DeLeire concludes that following passage of the ADA there was a 7.2% decrease in the employment rates of men with disabilities relative to that of men without disabilities. DeLeire cites unpublished research by Acemoglu and Angrist to support his opposition to the ADA. Acemoglu and Angrist (Journal of Political Economy, 2001) estimate statistically significant decreases in weeks worked for younger workers with disabilities following enforcement of the law.
We agree that employment for individuals with disabilities decreased during the 1990's relative to employment of individuals without disabilities, but we do not agree that the ADA was the primary cause of this decline. To begin, the ADA was not altogether a new innovation. Following the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, eighteen states had passed ADA-style laws prior to passage of the ADA in 1990. Another twenty-nine states had anti-discrimination laws protecting individuals with disabilities, though they did not require the 'reasonable accommodations' provision found in the ADA. Only three states had no legal protections for individuals with disabilities.
Full textToday the Consumer Product Safety Comission released three draft reports on its findings so far regarding contaminated Chinese drywall.
Here's how the Sarasota Herald-Tribune puts the development:
In what is sure to inflame lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the federal government issued a report on Thursday about Chinese drywall that stopped short of linking the material to health problems, foul smells or corrosion reported by homeowners.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and others have been analyzing the drywall and said they need more time to complete that work.
Explains CPSC's email update:
Full textBasically, the combined federal task force investigating the issue has found elevated levels of two elements in some Chinese-made drywall: sulfur and strontium. We are conducting additional scientific tests to find the connection between these elevated levels and any reported health symptoms or corrosion effects. The results of these additional tests will be released in November.
The investigation of the drywall itself also found that the Chinese-made drywall emits elevated levels of sulfur compounds. Current testing is looking for the specific chemical compounds and any connection to health and corrosion effects.
When investigators tested homes, some findings surprised them. Researchers were looking for hydrogen sulfide, carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide, which have been suspected of being related to the contaminated drywall due to reports of "rotten egg" smells and sulfur-like corrosion of copper and other metals in the homes. These gasses were only found occasionally when outdoor air levels were elevated as well.
The early sample study of homes found levels of two known irritants: acetaldehyde and formaldehyde. But the levels were the same for both homes with Chinese and non-Chinese drywall and were not unusual for new homes. Levels were lower when home air conditioning was in use.
Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book's methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking.
But yesterday brought a new whopper from co-author Steven Levitt, on the Diane Rehm Show:
"Of course, ocean acidification is an import issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it's actually, that's actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that."
The interview is here; the quote is at 20:15 in the audio. (Update: the specific audio clip is here)
Well, problem solved!
For a little review of why the problem is, of course, not simply solved by dumping base into the oceans, see the Royal Society's review of the literature on this (page 45 of the PDF of their ocean acidification report). NRDC also has a useful library on ocean acidification generally.
Levitt goes on the Daily Show tonight.
Update: Tim Lambert points out a new claim by Dubner that they 'address' ocean acidification in the book, when in fact they don't.
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