CPR Member Scholar Robert Adler has an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune looking at a series of developments in Utah -- administrative actions as well as pending legislation -- that could hinder citizen engagement in environmental decisions. The context, write Adler, is this:
Whether or not one agrees that Tim DeChristopher was legally or morally justified in his civil disobedience as “bidder 70” in Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases, virtually everyone asks why he did it.
I do not presume to speak for him. But one possible reason was surely his frustration about what he perceived as the ineffectiveness of other avenues to influence public decisions that affect his health and the quality of his environment.
It is ironic, therefore, that at the very time Mr. DeChristopher and his attorneys have been fighting to highlight this frustration, multiple levels of Utah’s state government have been working to systematically shut the door to other citizens who want to raise — through entirely lawful means — important questions about the quality of our air and water, the use of our public lands and resources, and the nature of the world we will leave to our children.
Adler's full op-ed is here.
Full textIndustry representatives have long made exorbitant claims about the costs of regulations, only to be proven wrong again and again. And despite that history, anti-regulatory campaigners repeat the scariest statistics their own experts come up with, even if those statistics were meant to include a range of possible outcomes, or included caveats of uncertainty.
An important batch of articles this week dug into these issues. Here are some of the highlights:
Yet in testimony before House committees now run by anti-regulation Republicans, industry witnesses repeat numbers from imprecise economic models. Members of Congress often cite the same figures without the researchers' caveats.
... industry lobbyists warned in 1990 that the latest round of Clean Air Act amendments would mean a “quiet death for businesses across the country.” Businesses claimed the acid rain emissions trading program would cost ratepayers $5.5 billion annually between 1990 and 2000 and increase to $7.1 billion per year after that. But as it turned out, the costs were between $1.1 billion and $1.8 billion per year, according to a 2005 White House report to Congress.
Critics of the new EPA regulations are claiming that the measures will undermine the weak-as-a-kitten economic recovery, perhaps leading to a million or more lost jobs in coming years. But a cadre of economists trying to puncture that widely held view – which they call a persistent "myth" – are turning to history in an attempt to show that the impact of environmental regulations is far more positive than negative.
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Momentum for Chesapeake Bay restoration has advanced significantly in the past two years, shaped by the combination of President Obama’s Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration Executive Order and the EPA’s Bay-wide Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) process. These federal initiatives, taken in partnership with the Bay states, required the Bay states and the District of Columbia to submit Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) to demonstrate how they will meet the pollution targets in the applicable TMDLs.
In August, CPR sent the Chesapeake Bay watershed jurisdictions (Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia) metrics by which our panel of water quality experts would judge the strength of the plans; we also submitted comments to the states in November on their draft plans. The states’ final plans were submitted to EPA in November and December.
The state plans fail to provide a specific roadmap for restoring the Bay, CPR says today in Missing the Mark in the Chesapeake Bay: A Report Card for the Phase I Watershed Implementation Plans (press release). The report was written by CPR Member Scholars William Andreen, Robert Glicksman, and Rena Steinzor, and CPR executive director Shana Jones and policy analyst Yee Huang.
Our report found that the state plans all underperformed, to varying degrees, on the two primary areas for evaluation: transparency of information and strength of program design. While improvements from the drafts, the final plans were light on providing specific commitments for actions needed to achieve the required pollution reductions, and generally did not pledge dedicated funding for the proposed programs. The plans generally did not establish a baseline for existing programs’ effectiveness to allow the public to monitor future performance in implementing the pollution reduction controls.
Here's the report, along with the complete detailed assessment for each of the jurisdictions: Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
Full textIn case anyone thought the White House would seek additional appropriations to hire new agency staffers to do the regulatory look back work, it sure sounds like a no. Here's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein speaking on Federal News Radio:
"Agencies are in the best position to make choices about which rules to review and justify whether they need to be modified" he said. "The Executive Order makes clear that the look back process will occur with full understanding of the agency's priority settings and resource constraints in a tough budgetary environment. So we expect the agencies will take this process very seriously but do so in way that recognizes resources are not unlimited."
Sunstein said agencies will have to find a way to do the look back based on the resources they have already.
"I don't anticipate any additional budgetary assistance for the look back," he said. "We do anticipate a rule of reason where agencies will be expected to make their own choices about how to balance the cost because in many of the agencies there either is some process of look back and because of all agencies there is considerable expertise about the existing set of programs, we don't think this will require huge resources to be invested."
Presumably, as part of this process some agencies will identify some rules they might rework or ditch. Doing so will take time and resources, too.
So to recap: agency staffers who are currently working to protect public health and safety will have some of their time diverted toward the important business of making sure we accommodate industry’s deregulatory agenda.
Full textRepresentative Darrell Issa, the incoming chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has made his views on regulations fairly clear. Earlier this week, for example, he scored headlines when his office gave out a document publicizing the issues his committee will take up. From the document: "The committee will examine how overregulation has hurt job creation..."
No surprise; that's about the line we'd expect from Issa.
But someone in Issa's office must have recognized a problem: Won't the investigations not quite have the same credibility or punch if the investigator himself has already announced his conclusion?
Perhaps that’s why Rep. Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, took a different tack this same week, telling Politico: "Is there a pattern emerging? Is there a consistent practice or regulation that hurts jobs? Until you have all the facts, you really can't make a lot of determinations and judgments."
Note the use of question marks instead of conclusions. Quite a step back. But he better tell his boss, who’s already on the record with his determinations and judgments.
Full textTwo years ago this week, an earthen wall holding back a giant coal ash impoundment failed in Kingston, Tennessee, sending more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry over nearby land and into the Emory River. The ash had chemicals including arsenic, lead, and mercury. Clean up costs could be as much as $1.2 billion.
The coal ash issue is not "new" -- toxic chemicals from unlined coal ash pits have been leaching into the ground for a long time. But the Kingston disaster, and a new administration, brought attention back to the issue and its continuing danger. One-third of some 629 dump sites that hold ash mixed with water were not designed by a professional engineer, and 96 are at least 40 feet tall and 25 years old.
Just weeks after Kingston, in January, 2009, Lisa Jackson faced her confirmation hearing for EPA Administrator. Senators asked about coal ash, and Jackson pledged she would take on the issue. On October 16 of that year, EPA sent OMB a draft of a proposed rule to regulate coal ash waste. We suspected then, and know now, that the rule was a strong one. Finally, we were on track to fix this wrong.
But the train would be derailed. On that same October day, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at OMB hosted two representatives from the electric power industry to discuss coal ash. Things soon got busy; by a month later, OIRA was hosting multiple meetings on the coal ash rule every week. The meetings finally slowed down in March 2010. There were 47 meetings, and most, though not all, were with industry representatives opposed to EPA's proposal.
Full textA few stories from the last week that I thought deserved noting:
With the 40th anniversary of EPA last week, there's been some useful writing on the big picture of the history. I wanted to highlight:
Important reminders, I think.
Full text"In order for CBA [cost benefit analysis] to be workable, regulators need to have a relatively restricted range of possibilities." That's what OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein wrote in a 2007 book. So how about from $82 billion to negative $251 billion, a third of a trillion dollars – is that a relatively restricted range?
Those are the estimated net benefit figures, over 50 years, in the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) for EPA's "strong" coal ash regulation proposal. Do those numbers actually mean much? No. Yet there they are, trumpeted as if they have meaning. They don't.
As regular readers know, the regulation of coal ash has been quite the journey. We take the next step in the trek today, when the public comment period ends on EPA's current proposals. CPR President Rena Steinzor submitted comments on the coal ash rulemaking this morning (press release).
Let me step back a minute to explain the comments and the context. The Kingston, Tennessee, coal ash spill disaster in 2008 spurred the EPA to action; it said it would announce a specific regulatory proposal by the end of 2009. The agency submitted its proposal (which we now know was strong) to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in October. By Executive Order, OIRA has no more than 120 days to review proposed regulations, but the office went beyond its allowed limit, delaying action while it hosted some 47 meetings on the rule, mostly with industry opponents. In May of this year, the EPA was finally allowed to release a revised proposal reflecting OIRA's changes.
Full textSenator Mary Landrieu released her hold on the nomination of Jacob Lew for Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Senate confirmed Lew by voice vote Thursday evening.
Back when Lew had his confirmation hearings, CPR President Rena Steinzor wrote here about the challenges Lew will face on the regulatory front ("OMB Nominee Jacob Lew, Meet Broken Regulatory State").
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