The second segment of last night's Daily Show interview with David Axelrod featured a couple minutes on the broken regulatory system and questions of trust in government competence in the wake of the BP disaster.
Axelrod: "I think we've tested the proposition of what no regulation means, and what you get is .. the leak, the mine disaster in West Virginia, and you get an economic crisis."
Full textOSHA’s pending rule on construction crane and derrick safety cleared OIRA review yesterday.
The cranes rule has been a long, long time in the making and was featured as a case study in our white paper last year on the Costs of Regulatory Delay. It’s good news that this life-saving rule is finally almost set.
Update: Celeste Monforton has more on this at The Pump Handle:
Full textFirst, OIRA has completed its review of OSHA's final rule on cranes and derricks. The notation on the regs.gov website says "consistent with change," a phrase that has meaning only to those who have the secret decoder ring. Because the internal deliberations between OMB and the affected agency are considered confidential, (a policy dating back to OIRA's creation under President Reagan) we don't know whether the "change" required by OMB are good, bad or indifferent to worker protection.
As I said, this news may be mundane, or not. Once the final rule is published, we'll see how OSHA addressed the few sticky issues raised by interested parties. Looking on the bright side, it may mean that a new rule to protect workers (and the public) around cranes and derricks may be a reality very soon.
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is getting more and more attention. Here's some of the reporting out this week.
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The latest from ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
At least a half-dozen homebuilders, installers and environmental consultants knew as early as 2006 that foul smells were coming from drywall imported from China – but they didn’t share their early concerns with the public, even when homeowners began complaining about the drywall in 2008.
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ProPublica teamed with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to put out an important investigative piece on drywall a few days ago -- "Tainted Chinese Drywall Concerns Went Unreported for Two Years."
The article, by Joaquin Sapien and Aaron Kessler, reports that:
A leading East Coast homebuilder learned four years ago that the Chinese-manufactured drywall it had installed in several Florida homes was emitting foul odors, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
The company, WCI Communities, was so concerned that it started planning to tear out the material and rebuild the houses. But it never disclosed the problem to the bulk of its customers or to government authorities.
The evidence comes mainly through a series of emails between several companies in the building process. The article said the documents were from ongoing lawsuits; subsequent articles have said explicitly that the documents have been released by Victor Diaz, an attorney representing homeowners in Florida.
It's early yet in this process. But it strikes me that there may be a useful lesson coming here in the value of the common law system as a complement to the regulatory system. Plaintiffs' attorneys, it appears, have uncovered a development that federal regulators had not found (or certainly had not made public).
There's ideally a side-by-side, cooperative place for the regulatory and tort systems. The role of the common law system is particularly important when the regulatory side is weak, though. We've said previously that we think the Consumer Product Safety Commission's response to the toxic drywall matter has been too slow. It's also important to note that the agency has a small budget and a small staff, and more and more products to monitor. The CPSC has fewer employees today than it did pre-Reagan. It needs all the help it can get.
Full textThe Albany Times Union had a nifty, if depressing, scoop over the weekend in "Paterson bottling up mercury ban at plant":
Efforts by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to ban mercury-tainted coal fly ash used by a Ravena cement plant have been bottled up for more than 19 months in a special regulations review office of Gov. David Paterson.
The DEC request to yank permission from Lafarge North America for ash use at its Route 9W plant has been sitting in the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform since October 2008, according to records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act by the Times Union.
This isn't the first time we've heard about questionable regulatory review maneuvers in the Paterson administration; last August, the governor issued an executive order seeking to "eliminate unnecessary regulatory requirements" by "removing needless and excessive rules." Here in this space, Rebecca Bratspies laid out how that move was a big win for industry, and Sidney Shapiro compared the announcement to Ronald Reagan's Task Force for Regulatory Relief.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus and fellow UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Eric Biber have penned an op-ed in today's LA Times arguing that the Administration's plan to split the Minerals Management Service in two in response to the BP oil spill disaster falls short of what's needed.
Write Doremus and Biber:
Full textThe political pressure to prioritize rapid development over safety won't evaporate if the MMS is split. The new safety agency would still be under the supervision of the Department of Interior, where it would have to compete with its bureaucratic sibling. Environmental and safety interests have been losing that competition for years. Giving them a new name and logo won't automatically change that outcome.
Second, environmental protection is not just a matter of enforcing a clear set of regulations as wells are being drilled or operated. The key environmental questions come much earlier, when the MMS decides where to offer leases, sells those leases and approves permits for exploration and development. That's when the fateful decision was made to allow oil production in ultra-deep waters, on the basis of what turned out to have been absurdly rosy predictions about the likelihood and magnitude of spills and about the efficacy of response measures. Under the administration's plan, those key decisions would remain with the leasing agency, not with the newly independent enforcement arm.
CPR President Rena Steinzor has issued this statement on today's coal ash news. She says:
Because EPA is actively considering these two very different approaches, it has not actually proposed anything from a regulatory perspective. The EPA will almost certainly have to go back and get another round of public comment before making a final decision, which is not what Jackson wanted when she walked into OIRA’s door.
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The White House has met with industry representatives on this issue literally dozens of times, and it's no surprise those meetings netted a delay. The administration could and should have moved ahead months ago with one strong proposal to tackle toxic coal ash.
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EPA is making an announcement right now. We'll have more soon.
Update: EPA's announcement is up.
Full textThe EPA had projected an April announcement on the next step in regulating coal ash. But April came and went. The EPA now lists "05/2010" as the projected time for publication of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register.
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