Over the weekend, the Associated Press ran a story on the results of its enterprising investigation into the toxic content of children’s jewelry imported from China. Pressed to abandon the use of toxic lead in toys and jewelry, manufacturers have apparently begun using an even more dangerous metal, cadmium, which can cause neurological damage – brain damage – to children and give them cancer. AP tested 103 pieces of jewelry bought in American stores within the last few months, and found that 12 percent contained at least 10 percent cadmium. One item, a cute little Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer trinket, was 91 percent cadmium.
Addressing the question that leaps to mind – How did these extraordinarily dangerous trinkets get onto store shelves in the first place? – reporter Justin Pritchard writes these utterly terrifying and completely truthful words:
A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these nuggets of cadmium from U.S. store shelves. If the products were painted toys, they would face a recall. If they were industrial garbage, they could qualify as hazardous waste. But since there are no cadmium restrictions on jewelry, such items are sold legally.
Of course, this is just the latest in a series of startling tales of dangerous products making it to market in the United States – poisoned peanut butter, toxic drywall, lead-painted toys, and more. Not to put too fine a point on it, but such products often kill people – sometimes immediately, from acute exposure to toxins, and sometimes over a longer period of time by way of cancer. If folks are lucky, their lives simply become miserable, with headaches, nausea, respiratory and heart problems a daily occurrence.
Full textEPA today took an important step toward reversing one of the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations,” announcing a proposed rule that would improve monitoring standards for airborne lead. Under EPA’s new proposal, any establishment that emits lead into the air at a rate of a half a ton per year or more could be required to have a monitoring station.
In a previous post I noted that EPA finalized a rule in late 2008 that only required monitoring at sites with emissions topping 1 ton per year, after a last-minute entreaty from the lead battery industry and some of their accomplices at OMB. EPA had originally proposed a threshold somewhere in the 0.2 to 0.6 tons per year range.
After President Obama took over the White House and put Lisa Jackson in charge of the EPA, several environmental and public health groups petitioned the agency to reconsider the lead monitoring requirements. The newly proposed monitoring requirements are EPA’s response to the petition.
Monitoring stations that detect airborne lead are important to EPA because they help the agency determine whether existing emissions controls are keeping lead below the health-based ambient air quality limits set under the Clean Air Act.
Perhaps caught up in the spirit of the holiday shopping season, a large number of industry bargain hunters have been busy seeking great deals on regulatory relief at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in recent weeks. To be precise, the bureau hosted no fewer than 11 meetings with corporate interests regarding seven different regulatory issues between November 4 and November 16.
The meetings covered a range of topics. One meeting saw representatives of Shell Oil Company complaining about EPA’s proposed rule on fuel and fuel additives under the renewable fuel standards program mandated by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. In a second meeting, representatives of the beef and poultry industries met with OIRA officials to attack a proposed Department of Agriculture rule regarding nutritional labels for their products. Other meetings concerned NHTSA’s updated CAFÉ standards; EPA’s rule on hazardous pollutants generated by paint manufacturers; EPA’s rule on controlling ozone-depleting HCFC; and EPA’s attempts to update its NAAQSs for ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide.
By far the most popular topic, however, was EPA’s preliminary efforts to regulate coal combustion waste (coal ash). I blogged earlier about how the affected industries had already began putting on the full court press to oppose EPA, even though the agency hasn’t even proposed a rule yet. This press continued as affected industries have met with OIRA five more times to oppose EPA on this issue. (There have now been a total of seven meetings regarding coal combustion waste since October 16.)
We shall see if this will continue to be a busy shopping season at OIRA. The Obama OIRA ought to send all of these industry bargain hunters home empty handed.
Full textCass Sunstein had barely begun settling in to his new position as Administrator of OMB’s Office of Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in September, when OIRA released a draft of OMB’s 2009 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations. Today marks the deadline for submitting comments to OMB on the draft, and I joined CPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst James Goodwin in submitting comments.
We read this year’s report with interest, curious to see how the new administration would approach this annual ritual. While OIRA has in the past been a nerve-center of anti-regulatory ideology and the annual report a ritualized hymn to the virtues of cost-benefit analysis, we hoped Obama’s OIRA would use the annual report as an opportunity to fundamentally re-envision its mission – to perhaps re-invent itself as a resource providing positive and constructive assistance to the embattled, de-funded and demoralized federal agencies charged with protecting our health and environment.
Overall, we were disappointed. While this year’s report sanitized some of the more blatantly ideological material that had become a staple of past reports, the basic form and content of the report remain unchanged. It continues to waste inordinate time and resources on the inane and ultimately fruitless task of attempting to aggregate in dollar terms the overall costs and the overall benefits of dozens of regulations issued by a diverse array of federal agencies – rules that protect all sorts of intangible, non-market values: protecting the health of mothers and newborns, protecting endangered whale species, reducing respiratory and other health effects of ozone, reducing neurological damage to children. This year’s report concludes cheerily that the annual benefits of major rules issued by the federal government over the past ten were somewhere between $126 billion and $663 billion, while the annual costs of those regulations was just $51 billion to $60 billion. Phew! What a relief!
Full textCass Sunstein had his confirmation hearing Tuesday; it was well-attended and anti-climactic. President Obama's nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) testified for about an hour, and Senate approval of the nomination seems assured. Ironically, in a perfect example of timing being everything, at about the same hour that Sunstein took his seat in front of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, a story hit the media fan in Washington showing that for the past several months, it has been business-as-usual between OMB and EPA with respect to climate change, with the economists of the first subjecting the scientists of the second to a gauntlet of skeptical questions about whether responding to this urgent problem will cost too much. Full text
Two years ago, a pair of well-meaning economists, Richard Morgenstern and Winston Harrington, who work at the moderate think tank Resources for the Future (RFF) got a large grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation to convene a group of well-credentialed academics to consider how to improve "cost-benefit analysis" (CBA). Unfortunately, their long-awaited report, released today, is a mouse that tries to roar, but doesn't quite. The reforms proposed in the final chapter -- and that are never endorsed by the report's contributing experts -- are your grandma's version of cost-benefit analysis. Rather than presenting bold ideas that might somehow have transformed the cost-benefit methodology into something that, if adopted, would not hamper -- and eventually embarrass -- the Obama Administration, it instead offers up only modest tweaks. Full text
Center for Progressive Reform President Rena Steinzor blogs on what OIRA, presumably under Cass Sunstein, ought to be. Full text
Center for Progressive Reform Policy Analyst Margaret Clune Giblin blogs on the risks posed by air pollution to pregnant women, developing fetuses and young children. Full text
Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Rena Steinzor blogs on a proposed Executive Order for the Obama Administration recasting Executive Branch policy on protecting children from toxics in the environment. Full text