Is the Gulf of Mexico disaster a reason to pass climate legislation – or is that legislation largely irrelevant to curbing our oil use? A Greenwire article Tuesday quoted a number of economists arguing that the leading proposals in Congress wouldn’t do much to change our dependence on petroleum.
The only reasonable response is “yes, of course.” Climate proposals such as Kerry-Lieberman, Cantwell-Collins, or Waxman-Markey will have limited effects on oil consumption for two reasons: first, they are market mechanisms; second, they are weak market mechanisms.
To start with the good news, reducing carbon emissions from electric utilities is cheaper than reducing oil use. Any market mechanism is supposed to prompt us to do the cheapest things first; that’s the whole point. There are many ways to make electricity with lower carbon emissions than a coal plant; putting a price on carbon makes those alternatives cheaper relative to coal. There are also many ways to promote energy efficiency, incrementally reducing electricity use.
For most Americans, on the other hand, there is only one way to make transportation, and it runs on oil. In the short run, with all of us driving the cars we now own, there is very little chance to change our gasoline use. In the closing words of one of the best satirical videos about the oil spill, “BP: you’re not mad enough to not drive your car.”
Full textIn the year since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced a new process (pdf) for updating chemical risk assessments in EPA's IRIS database, agency scientists have succeeded in getting some stalled assessments moving through the system. Since the May 21, 2009 announcement, EPA staff have competed nine new and updated assessments. Two others are in the final stages of review and 20 more are at the external peer review stage.
But just as EPA staff are getting geared up, industry, potentially regulated federal agencies, and the White House are trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works.
First, Inside EPA reports (subs. required, "Industry, Agencies Struggle To Revise EPA's Risk Assessment Process") that anti-regulatory advocate Jim Tozzi's Center for Regulatory Effectiveness is making the claim that external peer review must be "Data Quality Act compliant." That's a great way to strike fear in the minds of an embattled office like the IRIS office, but it lacks any real basis. The purpose of a Science Advisory Board SAB (SAB) review is to get outside scientists' opinion on specific science-policy decisions made by EPA staff in the process of developing the IRIS assessment. By definition, opinions are not "information" covered by EPA’s DQA guidelines (pdf, p.16), so the DQA doesn't apply. And even if it did apply, there's no checklist to make sure a document is DQA compliant. The DQA simply creates a (not-judicially-reviewable) administrative mechanism for outside parties to request that an agency correct information that they disseminate that does not meet the agency's DQA guidelines. At its core, the DQA respects the fact that agencies are staffed by dedicated and highly competent individuals who do high quality work. The burden is on an outside party to prove that disseminated information does not conform to an agency's DQA guidelines. There is no burden for EPA to perform any sort of DQA-specific analysis of a piece of information before disseminating it.
Full textThis is the April installment of CPRBlog’s series of posts highlighting legal developments in other countries and in international environmental law.
Last month the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted a hearing to the residents of Mossville, Louisiana, based on their petition asserting that the U.S. government has violated their rights to privacy and racial equity by failing to address toxic pollution in their community. Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, the legal advocacy organization that filed the petition on behalf of the Mossville residents, says this hearing represents the first time IACHR has granted a hearing on complaints of environmental racism by the United States.
Located in southwest Louisiana, Mossville is a small community of roughly 375 residents, the majority of whom are African American. Fourteen industrial facilities—ranging from an oil refinery and a vinyl manufacturer to petrochemical facilities—are sited within and around Mossville. Using data taken from EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, the petition declares that these fourteen facilities release annually more than four million pounds of toxic chemicals into the surrounding land, air, and water. Residents have complained for years about poor health from inflammatory diseases and early deaths from cancer (see CNN's report). In 1998, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that the blood from 28 Mossville residents had dioxin levels that were three times the national average.
Full textToday CPR releases a new report, Failing the Bay: Clean Water Act Enforcement in Maryland Falling Short. The report, which CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman and I co-authored, details the results of an investigation of the Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement program at the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). CPR provided a copy of this report to MDE, and its response (and CPR’s follow-up) is included as an appendix to the report.
Overall, we found that state of Maryland is failing to enforce existing water pollution laws, allowing illegal pollution that damages Maryland waters and the Chesapeake Bay. The report focuses on three specific areas:
This item, by Liz Borkowski, is cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Exactly one year ago, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity that gave the Office of Science and Technology Policy 120 days to “develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” based on six principles that Obama specified. OSTP solicited public input to inform its drafting of the recommendations.
It’s now been 365 days, and OSTP hasn’t released its recommendations. Why the delay? Since President Obama issued the scientific integrity memo during his first hundred days in office, this is evidently an important issue for him.
Although advocates for scientific integrity have welcomed many of Obama’s decisions and appointments, threats to the integrity of government science haven’t disappeared. As I noted last week, my colleagues and I have just released a report on scientists in government, and we found that many policies and practices need to be strengthened in order to ensure that federal-agency scientists can do their best work. The Union of Concerned Scientists has been tracking the Obama administration’s progress on several aspects of scientific integrity, and they find that while the administration has made progress, it still has a long way to go.
Full textIn response to a question at a National Press Club appearance on Monday, Lisa Jackson said that the EPA would be finalizing an action plan on BPA in the "very near future."
As I noted here in January, the EPA had announced in September that it would be releasing action plans on a number of chemicals, including BPA, but when the first group of plans was released in late December, BPA was not among them. I raised a red flag because EPA had sent six draft chemical action plans to White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on December 14, OIRA hosted a meeting with BPA industry lobbyists a week later, then the BPA action plan was absent from the list of plans released on December 30. OIRA had no business reviewing the chemical action plans in the first place since they are not regulatory actions covered by EO 12,866.
Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer put some pressure on EPA and OIRA, asking Administrator Jackson for a written explanation regarding the “confounding decision” to hold back the BPA action plan. Now that the BPA action plan has been released from OIRA’s grip (Inside Story, 3/4/10) and delivered to EPA for publication, what can we expect it to say?
Full textThis post, by Sarah Vogel, is cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
If you thought the scientific debate about bisphenol A was over or even quieting down, you haven’t been reading the latest issues of Toxicological Sciences. (What are you doing with your spare time?) Last month in an editorial piece published in the journal, Richard Sharpe queried: “Is It Time to End Concerns over the Estrogenic Effects of Bisphenol A?” His answer was an unequivocal ‘yes’, based on the latest study from Ryan et al. (published in the same issue) that found no reproductive effects from bisphenol A exposure in rats. The study, according to Sharpe, “throws cold water on this controversy.”
Not so fast. On Wednesday, February 17, 2010, the journal published a second letter to the editors, “Flawed Experimental Design Reveals the Need for Guidelines Requiring Appropriate Positive Controls in Endocrine Disruption Research,” by Fred vom Saal and 23 other researchers. In a position quite contrary to Sharpe’s, the letter pointed to an important design flaw in the study.
This latest iteration of the controversy is about a fundamental and persistent challenge in the research on bisphenol A and other endocrine disrupting chemicals—what is the appropriate study design. Issues of animal selection, route of exposure, animal feed and housing, and appropriate use of positive controls all point to the complexity of studying extremely low levels of endocrine disruptors.
Full textThe Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had its latest article on BPA this weekend, this time looking at the role of the December 22 meeting between the industry and OIRA. Writer Meg Kissinger contrasts the forceful EPA statements on BPA from last year with the lack of an EPA action plan on the chemical now. As for the documents presented to OIRA at the meeting,
The Journal Sentinel reviewed the list and found 13 of the 19 papers and presentations cited were paid for by the BPA industry. The funding source for the authors of two other papers could not be determined. Only one was written by a scientist without ties to the industry.
Perhaps it's not surprising. But it bears noting that this is what's going on over there.
Full textAfter laying dormant for decades, industries’ abuse of EPA’s permissive confidential business information program (CBI) is finally getting some serious attention. An investigation in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and more recently articles in the Washington Post and Risk Policy Report; a report by the Environmental Working Group; and posts by Richard Denison at EDF, are turning the tide. Those of us at CPR who have spilled ink on various CBI problems over the years (i.e., Mary Lyndon, Tom McGarity, Sid Shapiro, Rena Steinzor, and myself) are thrilled to witness how these journalists and environmental watchdogs have finally managed to budge EPA on its contemptible program.
One document that has been referenced in several recent reports, but that I think deserves further attention, is an extensive empirical study of EPA’s CBI program by a consultant, Hampshire Associates. EPA commissioned this study in 1992 to evaluate whether EPA’s CBI program was in need of reform. Hampshire Associates documented extensive abuse of the CBI program by regulated industry, particularly in regulatory programs in which EPA does not require any justification for a CBI claim. The report is particularly relevant to current debates because virtually nothing has changed in EPA’s CBI policies since 1992. Continued evidence of CBI overclaiming over the years (see pages 129-35 and 146-47 in this article, where David Michaels and I argue that EPA's CBI program is far too lax) suggests that, if anything, abuse of the CBI privilege may only be getting worse, rather than better since the Hampshire Associates' study.
Full textThis post is the fourth in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card.
During the Bush Administration, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) simply fell further and further behind in terms of achieving its regulatory mission of protecting people from unsafe drugs, medical devices and food. A series of high profile mistakes made it clear that the American people could no longer lightly assume that the food they were eating and the drugs they were taking were safe. The challenge for the Obama Administration was to reenergize this demoralized agency, so that it could begin the difficult task of making up lost ground. FDA was able to make up a lot of this lost ground; that it still has so much further to go in order to make our food and drugs adequately safe illustrates how bad things were when President Obama assumed office.
Coming into President Obama’s first year in office, FDA faced a number of obstacles to achieving adequate food safety. Like other protector agencies, FDA has been chronically resource-starved, which hampered its ability monitor the food supply. As a result, the agency had little ability to prevent food-borne illness outbreaks, much less respond to them quickly when they did occur. FDA also suffers from a lack of adequate legal authority to ensure food safety. The task of ensuring food safety is divided among various federal agencies, and the resulting hodgepodge leads to unnecessary duplication and gaps in protection. Moreover, existing law does not authorize FDA to order recalls of tainted food—instead, the agency can only ask companies to recall their products. Finally, to make matters worse, FDA’s regulatory mission with respect to food safety has gotten a lot larger and a lot more complicated. The U.S. population has increased significantly, and the U.S. food supply is becoming more and more globalized, with food products now coming from countries that have little or no regulatory oversight over the goods they produce.
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