Last week, the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy published New Directions in Environmental Law, a symposium issue featuring articles from six CPR Member Scholars. The articles explore how lessons learned from first generation environmental statutes should be applied to future legislation in order to accomplish the original goals of the environmental movement.
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
On Monday the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued a report on the NEPA analysis that preceded exploratory drilling at the ill-fated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, together with recommendations for improving NEPA analysis in the future. According to CEQ, the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (successor to the disgraced Minerals Management Service) has already agreed to implement the recommendations.
The report offers a detailed look at the chaotic and uncoordinated NEPA procedures that were apparently routine at the old MMS. The major outlines of the story were already well known: MMS did a cursory, over-optimistic oil spill analysis at the 5-year program and lease sale stages, then applied a categorical exemption to applications for exploration plans. Separately from that environmental analysis, BP prepared an oil spill response plan which considered the possibility of a much larger catastrophic spill, but assured regulators that the company would be able to quickly and effectively clean up such a spill. There was never a thorough, realistic, transparent analysis of the probability and potential impacts of a blowout.
Full textIn June, I wrote about a settlement between EPA and environmental groups that requires EPA to publish guidance on the implementation of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and to propose a rule to collect more information on these operations. In that post, I cited numbers from EPA showing that states in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed had many CAFOs without NPDES permits; for some of the states, not a single CAFO was permitted. Maryland had an estimated 220 CAFOs and only 7 with NPDES CAFO permits.
In response, the Maryland Department of Environment’s Secretary Shari T. Wilson provided an update to the status of the state’s CAFO permitting program, showing nearly twice as many CAFOs and improvements in CAFO permitting statistics. The updated numbers are:
Full textCPR Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies was recently on Chicago Public Radio's Worldview talking about oil spills in the developing world, the power of big companies in small nations, and the broader picture of resource extraction and its effects on people.
Said Bratspies:
"any oil company that doesn't cut the same corners that the worst player does is going to be at a competitive disadvantage, and that creates a snowball effect, of choices that are not sustainable and choices that are not about doing things in a responsible fashion."
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In the past 15 months, 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 has established a framework for ensuring accountability and success in Bay restoration efforts. No aspect of this new framework is more important than the Bay states’ and the District of Columbia’s Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs), which will demonstrate how they will meet the pollution targets in the applicable TMDLs. While the soundness of states’ WIPs depends on a broad array of technical, financial, and administrative factors, our bottom line expectation is that states write clear, objective, and transparent plans so that all watershed partners achieve their TMDL pollution reductions and ultimately restore the Chesapeake Bay. These WIPs will also enable the public to vigorously monitor the progress in meeting those commitments.
The Center for Progressive Reform has just issued a set of metrics for grading and evaluating the Chesapeake Bay states’ and the District of Columbia’s Phase I WIPs. The metrics will evaluate each Phase I WIP by assigning letter grades that evaluate (1) the transparency of information in the WIPs in providing key information about their pollution control programs and (2) the strength of the programs in making actual pollution reductions. The WIPs provide an unprecedented opportunity to objectively measure progress toward restoring the Bay on a state-by-state basis, and the assigned grades will provide a clear and understandable tool for monitoring each state’s commitment to restoration.
In partnership with the Choose Clean Water Coalition, we are sending each state governor and environmental agency head a copy of the metrics to provide ample notice of what specific information we believe the WIPs should include.
The Chesapeake Watershed states are required by EPA to publish their draft Phase I WIPs by September 24, 2010, at which point they will be open for public comment for 45 days. A three-member panel of CPR Member Scholars will evaluate the draft plans and release the grades during that period.
Full textYou may have read of a letter sent by 31 Representatives to the EPA today to complain about coal ash regulation. I wasn't planning on dignifying it with a response, but sometimes something just calls out for a little highlighting. Like when the members write:
"States have been effectively regulating CCRs"
That's actually a case they want to be on record making? Really?
View of the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant fly ash spill. Photo used under Creative Commons by Brian Stansberry.
Full textJuly 1 marked the 35th anniversary of the effective date entry-into-force of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). While CITES is among the stronger international conventions, its strength is diminished by a lack of an enforcement mechanism and political maneuverings.
The arrests and cargo seizures may not make headlines often, but international trade in endangered species is one of the most valuable illegal markets, behind drugs but potentially comparable to arms and human trafficking. According to a 2008 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, the global trade in illegal wildlife is valued at more than $5 billion and potentially exceeds $20 billion annually. For example, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly (Orinthoptera alexandrae), which can have a wingspan of up to 14 inches, sells for as much as $10,000! Some of the more valuable species commodities are tiger parts, caviar, elephant ivory, rhino horn, and exotic birds and reptiles. Although no official statistics exist, the CRS report estimates that the United States purchases as much as 20% of the global market in illegal species. Other main importers include China and countries in the European Union.
Full textThanks to a strong ruling from a federal judge in Baltimore Wednesday, large poultry companies are one step closer to being held accountable for the pollution (manure) the small farms that grow chickens for them generate. Responsibility: it’s not just for the little guys anymore.
In March, several environmental groups in Maryland sued Perdue Farms, Inc. and Hudson Farm, a chicken farm that raises Perdue’s chickens, alleging violations of the Clean Water Act. (I blogged earlier about the political brouhaha that erupted here.) Samples taken on five different occasions from a ditch flowing from Hudson Farm showed excessive levels of fecal coliform, E. coli, nitrogen, phosphorus, and ammonia. Agriculture is the largest source of nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, contributing an estimated 38 percent of the nitrogen and 45 percent of the phosphorous.
The groundbreaking suit not only targeted the specific geographic source of the pollution – Hudson Farm and its stockpiles of uncovered poultry manure – but it also alleged that Perdue, a poultry company with $4 billion in sales annually, was responsible for the mess as well. The court rightly rejected Perdue’s argument that it should be dismissed from the lawsuit because it was a poultry integrator – not a grower – and was, the company asserted, not required to obtain a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act.
Full textCross-posted from Legal Planet.
Last year, I noted that the interim report of the Interagency Ocean Task Force appointed by President Obama marked a promising step toward a national ocean policy. Now the Task Force has issued its final recommendations, which the President promptly began implementing.
A national ocean policy has been a long time coming. Back in 2003, the Pew Oceans Commission called for a new “unified national ocean policy based on protecting ecosystem health.” A year later, the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy echoed many of the Pew Commission’s recommendations. But the Bush administration sat on those recommendations. President Bush did create an executive-branch Committee on Ocean Policy, but failed to give it any substantive mandate.
President Obama has filled that gap. On Monday, he issued an Executive Order (as yet unnumbered) replacing the Committee on Ocean Policy with a National Ocean Council jointly chaired by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s important because it means that the Council will have a strong voice in the White House.
Full textThis post was written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Michael Patoka, a student at the University of Maryland School of Law and research assistant to Steinzor.
Last October, the EPA proposed to regulate, for the first time, the toxic coal ash that sits in massive landfills and ponds next to coal-fired power plants across the nation. The 140 million tons of ash generated every year threaten to contaminate groundwater and cause catastrophic spills, like the 1-billion-gallon release that devastated Kingston, Tennessee in 2008. The EPA recommended that coal ash be listed as a subtitle C “hazardous waste,” making it subject to federally enforceable disposal requirements under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). But by the time that the Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis (OIRA) was through “reviewing” the agency’s proposal, the rule had been watered down to suggest a choice of three alternatives: the original proposal as well as two much weaker options. In addition, the accompanying regulatory impact analysis (RIA) had ballooned into an impenetrable, strictly quantitative cost-benefit analysis—one that systematically underestimates the benefits and overestimates the costs of subtitle C regulation.
Among the many shortcomings and biases of the RIA, of particular concern is the industry-fueled suggestion that a subtitle C listing would “stigmatize” the beneficial use of coal ash (in products like concrete and wallboard, as well as in road beds and farmlands), even though beneficially used coal ash would remain officially exempt from the rule. Because beneficial use is associated with valuable economic and environmental benefits, this highly speculative “stigma effect” is estimated to cost $233.5 billion in lost benefits—a cost that dwarfs any expected benefits of regulation by several orders of magnitude.
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