This week, House Republicans re-introduced the “Regulatory Accountability Act of 2015,” (H.R. 185).
Proponents of the bill are claiming that it would “modernize” the rule-making process and streamline government inefficiencies.
In fact, the RAA would bog down attempts by federal agencies to protect our health, safety and environment in red tape by adding over 74 new requirements to the rule-making process, including over 29 new “documentation” requirements.
Center for Progressive Reform Senior Analyst James Goodwin compiled a list of all the potential requirements for agency rule-making included in the bill. Goodwin notes that, “most of the requirements are nonsensical that at best add nothing to the rulemaking process—and at worst distract agencies from those considerations that would lead to better quality rules.”
The full, damning list is copied below. Adding extensive paperwork and bureaucratic burdens to the rule-making process would threaten the President’s initiative to move forward on his clean energy plan and could prevent agencies from issuing crucial safeguards to protect workers and the public health.
Full textToday, the EPA announced national standards governing coal waste from coal-fired power plants, also known as coal ash. The rule does not treat coal ash as a hazardous material, but as household garbage.
CPR President and University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor reacted to the classification:
It's bitterly disappointing that the electric utility industry, which earns profits hand over fist, has succeeded in bamboozling the White House to gut this rule. Originally designed by EPA to prevent fatalities, injuries, and grave long-term damage to the public's health, the rule was caught in the cross hairs of naysaying economists on the President's staff, who invented the misguided and subversive notion that if coal ash dumps were cleaned up, coal ash could not be recycled. In fact, a strong rule that makes it more expensive to dispose of coal ash could only result in more of it being recycled, especially because EPA never proposed to place any restrictions on recycling.
Coal-fired power plants produce an astounding 100 million tons of coal ash annually. For decades, utilities dumped this enormous quantity of waste into pits in the ground, where rain turned the ash into inky sludge. Unwilling to face the growing risk posed by the dumps, the companies kept shoring up the fragile walls of such dumps with the functional equivalent of chewing gum and spit. As smokestack scrubbers were installed to keep toxic metals like mercury and arsenic out of the air, these pollutants did not disappear, but instead fell down the stack into the ash, converting it into even more dangerous waste. Two recent spills--from a Duke Energy site in North Carolina and from a Tennessee Valley Authority site in Kingston, Tennessee--should have been the only wake-up call we needed to compel the companies to rebuild these sites before people are killed by spills and drinking water is ruined by leaks out of the bottom of the dumps.
Instead, the White House shut down a strong EPA rule and insisted on the pitifully weak alternative issued today, which treats coal ash as if it was household garbage and leaves it up to the tender mercies of state regulators to chase around after utility executives who have only to call their political bosses to shut down any further controls.
When--not if--the next spill happens, the White House will share the blame. We can only pray that no one is caught in the path of a river of sludge.
Full textContact: Erin Kesler
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: (202) 747-0698 X4
What: CPR and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law will host a luncheon and Q&A session with MD Attorney General-elect Brian Frosh on the state of environmental enforcement in the Chesapeake Bay. Mr. Frosh will speak to a group of Bay advocates, University of Maryland faculty, attorneys at firms that represent Maryland businesses, and interested citizens and students, and take questions from the audience, including media.
Background: Yesterday, the Center for Progressive Reform and Chesapeake Commons released an interactive map detailing the extent of pollution caused by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The map, released concurrently with a report from the Environmental Integrity Project drawn from its data, relies on farmer-reported information to find that all but one of the sixty CAFOS examined has excessive phosphorus levels caused by over-application of manure. The pollution that results from the farms strains Maryland’s efforts to enforce its pollution-control limits as mandated by federal and state law. Maryland’s Governor-elect Larry Hogan vowed yesterday to fight any effort to implement the Phosphorous Management Tool (PMT) proposed under Governor O’Malley’s Administration to deal with the pollution caused by overuse of phosphorous on the state’s farms.
When: Thursday, December 11, 2014
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Registration opens at 11:15
Where: Westminster Hall
University of Maryland Carey School of Law
519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD
Full text
At the Maryland Farm Bureau's Annual Convention today, Maryland Governor-Elect Larry Hogan vowed to fight against the state's proposed phosphorus management tool (PMT) regulations.
CPR President and University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor reacted to Hogan's comments, "It’s truly a shame that Governor-elect Hogan is indicating so early that he is willing to jeopardize the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay by rejecting pollution controls out of hand rather than working with scientists to improve them. As the Governor-elect will soon discover, farmers have an interest in minimizing the use of excess fertilizer because it is as expensive as it is unnecessary. Large animal feeding operations looking for a cheap way to dispose of manure by dumping it on the ground year round, even in the dead of winter, may have an economic interest in defeating these controls. But for the rest of us, dead zones in the Bay are an economic, as well as a recreational, disaster."
Today, CPR and the Chesapeake Commons released new interactive map that demonstrates that all but one industrial-scale chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore reported having at least one field saturated with “excessive” soil phosphorus from the spreading of manure. The farmer-reported data comes from the Maryland Department of the Environment.
New, science-based regulations would limit phosphorus application on farms with excessive soil phosphorus readings. The map, which shows soil phosphorus FIVs on fields on which farmers spread manure, demonstrates that the proposed and widely supported phosphorus management tool (PMT) is desperately needed.
“Maryland has a huge stake in restoring the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and it won’t get there without addressing the phosphorus pollution running off of farms,” said Steinzor, “The overwhelming phosphorus saturation along the Eastern Shore, which comes from the farmers themselves, cannot be ignored and Governor-elect Larry Hogan should reverse his opposition to the PMT for the good of the Chesapeake Bay and the millions of people who rely on this national treasure.”
Maryland already derives billions of dollars from the Bay, mainly from tourism, and stands to gain $4.6 billion more annually once the watershed is restored, according to a Chesapeake Bay Foundation report. As part of the Chesapeake Bay-wide pollution diet, a federally led plan to restore the health of the Bay by 2025, Maryland must dramatically reduce water pollutants, including phosphorus. It will not be able to do this without dealing with its excess manure problem. As it stands now, Maryland farms contribute 53 percent of the state’s total phosphorus loading into the Bay, and CAFOs make up a significant part of the problem.
Full text
Recent stories about "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay are a reminder that despite progress on some water pollution fronts, we still have a serious problem to address. One politically popular approach to addressing the problem is a market-based solution, in which hard-to-regulate "non-point" pollution sources (farming, run-off, other sources without a "pollution pipe") and point sources engage in pollution-credit trades. So, for example, an industrial polluter might pay farmers to control run-off of fertilizer, thus reducing the flow of nutrients that cause dead zones. The interesting idea has been tried in some places, but has faltered because very few trades have actually been made, presumably because farmers lack incentive to overcome the challenges of striking deals and then implementing the pollution-control measures. It's just not their area of expertise.
In an op-ed published today in the Houston Chronicle, CPR Member Scholar and University of North Carolina law professor Victor Flatt proposes a novel solution: Independent third-party aggregators who would serve as "market makers." In Flatt's proposal, they would assume the risk of the transaction, making it easier for farmers to simply sign on the dotted line, follow a pollution-control plan, then cash a check. He recently published research on the failings of trading systems in the Houston Law Review, along with his proposal for aggregators.
According to the piece:
In today's political environment, and with issues of agriculture and local control to contend with, no one expects Congress to act, and so the EPA and the states are left to use the legal tools they have under the Clean Water Act to address this problem. To their credit, the EPA and many states have promoted pollution "trades," wherein expensive point-source controls can be replaced with cheaper non-point-source controls.
Paying farmers and other landowners to control runoff is a much cheaper way to reduce pollution than squeezing ever smaller improvements from industrial facilities. This means that more pollution can be controlled at lower overall cost.
Full textToday, the Baltimore Sun published an op-ed by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Public Justice Center attorney Sally Dworak-Fisher entitled, "Maryland's whistleblower laws need teeth."
According to the piece:
Whistleblowers can help identify and put a stop to all sorts of illegal activity, if they're properly protected. Dozens of state and federal laws include provisions intended to shield whistleblowers from retaliatory actions by employers who have been outed. But this piecemeal approach, with different laws enforced by different agencies, is too complicated and has too many holes.
To take the load off of overburdened state investigators, Marylanders need a new law that gives whistleblowers the right to sue employers who retaliate. A comprehensive law with that fail-safe mechanism would be an invaluable tool for promoting better practices at worksites across the state because it would encourage workers to raise red flags when their employers skirt the law and protect them when they have the courage to do so.
To read it in full, click here.
Steinzor is also the author of the recently released book, "Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction."
Full text
Today the President addressed the Business Roundtable on the subject of regulation.
When speaking about revising current regulations, he spoke about the need to keep child labor laws.
According to CPR Executive Director Matt Shudtz:
The President was right to start his remarks with the clear examples of how strong (or to the business lobby, “costly”) regulations save lives and improve the environment. There are hundreds more where they came from, including our labor laws. That’s what makes his later statement about child labor laws so jarring. Keep in mind, this is the same president whose administration pulled back a proposal that would have saved kids from green tobacco poisoning and dangerous farm equipment. He needs to do more than keep the laws on the books—he needs to be moving forward with new rules that address the many hazards that are currently unregulated.
Full textToday is the deadline for comments from the public on EPA's proposed rule to limit carbon emission from existing power plants.
CPR Member Scholar and University of North Carolina School of Law professor Victor Flatt submitted a comment on the rule.
According to his comments:
What I would like to focus on is suggesting that the agency definitively interpret Section 111(d) to allow states to utilize a greenhouse gas market reduction strategy that allows greenhouse gas reductions to come from any source.
Section 111(d) specifies that the Best System of Emissions Reduction adopted by a state be modeled on the CAA’s section 110, which governs the State Implementation Plans (SIPS). While the EPA has not had cause to consider the direct meaning of this before, I believe that it means that 111(d) provides a hybrid sort of emissions reduction based on proposed emissions reduction at the source, as contemplated by Section 111(b), but also extreme flexibility and state autonomy in selecting such reductions as contemplated for states meeting the NAAQS limits as required by Section 110. The EPA appears to support this interpretation in the body and text of the proposed rule by indicating at several junctures that the states do not have to use the four building blocks in order to meet their target reductions, and that the state can use “any” program that meets the targets, including trading systems in existing programs, such as California’s AB32. Despite this apparent overall flexibility in the rulemaking itself, the technical support documents and the rulemaking itself in several places seem to forbid the possibility of true flexibility in reducing GHGs by noting that reductions must come from the “affected units.”
To read his comments in full click here.
Full textToday, the Supreme Court agreed to review a challenge to an EPA rule to reduce mercury pollution.
The Utility Air Regulatory Group and the National Mining Association, and twenty-one states, appealed an April 2-1 federal appeals court ruling that upheld EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
According to Center for Progressive Reform President and University of Maryland School of Law professor Rena Steinzor:
The Supreme Court’s decision to grant review is lamentable. It’s no surprise that the coal-fired power plants want to overturn EPA’s carefully crafted controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants. But this rule was mandated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments because mercury, in very small quantities, damages brain and nervous system development in children and babies in utero. The rule would control, for the first time, not just mercury but acid gases and heavy metals such as chromium, arsenic, and nickel. Cost-benefit analyses show that each year the rule will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 130,000 asthma attacks, and 3.2 million days when people cannot go to work or school. The electric utility industry, which has never met a public health safeguard that it can tolerate, wants the Supreme Court to micromanage the cost side of this equation, by requiring analysis not required by the Clean Air Act, and turning judges into economists who flyspeck thousands of pages of elaborate, impenetrable calculations. We can only hope the Court will resist that temptation.
Full text
The Board of Directors of the Center for Progressive Reform today announced the selection of Matthew Shudtz as Executive Director of the 12-year-old organization. Shudtz, who succeeds Jake Caldwell, has been Acting Executive Director of CPR since July of this year.
Shudtz joined CPR’s staff in 2006 as a Policy Analyst, and was subsequently promoted to Senior Policy Analyst. His work has focused on OSHA and related workplace health and safety regulations and toxic chemical control and reform. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 CPR reports and publications including, “At the Company’s Mercy: Protecting Contingent Workers from Unsafe Working Conditions,” “Winning Safer Workplaces: A Manual for State and Local Policy Reform,” and “Reforming TSCA: Progressive Principles for Toxic Risk Regulation.” He holds a J.D. from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and a B.S. in Earth and Environmental Engineering from Columbia University.
Full text