The Capital of Annapolis reported recently on the alarmingly low penalties assessed by the Maryland Department of Environment for massive spills of raw sewage—containing a mix of untreated human, residential, agricultural, and industrial wastewater—into the state's waters. This article supports one of the key findings from CPR’s report, Failing the Bay: Clean Water Act Enforcement in Maryland Falling Short, released earlier this year. These low penalties, sometimes “about the same as a speeding ticket,” do not and cannot serve as the basis of an effective, deterrence-based enforcement program—precisely what is needed to compel compliance with the Clean Water Act and state water quality laws.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Douglas Kysar has an opinion piece in the Guardian making the case for Carbon Upsets. Upsets, you ask? That is:
Full textRather than award credits based on development that moves us toward a cleaner but still very dirty future, why not award credits to legal and political actions that have more dramatic impact? For instance, rather than bribe fossil fuel companies to stop flaring natural gas, why not reward indigenous groups that entirely block new exploration activities? Rather than transfer money to logging operations for incremental replanting programs, why not award credits to forest-dwelling communities that successfully fight to stop logging altogether?
The below is testimony (PDF) given today by CPR President Rena Steinzor at the EPA's public hearing on coal ash regulation. The hearing, in Arlington, VA, is the first of seven; the public comment period has been extended to November 19. See CPR on Twitter for updates from the hearing.
We are all familiar with the psychological studies that have become a cottage industry at American universities. Consider this one. A presumably dead cockroach is “medically sterilized”—and I honestly do not know what that means—and then dipped into a glass of juice in front of a group of people. The purpose: to gauge the test subjects’ willingness to drink the juice after the cockroach is removed. To the researchers apparent surprise, the people—all victims of an irrational phenomenon known as “stigma effect”—would not drink the juice, although they were willing to take a sip if the cockroach was merely laid to rest peacefully beside the glass, as opposed to dunked inside it. As amazing, they refused to drink the dunker juice, even if it was placed in a freezer for one year or the cockroach was dipped in the juice very, very quickly. So, conclude the researchers, “while shunning may have evolved from an adaptive response to avoid contaminated food, it can be triggered in inappropriate circumstances.”
Now why on earth am I bringing up this bizarre experiment in the context of this perfectly staid hearing on a hyper-technical EPA rulemaking proposal, which covers—count ‘em—138 pages in the Federal Register, leaving many supposedly more relevant points to be addressed by witnesses today? I am telling you the cockroach story because it is at the root of the reasons why the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) mangled this rulemaking, constructing a fanciful but deadly cost-benefit analysis that predicts negative net benefits of as much as $239 billion if EPA regulates coal ash appropriately, as a special waste under subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Or, to put it more bluntly, electric utility executives who generate 136 million tons of coal ash annually will squander $239 billion of the nation’s resources over the next 50 years because, suffering from the stigma effect, they will send millions of tons of the stuff to lined landfills rather than dumping it in road beds and mine shafts.
Full textThe past year has certainly had disappointments for people who care about protecting the environment. A major international conference on global climate change yielded no sweeping agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States Senate declined to pass comprehensive climate change legislation, and residents of Louisiana and other states bordering the Gulf of Mexico suffered the ill effects of a long-running, disastrous offshore oil spill. One recent—far more sanguine—development development should not be overlooked, however: the decision of a special district in Florida, the South Florida Water Management District, to purchase a large tract of land for use in the treatment and storage of surface water. The deal was approved by the District earlier this month and cleared one of its final legal challenges on Monday.
The “sugar deal,” as it is known to many Floridians, represents a significant victory for the environmentalists and scientists who seek to protect the fragile, endangered Everglades. Under the plan, the Water Management District will pay $197 million for 26,800 acres of land owned by U.S. Sugar Corporation, a major sugar grower in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) situated south of Lake Okeechobee and north of the “river of grass.” The District was also given an option to purchase the remainder of U.S. Sugar’s EAA property—more than 100,000 additional acres--if and when the District’s property tax revenues increase.
To understand the significance of this major land purchase, one must consider the history of its evolution. In the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists drew up plans to restore the Everglades, they noted the critical importance of converting some of the farmland in the EAA to use as a water treatment and storage area. The problem, as those scientists saw it, was that the water flowing into the Everglades from EAA agricultural operations contained such excessively high levels of nutrient contaminants that it had to be captured and treated. Moreover, under the prevailing arrangement, there was frequently a need to divert oversupplies of water into nearby rivers and the Everglades itself. This situation did (and continues to do) considerable damage to the Calusa and St. Lucie estuaries and to the natural systems of the Everglades themselves.
Full textLast 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."
Full text
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 textCross-posted from Flatt Out Environmental.
As expected, the EPA's "tailoring rule," under which it proposes to regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA) only if they produce over 75,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent forcing per year, has been challenged in court by numerous organizations. These include industry, several states (the usual suspects including Texas), and more surprisingly several environmental organizations.
The crux of industry and state challenges to the tailoring rule is that it is illegal pure and simple. Specifically, the challenges note that the CAA requires that when the EPA regulates stationary sources under the CAA, that it do so for sources that emit over either 100 or 250 tons per year. Of course, industry doesn't really want all of these smaller sources regulated, but they want to make it virtually impossible for EPA to regulate at all. If the EPA had to regulate all of these small sources, regulation would be virtually impossible. (EPA's primary argument for the legality of the tailoring rule is a doctrine known as "administrative impossibility"). Even if the EPA tried to, Congress would surely take action then to suspend the regulation (something that it has not been able to do so far, though several Senators have tried).
The environmental organizations take the other tack, claiming that while they don't oppose "tailoring" out small sources, that the level is not small enough. (They prefer 25,000 tons per year).
Full text
Guest Blogger: Liz Borkowski