Environmental Protection Agency
sb admin | May 1, 2008The Chicago Tribune has just reported that Mary Gade, the Bush administrationâs top environmental regulator in the Midwest, has been forced to quit her job after months of efforts to get Dow Chemicals to clean up dioxin contamination around its Michigan headquarters. The Tribuneâs Michael Hawthorne explains:
Gade, a former corporate attorney appointed by Bush in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last year to force Dow to clean up four hot spots of dioxin, including the largest amount of the cancer-causing chemical ever recorded in the United States.
In January, Dow urged officials at…
sb admin | April 29, 2008On the heels of the Union of Concerned Scientistsâ report on political interference with EPA scientists, the Government Accountability Office reports that the White House Office of Management and Budget is taking a major and non-transparent role in EPA toxic chemical assessments.
At issue is the agency's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which contains EPAâs scientific position on the potential human health effects of chemicals. There are 540 chemicals in the system now, but the process of adding them has slowed in recent years, and now thereâs a backlog of 70 chemicals. This…
sb admin | April 24, 2008The Union of Concerned Scientists has released another disturbing report about political interference with government science. For Interference at the EPA, they surveyed EPA scientists from all of the agencyâs scientific program offices and 10 regional offices, and from more than a dozen research laboratories, to learn about the extent and type of political interference with EPA science. Like UCS's previous investigations on the Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and federal climate scientists, this one found significant…
sb admin | April 3, 2008One year ago yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that EPA must formally declare whether greenhouse gases could harm human health, and if they find that they do, regulate automobile greenhouse-gas emissions. Last week, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson revealed the Bush administrationâs response to the Courtâs requirement: theyâre going to drag their feet some more, using the excuse of more information-gathering.
Eighteen states, led by Massachusetts, have responded by filing a petition in federal court, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington to order the EPA to make its determination…
sb admin | March 20, 2008In a welcome contrast to the disappointing ozone rule the agency announced last week, EPA has issued tougher air-pollution standards for diesel locomotives and marine engines. When fully implemented in 2030, the new standards will reduce particulate matter pollution by 90% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%. The new standards only cover ships traveling on inland waterways and between U.S. ports â which means that LA and Long Beach residents will still be breathing lots of pollution from international cargo ships â but EPA estimates that its benefits will still be substantial:
When fully…
sb admin | March 13, 2008EPA has set the limit for pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 ppb, despite the unanimous advice of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee to set it between 60-70 ppb (more here on the health effects of ozone). This is hardly a surprise, given the Bush Administrationâs record. But in this case, itâs apparently not enough to make a single standard insufficiently protective; administration officials have decided to take on the rulemaking requirements of the Clean Air Act. The Washington Postâs Juliet Eilperin explains:
Administrator Stephen L. Johnson also said he would push Congress…
sb admin | March 12, 2008In the largest Superfund cleanup settlement ever, W.R. Grace has agreed to pay $250 million to cover government investigation and cleanup costs associated with the asbestos-laden ore the company mined in Libby, Montana.
EPA has already spent roughly $168 million removing asbestos-contaminated soils and other dangerous materials, EPA Emergency Coordinator Paul Peronard told the Missoulian. He estimates that it will take another $175 million to get to the point where cleanup efforts are considered a success â which doesnât mean that the town will be entirely clean. EPA cleanup efforts started…
sb admin | February 29, 2008Weâve written before about the problems with conflicts of interest on EPA scientific advisory panels. In particular, we think scientists working for product defense firms, whose money comes from clients seeking to avoid regulation of their products, ought to be barred from such panels. Now, a group is raising concerns about bias on an EPA panel reviewing the brominated flame retardant deca â but the charge comes from an industry group thatâs concerned about the state-government scientist chairing the panel, and the EPA has acceded quickly to their wishes.
The LA Timesâ Marla Cone reports:…
sb admin | February 28, 2008The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that Californiaâs regulation of pollution from ships using its port is pre-empted by the Clean Air Act, and thus requires a waiver from the EPA. This is bad news for the state, since the last time it requested a waiver from EPA, the agency delayed for a long time and then denied the request â against the advice of its legal and scientific staff.
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Ships arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are a major source of the particulates, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur that make the regionâs air so unhealthy. (The ports are…
sb admin | February 20, 2008As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but thatâs not the whole story. Itâs also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply arenât strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems weâre facing and offer…
sb admin | February 12, 2008Forbes has created a âMisery Measureâ to rank the countryâs 150 biggest metro areas, and I wasnât surprised to see Detroit awarded the title of Most Miserable City. What did surprise me, though, was one of the factors Forbes considered: number of Superfund sites. Kudos to them for acknowledging that hazardous waste has a way of interfering with residentsâ happiness.
The article doesnât go into detail about Superfund misery; for that, we can look at an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, which discovered that site cleanups are dragging, companies are forking over less to clean up…
sb admin | February 1, 2008When the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced its Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) in 2003, it had what sounded like a worthwhile goal: get federal agencies to evaluate how well they do their jobs, in order to assure that taxpayer money is used efficiently. Like so much that comes out of the Bush White House, though, PARTÂ consumes too much agency time to produce something of questionable utility.
An âineffectiveâ rating can have serious adverse consequences for agencies and programs, so when the Environmental Protection Agency had particular difficulty…
sb admin | January 22, 2008By Les LeopoldÂ
If you need a quick snooze, read a US Government Accountability Office report with its carefully parsed prose. But lost in the holiday rush was a December GAO report that could keep you awake as it bashes the Bush administrationâs effort to water down the community Right to Know regulations that provide us with potentially life-saving information about the use, storage and release of toxic substances. These regulations require that companies make detailed reports which form the Toxics Release Inventory â an accessible public database on the quantity of toxic chemicals on…
sb admin | January 8, 2008Remember how EPA library closures and record purges were threatening public access to important environmental information? Now Congress is requiring the agency to restore library services, reports Katherine Boyle of Greenwire:
U.S. EPA must craft plans to reopen regional libraries shuttered from a Bush administration cost-cutting effort under a provision in the agency's fiscal 2008 budget.
Congress allocated nearly $3 million for restoring library services and requires the agency to report its progress to lawmakers within three months.
At issue are EPA libraries that were closed in Chicago,…
sb admin | December 20, 2007EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has denied Californiaâs petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucksâagainst the advice of technical and legal staff, reports the Washington Postâs Juliet Eilperin. Governor Schwarzenegger says his state will sue over the decision, and EPA lawyers and staff predict California will win that suit (just as states have won previous related suits).
Johnson claims that Californiaâs proposed tailpipe emissions standards arenât necessary, anyway, because the Energy Bill thatâs just been approved will boost fuel economy standards to a comparable…
sb admin | December 13, 2007If you live near a facility that releases between 500 and 2,000 pounds of a toxic chemical each year, you may be about to lose your access to important information about what you and your neighbors are potentially exposed to. Thatâs because EPA has changed its Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements, raising the level at which facilities have to start detailed reporting on the release of designated chemicals from 500 pounds to 2,000. (More on the TRI and why it's important here.) Thanks to the new rule, more than 3,500 facilities will be able to skip filing more than 22,000 TRI…
sb admin | November 13, 2007At last week's annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the organization adopted more than a dozen new policy resolutions which will guide its work into the future. Included among them was a call for "Congress to fundamentally restructure the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA)" so that more attention is paid to the toxic and ecotoxic properties of chemicals in commerce.
 APHA's policy resolution on TSCA* describes the limitations of the existing law, echoing assessments made by other groups. In 2005 and 2006, for example, the Government Accountability…
sb admin | October 15, 2007Today is Blog Action Day, when bloggers around the world post about environmental topics. It seems like a good time to take a look at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has been in the news lately.
Late last month, as Carol Leonnig reported in the Washington Post, EPA issued new national water regulations that it said will help reduce lead in drinking water, keep utilities honest in testing for lead and warn the public when water poses a health risk.
That sounds good, right? EPA is doing its job to keep our air and water healthy and clean. Itâs too bad that other recent news…
sb admin | October 1, 2007Last week, the U.S. EPA issued a new regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to help reduce the amount of lead contained in consumers' tap water. The new rule amends a 1991 EPA's "Lead and Copper Rule" by requiring improved monitoring and replacement of lead-service lines, and providing more complete information to consumers (by water utilities) so they receive more timely and useful information about lead contamination in their drinking water.
As reported by the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig, changes to EPA's Lead and Copper rule were prompted by a
"lead crisis in the…
sb admin | August 30, 2007By Liz BorkowskiÂ
Here in the U.S., people seem to like the idea of our government ensuring that weâve got clean air, clean water, and healthy workplaces, and that our exposure to toxic substances is limited. However, we also keep electing politicians who make it hard for federal agencies to ensure these things.
Weâve written before about problems at OSHA, where workers suffer from preventable harm while officials emphasize voluntary compliance at the expense of standard-setting, and at FDA, where a rush to review new drug applications leaves post-market drug safety under-resourced. While…