What’s in Your Juice?
NPR reported yesterday about a study by Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) of lead (that's right, lead) in juices and packaged fruits marketed for kids. The group purchased single serving packages of juice and fruits and sent them to an EPA-certified laboratory for testing. According to NPR, the group discovered that "[m]any individual servings of apple juice, grape juice, packaged peaches and pears and fruit cocktail . . . contained lead above the daily limit...
CONTINUE READING“Murky” Resolution Vote
The Senate voted today on Sen. Murkowski's resolution to halt EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. The resolution was defeated by47 to 53. What are we to make of the vote? The resolution was offered under the Congressional Review Act, which provides a fast-track mechanism for Congress to override agency regulations. (The CRA, which was part of the Contract with America in the 1990s, is a substitute for the kinds of "legislative vetoes" that the Supreme Court has f...
CONTINUE READINGReforming the Reforms: Building Safe Alternatives into Safety Standards
Chemical policy reform is heating up at the federal level. Senator Lautenberg has introduced a comprehensive reform bill in the Senate, and Congressmen Rush and Waxman are circulating a discussion draft bill in the House. In their current form, both the Lautenberg bill and the Rush/Waxman discussion draft rely upon risk-based safety standards to protect against toxic chemicals. Although this approach has clear advantages over the existing process under the Toxic Su...
CONTINUE READINGProp 16 Defeated
Prop 16 was a California ballot measure designed to make it harder for local governments to get into the market as electricity sellers. A CLEE White Paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the proposal. Prop 16 was defeated by 52-48%. PG&E and its parent company had spent $46 million to push the measure, while opponents spent virtually nothing. Apparently vote buying has its limits, even in the bizarre world of California popular democracy....
CONTINUE READINGA Corporate Culture of Criminal Recklessness?
That Washington Post has a detailed story that details BP's culture of carelessness: Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations -- from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them. What's most disturbing in the story is BP's history of filing false reports and suppressing worker ...
CONTINUE READINGBP’s pollution: not just the oil spill, according to The Onion
I can't resist pointing out this article from America's Finest News Source, The Onion, about the BP spill (continuing Dan's introduction of off-color expressions into Legal Planet). The Onion mocks BP's handling of the oil spill by characterizing the company as spewing out something else rather vile (a common expression for insincere or deceitful talk) from its corporate headquarters. Part of what makes this funny (and even more so, part of what makes it sad) is th...
CONTINUE READINGReflections on the BP disaster and today’s Bhopal criminal verdict
As Dan has pointed out, there has been discussion of possible criminal liability for BP for its conduct leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. David Uhlmann of the University of Michigan, a former federal environmental criminal prosecutor, has expressed optimism that a robust criminal prosecution of BP would appropriately punish BP, make it more likely that victims will be compensated, and "send a clear message that an environmental disaster of this magnitude c...
CONTINUE READINGThree Ingredients of Disaster
The N.Y. Times ran a front-page article Sunday about the organizational problems that contributed to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For those who are familiar with the research on the causes of catastrophic accidents, there are few surprises. Deepwater Horizon involved three familiar organizational flaws that are often associated with catastrophic outcomes. The same kinds of organizational failures that led to the collapse of the defective New Orleans levee system d...
CONTINUE READINGEPA proposes general Clean Water Act permit for pesticides
In January 2009, the Sixth Circuit in National Cotton Council v. EPA struck down a Bush-era rule declaring that pesticide application to or over waters was exempt from the Clean Water Act's NPDES permit program, under which a permit is required for any discharge of pollutants to waters of the U.S. from a point source. The effect of that decision was later stayed until June 2011 to allow EPA time to respond. The agency has now issued a draft Pesticides General Permit whic...
CONTINUE READINGSave the Mountain Gorilla!
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, gorillas are a focus of this year's World Environment Day. There are only about seven hundred mountain gorillas in the wild - fewer than the number of students at most law schools. They're split between a group in the Virunga range of volcanoes and one in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. Lowland gorillas seem to be in better shape. Little is known about the Eastern lowlanders, but the western ones (with the wonderful scie...
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