Regs Talk: The CSS Blog
Blogs are authored by CSS members and policy experts, and have been reprinted with permission.
The Trump Administration Is Poised to Gut Environmental Review. What’s at Stake?
By Sally Hardin and Claire Moser, Center for American Progress In the coming weeks, the Trump administration is poised to make some major changes to how much—or more likely, how little—environmental review and public input is required for federal projects, including for roads and bridges, oil and gas development, and pipeline construction. In yet another handout to Trump’s corporate […]
Courts Matter for Workers
By Alliance for Justice Retail and service jobs can be brutal on the best days, and the holidays exacerbate the mistreatment of working people. For many people who are just trying to get by, the only options for work are service-based jobs that pay federal minimum wage during the year with the only pay increase […]
This Year’s Defense Bill Has Important Public Health Protections
By Erik D. Olson and Katie Hobbs, Natural Resources Defense Council Congress has reached an agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2020 (NDAA), after a tense year of negotiation. The final bill will, we believe, deliver substantial public health benefits. It does not include every measure we will ultimately need and several key […]
Pesticides, Heat, and the People Who Feed Us: Climate Change Is Making Farmworkers’ Dangerous Job Even Worse
By Rafter Ferguson, Union of Concerned Scientists In a new report released this week, we show that climate change poses dire threats to farmworkers. While conversations around agriculture and climate change have increasingly focused on the devastating impacts of extreme weather, or ways in which farmers might help fight climate change, the farmworkers that are the backbone […]
EPA Science Advisors Fail to Reach Consensus on Particulate Pollution Standards
By Gretchen Goldman, Union of Concerned Scientists This week I’m at the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) meeting in North Carolina and an expected but disappointing outcome has just occurred: The committee has failed to reach consensus recommendations for the EPA head on the particulate matter (PM) standards, thus putting the nail in the […]
Communities Face Harm When the EPA Dismantles Chemical Safety Protections
By Anita Desikan, Union of Concerned Scientists If chemical facilities are regularly catching on fire or exploding in your neighborhood – like the recent TPC Group plant chemical fire near Houston that dangerously blazed during the Thanksgiving holiday – you would want the government to do something about it. You would want to know what is going […]
Enough Is Enough! It’s Time for the FTC to Protect Consumers From Deceptive Automatic Renewal Clauses
By Brian Young, National Consumers League If you’re like most Americans ,you have probably had a bad experience with an automatic renewal or—as they are sometimes referred to—a negative option clause. Regardless of the name they go by, these clauses cause contracts and subscriptions (ranging from equipment leases to gym memberships) to renew if a consumer fails to cancel the […]
Court Hears Challenge to EPA Science Advice Ban
By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists UCS’s lawsuit challenging the EPA’s policy banning anyone who has received agency funding from sitting on advisory committees got a hearing today in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts. UCS and co-plaintiff Dr. Elizabeth A. (Lianne) Sheppard, a professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health, […]
Why (Some) Automakers Are Working with the Trump Administration to Undermine the Clean Air Act
By Dave Cooke, Union of Concerned Scientists The Los Angeles Auto Show is just wrapping up, but while my colleague Dave Reichmuth was there getting a sneak peek at what the next couple years have in store, California’s emissions regulators were absent for the first time in 50 years. The reason? It is all too apparent that automakers […]
No More Coal Ash Toxics in Our Waters!
By Larissa Liebmann, Waterkeeper Alliance For decades, coal-fired power plants have profited from being allowed to dump unlimited amounts of toxic coal ash pollutants into our waterways, pushing the cost of their dirty industry on communities and the waterways they use. In 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally issued a regulation that […]
EPA “Action” on Toxic Chemicals: Thanks, But No Thanks
By Daniel Rosenberg, Natural Resources Defense Council The Trump EPA has again shown it intends to do nothing meaningful to protect the public from the whole class of Teflon “forever” chemicals known as PFAS. The chemicals are associated with a wide range of health effects including cancer of the kidneys and testicles, thyroid disease, pregnancy-related […]
Trump’s Newest SNAP Rule Will Leave Families in the Cold
By Sarah Reinhardt, Union of Concerned Scientists As the weather turns colder, many of us are pulling out our bulkiest sweaters and diving headlong into hygge. But as we reach for all of our coziest creature comforts to stay warm this winter, there’s one thing that no one should have to worry about: choosing between our […]
This Thanksgiving, Remember That Hands Grow Your Food
By Alejandro Dávila Fragoso, Earthjustice One morning many years ago, my best friend and I put cameras and microphones in the back of my jeep and drove to the nearest farm field. Our mission was simple yet daunting: document farm work, officially become filmmakers and show our movie in theaters as soon as possible. We were young and […]
Automakers Can Build Better Cars, But We Need Strong Standards to Make Them
By Dave Cooke, Union of Concerned Scientists The Trump administration is looking to finalize its rollback of vehicle efficiency and emission standards by the end of the year. The exact level of the standard is expected to be somewhere between “complete and total abdication of responsibility” and “essentially worthless”—and no matter where it lands, it will not be […]
The Trump Administration’s Hazy Plans to Weaken Car Pollution Standards Won’t Work. Here’s Why.
By Paul Cort, Earthjustice The future of the nation’s clean car protections is on the table, and Andrew Wheeler, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is moving forward with a plan that will unleash tailpipe pollution across the country. On Nov. 22, Earthjustice and Sierra Club, together with a broad coalition of public health […]
The EPA’s ‘Censored Science’ Rule Isn’t Just Bad Policy, It’s Also Illegal
By James Goodwin, Center for Progressive Reform The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) appears poised to take the next step in advancing its dangerous “censored science” rulemaking with the pending release of a supplemental proposal. The EPA presumably intends for this action to respond to criticism of the many glaring errors and shortcomings in its original proposal, hastily […]
Selling Out Safety
By Tom Conway, United Steelworkers The March 2005 fire and explosions at BP’s Texas City, Texas, oil refinery killed 15 contractors and injured 180 other workers in ways that will haunt them forever. Some lost limbs. Others suffered horrific burns, head injuries or wounds that left them infertile. Still others live with the memory of injured co-workers […]
States Should Be Allowed to Protect Their Residents From Dirty Tailpipe Emissions
By Natural Resources Defense Council Striking back against the Trump administration’s attack on clean cars, NRDC and a coalition of environmental groups sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today for blocking California and other states from enforcing their own stronger vehicle pollution standards. “The authority of California and other states to set clean car standards was […]
Why UCS Is Suing Trump Over Car Standards
By Ken Kimmell, Union of Concerned Scientists On September 27, the Trump administration issued a new rule that purports to take away the right of California and thirteen other states to cut carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light duty trucks and require increasing percentages of new car sales to be electric vehicles or other […]
Better Markets Opposes the CFTC’s Continued Deregulation Endangering the Financial System
By Better Markets On Monday, Better Markets filed a comment letter on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) proposed exemption from certain U.S. regulations for certain derivatives clearinghouses organized outside of the United States. Despite the CFTC’s naming convention—”alternative compliance”—the proposal is not a means to comply with U.S. law at all, but rather, an explicit and […]