A powerful policy tool that puts a price tag on greenhouse gases has reemerged as a flashpoint in the courts and in Congress, the latest development in an ideological tug-of-war that has played out for most of the Biden administration. The White House has been developing updated estimates for the tool, known as the social cost of carbon, since the day President Joe Biden took office. The metric is a dollar estimate of the harm to the economy caused by releasing one ton of planet-warming carbon dioxide, taking into account such variables as lost agricultural productivity, property damages from strong storms, and diminished freshwater availability. The administration hasn’t issued a one-size-fits-all metric for usage across all agencies. Biden signed an executive order in 2021 that directed an interagency working group to publish social costs of carbon, nitrous oxide, and methane by January 2022. But those numbers still aren’t out.
Thousands of warehouse workers across the U.S. are likely regularly exposed to the cancer-linked chemical ethylene oxide. More than half of the country’s medical equipment is sterilized with the compound, which the EPA considers a carcinogen. Ethylene oxide evaporates off the surface of these medical products after they’ve been sterilized, creating potentially dangerous concentrations of air pollution in the buildings where they’re stored. By and large, the EPA does not regulate these buildings — in fact, regulators don’t even know where most of them are. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in charge of worker protection that is known by its acronym, OSHA, has also done relatively little to evaluate worker exposure in these warehouses. But last week, OSHA opened a new investigation into a Georgia warehouse that stores medical devices sterilized with ethylene oxide, raising questions about whether the federal government is beginning to respond more quickly to these risks.
Records and interviews show that the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of large baby formula companies while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard children’s health.
The Biden administration released one of several coming car regulations Tuesday, a clean vehicle formula designed to push automakers to build more fuel-efficient or electric vehicles. The Department of Energy softened its “petroleum equivalency factor” after complaints from the car industry, though environmentalists said the final rule is still strict enough to move auto fleets in a more fuel-efficient direction. Tuesday’s clean car regulation is the first of four rules scheduled that could be announced in the next several weeks to propel the Biden administration’s plan to electrify large parts of the transportation system. EPA is expected to release its tailpipe standards for cars and light-duty trucks as soon as tomorrow, which could result in about two-thirds of new cars being electric by 2032. A similar standard for heavy-duty trucks is expected in the next few weeks.
The Biden administration is unleashing a flurry of regulatory actions that aims to shift the nation toward electric vehicles — with the biggest rule coming Wednesday to set strict limits on climate pollution from passenger cars. The regulation being announced by EPA Administrator Michael Regan, as POLITICO’s E&E News reported last week, would slash greenhouse gases from cars and light trucks in half, while pushing to have electric vehicles make up about two-thirds of new passenger vehicle sales by 2032. It’s the highest-profile rule of four regulations being released in the coming weeks to overhaul the transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of climate pollution.
Policymakers in the United States today are grappling with two major crises: the lack of affordable housing and the looming threat of climate change, to which housing is a significant contributor because of urban sprawl. In response to these challenges, policymakers have loosened aspects of the zoning laws that govern the structures and activities permissible on a piece of land. But according to some scholars, these reforms may not have the effect that policymakers intend. In a recent article, Christopher Serkin, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, and Kelsea Best, an assistant professor at The Ohio State University, argue that to address the environmental and housing crises, relaxed zoning laws must result in housing growth and greater density in urban areas. They find, however, that density is correlated with more intensive zoning, not less.
The Biden administration has banned use of the most common type of asbestos. The EPA rule is part of President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, a whole-of-government effort aiming to end cancer. Asbestos exposure causes lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer and laryngeal cancer and is tied to 40,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, according to the agency. The rule sets in motion a phaseout of the last type of asbestos still used in the United States and previously banned in more than 50 countries. EPA said the rule on asbestos, known as the “poster child” for failed U.S. chemical policy, marks a major milestone for chemical safety and acknowledged the ban is “long overdue.”
Federal judges have temporarily halted a landmark new climate reporting rule, sidelining efforts by Wall Street’s top regulator to uncover the risks U.S. corporations and their investors face from rising global temperatures. Judges of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided Friday with two fracking companies that had asked for an emergency stay of the “expansive and novel requirements” that they say the Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed on them. The companies’ preliminary victory could spell legal trouble for the SEC rule, which faces court challenges from the energy industry and environmentalists. The rule — a first-of-its-kind effort to require public companies to start reporting a raft of new climate-related information to investors — has drawn lawsuits from industry groups and environmentalists.
This election year, as Americans on different sides of political issues shout past one another, the “voices” of artificial intelligence programs could have a great say in who gets elected to federal office. Advances in generative artificial intelligence, experts warn, could unleash a wave of misinformation and propaganda this coming U.S. presidential election cycle, threatening American democracy. It may seem self-evident that the U.S. Congress has the mandate to address the problem and, in fact, several national lawmakers have proposed bills to combat false or misleading AI-generated “speech.” But the First Amendment might stop these lawmakers in their tracks. The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” “Speech,” as the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the term, refers not just to the written or spoken word, but also to art, films, parades, and other forms of expression. Until now, courts have applied the free speech clause to forbid government restrictions on human expression. But given that the First Amendment protects speech generally, rather than speakers, there is no textual basis for applying different rules depending on the source of speech, natural or artificial.
Litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court has become the right wing’s genteel alternative to open rebellion. The three newest justices, who gave the Court a conservative supermajority, were installed in their posts precisely for the purpose of neutralizing the government. Billionaire-funded advocates declare that the United States is a “shell” of a republic and concede that their goal is to topple the government as it stands. One lawyer helping to wage this assault admits to preferring the Supreme Court as a venue for momentous change because it is “more efficient” than working through the electoral branches of government. This radical judicial project is well underway. Based on an aggressive and controversial vision of the constitutional separation of powers, the reconfigured Court, spurred on by well-heeled litigants, has already dramatically changed the structure and authority of the federal government. With each new case, the Court has enlarged its own power while shrinking the power of the other institutions of government.
On March 8, the Biden administration took a major step towards curtailing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by publishing its expansive rule to reduce the potent climate pollutant. First announced in early December by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan at the United Nations climate talks in Dubai, the rule is scheduled to take effect 60 days after publication, or sometime in May. According to the EPA, the final rule will avoid an estimated 58 million tons of methane emissions from 2024 to 2038. That’s nearly 80 percent less than projected methane emissions without the rule, and the equivalent of 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) — nearly equal to CO2 emissions from U.S. power plants in 2021. The rule will also avoid 16 million tons of smog-forming volatile organic compound emissions and 590,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants tied to cancer and other health risks, according to EPA.
Federal land managers have sparked a heated debate about recreation in some of this country’s most wild places with a proposed overhaul of rules governing rock climbing on public lands, angering both wilderness advocates and climbers alike. At issue for the National Park Service and Forest Service, which released draft guidance for managers four months ago, are the small metal anchor bolts used to make climbs safer but that are oftentimes left behind in national parks and forests. Some wilderness groups regard the anchors that climbers drill into rocks as a clear violation of federal law, noting that there are 20,000 bolts just at Joshua Tree National Park in California, with roughly 30 percent of those on rocks in officially designated wilderness areas. By definition, those areas are supposed to be “untrammeled by man.”
EPA on Thursday announced new regulations to slash releases of a cancer-causing compound used by dozens of medical equipment sterilization plants, often located in heavily populated and marginalized communities. The final rule is the latest of a series for various industries, including many chemical manufacturers, to account for a 2016 finding that ethylene oxide was much more dangerous than previously thought. The rule, stronger in some respects than a draft released last year, will eventually cut emissions of ethylene oxide by sterilization facilities by more than 90 percent, according to an agency forecast. Many of those plants are located in neighborhoods or near schools. When the new regulations are fully in effect, EPA predicts that they will reduce the lifetime cancer risk for all nearby residents below a key Clean Air Act threshold of one additional cancer case per 10,000 people.
Amid a difficult year for North Atlantic right whales, a proposed rule to help protect them is one step closer to reality. Earlier this month, a proposal to expand speed limits for boats — one of the leading causes of death for the endangered whales — took a key step forward: It’s now under review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the last stage of federal review. Fewer than 360 of the whales remain; only about 70 of them are females of reproductive age. Every individual whale is considered vital to the species’ survival, but since 2017 right whales have been experiencing what scientists call an “unusual mortality event,” during which 39 whales have died. Human actions — including climate change — are killing them.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) continues to work on six economically significant rulemakings, including developing a workplace violence prevention rule, according to a March 14 Department of Labor (DOL) Federal Register notice. An earlier DOL notice omitted a listing of the department’s regulatory flexibility items on its semiannual regulatory agenda.
In the blink of an eye, $40 billion in life savings, home down payments, and investment portfolios disappeared in the cryptocurrency collapse of 2022. For policymakers, the crypto market failure underscored serious issues of fraud, deception, and unfair business practices in the digital asset space. In an article, Sarah Hammer, legal scholar and an executive director at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Brett Hemenway Falk, director of the Crypto and Society Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that regulators should adopt new cryptocurrency standards to protect investors from predatory digital currency practices. Hammer and Hemenway Falk recommend a three-prong approach to improve consumer protection while maintaining industry innovation.
A federal district court’s invalidation of a National Labor Relations Board regulation on joint employer liability under federal labor law presents the board with several potential responses—including treading into untested legal territory. The NLRB’s possible paths include appealing the decision, initiating new notice-and-comment rulemaking to rescind the Trump-era joint employer rule that’s currently in effect, and refusing to acquiesce to the judge’s ruling outside of his judicial district, the Eastern District of Texas. Those options don’t seem to be mutually exclusive.
For decades, activists seeking to improve the fate of workers have argued that the U.S. Congress should amend the National Labor Relations Act—a critical law that protects employees in forming unions. But are these advocates wasting their energy? Yes, according to some scholars. In an article for the Missouri Law Review, law professors Leonard Bierman, Rafael Gely, and William B. Gould IV argue that statutory labor reform may be a pipe dream in the current legislative and judicial climates. Instead, Bierman and his coauthors contend that a more realistic avenue for reform is through changes to union election rules.
Amateur investors outmaneuvered Wall Street professionals by inflating the price of GameStop stock during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing a boom in the underperforming stock and a shift in Wall Street power dynamics. Eventually, though, professional investors regained their influence over the financial system, and GameStop’s stock popularity dwindled. This “meme stock” phenomenon—where amateur investors influenced by online communities cause stock prices to surge—highlights a divide between average Americans and the public institutions meant to serve them. And this divide stems in part from the disconnect between regulators and the regulated, according to one scholar. In a forthcoming article, Cristie Ford of the University of British Columbia Peter A. Allard School of Law, proposes an alternative regulatory system that centers the needs of real people over industry players to address the existing disconnect between the regulatory system and the public.
EPA’s rule to limit methane emissions from the oil and gas sector may be the latest battleground over whether the agency is exceeding its authority to regulate planet-warming emissions. The rule is part of a suite of regulatory actions by the Biden administration to address climate change. Methane is a particularly useful target for quickly stemming the rise of global temperatures because the potent greenhouse gas has about 80 times the heat-trapping capability of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. EPA published the rule Friday in the Federal Register. Lawsuits are already rolling in.
On his Brooklyn stoop, Marcel Bichotte could hold notes on his saxophone for what felt like hours. Bichotte was an accomplished musician with the big-band group Super Jazz des Jeunes, or Jazz of the Young, in his native Haiti. In the 1960s, he moved to the U.S., where he had day jobs in textiles and security. In New York, he started smoking menthol cigarettes. His daughter, New York Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, said he smoked a pack a day. The long notes ended after her father became addicted to menthols, she said. He developed debilitating respiratory problems and died at age 73 from lung and throat cancer. Bichotte Hermelyn sees her father's death as a targeted strike on a Black man in a community targeted for years by the makers of menthol cigarettes. The Brooklyn lawmaker is backing a measure to ban the sale of menthols and other flavored tobacco products in her state as the Biden administration stalls on a separate plan to ban menthols nationwide. Both the New York and the federal ban face opposition from the deep-pocketed tobacco industry and civil rights groups, who fear a ban will prompt a crackdown on vendors and smokers.
The White House is reviewing a Labor Department retirement advice proposal expected to put tough new limits on Wall Street banks and insurers, the latest signal that a final rule could be nearing release. DOL’s Employee Benefits Security Administration sent the Retirement Security Rule to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs late on March 8. OIRA clearance is the last step in the regulatory process before a proposed regulation can be fully finalized. The rule, first issued on Nov. 3, would subject more financial professionals to the strictest fiduciary standards of conduct under common trust law and federal benefits statutes, threatening the commissions broker-dealers make on trades.
Norfolk Southern alone will be responsible for paying for the cleanup after last year’s fiery train derailment in eastern Ohio, a federal judge ruled. The decision issued Wednesday threw out the railroad’s claim that the companies that made chemicals that spilled and owned tank cars that ruptured should share the cost of the cleanup. An assortment of chemicals spilled and caught fire after the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, 2023. Three days later, officials blew open five tank cars filled with vinyl chloride because they feared those cars might explode. Residents still worry about potential health consequences from those chemicals. The Atlanta-based railroad has said the ongoing cleanup from the derailment has already cost it more than $1.1 billion. That total continues to grow, though EPA officials have said they expect the cleanup to be finished at some point later this year. U.S. District Judge John Adams said that ruling that other companies should share the cost might only delay the resolution of the lawsuit that the Environmental Protection Agency and state of Ohio filed against Norfolk Southern. He also said the railroad didn’t show that the derailment was caused by anything the other companies could control.
The Biden administration is expected to soon release its road map to save the greater sage grouse, which would impose most — but not all — of the Obama-era restrictions to block oil drilling and other activities near the imperiled bird’s habitat, according to people familiar with the plan. How to save the grouse — the roly-poly bird known for its elaborate spring mating dance — has long been one of the most contentious issues in the West. The trade-offs are stark: Protecting the bird’s sagebrush habitat often means limiting drilling, renewable energy projects, mining and livestock grazing on wide swaths of land. After years of negotiations with environmentalists, state leaders and industries that operate on federal land, the Obama administration in 2015 came out with its plan to safeguard the most sensitive grouse habitat across 10 states. Then in 2019 the Trump administration rewrote those regulations, giving states more leeway to greenlight projects near grouse breeding grounds. Now the Biden administration is poised to offer its compromise. It potentially could frustrate both conservationists who want to see the strongest possible protections, as well as state leaders and industry advocates who warn of the economic fallout for Western communities if restrictions are too stringent.
Ground cinnamon sold by U.S. discount retailers is contaminated with high levels of lead and should be discarded, federal health officials said Wednesday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said cinnamon sold by stores including the Dollar Tree and Family Dollar contains lead at levels that could be unsafe for people, particularly children, with prolonged exposure to the spice. The agency urged suppliers to recall the products voluntarily. Cinnamon products included in the agency’s safety alert include the La Fiesta brand sold by La Superior and SuperMercados; Marcum brand sold by Save A Lot stores; MK brands sold by SF Supermarket; Swad brand sold by Patel Brothers; El Chilar brand sold by La Joya Morelense; and Supreme Tradition brand sold by Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores.
