EPA’s draft strategic plan for 2018-2022 represents a dramatic shift in focus to supporting states and tribes as the locus of environmental law implementation and streamlining agency processes to accelerate decisions and increase efficiency. The plan identifies three overarching goals: re-focus EPA on its core mission, restore cooperative federalism and adhere to the “rule of law.” If implemented, the strategic plan should give states latitude to exercise primacy in both policy-setting and implementation of environmental laws.
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Scott Pruitt
Can Superfund Be Reformed to Reduce the Misallocation of Resources?
By Eric J. Murdock on
The Superfund program is much criticized for good reason on many grounds. It takes too long to investigate sites and decide on the appropriate cleanup. The costs for investigation and cleanup actions are excessive. The process is seemingly never-ending as contaminated sites languish on the National Priorities List for decades.
Streamlining the process is a worthwhile goal, but equally important would be reforms to promote remedy decisions that take account of the fact the resources are not unlimited. Money spent on cleanup is not available for another purpose. Unfortunately, because of its single-minded focus on often remote human health and ecological risks associated with exposures to chemical contaminants (usually based on highly conservative exposure assumptions), the Superfund program drives a lot of resources to cleanup that likely would be better allocated to another use.…
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A New Perspective on Regional Haze Regulation?
By Norman W. Fichthorn on
During much of the Obama administration, states and EPA were in conflict about how to craft Clean Air Act plans to reduce “regional haze” impairment of visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. The technical and policy issues are daunting. Regional haze forms in the atmosphere from many sources’ air emissions — emissions from cars and trucks, construction equipment, factories and power plants (among others), plus natural sources like wildfires and dust storms. Developing regional haze implementation plans entails complex policy choices and weighing sometimes heavy compliance costs for emission controls — costs that may total in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — against improvements in visibility that can be hard to measure and in some cases are even imperceptible to the human eye.
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