Government rulemaking takes place with everything on the record in a public docket, right? Well ... actually not. EnergyWire reporter Mike Soraghan revealed in an April 12, 2013 story that presidential aide Heather Zichal met more than 20 times with industry groups lobbying on the proposed rule for fracking on federal lands.
News stories about the April 17, 2013, explosion of a fertilizer storage plant in the town of West, Texas that killed 15 people have so far focused on the plant operator's risk-disclosure failure, instead of the likely fact that government agencies knew the nature and magnitude of the hazard — or should have known. The bigger story is the regulatory failure — and industry's decades-long campaign to keep the public ignorant of the threats they face. Photo: AP/LM Otero/Available through Creative Commons.
"A federal appeals court ruled today that U.S. EPA's 2011 retroactive veto of a major West Virginia mountaintop-removal mining project was legal."
"WASHINGTON, DC -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must meet a court-ordered deadline to issue regulations that clean up power plant water pollution, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled [Tuesday]. The decision turns back an attempt by the utility industry to avoid the financial and operational burdens of the regulations."
"Supreme Court justices on Tuesday wrestled with the sensitive issue of whether a thirsty Texas water district has the right to access water across the Oklahoma state line."
"Wisconsin Power & Light Co. and three other utilities will spend $1.2 billion to clean up coal-fired power plants and shut down older plants under a settlement announced Monday with federal regulators."
"As the Obama administration launches a broad investigation of flame retardants used in furniture and other household goods, the nation's top environmental regulators are running into the limitations of a federal law that makes it practically impossible to ban hazardous chemicals."
InvestigateWest's Robert McClure and Jason Alcorn explain how to spin the local angle about how parks built or improved with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund are increasingly being illegally privatized or converted to something other than parks — including sharing their searchable database of almost 40,000 park grants.
"TALLAHASSEE -- The state of Florida filed a lawsuit Saturday against the oil company BP and the cement contractor Halliburton over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, becoming the fourth state to seek damages for the 2010 disaster."
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