An amendment introduced by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) would hogtie the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by forcing the agency to wait for public health crises to happen before it could act. "This amendment would require that consumers actually be harmed before FDA can take certain actions to protect the public health,” the agency said.

Rehberg’s amendment, attached to a spending bill that moved out of the House appropriations committee last week, would prohibit the FDA from taking regulatory action on food, medical products, or tobacco unless it has “hard science” showing that a product or substance will harm consumers. The amendment makes a clumsy attempt to define “hard science,” but the intent is clearly to prevent the FDA from taking proactive measures to protect vulnerable people unless and until it can conclusively solve a health or safety mystery – no matter how many bodies pile up or hospital beds fill up in the process. Here is the text:

Sec. 740. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Food and Drug Administration to write, prepare, develop or publish a proposed, interim, or final rule, regulation, or guidance that is intended to restrict the use of a substance or a compound unless the Secretary bases such rule, regulation or guidance on hard science (and not on such factors as cost and consumer behavior), and determines that the weight of toxicological evidence, epidemiological evidence, and risk assessments clearly justifies such action, including a demonstration that a product containing such substance or compound is more harmful to users than a product that does not contain such substance or compound, or in the case of pharmaceuticals, has been demonstrated by scientific study to have none of the purported benefits. 

Michael Taylor, FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods, spoke in opposition to the amendment today. “I think if we waited until the last science was in, I think the public would find that unacceptable because you'd be waiting until people are hurt," Taylor said, according to The Hill. “He gave the example of efforts to prevent contaminated irrigation water that is known to be a hazard even though regulators lack data on how each individual type of produce can affect the public health,” The Hill reports.

“Legislation that would require us to wait until people are hurt in order to take action is counter, in our view, to what public health is all about.”

Environmental standards finalized under the Obama administration are expected to yield extraordinary benefits while imposing relatively small costs on businesses, according to a new paper by the Economic Policy Institute. “The combined annual benefits from all final rules exceed their costs by $32 billion to $142 billion a year,” the paper, Tallying up the Impact of New EPA Rules, concludes.

The EPI paper, written by Isaac Shapiro, examines nine major rules finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the Obama administration. The report adds up the projected costs and projected benefits of all the rules, using both the low-end and high-end estimates provided by EPA. Even if the costs of all nine rules turn out to be at the high-end of EPA’s estimates, and the benefits of all nine rules end up at the low-end, benefits will outweigh costs by $32 billion ($12.5 billion in costs compared to $44.5 billion in estimates), according to the report. Given that a previous EPI report found that agencies often overstate compliance costs when preparing the cost-benefit analyses for rules, the actual “net benefits” are likely to be much higher.

Of course, the real benefits are those to human health. As the EPI report also points out, the environmental standards will save lives, prevent heart attacks, and result in fewer hospital visits and more days at work for those affected by air pollution.

The EPI report is unlikely to dissuade Congressional Republicans of their ridiculous view that environmental regulations are hurting the economy. This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is considering the TRAIN Act, a piece of legislation that would create a closed committee of cabinet secretaries and other high-level officials to scrutinize the impact of EPA standards on the economy. The committee’s review, which would be in addition to the internal reviews EPA already performs and the review conducted by the Office of Management and Budget, would delay public health and environmental standards while giving polluters yet another audience for its anti-regulatory lobbying.

But those of us who believe in the value of environmental protection have the truth on our side. “When fully in effect in 2014, the combined costs of the rules finalized by the Obama administration’s EPA would amount to less than 0.1% of the economy,” the EPI paper says.

Today, the Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel submitted to the governor of West Virginia its report on the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster that killed 29 men in April 2010. Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle blog has a detailed summary. Be sure to read it, especially if you’re going to bypass the 126-page report.

From a regulatory perspective, the bottom-line is this: Massey Energy, the owner of UBB, was a scofflaw – a repeat violator of critical safety standards; but for a variety of reasons, some explicable and some inexplicable, nothing was done to halt the company’s chronically dangerous practices at the Upper Big Branch mine. At a more visceral level, the transgressions and events leading up to and surrounding the disaster are a blow to human dignity.

MSHA clearly could have done more, according to the governor’s report: “Despite MSHA’s considerable authority and resources, its collective knowledge and experience, the disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine is proof positive that the agency failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners.” In the year leading up to the disaster, the UBB mine was sending all the signs that it was about to be a big problem:

Inspectors spent 1,854 hours at the mine in 2009, nearly twice the time as in 2007. During 2009, they wrote 515 citations and orders for safety violations, including 48 withdrawal orders for repeated significant and substantial (S&S) violations. The monetary penalties proposed for violations in 2009 and early 2010 totaled nearly $1.1 million. 

But MSHA didn’t exercise elements of its regulatory authority. The agency’s inability to place UBB, or any mine, on its pattern of violations list has been well documented. The governor’s report also points out that MSHA chose not to use its power to declare “flagrant” violations at UBB, which come with a $220,000 fine.

The agency also failed “to see the entire picture” and “to connect the dots of the many potentially catastrophic failures taking place at the mine,” the report says. As a result, MSHA lost sight of its most important goal: prevention. “Enforcement aimed at prevention is what Congress envisioned for MSHA when it passed the federal Mine Law,” the report reminds us.

Of course, Massey wasn’t making it easy. The company has years of experience gaming the system. It routinely appeals violations and generally gives MSHA the legal runaround. The governor’s report relays this tale: “Massey’s Vice President for Safety Elizabeth Chamberlin reportedly took a violation written by an inspector, looked at her people and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll litigate it away.’ ”

I feel obligated to highlight one other element of the report, summarized by Borkowski:

Autopsies on 24 of the victims, ranging in age from 25 to 61, found that 17 of them (71%) had coal workers' pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease. Five of them had less than 10 years of coal mining experience. The current limits on coal mine dust, put in place in 1973, were intended to be sufficient to prevent CWP, but have apparently not succeeded in eliminating this irreversible respiratory disease. 

Even if the explosion at UBB hadn’t occurred, holes in the regulatory safety net were going to jeopardize these men’s lives anyway. This is no way to treat humankind.

The House of Representatives today passed a bill that sets ridiculous and dangerous deadlines for the approval of oil drilling permits. According to Earthjustice, “Sponsored by Doc Hastings (R-WA), H.R. 1229 requires the Department of Interior to decide whether to approve a drilling permit within 30 days after receiving an application and allows only two 15-day extensions of this deadline.”

The bill is titled the “Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act,” which would be hilarious if it weren’t so despicable. It’s as though the 235 Republicans and 28 Democrats who voted for the bill have completely forgotten what put thousands in the region out of work in the first place

It’s been just over a year since BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 men and spawning the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. It also caused incredible economic consequences, costing and continuing to cost the region billions.

The bill is the second of three bills House leadership is pushing to create a “Drill, Baby, Drill” society. The final bill, H.R. 1231, is expected to be voted on tomorrow, and it is likely the worst of the bunch. According to Scott Slesinger at NRDC, “From the pristine Arctic Ocean, to California’s sparkling beaches, to the entire eastern seaboard, leasing for offshore drilling would commence in 2012, and would continue in perpetuity, as the bill requires 50% of unleased acreage in our oceans to be available for leasing every five years.”

America isn’t likely to stop drilling for oil any time soon. But how can Congress be so cavalier when the wounds of oil industry deregulation are still so fresh? We saw what happens when deliberation is sacrificed in the name of expediency; when safety is sacrificed in the name of profits; and when regulators feel more beholden to industry lobbyists than they do to the American public. The basic safeguards the House is attempting to strip away may not prevent another oil spill, but refusing to learn the lessons of the past is sure to cause one.