Date: November 25, 2011
Source: News Room
A former EPA policy chief and top climate advisor is publicly blasting the Obama Administration for failing to mount a forceful defense of environmental regulations in the face of fierce partisan attacks, charging that officials are overemphasizing rules' potential costs and understating benefits, resulting in overly cautious and inadequate regulations. Lisa Heinzerling, the former head of EPA's policy office left EPA after a two-year stint last December shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. Since leaving EPA, she has continued her advocacy, charging that the agency's climate rules are "too modest" and that President Obama's decision to block EPA's ozone standard revision is likely "unlawful." Her stance is antithetical to many Republicans and industry officials who pushing to roll back or limit some of EPA's latest initiatives.
At Georgetown she was the lead author of the winning briefs in Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling that found EPA had Clean Air Act authority to regulate GHGs, and a strong critic of excessive use of cost-benefit analysis to set regulatory standards.
Heinzerling authored a paper "Missing a Teachable Moment: The Obama Administration & The Importance of Regulation," issued by the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy Nov. 21, where she argues the administration is failing to make the "moral" case for EPA and other agencies' environmental and health and safety rules, while warning that the climate rules EPA is still developing may be "the last regulatory initiatives" the administration crafts to address global warming. "When the Obama administration talks about regulation, it should emphasize not only the end point to be achieved -- protection of public health, for example -- but also the causal link between that end point and human behavior," she says in the paper.
FROM ACS WEBSITE
Missing a Teachable Moment: The Obama Administration and the Importance of Regulation
Author(s): Lisa Heinzerling
Publication Date: November 21, 2011
ACS is pleased to distribute "Missing a Teachable Moment: The Obama Administration and the Importance of Regulation", an Issue Brief by Lisa Heinzerling, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. In this Issue Brief, the author, who was the Associate Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Policy (2009-2010), addresses the administration's response to recent attacks on regulation, calling on the Obama Administration to tout the benefits of regulation amidst an atmosphere that overemphasizes its costs.
Professor Heinzerling writes:
While directing agencies to trim costs from their regulatory programs, the Obama administration missed an opportunity to talk about why we regulate and what regulation achieves. How much better it would have been if the administration had led with an affirmative recognition of the important purposes of regulation and a detailed accounting of the good consequences that come from its own regulatory efforts: money saved, health protected, lives not cut short.
Regulations, Heinzerling explains, fulfill a "basic purpose of our government" by protecting "people from being hurt by other people." Yet, ironically, according to the author, the regulations under most vigorous attack, such as those stemming from the Clean Air Act, have some of the greatest potential to protect that principle by safeguarding against health, safety, consumer and environmental harms. Professor Heinzerling reminds readers that all is not lost, stating, "For good or for ill, . . . the continuing attacks on the regulatory state give the administration a continuing opportunity to articulate how human well-being, and freedom itself, are protected through law."
Read the paper: www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Heinzerling_-_Missing_a_Teachable_Moment.pdf.
About the author: www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/Heinzerling/.
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