Download or read book Regulatory Blowout written by Alyson Flournoy and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is destined to take its place as one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, or for that matter, of the entire planet. Like so many other disasters on that list, it was entirely preventable. BP must shoulder its share of the blame, of course. Similarly, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) - since reorganized and rebranded - has come under much deserved criticism for its failure to rein in BP's avaricious approach to drilling even where it was unable to respond to a worst-case scenario in a responsible and timely fashion. But the problems run much deeper than a single risk-taking company and a single dysfunctional regulatory agency. This report sketches out widespread regulatory failure, touching several agencies of the federal government and affecting several critical environmental statutes. Prepared by Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), it has two goals: (1) to identify how and why the regulatory system failed to protect the public and environment and prevent the BP disaster, and (2) to recommend the priority reforms that are essential to correct these regulatory deficiencies. The report begins by laying out the shortcomings in the primary statute under which deepwater oil drilling is regulated - the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) - and outlines key reforms needed to provide the authority necessary to protect the public interest. It then turns to systemic problems within the agency charged with regulation of deepwater oil drilling under the OCSLA - the Mineral Management Service (MMS), renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) in the wake of the disaster. These include problems of agency capture and inadequate funding. The third topic addressed in the report is the role of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) - how and why this landmark statute was disabled from performing its critical role in the case of the BP well, and what regulatory changes can ensure that it functions effectively in the future. The report next details the problems that surrounded the implementation and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as it applied to oil drilling and recommends several key reforms. The report then discusses a systemic problem that is a theme in each prior section and that specific statutory reforms cannot fully remedy: obstacles to making sound regulatory decisions in the face of uncertain, low probability risks of potentially catastrophic or irreversible harm. This section highlights a common sense solution: adoption of a precautionary stance. A precautionary approach would replace the current widely-adopted presumption that regulation must await a high - and often unattainable - degree of certainty, even when the potential costs are irreversible or catastrophic. In the last sections of the report, we step back to look at the regulatory system from a broader perspective. We consider first how the regulatory system and its failures in this case were caused in part by the absence of coherent policies on energy and climate change. Our current policy provides vast incentives for risky oil and gas development like deepwater drilling and few for low-carbon alternative energy sources. In the wake of yet another painful lesson on the cost of our current incoherent approach, it is time to focus political attention on the difficult but necessary task of debating and adopting a coherent and sound energy policy. In the final section, we step back geographically to suggest why another lesson of this disaster is that the United States should undertake to learn more from the experience abroad, offering the example of the North Sea. Had we been paying closer attention, the investigations and reforms in the wake of the infamous Piper Alpha spill or the Bravo platform blowout might have offered insights to help us avoid this disaster.
Download or read book Regulatory Blowout written by Alyson C. Flournoy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Macondo Well Deepwater Horizon Blowout written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blowout of the Macondo well on April 20, 2010, led to enormous consequences for the individuals involved in the drilling operations, and for their families. Eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig lost their lives and 16 others were seriously injured. There were also enormous consequences for the companies involved in the drilling operations, to the Gulf of Mexico environment, and to the economy of the region and beyond. The flow continued for nearly 3 months before the well could be completely killed, during which time, nearly 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the gulf. Macondo Well-Deepwater Horizon Blowout examines the causes of the blowout and provides a series of recommendations, for both the oil and gas industry and government regulators, intended to reduce the likelihood and impact of any future losses of well control during offshore drilling. According to this report, companies involved in offshore drilling should take a "system safety" approach to anticipating and managing possible dangers at every level of operation-from ensuring the integrity of wells to designing blowout preventers that function under all foreseeable conditions-in order to reduce the risk of another accident as catastrophic as the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. In addition, an enhanced regulatory approach should combine strong industry safety goals with mandatory oversight at critical points during drilling operations. Macondo Well-Deepwater Horizon Blowout discusses ultimate responsibility and accountability for well integrity and safety of offshore equipment, formal system safety education and training of personnel engaged in offshore drilling, and guidelines that should be established so that well designs incorporate protection against the various credible risks associated with the drilling and abandonment process. This book will be of interest to professionals in the oil and gas industry, government decision makers, environmental advocacy groups, and others who seek an understanding of the processes involved in order to ensure safety in undertakings of this nature.
Download or read book Blowout written by Rachel Maddow and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All “A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”—The New York Times Book Review In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Vladimir Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”
Download or read book Blowout in the Gulf written by William R. Freudenburg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how a chain of failures, missteps, and bad decisions led to America's biggest environmental disaster.
Download or read book Regulatory Breakdown written by Cary Coglianese and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regulatory Breakdown: The Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Regulation brings fresh insight and analytic rigor to what has become one of the most contested domains of American domestic politics. Critics from the left blame lax regulation for the housing meltdown and financial crisis—not to mention major public health disasters ranging from the Gulf Coast oil spill to the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion. At the same time, critics on the right disparage an excessively strict and costly regulatory system for hampering economic recovery. With such polarized accounts of regulation and its performance, the nation needs now more than ever the kind of dispassionate, rigorous scholarship found in this book. With chapters written by some of the nation's foremost economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, Regulatory Breakdown brings clarity to the heated debate over regulation by dissecting the disparate causes of the current crisis as well as analyzing promising solutions to what ails the U.S. regulatory system. This volume shows policymakers, researchers, and the public why they need to question conventional wisdom about regulation—whether from the left or the right—and demonstrates the value of undertaking systematic analysis before adopting policy reforms in the wake of disaster.
Download or read book Stress Testing the USA written by John Rennie Short and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stress tests highlight a system’s weak spots. This second edition provides a stress testing of the United States by exploring in detail the background to the disasters of the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill and the COVID-19 epidemic. These major stresses—the country’s longest war, its biggest natural disaster, its biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, its biggest oil spill and its worst pandemic since the influenza pandemic of 1918—tell us much about structural flaws in the United States. This book explores each of these events in detail to locate the seed of the disasters, and highlights what we have learned and not learned from these stress tests.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 1999 written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 1588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 1994 written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 1535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
Download or read book A Behavioral Approach to Financial Supervision Regulation and Central Banking written by Ashraf Khan and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper describes how behavioral elements are relevant to financial supervision, regulation, and central banking. It focuses on (1) behavioral effects of norms (social, legal, and market); (2) behavior of others (internalization, identification, and compliance); and (3) psychological biases. It stresses that financial supervisors, regulators, and central banks have not yet realized the full potential that these behavioral elements hold. To do so, they need to devise a behavioral approach that includes aspects relating to individual and group behavior. The paper provides case examples of experiments with such an approach, including behavioral supervision. Finally, it highlights areas for further research.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 2001 written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 1592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 1995 written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 1604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 1998 written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 1578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
Download or read book Regulation and Public Interests written by Steven P. Croley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not since the 1960s have U.S. politicians, Republican or Democrat, campaigned on platforms defending big government, much less the use of regulation to help solve social ills. And since the late 1970s, "deregulation" has become perhaps the most ubiquitous political catchword of all. This book takes on the critics of government regulation. Providing the first major alternative to conventional arguments grounded in public choice theory, it demonstrates that regulatory government can, and on important occasions does, advance general interests. Unlike previous accounts, Regulation and Public Interests takes agencies' decision-making rules rather than legislative incentives as a central determinant of regulatory outcomes. Drawing from both political science and law, Steven Croley argues that such rules, together with agencies' larger decision-making environments, enhance agency autonomy. Agency personnel inclined to undertake regulatory initiatives that generate large but diffuse benefits (while imposing smaller but more concentrated costs) can use decision-making rules to develop socially beneficial regulations even over the objections of Congress and influential interest groups. This book thus provides a qualified defense of regulatory government. Its illustrative case studies include the development of tobacco rulemaking by the Food and Drug Administration, ozone and particulate matter rules by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service's "roadless" policy for national forests, and regulatory initiatives by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Download or read book Regulatory Politics in an Age of Polarization and Drift written by Marc Allen Eisner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regulatory change is typically understood as a response to significant crises like the Great Depression, or salient events that focus public attention, like Earth Day 1970. Without discounting the importance of these kinds of events, change often assumes more gradual and less visible forms. But how do we ‘see’ change, and what institutions and processes are behind it? In this book, author Marc Eisner brings these questions to bear on the analysis of regulatory change, walking the reader through a clear-eyed and careful examination of: the dynamics of regulatory change since the 1970s social regulation and institutional design forms of gradual change – including conversion, layering, and drift gridlock, polarization, and the privatization of regulation financial collapse and the anatomy of regulatory failure Demonstrating that transparency and accountability – the hallmarks of public regulation – are increasingly absent, and that deregulation was but one factor in our most recent significant financial collapse, the Great Recession, this book urges readers to look beyond deregulation and consider the broader political implications for our current system of voluntary participation in regulatory programs and the proliferation of public-private partnerships. This book provides an accessible introduction to the complex topic of regulatory politics, ideal for upper-level and graduate courses on regulation, government and business, bureaucratic politics, and public policy.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 2014 written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 1466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2015.
Download or read book Code of Massachusetts regulations 2003 written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 1678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.
