Posts Tagged ‘evaluation’
Offshore drilling faces actual review instead of a rubber stamp
The Obama administration said Monday that it would require significantly more environmental review before approving new offshore drilling permits, ending a practice in which government regulators essentially rubber-stamped potentially hazardous deepwater projects like BP’s out-of-control well.
The administration has come under sharp criticism for granting BP an exemption from environmental oversight for the Macondo well, which blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and spewing nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The more stringent environmental reviews are part of a wave of new regulation and legislation that promises to fundamentally remake an industry that has operated hand-in-glove with its government overseers for decades…
You can guess who’s the hand and who’s the glove.
Drillers are already chafing under a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the gulf and strict new rules on shallow-water wells. The new environmental rules provide a foretaste of what the regulatory climate will be once the moratorium is lifted later this year. The House and Senate are moving legislation that will tighten regulatory standards for offshore drilling and put a higher multibillion-dollar limit on liability for damages from any future oil spill.
The administration is moving on a parallel track. After three months of review of federal environmental law, the White House Council on Environmental Quality on Monday recommended that the Interior Department suspend use of so-called categorical exclusions, which allow oil companies to sink offshore wells based on environmental impact statements for supposedly similar areas, while the department reviews the environmental impact. Permits for the Macondo well were based on exemptions written in 1981 and 1986. The waiver granted to BP in April 2009, as part of the permitting process for the doomed well, was based on the company’s claim that a blowout was unlikely and that if a spill did occur, it would cause minimal damage.
The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, recently renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, issued hundreds of these exemptions in recent years to reduce the paperwork burden for oil companies seeking new wells and for government workers. As a result, there was no meaningful plan in place to cope with the BP spill and its impact on aquatic life and gulf shorelines.
This is the how and why that Mussolini always said that fascism should be called corporatism.
When the state and federal governments say nothing more than “how high” whenever corporations say “jump” – the result as defined by most legislation from Congress, rolled out in practice via regulatory agencies from the Interior Department to the SEC – is eventual disaster.
The cost in context, in environment, in jobs, in degradation of lifestyle and standing for working people and the middle class is exactly what you should expect. At least, if you ignore the lies of our politicians and collaboration of the press.
Obama chides California for failing to evaluate teachers
U.S. President Barack Obama has singled out California for failing to use education data to distinguish poor teachers from good ones. Obama urged the state to change this situation so as to receive competitive, federal school dollars, according to the Los Angeles Times.
At stake are billions of U.S. dollars in federal stimulus funds to be allocated in “Race to the Top” grants, the paper noted.
Obama’s comments on Friday echo recent criticisms by his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who warned that states that bar the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, as California does, are risking those funds.
Obama and Duncan made their position clear. “This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group,” Obama said. “Instead, it will be based on the simple principle: whether a state is ready to do what works.”
“Race to the Top” applicants must show progress in four key areas to compete for the 4.35 billion dollars: adopting rigorous academic standards, recruiting and retaining talented educators, turning around chronically low-performing schools, and building data systems to track student and teacher effectiveness.
But Obama also pointed out that teachers should not be judged solely on student test scores.
You’d think that was clear enough.
It seems likely that if the president has to point out student eval isn’t the only road on the map – then that must be the target for those whose opposition to change is more important to them than the change considered.
Humbugs all.
