Defining healthcare as a responsibility of good government could transform our ability to expect better environmental governance.Though corporations are technically subject to environmental laws, as EDGI has thoroughly documented, these laws are largely unenforced, not effective as deterrents when enforced, and largely reliant on accurate self-reporting of any misdeeds.
In April, EDGI received a grant from Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) to participate in the recent UNBOUND (Understanding Needs to Broaden Outside Use of NASA Data) Environmental Justice Workshop series, which was hosted by ESIP and NASA’s Earth Science Division.
Tuesday July 19, 2022, after recently announcing the planned sunsetting of portions of its online archive, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated their Web Archive website with an announcement that the archive in its entirety will remain online until at least July 2023. The EPA stated that they extended the timeline “to assess the use of archive content and to continue to analyze, inventory, and transition key content to our main website.” This comes after EDGI and other environmental groups sent an open letter to the agency, urging them to keep this critical public resource online.
EDGI, Toxic Docs, and Sierra Club are collecting thousands of internal government documents on the environment obtained by public interest groups through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents are available in an online repository called EDGIFOIA. Upcoming Workshop Reveals Documents Showing How the Trump Administration Worked to Hamper the EPA July 27th, 2022, at … Read more
On July 27th at 1PM EST, Merlin Chowkwanyun of Toxic Docs, Chris Sellers of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, and Elena Saxonhouse of the Sierra Club will publicly debut a cache of internal documents from the Trump administration detailing what it did to hamper the efficacy of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the latest addition to a project we’re calling EDGIFOIA, an initiative of EDGI, Toxic Docs, Sierra Club, and other environmental and open government groups to pool documents from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests over the past few years into a single, easily searchable repository. The repository includes documents revealing behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Trump’s first EPA administrator, deliberations that led to the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan, and the many firms that took advantage of the agency’s receptiveness to industry.
Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled to limit the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out and enforce the Clean Air Act. In West Virginia v. EPA, it ruled that the defunct Obama Administration Clean Power Plan exceeded the powers granted by the act, arguing the agency lacked “comparative expertise” to determine how the law should be executed without clear legislation from Congress. The ruling invoked a new “major questions doctrine” that agencies lack the ability to determine “major questions” without “clear” statutory authority. The doctrine likely opens a wide array of regulatory actions–by the EPA and other federal agencies–up to legal challenge.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash. By Kelsey Breseman EDGI’s work on environmental data justice (EDJ) examines the intersectional areas of environmental justice and data justice: what are the assumptions behind the gathering and use of data for environmental governance? Who do those assumptions empower, and who do they marginalize? Control over data, especially data that touches … Read more
By EHAC Steering Committee On June 16 and 17, 33 scholars will come together in “The Climate Crisis: Early Americanists Respond,” a workshop organized by EHAC (an EDGI working group), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Early Modern Studies Institute, and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Why is the Environmental Historians Action … Read more
The EPA plans to retire its online archive in July 2022. Open Letter to EPA Asks Agency Not to Sunset its Online Archive June 13, 2022 – Today, environmental and archivist groups including the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Free Government Information published an open letter asking the … Read more
Image from Unsplash. By Kelsey Breseman The Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe is bringing a case against the City of Seattle over their treaty rights, specifically for mismanagement of the Skagit River watershed, which they say impede the rights of salmon to “exist, flourish, regenerate.” As a Tlingit who researches environmental governance, this story caught my attention. … Read more