Contributors: Kelsey Breseman, Eric Nost, Gretchen Gehrke, Chris Sellers, Marcy Beck, Lourdes Vera, EDGI On March 26, 2020 EPA released a memo suspending permit enforcement for industries that claim to have been impacted by COVID-19. This memo has already rightly been called out as an unprecedented relinquishment of power (see: The Intercept, The Hill, The … Read more
By Kelsey Breseman, Stephanie Knutson, EDGI One of this year’s initiatives for EDGI’s working group on organizational structure is to more publicly share some of our organization’s modes of work, adding to a growing conversation around remote work, collaboration, and non-hierarchical decision-making. For this reason, we’d like to share EDGI’s Authorship Protocol. EDGI’s work developing … Read more
Photo: Jeffrey Hamilton By Marcy Beck, Gretchen Gehrke, and Aaron Lemelin EDGI welcomed the opportunity to comment on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Proposed Rule: Migratory Bird Permits; Regulations Governing Take of Migratory Birds (Docket No. FWS-HQ-MB-2018-0090) in March 2020. This rule would narrow the scope of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) … Read more
Computer generated COVID-19 Coronavirus particle By Christopher Sellers, Leif Fredrickson, Alissa Cordner, Kelsey Breseman, Eric Nost, Kelly Wilkins, and EDGI Executive Summary The administration of President Donald Trump has repeatedly undermined science-based policy as well as research that protects public health. That undermining has eroded our government’s capacity to respond to the coronavirus — from … Read more
In January 2020, the Trump administration proposed dramatic regulatory changes that, if instituted, will undermine one of the nation’s most effective environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Act, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is a cornerstone of the laws and regulations put into place in the 1970s to protect the environment … Read more
By: Kelsey Breseman, EDGI The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed as an emergency effort to ensure public climate data stayed available in 2016, when it designed and organized 48 “Data Rescue” events together with the University of Pennsylvania where volunteers and activists saved 200 Terabytes of government data (EDGI 2018). These events prompted … Read more
EDGI’s comment supports this Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) effort to make data from federally funded research more available and accessible, with comments that focus on the importance of version-control, data accessibility, and facilitation of data utilization.
By Chris Sellers, Kelsey Breseman, Leif Fredrickson, EDGI Abstract: Throughout the history of U.S. environmental legislation, science has rightly served as our main touchstone for truths about threats to environmental and human health, but the Trump Administration has been slowly eroding its ability to do so. In this report, the first of a three-part survey … Read more