PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN U.S. OIL POLLUTION PLANNING AND PREPAREDNESS POLICY

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Author(s):  
Gary Yoshioka ◽  
Julie Reber ◽  
Ryan Thompson ◽  
Joan Tilghman

ABSTRACT Regulatory agencies in the United States represent the Executive Branch of the Federal Government in implementing and enforcing rules, and these agencies are required to follow certain procedures when writing those rules. At a minimum, the agency must publish a notice explaining the proposed rule, request comments, and state the basis and purpose of the final action. This paper provides examples of instances where an agency has revised the rule as a result of comments received or has otherwise been responsive to the commenter'S argument. For example, with regard to oil pollution planning and preparedness policy, commenters on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency'S proposed revisions to the Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) plan rule raised the idea of a minimum container size for applicability of the SPCC rule and EPA included such a minimum for the first time in the final rule, thus reducing the burden of the rule for many facilities. Federal agencies are required to request public comments on the issues presented in their proposed rules to enable the agencies to evaluate the new or revised provisions. With agencies now accepting electronic comments through web sites, regulated parties can easily participate in this process. As this paper shows, many agencies that regulate oil pollution planning and preparedness are very responsive to suggestions, and members of the regulated community have an opportunity to influence public policy decisions in this area.

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Higgs

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-376
Author(s):  
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson

In December 1977, a tiny group of U.S. glove makers—most of whom were African American and Latina women—launched a petition before the U.S. International Trade Commission calling for protection from rising imports. Their target was China. Represented by the Work Glove Manufacturers Association, their petition called for quotas on a particular kind of glove entering the United States from China: cotton work gloves. This was a watershed moment. For the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, U.S. workers singled out Chinese goods in pursuit of import relief. Because they were such a small group taking on a country as large as China, their supporters championed the cause as one of David versus Goliath. Yet the case has been forgotten, partly because the glove workers lost. Here I uncover their story, bringing the history of 1970s deindustrialization in the United States into conversation with U.S.-China rapprochement, one of the most significant political transformations of the Cold War. The case, and indeed the loss itself, reveals the tensions between the interests of U.S. workers, corporations, and diplomats. Yet the case does not provide a simple narrative of U.S. workers’ interests being suppressed by diplomats and policymakers nurturing globalized trade ties. Instead, it also underscored the conflicting interests within the U.S. labor movement at a time when manufacturing companies were moving their production jobs to East Asia.


Plant Disease ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 81 (11) ◽  
pp. 1333-1333 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. E. El-Gholl ◽  
T. S. Schubert ◽  
S. E. Walker ◽  
J. K. Stone

Plant pathologists in Florida and Oregon have recently found Cylindrocladium colhounii for the first time on two new ornamental plant species. Brown, pinpoint leaf spots were observed on Callistemon rigidus (stiff bottlebrush) in a Florida nursery. C. colhounii was isolated consistently from these lesions. To confirm Koch's postulates, 25 ml of aconidial suspension at 96,000 conidia per ml was used to spray a 38.1-cm branch of C. rigidus. Plants were maintained in a moist chamber at room temperature (25 ± 2°C). Symptoms appeared within 3 days, and included brown, pinpoint spots (1 mm or less) occurring on both leaf surfaces, sunken blotches, and blight. The fungus was consistently reisolated from symptomatic tissue. In Oregon, the first detection of C. colhounii was from leaf spots on Gaultheria procumbens (wintergreen) in a nursery. No proof of pathogenicity was done in Oregon on G. procumbens. C. colhounii has now been reported on 14 host genera in 10 families from Australia, India, Mauritius, South Africa, and the U.S. (FL, HI, LA, NC, OR, SC) (1–4). References: (1) P. W. Crous and M. J. Wingfield. Mycopathologia 122:45, 1993. (2) A. Peerally. Mycotaxon 40:323, 1991. (3) A. Y. Rossman. Mycol. Pap. No. 150, Commonw. Mycol. Inst., Kew, Surrey, England, 1983. (4) J. Y. Uchida and M. Aragaki. Plant Dis. 81:298, 1997.


Author(s):  
Andrew Rudalevige

The president of the United States is commonly thought to wield extraordinary personal power through the issuance of executive orders. In fact, the vast majority of such orders are proposed by federal agencies and shaped by negotiations that span the executive branch. This book provides the first comprehensive look at how presidential directives are written — and by whom. The book examines more than five hundred executive orders from the 1930s to today — as well as more than two hundred others negotiated but never issued — shedding vital new light on the multilateral process of drafting supposedly unilateral directives. The book draws on a wealth of archival evidence from the Office of Management and Budget and presidential libraries as well as original interviews to show how the crafting of orders requires widespread consultation and compromise with a formidable bureaucracy. It explains the key role of management in the presidential skill set, detailing how bureaucratic resistance can stall and even prevent actions the chief executive desires, and how presidents must bargain with the bureaucracy even when they seek to act unilaterally. Challenging popular conceptions about the scope of presidential power, the book reveals how the executive branch holds the power to both enact and constrain the president's will.


1994 ◽  
Vol 31 (03) ◽  
pp. 175-182
Author(s):  
Hans Hofmann ◽  
George Kapsilis ◽  
Eric Smith ◽  
Robert Wasalaski

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 has mandated that by the year 2015 all oil tankers operating in waters subject to jurisdiction of the United States must have double hulls. This paper examines the Act and the status of regulatory initiatives it has generated. Guidance for new hull construction and retrofit of existing vessels is outlined, and both IMO (International Maritime Organization) and U.S. Coast Guard requirements are discussed. Finally, the structural changes necessary to convert the U.S. Navy's T-AO Class oil tankers to meet the requirements of the Act are specified and illustrated.


2020 ◽  
pp. 104420732095976
Author(s):  
Valerie L. Karr ◽  
Ashley Van Edema ◽  
Megan McCloskey ◽  
Krista Geden ◽  
Jim Murphy ◽  
...  

Persons with disabilities living in developing countries look to the United States—the world’s largest contributor to Official Development Assistance (ODA) by volume—as a steadfast supporter of inclusion. This case study examined disability inclusion within the current policies and practices of four federal agencies responsible for either funding or executing U.S. foreign assistance activities. The agencies of interest were the U.S. Department of State (DOS), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps (PC), and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Core areas of investigation were (a) agency disability policies and guidance, (b) the inclusion of persons with disabilities in foreign assistance programs, (c) the employment of persons with disabilities within federal agencies, and (d) physical accessibility of federal agencies. Key findings show that while some progress has been made in regard to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in U.S. foreign aid, a persistent lack of formal accountability measures impedes the inclusion of persons with disabilities diffusing responsibility and results within and across agencies.


Author(s):  
William J. Barattino ◽  
Scott Foster ◽  
James Spaulding

The Federal Government accounts for about 2% of energy usage within the United States, with electricity accounting for approximately one-fifth of this usage. The Department of Defense (DOD) is the largest energy consumer across all Federal Agencies, accounting for nearly half of total use and has implemented programs to assure sustainable energy supplies for meeting mission critical operations. As prototype systems of Small Modular Reactors mature during the remainder of this decade, there is growing interest at senior levels of government to use the secure confines of military bases for electricity generated with SMRs to service power requirements of the DOD base and possibly the surrounding communities. This paper explores the potential for using DOD as an early adopter of SMRs from perspectives of the size of the market and adaptability of the current procurement process for private ownership of SMRs on military bases. Such an approach is shown to be consistent with DOD Sustainability objectives, as well as ensuring a continuation of the projected erosion of diversity mix for prime power generation within the U.S. A review of contract types for energy services are evaluated from the perspective of including SMRs. Required modifications for SMRs to be a part of this energy mix for Federal Agencies are presented.


First Monday ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Royce Kimmons ◽  
Jared Smith

Web site accessibility is a serious civil rights concern that has historically been difficult to measure and to establish success criteria for. By conducting automated accessibility analyses via the WAVE tool, we calculated accessibility norms of a statistically appropriate, random sample of K–12 school Web sites across the U.S. (n = 6,226) and merged results with national datasets to determine how school demographics influence accessibility. Results indicated that schools across all demographic groups generally struggle to make their Web sites fully accessible to their universe of diverse users and revealed that the concrete, highest-impact steps that schools nationwide need to take to improve accessibility include improving poor contrast between text and backgrounds, providing alternative text to images and other visual elements, and labeling form controls.


1995 ◽  
Vol 1995 (1) ◽  
pp. 713-717
Author(s):  
Mary G. Holt ◽  
Lindy S. Johnson

ABSTRACT Congress departed from the international community to unilaterally enact comprehensive oil spill legislation, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA). OPA legislates in several areas not covered by the international liability scheme for oil spills, including requirements for double-hull vessels, manning standards for foreign vessels, vessel response plans, and detailed and extensive provisions for liability for natural resource damages. Thus, it clearly provides better protection for the U.S. marine environment than would the international liability scheme. While OPA has encouraged the international community to take certain steps to provide greater protection, significant differences remain between OPA and the applicable international rules and standards. Protection of the marine environment on a global scale would be increased if the United States and the international community could bridge these differences.


1999 ◽  
Vol 1999 (1) ◽  
pp. 635-638
Author(s):  
William C. Rogers ◽  
Jean R. Cameron

ABSTRACT Oil shipping companies operating on the West Coast of the United States are subject to international, federal, and state oil spill prevention and response planning regulations. Many companies wrote separate plans for each jurisdiction with the result that tank vessels carried several different plans on board and parent companies faced an administrative burden in keeping plans current. In June 1996, oil shipping company representatives proposed that the States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force work with them to develop a format incorporating West Coast states' and U.S. Coast Guard contingency planning requirements. A workgroup comprised of representatives of the Task Force, industry, and the U.S. Coast Guard, working cooperatively, eventually proposed a voluntary integrated plan format based on the key elements of the U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Response Plan. This format allowed correlation with state planning requirements as well as with the Shipboard Oil Pollution Emergency Plan (SOPEP) required by international regulations. The U.S. Coast Guard, the Canadian Ministry of Transport, and all West Coast states have subsequently documented their agreement to accept vessel plans in this format, to coordinate review as needed, and to allow references to public documents such as Area Plans.


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