Testimony of Rena Steinzor…before the U.S. House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Environment and Economics. 112th Congress, 1st Session (2011).

Environmental regulations have saved millions of lives, preventing chronic respiratory illness and heart attacks in cities across the country. These rules protect children from irreversible neurological damage, save billions of dollars in cleanup costs, and preserve water quality in lakes, rivers, and streams. If anything, our regulatory system is dangerously weak, and Congress should focus on reviving it rather than eroding public protections…

(Still) Unsafe at Any Speed : Why Not Jail for Auto Executives?

Americans can be forgiven for wondering what has gone so drastically wrong with the companies that sell automobiles. In 2014, 64 million, a number equivalent to one in five of the cars on the road, was recalled. Safety defects such as the lack of torque in ignition switches installed in GM compact cars like the Cobalt put motorists in the terrifying position of coping with a stalled engine and loss of power brakes while traveling at high speeds. GM had the audacity to classify this condition was not a safety defect, but instead was merely “inconvenient” for its customers. It persisted in this position for many years until a private lawsuit forced the company to acknowledge that stalled engines also meant disabled airbags. This Article uses the ignition switch debacle to consider two crucial questions. First, is the regulatory system capable of stepping into the marketplace and stopping corporate malfeasance that creates too many incentives for executives to deny the existence of safety defects well past the time when they should be acknowledged? Concluding that the answer to this question is no, the piece then considers whether criminal prosecution of mid- and senior-level managers, including in-house counsel for the companies, is a feasible and effective alternative to traditional regulation? I argue that publicly available facts justify criminal prosecution of GM as well as individual managers for reckless homicide under state law, as well as such federal crimes as failure to disclose a safety defect and obstruction of justice

The End Game of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management and the Next Catastrophe

By using the Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant’s spill into the Emory River as a case study, this article offers several explanations for why the twentieth century dynamic of crisis and reform has disappeared in the early twenty-first century. In Part I, it is argued that regulated industries dominate regulatory debates on Capitol Hill and at the federal agencies to an unprecedented extent. Part II examines what is known about the Kingston spill and the implications of that information for recurrence of such events. Part III explains how the EPA and Congress responded to this disaster, highlighting how politics driven by a deregulatory ideology eventually took over the EPA’s science-based rulemaking process. Part IV offers suggestions for rebuilding regulatory agencies like the EPA and for restoring public trust in government.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Rescuing Science from Politics

When researchers feel the squeeze from lawsuits and government regulators, we all suffer