Tag: regulation

This story originally appeared on High Country News.  For years, the company operating oil wells in New Mexico’s Aztec National Monument was exempt from being regulated...

Research is thin linking any negative impacts to pregnant pot smoking. But lawmakers in Denver say pregnant women are being subtly marketed to by the cannabis industry.

ASPEN — After an Oxford-style debate Sunday night, environmental attorneys Deborah Goldberg and Katherine Hudson convinced 15 percent of the audience here to change their minds about hydraulic fracturing. Before the debate, only 38 percent of the audience agreed that the detriments of hydraulic fracturing are greater than its benefits but afterward, 53 percent agreed fracking does more harm than good.

Even as U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, continued his crusade last week to step up federal oversight of the natural gas drilling industry, his fellow Western Slope congressman, Republican Scott Tipton of Cortez, proposed a new regulatory impact study (RIS) to tabulate the fiscal impacts of federal regulations on industry.

The Obama years have so far been a predictable boom-time for the army of anti-regulation lobbyists paid by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that the Chamber spent $276 million over the past two years lobbying against, among other things, health care reform, environmental protections and Wall Street regulations. The Chamber is the number-one spender on lobbying this year as in years past, but it is outdoing itself, setting records in its own outrageous largess. In just the last three months of 2010, the Chamber spent $50.9 million on lobbying at the federal, state and grassroots levels. That's a step down from last year, when in the last financial quarter as health and financial industry reform were being discussed in DC, the Chamber spent $79 million from October through December to defeat or water-down Democratic legislation.

Bill Black is a professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust,...

Colorado businesses, tourism industry and health care officials are scrambling to counteract an ongoing push in the U.S. Senate to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.