CEI Today: Hidden EPA rules and emails, fighting back against trial lawyers, and more

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION? - WAYNE CREWS

Openmarket.org: Where Did All The Environmental Protection Agency Rules Go?

The Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations has always been squishy and has never bound agencies to issue solely the rules contained within; but the decline in EPA rules in the Unified Agenda between 2011 and 2012 indicates a scrub of some sort before the tardy document was finally released.

Overall, the Agenda contains 4,062 across all the depts and agencies at the active, completed, and long-term stage. This is slightly down from the year before, but it doesn’t seem genuine; the Agenda should be bigger given the far higher number of EPA rules in the past decade.

Where did all the rules go? Liberalization and deciding not to regulate has not been an Obama administration priority. EPA rules have never been lower than 2011′s 318 in the past decade. It seems we’re getting only part of the story and Congress should take a look.  > View the full commentary at Openmarket.org

> Inteview Wayne Crews

 

EPA EMAIL SCANDAL, CEI FOIA REQUEST - CHRISTOPHER HORNER At about 4:55 p.m. on Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency finally complied with a court order to deliver the first of four sets of emails in response to a lawsuit filed by Christopher Horner, a senior fellow in the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. EPA owed CEI a cache of identified emails to or from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (by pure coincidence, that’s now "outgoing Administrator Jackson”...), using one or more of four keywords: coal, climate, endanger/endangerment and/or MACT ("war on coal" emails). Horner shared his initial analysis of the data dump here. > Interview Christopher Horner > View A Timeline of the EPA's "Richard Windsor" Email Scandal > See also: New mysteries in EPA's Windsorgate scandal EPA releases first tranche of Lisa Jackson’s alias e-mail correspondence

CLASS ACTION ATTORNEY FEES - SAM KAZMAN CEI Lawyer Fights Sky-High Class Action Attorney Fee in Groundless Merger Challenge Oral arguments are scheduled in Houston today in a lawsuit over a class action settlement that netted attorneys several hundred thousand dollars in fees in return for trivial proxy statement changes. The case arose from the 2011 Frontier Oil-Holly merger. The shareholders were overwhelmingly satisfied with the proposed merger.  However, as is the case with over 95% of mergers, several trial lawyers saw this as a money-making opportunity and filed class action challenges to the merger, alleging deficiencies in the proxy statements. > Read more about the case   > Interview Sam Kazman

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