"President Barack Obama says his administration is considering seven new government regulations that would cost the economy more than $1 billion each a year, a tally Republicans will pounce on to argue that Congress needs the power to approve costly government rules.
"Seven months after receiving an executive order to cut red tape, federal agencies today released their final plans for cutting burdensome regulations, unveiling hundreds of changes that are estimated to save billions of dollars and millions of hours of paperwork in the coming years."
Two and a half years after being sued, EPA is under a twice-extended court deadline to release by July 28, 2011, proposed standards which will address air toxics from oil production facilities and natural gas production, processing, transmission, and storage facilities.
The standards were initially scheduled to be released in August 2010, then October 2010, after EPA determined that the ones approved during the George W. Bush administration weren't grounded in science, didn't protect public health with an adequate margin of safety, and didn't protect the environment.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan of the Eastern District of Louisiana ordered iPad-only publication The Daily to remove the deposition, by former BP CEO Tony Hayward in the Gulf oil spill lawsuit, because it had not been published with her permission.
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While primary standards are designed to protect human health, secondary standards are established to protect the environment. In the case of NOx and SOx, some of the primary targets include reduced aquatic and terrestrial acidification, and reduced nitrogen deposition on land and water.
"When commercial nuclear power was getting its start in the 1960s and 1970s, industry and regulators stated unequivocally that reactors were designed only to operate for 40 years. Now they tell another story -- insisting that the units were built with no inherent life span, and can run for up to a century, an Associated Press investigation shows."
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