From Todd Tucker @ Eyes on Trade: Much of the U.S. consumer movement has encouraged the development of punitive damages, mostly because of the massive holes in our regulatory and social safety net structure. Now, the New York Times reports that other countries are pushing back when asked to enforce U.S. punitive damage awards. Continue Reading >>
Archive for March, 2008
March28
Liability in a globalized world
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGVlF95DDjk&rel=0]
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn’t seem to understand what Congress meant when it directed the agency to develop a new standard for vehicle roofs that would help reduce the thousands of deaths each year from rollover crashes. The standard it has proposed is so inadequate, it might as well have been written by the auto industry, which has a long history of opposing important vehicle safety improvements. Seat belts. Airbags. Those are just two of the advances industry opposed. Now, NHTSA has proposed a rule that requires stronger vehicle roofs but completely ignores what happens to the people inside a vehicle when it rolls over.
The anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident is a somber reminder of the fatal flaws of nuclear power and the unresolved dangers nuclear energy poses. However, despite the lessons learned from that catastrophe, the Bush administration is attempting to jump-start an industry that has been stagnant for almost three decades.
It’s almost as if the Bush administration forgot what happened March 28, 1979, when feedwater pumps failed at Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa., leading to a partial core meltdown and the release of significant amounts of radiation. Prior to this event, mounting public concern and disastrous cost overruns led to the cancellation of most proposals for new reactors. Three Mile Island was the final blow.
March26
In defense of common sense
As you might expect, readers of the Economist are generally less supportive of government regulation than, perhaps, readers of this blog. A survey on the Economist Web site has the anti-regulation side ahead 55 percent to 45 percent. Of course, the poll is meaningless. What is important is the debate that’s taking place in this country over the shift towards sensible regulation in the public interest. Ed Mierzwinski (left), U.S. PIRG’s consumer program director, has jumped into the fray with a well-reasoned defense of government regulation. As Mierzwinski points out,
March25
Nuclear is not a panacea
At the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference, a global ministerial-level gathering held in early March in Washington, D.C., President Bush stated “We’ve got to get off oil. … [O]ur dependence on fossil fuels like oil presents a challenge to our environment. When we burn fossil fuels we release greenhouse gases. The concentration of greenhouse gases has increased substantially.”
That’s pretty amazing, coming from a guy whose administration has scoffed at the notion of conservation and stifles administration staffers who talk openly about the dangers of climate change.
The problem is what Bush said next.
