Superfund: Case Studies Of Pollution

In this episode, we take a look at the impact of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act, with a focus on Title III: The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-know Act, or EPCRA. Revolutionary for its time, the act served to streamline the emergency planning and response process across state and federal agencies, working to better inform cities, towns, and citizens of the public healt...

On this episode, we cover the Ruckelshaus Restoration of the Environmental Protection Agency during the mid-1980s, which featured the reauthorization and strengthening of several major pieces of environmental law. Culminating in that effort was the passage of the Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act of 1986, which reauthorized funding for the Superfund program and greatly overhauled its sys...

In this episode, we take a look at the first years of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, and its implementation by the Reagan Administration. While several court cases in the early 1980s served to authorize and strengthen the statutes of CERCLA and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, both regulatory programs experienced major cuts and roll ba...

In Episode IX, we take a comprehensive look at the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA. Going section by section, we break down the basic definitions, the statutes, and the language, and look at how the final bill was the result of more than three years of debate surrounding how best to form a Superfund law. With this firm understanding of CERCL...

We finish our look at the legislative history of the Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. In the midpoint of 1980, the Presidential election was in full stride, and the reelection of President Jimmy Carter looked increasingly doubtful. Feeling the pressure to enact a Superfund law before the end of the year, Congress scrambled to compromise between three legis...

In Episode VII, we continue our survey of the legislative history of the Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. Moving into 1980, efforts by Congress and the Carter Administration to pass a comprehensive emergency response law to address toxic waste pollution enters a new phase of desperation. Seeing current legislative proposals stall before committee, Represen...

We continue our survey of the legislative history of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA. By June of 1979, the debate about a potential Superfund law was getting bogged down in committee hearings and congressional debates, with no clear direction of which way to turn. The Carter Administration, in a desperate attempt to get legislation consi...

We continue our look at the legislative history of Superfund, and how the final bill formed over the course of many years of public debate. Much of this debate took place before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. As we'll see, a number of legislative proposals were introduced that tried to balance emergency response mech...

In the latest installment, we begin our dive into the legislative history and framework of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA. We conduct a brief survey of some fundamental environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Solid Waste Disposal Act, which was later amended by the Resourc...

In Episode III, we continue our survey of a brief history of pollution by looking at the string of environmental legislation passed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in the lead-up to a number of highly publicized environmental crises that were beginning to grip the nation, including Love Canal. As the general public and lawmakers came to the realization that our landscape was peppered w...

In Episode II, we continue our survey of a brief history of pollution, further illustrating the transformation of the U.S. industrial economy at the turn of the 20th century, and how that led into post-World War II economic growth in the years from 1945 to 1975—otherwise known as, The Glorious Thirty . Arriving in the 1970s, society takes an unprecedented stance against industrial pollution in the...

In this inaugural episode of Superfund: Case Studies of Pollution , host Michael Pintauro introduces the podcast, its mission and purpose and embarks on a semi-comprehensive survey of society's complex relationship with industrial pollution. Join us as we take a look at the last 2000 years of pollution and how concepts of nuisance, common law, and reasonable use have evolved over time to infor...