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Laura Bloomer

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  • In the Media

Biden Faces Moral Imperative to Advance Climate Regulations

“What happened under the Trump administration exposed all of the ways that interpretations of these statutes could be pushed to extremes. The Biden administration can learn from that,” Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra. “It’s not just about putting things back together or returning to the status quo. We need to strengthen regulations, because the climate crisis has accelerated dramatically over the last four years, and we have failed to take action on a federal level. This is an incredible opportunity to think creatively about how we can insulate these rules and regulations from future changes.”

November 24, 2020
  • In the Media

What Has Trump Done to Alaska? Not as Much as He Wanted To

But because opening the refuge was included in the 2017 tax bill, Congress must also be involved in undoing it. “Without Congress’s help, I think there’s less flexibility for a Biden administration to stop the project,” said Laura Bloomer, a fellow at Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who has been tracking regulatory rollbacks. “But there’s enormous flexibility for a Biden administration to change how they do it,” she added, noting that they could apply more environmentally rigorous standards that might make drilling there even less appealing. (Industry experts say it remains to be seen just how appealing it will be, given the price of oil, and the technical challenges of drilling there).

September 24, 2020
  • In the Media

100 Federal Rollbacks (And Counting)

When asked how many environmental regulatory changes have been made or proposed by the Trump administration, Laura Bloomer, a legal fellow at Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program, can’t give the exact figure off the top of her head. But the program has been tracking relevant executive orders, rule changes, and other actions since President Donald J. Trump took office in 2017, and she knows how long that list has gotten: about 80 pages.

September 24, 2020
  • In the Media

What Has Trump Has Done to Alaska? Not as Much as He Wanted To

But because opening the refuge was included in the 2017 tax bill, Congress must also be involved in undoing it. “Without Congress’s help, I think there’s less flexibility for a Biden administration to stop the project,” said Laura Bloomer, a fellow at Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who has been tracking regulatory rollbacks. “But there’s enormous flexibility for a Biden administration to change how they do it,” she added, noting that they could apply more environmentally rigorous standards that might make drilling there even less appealing. (Industry experts say it remains to be seen just how appealing it will be, given the price of oil, and the technical challenges of drilling there).

August 31, 2020
  • In the Media

Agency leans on 1870s ‘housekeeping’ law to block science

EPA is trying to use a 19th-century statute giving department heads the right to manage personnel and internal record keeping to contain the science it uses when drafting regulations, including those on greenhouse gases. The March supplementary proposal for a rule EPA bills as improving transparency of the science and modeling that underpin important agency work points to an obscure “housekeeping statute” enacted in 1874. It has roots in laws enacted under President Washington when early federal agencies were founded. The proposed rule in question, known as “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would banish long-used scientific studies from future rulemaking processes if they rely on data that isn’t made public…But environmental attorneys say the proposed rule, by barring EPA from using the latest science in setting rules or maintaining models, would interfere with the agency’s statutory responsibilities under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other substantive statutes. “It certainly hasn’t been used independently as a basis for promulgating a rule that will effectively change the way the agency fulfills its statutory mandate,” said Laura Bloomer, a legal fellow at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “I do think that this is just a different type of rule.”

May 11, 2020