CPR Blogs

CPR Congratulates Chairman Henry Waxman

In January, “committed environmentalist” Henry Waxman will take the chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, the body through which environmental legislation – and most significantly, climate change legislation – will pass on its way to the floor of the House of Representatives next year. As it happens, Representative Waxman is a charter member of the Center for Progressive Reform’s Advisory Council, and has been very supportive of the organization’s work.

CPR isn’t in the business of endorsing candidates, nor involving itself in intra-party battles for leadership positions. But we recognize an environmental leader when we see one, and our Member Scholars look forward to contributing their policy ideas to the work of his committee...

National Forests, a New Administration, and Climate Change

One important environmental challenge facing soon-to-be-President Obama is how to reinvigorate the National Forest System’s environmental protections.  The system encompasses 192 million acres of land, which – to the constant amazement of those of us on the East Coast – represents about 8 percent of the total land area of the United States (roughly equivalent to the size of Texas), and about 25 percent of the country’s total forested lands. 

Late in the 19th Century, amid concerns that excessive logging was damaging watersheds and depleting future timber supplies, Congress authorized setting aside areas of federal forest lands as “reserves.”  President Theodore Roosevelt transformed the early system of reserves, giving it many of the characteristics it retains today – renaming them National Forests, increasing their total size to about 194 million acres, and assigning their management by the Forest Service to the Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

Legislation in the 1960s and 1970s recognized the importance of a wide range of uses of the national forests, including recreation, wilderness, and fish and wildlife habitat...

A Better Measure for the Social Costs of Dangerous Products

Last Friday, the American University Washington College of Law and the Robert L. Habush Endowment of the American Association for Justice hosted a conference on emerging ideas in consumer product safety. CPR Member Scholar Sid Shapiro opened the day with a presentation of a new paper he’s written with Professors Ruth Ruttenberg (National Labor College) and Paul Leigh (UC-Davis).

Their paper is an empirical study of the “extended costs” economists typically overlook when tallying up the costs of personal injuries caused by dangerous products. Traditionally, economists use a “cost-of-illness” or “cost-of-injury” (COI) approach that takes into account direct costs (e.g., hospital bills, medical tests, rehabilitation) and indirect costs (e.g., lost earnings, lost value of home production, lost fringe benefits). Shapiro, Ruttenberg, and Leigh refine the traditional methodology by also accounting for the “extended” costs of injuries – things ranging from the cost of assisted living for the widower of a grandmother killed in an SUV rollover to the price of hotel and airfare for family members who attend the funeral.

The authors use three case studies to illustrate their new ideas: Ford SUVs with Firestone tires, the prescription drug Baycol, and three-wheeled ATVs...