Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

Growing up, my mother was instrumental in our family of eight taking camping trips each summer. By the time I was in 4th grade, I had been in 42 states, Canada and Mexico, and had never been on a plane. We explored, hiked, and camped in state parks, national parks, and forests, traversing the country, with a pop-up camper and a paper road map to navigate our journeys.

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There are no national ergonomics requirements for employers, but California has just expanded its longstanding requirements, to add specific protections for hotel housekeepers. These new requirements complete review and rulemaking triggered in 2012 by a petition by a labor advocacy group, and are consistent with other requirements already administered by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health (CalOSHA). The state’s efforts are also consistent with general guidance provided US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). (OSHA has enforced its General Duty Clause against employers found to have ignored known hazards to their employees, since President Bush signed legislation in 2001 repealing OSHA’s own national ergonomics standard.).

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Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) are appearing in more and more public spaces and workplaces. These electronic devices are designed to deliver an electric shock to a victim of sudden cardiac arrest, and could save thousands of lives every year:

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Since enacting AB 32 in 2006, California has pursued aggressive policies to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Primary responsibilities are assigned to the California Air Resources Board (ARB), although other state agencies implement complementary policies within their areas of special jurisdiction. In addition to emissions control regulations, state law assigns ARB to develop a Scoping Plan that identifies the state’s strategic goals, and compiles the many tactical approaches through individual regulatory and incentive programs. ARB issued the first Scoping Plan in 2008, with an update in 2014 and the latest update in 2017. The rest of this note describes changes in the latest Scoping Plan to reflect the state’s ever-expanding GHG reduction goals.

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On June 22, 2016 President Obama signed the “Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act,” revising the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) TSCA extensively. I’ve written about the major programmatic changes here, here, and here. In addition to those Big Picture changes however, the 2016 Amendments provide a number of targeted revisions.

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Although Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) requirements target hundreds of micro-organisms (primarily viruses and bacteria), important hazards remain unregulated. Many await definitive scientific conclusions, but others need testing and control methodologies that would allow requirements to be designed and administered, sufficient regulator and regulated entity resources, and/or high enough political priorities. Until recently, one of these unregulated pathogens has been the legionella bacterium, first identified in 1976 as the cause of “Legionnaire’s disease,” which appears as a form of pneumonia.

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In December 2015, representatives of 195 countries agreed to continue to expand global efforts to combat climate change. The new Paris Agreement broke a longstanding impasse with a clever mixture of binding but unenforceable commitments, contemporary agreements, and ongoing agreements-to-agree (I wrote about the Agreement here). Since then, analysts have estimated that full implementation of these national targets would reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by about half the amounts necessary to accomplish the Agreement’s stated goal by holding average global temperature increases below 2 ^o C. Incomplete national successes – President Trump’s decision to back off U.S. commitments is the first and most obvious example – would leave even more to be done.

The Paris Agreement anticipated that sub-national governments and private organizations would contribute to global progress, by meeting and often exceeding national requirements (I wrote about formal United Nations programmatic expectations here).

One of the non-governmental efforts is the Science Based Targets Initiative, through which individual companies can set GHG-reduction goals. At latest report, over 300 companies participate.

What is the Science Based Targets Initiative?

The Initiative is a multi-sector collaboration among the following international organizations: CDP (formerly called the Carbon Disclosure Project), World Resources Institute (WRI), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF; formerly World Wildlife Fund), and the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). Participation in the Initiative is also identified as one of the commitments under the We Mean Business Coalition, which is another international business initiative. The Initiative defines “science-based targets” by reference to the Initiative’s effort to support the 2^o C target (which the Initiative refers to as the “2°C pathway”):

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EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has, by word and individual action, been moving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) away from President Obama’s aggressive agenda and toward President Trump’s preference for reduced activity. These have included a less-regulatory “Back-to-Basics Agenda,” which I described here. Now the agency is proposing to formalize these priorities in its strategic plan for the next four fiscal years, 2018-2022.

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In a recent decision, Canadian Union of Postal Workers v. Canada Post Corporation, the Federal Court of Appeal reversed an earlier Federal Court endorsement of an appeals officer’s decision to limit the definition of “workplace” for the purposes of inspection under Part II of the Canada Labour Code to workplaces where the employer exercises control.

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One of new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt’s many initiatives has been to change his agency’s approaches to cleanups under the national Superfund law. He announced several basic policy changes in May, and convened a Superfund Task Force to develop detailed recommendations. The task force issued its report late in July, offering 42 recommendations. These are summarized below.

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