George Russell: EPA Ponders Expanded Regulatory Power.

The US Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyses problems and makes decisions, in a way that would give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of "sustainable development," the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June. The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academy of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled "Sustainability and the US EPA," cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts, and about half as many National Academies staff. Its aim is how to integrate sustainability as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA. The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to provide guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable develop -ment trajectory for the United States, or, in other words, how to use existing laws to new ends. According to the Academies, the sustainability study both incorporates and goes beyond an approach based on assessing and managing the risks posed by pollutants that has largely shaped environmental policy since the 1980's.