National Parks Conservation As v. EPA

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Final Environmental Impact Statement South Baggs Area Natural Gas Development Project Carbon County, Wyoming

The FEIS contains corrected and new material which supplements the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) issued May 14, 1999. The FEIS and the DEIS comprise the complete document. Please refer to the DEIS for more detailed analyses and descriptions of the proposed action and alternatives

Regional Haze: EPA's Proposal to Improve Visibility in National Parks and Wilderness Areas

On July 31, 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new regulatory program to reduce "regional haze." The proposed program would require the states to develop and implement long-term strategies to attain a congressionally the mandated goal of remedying the impairment of visibility in national parks and wilderness areas resulting from man-made air pollution

Evaluation of wilderness character as a framework for monitoring and measuring wilderness in Rocky Mountain National Park, An

2014 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-577) provided for the statutory designation of wilderness areas in the United States through the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). While the Wilderness Act specifies requirements for wilderness designation, it does not specify how agencies should manage wilderness areas, other than to "[preserve] the wilderness character of the area." Over the last 50 years a number of frameworks and methods for managing and assessing wilderness have been proposed. Recently, Wilderness Character Monitoring (WCM) has emerged as a promising framework for quantify the status and trend of wilderness character within management areas. While interagency efforts have been largely successful in establishing the WCM framework across all four managing agencies, few studies have been conducted evaluating the process of WCM, particularly as it relates to the broader goals of wilderness management. This thesis explores the potential for wilderness character concepts to inform wilderness management through the presentation of four chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction to the concept of wilderness character including a brief history of wilderness, its associated values and some management challenges. Chapters two and three present independent manuscripts that seek to better understand wilderness character from two different scales of analysis: conceptual overview and measurement of a specific wilderness value, respectively. Chapter two (first manuscript) evaluates wilderness character by applying the WCM framework to the newly established Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness. The introduction and methods sections provide an overview of the study area, the WCM monitoring structure, and additional evaluative criteria used for the selection of measures. Selected measures are then presented in the results section, followed by a discussion of insights and considerations gained from both the final list of measures as well as the selection process itself. Chapter three (second manuscript) evaluates one discrete value or measure of wilderness: soundscapes. Specifically, this study examines the potential of Observer Based Source Identification Logging (OBSIL) to inform soundscapes assessments in wilderness by measuring audibility metrics. The two metrics used are a) percent time audible (PTA), which represents the extent within a given timeframe a particular source is audible; and b) the noise-free interval (NFI), which represents the length (usually average) that no non-natural sounds are audible. Findings from this study indicate both a high potential of OBSIL to inform soundscape assessments and provides several insights that support the need for better understanding of the wilderness acoustical environment. Chapter four concludes this thesis with a discussion of insights gained regarding the potential of WCM in the larger context of wilderness stewardship

Effects of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments on distributions of visual impairment

The Acid Rain Provisions (Title IV) of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (1990 CAAA) focus on emission policies designed to reduce the amount of deposition of acidifying pollutants, particularly in the Northeast. The primary strategy is a significant reduction in SO{sub 2} emissions, with lesser reductions scheduled for NO{sub {times}} emissions. However, lessening of acid deposition is not the only important benefit of the emission control strategy. Decreasing SO{sup {minus}} and NO {sup {minus}} emissions will decrease atmospheric concentrations of sulfate and nitrate particles, which account for much of the visibility reduction associated with regional haze. Although one can get a qualitative sense of how visibility might improve by examining historical large-scale trends in regional emission totals and regional visibility, quantification of the expected improvement requires model simulations. One must model the spatial and temporal patterns of emissions reductions; the relevant pollutant transport, transformation, and removal processes in the atmosphere; and the changes in particulate loading. For this initial examination of the visibility improvement at Shenandoah National Park associated the the Phase I and Phase II SO{sub 2} emission reductions, we have linked emission trend projections taken from ongoing analysis of the 1990 CAAA at Argonne National Laboratory, regional transport modeling with the Advanced Statistical Trajectory Regional Air Pollution (ASTRAP) model and visual impairment modeling with the Visibility Assessment Scoping Model (VASM)

A review of air pollution impact on subjective well-being: Survey versus visual psychophysics

Air pollution is a worldwide environmental and health issue, especially in major developing countries. A recent World Health Organization report shows about 3 million deaths in the world in 2012 are due to ambient air pollution and China and India are the countries with the most severe challenge. Air pollution influences people's thought and experience of their lives directly by visual perceptions. This reduces people's subjective well-being (SWB) to a significant degree. Empirical researchers have made efforts to examine how self-reported well-being varies with air quality typically by survey method - matching SWB data with monitored air pollution data. Their findings show NO2, particles, lead, SO2 and O3 have significant negative impact on SWB. However, it is very hard to match air pollution characteristics from monitor stations with each respondent's state of SWB at the moment a survey is conducted. Also it is very hard to find the detailed trend impact from only air pollution factor on SWB. This review illustrates the features and limitations of previous survey studies on quantifying the effects of air pollution on subjective well-being. This review further displays the progress of psychophysics and its application in landscape and air quality research. We propose using psychophysics application to quantify air pollution impact on SWB

Air Quality: EPA's 2013 Changes to the Particulate Matter (PM) Standard

This report summarizes the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) January 15, 2013, final and June 2012 proposed changes to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) and includes comparisons with previous (1997 and 2006) promulgated and proposed standards. Key actions leading up to the agency's determination, and potential issues and concerns associated with changing the Particulate Matter annual standard, are also highlighted

Cost-Benefit Default Principles

In an important but thus far unnoticed development, federal courts have created a new series of "default principles" for statutory interpretation, authorizing regulatory agencies, when statutes are unclear, (a) to exempt trivial risks from regulation and thus to develop a kind of common law of "acceptable risks," (b) to take account of substitute risks created by regulation, and thus to engage in "health-health" tradeoffs, (c) to consider whether compliance with regulation is feasible, (d) to take costs into account, and (e) to engage in cost-benefit balancing, and thus to develop a kind of common law of cost-benefit analysis. These cost-benefit default principles are both legitimate and salutary, because they give rationality and sense the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, they leave many open questions. They do not say whether agencies are required, and not merely permitted, to go in the direction they indicate; they do not indicate when agencies might reasonably reject the principles; and they do not say what, specifically, will be counted as an 'acceptable' risk or a sensible form of cost-benefit analysis. Addressing the open questions, this essay urges that the principles should ordinarily be taken as mandatory, not merely permissive; that agencies may reject them in certain identifiable circumstances; and that steps should be taken toward quantitative analysis of the effects of regulation, designed to discipline the relevant inquiries. An understanding of these points should promote understanding of emerging "second generation" debates, involving not whether to adopt a presumption in favor of cost-benefit balancing, but when the presumption is rebutted, and what, in particular, cost-benefit analysis should be taken to entail.

Fontenelle Natural Gas Infill Drilling Projects, Sweetwater and Lincoln Counties, Wyoming, Final Environmental Impact Statement

DALEN Resources Oil & Gas Co. (DALEN Operator) and Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., Presidio Oil Co., and several other companies (collectively the Lincoln Road Operators) propose to continue infill drilling their existing lease acreage (collectively approximately 179,760 acres) within the Fontenelle II and Lincoln Road development areas. The Fontenelle II and the Lincoln Road development areas are immediately adjacent to each other. Both proposed actions would be implemented in northeastern Lincoln and northwestern Sweetwater counties, Wyoming adjacent to and east of Fontenelle Reservoir and the Green River. The project areas are approximately 30 miles northeast of Kemmerer, Wyoming and 70 miles northwest of Rock Springs, Wyoming