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AM ACC 12/29/2015
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EPA Health Benefits Project Sees Renewed Interest From Political Leaders
Dec 29, 2015 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
A recent memo of support from top EPA officials is rejuvenating a project between EPA scientists and economists to harmonize cancer and non-cancer risk analysis methods and assign monetary values... -
Wrong Track: Authorities Lack Manpower to Inspect Rail Lines
Dec 29, 2015 | Columbus Dispatch
By Rick Rouan and Laura Arenschield
Months before a CSX train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Mount Carbon, W. Va., polluting the air and water and forcing more than 1,100 people from their homes, inspectors missed a problem with the track there. -
The Five Biggest Lobbying Fights to Watch in 2016
Dec 29, 2015 | Washington Post
By Catherine Ho
2016 might not provide the same levels of legislative and leadership drama on Capitol Hill — no Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to kick around anymore, spending caps to argue over (for now), or shutdowns in the offing... -
Major NYC Hotels Pledge to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Dec 29, 2015 | Associated Press (in the New York Times)
By Jonathan Lemire
More than a dozen of New York City's most famed hotels are pledging to get greener.
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EPA Health Benefits Project Sees Renewed Interest From Political Leaders
Dec 29, 2015 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
A recent memo of support from top EPA officials is rejuvenating a project between EPA scientists and economists to harmonize cancer and non-cancer risk analysis methods and assign monetary values to non-cancer risk estimates for use in benefit-cost analysis to better support EPA regulatory proposals, agency sources say.
Executive Order 12866 and certain statutes require the use of benefit-cost analysis to evaluate environmental policies, but "[f]or most contaminants, there are few tools with which to evaluate the non-cancer human health benefits of exposure reductions," explains a poster on the research project presented Dec. 7 at the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) annual meeting in Arlington, VA.
The project "brings together economists, epidemiologists, statisticians and toxicologists from across [EPA] for the purpose of quantifying health risks and their associated economic valuations," the poster says.
Risk estimates for health effects other than cancer have long been headaches for agency economists and policy makers because the limited information they provide does not lend itself to cost-benefit analysis.
EPA staff began working a few years ago on ways to tackle the problem partly in response to recommendations in the 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences, "Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment." The report suggested numerous improvements to EPA risk assessment practice including unifying how assessments of cancer and non-cancer risks are conducted.
But the project sputtered early in 2015 after Weishueh Chiu, one of the effort's leads, left the agency for academia, an agency source told Inside EPA last spring.
Now the group of scientists and economists has been revived, multiple agency sources say, following an October memo from Joel Beauvais, then the associate administrator for the Office of Policy, and Thomas Burke, the agency's science advisor and nominee to be head of its research office. Burke, before assuming his roles as science advisor and deputy assistant administrator for EPA's research office, had been an associate dean of public health at Johns Hopkins University. He was also the chairman of the NAS committee that wrote the "Science and Decisions" report.
An EPA spokeswoman said the memo "discusses how benefit-cost analysis is important for informing and supporting EPA policy decisions. The memo invites EPA programs to work collaboratively to improve our ability to quantify and value health benefits." She declined to provide the document, describing it as "an internal memo among senior leadership at EPA."
The research project will help "figure out what we need to do to get there," a second agency source says, adding there is "no reason why we can't" monetize the benefits of non-cancer health effects.
Risk Estimates
At the 2013 SRA meeting in Baltimore, Chiu explained the need for the project, saying that risk analyses result in non-cancer risk estimates like reference doses (RfDs), acceptable daily intakes, or hazard quotients, "there's really no way to monetize the benefits of either going down to RfD or above or below the RfD, what the benefits of those different types of decisions might be."
An RfD is the amount of a chemical or environmental contaminant EPA anticipates can be consumed daily over a lifetime without resulting in adverse effects. It is a single point estimate, often viewed as a level of exposure not to be exceeded by decision makers. Similar risk estimates, called reference concentrations (RfCs), are calculated to protect against inhaled exposures.
By contrast, EPA's cancer risk assessments result in potency estimates that can be set at various risk levels, often 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 1 million excess cases of cancer. These numbers can be monetized, in part because it is possible to weigh the costs of a standard set at 1 in 10,000 excess cases of cancer with a standard set to protect against 1 in 1 million excess cancer cases.
Additionally, there is economic research into the costs of cancer treatment and individuals' willingness to pay to avoid developing cancer, research that is not available for many other effects seen in toxicology studies that are often the basis for non-cancer assessments.
Harmonizing cancer and non-cancer dose-response methodology and risk assessment approaches are among the methods described in the research team's poster presentation.
Over the next two years, the poster indicates that the team's anticipated products include "assess EPA's needs for benefits analysis"; "evaluate [Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS)] database for dose-response functions" and conduct "case studies of dose-response methods."
IRIS Assessments
The influential IRIS program, where Chiu worked and some current members of the research team work, maintains a database of several hundred chemicals its staff have assessed. IRIS assessments are detailed human health risk analyses often used as the basis for agency rulemakings. They contain dose-response information and quantitative risk estimates for cancer and non-cancer endpoints such as cancer potency estimates, RfDs and RfCs.
The team will "go back to the IRIS database and detail which non-cancer endpoints come up the most frequently; then the economists can seek prices to those," the second agency source explains, adding that environmental economists are used to valuations between people that have cancer or don't, or have asthma or don't. "But what do we do about [an effect such as] decreased pulmonary function?"
The poster describes key goals for the program as "develop standardized weight-of-evidence conclusions for all non-cancer health hazards to communicate clearly and provide improved support for benefits analysis; explore how to include effects with a 'suggestive' or 'possible' weight-of-evidence conclusion in economic benefits analysis, and how to incorporate weigh-of-evidence uncertainty into the benefits analysis; estimate risk at a given dose by applying dose-response modeling techniques and incorporating uncertainty and variability, which will directly support economic analysis and provide additional information for decision makers; establish linkages of upstream and early biomarkers of effects to health outcomes that are amenable to economic valuation."
The team will be "talking to directors about what they need," the source says, such as "What chemicals are they concerned about for rulemakings? How can we help?" Chemicals prioritized from such discussions may be selected for the case studies the team will develop to show proof of concept, the source adds.
Anticipated products in fiscal years 2018-19 include analytic methods to characterize dose-specific risks" and "analytic methods to characterize uncertainty," according to the poster.
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Wrong Track: Authorities Lack Manpower to Inspect Rail Lines
Dec 29, 2015 | Columbus Dispatch
By Rick Rouan and Laura Arenschield
Months before a CSX train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Mount Carbon, W. Va., polluting the air and water and forcing more than 1,100 people from their homes, inspectors missed a problem with the track there.
Inspection reports compiled by a railroad contractor and CSX showed evidence of the defect, but the track wasn’t repaired or replaced. In fact, CSX officials and federal regulators didn’t find out about the defect until it was too late.
About 140,000 miles of train tracks crisscross the nation, carrying hazardous cargo past houses, hospitals and schools every day. And hundreds of trains derail each year because of problems with those tracks.
One-third of all derailments — about 17,000 since 1995 — are blamed on problems with track.
For the most part, railroads are responsible for inspecting their own tracks, but they don’t report those inspections to regulators. Federal inspectors only see those reports if they audit railroads or investigate a crash.
And as trains have gotten longer and heavier and started carrying more Bakken — the most volatile crude oil in the world — the number of federal inspectors conducting those audits and their own checks has remained nearly the same.
In 2006, before hydraulic fracturing opened up new shale oil fields, the Federal Railroad Administration employed 344 inspectors. Today, it has 346 — one inspector for every 400 miles of track in the United States.
States also employ their own inspectors, but it’s unclear how many monitor tracks. Some estimates peg the total number of state inspectors nationwide at about 180.
“It’s clear that (the Federal Railroad Administration) does not have the manpower, nor do they really have the charge to go out and do the inspection,” said Rick Inclima, safety director for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Engineers, the union that represents track inspectors.
Federal railroad officials declined an interview for this series.
Inclima said the union represents about 35,000 members who build, maintain, inspect and repair railroad tracks, bridges and other infrastructure related to rail transport. About 1,500 members are track inspectors employed by the railroads.
When an inspector detects track problems, railroads must follow federal regulations to address them, said Ed Greenberg, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. They can block tracks or slow down trains that use them until they are repaired.
“If a potential issue or something is identified by the visual inspection or specialized track inspection vehicles or a train crew that reports something, it is considered a priority to address it,” he said.
Crude oil trains that rumble through Franklin County every week barely registered on the local radar five years ago.
· Back then, county officials were more focused on trucks carrying hazardous cargo. A county study showed gasoline was the most common hazardous material in Franklin County at the time, and it primarily moved on highways.
Trucks carrying hazardous materials generally are barred from going through the city center and must stay on I-270 unless they are making local deliveries.
Today, though, crude oil fills more tankers than any other chemical passing through the region. And it moves through Franklin County in 30,000-gallon tank cars — about four times larger than a single truck tanker — that often are part of trains that stretch as long as a mile.
The 2010 study didn’t show rail to be a significant threat because it didn’t closely look at railroads at all.
Central Ohio — like other regions across the nation — now is taking notice of the trains made up of black, pill-shaped tankers carrying volatile crude oil.
Track inspection problems are drawing more attention, and emergency responders are talking about the potential for a catastrophic crude oil derailment in densely populated areas. The domestic oil boom has put millions more gallons of crude on rails.
The damage
Crude derailments have caused tens of millions of dollars in damage and killed dozens of people.
In 2013, a runaway train derailed in downtown Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people in the resort town across the Canadian border from Maine.
Derailments and explosions are, some experts say, unavoidable: The more crude oil we ship, the greater the risk of derailments.
Crude oil production has increased in the United States by nearly 33 percent since 1995, according to the Energy Information Administration. North Dakota, home to much of the Bakken shale the oil is pulled from, produced about 13.5 times as much oil in that same time.
Production has slowed a bit as the price of crude oil has dropped, but the numbers, particularly in North Dakota, still are among the highest they have ever been.
And though the United States still imports more oil than it produces domestically, hydraulic fracturing of rock to release oil and gas has opened geologic formations deep underground to drilling that previously would have been difficult or impossible to access.
Oil doesn’t come out of the ground ready to use. It must be transported by pipeline, train, truck or barge to refineries along both coasts.
And no type of transportation is completely safe. Pipelines rupture, barges sink and trucks crash.
But during the past few years, more and more trains carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale fields have derailed, often causing toxic spills and fiery explosions.
A single train can transport as much hazardous material as 500 trucks, according to Franklin County’s study.
And as crude oil production has grown in the United States, so have the number and size of petroleum crude oil spills from trains, according to a Dispatch analysis of data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Domestic oil production from shale was still in its early stages in 2010 when Franklin County’s study of chemicals coming through the region looked at 90 rail cars compared with nearly 2,200 trucks.
This year, however, a new study examined nearly 5,200 railcars and about 3,400 trucks.
Train tracks run through the heart of Ohio’s largest population centers, including downtown Columbus, and through small towns ill-equipped to handle major derailments.
Since 1995, problems with track were blamed in more than 600 Ohio derailments.
As with all derailments, those caused by track defects are dropping. In 1995, railroads reported 800 track-caused derailments nationwide. In 2014, they reported about 500.
However, most trains weren’t carrying volatile crude oil 20 years ago. Today, they carry millions of gallons.
Federal Railroad Administration Director Sarah Feinberg vowed after the Mount Carbon investigation that the agency would have a renewed focus on track problems.
The agency released a safety advisory urging more detailed inspections when defects and flaws are suspected and more training for rail inspection vehicle operators. The agency also said it plans to look at whether standards for rail wear are needed and whether trains should be slowed or rails replaced when evidence of poor conditions are found.
The federal government has rules for how often tracks must be inspected based on the class of track and how fast trains can travel on them.
Railroads are required to visually inspect the highest class of track at least twice a week and keep records of the inspections.
Twice-weekly inspections should be “an absolute minimum,” said Inclima, of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Engineers. The union has advocated requiring supplemental inspections that use new technology to evaluate track.
Railroad companies are testing various forms of new technology to detect problems with track, Greenberg said. They aren’t required by regulators to use all of them, though.
Federal manpower an issue
Since 2012, the Federal Railroad Administration has asked Congress for 154 additional safety positions. It has received 30, according to the agency.
In 2013, a Government Accountability Office report warned that the railroad agency might face an inspector crisis.
At the time, about one-third of federal inspectors were expected to reach retirement eligibility in the next five years, and the report said preparing a single new inspector could take as long as two years.
A spokesman for the rail agency said it is addressing problems in the accountability report.
The railroad administration also has a fleet of railcars that can detect some track imperfections. Those survey about 30,000 miles of track a year, leaving more than 110,000 miles uninspected.
“It doesn’t take too long before little things pop up and if you don’t take care of the little things, big things pop up,” Inclima said.
On top of the federal inspectors, 31 states participate in a federal program that allows state inspectors to be certified and report problems to the railroad administration.
The federal agency does not track the number of state inspectors, a spokesman said.
State inspectors spend about 50 days a year monitoring track, signals, equipment, hazardous materials and operations for the Federal Railroad Administration. They also inspect railroad crossings.
“A railroad is just like a building. It’s a structure, only it’s lying down,” said Jerry Gibson, a PUCO rail inspector. “The train is like an earthquake every day. It’s very high maintenance.”
In August, a new strike team of federal inspectors spent about two weeks monitoring tracks that carry crude oil and ethanol in the region that includes Ohio.
The new program focused on routes near metropolitan areas, places where more defects are detected and areas in which a derailment could threaten the environment.
The 24 inspectors combed about 1,900 miles of track in six states and Washington, D.C. Findings have yet to be compiled, the spokesman said.
Watertown, Wisconsin, Mayor John David said his city hopes that Canadian Pacific is completing inspections on the main line that runs through the town. The main line through Watertown is an active route from the Bakken region into Canada.
Watertown residents had grown restless over the railroad’s refusal to release inspection records for a bridge in the city. David said the railroad finally released the inspection reports for the bridge after the train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed in a separate industrial sector of the city in November.
That report showed that the bridge is structurally sound, David said, but the railroad plans to make some repairs and re-inspect the bridge next year. He said the railroad has committed to showing city officials the new inspection reports as well.
The train that derailed did not explode or catch fire. David said the city was lucky.
Lobbying efforts
For the most part, however, railroad companies have focused their lobbying efforts on the tank cars that carry oil. They aren’t responsible for the cars, just the track.
After the 2013 deadly crash in Quebec province, Canada, not far from the Maine border, U.S. officials began to make some changes.
The Department of Transportation created new rules to replace outdated tank cars and lower the speed at which crude oil trains are allowed to travel through densely populated areas, such as Columbus. Oil companies also are required to do more testing of crude oil before it ships.
But some who watch the oil-by-train industry say those measures fall short.
The rules, for example, allow older tank cars to be retrofitted over five years, which means those older tank cars could still be on the tracks hauling crude oil.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups had advocated for oil companies to strip volatiles from crude oil at the wellheads, but were unsuccessful.
Wayde Schafer, conservation director for the Sierra Club in North Dakota, said the advocacy group also worries about the railroad routes that carry crude.
“When railroads were designed and the routes chosen, they wanted to get just from point A to point B as quickly as possible,” he said. “They weren’t designed to haul these volatile chemicals and ... they don’t take into account population centers or sensitive wildlife areas.
“They’ll go across wetlands or rivers — whatever — hauling something that is a very volatile, could explode or could be a huge source of pollution.”
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The Five Biggest Lobbying Fights to Watch in 2016
Dec 29, 2015 | Washington Post
By Catherine Ho
2016 might not provide the same levels of legislative and leadership drama on Capitol Hill — no Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to kick around anymore, spending caps to argue over (for now), or shutdowns in the offing (at least until September). But lobbyists are gearing up for some tough fights, nonetheless, the contours of which are already taking shape.
Here’s our look at what are likely to be the biggest legislative fights of 2016:
1. Trans-Pacific Partnership:
TPP, the sweeping trade deal reached in October between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations, is expected to be hotly contested, both from members of Congress and from a wide swath of interest groups. It will be the biggest showdown among lawmakers, interest groups and the White House in 2016.
ne of the biggest problems for deal advocates is timing: the Obama administration initially planned to send the deal to Capitol Hill for a vote in the spring or summer of 2016. But there’s one big vote of no confidence on this election-year plan: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in December that the deal is unlikely to come before Congress prior to the election. But new Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was a big ally to the White House in pushing fast-track trade promotion authority and could help Obama if he supports TPP (which is now unclear). The agreement is complicated by the fact that several leading presidential contenders oppose it, including Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Meanwhile, TPP’s foes are multiplying. Environmental activists are gearing up to fiercely fight the pact, saying it would weaken governments’ abilities to combat climate change by encouraging the production and export of fossil fuels, natural gas and crude oil. U.S. automakers criticize the pact for not going far enough to address currency manipulation. Labor unions are concerned the deal would encourage the outsourcing of U.S. jobs.
However, TPP will likely get significant support from the business community, which would largely benefit from expanding markets abroad.
2. Puerto Rico:
The U.S. territory is struggling to repay billions of dollars in debt, and the island’s top officials are aggressively lobbying Congress to to allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debts in bankruptcy — a tactic that is riling many bondholders. The Puerto Rican government’s lobbying strategy hasn’t yet paid off, but legislative efforts to address the fiscal crisis did gain some bipartisan traction right before the holiday recess, when Senate GOP chairmen for the first time introduced a bill offering some aid to the island.
But the issue was excluded from the year-end spending package, to Democrats’ dismay. Yet there’s a glimmer of hope heading into the new year: both Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and McConnell pledged to address the issue early next year. It’s a small victory for House Democrats, who pressed for quick consideration of the aid as a condition to back the omnibus package.
3. Criminal justice reform:
Momentum to reform sentencing and other aspects of the criminal justice system has been building throughout 2015, getting attention from the White House, members of both parties in Congress and presidential candidates. The effort unites unusual allies from the White House to Koch Industries.
The House and Senate are working on measures to reduce minimum sentences for drug offenders — and 2016 could yield significant progress. One sticking point called “mens rea,” supported by the Kochs, is controversial because it would require prosecutors to prove that white-collar defendants “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful.” But the White House and Koch interests have agreed “mens rea” should be jettisoned if it jeopardizes the entire package.
Many interest groups care deeply about reform, including social justice advocates and the business community, the latter of which has a stake in how potential reforms may affect white-collar prosecutions.
4. Mega-mergers:
Merger and acquisition activity reached a record high in 2015, with a number of industry leaders announcing proposed combinations, including health insurers Aetna and Humana, and Anthem and Cigna; beer giants Anheuser Busch InBev and SABMiller; and Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications.
In some cases, the mergers would mark uncharted territory in their respective sectors in terms of market share and value.
Proposed mergers are reviewed, and can be blocked, by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law typically hold hearings to question executives of the merging companies and to hear concerns from those opposing the deals. Expect to see plenty of such panel grillings in 2016.
Many of the companies have already lined up lobbyists to urge antitrust regulators to green-light the deals. Some of the mergers have already been contested — the American Medical Association and American Hospital Association are urging the Justice Department to reject both the Aetna-Humana and Anthem-Cigna deals, arguing they would quash competition and hurt consumers.
5. Environmental regulations:
The year-end spending bill includes funding to implement many environmental measures advanced by the Obama administration, including the “Waters of the U.S.” rule (meant to protect waterways from pollution), the Clean Power Plan (meant to reduce carbon emissions from power plants) and new ozone standards.
But the fight will undoubtedly continue between the Obama administration and Congress over these measures, with Obama dedicated to implementing them through executive action and the Republican-controlled House and Senate bent on stopping him.
The fate of the Clean Power Plan may ultimately be decided in the courts. Twenty-seven states and a number of industry groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, utilities and coal companies — have sued the Obama administration over the new regulations. Environmental groups are siding with the Environmental Protection Agency in defending the rules. The lawsuits are expected to stretch well beyond 2016.
The international climate pact reached in Paris earlier this month does not need approval from Congress, but Republicans could continue opposing funding that is critical to implementing the pact. They had hoped they could block U.S. contributions to the Green Climate Fund — a U.N.-founded global pool of money meant to help poorer countries combat climate change — in the year-end spending bill, but that effort failed. Still, some GOP lawmakers say they could challenge the funding in the 2017 appropriations process.
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Major NYC Hotels Pledge to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Dec 29, 2015 | Associated Press (in the New York Times)
By Jonathan Lemire
More than a dozen of New York City's most famed hotels are pledging to get greener.
The Waldorf-Astoria New York, the Lotte New York Palace, the Pierre-A Taj Hotel and the Crowne Plaza Times Square are among the 16 city hotels — all currently thronged with tourists visiting New York for the holidays — whose owners have agreed to cut greenhouse gases from their buildings by 30 percent or more in the next decade.
Mayor Bill de Blasio's office is spearheading the NYC Carbon Challenge program, and will announce the hotels' commitment on Tuesday, his aides told The Associated Press on Monday.
"If some of New York's most iconic hotels can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, anyone can," the mayor said in a statement.
New York is one of the nation's leading tourist attractions — 56.5 million people visited in 2014 — and administration officials believe the famed hotels are a powerful billboard for the mayor's environmental program. The so-called Carbon Challenge is part of City Hall's ambitious plan to reduce all citywide greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050.
The expansion to the 16 hotels — which also include the Grand Hyatt New York, the Westin New York at Times Square and The Peninsula New York among others — is estimated to reduce emissions by 32,000 metric tons and result in an estimated $25 million in energy cost savings. Environmental advocates largely praised the move, suggesting that enlisting a few high-profile structures to the cause could spur others to join.
"As the nation's number one big city destination, the hotels are showing the rest of the world that our city is committed to reducing our carbon emissions and fighting climate change," said Herve Houdre, general manager of the InterContinental New York Barclay.
City officials said that more than 17 universities, 11 hospitals and nearly 20 residential property management companies — combining for nearly 7 percent of citywide building-based emissions — have already signed on to the mayor's program. Officials estimate that the program overall will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 515,000 metric tons — the equivalent of taking 100,000 cars off the roads.
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