Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 4/1/2016
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(ACC Blog) Listen to the Science: BPA is Safe
Mar 31, 2016 | American Chemistry Matters
By Steven Hentges
From Proposition 65 to activist reports, recent activities related to epoxy can linings made from BPA have dialed up a flurry of news coverage lately. n response to consumer interest, and as a reaction to pressure... -
(ACC Blog) South Korea Listens to the Science on BPA
Mar 31, 2016 | American Chemistry Matters
By Steven Hentges
Last week the South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) published its risk assessment of BPA in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Environmental Research. The MFDS is a government agency that is responsible... -
Report Finds Toxic BPA Common in Food Cans
Mar 30, 2016 | Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
By Tony Iallonardo
A new report released today by six nonprofit organizations that tested nearly 200 food can linings for the toxic chemical, Bisphenol A (BPA) found that two out of three cans tested have the chemical in the lining. -
EPA Preparing New Work Plan Assessments, Flame Retardant Test Rule
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's toxics office priorities for 2016 include risk assessments for several chlorinated solvents prioritized for review under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) work plan program and the crafting of a test rule... -
EPA Seeks to Expand, Speed Safer Choice Chemical Alternatives Program
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA is seeking to expand its voluntary Safer Choice program, which has traditionally performed alternative assessments and reviewed interested companies' cleaning products for recognition with an EPA logo on their labels... -
Legal Experts: Supreme Court Decision on Mercury Pollution Could Undercut Chemical Reform
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Melanie Benesh and Thomas Cluderay
You might think you can’t put a price on protecting public health and the environment. But you’d be wrong — especially if we’re talking about the nation's broken and outdated chemicals law... -
FDA Sued for Delay in Deciding Perchlorate Food Additive Petition
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
It’s been 15 months since a group of environmental, consumer, and public health advocates petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove the agency's approval of perchlorate uses in packaging. -
Eight Chemical Firms No Longer Make, Use PFOA
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The Arkema Group, BASF Corp., Daikin Industries, DuPont successor Chemours and four other chemical manufacturers that previously made or used perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and related perfluorinated chemicals... -
Chemical Sector Details First Challenge to EPA's Climate-Based HFC Limits
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Abby Smith
Two chemical companies are laying out a first-time legal case against EPA regulations limiting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants based on their global warming potential (GWP), charging both that the agency lacks authority... -
Former EPA Administrators Defend Clean Power Plan
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
The Clean Power Plan falls squarely within the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the “broadly worded” provisions of the Clean Air Act, two past agency administrators said in defense... -
EDF Joins Broad Coalition to File Vigorous Defense of the Clean Power Plan
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tomas Carbonell
This week a broad coalition of public health and environmental organizations, including EDF, submitted abrief in support of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan to the U.S. Court of Appeals... -
Oil Industry Urged to Focus on Long Term During Downturn
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Nushin Huq
Even though the current oil-gas downturn is a normal part of the industry's cycle and less severe than the 1980s slump, companies need to focus on a long-term business strategy, panelists at a forum in Houston said March 31. -
Experts See M&A Activity Increasing in Appalachia This Year After Slow 2015
Apr 1, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
After 2015 failed to deliver the expected spike in oil and natural gas industry merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the United States and abroad, a group of Appalachian experts is anticipating much more this year... -
Administration Rushing Methane Rules to Boost Legacy: API
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Anthony Adragna
President Barack Obama's administration is rushing out a suite of rules meant to curb methane emissions as a way to bolster his climate change legacy, the American Petroleum Institute said March 31. -
America Needs An Energy President
Apr 1, 2016 | Forbes
By Ed Hirs
Anyone who has been waiting for leadership on energy policy during this year’s tumultuous Presidential campaign may be waiting in vain. -
EPA Must Resolve Oil, Gas Wells Oversight Issues: GAO
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven
The Environmental Protection Agency hasn't ensured that underground sources of drinking water are being adequately protected from certain oil and gas underground injection activities, the Government Accountability Office said... -
Nebraska Governor Signs Bill on Fracking Disposal Wells
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Brown
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) signed a bill March 30 that imposes additional disclosure regulations on operators of wastewater disposal wells used in hydraulic fracturing. -
The Invisible Catastrophe
Mar 31, 2016 | New York Times Magazine
By Nathaniel Rich
It just seems like a beautiful day in Southern California,” Bryan Caforio said. -
Return of Gas Pipeline Rules Opposed by Industry
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter
Safety regulations previously opposed by natural gas pipeline operators and others in the industry have returned in a Department of Transportation proposed rule that would set new requirements for both main and gathering pipelines. -
Enforcement Chief Sees 'Silver Lining' in Budget Crunch
Mar 31, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Robin Bravender
Deep budget cuts and staff reductions at U.S. EPA have taken a toll on its efforts to hold polluters accountable. -
EPA Sends 'De Minimis' GHG Permit Threshold to OMB
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
The White House Office Of Management & Budget (OMB) has started inter-agency review of EPA's forthcomingde minimis threshold for greenhouse gases to trigger major source permitting requirement -
N.C. Sues to Force EPA Decision on Ozone Transport Region
Mar 31, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
North Carolina is suing U.S. EPA to force a decision on whether the state should become part of the Ozone Transport Region, a step that would entail tighter air quality regulations related to ground-level ozone and acid rain. -
US, China Pledge Swift Action on Paris Climate Deal
Mar 31, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The United States and China are pledging to sign last year’s Paris climate change agreement as early as possible.
Industry and Association News - There are no clips to report at this time.
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(ACC Blog) Listen to the Science: BPA is Safe
Mar 31, 2016 | American Chemistry Matters
By Steven Hentges
From Proposition 65 to activist reports, recent activities related to epoxy can linings made from BPA have dialed up a flurry of news coverage lately. In response to consumer interest, and as a reaction to pressure from activist groups, some food brands are announcing that they are moving away from these can linings and using a variety of alternatives. Ironically, the announcements note that epoxy can linings have performed almost flawlessly for 40 years and that FDA has re-affirmed the safety of BPA.
With all the alarming media attention, brand reputation (and not science) understandably drives these decisions. But it is a scientific fact that exposure to BPA from canned food, and all other sources combined, is very low, and well within safety standards. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, typical human exposure to BPA is far below even the most stringent science-based safety limit set by government bodies worldwide.
BPA linings in cans serve an important role in food safety as well. Epoxy linings create a protective barrier in metal containers to prevent canned foods from becoming spoiled or contaminated with bacteria or rust.
But how do we know canned food with BPA is safe? In the last several years, federal government scientists have been conducting in-depth studies to answer key questions about the safety of BPA. To date, more than 20 of these studies have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The results clearly show that:
· Consumer exposure to BPA is extremely low.
· BPA is rapidly eliminated from the body.
· No risk of health effects at typical consumer exposure levels.
The comprehensive data now available provides a compelling reason to listen to the science on the safety of BPA. If you do, you won’t be alone. Most recently, South Korea’s scientific experts from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety did just that in a recently published assessment. In their words, “there are no health concerns for the general Korean population” from exposure to BPA.
https://blog.americanchemistry.com/2016/03/listen-to-the-science-bpa-is-safe/
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(ACC Blog) South Korea Listens to the Science on BPA
Mar 31, 2016 | American Chemistry Matters
By Steven Hentges
Last week the South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) published its risk assessment of BPA in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Environmental Research. The MFDS is a government agency that is responsible for promoting public health by ensuring the safety of foods and other products.
The details are important, but what everyone wants to know is the bottom line. MFDS concluded:
We find that there are no health concerns for the general Korean population from dietary exposure or from aggregated exposure [to BPA].
So why should you care since, if you’re reading this, you probably don’t live in South Korea? You may not even like Korean food. But it’s not about where you live or what kind of food you like. It’s all about the science, and that you should care about.
To reach their clear conclusion, the MFDS researchers followed well-established scientific procedures to assess potential risks from exposure to BPA. In broad terms, this involved measuring exposure of the Korean population to BPA and comparing those exposure levels with a health-based safety guidance value.
To measure exposure, the researchers took advantage of a recent MFDS study, which involved 2,044 participants ranging in age from one month to greater than 60 years. Exposure to BPA was estimated using three independent methods using data from the study.
For the overall safety conclusion, the exposure estimates were compared with a Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI), which the researchers derived from extensive animal testing data on BPA. As noted by the researchers, “[e]ven conservatively estimated BPA exposures were less than 2% of the TDI.” In plain English,
There are no health concerns for the general Korean population.
Importantly for us non-Koreans, the MFDS researchers also evaluated BPA exposure data from North America and Europe for comparison to the Korean data. Since exposure to BPA was similar in each region, the MFDS safety conclusion can be extrapolated to further conclude that there are no health concerns from exposure to BPA in other regions of the world as well.
But there’s no need to extrapolate. Other government bodies around the world, notably including the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have conducted their own assessments and independently reached similar conclusions. As a straightforward and representative example, FDA, based on its own assessment, answers the question “Is BPA safe?” with a single unambiguous word: “Yes.”
https://blog.americanchemistry.com/2016/03/south-korea-listens-to-the-science-on-bpa/
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Report Finds Toxic BPA Common in Food Cans
Mar 30, 2016 | Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
By Tony Iallonardo
A new report released today by six nonprofit organizations that tested nearly 200 food can linings for the toxic chemical, Bisphenol A (BPA) found that two out of three cans tested have the chemical in the lining. BPA is an endocrine-disrupting chemical that negatively impacts our hormonal systems. Evidence suggests it may contribute to a host of harmful health effects including breast and prostate cancer, infertility, type-2 diabetes, obesity, asthma and attention deficit disorder. Other studies have demonstrated the capacity of BPA to migrate into food and then into people, raising concerns about exposures to low, but biologically relevant levels of BPA.
For the first time ever, this report also identified the replacement materials for BPA in can linings, and to what extent – if any – their safety has been studied.
Buyer Beware: Toxic BPA & Regrettable Substitutes in the Linings of Canned Food (#BPA #ToxicFoodCans) was conceived and authored by the Breast Cancer Fund; Campaign for Healthier Solutions; Clean Production Action; Ecology Center; Environmental Defence (Canada); and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families’ Mind the Store campaign. (The full report can be downloaded at here.)
The report identified and analyzed the interior linings and lids of canned foods containing vegetables, fruits, soups, broth, gravy, milks and beans.The findings were alarming:
· 100 percent of Campbell’s products sampled (15 of 15) contained BPA-based epoxy, while the company says they are making significant progress in its transition away from BPA. Upon learning about the upcoming report, Campbell’s announced yesterday they are eliminating BPA in North American cans by mid-2017. While this is a step in the right direction, report authors state the announcement left out important details that we think would make this truly good news for Campbell’s soup lovers.
· 71 percent of sample Del Monte cans (10 of 14) tested positive for BPA-based epoxy resins.
· 50 percent of sampled General Mills cans (six of 12, including Progresso) tested positive for BPA.
· Collectively, 62 percent of private-label, or generic food cans (71 out of 114) from retailers analyzed in the study tested positive for BPA-based epoxy resins, including Albertsons (including Randalls and Safeway), Dollar General, Dollar Tree (including Family Dollar), Gordon Food Service, Kroger, Loblaws, Meijer, Publix, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Walmart.
· BPA was found in the majority of private-label canned goods tested at the two biggest dedicated grocery retailers in the United States: Kroger and Albertsons (Safeway). In private-label cans, 62 percent of the Kroger products sampled (13 out of 21), and 50 percent of the Albertsons products sampled (eight out of 16 from Albertsons, Randalls, Safeway) tested positive for BPA-based epoxy resins.
· BPA was found in private-label cans sold at both Target and Walmart, the largest grocery retailer in the United States. In their private label products, 100 percent of Target cans sampled (five out of five) and 88 percent of Walmart cans sampled (seven out of eight) tested positive for BPA-based epoxy resins.
· Discount retailers (commonly known as “dollar stores”) were among the laggards in transitioning away from BPA in can linings. Testing revealed that 83 percent of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar private-label cans (five out of six) and 64 percent of Dollar General private-label cans (nine out of 14) were coated with BPA-based epoxy resins. This is especially a problem because discount retailers are often the major retail outlet in low-income communities—which already face higher levels of BPA exposure.
· Broth and gravy cans were the most likely (100 percent of those sampled) to contain BPA in the can linings; corn and peas were the least likely category (41 percent of those sampled).
· On the positive side, Amy’s Kitchen, Annie’s Homegrown (recently acquired by General Mills), Hain Celestial Group, and ConAgra have fully transitioned away from BPA and have disclosed the BPA alternatives they’re using. Eden Foods reported eliminating the use of BPA-based epoxy liners in 95 percent of its canned foods and stated that it is actively looking for alternatives. Whole Foods has clearly adopted the strongest policy of the retailers surveyed in the report. Whole Foods reports that store brand buyers are not currently accepting any new canned items with BPA in the lining material.What about the alternatives?
The report found that retailers and national brands that are phasing out BPA could be replacing it with regrettable substitutes. Identifying the safety of BPA alternatives is challenging, given the insufficient FDA review and approval of packaging additives and highly protected trade secrets in this product sector. However, the report found that:
· Aside from BPA, four major coating types were identified among the 192 cans tested: acrylic resins, oleoresin, polyester resins, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) copolymers. There were multiple formulations of these compounds found, but no way to determine the specific chemicals used or how they are produced.
· 18 percent of retailers’ private-label foods and 36 percent of national brands were lined with a PVC-based copolymer that is made from highly hazardous chemicals including vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen. PVC is considered a regrettable substitute.
· 33 percent of retailers’ private-label foods and 51 percent of national brands were lined with acrylic based polymers. Of the cans tested, 39 percent had a polystyrene-acrylic combination, of concern because styrene is considered a possible carcinogen.
· Much more research is needed to determine the safety of these compounds, and what may be migrating from the “alternative” can linings into food.The report includes numerous recommendations including:
· National brands, grocery stores, big box retailers and dollar stores should eliminate and safely substitute BPA from all food packaging and label all chemicals used in can liners.
· In conjunction with the report release, advocates have launched a national online campaign calling on Kroger and Campbell’s to eliminate and safely substitute BPA.
· Congress should adopt comprehensive legislation to reform the FDA’s fatally flawed system for reviewing and approving the safety of packaging material.
· Consumers should choose fresh or frozen foods, or only purchase canned food from manufacturers and retailers that fully disclose the identity and safety of their can linings. Look for food packaged in other materials such as glass and Tetra Pak containers.Quotes from the report authors:
“Most people in the United States are exposed to BPA every day, largely from food packaging, despite the negative health impacts. It shouldn’t be a buyer beware situation for shoppers every time they set foot in the canned food aisle,” said Janet Nudelman, director of Program and Policy for the Breast Cancer Fund. “Campbell’s and other major national brands need to get BPA out of food can linings and fully disclose the identity and safety of any BPA alternatives they’re using. Consumers deserve protection from the toxic effects of this hormonally active chemical and the likelihood of exposure to unsafe toxic alternatives.”
“Food manufacturers refused to tell us what chemicals were in their cans, so we reverse engineered and tested them ourselves,” said Jeff Gearhart, MS, the Ecology Center’s HealthyStuff.org research director. “Since they can’t hide these chemicals from consumers anymore, perhaps they will be more motivated to use safer materials.”
“This new report should be a wake-up call for grocery and big box retailers across the nation,” said Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. “We found 62 percent of Kroger’s cans in the investigation tested positive for BPA. As the largest grocery chain in the country, Kroger should be leading the way by developing a clear public timeframe for phasing out and safely substituting BPA in all of their canned food.”
“BPA-free doesn’t mean a can lining is safe, as the substitute could itself be harmful. That is why we are asking companies to take the GreenScreen Challenge and work with us to demonstrate the chemical safety of their can liners,” said Clean Production Action’s Beverley Thorpe, who helps companies understand the value of the GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals as an essential tool for replacing toxic chemicals with safe alternatives.
“While some families are fortunate to have access and means to purchase fresh produce, many communities across America have no choice but to buy canned food lined with toxic BPA,” said Jose Bravo, coordinator of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions. “Some families, live in a food desert where fresh food simply isn’t available, or they can only afford the cheap food sold at dollar stores. These communities, people of color and low-income families are already exposed to toxic chemicals more frequently and at higher levels than the average American. The use of toxic BPA in canned foods means that families will sit down to a double serving of harmful chemicals.”
“The fact that many food cans contain endocrine-disrupting BPA means that Canadians are likely eating food contaminated with the hormone-mimicking chemical,” said Maggie MacDonald, Toxics Program manager with Environmental Defence. “This is very disconcerting, as Canadians who rely on canned foods in their diets are at continuous risk of developing serious health problems.”
http://saferchemicals.org/newsroom/12949/
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EPA Preparing New Work Plan Assessments, Flame Retardant Test Rule
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's toxics office priorities for 2016 include risk assessments for several chlorinated solvents prioritized for review under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) work plan program and the crafting of a test rule for a group of flame retardant chemicals the agency began analyzing last year.
Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, director of EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT), outlined these and other priorities for her office during her March 23 keynote remarks at the annual chemical industry conference, GlobalChem, including updates to a series of TSCA rules and upcoming and ongoing work plan risk assessments.
Cleland-Hamnett announced that the next group of chemicals up for review in the TSCA work plan risk assessment program will be six chlorinated solvents. "The process to look at the data available, what we know about sources of exposure, has started for these chemicals," she added.
The chemicals include 1,1-dichloroethane, 1,2-dichloroethane, 1,2-dichloropropane, trans-1,2-dichloroethylene, 1,1,2-trichloroethane, carbon tetrachloride and tetrachloroethylene.
Cleland-Hamnett also announced that her staff is "in the process of developing a section 4 test rule . . . which we also hope to have out" by next summer or early next fall, for a group of brominathed phthalates for which the agency has insufficient data to perform a risk assessment. The group of chemicals was one of four clusters of related flame retardant chemicals that EPA began assessing last year. Cleland-Hamnett noted that the agency last fall released problem formulation documents for three of the clusters, the first step in the risk assessment process, but for the brominated phthalates they instead released a data needs assessment. Stakeholder comments on that document form the basis for the rulemaking, Cleland-Hamnett said.
Section 4 of TSCA gives EPA the authority to order companies to produce toxicity data, but the rule has been infrequently used. Agency sources have indicated in the past that the high evidentiary bar for section 4 rules is one of the reasons that previous agency leaders chose to step away from the High Production Volume Challenge program through which the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations sought to gather more data about existing chemicals -- those in existence when TSCA was enacted in 1976 and largely grandfathered under that law.
The program encouraged companies who produced chemicals in excess of 1 million pounds per year to provide toxicity information about those chemicals, while EPA wrote test order rules for those chemicals that were not "sponsored" by a company. The agency only completed a handful of such rules.
Work Plans
The Obama administration work plan program started in 2012 with an initial list of 83 chemicals prioritized for risk assessment and potential regulatory action in the face of congressional inaction on reforming TSCA. The agency updated the list with new exposure information in 2014, leaving the agency with a list of 90 chemicals on the prioritized list to be completed over the next several years, or until Congress enacts TSCA reform.
Cleland-Hamnett and Jim Jones, EPA's toxics chief, said in their GlobalChem speeches that they initiated the work plan program in part to create a strong chemicals management program in the face of congressional inaction to reform TSCA, but also to provide a learning experience for agency managers and staff on approaches they anticipate in a reformed version of a TSCA statute. All the same, the program has resulted in several ongoing important rulemakings, including three of the first TSCA Section 6 restrictions or bans on chemicals since EPA's last attempt at a Section 6 rule was rebuffed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in the 1991 Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA decision.
Cleland-Hamnett also indicated that a draft assessment of 1,4 dioxane "will go out in 2016." The agency published its first problem formulation document for the work plan program on it last year, concluding that EPA should further assess potential risks to workers and consumers from the ubiquitous substance.
She also noted that the agency has been working on a series of Significant New Use Rules (SNURs) per its TSCA Section 5 authority for existing chemicals in recent years "for chemicals [that] might be problematic, have been phased out, or haven't started yet, [so we'll] have that notification out so we have a chance to look at those" before new uses begin.
Cleland-Hamnett said staff are "working on finalizing a number of SNURs proposed in 2014 or last year," including a SNUR on nonyphenols and nonylphenol ethoxylates, proposed in 2014; a SNUR proposed last year on certain minor consumer uses of trichloroethylene that have been phased out; and a SNUR proposed last year on long-chain perfluoroalklyl carboxylates.
Proposed Rule
OPPT is also "working on a proposed rule for existing chemicals that appear to be close analogues for [n-methylpyrrolidone], one of the chemicals for which we found significant risk and for which we're developing section 6 rules, so if one of those chemicals were to be used as an alternative, we'd have a chance to look at that," Cleland-Hamnett said.
Other major activities for the final year of the Obama administration are completing a Section 8 reporting rule for nanomaterials and completing a rule on formaldehyde in particle board, as required by Congress. Cleland-Hamnett said the agency is "getting close to finalizing that [nanomaterials] rule, that will be happening in 2016."
Cleland-Hamnett's slides indicate that she anticipates that OPPT will finalize a rule on formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products and propose a rule modifying the existing statute's limited allowance of polychlorinated biphenyls.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-preparing-new-work-plan-assessments-flame-retardant-test-rule
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EPA Seeks to Expand, Speed Safer Choice Chemical Alternatives Program
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA is seeking to expand its voluntary Safer Choice program, which has traditionally performed alternative assessments and reviewed interested companies' cleaning products for recognition with an EPA logo on their labels, by both increasing the number and the types of products it reviews and the number of chemicals on its safer ingredients list.
One reason for the program's expansion may be a push from Walmart, which is seeking to have its store brand products recognized by Safer Choice, according to a former state regulator.
The agency has spent much of the past two years working to re-brand the program from its former name, Design for the Environment, which traditionally has reviewed cleaning products against its hazard screen. Products that pass the screening are eligible to add the Safer Choice logo to their labels. The program has been popular in institutional purchasing programs, and with input from partner companies, EPA is seeking to boost the program's profile with consumers as well.
Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, director of EPA's toxics office, announced the expansion in March 23 keynote remarks at the annual chemical industry conference GlobalChem in Washington, D.C. She said EPA is seeking to expand the types of products that Safer Choice reviews and also to increase "by at least 10 percent" the number of chemicals on its safer ingredients list. She said they are also seeking to grow the program so that it can review more products more quickly.
"Doing these things are our priorities for Safer Choice in 2016: raising awareness, expanding the categories of products that are eligible for Safer Choice and making the program more efficient," she said. She added that the agency is planning a major "spring cleaning" themed-awareness drive for the program targeted at household consumers in early April.
EPA March 17 published a Federal Register notice announcing that it is "seeking additional third-party profilers to help the Safer Choice Program meet the growing consumer demand for safer products carrying the Safer Choice label," and asking interested companies to submit an application by May 16. The notice explains that third-party profilers "review the candidate's products against Safer Choice standards and criteria, collect performance information, and develop chemical profiles."
Cleland-Hamnett described the third-party profilers as "the folks who contract with partners and work with us to do the initial review of products and all the chemicals in products. One of the things that was causing a bit of a clog in the pipeline is that we just had the two third-party profilers. We're looking to add two this year and possibly more next year. The program is expanding and we're trying to keep up with the popularity by expanding the infrastructure."
Maureen Gorsen, formerly director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control and now partner with the law firm Alston & Bird, said during the conference that an internal Walmart goal of having its entire Safer Choice eligible store brand products reviewed and approved by the program may be contributing to the program's expansion.
The international retail giant "wants all their private label [products] certified by EPA as Safer Choice and they're very, very frustrated that EPA's process is so slow that they may not make their goals," Gorsen said during another March 23 panel at GlobalChem.
Walmart did not return a request for comment.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-seeks-expand-speed-safer-choice-chemical-alternatives-program
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Legal Experts: Supreme Court Decision on Mercury Pollution Could Undercut Chemical Reform
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Melanie Benesh and Thomas Cluderay
You might think you can’t put a price on protecting public health and the environment. But you’d be wrong — especially if we’re talking about the nation's broken and outdated chemicals law, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA.
We’ve written a lot about how the House and Senate are working to amend this defective law (here, here and here) through negotiations to reconcile language in their respective TSCA reform bills.
A critically important issue still under discussion is to what extent the Environmental Protection Agency must consider economic costs as part of its decisions on regulating chemicals. In practice the requirement that EPA balance costs and benefits translates into serious delays – if action at all – when it comes to protecting people and the environment from toxic chemicals. This onerous requirement most notoriously blocked the EPA's efforts to ban asbestos, even in the face of abundant evidence that it is a deadly carcinogen.
Although both the House and Senate bills attempt to minimize considerations of regulatory costs, those efforts could be undermined by the 2015 Supreme Court decision Michigan v. EPA, which stymied EPA’s regulations of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
That's why more than 30 leading legal scholars and public interest lawyers wrote to Congress today (March 31) to urge lawmakers to be mindful of this decision as they’re reconciling language in the bills.
In the letter, they warn that in light of the Michigan decision, some language in the bills could unintentionally reassert EPA's obligation to detail the costs regulating a chemical. They say such requirements “would unduly burden EPA’s ability to effectively protect public health, even in the face of credible threats of toxic chemical exposures.”
Lurking over this discussion is the ghost of the 1991 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA. That decision said that EPA had not given enough consideration to cost when determining that asbestos posed an “unreasonable risk” to health and the environment. As a result, the proposed ban on asbestos was overturned.
Corrosion Proof Fittings, and the cost requirements it saddled EPA with, paralyzed the agency’s efforts to address chemical safety. In the more than two decades since that decision, EPA has only attempted to regulate a handful of chemicals out of the tens of thousands on the market.
Efforts to minimize cost considerations in the House and Senate bills have largely focused on rectifying the “unreasonable risk” question. But the Michigan decision shows that lawmakers also need to be wary of other language in the bills.
In Michigan v. EPA, the Supreme Court interpreted the terms “appropriate” and “necessary” in the context of the Clean Air Act. The Court found that those terms imply that costs must be evaluated when EPA decides whether to regulate power plant emissions. Because in that case EPA decided to regulate mercury emissions based on health and environmental factors, but without considering costs, the Court blocked the regulations.
The new bills have several references to “appropriate” EPA actions. Courts could interpret that language to re-impose obligations for EPA to consider costs, undercutting language in other parts of the bills that would limit such requirements. If so, EPA efforts to regulate toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, another notorious carcinogen, could meet the same fate as the mercury emission regulations.
If Congress is going to seize a once-in-a-generation moment to overhaul TSCA, burdensome cost evaluations must be limited. EPA must have broad power and flexibility to effectively restrict chemicals without being tied up in endless red tape.
In particular, EPA shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to show that a chemical’s potential harms are worth the costs of regulation. Instead, regulatory decisions should be based on health, safety and environmental risks – not complex calculations, subject to challenge from industry, about what it might cost to use the chemical more safely.
The letter can be found here.
http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2016/03/supreme-court-decision-mercury-pollution-could-undercut-chemical-reform
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FDA Sued for Delay in Deciding Perchlorate Food Additive Petition
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
It’s been 15 months since a group of environmental, consumer, and public health advocates petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove the agency's approval of perchlorate uses in packaging.
Traditionally, FDA’s food additive petition process has been the exclusive purview of food manufacturers seeking approval to use new chemicals or expand uses of already approved chemicals in food production. However, nothing in the law prohibits the public from using the process to ban or restrict the use of certain chemicals.
The perchlorate food additive petition was one of the first times that the process has been used to seek removal of a risky chemical from the nation’s food supply. Such an innovative approach was shown to be effective when FDA accepted a separate petition submitted by the same organizations to ban long-chain perfluorinated compounds in January 2016. Food additive petitions are a powerful tool in the ongoing effort to remove unsafe chemicals from our food.
By law, the process is supposed to take 180 days – six months. FDA formally agreed to consider the petition on December 31, 2014 – 15 months ago. Today, the Breast Cancer Fund, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Food Safety, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Working Group, and Natural Resources Defense Council sued FDA to force action on the petition.
It is disappointing that the petitioning NGOs had to turn to the courts to get an answer on a petition that, if granted, could prevent vulnerable populations such as pregnant women, fetuses and young children from ongoing exposures to perchlorate, a chemical that has high health risks.
Perchlorate can inhibit the thyroid’s ability to use the iodine in the diet. The body needs iodine to make the thyroid hormones that are essential to a fetus’ and child’s brain development. Lower hormone levels could impair a child’s cognitive and developmental skills. Most pregnant women in the United States already have inadequate iodine levels, and unnecessary exposure to perchlorate can increase the risk to a child’s healthy development.
In 2005, FDA granted approval for using perchlorate as an anti-static agent in dry goods plastic packaging. The chemical compound was already approved as an additive in sealing gaskets for food containers. Perchlorate also has other non-FDA regulated uses ranging from rocket fuel and fireworks to road flares and airbags and it is a common contaminant of hypochlorite bleach. When hypochlorite, a common household and industrial disinfectant used in food processing and to peel and wash produce, is not managed carefully, it quickly degrades to perchlorate.
Three years after FDA approved perchlorate as an anti-static agent in dry goods packaging, a separate FDA study of food revealed that 74% of the food types tested had measurable amounts of perchlorate. It may be surprising to note that the food in that study was collected around the same time as the agency was making its decision to expand the use of perchlorate.
Other public health agencies have released additional studies that underscore the breadth of the problem. TheCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found perchlorate in the urine of every American they tested since 2001. Children have higher levels than adults. Meanwhile, in 2013, EPA’s Science Advisory Board alsocautioned that children are disproportionately impacted by the presence of perchlorate.
This is a complicated issue. I can understand that it was going to take FDA longer than six months to complete its review. The agency must, by law, consider the cumulative effect of not only perchlorate but two other chemicals—thiocyanate and nitrates—in the diet that also inhibit the thyroid's ability to use iodine. In addition, our food supply is extensively contaminated with perchlorate. However, with the agency's technical scientific review drawing to a close, it is time for FDA to act. Hopefully, the NGOs’ lawsuit will be the impetus needed to get the overdue petition resolved.
Perchlorate is a dangerous chemical. FDA's 2005 decision was wrong and never should have been made. To protect kids' brains, the agency needs to reverse its prior approvals and ban the use of perchlorate as an additive.
http://blogs.edf.org/health/2016/03/31/perclorate-lawsuit/#more-5042
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Eight Chemical Firms No Longer Make, Use PFOA
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The Arkema Group, BASF Corp., Daikin Industries, DuPont successor Chemours and four other chemical manufacturers that previously made or used perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and related perfluorinated chemicals ceased their production or use of them by the end of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency told Bloomberg BNA March 31.
The EPA updated Bloomberg BNA on the status of the 2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program. The agency's stewardship program website has not been updated since October 2015.
Under the voluntary 2006 program, eight major U.S. fluoropolymer and telomer manufacturers committed to reduce their production or use of PFOA and chemicals that can break down to it after a draft risk assessment showed potential risks were associated with common levels of exposure in the U.S. population. They also pledged to work toward the elimination of PFOA from their emissions and products by 2015.
Those pledges were met, the EPA said in a statement e-mailed March 31.
The agency did not reply to a question about whether any other company had begun to produce PFOA in or import it into the U.S.
Daikin stopped using PFOA in the U.S. in 2011, well ahead of its commitment, Ritchie Straff, vice president for strategic planning, told Bloomberg BNA.
The company, headquartered in Osaka, Japan, stopped its use of PFOA globally as of the end of 2015, Daikin said in a press release.
The PFOA Stewardship program produced results that would have been “very difficult if not impossible to achieve” using the authority the Toxic Substances Control Act provides the EPA, Charles Auer, of Charles Auer & Associates LLC, told Bloomberg BNA.
Auer directed the EPA's chemicals and pollution prevention office when the stewardship program was launched.
EPA's Help Sought for Nearly 15 Years
PFOA has been used to make fluoropolymers, which are found in many consumer and industrial products including non-stick cookware.
The association of PFOA with kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other diseases have prompted thousands of lawsuits against DuPont and Chemours.
A jury verdict and $1.6 million award in the first of 3,500 lawsuits addressing exposure to PFOA withstood a preliminary challenge from DuPont in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio (33 DEN A-7, 2/19/16).
Notwithstanding the cessation of PFOA's production and use, the chemical persists for years in people's bodies and in the environment. Is has been found in drinking water in Ohio, New Hampshire, New York, West Virginia and other states.
Three Democratic governors urged EPA in a March 10 letter to establish national guidance addressing PFOA contamination to help states assess the safety of their drinking water (48 DEN A-15, 3/11/16).
That request comes almost 15 years after West Virginia sought EPA's assistance as it dealt with the discovery of PFOA, also called C-8, in drinking water (94 DEN A-8, 5/15/02).
Residents of Parkersburg and Vienna, W. Va., who sought help from EPA and West Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection in 2001 following their exposure to PFOA in drinking water supplies, repeated their request in a March 1 letter to the EPA (42 DEN A-8, 3/3/16).
Inadequate Evidence Then, Maybe Now
It would have been very difficult in the early 2000s for the EPA to satisfy the requirements Section 6 of TSCA requires the agency to meet before it can restrict or ban a chemical, Auer said.
Section 6 requires the EPA to have evidence that a chemical “will present” an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.
There wasn't enough evidence in the early 2000s to prove that PFOA would present an unreasonable risk, Auer said.
The voluntary Stewardship Program worked, because it pushed the industry to work toward eliminating the chemicals but left it up to them to decide how best to do it, Auer said.
“Seemingly they have developed alternatives and shifted away from PFOA and other similar chemicals over the past 10 years with the result that domestic production of PFOA has ceased entirely, while use has declined significantly,” he said.
The evidence against PFOA has grown over the years, but the agency could still find it difficult to meet the “will present” standard, Auer said.
The general population has low exposures and U.S. blood levels of PFOA are declining based on measurements from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, he said.
“It is not clear that EPA could meet the Section 6 requirements even at this time,” Auer said.
Legislative Solution?
Two bills on Capitol Hill that would reauthorize and revise TSCA would make it easier for the agency to address chemicals that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT), he said.
Auer referred to the House's TSCA Modernization Act (H.R. 2576) and the Senate's Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Formerly S. 697, the Senate passed its bill unanimously in December as an amendment to H.R. 2576.
“Both bills give greater attention to PBTs than exists under TSCA and, if enacted ,should contribute to greater efforts to identify and successfully manage PBT exposures and releases,” Auer said. “This is particularly true for existing chemical PBTs.”
The EPA's new chemicals program already has been effective in encouraging companies to move away from PBTs when they cannot manage exposures and releases, Auer said.
The Senate bill should help the agency do even more to prevent new PBTs entering commerce, he said.
The Senate bill would require the agency to affirm that a new chemical is safe before it can enter commerce. The House bill makes no changes to TSCA's new chemicals provisions.
“It might not be economical for new chemicals to meet requirements that potential exposures be limited to the maximum extent practicable,” Auer said.
Richard Denison, lead senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, shares Auer's view that TSCA reform could make it easier to prevent chemicals such as PFOA getting into people's bodies and the environment.
Denison described the reasons in a blog he wrote in January.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217253&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217253&jd=86217253
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Chemical Sector Details First Challenge to EPA's Climate-Based HFC Limits
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
By Abby Smith
Two chemical companies are laying out a first-time legal case against EPA regulations limiting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants based on their global warming potential (GWP), charging both that the agency lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to do so and that, even if it did, EPA violated its own policies in a way that was “arbitrary and capricious” by failing to consider factors other than GWP.
Mexichem Fluor, Inc., and Arkema, Inc., on March 28 filed their opening brief in the case Mexichem Fluor, Inc., v. EPA, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, challenging EPA's July 2015 rule removing several high-GWP HFCs from a list of acceptable chemicals under its Significant New Alternatives Policy (SNAP) program.
The rule is the first of several such measures the agency is already developing or planning as it works to curtail production and use of the chemicals due to their climate impacts -- one of the administration's major climate policy agenda items in President Obama's final year.
But the litigation could cast significant uncertainty over the administration's regulatory efforts -- raising doubts over the agency's authority to regulate the chemicals for the climate impacts.
The companies challenging the rule at issue in this case say that section 612 of the Clean Air Act, which authorized the SNAP program, was intended to address ozone-depleting chemicals, not the high-GWP substances the agency is now targeting. Many of the ozone-depleting chemicals were replaced by HFCs -- chemicals that do not deplete the ozone layer but have since been found to have a high GWP.
In their brief, the companies call for the rule's vacatur, doubling down on charges that EPA disregarded the bounds of the SNAP program as set by section 612 in order to meet the HFC reduction goal in President Obama's 2013 Climate Action Plan.
“In short, EPA has pounded the square peg of the President's Climate Action Plan into the round hole of [section] 612 and the SNAP regulations. In doing so the Agency has produced a rarity -- an air emissions regulation where the significance of risk, amount of emissions, extent of controls, and actual effects on the atmosphere are irrelevant,” petitioners write.
Though arguing that section 612 “unambiguously” cannot be used to set HFC controls, the petitioners also contend that even if EPA has the authority, it did not adequately satisfy its own policies for making determinations to delist a chemical under the SNAP program.
The agency, they charge, neglected to consider factors beyond GWP -- such as other risks, energy efficiency and costs -- and thus “disregarded both [Clean Air Act section] 612 and basic principles of rational, non-arbitrary agency decisionmaking.” In addition, petitioners argue EPA did not provide an objective standard by which it measures the risk level of GWP in various end uses.
Montreal Protocol
The companies' legal filing came one day before EPA released its latest proposed SNAP rule targeting a second round of HFCs, a proposal that has already drawn criticism from the commercial refrigeration industry because it adopts a speedier phaseout schedule than proposed in a first-time deal between the industry and advocates.
In addition, international talks commence next week in Geneva, where countries will begin negotiations to broker this year a global phase-down of HFCs under the Montreal Protocol -- an effort the Obama administration is marking as one of its next international climate priorities following the landmark Paris climate deal last December.
Many industry groups largely support an HFC phaseout, setting voluntary commitments to limit the chemicals and privately research low-GWP alternatives, as well as backing the Montreal Protocol process.
But the Mexichem litigation will loom over administration efforts domestically and abroad, as it ramps up efforts to prompt a shift away from HFCs within U.S. industry and as it works to secure the global deal.
For example, EPA's just-proposed rule is slated to be finalized in August, according to the Unified Agenda, which means the rule could be issued even before the D.C. Circuit hears oral arguments in the Mexichem litigation. EPA is not due to respond in the litigation until May 27, and final briefs in the case are not due until Aug. 12.
Negotiations to craft a global HFC amendment under the Montreal Protocol are set to wrap up in the fall, as countries aim to approve a final amendment during a meeting of the parties in Kigali, Rwanda, in October.
Were the court to back Mexichem's claims and later overturn EPA's first SNAP rule, it could upend the agency's domestic HFC phaseout and threaten any global deal, as sources say the SNAP rulemakings have been crucial to demonstrate a level of commitment to the international community.
Both Mexichem Fluor, which produces fluorine-based products, and Arkema, which manufactures specialty chemicals for various types of products, argued in statements of issue to the case and comments on the first proposed SNAP rule that EPA lacked authority to regulate HFCs under the statute “without Congress's authorization.” Congress would have to act, also, in order to grant EPA ability to craft regulations to implement any potential global phase-down of HFCs set under the Montreal Protocol, Mexichem Fluor wrote in its October 2014 comments.
In their opening brief, the chemical companies expand on their argument, charging that not only does EPA lack authority under section 612 to change the status of non-ozone-depleting chemicals like HFCs, but the agency has previously acknowledged such limitations of the SNAP program.
The brief references a 1995 case, where EPA rejected a petition from OZ Technology seeking to delist an HFC refrigerant that was non-ozone-depleting.
EPA denied the petition, the petitioners write, noting that the agency “explained that, 'under the March 18, 1994 SNAP rule, EPA does not review substitutes for non-ozone-depleting refrigerants like HFC-134a' and that 'the SNAP rule does not regulate the legitimate substitution of [a second-generation substitute] for first-generation non-ozone-depleting substances.”
“With no change to the regulatory framework since 1996, the Agency has come to the opposite conclusion in its 2015 Final Rule,” the companies add.
In addition, the chemical companies argue that even if section 612 is ambiguous, EPA's interpretation is “impermissible” and therefore the agency should not be awarded deference by the courts.
EPA appears to adopt an interpretation of section 612 that allows them to continue to direct replacement of further generations of chemicals, the companies say.
“This astonishingly expansive understanding of Section 612 is so far removed from the comparatively modest purpose of the provision -- to ensure that ozone-depleting substances are replaced with safe alternatives as they are phased out -- that Congress could not possible have intended it,” the brief reads.
'Blinded Itself'
EPA also violated its own administrative principles for making SNAP program determinations, the companies argue, an oversight they write should lead to a vacatur of the rule even if the agency is found to have adequate authority to regulate HFCs under the air action section.
Petitioners outline three factors EPA failed to consider in making its determinations: the significance of the risk posed by the banned HFCs, the atmospheric effects of the chemicals and the costs of the final rule.
“In sum, the Agency has blinded itself to any factor that might interfere with the [Climate Action Plan]. Despite protestations to the contrary in the Final Rule, EPA previously has determined that transition and efficiency costs are relevant to SNAP decisions,” the brief reads.
Energy efficiency, industry has argued, is an especially important consideration in regards to refrigerants, as many low-GWP alternatives to HFCs are less energy efficient. And the Mexichem brief faults EPA for its failure to take into account “this important aspect of risk from global warming.”
The companies note: “At best, EPA does not know what energy efficiencies will result from the Final Rule, in which case it does not know whether the HFC bans reduce atmospheric effects and risks. At worst, the HFC bans will lead to use of less-energy-efficient replacements and an increase in [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
EPA's approach to determining the significance of risk posed by a high-GWP HFC is flawed, as well, petitioners argue, noting that the agency sets GWP levels compared to carbon dioxide -- which has a GWP of 1 -- even though “EPA has concluded that total carbon dioxide emissions are the leading cause of the radiative forcing leading to climate change.”
Thus, to that effect, if CO2 poses a risk, then the agency would have to delist any other chemical with a GWP greater than CO2, petitioners contend. As the agency does not do so, “[a]pparently there is some unstated magnitude of difference, in the Agency's view, that has no atmospheric effect.”
This critique also aligns with another of the companies' arguments: that EPA does not provide an “objective standard,” or a metric, by which it determines whether to delist a chemical. The companies contend that the metric cannot be simply based on magnitude, giving an example where the agency delists a refrigerant with a GWP of 2730 but considers another refrigerant with a GWP of 2630 to be “comparable” to 0.
The companies note that in its final rule, EPA does indicate it considers factors like charge size of the refrigeration equipment and total estimates of production, but the brief argues this reasoning is not sufficient.
“In the end, the Final Rule's HFC bans are arbitrary and capricious because EPA has not explained the basis either for its comparisons with the replacements or for the delistings,” the companies write. “For the Agency, it appears that meaningful differences in GWPs, as well as control of residual risk, are like pornography for Justice Stewart: EPA knows them when it sees them.”
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/chemical-sector-details-first-challenge-epas-climate-based-hfc-limits
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Former EPA Administrators Defend Clean Power Plan
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
The Clean Power Plan falls squarely within the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the “broadly worded” provisions of the Clean Air Act, two past agency administrators said in defense of the rule (West Virginia v. EPA, D.C. Cir., No. 15-1363, brief filed 3/31/16).
Congress intentionally made many of the Clean Air Act's provisions broad to give the EPA the flexibility to address emerging air pollution problems without having to ask for the law to be updated, and the current administration has applied that flexibility to its carbon dioxide standards for power plants, former EPA administrators William D. Ruckelshaus and William K. Reilly, both Republican appointees, said in an amicus brief filed March 31 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“Many of the Clean Air Act's central terms are famously capacious precisely because Congress in drafting the law anticipated EPA's need to address environmental issues as they emerged and evolved over time, in ways not specifically identified at the time of enactment,” the brief said. “In that light, the current administrator's interpretation of the act in support of the Clean Power Plan falls well within her authority under the act to make discretionary judgments in adapting its provisions to new challenges.”
Past Broad Interpretations
EPA administrators in the past have used broad interpretations of their existing statutory authorities to ban certain uses of the pesticide DDT, determine the adequate margin of safety for air pollution and address the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the past administrators said.
Ruckelshaus was the EPA's first administrator appointed by President Richard Nixon. He later served under President Ronald Reagan as well. Reilly was appointed administrator by President George H.W. Bush.
The EPA's Clean Power Plan (RIN 2060-AR33), issued under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, sets carbon dioxide emissions limits on the power sector in each state. The rule is being challenged by 27 states as well as several utilities and industry groups. Opponents of the rule have argued that the EPA overstepped its Clean Air Act authority by regulating how electricity is generated rather than how pollution from power plants is controlled (35 DEN A-16, 2/23/16).
‘System' Is a Broad Term
However, Ruckelshaus and Reilly argued that the Clean Power Plan respects state sovereignty over the power sector while setting reasonable and achievable limits on carbon dioxide pollution. They argued the term “system” in Section 111(d)'s requirement that the EPA determine the “best system of emission reduction” for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants is sufficiently broad to incorporate Clean Power Plan provisions like shifting generation from coal-fired power plants to less polluting natural gas or renewable generation even if that was not what was envisioned when the Clean Air Act was first passed in 1970.
“What constitutes the ‘best system for emissions reduction' turns not on what systems existed in 1970, but on what systems exist today,” they said. “And the word ‘system' is plainly capacious enough to support EPA's reliance, in its effort to address climate change, on the unquestionably pragmatic and cost effective carbon emission reduction opportunities offered by the modern grid.”
The EPA made a similar argument for generation shifting in its brief defending the rule (60 DEN A-1, 3/29/16).
Ruckelshaus and Reilly are represented by Harvard law professors Jody Freeman and Richard J. Lazarus.
The deadline for amicus briefs supporting the EPA is April 1, and several public health groups—including the American Lung Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and American Public Health Association—said they will file a brief unpinning the health benefits of addressing climate change through the Clean Power Plan.
Additionally, 25 business groups—including the American Sustainable Business Council, Green America, the U.S. Black Chambers Inc. and National Small Business Network—will also voice their support for the rule.
“Climate change is a public health issue that disproportionately affects children,” Jennifer Lowry, chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Council on Environmental Health, told reporters March 31.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217235&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217235&jd=86217235
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EDF Joins Broad Coalition to File Vigorous Defense of the Clean Power Plan
Mar 31, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tomas Carbonell
This week a broad coalition of public health and environmental organizations, including EDF, submitted abrief in support of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
As required by the Clean Air Act, the Clean Power Plan establishes the first national limits on carbon dioxide from existing fossil-fuel fired power plants – the nation’s single largest source of this harmful pollution. The Clean Power Plan provides eminently achievable targets for carbon pollution reduction that phase in gradually from 2022 to 2030, and it offers states and power companies tremendous flexibility to determine how best to meet those targets.
Unfortunately, opponents of climate progress have been waging a relentless litigation campaign to overturn these urgently-needed and reasonable standards – a campaign that began by filing lawsuits in multiple courts before EPA had even finalized the Clean Power Plan.
Now, the D.C. Circuit is poised to consider the legal merits of the Clean Power Plan – the first time any court has considered the case on its merits.
The brief filed by the environmental and public health coalition (including EDF), which represents millions of Americans around the country, adds to EPA’s own powerful defense.
Here, we provide a brief overview of the major points in our coalition’s brief.
The Urgent Need to Address Carbon Pollution
The opening paragraph of the brief emphasizes the critical stakes in this litigation —and the urgent need to address harmful pollution from existing power plants that is threatening public health and welfare:
Fossil fuel-fired power plants are the country’s largest sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, exceeding even the “enormous quantity” emitted by the transportation sector … That pollution is destabilizing the climate that supports human civilization and all life, posing a dire threat to public health and welfare. Higher temperatures worsen deadly heatwaves, promote the spread of insect-borne diseases, intensify storms and flooding that cause death and injury and enormous property damage, and deepen droughts that threaten crops and water supplies. These harmful impacts are already occurring in the United States, and they disproportionately affect children, the elderly, low-income populations, communities of color, and indigenous populations worldwide. (Brief, page 1)
The Clean Power Plan is Firmly Anchored in Our Nation’s Clean Air Laws
Our coalition's brief underscores recent Supreme Court precedent that unanimously found that the Clean Air Act “speaks directly” to the carbon pollution from existing power plants, and “delegate[s] to EPA the decision whether and how to regulate” those emissions. (Brief, page 1, quoting American Electric Power v. Connecticut, 131 S. Ct. 2527, 2530, 2538 (2011) )
The brief also explains that the Clean Power Plan is a reasonable exercise of this authority, establishing “readily achievable” emission reduction targets that build on current industry trends and are based on the techniques the industry most commonly uses to reduce carbon pollution:
The [Clean Power Plan] is highly cost-effective, well-suited to the regulated industry, and accommodating of industry and state requests for compliance flexibility … the Rule reflects the predominant approach to reducing power plant CO2 emissions employed by companies and states across the country. The record shows that industry trends predating the Rule are driving cleaner electricity generation, moderating electricity demand, and reducing use of old, uneconomical coal plants…The Rule provides six years’ lead time before emission reduction requirements begin gradually phasing in, and the pace of CO2 reductions the Rule requires by 2030 is in line with the pace actually achieved by the industry in recent years. These readily achievable reductions are not too much to ask of an industry that contributes disproportionately to a grave public hazard. (Brief, pages 1 and 2)
And the brief demonstrates that the Clean Power Plan faithfully follows the language of the Clean Air Act, and draws on well-established regulatory approaches that have long been applied to the power sector and other industries:
The Rule is in keeping with a long line of power sector regulations that take account of the unique characteristics of the industry and its pollution … The Rule achieves its pollution-reducing objectives at reasonable cost using flexible measures that are already widely used in the power industry. EPA has employed such measures in many regulations both to set emission targets and to ease compliance. (Brief, pages 2 and 3)
Lastly, the brief takes apart opponents’ arguments that EPA is prohibited from regulating carbon dioxide emissions under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — the same provision that the Supreme Court unanimously found “speaks directly” to such regulation:
After lengthy attacks on how EPA applied [section 111(d)], Petitioners contend the agency may not use that section at all, because EPA previously regulated different pollutants — mercury and other hazardous air pollutants (“HAPs”) — under a different section of the Act … This bizarre proposition is like exempting restaurants from food handling requirements because they are subject to the fire code. The Clean Air Act does not work that way. (Brief, page 20)
The Broad Coalition Supporting the Clean Power Plan
The coalition brief was submitted to the court by the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Clean Air Council, the Clean Air Task Force, Clean Wisconsin, the Conservation Law Foundation, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Ohio Environmental Council, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Coal River Mountain Watch, the Kanawha Forest Coalition, the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition, and Keepers of the Mountains Foundation.
In addition to the health and environmental brief, other parties supporting EPA – including a coalition of 18 States as well as Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, South Miami and others; a large group of power companies; and three advanced energy trade associations — also submitted their briefs in defense of the Clean Power Plan.
What’s Next in the Clean Power Plan Litigation
Today and tomorrow, an extensive group of Clean Power Plan supporters will file amicus, or “friend of the court,” briefs.
A few examples of these amici include:
· The National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and numerous individual cities and counties including major cities in states who are litigating to obstruct these safeguards such as Houston, Salt Lake City and Grand Rapids
· Leading medical and public health associations, including the American Thoracic Society and the American Medical Association
· Two former EPA Administrators, William Ruckelhaus and William Reilly, who served under Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush
· Numerous former senior state environmental and energy officials, including officials in states litigating against these standards
· Technical experts on the nation’s electricity grid
Oral arguments will take place on June 2 before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court.
Click here to find more information about the Clean Power Plan, including all legal briefs.
http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/?_ga=1.165839990.918768490.1456939137
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Oil Industry Urged to Focus on Long Term During Downturn
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Nushin Huq
Even though the current oil-gas downturn is a normal part of the industry's cycle and less severe than the 1980s slump, companies need to focus on a long-term business strategy, panelists at a forum in Houston said March 31.
While there is constant pressure to grow and deliver returns in the short term, the petroleum industry is a long-term business and one that has changed dramatically since the increased production of fossil fuels using hydraulic fracturing, panelists said during a King & Spalding LLP Quarterly Energy Forum.
“Yes, this is normal,” said Roger Burks, managing director and chief financial officer at WG Consulting. “I can tell you this is nothing compared to 1985. What is happening now is really the fact that the Federal Reserve starting printing money, and we had a bubble created by an increase in the money supply and low interest rates.”
It is important for oil and gas companies to focus on the long term, Burks said. Companies need to focus on keeping costs low and focus on their people. Companies should also hedge through trading future development costs. If companies are disciplined during the good times, they will be fine during the downturns. The industry will learn to make money at $30 per barrel.
“Run it for the long term, not for quarters,” Burks said. “It will be a difficult 18 months for a lot of people, but the next 18 months will decide the next 10 years.”
‘200-Year Supply.'
While the cyclical nature of the industry remains the same, there has been an important change from the 1980s, Burks said. In 1985, the world was living in the era of “peak oil,” the mindset that the global oil and gas supply had peaked.
“We now have a minimum of a 200-year supply of oil and natural gas, based on current technology,” Burks said. “The world has changed.”
Technology has been the driver of that change. The industry has gone from looking at land plays to technology plays, said Rick Plaeger, former general counsel and current vice president for EOG Resources Inc. In the past, companies would invest significant money looking at where oil might be found, he said. They ran the risk of coming up with dry wells. Technology, especially in hydraulic fracturing, has changed that.
“Everyone knows where [oil and gas] is,” Plaeger said. “The question is, do you have the right technology and the right people to get it out of the ground, most cost-effectively as possible.”
Unlike previous downturns, where the industry reaction was to cut costs wherever possible, this time around industry tried to increase efficiencies. It was due to companies using new technologies and human ingenuity, Plaeger said.
“This time around the producers are really trying to hold onto their people,” Plaeger said. “That [immediate layoffs] happened the last time around; we lost talent that never came back.”
Keep Up Lobbying
In order to really create value, companies should focus on research and development, said Brad Beitler, vice president of technology at FMC Technologies. There needs to be focus on the next generation of technologies.
It is also important for the oil and gas industry to keep up its lobbying efforts and continue educating lawmakers about the industry, especially hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling methods, the panelists said. Some candidates have been campaigning on a platform of increased regulation of hydraulic fracturing, said Kathy Marietta, partner at King & Spalding LLP in Houston.
During elections, presidential candidates might criticize hydraulic fracturing and threaten to heavily regulate it once they get into office, but the reality is different, said Tim Wall, former president of Apache Canada and Kitimat LNG.
“What ends up happening is he doesn't do the things he says he will or does it in a modified way,” Wall said. “What's important is that if you're in the oil and gas industry, take a part in that, be able to lobby your politicians. They need to be in your ear, so they understand the effects. Otherwise, they're hearing one side of the story.”
‘Benefits of Fossil Fuels.'
“It's astounding how little policy makers know about our business,” Plaeger said. “They catch sound bites here and there. There's a huge responsibility in educating them, first, about the benefits of fossil fuels.”
Fossil fuels have improved the lives of many in the world, and new technologies make them even better, Plaeger said. He added that the industry isn't against new sources like renewables and that most companies are in favor of developing all sorts of technologies.
“Wind and solar is not in competition with oil and gas,” Plaeger said. “Those are interruptible sources of supply that natural gas can be a tremendous partner with.”
Fossil fuels have a huge impact not only on the quality of life but also on the economy, Plaeger said. No one quite knows what a world without fossil fuels looks like, and while it can sound great, there's currently nothing to take the place of fossil fuels, he said.
“Some candidates make fairly outrageous comments like they want to regulate hydraulic fracking out of business,” Plaeger said. “Those people have to understand that over half of the oil and gas produced in the United States is produced through hydraulic fracturing.”
There is a slew of new regulations being initiated by the current administration, Plaeger said. Some of those will fall aside and some will be modified, but the industry cannot take for granted the “social license to operate.”
“We cannot take the foot off of the accelerator trying to educate,” Plaeger said. “If we let the shrill voices against fossil fuels prevail, people will be afraid of what we produce and they won't know that we can do it responsibly.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217237&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217237&jd=86217237
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Experts See M&A Activity Increasing in Appalachia This Year After Slow 2015
Apr 1, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
After 2015 failed to deliver the expected spike in oil and natural gas industry merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the United States and abroad, a group of Appalachian experts is anticipating much more this year, particularly in the Marcellus and Utica shales.
Speaking on a panel at this year's Northeast Oil and Gas Awards Industry Summit on Wednesday in Pittsburgh, the experts agreed that better assets would be available this year and owners battered by the prolonged slump in oil and gas prices would be more willing to part ways with them for lower prices as the natural gas market is closer to a bottom.
"I think we're expecting a much more robust M&A market in 2016. We talk a lot in our shop that in 2015, there were a lot of things for sale, but not on sale. There were a lot of deals that didn't close or didn't meet reserve," said EdgeMarc Energy COO Callum Streeter. "Already this year, we're starting to see a lot more tier one assets. I think last year you saw people maybe trying to shed assets that were not contiguous or were kind of not really core assets in portfolios. But now we're starting to see really high-quality assets, a lot of [held-by-production] components and proved developed producing associated with them.
"We really do expect to see the M&A market here heat up in 2016 and potentially see private equity chase the assets as well," added Streeter, whose company is one of the largest privately-owned independents operating in the basin. Canonsburg, PA-based EdgeMarc is backed by Goldman Sachs and has about 52,000 acres in Marcellus- and Utica-rich counties in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
With the downturn that began in mid-2014 and stretched throughout last year, many forecasters had expected M&A activity to reach new heights in 2015, but those assumptions never proved accurate.
In a report released in January, Deloitte LLP noted that the commodity slump had created price disparity between buyers and sellers last year. With no clarity on when prices would rise, the firm said, M&A activity remained low and could continue to remain low this year until factors such as lending pressures and commodity pricing narrow the bid/ask spread for transactions.
In all, Deloitte found that M&A volumes last year were lower than during the Great Recession (seeDaily GPI, Jan. 25). The deal count declined by more than half to 379 from 709 in 2014, while values also fell 20% year/year.
"Here, in this basin, players will start to put some more attractive assets out there," said Manager of Business Development and Planning for Chevron Appalachia LLC Marc Payne. "There is a distressed position for many of these companies, and it's a world of opportunity.
"We did put some of our own assets up for sale here in this basin in 2015," Payne added of a small package of acreage in central Pennsylvania the company began marketing last year.
Huntley & Huntley CEO Keith Mangini said his company was extremely active in 2015 in acquiring small companies to block up the producer's deep rights. Privately-owned Huntley has interests in 600 wells across the country, with most in Southwestern Pennsylvania, where it participates in Marcellus wells. Mangini said the deals his company made were opportunistic, completed at a point when natural gas prices were higher than they are today.
"We spent a lot of time in 2015 buying a lot of companies that were smaller than us, largely to get the deep rights," he said. "I did a few acquisitions of production last year, thinking that was the opportune time at what I thought was the bottom of the gas market. I thought I did some pretty good deals, but not as good as if I would have waited until prices collapsed like they did in November of this past year.
"Now is the time to be doing acquisitions in my opinion," Mangini added. "You know I've been through a bust before and it creates opportunities. It's now time to be buying production at these strip prices instead of going through the drill bit."
Mangini continued by saying that there's a lot of capital "sitting on the sidelines" in private equity that's only now being unleashed after a quiet 2015. Charles Schliebs, founder of Pittsburgh-based M&A consultancy Stone Pier Capital Advisors, agreed. He noted a series of transactions that began in late 2015 that has continued this year.
In December, a group of former EQT Corp. executives secured $250 million to start Lola Energy LLC, which plans to focus on the Marcellus and Utica (see Shale Daily, Dec. 9, 2015). Private equity firm Denham Capital Management LP is backing the company. American Petroleum Partners LLC recently announced a commitment of up to $800 million from Apollo Global Management LLC to focus on Appalachian exploration (see Shale Daily, March 24).
Gastar Exploration Inc., meanwhile, expects to close the $80 million sale of its Marcellus and Utica assets in West Virginia with Tug Hill Inc. in early April (see Shale Daily, Feb. 22). Range Resources Corp. also just announced the closing of a $110 million sale of non-operated properties in Northeast Pennsylvania (see Shale Daily, March 29). Private equity is again entering Appalachian joint ventures, as evidenced by a deal announced this year by Rex Energy Corp. to better develop its Marcellus assets in Pennsylvania (see Shale Daily, March 2).
"Private equity has been important in this basin for quite sometime, especially to the modern shale gas era," Schliebs said. "There's a lot of activity still, and there's a lot of activity that's going on that you haven't heard about, that hasn't been announced. So, we'll see what happens as we continue on throughout 2016."
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/105894-experts-see-ma-activity-increasing-in-appalachia-this-year-after-slow-2015
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Administration Rushing Methane Rules to Boost Legacy: API
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Anthony Adragna
President Barack Obama's administration is rushing out a suite of rules meant to curb methane emissions as a way to bolster his climate change legacy, the American Petroleum Institute said March 31.
The industry group, which represents oil and gas companies including Spectra Energy Corp., Shell Oil Co. and Chevron Corp., said it was “staring down the barrel of multiple regulatory regimes” that were being swiftly shepherded through the rulemaking process so the administration can meet its “arbitrary” goal of reducing methane emissions between 40 percent and 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025.
“In a lot of ways they're rushing to complete work to establish this administration's legacy before they leave office and in the course of doing so are in some ways developing arbitrary targets,” Louis Finkel, executive vice president of government affairs at API, told reporters. “Clearly, they're trying to do all they can to ensure that they've pressed forward hard enough and strong enough [on climate change].”
Taking the lead role in the administration's methane reduction efforts is the Environmental Protection Agency, which has announced its intent to regulate existing oil and gas infrastructure, proposed a series of rules targeting new and modified sources and unveiled a voluntary program meant to recognize successful corporate efforts to slash methane emissions (62 DEN A-1, 3/31/16).
The API has steadfastly opposed regulations of both new and existing sources within the sector, arguing the EPA's own data show methane emissions from hydraulically fractured wells are down 79 percent since 2005.
Shrugs Off Voluntary Program
Both Finkel and Howard Feldman, director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the API, said their members appeared cool to joining the EPA's voluntary program, unveiled March 30, given it required significant additional emissions reporting and forthcoming regulatory requirements for companies remain unclear.
“In light of the regulatory climate that people find themselves right now, to take a step and make another commitment someplace for something that may take extra work and have extra cost and not provide any additional benefit—because the companies are taking steps in and of themselves—it's a business decision each company has to make,” Feldman said.
The API is not commenting on the voluntary EPA program to its members, according to Finkel and Feldman.
The voluntary program, known formally as the Natural Gas STAR Methane Challenge Program, calls for members to implement best management practices to slash methane emissions within five years, submit annual data on their efforts to the EPA and have that information posted online. There are 41 founding members of the program.
New Source Rules Expected
Feldman said the group anticipates the EPA completing its work on the methane regulations for new sources before the end of Obama's term, likely in May, but said one regulation—establishing control technique guidelines—could come later.
“It's not the same type of rule because it's a guideline to states,” Feldman said. “Staff are apparently very busy trying to get the other rules done.”
Regarding existing sources, Feldman said the EPA's decision to issue an information collection request was a “correct step” since it appeared resolute on pursuing regulations.
“They hope to get a draft of the [information collection request] out to look at in April,” Feldman said. “They're just starting to work on this. It wasn't that they had the information collection request in their back pocket and were waiting to give it to us. So the staff is moving on that as well.”
‘Stark Choices' in Election
Finkel said the group would continue to raise the profile of energy issues in this fall's presidential election, arguing the contest offered “stark choices” for how the nation would develop its energy resources.
Neither Republicans, including front-runner Donald Trump, nor Democrats have yet made clear how they would handle the country's energy needs, according to Finkel.
“I'm not exactly sure what Trump's been saying about natural gas,” Finkel said. “I'm looking for the presidential candidates to really articulate their vision for America's energy future and hopefully we'll hear more about that in the coming months from both parties.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217252&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217252&jd=86217252
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America Needs An Energy President
Apr 1, 2016 | Forbes
By Ed Hirs
Anyone who has been waiting for leadership on energy policy during this year’s tumultuous Presidential campaign may be waiting in vain. There’s little talk of energy and, even when the candidates offer a few proposals on their campaign websites or mention them during a debate, there is a dismaying lack of detail.
About the only talk of energy has come from Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing as the cornerstone of his energy and climate policy. Sanders’ rhetoric has forced the presumed Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, to say she, too, would impose more restrictions on fracking.
This is in spite of numerous studies – by the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration’s handpicked Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Shale Gas Production Subcommittee – both finding hydraulic fracturing to be benign for the environment and drinking water supplies in particular. To be fair, studies have determined that water disposal injection wells are linked to earthquakes, but hydraulic fracturing has not been so linked. And shale gas has been an enormous benefit for Americans. In 2012, my colleagues and I demonstrated that the annual gain to natural gas consumers from hydraulic fracturing is more than $100 billion—even more today.
On the Republican side, John Kasich is happy to tout the job growth drilling has brought to Ohio during his time as governor but otherwise has said little other than “we need everything” in energy development. Donald Trump has said he would end oil imports from Saudi Arabia if Saudi Arabia fails to step up its own military commitments.
Even Ted Cruz, the candidate from Houston, the oil capital of the world, has offered little more than promises to slash regulations and approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.
None of them has released a detailed and coherent energy policy, even as the impact of the oil bust – low prices, big layoffs and concerns about the global economy – collide with questions about mitigating climate change.But whoever is elected president in November will no longer be able to ignore the subject, from the nuts and bolts of building new pipelines to balancing the climate impact of coal with policies to retire or retrofit our remaining coal plants.
And those are just the issues related to hydrocarbons. Nuclear and renewable energy should be part of a lower-carbon future. Both pose big challenges.
Public knowledge about nuclear power is largely confined to scare stories, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and “The Simpsons.” Building support for fourth-generation reactors and safer fuels won’t be easy. Neither will decommissioning existing nuclear plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission appears to have underestimated the cost of decommissioning the Vermont Yankee plant by more than one-half, or $600 million-plus.
Entergy, the owner of Vermont Yankee, plans not to begin cleanup until a trust fund of about $600 million grows to be $1.2 billion in some number of decades, long after current executives and shareholders have passed away. Will the cleanup costs grow beyond today’s $1.2 billion estimate also? Are there other such shortfall surprises across the current fleet of more than 100 nuclear power plants? The solution to long-term storage or remediation of nuclear waste has been avoided both by Congress and recent administrations. Such long-term thinking is usually outside the interest and beyond the competence of politicians.
Candidate Clinton has called for 500 million solar panels. Pundits have challenged the numbers behind her rhetoric, but integrating the growing amount of solar and wind energy into the grid will require re-engineering not only the grid, but reworking energy storage, intermittency, distributed generation and transmission solutions. As Spain and Germany found out with very successful subsidy programs, the success and costs of the subsidies can overwhelm taxpayers, ratepayers and utilities. Renewable and carbon free energy is not free of costs.
None of the presidential candidates has offered a blueprint for any of these priorities, or for helping the more than 200,000 people who have lost their jobs in the U.S. oil industry since prices began dropping. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently pointed to the economic loss due to the decline in oil prices that appears to have more than offset the consumer gain of lower prices at the pump. The U.S., as one of the largest oil producers in the world, is suffering from the low oil prices even more than any member of OPEC. How to replace the conservatively estimated $200 billion cut from the nation’s GDP due to lower revenues and less drilling activity? No one is offering suggestions.Specific policies could help. My colleagues and I have demonstrated the costs and benefits of restricting imports, and we have called for the return to that policy to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign crude. Animport quota imposed by President Eisenhower saw U.S. crude prices persist at double the world price charged by OPEC. A return to import quotas would encourage conservation and return U.S. workers to the oil industry.
Removing the impediments to new pipelines would help, too, ensuring that people in Boston do not continue to buy LNG like the residents of Tokyo. Expanding pipelines into the Northeast will hasten the end of coal fired power plants in the Northeast and the use of dirty fuel oil for heat.
All of these issues matter. They will require leadership. Doing nothing – and the resulting environmental damage from coal-fired power plant emissions, ash ponds and mining operations, for example, and the financial and human costs of U.S. military efforts in the Middle East – will cost far more than higher gasoline prices, higher electricity rates and higher taxes.
The question is, who among the candidates can lead the nation to address these challenges? So far, no one in either party has stepped up.
Ed Hirs teaches energy economics in the University of Houston’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. In addition, Hirs is managing director for Hillhouse Resources, LLC, an independent exploration and production company.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/03/31/america-needs-an-energy-president/print/
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EPA Must Resolve Oil, Gas Wells Oversight Issues: GAO
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven
The Environmental Protection Agency hasn't ensured that underground sources of drinking water are being adequately protected from certain oil and gas underground injection activities, the Government Accountability Office said in a recently released report.
The EPA failed to adequately collect or complete inspection and enforcement data or to conduct sufficient oversight activities for these well programs, the report released March 28 said. Without adequate data, the EPA can't assess whether annual inspection goals are being met and can't be sure it is taking appropriate enforcement actions to protect these underground drinking water sources, it said.
At issue is EPA oversight of the 26 state-run and seven-EPA region run underground injection programs with “class II” oil and gas-related wells that aim to protect underground water. Class II wells—there were more than 176,000 nationwide as of 2013—include wells where fluids or materials are injected to increase oil or gas recovery; wells where brine or fluids surfacing during recovery activities are disposed of; and wells where liquid petroleum products are stored.
The EPA could address these issues by requiring reporting of data from well-specific inspections, and it could issue guidance on enforcement data reporting, improve its exemption database and conduct a human resources analysis to identify what new resources are needed, it said. While the agency agreed with most of the recommendations, the EPA said it isn't planning to require that inspection data or conduct the analysis—stances the accountability office took issue with.
“We recognize EPA's efforts to improve the consistency and completeness of summary data … and to collect additional well-specific data through voluntary programs … but EPA has made little progress since 2007 collecting well-specific inspections data from state programs voluntarily,” the report said. “If EPA believes that well-specific data is important, it should require that state and EPA-managed programs report well-specific data on inspections.”
To come to its conclusions of its performance audit, the accountability office conducted a number of interviews with EPA headquarter and regional officials and state officials associated with these programs. The office selected a sample of eight states with class II programs run by either state or EPA region officials, including Kentucky, Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. It was conducted between October 2014 and February 2016.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217229&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217229&jd=86217229
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Nebraska Governor Signs Bill on Fracking Disposal Wells
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Brown
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) signed a bill March 30 that imposes additional disclosure regulations on operators of wastewater disposal wells used in hydraulic fracturing.
The bill (L.B. 1082) requires commercial injection-well operators to sample and analyze injected wastewater at least once per year and provide the resulting data to the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates Nebraska's oil and gas production (58 DEN A-12, 3/25/16)
The bill also requires periodic evaluation of well operators’ ability to pay the costs of shutting down their wells, and the certification and monitoring of vehicles used to transport well wastewater.
In addition, the bill requires the commission to provide public notice to local communities when an application for a well permit has been filed and to hold public meetings to review applications.
Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, an activist group that lobbied in favor of the bill, said in a statement, “Citizens, farmers and ranchers worked hard to ensure that our water is protected from out-of-state fracking waste…. We are a proud Ag[gricultural] state and need to keep taking steps to protect folks' livelihoods and our water from risky fossil fuel corporations.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217246&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217246&jd=86217246
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Mar 31, 2016 | New York Times Magazine
By Nathaniel Rich
It just seems like a beautiful day in Southern California,” Bryan Caforio said.
It was late January in Porter Ranch, an affluent neighborhood on the northern fringe of Los Angeles. Caforio and I sat at a Starbucks overlooking an oceanic parking lot crowded with shoppers. The air was still, dry, 70 degrees. Caforio, a young trial lawyer running for Congress in the state’s 25th District, gestured at the pink and orange striations of sky above Aliso Canyon, its foothills bronze in the falling daylight. “It seems like a beautiful sunset in a wonderful community,” Caforio said, “and we’re sitting outside, enjoying a wonderful coffee.”
But there were scattered clues that suggested that everything was not so wonderful. Near a trio of news vans parked in front of the Starbucks, antenna masts projecting from their roofs, a cameraman stared quizzically up at the canyon. Next to the SuperCuts, security guards stood outside two nondescript storefronts; stenciled on the windows were the words “Community Resource Center” and, in smaller letters, “SoCalGas.” The guards asked for identification and dismissed anyone who tried to take a photograph. At the entrance to Bath & Body Works, a device that resembled an electronic parking meter was balanced on a tripod; the digital display read “BENZENE,” followed by a series of indecipherable ideograms. The parking lot held a preponderance of silver Honda Civics bearing the decal of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Inside the cars, men sat in silence, waiting.
Beyond the Ralphs grocery store and the Walmart rose a neighborhood of jumbo beige homes with orange clay-tiled roofs and three-car garages. The lawns were tidily landscaped with hedges of lavender, succulents, cactuses and kumquat trees. The neighborhood was a model of early-1980s California suburban design; until October, it was best known for being the location where Steven Spielberg shot “E.T.” But now the meandering streets were desolate, apart from the occasional unmarked white van. As you ascended the canyon, reaching gated communities with names like Renaissance, Promenade and Highlands, the police presence increased. On Sesnon Boulevard, the neighborhood’s northern boundary, an electric billboard propped in the middle lane blinked messages: “REPORT CRIME ACTIVITY; L.A.P.D. IN THE AREA; CALL 911.” Holleigh Bernson Memorial Park was empty aside from three cop cars, patrol lights flashing.
But the most significant clues were the spindly metal structures spaced along the ridge of the canyon. They resembled antennas or construction sites or alien glyphs. Until recently, most residents of Porter Ranch did not pay them much attention.
“You look at the hills, you see a few towers,” Caforio said. “But do you really know what they are?” He shook his head. “You try to say, ‘Hey, we’re having an environmental disaster right now!’ But it just looks like a beautiful sunset.”
The first sign of trouble came on Oct. 25, when the Southern California Gas Company filed a terse report with the California Public Utilities Commission noting that a leak had been detected on Oct. 23 at a well in its Aliso Canyon storage facility. Under “Summary,” the report read: “No ignition, no injury. No media.”
The local news media began to take notice, however, when Porter Ranch residents complained of suffocating gas fumes. In response, SoCalGas released a statement on Oct. 28 pointing out that the well was “outdoors at an isolated area of our mountain facility over a mile away from and more than 1,200 feet higher than homes or public areas.” It assured the public that the leak did not present a threat.
Timothy O’Connor, the director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s California Oil and Gas Program, had read about the complaints. But he did not think much of them until Nov. 3, when, at a climate-policy event in downtown Los Angeles, he learned from an acquaintance who worked at SoCalGas that the company was flying in experts from around the country to help plug the leak. At home that night, O’Connor read everything he could about the Aliso Canyon gas field. How much gas was stored inside the canyon? How much could leak out?
The foothills on which Porter Ranch was built, O’Connor learned, once belonged to J.Paul Getty. His Tide Water Associated Oil Company hit crude in 1938 and did not sell the land until the early 1970s, after it had extracted the last drop. The drained oil field was bought by Pacific Lighting, which used it to store natural gas. With a capacity of 84 billion standard cubic feet, the cavity, which lies between 7,100 and 9,400 feet below the surface, is one of the country’s largest reservoirs of natural gas (which is composed mainly of methane). The facility functions as a kind of gas treasury. When prices are low, the company hoards the gas inside the canyon; when they are high, it releases the gas into pipelines that snake through Los Angeles, heating homes, fueling stoves and providing power to solar-and wind-energy facilities.
The 115 wells in Aliso Canyon can be imagined as long straws dipping into a vast subterranean sea of methane. The leaking well, SS-25, is a steel tube seven inches in diameter that descends 8,748 feet from the canyon’s ridge. The well is plainly visible from many of the streets in Porter Ranch. From the ground, it resembles a derrick, set beside a series of low white buildings. If you look at it through a pair of binoculars, you can make out, flying from its highest girder, an American flag.
After conducting some basic calculations, O’Connor arrived at a shocking conclusion. Given the pressure and quantity of gas stored within, the canyon was like an overinflated balloon; a puncture could release in a single day as much gas as 1,785 houses would consume in a year. As it turned out, O’Connor was mistaken — the figure ended up being much higher than that — but he included it in an urgent letter he sent the next day, on Nov. 4, to the governor’s senior energy adviser and members of the California Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, Energy Commission and Department of Conservation. He demanded that the agencies conduct “an accurate and public accounting of the gas lost at Aliso Canyon.”
That evening, O’Connor attended a hearing at the Community School in Porter Ranch with about 100 panicked residents. They complained that the gas fumes were causing headaches, respiratory problems, nosebleeds and vomiting. The next morning, having yet to receive a response to his letter, O’Connor realized that he didn’t have to wait for the state to take action. He could call Stephen Conley.
Conley is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis, and the founder of Scientific Aviation. He flies a single-engine Mooney TLS that looks like something Cary Grant might have flown in “Only Angels Have Wings.” Public agencies, scientists and nonprofit organizations that study the climate hire Conley to loop over oil and gas fields at low altitudes, measuring methane concentrations with a device called a Picarro analyzer. At 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 5, Conley took off from Lincoln Regional Airport, just north of Sacramento. As a courtesy, O’Connor notified Jill Tracy, the director of environmental services at SoCalGas. He began to receive a flurry of text messages from executives at SoCalGas. They said the flight was unsafe and inappropriate. But SoCalGas was not concerned for the safety of the pilot, as O’Connor first assumed. The executives claimed to be concerned for the workers on the ground, who were operating cranes and drills in an effort to plug the leak. The workers, Tracy wrote, might become distracted by the sight of an airplane overhead, with catastrophic consequences.
O’Connor found this reasoning odd, because Porter Ranch lies in the flight path of Van Nuys Airport. Nearly 600 flights take off or land there every day. He proposed that the airplane keep one mile away from the well site. SoCalGas executives said they still considered this unsafe. O’Connor asked whether there was a safe distance from the well at which the airplane could fly. The company said there was not. Conley was forced to turn back.
Two days later, though, Conley was back in the air, this time on assignment for the California Energy Commission. Over the course of the next four months, Conley flew 15 flights over the site. On his first flight, Conley’s Picarro analyzer registered 50 parts per million. The normal concentration of methane in the atmosphere is two parts per million. Conley thought something was wrong with the instrument. But a backup analyzer gave the same reading. He recalled, “That’s when I said, Oh, my God, this is real.”
What is real to a climate scientist is abstract to the rest of us. The study of the climate is a study of invisible gases. In order to translate findings to a public lacking a basic understanding of atmospheric chemistry, climatologists must resort to metaphor and allegory. They must become writers, publicists, politicians. This doesn’t always come easily. The leak at Aliso Canyon, Conley discovered, was the largest methane leak in the country’s history. But what did that mean?
You could begin by comparing emissions from the gas leak at Aliso Canyon with other pollution sites. Conley had logged about 1,500 hours of flight time over oil and gas fields, moonscapes like the Barnett and Eagle Ford Shales in Texas, the Julesburg Basin in Colorado and the Bakken Formation in North Dakota. The highest methane-emission rate he had ever recorded was three metric tons per hour. The methane was leaking from Aliso Canyon at a rate of 44 metric tons per hour. By Thanksgiving, it had increased to 58 metric tons per hour. That is double the rate of methane emissions in the entire Los Angeles Basin. This fact takes some effort to absorb. It means that the steel straw seven inches in diameter plugged into Aliso Canyon was by itself producing twice the emissions of every power plant, oil and gas facility, airport, smoke stack and tailpipe in all of greater Los Angeles combined.
In a paper published in the February issue of Science, Conley and his co-authors estimate that 97,100 metric tons of methane escaped the Aliso Canyon well in total. Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted — 25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon. If well SS-25 were a nation-state, it would have contributed to global climate change at a rate exceeding that of Senegal, Laos, Lithuania, Estonia, Zimbabwe, Albania, Brunei, Slovenia, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica, Latvia, Georgia, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Costa Rica, Honduras, Tajikistan, Armenia and Iceland. SS-25 would rank just behind Mali.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEA Gas Leak Is Capped, but Neighbors Are Wary FEB. 18, 2016California Gas Leak Threatens Jerry Brown’s Image as a Climate Change HeroMARCH 4, 2016FEATUREThe Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare JAN. 6, 2016RECENT COMMENTSflak catcher 9 hours ago
This was a fun piece of reportage.But:It shouldn't have been written as such. Because this is no joke. This is no joke because it is no...whoandwhat 9 hours ago
" Inside the cars, men sat in silence, waiting....At the entrance to Bath & Body Works, a device that resembled an electronic parking meter...NewAlgier 10 hours ago
Great article. In the energy business, natural gas is measured in cubic feet, and it seems like about 5 billion cubic feet of gas hit the...SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
These facts, despite their world historical significance, still failed to make much of an impression locally and nationally, let alone internationally. What was one more airborne toxic event at a time when the global climate was itself an airborne toxic event? The World Health Organization has called climate change the greatest global health threat of the 21st century, an opinion shared by the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes for Health, among others. By 2030, increased rates of heat stress, infectious-disease transmission and malnutrition caused by climate change are expected to cause an additional 250,000 deaths a year. Yet as gargantuan as the Aliso Canyon emissions might be, their influence on the climate would have no immediate or direct effect on the lives of the residents of Porter Ranch. Residents were as concerned about the leak’s contribution to atmospheric warming in the years and centuries to come as everyone else on the planet — which is to say, not especially. We are already immersed in leaking invisible gases with largely invisible effects too overwhelming to control. What difference was another Lebanon’s worth of emissions?
The residents of Porter Ranch were very concerned, however, about what the inhalation of the gas might do to their brains and their lungs. Some residents found the smell of gas so overwhelming that they sealed their windows and doors and refused to go outside. Others could not smell the gas and experienced no symptoms. Sometimes those with severe symptoms and those without lived in the same household. In the absence of reliable information from SoCalGas or state agencies, the residents of Porter Ranch underwent their own transformation: They became amateur scientists, epidemiologists, sociologists, political theorists. They began to develop their own hypotheses.
“Yellow spots,” Charles Chow said, “are coming out of the atmosphere.”
I met Chow, a 76-year-old retiree with mirthful eyes and springy joints, in his driveway in late January. He was installing new shocks on his 1992 burgundy Cadillac Brougham Elegante. Beside the Cadillac was a 1986 Silver Spirit Rolls-Royce. In the street, which is called Thunderbird Avenue, there was a 2002 Black Thunderbird. Chow pointed out the spots. They were about the size and color of a yellow split pea. They had appeared on the windshields of his cars, on the Cadillac’s vinyl roof, on the canyon-facing windows of his home.
Chow first became concerned about the Aliso Canyon leak in October, when Chaka Khan, his Chihuahua-miniature pinscher, began having severe respiratory problems. His wife, Liz, who is 73, began suffering chronic headaches, eye irritation and a sore throat. Her doctor said there was nothing he could prescribe her. The only thing she could do, he said, was to leave Porter Ranch. Most of their neighbors fled before Thanksgiving. On their block alone, Chow estimates that 15 households, mostly retirees, relocated. Since then, the Chows have driven four times a month to a vacation rental they share on the Baja Peninsula, 60 miles south of the border, “just to get out of the atmosphere,” Chow said. In the Mexican air, Liz’s symptoms vanished.
Chow was soon joined in his driveway by Rick Goode, a neighbor of 25 years with a slender build and a birdlike gait. Goode wanted Chow’s advice about legal representation: About two dozen plaintiff’s firms had descended on Porter Ranch since October, competing to sign as many clients as possible. What did Chow think of Robert Kennedy’s firm? Or Weitz & Luxenberg, which had sent Erin Brockovich to solicit clients? The previous week, Brockovich told reporters that she “started feeling kind of dizzy” within 10 minutes of arriving in Porter Ranch. Chow ruled her out.
“You don’t get sick that fast,” he said.
“I’ve been having terrible headaches,” Goode said. “Have you?”
“My wife has headaches every day, sore throats,” Chow said. “I don’t. We both live in the same house. Everybody is different.”
Liz returned from a doctor’s appointment. She removed her sunglasses to reveal a new cyst on her eyelid. She searched for a word to describe her general condition since October. “A malaise,” she said finally.
Barbara Weiler, 64, who was walking her dog very slowly several blocks away, first experienced the malaise in gym class. “You felt like you were lazy,” she said. “It was obvious when we were using the resistance bands. We felt like we didn’t want to work as much as we normally would.”
Paula Vasquez found the smell of gas so strong in late October that she was certain there was a leak inside her house. She hasn’t opened a window since. She and her family — she lives with her husband, their 33-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old grandson — have experienced bloody noses, blurred vision and nasal congestion. But Vasquez has also noticed other signs. She pointed to fruit trees in her neighbors’ backyard. “I see them picking lemons,” she said. “I don’t say anything, but I’m concerned for them. Is there gas in the fruit?”
She showed me photographs she made her grandson take on her cellphone while she was driving home on the Ronald Reagan Freeway. In the sky above Porter Ranch, a heavy funnel of clouds was lit neon orange.
It looks like a big atomic cloud,” she said. Vasquez had a warm, cheerful manner; horror did not come naturally to her. “Creepy, huh? But I don’t know anything about science.”
We are a show-me species, wired to look for visible evidence of invisible harm. That impulse can lead a person to blame global warming for a hot day in February or, conversely, make a climate-change denialist find vindication in a snowstorm. But the world’s largest natural-gas leak has no known effects on clouds or lemons. (It may, however, create yellow dots. Michael Jerrett, the director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at U.C.L.A., explained that the dots are most likely a residue of the petroleum-laced slurry used to plug the leak.) The most dangerous threats to our species are precisely those that are most difficult to visualize: long-term, slow-to-emerge, amorphous. These threats include not only warming temperatures but also mutating viruses and political corruption and tend to be invisible, dimensionless and pervasive, like death. Like natural gas.
While the yellow dots were coming out of the atmosphere and staining the vinyl roof of Charles Chow’s Brougham Elegante, the planet was enduring the warmest January on record. It was the fourth consecutive month in which global temperatures beat historical averages by more than one degree Celsius, another novelty. This news, when publicized at all, tended to be accompanied by NASA’s map of the world, overlaid muddily with orange and red splotches denoting temperature increases; otherwise there appeared stock photographs of sunbathers on beaches or icicles melting. Then came February, the warmest month in recorded history. The threat to human civilization is advancing faster than ever before — the climate is warming faster than at any time in the last 65 million years — but all we can see are sunbathers and melting icicles.
All that the residents in Porter Ranch could see during those months of yawning uncertainty were empty streets and mysterious white vans. They were desperate for answers: Was the gas making them sick? How could they protect themselves? Who would be held responsible? The personal-injury lawyers were well prepared. They offered clarity, assurance, optimism. They could predict, with confidence, the future — a profitable future for the residents of Porter Ranch. Since November, the firms had been holding weekly informational meetings at local churches and hotels. At each session, lawyers answered questions from the community, often for several hours at a time, and circulated client forms.
Rick Goode and the Chows attended one such meeting in late January, two days after their driveway conversation on Thunderbird Avenue. It was hosted by R.Rex Parris at the Hilton in Woodland Hills, about 10 miles south of Porter Ranch. R.Rex Parris belongs to a consortium of law firms that on Dec. 2 filed the first class-action complaint against SoCalGas and its parent company, Sempra Energy, the nation’s largest natural-gas utility, on behalf of thousands of Porter Ranch residents. The group’s news release anticipated that the leak would end up costing Sempra shareholders “well over $1 billion.” On this morning, about 20 community members sat at conference tables, grazing on the free coffee, doughnuts and bagels. A young lawyer, who seemed to have consumed a large quantity of the coffee, stood at the front of the room, delivering her sales pitch.
“Anything SoCal tells you,” she said, “don’t listen to it. Everything they say means nothing.”
She advised the residents to keep daily journals. They were to note each occurrence of a physical symptom or a gas smell and list all expenses incurred by relocation or illness. Someone asked whether he could qualify as a plaintiff even if he lived 10 miles from Aliso Canyon.
“Nothing’s been established yet,” the lawyer said. “I’ve heard between five and 10 miles. But we don’t have the data yet.”
They claim it started on Oct. 23,” one older woman said. “But in April, my dog, a boxer, died within two weeks. I know it was the gas.”
“It was earlier than Oct. 23,” the lawyer said. “I just don’t know when. We want it to be as early as possible, so we can get much more money for everyone.”
The residents nodded in approval.
The lawyer explained that about 30 attorneys were assigned to the case. The firms would receive as their fee 30 percent of any payouts. “We’re predicting a settlement,” she said.
A Russian man who resembled Gérard Depardieu exclaimed, “I escaped Chernobyl for this!”
The man, Igor Volochkov, later told me that in 1986 he moved from Kiev, 60 miles south of Chernobyl, to Los Angeles when his wife was pregnant with their son. “We ran away to save our lives and the lives of our children.”
Volochkov said he knew something was wrong in October, when his parrot, Bon, dropped dead. He bought a new parrot and a parakeet, Gosha and Margosha, but they died within a month. The same thing happened in Kiev, when, he said, nuclear radiation from Chernobyl killed his parakeet, Petruschka. Volochkov said his son had asked why they moved from one Chernobyl to another Chernobyl.
“Maybe,” Volochkov replied, “our destiny is to fight against Chernobyls.”
In mid-november, nearly a month into the leak, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ordered SoCalGas to pay for new housing for anyone affected by the gas odors. Nearly 6,000 households, about half of Porter Ranch’s population, accepted the offer, moving to hotels, apartments and houses in surrounding neighborhoods. Those who did not relocate immediately struggled to find available short-term rental properties, but others took advantage of the gas company’s largess. Charles Chow said he knew a family paying $10,000 in monthly rent. “People are gouging the gas company,” he said. “I don’t believe in unfair practice. I was a businessman. I think fair is fair. All I might take is reimbursement for money I’ve had to pay the vet for Chaka Khan.”
Jerry McCormack, another neighbor of the Chows, has rarely detected an odor and has not been sick. “I think there’s a lot of foolishness going on,” he said. “This is not Fukushima. The rental market has gone crazy. Everyone is out to get the gas company. The hysteria is proportional to the number of lawyers coming to town.” He conceded that his wife, who is recovering from cancer, “can smell it quite well” and is concerned. Her oncologist advised her to leave.
Adam and Mindi Grant, a couple in their mid-40s, live a mile from the leak site. Their three children play basketball and swim outside. “We’ve legitimately smelled it one day,” Adam said. “We joke about it. Every time someone gets a bloody nose, we say, It’s the gas!”
Adam teaches world history at a local high school. Mindi is an insurance lawyer. “I have friends with real symptoms,” she said. “Some, maybe not. They’re setting up for a money grab. They think there’s big money, deep pockets. But they’re going to have trouble showing causation.”
“Had the smell been horrific,” Adam said, “we would have relocated. But because it’s not affecting us as a family, I’m a little lackadaisical about it.”
If the smell of gas makes one person dizzy while the neighbor next door can’t smell anything, is one of them lying? If a man does not actually inhale gas but develops headaches and nausea anyway, is his suffering any less? Disaster psychiatrists call this phenomenon “somatization,” a word that has replaced “hysteria” and “psychosomatic,” terms now considered offensive. “In man-made disasters, the psychological consequences can be very severe and ongoing,” David Eisenman, the director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters at U.C.L.A., told me. “Unexposed individuals can have symptoms similar to people who have exposure.” Fear makes you sick. As it turns out, inhaling poisonous gas causes the same symptoms as the fear of inhaling poisonous gas: headaches, dizziness and nausea.
Porter Ranch residents had reason to be afraid. Nobody could tell them what they were breathing. Methane was gushing from the leak, of this they could be certain, but methane was not what they smelled. Methane is odorless. What they smelled were mercaptans: sulfur compounds that in nature are released in animal feces. Mercaptans are added to natural-gas pipelines to provide an olfactory alarm in case a leak occurs, the way banks insert exploding dye packs into bags of cash. Inhalation of mercaptans can cause headaches, dizziness and nausea, but like methane, they are not currently known to cause significant long-term health effects. The main health concern about the leak was that other, more toxic gases might also be escaping from the bowels of Aliso Canyon — including gases remaining from its previous life as an oil field.
Chief among these was benzene, a known carcinogen. Los Angeles air, among the most polluted in the nation, tends to have a background concentration of benzene between 0.1 and 0.5 parts per billion. The World Health Organization has declared that “no safe level of exposure can be recommended.” In November, readings taken by SoCalGas near its facility found benzene concentrations fluctuating wildly between 0.3 p.p.b. and a nightmarish 30.6; readings taken by the company in Porter Ranch shot as high as 5.5 p.p.b. Other toxic gases — toluene, xylene, hexane and hydrogen sulfides — were also detected at higher-than-normal concentrations. The South Coast Air Quality Management District tested the air in Porter Ranch during the first two months of the leak, but the monitoring was sporadic and conducted at only a handful of locations. By mid-January, after efforts to depressurize the well had managed to reduce the leakage rate considerably, a more rigorous study by Michael Jerrett of U.C.L.A. found that the air in Porter Ranch was in fact unusually clean — most likely because of the absence of so many residents and their cars.
California health officials believe that there will be no long-term health effects from the leak. “Increased cancer risk is very small,” said Dr. Melanie Marty, the acting deputy director for scientific affairs for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. “Much smaller than routine risks we experience every day.” But Jerrett suspects that during the first six weeks of the leak, when the gas escaped at a much higher rate, conditions might have been dangerous, particularly for children and older residents. On March 10, following complaints from relocated residents who suffered nosebleeds and skin rashes after moving back home, Jerrett took dust samples at seven houses in Porter Ranch. Two contained benzene and hexane, a finding that Jerrett found “concerning.”
The actual composition of the gas was only the beginning of what the residents of Porter Ranch did not know about the invisible fumes seeping from Aliso Canyon. They did not know how far the gas was drifting or in what quantities. It seemed that the smell was stronger the higher you went up the mountain and stronger at dusk and dawn, but there was little data to support this. There was also the mystery of the complex local wind patterns, which resemble those of no other part of the Los Angeles Basin and change direction capriciously.
No one even knew what had caused the leak in the first place, though a broken safety valve, removed by SoCalGas in 1979 and never replaced, received some blame. In 2012, President Obama signed a pipeline-safety bill that should have prevented a leak of this kind. “We have the law, but no one is complying,” said Mel Reiter, the editor of The Valley Voice, a monthly newspaper that may be the only local business to profit from the leak: More plaintiffs’ law firms sought full-page ads than it has pages. “There are 115 active wells, and more than two-thirds were built before 1980,” Reiter said. “If one is leaking, what are the odds that 30 more are, or will soon?”
Regulations are in place, but nobody knows who can enforce them. When Matt Pakucko, a lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, first smelled the leak on Oct. 24, he called SoCalGas. He said he was told that the company was merely “releasing gas into the air,” which was “something that they do periodically,” and that there wasn’t a leak. He knew that the South Coast Air Quality Management District was responsible for investigating air-quality complaints. But SoCalGas, a private utility, did not fall under the regulatory oversight of any single agency. Besides the Air Quality Management District, agencies responsible for responding to the leak included the State Energy Commission; the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health; the Air Resources Board; the Public Utilities Commission; the Division of Occupational Safety and Health; the Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment; the County Fire Department; and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. In January, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called for the creation of yet another regulatory “structure,” to oversee gas-storage facilities.
For most Porter Ranch residents, all this confusion added up to a single fact: An invisible gas was threatening their lives. “We don’t know what methane is,” said Sam Kustanovich, a Belarussian pawnbroker who had the misfortune of buying his house two months before the leak was detected. “Nobody knows. It could mean explosions. Me, I’m afraid of explosions.”
The global climate, even in drought-stricken Southern California, is not an especially consequential campaign issue. A menacing disaster that causes mass vomiting and mass nosebleeds in a wealthy, vote-rich community, however, is a candidate’s dream. In this election season, the procession of scientists and lawyers heading to Porter Ranch has been trailed by a caravan of Californian politicians. None have come out in favor of mass nosebleeds. Though the 25th Congressional District reaches only its pinkie toe into Porter Ranch, Bryan Caforio, a Democrat, has made the leak a central issue of the election, which promises to be one of few closely contested races in the House. The Republican incumbent, Steve Knight, who has received campaign donations from Sempra Energy, said in December that he was confident that SoCalGas was “working on this as diligently as they can” but more recently called for a congressional hearing on the matter and introduced safety regulations for natural-gas storage. Even a Los Angeles County supervisor, Michael Antonovich, a Republican who has voted consistently against regulation efforts, has loudly proclaimed his determination to hold SoCalGas responsible.
“We’re all kind of feeding on it in a weird way,” said Henry Stern, a Democrat who is running for State Senate in the local district. He previously served as senior counsel on energy and environmental policy for the district’s current senator, Fran Pavley, a Democrat who cannot run again because of term limits. “How often are there climate disasters in suburbia?”
Stern has been struck at community meetings by the comments of local residents, many of them self-identifying conservatives, who have begun to question the wisdom of relying on fossil fuels. “Climate change is not a real thing for most of these people,” Stern said. “But you change your mind quick when your kids are puking.”
The only politician who has failed to use the gas leak for political gain is Gov. Jerry Brown. His Office of Emergency Services, following protocol, began monitoring the leak in October and began coordinating the state’s response in mid-November, overseeing the various state agencies responsible for responding to it. On Dec. 18, Brown, a Democrat, sent a stern letter to the chief executive of SoCalGas, urging cooperation and demanding accountability. “Everything that could be done under the authority of the governor was being done,” Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, told me. But Brown did not visit Porter Ranch until January, when he toured the SoCalGas facility and met privately with four members of the local Neighborhood Council; this was 11 weeks into the leak and nearly a month after he attended the United Nations climate talks in Paris, where he boasted of California’s emissions-reduction plan, the most ambitious in North America. Brown declared a state of emergency in Aliso Canyon on Jan. 6, but for many in Porter Ranch, that wasn’t nearly soon enough.
“We’re suffering because Jerry Brown is so not involved in this,” Matt Pakucko said. “There he was in Paris, saying look how green California is, while 10 years of green stuff is going into the air right now.”
Ghilarducci disputes this. “This concept that nothing happened and the governor was not engaged until he issued a state of emergency on Jan. 6 is just absolutely not correct,” he said. “Let’s face it: We deal with so many emergencies out here. This is not Vermont, this is not Oklahoma. ... This is a nation-state.” He continued, “The governor is very confident that he doesn’t need to be on the scene, holding a press conference, to show that he’s doing something.”
The governor’s reputation in Porter Ranch was not helped by the revelation that his younger sister, Kathleen Brown, is a paid board member of SoCalGas’s parent company, Sempra Energy. “I’m sure there’s a conflict of interest,” Rick Goode said. “My feeling is it’s an ‘I scratch your back, and you scratch mine.’ It concerns me.” In 2013 and 2014, Kathleen Brown received $456,245 in compensation, including stock awards. A partner at the firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, she also has, according to the Public Accountability Initiative, a $949,653 stake in the Forestar Group, a real estate and natural-resources company, where she is a director and major shareholder. Forestar is developing Hidden Creeks Estates, a gated community of 188 luxury homes, right next to Porter Ranch, on property abutting Sempra’s.
Kathleen Brown’s office at Manatt referred me to Doug Kline, the director of corporate communications for Sempra Energy. He would not give a specific comment on Brown’s role, but he did say, “Our board of directors has been actively engaged and regularly briefed on the Aliso Canyon incident.” Deborah Hoffman, Jerry Brown’s deputy press secretary, wrote in a statement that any implication that the state did not exercise “its full regulatory and oversight authority” was “scurrilous and irresponsible.”
SoCalGas announced on Feb. 18 that the well had been sealed. Chris Gilbride, a spokesman for SoCalGas, wrote in an email, “Throughout the incident, air samples for benzene and other compounds were found to be at or near levels seen in the rest of the county and below levels of concern.” He continued, “The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has consistently reported that no long-term health effects are expected due to the leaking well.” In late February, many residents, including Rick Goode and Igor Volochkov, said they still smelled gas or still suffered symptoms. “Maybe SS-25 is capped,” said Kyoko Hibino, Matt Pakucko’s girlfriend. “But I think there is still something seeping up from underground. I think other wells are continuing to leak. The smell is still pretty strong. It is out there still.”
It is uncertain whether the residents of Porter Ranch will experience health effects in the long term. It is certain that the atmosphere will experience long-term effects. But the effects will be as indecipherable as a plume of colorless gas leaked into a windswept canyon. How do we make sense of the addition to the atmosphere of thousands of tons of invisible gases that will have semi-invisible effects on us and only slightly more visible effects on generations we won’t live to see?
“If you compare the Aliso Canyon leak to other leaks,” said Stephen Conley, the aviator-scientist, “it’s top dog. It’s a monster. It throws off L.A.’s emissions for the year. It’s a significant percentage of California’s annual carbon budget. But it’s about 0.002 percent of the global methane budget. It’s not like next year will be warmer because of Aliso Canyon.”
This is true. It’s not like next year will be warmer because of the car trips that Porter Ranch residents make to their temporary rental homes, or the gas they use to cook dinner, or the energy required to heat their swimming pools. Next year won’t be warmer because of the 200,000 airplanes passing through Van Nuys Airport. Next year won’t even be warmer, necessarily, because of the roughly 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas that oil companies flare into the atmosphere. But next year will be warmer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/the-invisible-catastrophe.html
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Return of Gas Pipeline Rules Opposed by Industry
Apr 1, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter
Safety regulations previously opposed by natural gas pipeline operators and others in the industry have returned in a Department of Transportation proposed rule that would set new requirements for both main and gathering pipelines.
In addition to the potential to add millions of new compliance costs for industry, the “gas transmission” rule, made public by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in March, marks a shift away from performance-based rules and voluntary standards historically preferred by the industry, according to analysts such as Brigham McCown, who formerly served as acting administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration during the George W. Bush administration.
“Depending on how you slice these numbers the potential impact could affect over 300,000 miles of pipelines that are currently not regulated or are subject only to reporting requirements,” McCown told Bloomberg BNA. “I think it's broader than anyone expected and people are surprised it's this broad.”
Among the rule's most onerous requirements are that it would regulate pipelines in more modestly populated areas for the first time, set new testing requirements for pipelines built before 1970 and end an exemption on regulation currently in place for most pipes used in the mid-stream production process known as “gathering lines.”
In all, the 549-page proposed rule would modify approximately 47 different sections of regulations related to the impact, design, construction, maintenance, operations and integrity management of gas transmission and gathering pipelines, according to the American Petroleum Institute, the American Gas Association, and other trade groups that are requesting that the agency extend its 60-day comment period to allow for more careful consideration of its components.
Response to Gas Boom
The proposal comes in response to incidents such as the 2010 explosion of an intrastate pipeline segment owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in a residential area that killed eight people and leveled dozens of homes (199 DEN A-1, 10/18/10).
The number of explosions and other “significant incidents” involving gas pipelines has increased from 264 in 2010 to 317 in 2015, according to safety data compiled by PHMSA.
The uptick in incidents may be expected as the shale revolution has seen tremendous increases in the production and use of natural gas and placed unprecedented demands on the nation's pipeline system, the agency said. Natural gas production increased by 33 percent between 2005 and 2013, from 19.5 trillion cubic feet per year to 25.7 trillion cubic feet per year, PHMSA said.
“In short, the nation's existing, and in many cases, aging, pipeline system is facing the full brunt of this dramatic increase in natural gas supply and the shifting energy needs of the country,” the agency said.
The broad scope of the rule was evident in 2011 in an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking which met with swift industry pushback, with groups such as the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America saying the original proposal would “yield little if any improvement in public safety.” The group represents companies such as pipeline operator Kinder Morgan Inc. and Spectra Energy (19 DEN A-7, 1/31/12).
The proposed rule released by the agency “is more comprehensive” than the direction PHMSA indicated they were headed in the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, Mark Brownstein, head of the oil and gas program at the Environmental Defense Fund, a non-profit advocacy group, told Bloomberg BNA.
“There is no question it is an improvement,” he said.
Cost Estimates Questioned
It's likely to be expensive for the industry, with multiple sources casting doubt on the agency's cost estimate of $47 million a year to industry.
“I'm concerned this rule may substantially increase the costs associated with transporting energy products to households and consumers,” McCown, the former PHMSA official, said. “There appears to be a number of questions concerning its safety benefit analysis, and whether PHMSA's cost estimates are accurate or substantially underrepresented.”
The agency is expected to produce a more detailed cost-benefit analysis when the proposal is published in the Federal Register.
Some groups, such as the Gas Processors Association, said they felt blindsided by the rule.
“We were surprised to the extent of how far the regulation went,” Matthew Hite, the group's vice president of government affairs, told Bloomberg BNA. “Are we upset with it? Definitely.”
The group represents companies such as Williams Co. and Targa Resources Corp. that own and operate midstream gas services including pipelines that are used to transport natural gas from the wellhead to processing facilities and other collection points. Those pipelines, known as gathering lines, are typically smaller in diameter and lower in pressure than transmission lines and have been largely unregulated.
Gathering Line Exemption Repealed
PHMSA's proposed rule would repeal an exemption for gas gathering line reporting requirements, and extend regulatory requirements to previously unregulated pipelines eight inches in diameter or greater in more rural areas. The new requirements would include corrosion prevention and emergency planning steps, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of the rule that estimated a third of its annual estimated compliance costs could come from the regulation of gathering lines.
“We thought we were only going to get regulations on larger gathering lines,” Hite said. “They are basically going after all gathering lines.”
The agency noted in the rule that the shale revolution is leading gathering lines to be constructed in “new geographic areas” and changes in gas demand factors mean pipe diameters equal to or larger than typical transmission lines are being operated at much higher pressures.
“The dramatic expansion in natural gas production and changes in typical gathering line characteristics require PHMSA to review its regulatory approach to gas gathering pipelines to address new safety and environmental risks,” the agency said.
Less Populated Areas Regulated
The rule also would require new integrity assessments and other requirements on pipelines in a newly created category of “moderate consequence areas” where the population and building density, among other standards, are lower than in the currently regulated “high consequence areas,” which is defined as areas along the route of the pipeline with specific population densities, buildings containing populations of limited mobility, and areas where people gather (53 DEN A-9, 3/18/16).
PHMSA previously sought comment on the idea of expanding the definition of such “high consequence areas,” but industry groups urged PHMSA not to change it.
While the moderate consequences category didn't really come out of left field, it remains to be seen if industry “is okay with it,” Mike Friedberg, a senior policy advisor at Holland & Knight, told Bloomberg BNA.
“I think people are going to be cagey until they comment,” said Friedberg, who previously served as staff director on the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials.
Trade Groups Holding Fire
For now, groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, the nation's largest oil and gas trade group, appear to be holding their fire, saying they are still reviewing the rule.
“We will take the time to analyze the proposed changes and work with our members to evaluate the rule's impact and the estimated costs for implementation,” the American Gas Association, which represents utilities such as Sempra Energy and National Grid, said in a statement.
The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America in their 2012 comments on the proposed rulemaking, said the agency should focus on voluntary pipeline safety programs undertaken by its members that includes expanding integrity—or leak detection and repair—management.
“Any changes contemplated by PHMSA will be most effective in improving our nation's pipeline safety if they are implemented as a performance-based supplement to existing regulations, rather than as prescriptive revisions that could limit or restrict the flexibility operators may have to exceed the regulatory standards and/or tailor responses specific to an operators system and which could impede innovation,” Houston-based Spectra Energy Corp., which owns more than 19,000 miles of transmission pipeline, wrote in their 2012 comments. Spectra did not respond to a phone message seeking comment on the most recent version of the rule.
Advocates Want Stronger Rule
Meanwhile, pipeline safety advocates and some environmental groups argue the proposed rule does not go far enough.
“It's weaker than certainly what we hoped for when you get into the details,” Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, told Bloomberg BNA.
Among his concerns is that the proposal's requirements for pipelines in the new moderate consequence areas “was really designed to match up with what the industry is doing already voluntarily.”
In addition, Weimer said, a requirement for leak detection and automatic shutoff valves recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board in the wake of the San Bruno explosion was left out of the rule, with the agency saying it planned to address that issue in a future rulemaking.
The rule also doesn't include a mapping requirement for gathering lines, added Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund.
“There is no comprehensive inventory of where these things are located, or their age,” he said. “It's a big gap. As a practical matter we have no records of where they are or what condition they are in.”
“We can no longer turn a blind eye to the age of this vital infrastructure,” he said.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=86217234&vname=dennotallissues&fn=86217234&jd=86217234
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Enforcement Chief Sees 'Silver Lining' in Budget Crunch
Mar 31, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Robin Bravender
Deep budget cuts and staff reductions at U.S. EPA have taken a toll on its efforts to hold polluters accountable.
But it hasn't been all bad, Obama administration enforcement officials said here today at an environmental law conference.
"I think things are actually going incredibly well," EPA enforcement chief Cynthia Giles said at the event hosted here by the American Bar Association. "The silver lining is that it forces everybody to focus -- laser focus -- on what are your most important things to do and make sure you have your priorities straight."
Her comments came after former George W. Bush administration EPA enforcement chief Granta Nakayama painted a dire picture of the agency's fiscal situation.
"EPA is facing a severe resource issue," said Nakayama, now a partner at the law firm King & Spalding, citing years of constrained budgets. "Of course it's going to affect the enforcement program," he said. "You see this pretty dramatic drop in the inspections and the number of cases brought."
EPA officials have consistently said they've been able to do more with less.
"We are keenly focused on making sure that the cases that we do are the highest impact, most important cases that we can bring," Giles said today. "Although we have fewer cases in total, we have fewer small cases and we are very focused on making sure that the big, high-impact cases are being handled.
Those efforts have been bolstered, she added, by "an explosion of technology and solutions that can help us be more effective at our job."
Bruce Gelber, deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, said those changes are in line with a trend he's seen in enforcement cases since he joined DOJ in the mid-1980s.
"I think the biggest change in the area for enforcement is a dramatic change in where we focus our resources," Gelber said today. Decades ago, environmental enforcement cases would have taken aim at single facilities or single incidents. That's changed, he said, in large part due to EPA efforts to target bigger problems.
"The numbers may have gone down; I think the impact of cases has gone up," he said.
The enforcement officials laid out their goals for the remainder of President Obama's term in office.
Giles said she's focusing on getting high-profile civil and criminal cases wrapped up or as far along as possible, advancing EPA's Next Generation Compliance enforcement program as much as possible and finalizing the agency's next five-year environmental justice plan.
At DOJ, Gelber said he's hoping to resolve or get close to resolving the administration's air pollution case against Volkswagen AG, support EPA in its national enforcement initiatives and "take further steps in the area of environmental justice."
http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2016/03/31/stories/1060034906
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EPA Sends 'De Minimis' GHG Permit Threshold to OMB
Mar 31, 2016 | InsideEPA
The White House Office Of Management & Budget (OMB) has started inter-agency review of EPA's forthcomingde minimis threshold for greenhouse gases to trigger major source permitting requirements, a level the agency was required to craft following a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that curtailed its GHG permitting program.
According to OMB's website, it received the draft proposed rule from EPA March 30. The agency has said it plans to issue the proposal in October, setting a threshold below which best available control technology (BACT) reviews would not be required for GHG emissions under EPA's prevention of significant deterioration (PSD) program.
Sources have told Inside EPA that the agency will base the new threshold on past permits that included GHG limits, suggesting it would be similar to the current 75,000 ton per year (tpy) level the agency has been using.
EPA told its Science Advisory Board recently that it is reviewing its past PSD permitting activity to determine how to set a proposed significant emissions rate (SER) for GHGs.
“The EPA is mainly basing our proposed GHG SER on a review of past permitting activity to determine the types and sizes of GHG emission units that are likely to be part of PSD permits that could be issued for 'anyway sources' in the future,” the paper says.
EPA is setting the threshold after the Supreme Court in a 2014 decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG) v. EPA rejected portions of EPA's tailoring rule.
The rule had generally sought to set GHG thresholds above which new and modified stationary sources would be subject to PSD permits, which regulate major sources in areas that meet federal air quality standards.
It did this by tailoring statutory thresholds of 100 or 250 tpy for conventional pollutants to GHGs to prevent regulation of office buildings and small shops, with the rule's Step 1 setting a 75,000 tpy permit limit.
But the high court's decision narrowed the rule's reach after finding that the agency lacked authority to require major source permits for facilities' GHGs alone. The justices said EPA should set a de minimis threshold for when GHGs trigger BACT reviews, which are emissions control reviews required in PSD permits, but gave no direction on how to craft the threshold.
The high court remanded litigation over the permitting program back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which then heard additional briefing on how to proceed. The court ultimately sided with EPA by scaling back the permitting rule to comply with UARG and remanding it to the agency to craft the new threshold.
Critics, led by the Energy-Intensive Manufacturers Working Group, unsuccessfully petitioned the high court to bar EPA from including GHGs in any permit until it completed the SER rule, including any judicial review, but the court denied that request, leaving the agency free to move forward with permits as it crafts the rule.
In the interim, EPA is using its current 75,000 tpy of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) -- the threshold it set in Step 1 of its tailoring rule.
http://insideepa.com/the-inside-story
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N.C. Sues to Force EPA Decision on Ozone Transport Region
Mar 31, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
North Carolina is suing U.S. EPA to force a decision on whether the state should become part of the Ozone Transport Region, a step that would entail tighter air quality regulations related to ground-level ozone and acid rain.
That decision, in response to a December 2013 petition by the governors of eight Northeastern states, was due by the middle of last year, according to the lawsuit filed yesterday by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. To date, EPA officials have failed to so, the suit said.
The state is asking a federal judge for an injunction ordering EPA to either approve or disapprove the petition by a firm date.
The 2013 petition "was nothing more than a political attempt to shift the blame for poor air quality in the Northeast," Sam Hayes, general counsel for the North Carolina DEQ, said in a news release.
In the petition, the eight governors said pollution from North Carolina was "significantly" contributing to violations of the 2008 ozone standard in their states. They levied the same charge against eight other states as far west as Michigan and Illinois and asked that all nine be made part of the Ozone Transport Region.
Ozone is a toxic gas that can damage the lungs and is formed by the reaction of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in sunlight.
The Ozone Transport Region, created by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, currently encompasses the District of Columbia and all or part of a dozen states, including Maine, New York and Maryland. As members of the Ozone Transport Commission, based in Washington, D.C., they are supposed to work on reducing the movement of ozone and the chemicals that create it across state lines.
Any state added to the Ozone Transport Region then has nine months to turn in a plan for meeting added controls on both NOx and VOC emissions, according to the petition.
Stephanie Hawco, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina DEQ, declined to comment further today on the state's rationale for launching the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in North Carolina. But in a separate suit filed in November to prod EPA to act on North Carolina's plan to comply with fine particulate regulations, the state complained that federal regulators' inaction was fostering uncertainty within the business community and hindering growth.
Under a proposed consent decree lodged last week and still needing a judge's approval, EPA would make a final decision on the particulate plan by this September.
EPA will review the suit filed yesterday, spokesman Nick Conger said in an email. It was not immediately clear whether any of the other states targeted by the petition are pursuing similar litigation.
http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2016/03/31/stories/1060034909
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US, China Pledge Swift Action on Paris Climate Deal
Mar 31, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The United States and China are pledging to sign last year’s Paris climate change agreement as early as possible.
President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed Thursday that their representatives will approve the deal on April 22, Earth Day. It’s also the earliest date on which countries can sign it.
Though the agreement was crafted in December, it does not enter into force until 55 countries with at least 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are on board.
“By making this announcement today that both the U.S. and China will formally join as soon as possible this year, you now have countries representing close to 40 percent of global emissions committing to join quickly,” top Obama adviser Brian Deese told reporters Thursday.
“That commitment will help build momentum for expeditious entry into force, which is something that both our countries, through this joint statement, are calling for, and what we will both be working together and respectively to try to encourage going forward.”
Even after enough countries sign it, the greenhouse gas emissions cuts each nation submitted to form the deal do not have the force of international law.
Obama and other world leaders demanded the emissions be unbinding because the deal would then be a treaty requiring approval from two-thirds of the Republican-led Senate, an unlikely scenario.
Nonetheless, Obama pledged that the United States would cut its emissions by 26 percent by 2025 compared with 2005 levels.
China said its greenhouse gas output would peak by 2030 and fall after that, the first time China has agreed to limit emissions at all.
The Obama administration has kept moving on the Paris deal even after the Supreme Court in February halted the administration's rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the main pillar of Obama's pledge for the deal.
"We have, and will continue to, demonstrate that the United States has both the capacity and the tools to meet the international commitments that we have put forward," Deese said.
"We feel confident that the Clean Power Plan is on solid legal foundations," he continued, adding that Congress' action last year to extend tax credits for wind and solar energy is significant in terms of greenhouse gas reductions.
The leaders made the announcement during the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. The two countries have been working closely on international climate policies since first announcing their pledges together in November 2014.
Obama and Xi also agreed to work together to seek international agreement on policies to reduce planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons and get a worldwide deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from commercial airliners.
http://thehill.com/regulation/energy-environment/274805-us-china-pledge-swift-action-on-paris-climate-deal
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