Preview Newsletter
ACC AM 4/25/16
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NEW DATE: Hearing to Examine Challenges and Opportunities for Oil and Gas Development in Different Price Environments
Apr 26, 2016 | U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources
366 Dirksen Senate Office Building 10:00 AM -
(ACC Mentioned) The Bag Bill
Apr 25, 2016 | The New Yorker
By Ian Frazier
Jennie Romer moved from California to New York about four years ago to save the city from plastic bags. A practicing attorney, she is the country’s leading expert in plastic-bag law. -
(ACC Mentioned) Chevron Phillips Launches Media Campaign to Raise Awareness for Plastic Film Recycling
Apr 22, 2016 | The Courier
By Jenn Griffin
More than 1 billion pounds of plastic film was recycled in 2013 in the United States, an increase of 74 percent from 2005. Plastic film includes the over-wrap on packages of paper towels, tissue and diapers, liners in cereal boxes, bread and produce bags, the plastic pillows used to cushion products delivered through the mail, grocery and dry cleaning bags — even that found on newspapers. -
(ACC Mentioned) Rep. Bill Johnson has More Than $1M in Campaign Fund; Opponent has Nothing
Apr 23, 2016 | The Vindicator
By David Skolnick
U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, R-6th, has raised $1,187,007 toward his re-election effort while his Democratic challenger recently filed paperwork to start collecting money for his campaign fund. -
(ACC Mentioned) Re-Imagine Everything
Apr 22, 2016 | ARC Advisory Group
By Mark Sen Gupta
ARC Advisory Group had the opportunity to attend and participate on the executive panel at the recent SAP Best Practices for Chemicals Event in The Woodlands, Texas. More than 300 people, mostly from North America, attended the event, which was coordinated by The Eventful Group. -
(ACC Mentioned) The Creepy Way Processed Food Packaging Messes With Your Hormones
Apr 23, 2016 | Alternet
By April M. Short
As if it weren’t already enough of a headache to find non-toxic, safe and healthy food to eat, a recent study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspective reveals that the packaging used to contain certain food products can impact your hormones. -
(ACC Mentioned) Mass. Firefighters Seek Ban on Flame Retardants
Apr 25, 2016 | Boston Globe
By David Abel
Amid growing concern that flame retardants are responsible for elevated cancer rates in firefighters, Massachusetts lawmakers are pushing legislation that would go further than any other state’s in banning the use of chemicals meant to slow the spread of fires. -
Vt. Lawmakers Push for State Authority in TSCA Rewrite
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Sam Pearson
Vermont's congressional delegation this week used a water contaminant of concern in the Green Mountain State in making the case for providing maximum enforcement latitude for states in pending legislation to update the nation's chemicals law. -
In the News
Apr 22, 2016 | Chemical Watch - Briefing
The Ministry of Environment (MoE) Task Force for K-REACH has published guidelines for the lead registrants of existing substances in South Korea. The Model Agreement for Joint Submission of Registration Documents of Chemical Substances is available in Korean and English (12 April). Industry has stressed the need for guidance to facilitate hazard communication compliance, and urged the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) and Health Canada to address variances between their regulations. -
Maine Voices: Urge Maine Delegation to Back Tighter Federal Control Over Toxic Substances
Apr 25, 2016 | Portland Press Herald
By James H. Maier
The recent Portland Press Herald story on a proposal to limit the use of synthetic pesticides in South Portland (“Plan to ban pesticides: A model or a mistake?” Page A1, April 11) offers an overview of the differing perspectives on proposed pesticide ordinances. It also raises the significant issue of how both federal and state agencies are not doing enough to ensure that commonly used lawn and garden products are safe. -
Are Air Fresheners Really Toxic?
Apr 21, 2016 | The Muhlenberg Weekly
By Alyssa Scott
Air fresheners are very useful. They cover up bad odors and fill your house with a fresh scent. However, what many people may not think about is the harmful effects of these air fresheners. According to the EPA, the indoor air levels of pollutants (partially caused by air fresheners) is 2-5 times higher than outdoor levels. -
California Lists Styrene as Carcinogen
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Carolyn Whetzel
California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has added styrene to the Proposition 65 list of carcinogens. -
EPA Must Act Now To Protect Public From Teflon Chemical In Drinking Water
Apr 25, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Bill Walker
The Environmental Protection Agency was first alerted 15 years ago to contamination of drinking water by PFOA, a chemical used to make Teflon that has since been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, heart disease and other serious health problems. -
OxyChem Expansion Will Support New Coolants
Apr 25, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Marc S. Reisch
As regulatory limits loom on older fluorinated refrigeration chemicals, companies are investing in a new generation of fluorochemicals with low global warming potential (GWP). In the latest such move, Occidental Chemical says it will spend $145 million to expand its Geismar, La., site to make a raw material for “next-generation, climate-friendly refrigerants.” -
EPA Finding on Power Plant Mercury Standards to Be Published
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Patrick Ambrosio
The Environmental Protection Agency's final supplemental finding on the need to regulate power plant emissions of mercury and other hazardous pollutants is scheduled to be published April 25, which will open a 60-day filing period for lawsuits challenging the decision. -
Republicans Set to Attack BLM Venting and Flaring Rule
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Scott Streater
House Republicans this week are expected to once again push the Interior Department to reconsider finalizing a proposed rule aimed at reducing the volume of natural gas from roughly 100,000 wells on federal and tribal lands. -
Senate Panel to Weigh Drilling Opportunities Amid Low Prices
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hear testimony tomorrow on oil and gas production in challenging market conditions. -
The ‘Keystone-ization’ of Everything
Apr 25, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Sylvan Lane
Bill McKibben, the author and environmental activist who helped lead a grassroots campaign against the Keystone XL oil pipeline, says 2016 will see the “Keystone-ization” of projects across the U.S. -
Mexican Petrochemical Explosion Death Toll Reaches 32
Apr 25, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Anthony Harrup
Rescue teams recovered four bodies Sunday at the site of an explosion at a petrochemical plant in southern Mexico, bringing the number of workers killed in the accident to 32, state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos said. -
Energy Committee to Vote on Safety Bill
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Hannah Hess
Efforts to update pipeline safety oversight may move a step closer to the House floor this week, with the Energy and Commerce Committee scheduled to vote on legislation to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. -
Industry Coalition, Advocates Wage Competing Attacks On Ozone NAAQS
Apr 22, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Stuart Parker
A coalition of major industrial sectors and a separate group of public health and environmental organizations are waging competing legal attacks on EPA's decision to tighten its ozone ambient air limit, with industry claiming the rule is flawed for not weighing natural “background” ozone while advocates say the limit is unlawfully weak. -
EPA to Complete Particulate Matter Review in 2021
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Andrew Childers
Environmental advocates are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to speed up its required review of the federal air quality standards for particulate matter, which is currently slated to run through 2021. -
Energy, Water Bill Draws Conservative Opposition
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Ari Natter
Fresh off playing a role in getting a package of renewable energy tax credits jettisoned from aviation legislation, the Heritage Foundation has a new target in its sights: the $37.5 billion energy and water spending act currently being considered on the Senate floor.
Congressional Hearings
Industry and Association News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News
Environment News
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Apr 26, 2016 | U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold an oversight hearing on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. to examine challenges and opportunities for oil and gas development in different price environments.
The hearing will be webcast live on the committee’s website, and an archived video will be available shortly after the hearing is complete. Witness testimony will be available on the website at the start of the hearing.
Opening Remarks
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
Chairman
Senate Energy and Natural Resources CommitteeSen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
Ranking Member
Senate Energy and Natural Resources CommitteeWitness Panel 1
Mr. Jason Bordoff
Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs
Founding Director, Center for Global Energy Policy, Columbia UniversityMr. Oren Cass
Senior Fellow
Manhattan InstituteMs. Suzanne Minter
Manager, Oil and Gas Consulting Services
Bentek EnergyMs. Leslie Palti-Guzman
Director of Global Gas
The Rapidan GroupMr. Michael Ratner
Specialist in Energy Policy, Congressional Research Service
Library of Congresshttp://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/4/hearing-to-examine-challenges-and-opportunities-for-oil-and-gas-development-in-different-price-environments
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Apr 25, 2016 | The New Yorker
By Ian Frazier
Jennie Romer moved from California to New York about four years ago to save the city from plastic bags. A practicing attorney, she is the country’s leading expert in plastic-bag law. Romer is thirty-eight years old, stands six feet tall, wears dark skirts with dark tights, and has copper-red hair, a pale complexion, and light-blue eyes. The bangs across her forehead sit as straight and level as the scales of blindfolded Justice. She served her apprenticeship in San Francisco, which in 2007 became the first city in America to place a ban on plastic grocery and retail-store bags. San Jose, where a similar law led to an eighty-nine-per-cent reduction of plastic-bag litter in the city’s storm drains, relied on her counsel. When Oakland moved to pass an anti-bag ordinance, it was defeated by the legal action of the plastics industry; from that setback, she learned how better to advise Los Angeles, which passed its own anti-bag ordinance, in 2012.
No. 1 among Romer’s goals today is the passage of a bill called Intro 209A, which has been awaiting a vote by the New York City Council since 2014. The bill, in its current version, would put a five-cent fee on the most common plastic and paper bags. Romer believes that because of plastic bags’ wastefulness and the damage they do to the environment humans will eventually use a lot fewer of them, and that New York’s acceptance of this change is only a matter of time. For the city to have come so far and so quickly toward rejection of the single-use disposable plastic bag, when ten years ago nobody in government was even talking about it, is partly because of her.
I first met Romer last fall, at an event held by United for Action, a community group, on the Upper West Side. An assembly of about eighty folding chairs in a church’s multipurpose room—tan walls, brownish-gray venetian blinds—filled up with the kind of locals you might expect to see. A gray-haired couple arrived with plastic bags entwined decoratively into their braids. Another woman was all in black and orange, for the approaching holiday. By the door, women at a small table handed out flyers in favor of recycling and a plan for zero waste, and against climate change and a liquefied-natural-gas port proposed for Long Island Sound. Clipboards with petitions circulated. A screening of the anti-bag documentary “Bag It,” followed by a speech by Romer, was the evening’s occasion. “The only problem with a screening like this is there’s not one single person here who needs to see it,” a bearded man in a gray-and-black pullover said.
A woman named Ling Tsou, a co-founder of United for Action, welcomed everybody and praised the turnout. Then the movie played, sending almost pleasurable shudders of environmental horror down people’s spines. Afterward, Tsou introduced Romer, who talked about her experience working on ordinances in California and explained the difference between banning bags and charging a fee for them. The fee is preferable, in her experience, because it makes shoppers think about whether they really need the bag, and allows them to buy it if they do (say, for cleaning up after their pets). Fees are also easier to defend against legal challenges. Bans, on the other hand, tend to get more support, she said, because voters seem to enjoy banning things.
As she was winding up her talk, a bustling arose by the door where the women had been handing out flyers. One of the women hurried over to Romer and showed her a piece of paper. Romer did a double take. It was a flyer with the heading “Plastic Bags Are Recyclable, Reusable, and Right for New Yorkers.” Somehow, a stack of pro-plastic-bag flyers had appeared on the table while the audience’s attention was elsewhere. In letters so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them, the logo of the American Progressive Bag Alliance suggested the flyers’ source. Plastics-industry-supported groups like the A.P.B.A. hire P.R. firms, lobby legislators, file lawsuits, and spend millions to defeat anti-bag laws. In 2009, the American Chemistry Council spent $1.5 million to defeat a bag-fee law in Seattle. Most of Romer’s anti-bag work is done at her own expense and pro bono.
Reading excerpts from the flyer out loud, she refuted some of its claims. Most plastic bags are not recycled, she said. Few recyclers want them, because there’s very little market for them and they clog up the sorting machinery. Even bags labelled “biodegradable” or “compostable” really aren’t, except in a very few places, like San Francisco, which have the sophisticated equipment needed to recycle compostable bags. The labels just make some people feel better about littering, she said. Meanwhile, Ling Tsou could not get over the idea that, apparently, someone from the other side had sneaked into her event. “That they would bother to pay attention to our little organization—I’m amazed,” she said. “And how did they even know that Jennie Romer was speaking here?”
A representative of the A.P.B.A., when told of this occurrence, said that it would never do such an underhanded move.
Veteran readers of this magazine may recall that I have written about plastic bags before. My first piece on the subject appeared in 1993. At that time, the bags had begun to vex me, flapping in the city’s trees. In 1994, I reported here that my friend Tim McClelland and I had made a device with tines and a hook, attached to a long pole, to snag the bags and remove them. Tim and his brother Bill and I then went all around the city and beyond, year after year, snagging bags and other debris out of trees.
After Tim moved to Massachusetts, Bill and I, both in commuter-range New Jersey, kept up our city bag-snagging but did it less frequently. We aged; the bags seemed to become only more numerous. A key moment of discouragement for me was when we went to Los Angeles to help with a cleanup of the L.A. River. As we were snagging bags in palm trees with many spines on them, a young man watching said, “Those bags are like gum in dreadlocks.” In my bones I felt the painful aptness of the simile.
It now strikes me as remarkable that, wrestling with the enormous problem of bag litter in trees, we did not consider that it could be stopped at the source. In fact, the thought never crossed my mind. I accepted plastic bags as an inevitable natural phenomenon, as if we were farmers battling scourge-of-God locusts on the Great Plains. Perhaps the privatizing spirit of the era had blinded me. Lone and unattached as the bags we pursued, we were concerned individuals expressing ourselves. Maybe we also offered a symbol of anger and resistance. But we were attacking one at a time, or three at a time, when a full assault at division strength was what the situation needed.
By some estimates, the world uses and throws away more than a trillion plastic bags a year. “Bag It,” the documentary, describes the plastic bag as the No. 1 consumer item in the world. Immense gyres of trash rotate slowly in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and Indian Oceans. In 2014, plastic grocery bags were the seventh most common item collected during the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, behind smaller debris such as cigarette butts, plastic straws, and bottle caps. The bags’ proliferation has inspired whole countries to ban them or impose fees on them. In 2008, China banned plastic bags thinner than .025 millimetres. The law resulted in a reduction of bag use in China by forty billion bags a year: that’s 40,000,000,000 bags. Mexico City has a bag ordinance. Certain plastic bags are banned in Uganda and in the city of Mumbai. When my friends and I first started bag-snagging, an Irish woman told us that in Ireland plastic bags that get stuck in trees are called “witches’ knickers.” Evidently, the colorful image was not enough to excuse them; in 2002, Ireland imposed a fee of fifteen euro cents on each plastic bag provided by retailers. Shortly afterward, the use of plastic bags in Ireland fell by ninety-four per cent.
Every New Yorker discards an average of about twenty single-use plastic bags a week, which adds up to about 9.37 billion bags a year. In a way, it’s surprising that the city isn’t totally covered in them, especially during the spring winds after the trash pickup has been spotty over the winter. Looking for bags in trees at the end of February, I found them almost everywhere, as usual. When I went to visit a friend who works at the Times, I admired the Times Building, new since 2007, and its interior courtyard open to the sky, where sedge grasses on small hummocks surround four tall birch trees. In a top branch, enclosed on all four sides by the building’s walls, flapped a flaglike white plastic bag.
“I’m from the East Bay area—Richmond, California, near Berkeley,” Romer told me recently when we got together for coffee across the street from the midtown law firm where she has her day job. “I grew up with sort of hippie parents. Before I was born, they travelled all over the country in a van. My mom worked as a waitress and an ophthalmologist’s assistant, and my dad was a hotel manager. He had a stroke and became severely disabled when I was ten. A big weekly event for our family was when my mom would take my brother and me to the recycling center in El Cerrito, right next to Richmond. The center is a wonderful, spread-out place, with different areas for different kinds of recyclables, like books and electronics, and always a crowd of retirees hanging around and waiting to see if something really good comes in. We got all our magazines there—I loved sitting in the magazine bin. Spending time at the recycling was a memorable part of our social life. I went to Fairmont Elementary School and to Berkeley High, a giant public high school, and then to the University of California at Santa Barbara. My degree was in zoology, environmental studies, and black studies. That’s also where I got interested in environmental legislation.”
After U.C.S.B., Romer became the manager of the record store where she had worked in high school, and she took law classes at night at Golden Gate University. With her degree, earned in 2009, she found jobs at boutique firms specializing in free speech and the environment, but she wanted to do more with policy, an ambition originally inspired by a college trip to Barbados, where she saw plastic bags of all colors disfiguring the beaches. During a volunteer stint in the office of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she put in hundreds of hours helping California municipalities that were trying to get rid of plastic bags. Her experience there set her future course. “The issue of climate change seemed so enormous to me, not something I could really affect,” she said. “But I did think I could do something about plastic bags in California.”
I told her that I had objected to the bags for aesthetic and spiritual reasons but didn’t know how else to answer people who argued in favor of them. From long practice, Romer has that conversation down. She reeled off the list: plastic bags require nonrenewable fossil fuels for their manufacture, disperse themselves easily because of their lightness, impede waterways, contribute to flooding, pollute oceans, entangle wildlife, kill sea turtles, degrade to small particles, contaminate water and soil, overwhelm landfills, and cost huge amounts of money to clean up and dispose of. Nor are giveaway plastic bags really “free,” she noted, because consumers pay for them in the price of their purchases.
A problem Romer faces is that laws in some states prohibit local governments from banning or putting fees on plastic bags. That is, some states have plastic-bag-ban bans. Such laws exist already in Florida and Arizona and are pending in several other states. When anti-anti-bag laws are in place, there’s not much Romer can do, besides encouraging bag opponents to get the laws repealed. In the world of plastic-bag law, the two sides strategize and counter-strategize. When a local ban on plastic bags is proposed, the industry may argue that it will cause people to switch to paper bags, thus leading to the cutting down of more trees, thus harming the environment. To keep people from switching to paper bags (as observation has shown they do), bill 209 puts a fee on paper bags, too, though they are easier to recycle than plastic bags.
Industry groups often call for an environmental-impact statement, or E.I.S., to delay or stop anti-bag ordinances. An E.I.S. can cost a hundred and forty thousand dollars or more, and many smaller communities can’t afford it. On her Web site, Romer has laid out the industry’s possible environmental objections so that communities can address and dispel them in the initial filings. Industry groups have also sued communities on various and miscellaneous grounds, and the threat of lawsuits has kept some places from going forward with anti-bag ordinances. Despite the many obstacles, more than two hundred municipalities have passed such ordinances, many of them with Romer’s help.
“I came to New York because if we can stop plastic bags here we’ll have an effect nationwide, even more than the anti-bag laws in California did,” she said. “We passed an ordinance in L.A., the second-biggest city, and it was time to move on to the biggest.”
She was speaking quietly now, almost in a monotone. “Honestly, though,” she went on, “I hoped we would be farther along after three-plus years. What the City Council decides on bill 209 will depend a lot on Mayor de Blasio, who has said he’s for the bill in principle but has yet to give his full support. I stay optimistic and keep pushing, but sometimes I get tired.”
Many people hate the idea of putting a fee on plastic bags. At a public hearing held by the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management in November, 2014, to discuss bill 209, the City Hall council chamber was packed. Under debate was the then current version of the bill, which called for a fee of ten cents. David Greenfield, the councilman representing Bensonhurst and neighboring parts of Brooklyn, said that he was ashamed even to be talking about the subject of raising the grocery costs of people like him who use thirty shopping bags a week and thus would pay three dollars more for groceries. “I just want to be on the record—it’s outrageous,” Greenfield said. James Vacca, a councilman from the Bronx, characterized the fee as a regressive tax that would hit the poorest New Yorkers hardest. The fee is not a tax, because the store owners would get to keep it, but Councilman Steven Matteo, of Staten Island, said that didn’t matter, because if it feels like a tax it is a tax. “Bottom line is that our constituents are being asked to give more out of their pockets in a context when they should least expect to do so, when they are going food shopping for their families,” Matteo said. More opponents of the bill spoke up, the anti-bag side answered, recycling experts weighed in, disputants talked over one another, and the sergeant at arms had to call for order.
I went around the city myself a few weeks ago to see what people thought. At the Bensonhurst Market, near Greenfield’s district, the manager, Vinny Colangeli, said that he’s been at the same location for twenty-three years and the people who sponsor the bill have no idea what they’re talking about. A recent compromise had reduced the fee from ten cents to five, but he argued that it made no difference. “This bill has great intentions, but it puts the burden on the people at the bottom,” Colangeli said. “In your yuppie areas they’re for it, but I see people all the time who don’t have the five cents for the deposit on a returnable bottle. If they don’t have a nickel for a bottle, how’re they gonna have it for a bag? They’ll yell at my girls, and argue with me, and hold up the line, and in the end I’ll let ’em go without charging and eat the fee.”
At the Associated Supermarket on Fulton Street, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, bringing your own reusable bags would involve an extra step, because all customers’ bags must be left up front. Luis Liz, the manager, said the fee would never work—“The customers ain’t gonna pay. It’ll never happen.” Other store managers echoed this. Shoppers, though, shrugged when I asked about the fee. Felix Marston, from the West Indies, who was coming out of a Key Food on White Plains Road, in the Bronx, said, “If they charge for bags, I’ll just bring my own.” In the parking lot of the Stop & Shop on 234th Street, a woman with black-and-gold braids who was wearing an M.T.A. jacket and would not give her name—“But thank you for asking”—said, “Plastic bags are supposed to be free. I will never pay for them. But, if they do start to charge, then I will go with this here.” She pointed to the single green reusable bag in her cart.
Margaret Chin and Brad Lander are bill 209’s primary co-sponsors. Chin’s district is in lower Manhattan, and Lander represents a part of Brooklyn that includes Park Slope, where he lives not far from the spot where Tim and I took the first bag from the first tree with our new invention, twenty-three years ago. When I reached Lander on the phone in early April, he was inclined to optimism. “I’ve said we’ll pass this by Earth Day, which is April 22nd, and I’m sixty-five per cent sure we will,” he said. “There are fifty-one councilpersons, so we need twenty-six votes, and right now we’ve got twenty-one. A few more will fall into place, I think. We’re hoping to tie it all down soon.”
I asked about the opposition. “Nobody likes to pay for something that used to be free,” Lander said. “It’s a natural part of the economic drive that motivates our species. Of course, the bags aren’t actually free, because they’re included in the store’s costs that it passes along to the customers. And all the data show that in cities that have imposed the fee people quickly get used to it. They bring reusable bags and you get overwhelmingly good effects in terms of reduction of bag litter. Washington, D.C., has had a sixty-some-per-cent decrease of bags in the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers since it imposed a five-cent fee.”
Reusable bags will be distributed gratis throughout the city, he said. Companies are eager to help sponsor the reusable bags if they can put their logos on them. Outreach, education, and public-service ads, including on ethnic media, will help. “This will probably be the most divided vote in recent City Council history,” Lander said. “Even the housing bill had only six or seven ‘no’ votes, and for this bill I think there may be as many as fifteen or eighteen ‘no’s. People feel strongly about the fee, but that’s also the reason it works. They don’t like to pay it, so they modify their behavior. Plastic bags have ended up all over the place because they’re currently objects of no value that are given away for free.”
One morning, I met Romer at Eighty-fifth and Broadway, where she had come to talk to a group from the West 80s Neighborhood Association. Members of that group, led by Melissa Elstein, a yoga teacher and former attorney for the N.Y.P.D., had gathered to learn how to take bags out of trees. Skilled professional bag snaggers from the New York Restoration Project, or N.Y.R.P., the environmental organization founded by Bette Midler, were there to provide instruction. In the lobby of Elstein’s building, we stood in a circle and introduced ourselves—fifteen of us in all. Romer said a few things about bill 209, emphasizing that it is a fee, not a ban, and she told a story about a famous TV star whom a friend saw coming out of a store in Beverly Hills soon after L.A. County put a fee on plastic bags. The star was carrying all his purchases, his broccoli and cornflakes and so on, loose in his arms; evidently, he had not wanted to pay the fee, or to be seen using a plastic bag.
Donte Taylor, Barry Elmore, and Maria Rodriguez, of the N.Y.R.P., explained what we were about to do. Elmore and Rodriguez wore chartreuse vests that said “Bag Snaggers” on the back. Donte Taylor, the team supervisor, said that Elmore, a fit-looking young man with cornrows and a beard that slanted forward, was the N.Y.R.P.’s top tree-bag-removal person. Elmore said the job is a physical workout, but you get a lot of satisfaction from making the city look better. He said taking bags out of trees requires care, so you don’t get clocked on the head. Helmets and safety glasses would be provided.
Melissa Elstein led us to our first tree. “There’s a bad tree at the corner of—wait, excuse me,” she said. “I misspoke. There are no ‘bad trees,’ just trees with bad litter in them.” As we walked, I asked Elmore how he liked our bag snagger. “We take thousands and thousands of bags out of trees with it,” he said. “It works good, but sometimes the end pulls out. That happened yesterday. We got the top section stuck in a tall tree, and we had to call the Parks Department to bring a bucket truck and help us get it. Whenever I’m snagging bags, I always go in very optimistic. I’m from Harlem originally, but when I was young I spent a lot of time on my grandmother’s farm near the small town of Cross, South Carolina, so I enjoy the out-of-doors, and I love the work I do.”
The first tree, at Eighty-fourth and Broadway, had a plastic tarp and balloons in it as well as bags. “You have to look out for pedestrians,” Elmore said. “They will watch you and get in the way. We have had people sit down right on the curb under the tree and stare up at what we’re doing.” Rodriguez set orange traffic cones on the sidewalk to secure the area. A man who identified himself only as Peter took one bag out, then another, and had to be gently persuaded to yield the snagger to someone else. Lisa Scheppke, an employee of the Littoral Society, successfully snagged a bag, and Cheryl Sussman, a retired accountant who cleans up trash on the Far Rockaway beaches by herself as a hobby, got one, too. A member of the group took a bag from a tree in the Broadway median strip while standing almost on top of a guy on a bench who did not lift his eyes from his crossword puzzle. Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.
Dave Robins, a retired advertising executive, and his wife, Carol, a freelance writer, snagged a few bags and brought them to Romer. Carol suggested that all the bags removed today be taken to a nearby supermarket bag-recycling bin. Romer said, “Unfortunately, the bags in most of the supermarket bins probably go straight to the landfill. Whatever we get today we should put in the trash barrels on the street.” Carol looked crestfallen. Romer continued, “Stores are supposed to have recycling bins for plastic bags, by New York State law, but that’s kind of ridiculous, because there’s no clear-cut way to determine what happens to those bags afterward. I always tell people to spend their time instead recycling items that we know really will be recycled.” The snagged bags went into the trash, amid some grumbling.
Before Romer left to return to her day job, she told me, “We’re still waiting for some kind of statement from the Mayor. This spring will be our best chance to pass the bill. Earth Day is the only time of year most people think about the environment. If we don’t have commitments by then, we’ll lose momentum, and with elections coming in the fall we probably won’t get a chance.”
Philip R. Rozenski is the senior director of sustainability at Novolex, a retail-packaging manufacturer, with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is also the policy chair at the American Progressive Bag Alliance, the organization whose flyers mysteriously turned up at the community-group meeting where Romer spoke last fall. Curious to talk to someone at the A.P.B.A., I left messages that eventually were answered by a public-relations firm in Washington, D.C., which put me in touch with Rozenski, who called from Las Vegas, where he was attending a recycling convention. I asked him what percentage of plastic bags are recycled in New York City. He said the national figure is about fifteen per cent, but he had no number for the city. “But you must remember that the vast majority of plastic bags are reused,” he said. “The plastic bag has a very strong reuse application, whether as a trash-can liner, or for a cat box, or some other household purpose. In the context of plastic, with bags there’s not much left to recycle! The other important thing is that the plastic retail bag makes up only eighteen per cent of total plastic-film packaging. So this ordinance that wants to ban plastic retail bags will have a minimal effect on the total amount of plastic-film waste that’s out there.”
He described the system by which plastic bags and other plastic film, such as dry-cleaning bags and bubble wrap, go from the recycling bins at Target, Lowe’s, Food Emporium, and ShopRite to distribution points in empty delivery trucks that are making return runs. There the plastic-film items are baled, and eventually other trucks—also on return runs, thus leaving no net carbon footprint—deposit the bales at a Novolex plant, in Wisconsin or southern Indiana, where sophisticated machines make the used items into plastic-resin pellets that then become new bags. I said that sounded good, and I wondered why Sims Municipal Recycling, the city’s recycling contractor for plastic, metal, and glass, says that it can find no market for plastic bags.
“We recently proved to Sims that if they can collect the plastic bags Novolex machines can recycle them,” Rozenski said. “Just last December, the Sims people were out in Indiana for a demonstration, and now we have a conversation with the city that’s under way. It’s been a magical moment. Councilman Lander has been briefed on it. We are countering the mistaken belief that plastic bags can’t be recycled.”
I asked whether Novolex would still consider working with the city if bill 209 passed; after all, there will still be a lot of plastic film in the city’s trash no matter what.
“Well, any ban would have a very negative effect,” he said. “I think that then investors would not want to fund the very expensive equipment this will need. The fear would be ‘You banned plastic bags, now you might ban all the other kinds of film packaging.’ But right now that’s an incredibly hypothetical question.”
The magic and the briefing notwithstanding, Councilman Lander says that nothing in Novolex’s ideas of plastic-bag recycling makes economic sense for the city.
Anyone who doubted that there is a lot of bag litter out there, or that it gets into the ocean, needed only to walk around Conference House Park, at the southern end of Staten Island, after Hurricane Sandy. Giant waves that swept away shorefront houses inundated the park’s woodland to a depth of perhaps twenty feet and left behind a vastness of shredded plastic in the trees, like the pennants of a cast-of-thousands demon army. Everywhere along the city’s coastline and beyond, detritus of all kinds demonstrated the highest point the ocean reached, and how much plastic trash was in it.
A plastic bag, if put through recycling processes like Novolex’s, can be remade into a new plastic product over and over indefinitely. But, unlike, say, wood or paper or the human body, it does not decay to the basic elements it used to be before it took solid form. Even broken down to microscopic crumbs, plastic will still be plastic. The ordinary plastic bag—like any of the trillions of other plastic things now existing on the planet—will be here after we’re gone, and essentially forever. At the Sanitation Committee meeting, a man named Reginald Bowman, the president and C.E.O. of the Citywide Council of Presidents, which represents the four hundred thousand-plus people in the city who live in public housing, spoke strongly against bill 209, and added, “They just landed a something on a comet going around space, and we still haven’t figured out how to recycle plastic. . . . I just can’t understand at this point why we don’t have the technology that can deal with this issue.” The fact is that science learned long ago how to put together hydrocarbon polymers to create plastic, but it still has not found a good way to take them apart.
I can no longer imagine the world without plastic, but I believe it’s possible that one day we will see a New York City without bags in the trees. The consumer world always changes. Twenty-three years ago, when Bill and Tim and I started hitting every borough in the city, taking bags out of trees, the second most common debris we removed was videotape and audio-cassette tape. Bill even cleaned some of the tape fragments and spliced them together and played them. The result was a deranged audio-visual presentation, a chaotic howling, a head-banging nightmare. Now that nightmare seems very nineties. You almost never see videotape or cassette tape in trees, or anyplace else, nowadays.
As it turned out, bill 209 did not pass by Earth Day. A week before the council planned to meet, both sides were in a sweat. On a Wednesday, both held rallies on the steps of City Hall, the pro-baggers at eleven in the morning and the antis at two in the afternoon. The pros consisted mostly of adults from church and community groups who arrived by school bus, chanted, “The people united will never be defeated,” and held signs (“$15 MINIMUM WAGE HELPS WORKERS. 10-CENT BAG TAX HURTS THEM”) written in big letters. The antis assembled at least twice as many people, many of whom were kids, and their signs used all kinds of colors and kid writing styles, with hand-drawn whales and birds and dolphins, and butterflies made from plastic bags.
For the pro-baggers, Dr. Raymond Rufen-Blanchette, of the Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice, harked back to the Depression, predicting that if the bill passed people will be saying, “Brother, can you spare a dime, so I can buy a plastic bag, so I can bring my groceries home to feed my family?” For the antis, Councilman Lander beamed and welcomed kids to the microphone and announced that he now had commitments of twenty-six votes and thought the bill would pass. Another speaker pointed accusingly to plastic bags hanging in nearby trees. Some in the crowd booed them.
But the much awaited vote, expected at the council meeting of April 20th, did not occur. Several of the key sponsors were out of town. Romer had been invited to a wedding in St. Louis, and she bought a plane ticket that could be changed if any developments came up on Earth Day itself. None seemed in the offing, so she left. When she reached St. Louis, she listened to the Mayor being interviewed on WNYC, in case he talked about bags. He seemed miles from the topic when Roxanne, calling in from the Bronx, asked him about the bill. He replied that everybody agreed that the bags have to go, that he appreciated the council’s leadership on the issue, and that he thinks the question is very close to a resolution. Romer was so cheered by his answer that she jumped up and danced in the baggage claim.
If the bill passes, perhaps in May, as she now believes it will, she plans to get a small plastic bag tattooed on her side, where it generally will not be seen.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/saving-america-from-plastic-bags
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Apr 22, 2016 | The Courier
By Jenn Griffin
More than 1 billion pounds of plastic film was recycled in 2013 in the United States, an increase of 74 percent from 2005. Plastic film includes the over-wrap on packages of paper towels, tissue and diapers, liners in cereal boxes, bread and produce bags, the plastic pillows used to cushion products delivered through the mail, grocery and dry cleaning bags — even that found on newspapers.
According to Chevron Phillips Chemical Sustainability Manager Rick Wagner, the flexible film recycling group at the American Chemistry Council developed the program and its correlating website,plasticfilmrecycling.org and set a goal of doubling the amount of plastic film recycled in the United States by 2020.
To raise awareness for the initiative, CPChem has created a campaign primarily geared toward social media that includes short videos illustrating where plastic packaging is in everyday life instances and identifying what plastic films can be recycled and where.
Some area drop-off locations promoted on the website are Randall’s Food Markets, JCPenney, Loew’s Home Improvement stores, Target, Wal-Mart Supercenters and the Montgomery County Recycling and Reuse Facility, which is located at 1122 Pruitt Road.
There may be businesses who accept the material that aren’t yet on the site, Wagner said, but those businesses have the option of signing-up on the site to be listed as a drop-off location.
“It’s important to note this is an everyday program,” said Melanie Taplett, media relations lead for CPChem. “It’s not just for Earth Day.
“For us to have a better tomorrow, we have to take personal action today and recycle when we can, and that’s not just through the curbside program.”
Wagner said getting the message out is the biggest challenge because people may not understand why plastic bags can’t go in their curbside recycling bin. Because it’s lighter, the material has to go through a densification process with makes it more compressed and heavier. He stressed that for recycling, the bags must be clean and dry and made of polyethylene plastic with No. 2 or No. 5 labels. Woven plastic bags, which are made of polypropylene, are not recyclable in this process.
The more obvious uses for recycled plastic are plastic packaging and toys, but it can be used to make things like plastic lumber used in decks and park benches. It can even be drawn out into fine threads and used to make T-shirts.
Wagner said that for the campaign, CPChem is encouraging individuals to take selfies with the recyclable film materials or at a drop-off location and post the pictures to their social media accounts with the hashtag #iamafilmrecycler.
“We have a great community here in The Woodlands,” said Wagner. “I want it to be a great community, a better community 10, 20, 30 years from now, and these are kinds of practices that help us make that happen.
http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/courier/news/chevron-phillips-launches-media-campaign-to-raise-awareness-for-plastic/article_c5786bd8-7580-5745-a3f1-1331a93c29b4.html
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(ACC Mentioned) Rep. Bill Johnson has More Than $1M in Campaign Fund; Opponent has Nothing
Apr 23, 2016 | The Vindicator
By David Skolnick
U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, R-6th, has raised $1,187,007 toward his re-election effort while his Democratic challenger recently filed paperwork to start collecting money for his campaign fund.
Johnson, of Marietta, had $1,033,840 in his campaign account as of March 31, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
His campaign raised $187,340 during the first three months of the year with $127,200 of it coming from political action committees.
That includes $5,000 each from the American Chemistry Council PAC of Washington, D.C., and the Energy Transfer Employee Management Co. PAC of Austin, Texas; and $4,000 each from the American College of Surgeons Professional Association PAC of Washington, D.C., National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors of Falls Church, Va., and Verizon Communications Inc. Good Government Club of Washington, D.C.
During the first three months of this year, Johnson’s campaign spent $52,253, including $7,000 to the Ohio Republican Party for campaign materials and a $20,000 contribution to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Johnson has a $286 airline travel expense on his first-quarter report, but no hotel costs.
Belpre Mayor Michael L. Lorentz, Johnson’s Democratic challenger, filed a statement of organization March 30 with the FEC, and didn’t submit a campaign finance report for the first three months of the year.
The 18-county 6th Congressional District includes all of Columbiana County and a southern portion of Mahoning County.
In the 13th Congressional District, incumbent Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Howland, has raised $772,690 toward his re-election, including $71,696 in the first three months of this year. Of the money raised in the first quarter, $61,750 came from PACs.
His campaign received $3,000 contributions from Huntington Ingalls Industries PAC of Washington, D.C., Employees of Northrop Grumman Corp. PAC of Falls Church, Va., and the Honeywell International PAC of Washington, D.C.
Ryan had $534,793 in his campaign fund as of March 31.
Ryan’s campaign spent $44,998 in the first quarter, including a $5,000 contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
His campaign spent $1,502 on two airline flights as well as $1,900 for a hotel stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in El Segundo, Calif.; $273 for lodging at the Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel, and $1,150 for a “caucus retreat” at the Hyatt Hotel in Baltimore.
Richard A. Morckel of Akron, his Republican opponent, submitted a statement of organization to the FEC on Feb. 22, but didn’t turn in a campaign finance report for the first quarter of the year.
The five-county 13th District includes most of Mahoning and Trumbull counties.
http://www.vindy.com/news/2016/apr/23/candidates-file-fund-information/?newswatch#sthash.dpmYXg1P.dpuf
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(ACC Mentioned) Re-Imagine Everything
Apr 22, 2016 | ARC Advisory Group
By Mark Sen Gupta
ARC Advisory Group had the opportunity to attend and participate on the executive panel at the recent SAP Best Practices for Chemicals Event in The Woodlands, Texas. More than 300 people, mostly from North America, attended the event, which was coordinated by The Eventful Group.
The president of the American Chemical Council (ACC), Cal Dooley, delivered the opening keynote. He provided interesting data on the state of American chemicals manufacturing, including the fact that the US has moved from a high-cost chemicals producer to the second-lowest-cost producer, mainly due to feedstock advantages. This year alone, the industry announced over 250 projects with 61 percent of those from foreign firms. Mr. Dooley also indicated that the industry expected the energy dividend in the US to continue in the long term.
This keynote laid a great foundation for the conference. While it provided an "upside" view on the industry, the fact is that all industries face headwinds like commoditization and government regulation. Three key takeaways from the conference were:
Change to business processes is inevitable.
External collaboration is key.
S/4HANA can provide a performant platform to make change achievable.
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(ACC Mentioned) The Creepy Way Processed Food Packaging Messes With Your Hormones
Apr 23, 2016 | Alternet
By April M. Short
As if it weren’t already enough of a headache to find non-toxic, safe and healthy food to eat, a recent study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspective reveals that the packaging used to contain certain food products can impact your hormones. Researchers for the study found that people who eat more fast food have significantly increased rates of phthalates—industrial chemicals used to make plastics—in their systems. The study authors attribute the trend to those chemicals seeping from plastic packaging into foods.
The study asked 8,877 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examinations Surveys between 2003 and 2010 to report all the food they had eaten within last 24 hours. Participants also donated a urine sample to the study. Researchers tested each urine sample for the industrial chemicals di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) and bisphenol A (BPA)—all of which are suspected to impact health and hormones.
The results showed people for whom fast food made up 35% or more of their daily food consumption had higher rates of DEHP (24%) and DiNP (40%), compared to those who did not eat fast food. There was no significant correlation between BPA and fast food.
Often packaging that contains phthalates arrives wrapped around fast food, but it also covers a number of processed grocery store items, according to the American Chemistry Council.
While this study did not show a correlation between BPA in the blood and fast food consumption, researchers concluded in 2008 hat plastics containing BPA can and do seep into foods, then into the bloodstream. Since then, BPA has been banned by many food packaging manufacturers, which could potentially explain its absence in the recent study.
A Time Magazine article on April 13 discussed the recent study results in detail, and spoke with study author Ami Zota, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Zota told Time:
“The same range of concentrations measured in this [group] overlaps with the range of concentrations that have been measured in some of epidemiological studies that find adverse health effects.”
Thanks to a fight to educate the public that dates back to the 50’s, most people now know chemicals are entering our food supply in a number of ways. Studies continue to link them with common cancers—like breast cancers—as well as other health issues like reproductive abnormalities in men and women. Despite mass efforts to reign in the big companies like Monsanto and others, which are responsible for the creation of many chemical poisons, chemicals continue make their way into our food supply all the time. They usually do so via packaging, pesticides sprayed on crops, or antibiotics and hormones given to poultry, pigs and cattle.
The public is generally aware that fast food is unhealthy (even with toxic chemicals aside, they contribute to our high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity). It’s also likely the average person has heard that processed foods contain cancer-causing carcinogens. But people in the US continue to consume these foods at perversely high rates. According to the United States Healthful Food Council, the average American adult buys a meal or snack from a restaurant 5.8 times a week, and more than 30 percent of children eat fast food on any given day. Americans spend an average of $100 billion on fast food each year, and It is likely that the inordinate rates of poverty and absurdly low minimum wages in this country are the main cause of our fast food addiction. Foods that lack chemical additives are more expensive and typically take more time to prepare. For the millions of overworked, underpaid people receiving poverty wages in America, fast foods and processed foods can be the only realistic option.
Zota spoke to this piece of the puzzle in the Time interview, which points out that “about a third of all the people in the study had eaten fast food in the prior day.”
“That’s a lot,” Zota said. “That alone tells you the public health impact of this type of food preparation.”
Zota also told Time that in addition to chemicals leaching into food through packaging, “plastic gloves and conveyer belts could also be sources.”
The study’s conclusion states that “Fast food may be a source of exposure to DEHP and DiNP. These results, if confirmed, could inform individual and regulatory exposure reduction strategies.”
http://www.alternet.org/food/processed-food-packaging-messes-hormones
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(ACC Mentioned) Mass. Firefighters Seek Ban on Flame Retardants
Apr 25, 2016 | Boston Globe
By David Abel
Amid growing concern that flame retardants are responsible for elevated cancer rates in firefighters, Massachusetts lawmakers are pushing legislation that would go further than any other state’s in banning the use of chemicals meant to slow the spread of fires.
Fire officials and environmental advocates, who have joined forces to support the restrictions, contend that at least 10 chemicals used in flame retardants endanger firefighters, while doing little to stop fires. They support two bills that would prohibit manufacturers and retailers from using the chemicals in children’s products and upholstered furniture and authorize state environmental officials to ban other retardants they designate as health risks.
“This is a vital public safety matter that we should be addressing,” said state Senator Cynthia Creem, a Newton Democrat who sponsored one of the bills. “As the industry has become aware of the risks, we need to do more to protect our families and firefighters.”
But chemical industry officials say that evidence linking the chemicals to cancer remains uncertain, and that the retardants play an important role in public safety.
“Because these substances do deter fires, they provide additional time for families to escape and provide more time for firefighters to arrive,” said Robert Simon, vice president of chemical products and technology at the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents chemical companies.
Simon has testified against the bills being considered on Beacon Hill, which he says are more sweeping than similar bills that 13 other states have passed in recent years. No other state has proposed banning as many chemicals, he said.
Some of the chemicals that Massachusetts lawmakers have cited have been deemed safe by regulators, Simon added.
“We don’t support any state regulation of a substance where a government authority has made a determination that they don’t present a risk,” he said.
Simon and other opponents of bans argue that until there is conclusive evidence linking the chemicals to cancer, their benefits outweigh the risks. They note that firefighters are exposed to other kinds of carcinogens, such as diesel fumes from their trucks.
Flame retardants have been widely used since 1975, when California began requiring that all polyurethane foam in furniture and children’s products be able to resist an open flame for 12 seconds. Other states followed suit, and today many ordinary household items — from sofas to mattresses — contain flame-resistant chemicals.
But as evidence linking firefighting and cancer has emerged, a growing number of states, including California, Maine, and Michigan, have stopped requiring them.
A 2006 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that reviewed dozens of previous studies found that firefighters have a higher risk than civilians for a variety of cancers, including multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and testicular and prostate cancers.
In 2008, a study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine found firefighters in Massachusetts were more likely to develop colon, brain, and bladder cancers, while a 2013 study of 30,000 firefighters in San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia found increases in risks of lung, digestive, and urinary cancers.
“The fact is that firefighters have a higher than typical rate of several types of cancers . . . and 56 percent of all career firefighter line-of-duty deaths in 2013 were from job-related cancers,” said Elizabeth Saunders, director of Clean Water Action in Massachusetts, an advocacy group. “For those reasons, anything that reduces their risk, especially from chemicals proven ineffective in reducing the spread of fire, is worth pursuing.”
The state fire marshal says home sprinklers are more important than flame retardants.
Saunders pointed to an ongoing study by the California Department of Public Health that has found that firefighters who have been on the job for more than a year have been exposed to substantially higher levels of chemicals in flame retardants than civilians.
In Massachusetts, firefighters are urging lawmakers to pass the ban.
State Fire Marshal Peter Ostroskey said homeowners and businesses would be better off installing sprinklers, which are more effective at slowing fires and safer than flame retardants.
“We’ve seen enough information that this is of concern,” he said. “There are other ways to provide fire retardants that would reduce exposure to carcinogens.”
State environmental officials declined to comment on the administration’s position on the bills, both of which were recently voted out of committee.
In Boston, the City Council last month updated the city’s fire code so that public buildings with sprinklers are no longer required to use furniture with flame retardants, and city firefighters said they hope the state takes more sweeping measures.
“We shouldn’t be the canary in the coal mine,” said Jay Fleming, deputy chief of the Boston Fire Department and a consultant to Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts, the firefighters union, which has been urging lawmakers to pass the bill. “The burden of proof should be on an industry that stands to make billions of dollars off these chemicals — not on the public or firefighters.”
Michael Hamrock, who spent 13 years as a physician with the Boston Fire Department and now treats hundreds of firefighters in private practice, said the city’s firefighters are nearly three times more likely to have cancer than the general public. He said firefighters often carry residue of flame retardants on their clothes and skin long after they leave fires. Traces are found in their blood for longer still.
As a result, the city recommends firefighters wear a self-contained breathing apparatus at fires, wipe soot from their skin as soon as possible, and take showers and wash their clothing as soon as they return to their stations. The department also recommends frequent cancer screening.
“No one should consider these chemicals safe,” Hamrock said.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/24/firefighters-seek-new-law-ban-flame-retardants/Zzv8aVoRN6WTcpKDIvV4cP/story.html
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Vt. Lawmakers Push for State Authority in TSCA Rewrite
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Sam Pearson
Vermont's congressional delegation this week used a water contaminant of concern in the Green Mountain State in making the case for providing maximum enforcement latitude for states in pending legislation to update the nation's chemicals law.
Sens. Patrick Leahy (D) and Bernie Sanders (I) and Rep. Peter Welch (D) weighed in on pending bicameral negotiations for Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 reform bills -- S. 697, or the "Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act," and H.R. 2576, or the "TSCA Modernization Act."
Both bills passed their respective chambers by wide margins last year and have been the subject of complex negotiations for several months.
Meanwhile, in Vermont, many residents are concerned about recent test results identifying perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in drinking and surface water in the Bennington area, the lawmakers wrote. The fact that PFOA was grandfathered in as an existing chemical under TSCA and not reviewed for safety is a testament to the law's failures, the lawmakers said.
"Of course," the lawmakers wrote, "PFOA is just one of tens of thousands of chemicals for which there is insufficient and incomplete information."
The fact that the federal government has done so little to review the safety of PFOA shows states have a role to play, the lawmakers argued.
Industry groups have pushed for a strong federal system, in which states would be largely precluded from going their own way on regulations if they would conflict with U.S. EPA's findings. The issue has been one of the most contentious of the legislative process.
The Vermont lawmakers urged Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to craft legislation consistent with the position of some state attorneys general.
The 12 attorneys general argued earlier this year for a law that would refrain from "pre-emption of state actions beyond that of existing TSCA".
http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2016/04/22/stories/1060036119
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Apr 22, 2016 | Chemical Watch - Briefing
The Ministry of Environment (MoE) Task Force for K-REACH has published guidelines for the lead registrants of existing substances in South Korea. The Model Agreement for Joint Submission of Registration Documents of Chemical Substances is available in Korean and English (12 April).
Industry has stressed the need for guidance to facilitate hazard communication compliance, and urged the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) and Health Canada to address variances between their regulations. This is in comments submitted to the US-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council’s (RCC’s) draft 2016-17 workplan for workplace chemicals (11 April).
Stakeholders involved in international chemicals activities have compiled a list of actions to link sound chemicals management to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The group met in Geneva this month to discuss how their work keys into the 17 goals agreed last September in New York (13 April).
Ministers and representatives of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have agreed to establish a regional action plan on chemicals and waste. The decision was made at a Forum of LAC environment ministers in Cartagena, Colombia in March (14 April).
Echa is to reopen hundreds of REACH registration dossiers for new completeness checks. This follows the decision of last month’s Board of Appeal ruling, which upheld the “one substance, one registration” (Osor) principle. The agency will first check the 118 individual charcoal dossiers directly related to the BoA’s decision (11 April).
The European Commission has issued a draft Regulation that would see tighter limits set for bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic food contact materials (FCMs). If adopted, it would apply a “migration limit” of 0.05mg of BPA per kg of food (mg/kg) to plastic materials and articles and varnishes and coatings found in canned foods. This is the maximum permitted amount of a given substance released from a material or article into food. The current limit is set at 0.6mg of BPA per kg of food (mg/kg) (7 April).
California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (Oehha) has launched a Proposition 65 warning website. This is despite concerns expressed by a coalition of more than 170 trade groups (6 April).
It is not too early for companies and trade groups to start preparing their strategies under a reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), an expert panel told a chemical conference in March. And some companies, delegates heard, have already begun ramping up resources to take on expected challenges – and identifying strategies for taking advantage of new opportunities (31 March).
A group of trade organisations is calling for the European Commission to abandon its proposal to “fast track” the restriction of 286 carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic (CMR) substances in textiles consumer articles (31 March).
Reform to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) would have a “negligible” effect on state regulatory programmes, according to Maureen Gorsen, a former head of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and now a partner at law firm Alston & Bird. The extent to which state regulation of chemicals will be preempted, by federal law, is a crucial component in the ongoing discussions to reconcile the TSCA reform bills that were passed by the House and Senate last year (31 March).
Echa’s head, Geert Dancet, last month defended the controversial Opinion, reached by the agency’s Committees on Socio-economic Analysis (Seac) and Risk Assessment (Rac), on an authorisation application for the use of the phthalate plasticiser DEHP in recycled PVC (30 March).
Clothing company Levi Strauss is developing a list of ‘preferred substances’ – those safer for the environment and human health – for its suppliers. The list will be a result of the company’s Screened Chemistry Programme, which assesses the environmental and human health impact of chemicals used in the finishing process of its products (31 March).
Apple’s entire supply chain is now being audited for the use of “conflict minerals”, according to a company report. This was accomplished following five years of effort to trace the source of the tin, tungsten, tantalum or gold (3TG) used in its supply chain.
https://chemicalwatch.com/46839/in-the-news
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Maine Voices: Urge Maine Delegation to Back Tighter Federal Control Over Toxic Substances
Apr 25, 2016 | Portland Press Herald
By James H. Maier
The recent Portland Press Herald story on a proposal to limit the use of synthetic pesticides in South Portland (“Plan to ban pesticides: A model or a mistake?” Page A1, April 11) offers an overview of the differing perspectives on proposed pesticide ordinances. It also raises the significant issue of how both federal and state agencies are not doing enough to ensure that commonly used lawn and garden products are safe.
But this is just one part of a larger and much more ominous problem: the failure over decades of state and federal government to protect citizens from the short- and long-term risks of exposure to literally thousands of hazardous chemicals all around us.
Toxicity to children (and, to a greater extent, dogs) from lawn and garden pesticides is just one aspect of the danger. Tons of widely used chemicals such as glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup and nitrogen-rich fertilizers eventually reach Casco Bay, contributing to overgrowth of green algae and mass die-offs of phytoplankton, which can adversely affect fish and shellfish. Growing public concern surrounds the use of neonicitinoid pesticides, which are closely linked with declining numbers of bees and other pollinating insects, bats and other species further up the food chain.
The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, a federal law conceded to have been largely shaped by the chemical industry, has been a toothless, sleeping watchdog. During the past 40 years, it is estimated that over 80,000 synthetic chemicals have entered into widespread use in industry, household products, personal care items and myriad other uses; newer chemicals are being added at an estimated rate of over 700 per year. Only a small fraction have been adequately tested and even fewer are adequately targeted by meaningful restrictions or outright bans on their use.
Alarmingly, widespread testing of umbilical cord blood reveals that is possible to detect over 200 synthetically produced chemicals and their breakdown products. In adults, evidence of these same chemicals can also be found in blood, urine, semen and other body fluids.
A wide spectrum of problems are correlated with exposure to synthesized chemical toxins, as well as to many other substances long recognized as harmful, such as lead, mercury, arsenic, dioxin and radon. Many public health experts attribute the rising incidence of various cancers, infertility, birth defects, lowered IQ, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and behavior and learning problems to increasing exposure to the toxins that are everywhere in our environment.
Children are more vulnerable to any type of poisoning than are adults, because of their higher metabolism and respiratory rate, greater surface-to-mass ratio and the tendency for toddlers to crawl across lawns and floors, mouthing whatever they think looks interesting. There are also critical periods in utero and during early childhood when their developing nervous systems are more vulnerable to disruptive influences.
Moreover, their longer lifespan means children may continue to accumulate toxic chemicals in their bodies far longer than adults. The presence of even small amounts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals at critical periods of embryonic development may contribute to birth defects in male genitals, and possibly later infertility or other reproductive problems. Such long-term adverse effects escape detection during short-term testing.
Research has shown a clear connection between exposure to some of these hormone-mimicking chemicals and marked obesity in rats raised on the same diet as matched controls, suggesting that environmental toxins – as well as more obvious factors such as overeating and inactivity – may be insidious contributors to the current national epidemic of obesity.
Bills intended to replace the Toxic Substances Control Act have been put forward in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, with conference committees now working to integrate these into a meaningful bipartisan consensus. Inevitably, chemical industry lobbyists will be attempting to weaken or dilute any final version. It is thus a crucial time for our congressional delegation to hear from Maine citizens and environmental groups seeking stronger protective action.
When writing or calling the offices of our senators and representatives, urge their support for provisions in any new chemical legislation that will:
• Compel the Environmental Protection Agency to identify and test significant numbers of “chemicals of high concern” (chemicals proven to cause serious health concerns) within a specific time frame.
• Ensure that the language of any new legislation does not effectively invalidate safeguards already in place in Maine and other states with progressive toxic control laws (such as the Kid-Safe Product Act, banning bisphenol-A in child products).
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/23/maine-voices-urge-maines-congressional-delegation-to-support-control-of-toxic-substances/
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Are Air Fresheners Really Toxic?
Apr 21, 2016 | The Muhlenberg Weekly
By Alyssa Scott
Air fresheners are very useful. They cover up bad odors and fill your house with a fresh scent. However, what many people may not think about is the harmful effects of these air fresheners. According to the EPA, the indoor air levels of pollutants (partially caused by air fresheners) is 2-5 times higher than outdoor levels. Numerous companies have recognized that air fresheners contain harmful chemicals and are now selling natural air fresheners. The question is, are non-natural air fresheners really as dangerous as some people claim?
In 2007, a Citizen Petition was created to address the issue of the lack of regulations on air fresheners. This petition was addressed to Administrator Johnson from the EPA and Commissioner Moore from the CPSC and it was signed by the Sierra Club, Alliance for Healthy Homes, the National Center for Healthy Housing, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). This petition contains a lot of information about the possible harmful effects of air fresheners. It contends that the chemicals found in some air fresheners can act as carcinogens, can have negative effects on reproductive health, and can be harmful to people with allergies or asthma. The petition also noted the lack of regulations by the government, as well as by the manufacturers, about what chemicals can be put into air fresheners. The petition also discusses the lack of data available to the public about the risks associated with inhaling chemicals in air fresheners. The petition end with a call to the EPA and CPSC to gather data about air fresheners and to take measures to protect the public.
The EPA says that VOCs (volatile organic substances) are emitted by air fresheners, along with many other household products. The EPA states that VOCs may have both short-term and long-term negative health effects. The EPA’s Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has some guidelines that may regulate what chemicals can be present in air fresheners. Section 8(e) requires that anyone who produces or imports a chemical substance must obtain information that reasonably supports the conclusion that the substance does not pose a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.
Many companies have begun to produce natural air fresheners that are not harmful to people’s health or the environment. One company that does this is Eco Me. Eco Me creates cleaning products, air fresheners, and other household products out of natural-based ingredients. These products can be used without risking the health of the people around you or the environment.
With the current data on levels of air pollutants indoors, as well as the known harmful effects of many air fresheners, it is essential that people are educated about what is in the products they are buying. Today, there are so many natural products to choose from that people should consider natural air fresheners as an alternative to non-natural air fresheners.
http://www.muhlenbergweekly.com/news/view.php/1020022/Are-air-fresheners-really-toxic
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California Lists Styrene as Carcinogen
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Carolyn Whetzel
California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has added styrene to the Proposition 65 list of carcinogens.
OEHHA issued notice announcing the listing April 22. At the same time, itproposed establishing a safe harbor level for styrene (CAS No. 100-42-5) of 27 micrograms per day, the exposure level that would trigger Proposition 65 warning requirements.
Public comments on the proposed safe harbor level, an exposure level expected not to result in significant cancer risk, are due June 6. Requests for a public hearing are due May 23, OEHHA said.
Styrene is used in the manufacture of a wide variety of products, including construction materials, fiberglass, automobile parts, synthetic rubbers, lighting fixtures, packaging materials and disposable food containers.
OEHHA launched this listing process, its third attempt to add styrene to the Proposition 65 list, last year.
The agency relied on a 2011 report from National Toxicology Program that concluded styrene is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” a classification that the National Academies supported in 2014.
Proposition 65 is the state's landmark right-to-know law: the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986. The voter initiative requires the state to maintain a list of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive toxicity. Businesses must provide clear warnings whenever exposing the public to unsafe levels of a listed substance.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=87959258&vname=dennotallissues&fn=87959258&jd=87959258
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EPA Must Act Now To Protect Public From Teflon Chemical In Drinking Water
Apr 25, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Bill Walker
The Environmental Protection Agency was first alerted 15 years ago to contamination of drinking water by PFOA, a chemical used to make Teflon that has since been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, heart disease and other serious health problems. Since then, PFOA pollution has grown from a regional problem to a national crisis. Yet EPA still has not set a legal limit for the compound in drinking water, even in the face of repeated appeals from state officials and representatives of the public interest community.
Today (April 25) EWG, which has investigated the harm done by PFOA and related chemicals since 2002, urged EPA to act swiftly to protect Americans from this threat. In a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, EWG said EPA’s “glacial pace and uneven approach to protecting the public from this highly persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemical . . . borders on an abdication of the agency’s responsibility to protect public health.”
EWG President Ken Cook urged McCarthy to not only move quickly to set an enforceable drinking water safety standard for PFOA but to investigate and make public all locations where the chemical was produced, used or dumped. Cook also asked EPA to step up efforts to test public water systems for PFOA and other currently unregulated pollutants.
The letter cited the severe PFOA contamination of drinking water around DuPont’s Teflon plant in Parkersburg, W.Va.; the detection of PFOA in more than 100 water systems serving almost 7 million Americans in 27 states; and the recent discovery of contamination in a string of small towns in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, caused at least in part by chemical plants formerly operated by Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, now owned by Honeywell International.
Cook wrote:
It is reasonable to suspect that further contamination is lurking in other communities’ water nationwide, but without complete and reliable information about the locations of all facilities that made, used or disposed of PFOA, state and local authorities do not know where they should conduct additional testing.
Acting on a petition from EWG, in 2005 EPA fined DuPont a then-record $16.5 million for withholding studies that showed that PFOA was hazardous to human health. DuPont and seven other chemical companies agreed to phase out production of PFOA by the end of 2015. But because of the chemical’s persistence in the environment and decades of use in hundreds of consumer and industrial products, PFOA pollutes the blood of virtually all Americans and is passed from mothers to unborn babies in the womb.
The EPA is expected to issue soon an updated yet non-enforceable health advisory for PFOA in drinking water, but the agency has said that it may not even consider setting a legal limit until 2019 or later. The most recent independent scientific studies say that the current advisory level is hundreds of times too weak to fully protect public health.
http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2016/04/epa-must-act-now-protect-public-teflon-chemical-drinking-water
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OxyChem Expansion Will Support New Coolants
Apr 25, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Marc S. Reisch
As regulatory limits loom on older fluorinated refrigeration chemicals, companies are investing in a new generation of fluorochemicals with low global warming potential (GWP). In the latest such move, Occidental Chemical says it will spend $145 million to expand its Geismar, La., site to make a raw material for “next-generation, climate-friendly refrigerants.”
Although OxyChem won’t provide details, evidence suggests the raw material is 1,1,2,3-tetrachloro-1-propene, also known as HCC-1230xa. In 2011 OxyChem announced plans to produce it in a joint venture with Dow Chemical. The two then described HCC-1230xa as a chlorocarbon “designed to enable the efficient production of the next-generation refrigerant hydrofluoroolefin (HFO)-1234yf, which has low global warming potential and zero ozone depletion.”
The joint venture appears never to have been formed, and Dow subsequently sold its chlorinated solvents business to Olin. However, OxyChem didn’t halt work on HCC-1230xa. In November 2014 the firm received a U.S. patent covering improved methods to make it.
Regardless of whether OxyChem will be making HCC-1230xa or another precursor, demand for HFO-1234yf is clearly on the rise. Global automakers have already adopted it as the most viable option to replace hydrofluorocarbon (HFC)-134a, a refrigerant with a GWP 1,430 times as great as carbon dioxide. HFO-1234yf has a GWP of less than 1.
Positioning to meet the demand, Honeywell International plans to open a HFO-1234yf plant in Geismar, La., in 2017 and recently added India’s Navin Fluorine and the Chinese firm Juhua as licensees to make the refrigerant. Japan’s Asahi Glass is already a Honeywell licensee. In addition Chemours, which developed the refrigerant with Honeywell, is planning a $178 million plant in Ingleside, Texas.
But even these additions may not be enough. New limits on HFCs coming, perhaps as soon as 2018, under an extension of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer will further ramp up demand for HFOs to be used in stationary air-conditioning units, says Ray Will, a fluorochemical specialist at consulting firm IHS. “A lot of eyeballs are following this development,” Will says.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i17/OxyChem-expansion-support-new-coolants.html
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EPA Finding on Power Plant Mercury Standards to Be Published
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Patrick Ambrosio
The Environmental Protection Agency's final supplemental finding on the need to regulate power plant emissions of mercury and other hazardous pollutants is scheduled to be published April 25, which will open a 60-day filing period for lawsuits challenging the decision.
The finding, posted online April 15, reaffirmed the EPA's determination that it is “appropriate and necessary” to regulate power plants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act.
That determination, originally made in 2000, ultimately led to promulgation of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, a regulation that the agency estimated to cost the power sector $9.6 billion per year while generating significant public health benefits (74 DEN A-2, 4/18/16).
The EPA's supplemental finding was made necessary by a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision that the agency erred when it didn't consider cost in its “appropriate and necessary” analysis (Michigan v. EPA, 135 S. Ct. 2699, 2015 BL 207163, 80 ERC 1577 (2015)).
The supplemental finding took two distinct approaches to considering cost: a preferred approach that weighed four different cost metrics against prior conclusions about the health and environmental hazards related to power plant emissions; and a secondary approach that involved a full cost-benefit analysis that showed the costs of the rule were dramatically outweighed by the as much as $90 billion in related benefits.
Environmental Groups Welcome Finding
While the supplemental finding (RIN 2060-AS76) was welcomed by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations that helped defend the MATS rule in court, publication of the finding is expected to trigger another round of litigation by states and industry groups.
Attorneys expect that petitioners will attempt to use the finding as an avenue to challenge the EPA's long-standing practice of counting the co-benefits of regulation, such as the benefits of reducing particulate matter from implementing air toxics standards, in cost-benefit analyses (52 DEN B-1, 3/17/16).
Any challenges to the supplemental finding must be filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has exclusive jurisdiction over nationally applicable regulations issued under the Clean Air Act. The filing deadline will be June 24.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=87959254&vname=dennotallissues&fn=87959254&jd=87959254
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Republicans Set to Attack BLM Venting and Flaring Rule
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Scott Streater
House Republicans this week are expected to once again push the Interior Department to reconsider finalizing a proposed rule aimed at reducing the volume of natural gas from roughly 100,000 wells on federal and tribal lands.
The Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will hold an oversight hearing Wednesday on what the subcommittee has titled the "Bureau of Land Management's regulatory overreach into methane emissions regulation."
Expect Subcommittee Chairman Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) to grill Amanda Leiter, Interior deputy assistant secretary for lands and minerals management, on the need and legal basis for the proposed rule, just as he and other GOP leaders have at previous oversight hearings.
Lamborn at a subcommittee hearing on the Obama administration's fiscal 2017 budget requests bemoaned the "onslaught" of federal oil and gas regulations.
"It seems that not a Friday afternoon has gone by without receiving a new notice of proposed rulemaking from one of the agencies," he said.
BLM Director Neil Kornze testified at that hearing, saying the proposed rule would start saving some of the $400 million of natural gas that's "wasted" through venting and flaring on federal and tribal lands alone -- enough to power 5 million homes (E&E Daily, March 3).
Reducing venting, flaring and leaking of methane is a major component of President Obama's 2013 Climate Action Plan. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Republicans and the oil and gas industry have argued that the industry is already taking adequate steps to reduce methane emissions.
But U.S. EPA this month released revised estimates of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, concluding that natural gas systems were the country's largest source of methane in 2014, accounting for a third of total emissions (E&ENews PM, April 15).
EPA will likely use this final version of the inventory to support developing methane regulations for existing oil and gas operations.
The issue has been a source of contention at earlier oversight hearings on BLM's draft proposal. GOP leaders and industry representatives have accused BLM of overstepping its authority in an attempt to do what EPA is authorized to do under the Clean Air Act.
"Our biggest issue with the rule is that BLM simply doesn't have the authority to regulate air quality," Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, told a Senate subcommittee at an oversight hearing this month (E&E Daily, April 15).
Sgamma added that "even if BLM had the authority to regulate air quality, why is it doing what EPA is already doing?"
The Western Energy Alliance, along with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the American Exploration and Production Council, and the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, submitted on Friday a joint comment letter on the rule to BLM that, among other things, questioned the agency's authority to regulate emissions.
"This proposed rule is an arbitrary attempt at regulating air, which is outside the scope of jurisdiction held by the BLM," Dan Naatz, IPAA's senior vice president of government relations and political affairs, said Friday in a statement.
Critics say there are similarities between the proposed venting and flaring rule and BLM's proposed rule on hydraulic fracturing.
U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl in Wyoming last fall ruled BLM does not have the authority to regulate fracking on public lands, and he enjoined the agency from enforcing the regulations while the court considers industry and state challenges (EnergyWire, Oct. 1, 2015).
But Leiter testified this month at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests and Mining oversight hearing that BLM not only has the authority to regulate the venting and flaring of methane gas, but also has an obligation to control the waste of federal resources.
"In supporting oil and gas development on public and Indian lands, the BLM's highest priorities are ensuring that operations are safe and environmentally responsible and providing a fair return on public resources," she said. "These common-sense measures in the proposed methane waste and reduction rule would advance those priorities by curbing waste of our nation's natural gas supplies."
Still, the industry had plenty of supporters at the subcommittee oversight hearing.
Subcommittee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said during the hearing that "the question is not whether we should take steps to reduce unnecessary venting and flaring; the question is what's the most cost-effective way of doing so and who is best positioned to lead this effort: producers, states, tribes or Washington."
He added, "I question whether Washington should play any role in this arena."
Schedule: The hearing is Wednesday, April 27, at 10 a.m. in 1324 Longworth.
Witnesses: Amanda Leiter, deputy assistant secretary for lands and minerals management, Interior Department; Mark Watson, oil and gas supervisor, Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; Shawn Bolton, commissioner, Rio Blanco County, Colo.; Lynn Helms, director, North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources; and Gwen Lachelt, commissioner, La Plata County, Colo.
http://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2016/04/25/stories/1060036153
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Senate Panel to Weigh Drilling Opportunities Amid Low Prices
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hear testimony tomorrow on oil and gas production in challenging market conditions.
The hearing will examine "challenges and opportunities for oil and gas development in different price environments," according to an advisory.
Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) originally scheduled the hearing for last week but had to postpone it because of floor action on energy reform legislation (E&E Daily, April 20).
The meeting comes as the domestic oil and gas industry continues to face major economic challenges -- with no quick turnaround in sight -- from the global overabundance of production and subsequent price decline because of the hydraulic fracturing boom and efforts by Saudi Arabia to protect its market share.
"We shouldn't stop looking at ways to harness our oil and gas potential just because prices are so low," a GOP aide said Friday.
Earlier this month, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard noted the "current market difficulties" that have followed the domestic boom. Since 2005, he said, U.S. crude production has surged 88 percent, while natural gas has grown 48 percent (Greenwire, April 13).
"As a result of America's 21st-century energy revolution, our nation is more energy secure, energy costs for consumers are lower, and our nation has the ability to show the world how energy abundance can be used as a positive force rather than a political and economic threat," Gerard said.
The issue is of paramount importance to Murkowski, whose state is struggling with a major budget crisis resulting from the slowing of oil and gas revenues.
The immediate fiscal headache is adding to Alaska's fight to reverse long-term production declines because of high drilling and transportation costs associated with tapping the vast North Slope oil and gas reserves.
However, the oil industry also scored a major win when Congress last year lifted the decades-old ban on crude exports, giving it access to global markets.
Schedule: The hearing is Tuesday, April 26, at 10 a.m. in 366 Dirksen.
Witnesses: Jason Bordoff, founding director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University; Oren Cass, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute; Suzanne Minter, manager, oil and gas consulting services, Bentek Energy; Leslie Palti-Guzman, director of global gas, the Rapidan Group; and Michael Ratner, specialist in energy policy at the Congressional Research Service.
http://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1060036154
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The ‘Keystone-ization’ of Everything
Apr 25, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Sylvan Lane
Bill McKibben, the author and environmental activist who helped lead a grassroots campaign against the Keystone XL oil pipeline, says 2016 will see the “Keystone-ization” of projects across the U.S.
“Every coal mine, every frack well, every oil export terminal ... all of them are being met with strict, strict resistance,” said McKibben, one of more than 1,200 people arrested for protesting Keystone in front of the White House.
“There’s people arrested every day now around the country taking on these infrastructure projects, the kind of spread of civil disobedience like we’ve never seen.”
McKibben, 55, is at the center of the “keep it in the ground” movement, which seeks to stop planned coal mines, oil wells and fossil fuel transportation infrastructure across the country with protests and pressure on local governments.
Those in the movement say humans have already gone too far down the path of climate change and can’t afford to dig up any more fossil fuels.
Activists have fought projects across the United States, successfully blocking the country’s largest planned coal strip mine in Montana, protesting a California coal export terminal and demonstrating against proposed oil drilling projects in Nevada and the Gulf of Mexico.
In Washington, a Republican-controlled Congress is waging its own fight against the Obama administration’s efforts to curb carbon emission from power plants.
McKibben, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, has spent the past three decades writing about climate change, leading marches and rallying protests against fossil fuel companies.
He argues that preserving nature is a virtue in and of itself but that humans have put the planet and society in peril through rampant use of fossil fuels.
McKibben was one of the earliest and most prominent voices against Keystone, but he says the battle had limited long-term political impact. Even so, it was the first crack in the fossil fuel industry’s armor, he says.
“Congress is so stuck in its ways and polarized and whatever that it’s sort of the last place that sort of seems cut off from the rest of the country’s politics,” said McKibben, who was arrested in early March protesting a planned methane storage facility in upstate New York. “But [Keystone] had a huge effect on helping lots of other people see that they can take on the fossil fuel industry.”
“To tell you the truth, Keystone was a big fight, but it wasn’t any bigger than a lot of other things,” he added.
The seven-year battle over the project, which planned to transport oil sands crude from Canada to the Gulf, ended in November when President Obama rejected a cross-border permit. He cited climate change as his main reason for the decision.
Prominent environmental advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are on the same page as McKibben, touting the Keystone victory as a pivotal moment for a movement always on its heels.
“Sometimes in the environmental movement, we underestimate our powers a little bit,” said Kelly Mitchell, energy campaign director for Greenpeace USA. “We’re used to thinking of ourselves as the scrappy David against the oil industry’s Goliath, and I think Keystone was an important moment where we got to see the real power of the climate movement reflected.”
The Sierra Club launched a campaign during the George W. Bush administration against planned and active coal mines; and while coal is still the United States’s primary source, its share of the countryt’s electricity production has fallen around 20 percent since 2000, according to federal data.
Even so, the Keystone victory is one of several factors that have swung momentum in environmentalists’ favor, says Michael Brune, the group’s executive director.
“There have been many victories against the fossil fuel industry over the last several years, but it’s definitely clear that the climate movement has the wind at our sails that we’ve never enjoyed before,” he said.
The Obama administration recently scrapped Atlantic and Alaskan oil drilling plans and declared a moratorium on public land leases for coal mining.
Low gas prices have also helped the environmental movement, because rising prices at the pump tend to shift momentum to the oil and gas industry.
Fossil fuel corporations are already are pushing back hard, arguing that American innovation has slashed carbon emissions. They argue that keeping fossil fuels in the ground would drive up energy prices, which would burden low-income Americans the most.
“I find it somewhat absurd and almost disingenuous that the environmental community is denying the progress the United States is making in leading the world in bringing down carbon emissions from using more clean-burning natural gas,” said American Petroleum Institute executive vice president Louis Finkel.
More than 70 percent of Americans believe the government should take any steps necessary to protect the environment, and 40 percent say stricter environmental laws do too much damage to the economy, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey.
But Finkel said it is a “false choice to have to choose between the environment and low energy prices, because we need to do both.”
Groups that fight against what they see as overzealous government energy regulation say the keep-it-in-the-ground agenda hurts the people it purports to protect.
“By making energy more expensive, that takes money right out of people’s pockets,” said Christopher Warren, communications director for the American Energy Alliance. “I see a direct tie here between health and wealth, but the agenda that the McKibbens of the world pursue would make people poorer. … I don’t see how they can reconcile that.”
McKibben himself has advocated for a world of small, self-sustaining communities, which hasn’t gained as much acceptance as his work to end fossil fuel use. But with the Keystone battle behind him, the push to keep fuel in the ground will continue.
“With all this good spirit, this reminds me very much of the first day of the Keystone pipeline arrests in Washington,” said McKibben in New York shortly before he was arrested there. “But this time, we’ve got a beautiful lake in the background instead of the White House.”
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/277256-the-keystone-ization-of-everything
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Mexican Petrochemical Explosion Death Toll Reaches 32
Apr 25, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Anthony Harrup
Rescue teams recovered four bodies Sunday at the site of an explosion at a petrochemical plant in southern Mexico, bringing the number of workers killed in the accident to 32, state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos said.
Pemex said 26 of the victims have been identified, and the bodies returned to families. Six of the bodies have yet to be identified, and six workers are still reported missing by families. Identification using DNA analysis is expected in several weeks.
All other workers who were at the plant at the time of the accident have been accounted for, Pemex said Sunday.
The explosion Wednesday at the plant owned by chemical company Mexichem SAB and Pemex injured at least 136 workers. Eighteen remained hospitalized as of late Friday.
The cause of the accident is yet to be determined, although a gas leak is suspected. The plant in Coatzacoalcos, in southern Veracruz state, uses ethane gas and chlorine to produce vinyl chloride, which is used in the manufacture of plastics.
The companies said they have begun the process of compensating the families of the victims.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mexican-petrochemical-explosion-death-toll-reaches-32-1461557149
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Energy Committee to Vote on Safety Bill
Apr 25, 2016 | E&E Daily
By Hannah Hess
Efforts to update pipeline safety oversight may move a step closer to the House floor this week, with the Energy and Commerce Committee scheduled to vote on legislation to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The panel convenes tomorrow for opening statements in what is expected to be a two-day markup of more than 20 bills, including the "Pipeline Safety Act of 2016."
At its crux, the legislation would renew PHMSA's oversight authority through fiscal 2019 and direct the Transportation secretary to report to Congress on the status of a number of mandated safeguards that the agency has failed to enact. PHMSA's authority expired eight months ago (E&E Daily, Sept. 15, 2015).
Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee gave bipartisan backing to its own four-year reauthorization (E&ENews PM, April 20).
Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) has said the committees are working in conjunction for a bipartisan solution (E&E Daily, March 15). They will merge their bills to offer one piece of pipeline safety legislation for a vote on the House floor.
Updated draft language, unveiled Friday, includes changes to Section 15. Republicans demanded an update to the provision that would provide the Transportation secretary with emergency authority to order operational controls for up to 30 days, after oil and gas lobbyists expressed concerns (Greenwire, March 16).
The latest version of the bill tweaks that authority, by adding language on judicial review of orders that would allow pipeline owners that are adversely affected by an emergency order to seek a judge's review in district court, with expedited consideration. It also defines "imminent hazard" and places other limitations on the secretary's authority.
Those changes mirror the Transportation Committee's bill (E&E Daily, April 15).
The Senate passed its own pipeline safety bill by unanimous consent on March 3.
Schedule: The markup is Tuesday, April 26, at 5 p.m. in 2123 Rayburn. The panel will reconvene Wednesday, April 27, at 10 a.m. and Thursday, April 28, at 10 a.m.
http://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2016/04/25/stories/1060036161
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Industry Coalition, Advocates Wage Competing Attacks On Ozone NAAQS
Apr 22, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Stuart Parker
A coalition of major industrial sectors and a separate group of public health and environmental organizations are waging competing legal attacks on EPA's decision to tighten its ozone ambient air limit, with industry claiming the rule is flawed for not weighing natural “background” ozone while advocates say the limit is unlawfully weak.
The arguments are detailed in April 22 opening briefs that the petitioners filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Murray Energy Corporation v. EPA, which consolidates suits over the Oct. 1 rule. EPA's regulation tightened the prior 2008 ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) of 75 parts per billion (ppb) down to 70 ppb. Industry groups, GOP lawmakers and some states say the agency lacked scientific justification to tighten the limit, while advocates say it should have been made even stricter.
EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) endorsed tightening the limit to within the range of 60 ppb-70 ppb in order to protect public health, and environmental advocates backed a 60 ppb standard.
Opponents of a stricter standard, however, argue that it ignores the role of naturally-occurring background ozone levels that could make it impossible for some areas to ever attain the NAAQS. This in turn would trigger an air law mandate for those areas to impose potentially expensive controls on industrial sources of ozone-forming pollutants. EPA's critics say that this nonattainment status drives businesses away and hurts local economies.
However, EPA by law cannot consider costs in setting a NAAQS and must do solely based on scientific data on a criteria pollutant's impacts on human health and welfare. Groups have routinely challenged EPA's decision on where it sets NAAQS for ozone and the five other criteria pollutants, but the D.C. Circuit has largely deferred to the agency's scientific expertize in determining what level of NAAQS satisfies Clean Air Act requirements.
The coalition of Murray Energy, the National Association of Manufacturers, American Petroleum Institute and others argue in their April 22 opening brief that the air law mandated EPA to consider background pollution from natural and foreign sources when setting the NAAQS, and that its failure to do so makes the rule unlawful.
The Clean Air Act “requires that NAAQS be achievable by regulation of U.S. sources” through state implementation plans (SIPs), which are NAAQS compliance plans crafted by states, the groups say.
“Consequently, in setting NAAQS, EPA must consider whether those standards can be achieved through such regulation and may not set standards that cannot be achieved. In lowering the ozone NAAQS level, EPA did not take appropriate account of evidence that naturally-occurring or internationally-transported background ozone that cannot be controlled under the Act can, in some circumstances, prevent achievement of those NAAQS, particularly given that the Act does not require man-made U.S. emissions to be totally eliminated (which is impossible in any event).”
Although EPA claims it is prohibited from considering background pollution levels when setting NAAQS, the groups say, “that claim is unsupported by the Act, the case law, or common sense and is inconsistent with EPA’s prior position. To the contrary, the Act requires such consideration.”
'Exceptional Events'
EPA's recommendation that states rely on regulatory exclusions offered under the agency's “exceptional events,” “rural transport areas” and international emissions exemption programs is insufficient, and cannot guarantee NAAQS compliance, the industry coalition says.
The exceptional events policy offers states the option of excluding from regulatory compliance determinations air quality data gathered during unusual events such as dust storms or wildfires.
EPA is working on an update to the exceptional events policy due to be finalized this summer, but critics say it still does not go far enough to streamline the policy to make it workable. The rural transport area policy allows similar exemptions for rural areas that are not adjacent to urban areas, where the rural area lacks pollution sources to regulate. And states can also petition EPA to exclude from NAAQS compliance air pollution from foreign sources.
Industry petitioners also argue that EPA has not taken into account “contextual factors” raised by Justice Stephen Breyer in his concurring opinion in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, the 2001 Supreme Court case that is widely interpreted to prohibit EPA from considering implementation costs when setting NAAQS.
Such factors include “the public’s ordinary tolerance for a particular health risk,” “comparative health risks,” and “the acceptability of small risks to health.” EPA should consider adverse economic, social and energy impacts of tougher NAAQS, the petitioners argue. The agency did not account for these factors in its decision to tighten the ozone limit, which also makes the decision unlawful, they say.
The industry petitioners claim that EPA has failed to provide a “reasoned explanation” for its tightening of the NAAQS. “Here, no new study since EPA last revised the ozone NAAQS in 2008 changed the fundamental scientific understanding of ozone effects or the exposure-response relationships,” they say. This contradicts EPA's view that there is ample new evidence to back tightening the standard.
Environmentalists' Claims
Public health and environmental groups in their April 22 opening brief urge the court to remand the primary and secondary ozone standards to EPA. Primary standards protect public health, while secondary standards protect the environment, and EPA set both at 70ppb. Advocates also want the court to vacate “grandfathering” provisions that exclude complete or near-complete permit applications from having to demonstrate compliance with the new standard.
“In light of EPA’s repeated delays in updating the ozone standards and the significant public health and welfare impacts at stake, the Court should also set a deadline for EPA to complete remand proceedings,” says the filing by the Appalachian Mountain Club, National Parks Conservation Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Sierra Club and West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc.
Their brief details significant concerns with primary health-based NAAQS, saying it is “underprotective” of human health and therefore falls short of the Clean Air Act mandate that the criteria pollutant standard protect human health with an adequate margin of safety. “Because EPA set the health standard with a form and level that combine to allow ozone pollution levels that EPA acknowledges cause adverse effects in healthy young adults, the standard unlawfully and arbitrarily fails to protect the health of both these and more sensitive populations, like asthmatic children, from acknowledged adverse effects,” they say.
The groups argue that EPA's own data showed that 8-hour exposures to 0.072 parts per million (ppm) ozone -- alternatively expressed at 72 ppb -- could cause adverse effects, yet the agency's “form” for measuring the standard could allow “multiple days every year with ozone concentrations at or above that 0.072 ppm level.”
They say EPA violated the air law by not addressing CASAC's findings that ozone can cause harm to some sensitive populations at levels down to 0.0070 ppm, or 70 ppb, yet the form could allow exposures above that level.
Advocates also fault EPA's decision not to set a distinct secondary ozone standard designed to protect the environment, faulting the agency's defense that the primary standard would also provide adequate welfare protection. Environmentalists have long sought a stand-alone secondary ozone NAAQS.
“EPA also violated the Act by failing to 'specify a level' of air quality requisite to protect against widespread ozone damage to leaves, despite specific recommendations” from CASAC and the U.S. National Park Service for such a level, the groups argue.
Grandfathering Provisions
The advocacy groups attack the agency for the grandfathering provisions in the rule that exclude some air permit applicants from showing their projects will not violate the 2015 NAAQS, which the groups say has “unlawfully waived permitting requirements designed to prevent violations of the new standards.”
In the final NAAQS rule, EPA says that two types of Clean Air Act prevention of significant deterioration permits will be eligible for grandfathering: “(1) applications for which the reviewing authority has formally determined that the application is complete on or before the signature date of the revised [ozone] NAAQS, or (2) applications for which the reviewing authority has first published a notice of a draft permit or preliminary determination before the effective date of the revised [ozone] NAAQS.”
In its response to comments in the rule, EPA rejected calls from industry groups who said in their comments that the agency should expand the range of situations that would qualify projects for grandfathered permits.
The agency further rebuffed environmental groups who had objected to any grandfathering provision and alleged that EPA lacks the legal authority to issue such regulatory waivers. EPA defended its legal right to grandfather some permits, but also rejected various ideas intended to increase the number of permits grandfathered.
But the advocates in their opening brief fault the grandfathering provisions, saying, “EPA’s grandfathering exemption flouts the plain text of the Act. Contrary to EPA’s claim, there is no ambiguity to the Act’s mandate that construction of any new or modified major source in certain areas can proceed only with a showing that the source will not cause or contribute to violations of ozone standards.”
Oral argument in the case has not yet been scheduled.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/industry-coalition-advocates-wage-competing-attacks-ozone-naaqs
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EPA to Complete Particulate Matter Review in 2021
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Andrew Childers
Environmental advocates are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to speed up its required review of the federal air quality standards for particulate matter, which is currently slated to run through 2021.
The EPA detailed the schedule for its periodic review of the national ambient air quality standards for particulate matter in a draft review plan currently out for public comment.
“They put out these timelines that confirm the obvious: that based on the meetings and work that occurred, that they're once again not on the schedule to meet the five-year statutory deadline,” John Walke, director of clean air programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Bloomberg BNA.
The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to review its various air quality standards every five years and, if necessary, make adjustments. The EPA last updated the air quality standards for fine particular matter in January 2013 (RIN 2060–AO47), setting the annual standard at 12 micrograms per cubic meter.
The plan offered by the EPA would see the agency take eight years to complete the required review, which officially began with a request for information in December 2014.
Though environmental groups would like to see the EPA's review accelerated, they have few options beyond suing the agency once it has officially missed that five year statutory window, Walke said.
EPA's Particulate Matter Review Plan
• December 2014: Call for information.
• May 2016: The Clean Air Science Advisory Committee evaluates the draft review plan.
• September 2016: Final review plan released.
• Spring 2017: First draft integrated science assessment.
• Spring/Summer 2017: Risk and exposure assessment planning documents released.
• Summer 2017: CASAC reviews the first draft science assessment.
• Winter 2018: Second draft integrated science assessment.
• Winter/Spring 2018: First draft risk and exposure assessment released.
• Spring 2018: CASAC reviews the second draft science assessment and first risk and exposure assessment.
• Fall 2018: Second draft risk and exposure assessment released.
• Fall 2018: First draft policy assessment released.
• Fall/Winter 2018: CASAC reviews second risk and exposure assessment and first draft policy assessment.
• Winter 2019: Final risk and exposure assessment released.
• Spring 2019: Final integrated science assessment.
• Fall 2019: Second draft policy assessment released.
• Fall/Winter 2019: CASAC reviews second draft policy assessment.
• Winter 2020: Final policy assessment.
• 2020: Proposed rule.
• 2021: Final rule.Bill Would Exacerbate Delays Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) has introduced a bill (H.R. 4775) that would, in part, extend the time for the EPA to conduct the air quality standards reviews from the current five years to 10 years (53 DEN A-4, 3/18/16).
While Walke said budget cuts have impaired the EPA's ability to conduct the reviews in the time frames required by the Clean Air Act, extending the review period isn't a solution. Instead, the delays would only drag out longer, he said.
“They understand very well the updates or revisions would occur over a 10 to 15 year period,” he said.
The EPA will accept comments on its review plan until June 23. Comment can be made at http://www.regulations.gov to Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OAR–2015–0072.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=87959261&vname=dennotallissues&fn=87959261&jd=87959261
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Energy, Water Bill Draws Conservative Opposition
Apr 25, 2016 | BNA Daily
By Ari Natter
Fresh off playing a role in getting a package of renewable energy tax credits jettisoned from aviation legislation, the Heritage Foundation has a new target in its sights: the $37.5 billion energy and water spending act currently being considered on the Senate floor.
The lobbying arm of the policy research organization, known for its conservative stances, cited the lack of policy riders and costly price tag in announcing opposition to the bill (H.R. 2028) and putting lawmakers on notice that those who vote for it will be marked on the group's scorecard rating their conservative record.
“As drafted, the Senate's FY17 Energy & Water appropriations measure spends too much money, funds too many bad programs, and excludes too many conservatives priorities to merit support,” Heritage Action said in an April 21 statement.
The Washington-based group said it takes issue with remarks made by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, discouraging policy riders to the bill during the committee markup process.
While the bill, which would appropriate $30.7 billion for the Department of Energy, does include a rider sought by mining companies that prohibits any changes to the definition of “fill material” and “discharge of fill material” under the Clean Water Act, the measure is largely free of policy provisions, especially when compared to its House counterpart which includes language blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water Rule (RIN 2040-AF30) and allowing firearms on Army Corps of Engineers property, among other provisions (71 DEN A-11, 4/13/16).
Conservatives' ‘Best Chance.'
“Republican leaders have long suggested that moving each of the 12 appropriations bills would give conservatives their best chance at enacting conservative policies through riders,” Heritage said in its statement.
Other complaints the conservative group has with the appropriations bill include a lack of funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository that was included in its House counterpart and the bill's total $37.5 billion cost, an increase of $355 million over last year's funding levels.
The group said the bill's spending could be cut by $2 billion and suggested reducing funding for the Energy Department's office of nuclear energy by $340 million and eliminating the DOE's Office of Fossil Energy among other cuts.
Heritage Action's statement comes after opposition from it and other conservative groups was largely credited for a decision by Senate leaders to drop a plan to add over $1 billion in tax credits for fuel cells and renewable energy sources like geothermal and biomass to Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization legislation (H.R. 636) (71 DEN A-10, 4/13/16).
Despite the group's opposition, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the Senate's No. 2 Republican, has predicted the bill will pass early the week of April 25.
The legislation also includes $6 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers, and $1.2 billion for the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation, and includes language that would authorize interim nuclear storage sites.
Still Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, said the vote is likely all for naught.
“Generally there is a sense that the appropriations process is all for show and that we're going to end up with a [continuing resolution] in September, and the length of that [continuing resolution] will be subject of much debate, with conservatives hoping for longer,” he said in an e-mail to Bloomberg BNA.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=87959248&vname=dennotallissues&fn=87959248&jd=87959248
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