Preview Newsletter
PM ACC 6/1/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Report Finds New Potential for Mixed Waste Processing
Jun 1, 2016 | Waste Dive
By Cole Rosengren
A new report from Gershman Brickner & Bratton, Inc. (GBB), prepared for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has found promising potential in mixed waste processing facilities (MWPF). -
Canada, U.S. Warn of Eight Chemicals in Great Lakes
May 31, 2016 | Environmental News Service
After a comprehensive scientific review process and public consultations, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy announced the chemicals of greatest concern: -
EPA Advances Alternative Tox Testing but Lacks International Equivalence
Jun 1, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's latest efforts to replace acute animal toxicology tests with alternative toxicity methods when registering and re-registering pesticides for use in the United States is gaining general approval from industry and other stakeholders though sources say the agency... -
Echa Gives Values to Chemical Health Impacts
Jun 1, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The final results of a study by Echa into the willingness to pay to avoid certain health impacts have been released. -
The Crisis in Flint Isn't Over. It's Everywhere.
Jun 1, 2016 | Wired
By Ben Paynter
At his home near Kearsley Park, on the east side of Flint, Michigan, Tony Palladeno Jr. grabs his keys and a pair of 1-liter medical-grade plastic bottles—one full and one empty. -
Clinton Aims to Boost Clean Energy on Federal Land
Jun 1, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Hillary Clinton is pledging a massive increase in renewable energy production on federal land and water. -
Trump Makes Sense on Energy
May 31, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Political markets are weird: They cry out for something and yet politicians, with their enslavement to conventional wisdom and careerist caution, are unwilling to supply it. -
Sanders to Blast Obama Admin Fracking Decision in Calif.
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Jeremy P. Jacobs
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders today will criticize a federal decision last week that could open the door to hydraulic fracturing off California's coast. -
Nuclear Plants, Despite Safety Concerns, Gain Support as Clean Energy Sources
May 31, 2016 | New York Times
By Diane Caldwell
Just a few years ago, the United States seemed poised to say farewell tonuclear energy. No company had completed a new plant in decades, and the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 intensified public disenchantment with the technology, both here and abroad. -
Overseers Fret About Vulnerable U.S. Power Network
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Northey
A grid overseer expressed concern today about how the United States would recover from a rare but plausible physical attack on its electricity network. -
Nuclear Regulator Denies 'One Size Fits All' Cyber Proposal
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Energywire
By Blake Sobczak
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected an erstwhile plan to make power plants install supposedly "hacker-blocking" technology. -
Mandatory Methane Leak Checks Proposed for Oil and Gas Sites
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Anne C. Mulkern
Nearly all oil and gas facilities in California would need to test for and control methane leaks under a proposed rule released yesterday, the first regulation of its kind in the Golden State. -
A Pipeline Safety Agency That Won't Do Its Job
Jun 1, 2016 | Bloomberg View (In The Chicago Tribune)
By Editorial Board
Last year in the U.S., pipelines carrying natural gas, oil or other hazardous materials leaked or ruptured 322 times, an average of almost once a day. Forty-nine people were injured; nine died. The damage amounted to more than $320 million. -
EPA Urges 11th Circuit To End States' Bid for Dual CWA Rule Appellate Suits
Jun 1, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Bridget DiCosmo
EPA is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to dismiss several states' suit over the agency's Clean Water Act (CWA) jurisdiction rule, arguing that the 6th Circuit's decision to hear consolidated challenges to the rule means other circuits lack jurisdiction... -
Supreme Court Ruling Offers Clues on Fate of Obama Rule
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Tiffany Stecker
Enforcement of the Clean Water Act could undergo a wave of changes in the wake of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on a key wetlands case, legal scholars say. The opinion is also offering clues to the possible fate of the administration's new water rule. -
Trump is Wrong on the Paris Climate Agreement. I Know Because I Negotiated It.
May 31, 2016 | Washington Post
By Todd Stern
Donald Trump vows that once in office, he’s “going to cancel the Paris climate agreement,” which, he asserts, “gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America.” -
Among Climate Scientists, A Fraught Debate on the Path Forward
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Umair Irfan
In a rented 15-passenger van barreling south on Interstate 55 out of Chicago in April, a group of environmental activists, a legendary scientist and a camera crew embarked on a quixotic rescue effort. -
Scientists Just Discovered Dozens of New Sources of Air Pollution
May 31, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chelsea Harvey
Scientists may have significantly underestimated a dangerous source of pollution in the atmosphere, new research suggests. A satellite study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, has revealed nearly 40 previously unreported major sources of sulfur dioxide...
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Report Finds New Potential for Mixed Waste Processing
Jun 1, 2016 | Waste Dive
By Cole Rosengren
Dive Brief:
· A new report from Gershman Brickner & Bratton, Inc. (GBB), prepared for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has found promising potential in mixed waste processing facilities (MWPF).
· GBB reviewed 10 types of equipment — from flip-flow screens to bag openers — currently in use by a variety of companies. Much of the equipment is also used in traditional material recovery facilities for recyclables.
· The report concludes that while the MWPF field still has room to grow in terms of economic performance, "potential for increased diversion has been enlarged."Dive Insight:
While mixed waste processing has been discussed for years, it has yet to fully take off as a popular option. Many cities are willing to adopt single-stream recycling, but due to either cost or environmental factors, they're not willing to stop sorting entirely.
A mixed waste facility in Montgomery, AL was closed last year and the city has since announced it may be converted into a single-stream recycling center. Other projects, such as one planned for Indianapolis, have also run into issues. Earlier this year, a survey of North American paper buyers found that they often reject material from mixed-waste streams.
Yet Republic Services recently opened a major new MWPF in Anaheim, CA. The site can reportedly process 100 tons per hour and 1,000 tons per day. As evidenced in the GBB report, the technology is also being used elsewhere. With the right investment and systems in place it may well have a strong future after all.
http://www.wastedive.com/news/acc-report-finds-new-potential-for-mixed-waste-processing/420087/
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Canada, U.S. Warn of Eight Chemicals in Great Lakes
May 31, 2016 | Environmental News Service
After a comprehensive scientific review process and public consultations, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy announced the chemicals of greatest concern:
§ Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) – functions as a flame retardant in polystyrene foam, which is used as insulation material in the building industry.
§ Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) – used as flame retardants in a wide variety of consumer products such as furniture household appliances and electronics.
§ Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) – used in the manufacture of nonstick cookware
§ Long-Chain Perfluorocarboxylic Acids (LC-PFCAs) – both PFOA and long-chain PFCAs are industrial chemicals. PFOA and PFCA and their salts accumulate and biomagnify in terrestrial and marine mammals.
§ Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) – used in industrial manufacturing of paper, plastics and textiles, in electroplating and in commercial firefighting foam, and in consumer products such as carpets.
§ Mercury – a naturally occurring element found in the earth’s crust that is released from the burning of fossil fuels. It is also found in consumer products including batteries and light bulbs.
§ Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) – used in the manufacturing of electrical equipment and in heat transfer and hydraulic systems, as well as other specialized applications, until the late 1970’s.
§ Short Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (SCCPs) – used in rubber manufacturing, the formulation of metalworking fluids, and as plasticizers and flame retardants in plastics and products such as paints and sealants).
“A safe and secure water supply is critical for human health, the environment and the economy. Our joint designation of these chemicals of mutual concern under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is yet another example of Canada’s commitment to keep our Great Lakes great through collaboration and sound science,” said McKenna.
McCarthy said, “Designating these chemicals of mutual concern puts us on the road to reducing them to protect the public health and water quality of the Great Lakes region.”
Once a chemical has been designated, the two countries develop and implement strategies to address the chemical, reporting every three years on its status to each other and to the public.
“Together with Canada and the region’s partners,” McCarthy said, “we’re making the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement work hard for the tens of millions of people who live, work and play around these magnificent water bodies.”
http://ens-newswire.com/2016/05/31/canada-u-s-warn-of-eight-chemicals-in-great-lakes/
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EPA Advances Alternative Tox Testing but Lacks International Equivalence
Jun 1, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's latest efforts to replace acute animal toxicology tests with alternative toxicity methods when registering and re-registering pesticides for use in the United States is gaining general approval from industry and other stakeholders though sources say the agency could progress more quickly if it adopted an international chemical classification system.
During a recent invitation-only stakeholders' meeting, Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) staff provided updates on their ongoing efforts to approve alternative testing methods. The meeting followed a March letter from OPP Director Jack Housenger and a similar meeting last fall, where OPP leaders outlined their goal of eliminating a half-dozen acute effect tests long required to register pesticide chemicals for use.
Among the advances discussed during the May 19 meeting is a pilot program wherein EPA will accept acute toxicity data for formulated products, along with additive calculations of toxicity data based on the formulations' components for comparison, sources say. This additivity approach is included in the international classification system, called the globally harmonized system (GHS), as well as a 2015 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) guidance document on Waiving or Bridging Mammalian Acute Toxicity.
This marks a change from EPA's current approach, which requires both individual chemicals as well as formulations to be tested, one source who attended the meeting explains. The GHS additivity calculations "are used in many parts of the world, but EPA has not accepted it til now," the source says.
The source adds that EPA is "taking a very cautious approach" with the pilot, asking stakeholders to provide all of the data to allow OPP experts to compare formulation testing with the additivity approach. In conjunction, the source adds, the National Toxicology Program's Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) and its contracting lab ILS Inc. is collecting published literature to perform similar analyses. They are also working to get clearance from EPA to access its data to expand the NICEATM review, the source says.
A source with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) says the pilot to compare current toxicology data with the GHS calculations is "certainly a step in the right direction" because the bulk of pesticide products being used are formulations of existing chemical. "There's not a lot of new active ingredients these days," the PETA source says.
But sources say EPA could move more efficiently toward alternative toxicology methods if it adopted the GHS chemical hazard classification system used in many other countries.
Alternative Methods
Currently, EPA cannot easily use alternative methods validated in countries that use GHS because the agency's classification system uses four tiers compared to GHS' three tiers, and many of the alternative toxicity tests are constructed around the three-tier GHS system, the first source explains.
The differences between the two systems require EPA to essentially re-validate the tests, which requires additional data from companies, the sources say. "And it'll be this way over and over again until EPA gets with the program," the first source says."If [EPA] adopted GHS, they could adopt all this data tomorrow."
An industry source agrees with the concerns, noting that EPA's not using the GHS system is "one of the key obstacles" to EPA's use of an alternative skin irritation assays. EPA has an ongoing pilot gathering data from chemical companies to gather the necessary data for the validation.
"We're starting to turn the corner . . . to make things work like they do with GHS in Europe," the industry source says of the irritation test project. "The [alternate] assays aren't robust enough for four categories" of classification, like EPA uses. Trying to tweak the assays to meet EPA's four-tier system is challenging, requiring "extended testing, changing the test parameters . . . it gets hard," the source says, adding that stakeholders faced similar challenges when assisting EPA with its pilot to replace animal eye testing.
The first source also notes EPA's challenges in replacing a rabbit test for eye irritation with one that was based on the GHS system. Part of the method of validation is looking for "a certain level of skin disruption after a certain amount of time [which] gives you the GHS classification, but EPA interprets the rabbit information differently," the source says.
"If EPA could just bite the bullet and go with GHS, it'd be a huge breakthrough," the industry source says. But the source acknowledges that any EPA adoption of GHS would have to be prospective, leaving the agency to juggle information set to two different classification systems. The source thinks that Housenger is "worried about what are the lawyers going to say" about that, referring to EPA's Office of General Counsel.
Asked to comment, an EPA spokeswoman referred to Housenger's March letter to stakeholders, which says that use of GHS "could be a potential step toward greater international harmonization and accelerating the progress" to use of alternate methods. The letter does not address challenges to EPA's adoption of GHS.
'Short-Term Bridge'
The industry source says that one approach discussed at the latest stakeholder meeting is "could you use, for companies that might want to, with data they've run for GHS categories in Europe . . . can we live with labeling with the other system?"
"I was a little disappointed with the progress on that," the industry source says. "It's like a short-term bridge to getting stuff done and reducing testing."
Other sources agree, with one saying, "Harmonization comes up over and over again. [At the latest stakeholder meeting, EPA speakers were] talking about exploring the option, but they said it would be a very long process. It was not encouraging . . . What matters to us is that they adopt these alternative approaches. Seems to us it would be easier to use the GHS system."
All of the sources say they are pleased that OPP has placed a new emphasis on moving to alternative testing methods since Housenger's arrival last fall, and OPP staff is making steady progress through the pilots and working with NICEATM.
OPP staff also indicated that they are continuing to make progress on other, related efforts such as a pilot collecting data to compare how alternate eye irritation assays that EPA has approved for use on antimicrobial chemicals fare on other types of chemicals. "They're really moving on that," the PETA source says, noting that information on 242 formulations has been gathered into a database. "They're interested in getting data on non-pesticide [chemicals] too."
Agency scientists continue to prepare for an international conference of regulators in Italy next October, where the attendees hope to craft a decision tree to guide how and when alternate tests for skin sensitization should be submitted to EPA and other regulators. OPP Senior Science Advisor Anna Lowit urged companies during remarks at the pesticide industry's annual spring conference in April to contribute data to advance EPA's pilot to project to prepare for this conference.
"They've developed the template to bring [data] in," the PETA source says. "They're really interested in data on known sensitizers and known non-sensitizers [to provide] baselines."
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-advances-alternative-tox-testing-lacks-international-equivalence
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Echa Gives Values to Chemical Health Impacts
Jun 1, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The final results of a study by Echa into the willingness to pay to avoid certain health impacts have been released.
The agency commissioned a service contract to examine the economic benefits of avoiding selected adverse health outcomes, due to exposure to chemicals. Three surveys were conducted in Italy, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic and the Netherlands with the aim of obtaining representative EU-wide estimates.
Values were derived for about 20 health outcomes, including acute and chronic dermatitis, cancer risks, birth defects and respiratory sensitisation, within both private as well as public good contexts.
The "willingness to pay" estimates can be used to facilitate the preparation of a socio-economic analysis in restriction proposals and applications for authorisation, Echa says.
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https://chemicalwatch.com/47730/echa-gives-values-to-chemical-health-impacts
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The Crisis in Flint Isn't Over. It's Everywhere.
Jun 1, 2016 | Wired
By Ben Paynter
At his home near Kearsley Park, on the east side of Flint, Michigan, Tony Palladeno Jr. grabs his keys and a pair of 1-liter medical-grade plastic bottles—one full and one empty. He filled the first yesterday, with slightly cloudy water from his own tap. To fill the second, he strolls a few doors down to a two-story home he once rented out. The place looks move-in-ready, with new windows, fresh trim, and crisp beige siding. But it’s vacant, just like three other rentals Palladeno owns on this block.
Some of his tenants moved out in the winter of 2015, after much of the city’s municipal water turned murky, reeking like swamp muck. Others stuck it out a little longer, even when the city issued boil advisories (E. coli in the water) and a notice about high levels of trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic byproduct of disinfectants.
That autumn, 21 percent of the tap water sampled from the dilapidated, bohemian neighborhood around Kearsley Park was positive for lead contamination. In fact, every residential zip code in Flint has houses that have tested hot.
In January, Genesee County health officials reported another waterborne threat—87 cases of Legionnaires’ disease in two years, with 10 deaths. It’s one of the largest outbreaks in US history. The entire city was vulnerable to either heavy metal or bacterial poisoning.
Palladeno’s bottles are part of a sampling effort run by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to map the chaos. Entering his rental, Palladeno ignores the chirp from a dying smoke alarm and heads to the kitchen sink to fill his bottle. “Bada bing,” he says, although it comes off flatly. Palladeno is supposed to drop his sample at city hall, but he has a more pressing concern. He’s not thirsty now, but he will be. So he steers his late-model Buick downtown, following signs tacked to wooden pallets leaning against trees and street posts. The messages—WATER PICKUP, with big blue arrows—lead to a fire station parking lot, where National Guardsmen in fatigues and orange vests watch over 6-foot-tall towers of bottled water.
You used to have to show ID—one case per person. After an uproar, that changed to two, no license required. Sometimes Palladeno and his wife come together and take four, stockpiling. Today one of the Guardsmen recognizes Palladeno and starts loading his trunk. “I tell you what I’m afraid of,” Palladeno says. “Once summer hits and the heat comes, we’re going to be fighting for this water.”
At city hall, he joins a procession of dazed-looking people dropping off water samples. It doesn’t feel like science in action. In fact, it’s a mess: Somehow many volunteers got the wrong kind of bottle, so their samples get set off to the side. Others have lost paperwork, so they’ve guessed at a few methodological particulars.
Palladeno was already skeptical. Like most Flint residents, he has come to distrust people from any level of government. He figures if anyone is going to save Flint, it’ll be people like him, who grew up there.
He has found someone to believe in, though—the person who was first to help, first to try to figure out what was going on in Flint, a folk hero scientist on the front lines of the battle against apocalypse. This is a town where uniformed guards deliver water to designated resupply drops and health care workers draw blood at overrun churches and elementary schools. Who can say whether the government guys are doing anything right? “When Marc Edwards comes in,” Palladeno says, “I can see if they are up to par.”
IN EARLY 2003 an Environmental Protection Agency subcontractor called Cadmus Group was looking into a singular problem: Homes all over Washington, DC, were springing pinhole leaks in their water pipes. So Cadmus hired a young environmental engineer at Virginia Tech named Marc Edwards as a consultant.
The leaks seemed confined to residential copper. PVC pipes and municipal lines weren’t leaking. That made Edwards think that the problem was in the city water supply. In the US, municipal drinking water is protected by the Safe Drinking Water Act, which compels utilities to monitor things like microorganisms and the disinfectants used to subdue them. In 1998 the EPA tightened its standards on disinfectants, many of which can have their own toxic byproducts. One of the worst offenders is a classic: chlorine. Its main replacement, a chemical called chloramine (really just a mix of chlorine and ammonia), has lower levels of carcinogenic breakdown products, but it also makes the water corrosive—enough to eat through metal.
It turned out that the District of Columbia’s Water and Sewer Authority had in fact swapped chlorine for chloramine in 2000. But when Edwards went into homes to check the damage, he discovered something even scarier than leaks. The corrosive water was burning through service lines and solders—and those contained lead. The water was even pitting the lead-infused brass in water meters and faucets. At one stop on the first floor of an old apartment building, Edwards ran a sample of water through a portable colorimeter. He got an error message. After diluting the sample with distilled water, it still registered a lead reading of 1,250 parts per billion. The EPA’s threshold for lead is 15 ppb.
Lead is insidiously useful. It’s hard but malleable, is relatively common, melts at a low enough temperature to be workable, and doesn’t rust. The Romans used it for plumbing—in fact, that word derives from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. Even the Romans noticed, as early as 312 BC, that lead exposure seemed to cause strange behaviors in people. But as Werner Troesken, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh, explains in his book The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, lead pipes solved a lot more problems than they caused. The hydrologists of the 19th century knew that lakes and wells could harbor cholera; they needed large, clean bodies of water that they could pump into the city. Lead made those pipes possible.
In fact, lead was the key to a lot of technologies. It made bullets heavy, paint opaque, and gasoline more potent. It’s also toxic. To a human body, lead looks like calcium; we slurp it out of our environment and absorb it into our bones and cells, especially neurons. By 1970 it had become clear to scientists that unlike calcium, lead causes irrevocable damage to those neurons, disrupting intellect and development.
But the pipes were already in the ground. So in 1991 the EPA instituted the Lead and Copper Rule, requiring utilities to check water regularly. The critical level has changed over the years as new science has come to light, but today officials are required to take action if lead exceeds 15 ppb in more than 10 percent of residents’ taps. The metric is utilitarian, scaled to spot trouble just before it turns into disaster. It’s a good rule, as long as utilities follow it.
After houses in DC started showing up hot, Edwards checked into the city’s lead and copper protocols. The city was sampling at really wide time intervals, sending most of what was sitting inside the service line down the drain. Edwards had the agency retest on nonflushed lines and close the time gap.
Nearly every new sample showed lead well above the redline. Edwards implored the agency to test the whole city. Cadmus didn’t renew his contract.
On January 31, 2004, The Washington Post exposed the subsequent cover-up. According to a later congressional report, tens of thousands of homes—two-thirds of those tested—had tap water that registered above the legal action limit. Some samples tripped 5,000 ppb, the technical definition of hazardous waste. Worse still, the EPA was giving out bad health advice, telling people to flush their water lines in a way that actually increased exposure.
Edwards, meanwhile, had become so obsessed with the problem that he’d forgotten to maintain the well water for his own house, which had plunged to a dangerously low pH. “I wasn’t taking care of myself or my family or my job,” he says. “I had this moment of total panic where maybe I’d just poisoned my family with lead.” He couldn’t take it. One night Edwards thought he was having a heart attack; he’d developed an arrhythmia.
This kind of obsession wasn’t new to Edwards. Impossibly fragile systems have always attracted him. In the 1970s, his father was principal of the only K-12 school in the rural town of Ripley, in western New York. The town’s main business, grape farming, was shriveling. Recognizing the inevitable, the elder Edwards proposed that the school consolidate with a cross-county rival. In response, the family’s house was splattered with tomatoes, and Marc got beaten up on the way to class. “My dad was kind of a moral exemplar to me,” Edwards says. “The writing was on the wall that something had to be done. Our family paid a big price.”
Young Marc found peace on the shores of nearby Lake Erie, which after decades of industrial and wastewater pollution was beginning to recover. He started keeping aquariums, carefully tuning their artificial ecosystems. For a while Edwards—tall, lean, intense, like an elongated George Clooney—thought he might become a marine biologist. But hearing about Love Canal, where 22,000 tons of toxic chemicals had been discovered oozing beneath school land in upstate New York, near where he’d grown up, pointed him in a more political direction. After earning a degree in biophysics, he started a PhD in environmental engineering at the University of Washington, focusing on water quality control. “One of the things that I found appealing when I went into it was that I would not have to deal with ethical dilemmas,” he says dryly.
Back when Edwards was a kid messing around with aquariums, he spent years tinkering with the symbiosis between a clown fish and a sea anemone. If the fish coats itself in the plant’s slime, it can nest within the poisonous, tentacle-like nematocysts. In the open sea, they depend on each other for either nutrients or protection. It’s a delicate balance—and in the closed, artificial ecosystem of an aquarium, futile. “I realized if I got really good I was just killing them slower and slower. I had to give it up,” Edwards says.
Thirty years later in Washington, he was trying to fix a system just as fragile but with far higher stakes. From his office at Virginia Tech, he fired off Freedom of Information Act requests to the state and the Feds. It took five years, but eventually Edwards pieced together the data that proved massive lead exposure. The congressional investigation found that the municipal authority in DC had disregarded test results for years. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children had been affected.
In response, the city eventually replaced thousands of lead service lines with pipes made of copper—but it didn’t touch the pipes under people’s homes. Edwards knew that would cause another problem. Water carries a small electric charge, and the places where two metals meet are highly conductive. Without a simple patch that every plumber knows how to use, those spots undergo galvanic corrosion. And of course DC didn’t install the patches. Edwards’ multiyear tests indicate that over time those points of corrosion will release more lead—exposing people all over again. Meanwhile, a CDC report estimates that 15,000 homes in the district are still contaminated.
The DC fight radicalized Edwards. According to the EPA, at least 7.3 million lead service lines lie beneath the surface of most major cities. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s entire substructure a D-plus rating. Any day in any place there could be another problem. “You don’t witness something like that and come out whole,” Edwards says. “You can crawl into a hole and get depressed, or you can fight.” Edwards decided to fight. To do it, he knew he’d have to spot budding disasters fast—to stop the next public health failure before it escalated.
He realized he needed to watch for what he calls “lightning strikes”—strange, small-scale epidemics. Then he could replicate in his lab whatever was causing the problematic water conditions and gin up a solution. Edwards turned his engineering students into a team of forensic investigators on watch for problems. And they started finding some. Soon Edwards was writing new coagulant-and-disinfectant-based prescriptions to help engineers fix their own mini-cataclysms in Hawaii, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
But he never forgot the lesson of DC. Taped to the door of Edwards’ office at Virginia Tech is a slip of paper that reads: “This, thought Winston, was the most frightening aspect of the party regime—that it could obliterate memory, turn lies into Truth and alter the Past …”
It’s from George Orwell’s 1984, a reminder of the doublethink Edwards encountered in DC. He still considers his work there a total failure. “These agencies, over every objection I made, went ahead and poisoned kids,” Edwards says. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.
http://www.wired.com/2016/06/flint-water-marc-edwards/
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Clinton Aims to Boost Clean Energy on Federal Land
Jun 1, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Hillary Clinton is pledging a massive increase in renewable energy production on federal land and water.
The tenfold boost in electricity production from sources like wind, solar and geothermal is one of the top features of a conservation and public land agenda the Democratic presidential candidate rolled out Wednesday.
“Now, as we work to combat climate change and build America into the world's clean energy superpower, our public lands can once again play a key role in unlocking the resources we need,” Clinton wrote Wednesday in the San Jose Mercury News, ahead of California’s primary next week.
“While protecting sensitive areas where development poses too great a risk, we can accelerate our transition to a clean energy economy by increasing renewable energy generation on public lands and offshore waters tenfold within a decade,” she said.
While oil, natural gas and coal dominate energy production on federal land and offshore, President Obama has prioritized renewable energy development on public land, seeing it as prime space for wind farms, solar arrays and the like.
The Interior Department has approved dozens of renewable projects during the Obama administration. Its other initiatives have included identifying places on federally owned land that would be ideal for wind and solar, and offered expedited permitting for companies wishing to develop those projects.
As president, Clinton would also set a goal to double the outdoor recreation sector within 10 years, which she said would create millions of new jobs and put up to $700 billion into the economy.
She also wants to better protect federal land from climate change and establish a trust fund for national parks, among other promises.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/281857-clinton-aims-to-boost-clean-energy-on-federal-land
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May 31, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Political markets are weird: They cry out for something and yet politicians, with their enslavement to conventional wisdom and careerist caution, are unwilling to supply it.
Then along comes Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump, in his set-piece energy speech on Thursday, did something that might outlast his presidential hopes. In his anti-intellectual way, he made an intellectual contribution. For decades, poorly justified scientific fears of future warming have hovered as an incubus over U.S. energy development. These fears, you’ll notice, have not actually blocked much of anything: Fracking happened. The U.S. continues to export coal to China. But these fears fill America’s leadership class with guilt and cognitive dissonance.
Give Mr. Trump credit for trying to break the spell.
In a speech the media has done its best to ignore or debunk, he said, “From an environmental standpoint, my priorities are very simple: clean air and clean water.” With these words, he relegated back to the land of abstraction the abstraction known as climate change.
His was a model political speech, one thatHillary Clinton might learn from. It set an agenda, with a minimum of windy rationalization, that voters can assess. Mr. Trump, as all politicians do, offered a prayer to the false deity of energy independence but he also offered a perfectly serviceable vision of Americans freely competing in global energy markets based on our own natural and (note) renewable resources and technology.
Mr. Trump hit the climate moment squarely.
By now, it should be obvious that a succession of “fraudulent” (to borrow a word used by out-of-school climate activist James Hansen) agreements like Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris are not paving the way for a non-fraudulent agreement to impose costly climate actions the public would never support.
The climate policy that actually gets enacted by now has a track record: It consists of ludicrous gestures and policies of cost-without-benefit like Tesla subsidies, whose driving force is the desire of influential pre-Trumpian elites for handouts.
As for the $100 billion spent on climate research, it has yielded one certainty: A human impact is hard to disentangle from a welter of natural variables.
What’s more, science can’t deny its nature forever. New information, based on actually measuring and understanding things like temperatures, emissions and cloud formation, is increasingly rewriting our hazy understanding of atmospheric processes. This data suggests our computer models have overstated the warming risk.
Also ripe to be revisited are the “business as usual” scenarios presumed by the climate alarmists, in which patterns of energy production and consumption don’t change in the absence of heroic government central planning efforts.
The emergence of fracking, which has played the major role in upending the U.S. coal industry, was not the product of climate policy.
The rise of the lithium-ion battery and explosion of battery-powered devices in our lives, of which even Tesla is but a flamboyant and overrated derivative, was not the product of climate policy.
Climate movement types, meanwhile, have increasingly turned to vilifying nonbelievers as a substitute for dealing sensibly with a possible human impact on climate. A minority movement is on its way to becoming a cult, increasingly anti-science. Know them by their talk of “saving” the planet: Even under the worst scenarios, global warming does not endanger the planet. It poses an inconvenience to human communities that have become accustomed to stacking their wealth at the water’s edge.
Perhaps it took Donald Trump fully to exploit the fish-in-a-barrel vulnerability of Democrats on climate. Democrats love citing a pending climate catastrophe but want to live in the land of the real politically, never taking ownership of policies actually commensurate with the alleged crisis. Al Gore, when he was running for president in 2000, wanted Bill Clinton to open the strategic reserve to keep gas prices low.
In his speech, Mr. Trump tweaked Hillary Clinton for promoting U.S fracking technology to China as secretary of state, then proposing to regulate fracking out of existence at home. He tweaked President Obama for seeking to block Canada’s energy exports by killing the Keystone pipeline even while enabling Iran to open its spigots.
Mr. Obama, proving again that he makes a better representative of the countries he visits than the one he comes from, said from Japan on Thursday that foreign leaders are “rattled” by the rise of Donald Trump.
Good grief. What endorsement could carry less weight with the American people? These are the same foreign leaders who’ve been marching America’s major allies into permanent decline, not least with massive renewable-energy subsidies that have produced no benefit for their societies. If anything survives as a monument to the great Trump boom of 2016, let’s hope it’s a turn toward realism on energy and climate.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-makes-sense-on-energy-1464733991?cb=logged0.5256118394615292
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Sanders to Blast Obama Admin Fracking Decision in Calif.
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Jeremy P. Jacobs
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders today will criticize a federal decision last week that could open the door to hydraulic fracturing off California's coast.
The Vermont senator will address the decision at a press conference today in Spreckels, a town about 20 miles east of Monterey. He yesterday added the event to his Golden State tour as he campaigns ahead of California's Democratic primary next week.
Sanders has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas and oil.
Sanders tails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination. Clinton has also called for restricting fracking but has not proposed an outright ban on the popular practice.
On Friday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement concluded an environmental review of oil and gas wells off California's coast and found no significant environmental impact, a decision that came after the agencies froze offshore permitting in the state earlier this year (Greenwire, May 27).
"The comprehensive analysis shows that these practices, conducted according to permit requirements, have minimal impact," BOEM Director Abigail Ross Hopper said in announcing the decision.
The BOEM analysis studied 23 existing oil and gas platforms off California's coast. It was conducted under the terms of a settlement with two environmental groups that sued in 2014 and 2015 challenging the government's permitting policies.
Industry groups welcomed the decision. Environmental groups, however, criticized it and may file another lawsuit.
"The Obama administration is once again putting California's beautiful coast in the oil industry's crosshairs," Miyoko Sakashita, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's oceans program, said in a statement. "Our beaches and wildlife face a renewed threat from fracking chemicals and oil spills. New legal action may be the only way to get federal officials to do their jobs and protect our ocean from offshore fracking."
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038139
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Nuclear Plants, Despite Safety Concerns, Gain Support as Clean Energy Sources
May 31, 2016 | New York Times
By Diane Caldwell
Just a few years ago, the United States seemed poised to say farewell tonuclear energy. No company had completed a new plant in decades, and the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 intensified public disenchantment with the technology, both here and abroad.
But as the Paris agreement on climate change has put pressure on the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some state and federal officials have deemed nuclear energy part of the solution. They are now scrambling to save existing plants that can no longer compete economically in a market flooded with cheap natural gas.
“We’re supposed to be adding zero-carbon sources, not subtracting,” Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, said recently at a symposium that the department convened to explore ways to improve the industry’s prospects.
As a result, there are efforts across the country to bail out nuclear plants at risk of closing, with important test cases in Illinois, Ohio and New York, as well as proposed legislation in Congress.
Exelon, one of the country’s largest nuclear operators, for example, is deciding whether to close two of its struggling plants in Illinois after efforts to push a bailout through its Legislature fell apart.
Nuclear power remains mired in longstanding questions over waste disposal, its safety record after the catastrophes at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl, and the potential for its plants to be converted into weapon-making factories. In spite of the lingering issues, policy makers, analysts and executives, along with a growing number of environmentalists, say that at stake is the future of the country’s largest source of clean energy.
“Nothing else comes close,” Mr. Moniz, a nuclear physicist, said at the symposium.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Moniz added, “Maintaining the nuclear fleet is really important for meeting our near-term and midterm goals.”
Renewable sources like solar and wind have grown in popularity in recent years, but nuclear plants provide nearly 60 percent of carbon-free power, followed by hydroelectric plants at roughly 18 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration. In addition, nuclear plants, which can produce power steadily and on demand, run at more than 90 percent of their capacity, higher than any other type of plant, including gas and coal facilities.
They also have the advantage of keeping fuel on-site, which allowed them to supply electricity during the extreme cold of the polar vortex in 2014, when the use of natural gas for heating led to shortages and when some coal plants shut down because of frozen fuel or equipment.
In recent years, a rise in greenhouse gas emissions has tended to follow nuclear plant closings, since they are most often replaced by natural gas, industry executives say. This was the case in California and New England after the San Onofre and Vermont Yankee plants folded.
But the nuclear industry is facing a crisis of old age. The majority of the country’s 99 nuclear reactors are more than 30 years old and were opened before deregulation. Starting in the late 1970s, under federal rules established to help reduce the price of electricity, independent power producers gained the ability to compete in wholesale electricity markets. When prices were relatively high, nuclear plants were able to fare well because their facilities, once up and running, were inexpensive to operate.
However, the recent slowdown in the demand for electricity and the glut of natural gas from the rise in fracking has driven down wholesale prices. That lower revenue poses special challenges for nuclear plants, which operate potentially for as long as 80 years, and so require costly upgrades and repairs during their life spans.
“At these prices,” said Jay Apt, a professor and a director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University, “they can’t save up enough to have cash on hand for periodic capital investments.”
Supporters of the bailouts say the current prices undervalue nuclear power, given the method’s lack of greenhouse gas emissions and ability to operate at all hours. The low prices make it hard for the plants to compete with other clean technologies like wind and solar, which receive subsidies and are bolstered by mandates that require purchases of clean power. They argue that the environmental and efficiency value of nuclear plants mean they should be eligible for similar subsidies or be included in clean energy mandates.
“We get no recognition for the fact that we emit nothing,” said Marvin S. Fertel, chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.
Support for plans to save nuclear energy has come from a seemingly unlikely group — environmentalists, some who have come to believe that the climate benefits of nuclear energy far outweigh the risks.
Michael Shellenberger, president of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit research and policy organization, said that because nuclear plants produce so much more energy than other forms, they can be more environmentally friendly than even renewables when all the mining, development and land disturbances are taken into account.
“Those of us who have changed our minds on it have changed most often on the climate stuff,” Mr. Shellenberger said, “but from the whole life-cycle analysis, it’s just better.”
Opponents argue that the industry has already had decades of support, which made many of the companies that own the plants profitable, and that further subsidizing nuclear energy would take momentum and investment away from renewables like solar and wind.
“We need to be building the 21st-century energy system and not continuing to subsidize the energy system of the past,” said Abraham Scarr, director of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocate.
Without help, nuclear officials say, there will be far less nuclear power. Two Exelon plants, Quad Cities in Illinois and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, for instance, were unable to submit winning bids in a recent auction to meet future energy needs in the PJM territory, covering 13 Middle Atlantic and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia.
After the auction, Christopher M. Crane, chief executive at Exelon, said that by itself the market “can’t preserve zero-carbon emitting nuclear plants that are facing the lowest wholesale energy prices in 15 years.”
Exelon pressured the Illinois State Legislature to approve a raft of energy measures, including extra subsidies for nuclear as a zero-carbon energy source, by the end of May or risk the shutdown of the two plants. However, the proposals never came up for a vote.
Exelon, which has not yet announced a decision on the plants, is hardly the only company seeking more income for its facilities.
In March, Ohio regulators approved contracts between the utility AEP and the power company FirstEnergy that guaranteed set rates for power from FirstEnergy’s struggling nuclear and coal plants even if other plants in the market charged less.
But federal regulators blocked the arrangement pending a review. FirstEnergy is now pursuing an amended version, which executives hope will go forward with state approval alone. It would allow the company to charge customers for the shortfall between the costs to operate the plants and the market rate it receives over the next eight years; customers would receive credit if the rate rose above the costs.
In New York, officials are taking a different approach. Public hearings were held last month on a proposed clean energy mandate that would include an credit paid to nuclear operators, aimed at helping keep upstate plants like FitzPatrick in Oswego County in operation.
The Exelon proposal in Illinois followed a similar logic but attracted a number of critics — including the state attorney general, Lisa Madigan — who said that customers had paid for the plants twice and should not have to pay again, especially when Exelon’s overall finances may not be so dire.
“The disruption in these communities if Exelon decides to shut down the plants is very significant and has a human consequence,” said Dave Lundy, a Chicago public relations executive who leads a coalition opposed to the proposal. “But I don’t know that they actually have to shut down these plants.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/business/energy-environment/nuclear-plants-despite-safety-concerns-gain-support-as-clean-energy-sources.html?_r=0
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Overseers Fret About Vulnerable U.S. Power Network
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Northey
A grid overseer expressed concern today about how the United States would recover from a rare but plausible physical attack on its electricity network.
Gerry Cauley, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., told energy regulators the government must consider the difficulty of recovering from a devastating attack and what constitutes a "rigorous and robust grid."
"I think we do a good job with intelligence and law enforcement to make sure that we don't have eight or 10 vans going to different sites and blowing things up," Cauley told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "But I worry about that because of the potential long-term impact and the difficulty [of] recovering possibly lasting weeks and months."
Cauley's comments nodded to the 2014 sharpshooter attack on a California power station, which damaged equipment that cools transformers and forced a shutdown (EnergyWire, Feb. 6, 2014).
FERC approved a new physical security standard for the grid in the wake of that attack, which Cauley called a "critical step."
Cauley spoke at an all-day FERC technical conference focused on threats to the sprawling grid, which is slowly being transformed as utilities push for more distributed generation and renewables and surge toward cheap natural gas.
Other conference panelists -- utility representatives, academics and government officials -- echoed Cauley's concerns, pointing to vulnerabilities in the existing power infrastructure and the need for better modeling.
Patricia Hoffman, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, called for a closer look at whether the grid is flexible and can respond to evolving threats from terrorism, severe weather and climate change. She pointed to dual-fuel options, power flow control models and the overall ability to boost redundancy in the system.
David Clark, a member of the Utah Public Service Commission, said he worries about weaknesses in the sprawling U.S. natural gas system. "While an attack might be remote, it's a very challenging prospect to conceive how those assets can be physically protected," said Clark, who also appeared before FERC on behalf of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "That's something that I spent some evening hours pondering."
Marija Ilic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said she wonders about "hidden problems" that may lurk within the complex operating systems that underpin the U.S. electric grid.
Paul Koonce, CEO of Dominion Generation Group who appeared on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, said he's worried that something hidden in the operation of the system might not show itself in traditional computer modeling.
Pointing to possible disturbances in a neighboring system that might affect Dominion's operations, he questioned whether current modeling would predict such challenges.
"One of the things that keeps me up at night is, are the transmission operators around that system looking through a similar lens to make sure something doesn't happen on their system and cascade into me?" he said.
FERC commissioners quizzed panelists about what role the agency should play, the difficulty of paying for new modeling and oversight, and the possibility of mandating data sharing across the grid. They also agreed the commission and grid overseers must stay alert.
"We're all singing from the same hymn book," said FERC Commissioner Colette Honorable.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038141
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Nuclear Regulator Denies 'One Size Fits All' Cyber Proposal
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Energywire
By Blake Sobczak
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected an erstwhile plan to make power plants install supposedly "hacker-blocking" technology.
The agency posted a 12-page rebuttal to Alan Morris' petition for rulemaking yesterday, but the main takeaway was clear: NRC's cybersecurity requirements are just fine, thanks.
"The proposed vulnerability to malware attacks described in the petition is already addressed in the current NRC regulations," the agency said, referring to Morris' claim that programmable logic controllers (PLCs), key pieces of equipment in modern nuclear plants, are at risk of being hijacked by hackers. "The approach recommended in the petition presumes that a 'one size fits all' solution would be adequate for the wide variety of industrial control systems and safety systems used in nuclear power plants."
NRC also pointed out that Morris' "new-design" controllers have not been shown to work in actual control system environments, a claim the Maryland-based engineering consultant doesn't contest.
Morris reached out to NRC in 2013 following news of an unprecedented cyberattack on Iran's nuclear program in the late 2000s. In that attack, industrial controllers at Iran's Natanz enrichment facility were infected with the Stuxnet worm, which destroyed centrifuges by commanding them to spin out of control.
Morris claims to have found a way to prevent PLCs from being overwritten with malicious code, via a "write-once, read-many" hardware design.
Reached for comment, Morris said via email that NRC "fiddled with my petition for 3 years," adding that he "cannot see" how NRC's cybersecurity regulations will protect controllers' "vulnerable (corruptible) memory."
Morris' proposal never gained ground with NRC, given the lack of a current market for his product and his estimated $1 billion price tag for installing it in control systems nationwide. The three federal agencies with the authority to set binding cybersecurity standards -- NRC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department of Homeland Security, for the nuclear, bulk electric power and chemical industries, respectively -- are normally keen to avoid enshrining one particular technology into regulation.
NRC has said previously that it does not keep a "white list" of approved cybersecurity firms, for instance, but rather checks each facility's cyberdefense plan to make sure operators meet baseline requirements.
Still, while Morris isn't the first vendor to try to pry open a market by government fiat, his plan did spur some discussion in security circles at DHS and among some private cybersecurity professionals. It also drew yesterday's defense of current practices from NRC.
"The NRC-approved cyber security plans, which are implemented through the licensee's cyber security programs, significantly reduce the possibility that a PLC installed at a nuclear power plant would be vulnerable to a malware attack that would negatively impact or challenge the plant's safety and control systems," the agency told Morris.
A spokesman for the agency said NRC "always provides an appropriately detailed response regardless of whether a petition is accepted or rejected."
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038115
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Mandatory Methane Leak Checks Proposed for Oil and Gas Sites
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Anne C. Mulkern
Nearly all oil and gas facilities in California would need to test for and control methane leaks under a proposed rule released yesterday, the first regulation of its kind in the Golden State.
The regulation would shrink by more than half emissions of methane, a powerful short-lived climate pollutant, the state's Air Resources Board said. ARB estimated that methane is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide when measured over a 20-year time frame.
Oil and gas facilities, including those that only store natural gas, will need to test quarterly for methane leaks, then will have a choice of methods and technologies for eliminating the pollutant. ARB estimated the proposed rule would cost $22 million annually.
"Short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP), including methane ... are among the most harmful to both human health and global climate," ARB said in a staff report on the proposed rule. "They are powerful climate forcers that remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter period of time than longer lived climate pollutants such as carbon dioxide."
"Reducing emissions of SLCPs will effectively slow the rate of climate change in the near-term; therefore, reducing these emissions can have an immediate beneficial impact on climate change," ARB added.
The rule California proposed surpasses in scope the one U.S. EPA is finalizing, said Tim O'Connor, a senior attorney and director of California oil and gas at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The federal rule will cover only new and modified equipment, while the Golden State one would encompass all but the smallest oil and gas sites with limited chances for methane emissions, he said.
"When you look at holistically ... we see a sort of moving of the state in a new direction on the issue of climate change," O'Connor said. "This rule really addresses the biggest emissions sources in the industry and really sets the groundwork for any other state that wants to follow."
Oil and gas industry trade group the Western States Petroleum Association, reached yesterday evening, said it would need more time to look at the draft rule. ARB released the proposal at 5 p.m. local time.
The proposed regulation arrived a few months after the massive methane leak at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage site in Los Angeles County. That facility, run by utility Southern California Gas Co., had a well that leaked from October to February. It spewed nearly 100,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, an amount equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas pollution of 572,000 cars. The leak forced the evacuation of an estimated 8,000 residents and the relocation of some schools.
California currently is addressing methane through multiple agencies. The state's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, is expected as soon as this week to release draft rules covering well construction, maintenance and operations standards for underground injection and storage of natural gas. The state's Legislature also has proposed bills dealing with Aliso Canyon and methane.
ARB is scheduled to hold a hearing on the proposed rule July 21 in Sacramento.
More sites covered than before
The state rule would cover many sites that haven't had to check for methane leaks, including natural gas storage sites like Aliso Canyon, O'Connor said. Most of the oversight on methane has been through local air boards, and they've had jurisdiction only over sites capable of forming ground-level ozone, he said.
In the area where the South Coast Air Quality Management District, or AQMD, has oversight -- the Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties region -- the proposed rule would bring in 7,000 pieces of equipment not previously covered, O'Connor said. In the San Joaquin area in the state's Central Valley, there would be 750,000 additional pieces of equipment covered.
Local air boards, if ARB approves the rule, will be able to inspect sites and check for leaks, as will state authorities. Companies, however, will be expected to do their own investigations.
The draft regulation sets thresholds for the maximum leaks a company can have, after which the leak must be fixed. A facility is allowed to have a certain number of leaks before it's considered in violation.
Once the rule is fully implemented in 2020, to stay clear of a violation, larger facilities can have leaks from no more than 2 percent of their total number of components if the leak is at a low rate. They can have no more than 1 percent of leaks at a moderately high rate.
To find leaks, operators can either use traditional equipment prevalent in industry, known as the Method 21 standard or opt for newer equipment like optical cameras. Those survey components are faster and are becoming increasingly more cost-effective, O'Connor said.
Method 21 is an EPA-approved technique for finding gas leaks from pieces of equipment. It typically involves a hand-held detection device being slowly swept through the air very close to the equipment being inspected, O'Connor said. When a leak is present, the detection device indicates elevated levels of gas in the air, helping the operator to pinpoint the source of the leak.
Gas flares restricted
Under the proposed rule, flaring of natural gas would not be permitted unless it can meet already allowed emission limits, and the system in place is 95 percent efficient, ARB said. In the absence of an existing system to stay within those limits, a new vapor control device is required and must meet the nitrogen oxides, or NOx, emission standard in the proposed regulation. This could include a low-NOx vapor control device or other non-destructive device, ARB said.
In areas classified as in attainment with all state and federal ambient air quality standards, devices would not have to meet the NOx emission standard.
Without the allowed devices or being in the specified areas, the operator would have to put the recovered natural gas into a disposal well, or capture it and sell it.
EDF criticized one part of the ARB rule. It requires that operators check quarterly for methane leaks. However, if a facility goes five consecutive quarters without a leak, it can switch to once per year inspections.
"You don't want to embed in this an incentive for operators to not find leaks. That's the ultimate incentive," O'Connor said.
The pending EPA rule requires checks twice a year but does not allow fewer even if a site repeatedly passes, he said.
"The fear is that after a period of time, all operators are going to be inspecting their equipment annually, and we're going to be having leaks that can go months and months and months" in California, O'Connor said, "whereas tightening the rule now can prevent that from happening."
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038121
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A Pipeline Safety Agency That Won't Do Its Job
Jun 1, 2016 | Bloomberg View (In The Chicago Tribune)
By Editorial Board
Last year in the U.S., pipelines carrying natural gas, oil or other hazardous materials leaked or ruptured 322 times, an average of almost once a day. Forty-nine people were injured; nine died. The damage amounted to more than $320 million. And 2015 wasn't a record year.
Thanks to a drastic increase in production, natural gas has become America's main power source -- displacing coal and lowering air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Oil production has expanded, too, helping to lower the price worldwide. But those changes have also strained the nation's 2.6 million miles of pipelines. Unfortunately, the agency tasked with ensuring that pipelines are safe has proven to be among the most dysfunctional in the federal government.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a part of the Department of Transportation, is late finishing many of the specific tasks Congress set out for it five years ago. As a result, the U.S. has no clear map of pipelines that run through cities or near drinking-water reservoirs. New pipelines operate without automatic or remote-controlled shut-off valves to limit the damage from leaks. Oil pipelines lack leak-detection technology. And operators aren't required to test the strength of pipelines running through populated areas, or to report leaks or ruptures promptly.
There's little Congress can do to push the agency along; it can't threaten to withhold funding, because PHMSA is financed by fees levied on pipeline operators. Ultimately, only the Barack Obama administration can stop overlooking the agency's failures and see that it gets its job done.
Besides putting lives at risk, explosions in highly populated areas could do more than legions of protesters to undermine support for fracking. PHMSA says it's making progress, including hiring more staff to write new rules and replacing some of its senior leadership. After five years, what matters is results.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-bg-editorial-pipeline-42bbe4be-27fe-11e6-8329-6104954928d2-20160601-story.html
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EPA Urges 11th Circuit To End States' Bid for Dual CWA Rule Appellate Suits
Jun 1, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Bridget DiCosmo
EPA is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to dismiss several states' suit over the agency's Clean Water Act (CWA) jurisdiction rule, arguing that the 6th Circuit's decision to hear consolidated challenges to the rule means other circuits lack jurisdiction and that federal law prohibits duplicative litigation over agencies' rules.
The 11th Circuit should not address the merits of the pending states' challenge, State of Georgia, et al. v. Regina McCarthy, et al., and instead should dismiss it for lack of subject matter jurisdiction in deference to the 6th Circuit, argues the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a May 31 brief in the case. Doing so “more directly addresses the root cause of the jurisdictional and mootness tangle here -- the States' dual-track litigation strategy,” DOJ says.
Georgia and 10 other Southern states are appealing an Aug. 27 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia's Brunswick Division that said the circuit courts are the correct venue for a legal challenge to the CWA rule. The order denied states' motion for a preliminary injunction against the rule because of a lack of subject matter jurisdiction -- although the 6th Circuit has imposed a nationwide stay on implementing the rule.
DOJ in its new filing says that an 11th Circuit finding of lack of subject matter jurisdiction to hear the states' case would resolve the lower court case in its entirety, rather than only resolving the states' appeal of a denial of the injunction sought to block EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers from implementing the regulation.
The brief responds to an April 25 memorandum issued by the 11th Circuit ordering new briefing in the suit to address how the case should be affected by the Feb. 22 6th Circuit ruling in Murray Energy, et al., v. EPA, et al., which held that authority rests with that appeals courts to hear challenges to the CWA rule.
In their May 16 supplemental brief, the 11 Southern states argued that initial challenges to the rule should be heard in the district courts, not the appellate courts, seeking to refute DOJ's claims that APA limits on duplicative litigation should mean that exclusive jurisdiction to hear challenges to the rule should be in the 6th Circuit.
The states argued that the challenge is not mooted by the stay issued by the 6th Circuit blocking the rule's implementation, because the dispute is "unrelated" to whether the district court have granted a preliminary injunction that would accomplish the same effect, because the jurisdiction question is dispositive.
DOJ counters that the states are seeking to litigate the merits of the same claims challenging the rule in two federal courts simultaneously: their Administrative Procedure Act (APA) suit in the 11th Circuit appeal challenging the denial of the injunction, and in their petition for review pending before the 6th Circuit.
DOJ says that because the 6th Circuit in October issued a nationwide stay of the rule ahead of its Feb. 22 decision holding that authority to review challenges to the rule is with the appeals courts, not the district courts, the 11th Circuit cannot award any effective relief to the 11 Southern states on their original motion for a preliminary injunction. “The Rule cannot be more stayed than it already is,” DOJ says.
Mootness 'Touchstone'
The DOJ brief says that the “touchstone” of a mootness inquiry is whether the court can grant effective relief to the appellant, citing a 1989 11th Circuit ruling in Tropicana Production Sales, Inc. v. Phillips Brokerage Co. and saying that when an appeal becomes moot, the court should dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, citing a 2002 11th Circuit ruling, Sierra Club v. EPA.
“Deciding the appeal in favor of the States, thus holding that the district court could consider granting a preliminary injunction, would accomplish nothing because, even if the district court granted that injunction, it could have no greater effect than the nationwide stay that the Sixth Circuit has ordered,” DOJ argues.
The court has consistently held that an appeal is not live just because the parties still dispute a legal issue decided by the district court, the brief says, pointing out that in Tropicana Products, the court held that the extirpation of a preliminary injunction mooted the appeal and divested the court of its jurisdiction.
If the 11th Circuit does not rule on the subject matter jurisdictional issue, it should stay of further proceedings in the suit while the 6th Circuit's stay remains in effect to avoid duplicative litigation “for now,” DOJ says.
But the department warns that dismissing the case is the proper option because the 6th Circuit is not likely to reverse course on the jurisdictional issue.
DOJ also urges the court to reject the states' argument that the Supreme Court could take up the jurisdiction question, saying if the high court did reverse the 6th Circuit's decision giving the appellate court power to hear suits over the rule, the states would be free to pursue their challenge to the regulation in the district court.
“The Agencies do not seek to block the States from having their day in court; the States simply are not entitled to have two days in two different courts at the same time,” the brief says. “This is a matter of fundamental fairness -- the Agencies should not have to defend the Clean Water Rule from attacks from the same parties in two different courts at the same time,” the brief says.
DOJ reiterates EPA and the Corps' position that the 6th Circuit ruling is controlling nationwide, saying that because the 6th Circuit held that review of the rule is available under CWA section 509(b)(1), review is not also available under APA, which provides for review of final agency action only if there is no other adequate remedy in a court.”
Jurisdictional Question
DOJ also refutes the argument pushed by the Southern states that the jurisdictional question of whether district or appellate courts have authority to review the rule is answered by Friends of the Everglades v. EPA, a 2012 11th Circuit ruling in which the court already rejected the "logic and holding" of a 2009 6th Circuit ruling in National Cotton Council of America v. EPA.
In the 6th Circuit's 2-1 ruling in Murray Energy, Judge David McKeague, writing the lead opinion, said that although the water law is unclear on where suits over the rule should start, the 6th Circuit has jurisdiction under a "functional" reading of CWA sections 509(b)(1)(e) and 509(b)(1)(f). After rejecting requests to reconsider the decision, the 6th Circuit recently set a May 30 deadline for proposed merits briefing schedules in the case.
McKeague in the Murray decision relied in part on the 6th Circuit's ruling in National Cotton, which said the appeals courts have direct power to review regulations governing the issuance of permits under the CWA's section 402 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit program.
Judge Richard Allen Griffin only supported the decision to take the case because it is in line with precedent established by National Cotton, but added that he believes the 2009 case was wrongly decided.
Dissenting Senior Judge Damon J. Keith said National Cotton should not apply, and the industry groups critical of the rule have cited his and Griffin's statements in calling for en banc review of the decision.
In its brief, DOJ argues that McKeague clearly distinguished the Friends of the Everglades decision in the same manner as DOJ has argued in the 11th Circuit: that in that case, the court found that EPA's water transfer rule “created exemptions” from limitations. “The Clean Water Rule, on the other hand, is not an exemption, and it restricts both regulated parties and States as permit issuers,” the brief says.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-urges-11th-circuit-end-states-bid-dual-cwa-rule-appellate-suits
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Supreme Court Ruling Offers Clues on Fate of Obama Rule
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Tiffany Stecker
Enforcement of the Clean Water Act could undergo a wave of changes in the wake of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on a key wetlands case, legal scholars say. The opinion is also offering clues to the possible fate of the administration's new water rule.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-0 yesterday in the case Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. Inc. to allow landowners to challenge corps decisions on what is a federally protected wetland (Greenwire, May 31).
Traditionally, landowners had to wait until they began the application process for permits to dredge and fill in wetlands before challenging the Army Corps in court.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his opinion that "the reach and systemic consequences of the Clean Water Act remain a cause for concern," adding that the law raised "troubling questions" on the government's influence on private property rights.
Kennedy's words may set the stage for a possible Supreme Court review of the Obama administration's contentious Clean Water Act jurisdiction rule, said Larry Liebesman, a senior adviser with the water resources policy firm Dawson and Associates.
"He didn't have to go down that road, but he decided to do that," said Liebesman, also a former environmental attorney with the Justice Department.
U.S. EPA and the corps promulgated the new rule to define which waterways and wetlands receive automatic Clean Water Act protection after a pivotal 2006 ruling in Rapanos v. United States, in which the high court ended up split 4-1-4.
In a stand-alone opinion in Rapanos, Kennedy wrote that streams and wetlands must have a "significant nexus" to navigable waters to be protected under law.
He also argued that regulators could consider isolated waters in combination with nearby water bodies for federal protection if they affect waters downstream.
Kennedy's Hawkes opinion could hint at his views on the new EPA-corps water rule, Liebesman said. "He could say 'it misinterprets what I said about significant nexus, I intended it to be more site-specific,'" he said.
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision is the culmination of a Minnesota peat mining company's efforts to obtain a permit to expand operations into a wetland.
The Army Corps oversees permits to develop near wetlands under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The program requires the agency to make "jurisdictional determinations" to assess whether a parcel of land is a water of the U.S.
Observers interpreted Kennedy's opinion as a win for developers and farmers who have struggled with the corps to build or expand on their own land.
Wetlands serve an important role in controlling flooding, filtering pollution out of aquifers and providing habitat for wildlife.
But unlike a river or stream, small and seasonally flooded wetlands on private property require a complicated assessment for determining eligibility for federal protection.
'Huge amount of pressure'
The Hawkes decision could lead to thousands of dollars and many years saved for developers, said Timothy Bishop, an attorney with Mayer Brown LLP.
Bishop represented a Chicago-area municipality that wanted to build a landfill in 2001's Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Army Corps of Engineers Supreme Court arguments.
The agency was tied up in litigation for nearly a decade, fighting a permit on land that, ultimately, was not found to have jurisdictional waters, Bishop said. The Hawkes case could avoid similar drawn-out legal sagas, he said.
What the Hawkes decision will do is place an additional burden on the corps, said Jan Goldman-Carter, who heads the National Wildlife Federation's wetlands and waterways program.
The practical effect "is that every one of these case-by-case agency actions is now open to litigation," she said. "This puts a huge amount of pressure on the Corps of Engineers, just in terms of resource constraints."
Central to the court's ruling is the "memorandum of agreement" between the corps and EPA. The memorandum established that jurisdictional determinations are legally binding, but also shielded landowners from potential Clean Water Act violations for five years if regulators failed to find federally protected waters.
The creation of the memorandum allowed for jurisdictional determinations to be "final agency actions" that could be challenged, the justices said.
This could open the door for review of the many similar agreements between agencies that are set up across the federal government, said Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau.
"There's tons of them," said Parenteau, on topics ranging from enforcement to the application of the Endangered Species Act across agencies. "That's how our multifaceted federal bureaucracy does business because there's all of these overlapping authorities."
Kennedy's new comments on the Clean Water Act could resonate with water debates outside wetlands. The Total Maximum Daily Load program -- a "pollution diet" for bodies of water that don't meet water quality standards -- may also come under scrutiny.
The Supreme Court recently turned down the opportunity to hear challenges to the Chesapeake Bay TMDL, the most expansive application of the program in the country, but the issue may eventually come back to the court.
"It's an issue that is raised front and center by the Chesapeake Bay case," said Richard Schwartz, an environmental attorney with Crowell and Moring LLP. The Hawkes decision "certainly indicates that the court might be friendly to that."
But others say the decision will have little connection with the rest of the law.
"It's like apples and oranges," said Liebesman of Dawson and Associates. "I don't see that there's any real connection to other aspects of the Clean Water Act."
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038146
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Trump is Wrong on the Paris Climate Agreement. I Know Because I Negotiated It.
May 31, 2016 | Washington Post
By Todd Stern
Donald Trump vows that once in office, he’s “going to cancel the Paris climate agreement,” which, he asserts, “gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America.”
That’s not especially surprising coming from Trump, who has said he is “not a great believer in man-made climate change.” But this particular promise caught my attention, since I led the U.S. negotiating team in Paris and in the seven years leading up to that agreement.
Let’s take a look at Trump’s position on the Paris Agreement, the first genuinely global, durable diplomatic response to the threat — and yes, it’s a real one — posed by climate change.
The bit about “foreign bureaucrats” controlling our energy use is ludicrous. Under the Paris Agreement, no foreigner, from bureaucrat to king, gains an iota of control over U.S. decisions about how much energy we use or, indeed, what our overall energy or climate policy is.
Rather, every country develops its own plan for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. No country can tell another what it must do. This “nationally determined” structure was exactly what the United States advocated. And some 190 countries, including all the big ones, have submitted plans.
All countries are covered by a strong transparency system for regularly reporting and being reviewed on their emissions inventories and the progress they are making toward targets. But again, these targets are a matter for the countries themselves to determine.
Indeed, the Paris Agreement ought to be embraced not only by those who seek strong action on climate change but also by all those who traditionally opposed climate agreements because China and other emerging economies seemed to get off scot-free. Rather than excuse these less developed countries, the Paris Agreement adopts a flexible means of differentiating among countries, keyed to their capabilities.
But suppose Trump disagrees and wants to keep his promise to “cancel” the Paris Agreement. For starters, he couldn’t do that even if he were foolish enough to try. Leaders of more than 190 nations endorsed the agreement. The United States has no power to cancel it. This isn’t reality TV. You can’t tell sovereign leaders around the world “you’re fired,” and you can’t tell them a multilateral agreement they just entered is canceled.
Of course Trump could, in theory, pull the United States out of the Paris regime, but that would be stunningly misguided. During the course of this century, climate change, with the impacts it produces — such as severe droughts and floods, extreme heat, massive wildfires, rising sea levels and super storms — has more capacity to disrupt life as we know it and to threaten both human welfare and national security than any other issue, save nuclear conflict.
Climate change is happening now, intensively, all over the world. It’s getting worse. We can’t hope to contain it without joint global action. The Paris Agreement is our vehicle for doing that. Trump would have us walk away? Really?
Further, if a President Trump were to stick to his wrongheaded notion that climate change is a hoax, and unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, he would also inflict severe diplomatic damage on the United States. U.S. standing in the world would plummet amid almost universal condemnation. Trump could pound his chest to his heart’s content, but he’d come out of this rash exercise a loser, with U.S. credibility and leverage in tatters.
It’s time to take Trump seriously. He is effectively the Republican candidate for president. Don’t make excuses for his words or assume he doesn’t mean them. We’re playing for keeps now.
Todd Stern was the U.S. special envoy for climate change from 2009 until April 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-wrong-on-the-paris-climate-agreement-i-know-because-i-negotiated-it/2016/05/31/ce3a680a-2667-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html
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Among Climate Scientists, A Fraught Debate on the Path Forward
Jun 1, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Umair Irfan
In a rented 15-passenger van barreling south on Interstate 55 out of Chicago in April, a group of environmental activists, a legendary scientist and a camera crew embarked on a quixotic rescue effort.
Their goal: saving Illinois nukes.
"We shouldn't be taking them off the table, in my opinion," said James Hansen, a former scientist at NASA famous for raising the alarm about climate change before Congress in 1988, speaking from the van. "It's our biggest source of carbon-free energy at this time."
Hansen and the bandwagon headed for Clinton, 160 miles southwest of Chicago, to meet employees at the Clinton Power Station, a sky blue and gray 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant.
The 29-year-old boiling water reactor's future is grim as the Illinois Legislature missed the deadline yesterday to pass new energy rules and rates that would extend Clinton a lifeline.
Exelon Corp., the plant's operator, punted last October on a decision to close the plant, but previously said if it didn't get to raise electric rates for customers by May 31, it would shut down the money-losing facility by 2017.
"We'll have more to say about the path forward within the next few days," said Exelon spokesman Paul Adams in an email.
Pro-nuclear activists want lawmakers to treat the Clinton plant and other fission reactors as some of the most powerful weapons in the fight against global warming, a rationale that would give them a new lease on life.
"The rules of the game are so rigged against nuclear in Illinois," said Michael Shellenberger, a nuclear energy supporter and founder of Environmental Progress who rode with Hansen. He pointed out that nuclear energy is excluded from the state's renewable portfolio standards and that wind energy is subsidized at more than double the rate Exelon was seeking.
However, the push to extend lifelines to nuclear power has collided with the goals of other environmental activists who have spent decades railing against reactors as expensive and unsafe, creating cracks in the coalition that helped bring nations to an international agreement to fight climate change.
Nuclear energy supporters, renewable power purists and all flavors of environmental activists in between gathered in Paris last December and applauded as world leaders inked a global agreement to combat climate change, the fruit of 20 years of fraught negotiation. But getting nations to acknowledge that the climate is changing, that the leading cause is human activity and that everyone is obligated to act is only the first step.
The harder part is figuring out a path forward. Nations have agreed to targets, but the road to achieving them remains uncharted. And some of the scientists, engineers, activists and policymakers that converged to assemble the Paris Agreement want to move in opposite directions.
Is the objective to take emissions to zero or to keep warming in check? Should nations run with the clean technologies now in existence or invest in finding better solutions? Can geoengineering play a role? Is the enemy short-term air pollution or long-term carbon emissions? Does everyone shoulder an equal burden, or should rich nations go first and further?
The push to peak global emissions and keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius has opened rifts over whether the world should embrace stepping stones like nuclear and natural gas power or go full tilt toward a 100 percent zero-carbon renewable energy economy. The debate is especially fractious among climate scientists, who ostensibly agree on the scale and urgency of climate change (ClimateWire, Dec. 21, 2015).
Billions of dollars in public and private capital for energy investment are up for grabs as developed countries like the United States and emerging economies like India get down to brass tacks on how they will hit their greenhouse gas emissions pledges and move their energy systems away from fossil fuels.
And without a firm hand on the rudder steering the world's energy, both nuclear and renewable advocates warn that the planet may miss its climate change targets.
"Now, the question has shifted from whether global warming is happening to what to do about it," said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, in an email. "For that we need to look to a different set of experts."
A scientific debate or an ideological one?
Among climate scientists, however, both the nuclear energy proponents and the renewable energy purists claim authority.
"I'm a physicist, and I'm looking at energy data," Hansen said. "I have as high a level of expertise as anyone I know."
Broadly, Hansen said the world should impose a stiff carbon fee while remaining agnostic about the technology solutions. Part of this strategy includes saving aging nuclear plants from shutting down and may lead to building new ones.
On the other side, atmospheric scientists like Mark Jacobson at Stanford University say that wind, water and solar are all that's needed to power the modern world. The avoided health and environmental damages offset the costs of building up this grid, and nuclear energy is an expensive, time-consuming distraction from this effort. The only thing lacking, he argues, is political will.
"He's a great climate scientist, and he's real passionate about solving the problem. I completely admire him for that," Jacobson said about Hansen. However, he said that Hansen and many scientists who have joined him haven't published any peer-reviewed research on comparing energy sources, while Jacobson has published dozens.
"Most of the people who do talk about it, they're not actually doing an evaluation of the science," Jacobson said. "They've examined the problem, but they've never examined the solutions."
Though researchers on either side of the debate remain largely cordial, the divide has become a flash point in public debates and even in otherwise stolid scientific meetings, leading to testy exchanges and heated arguments over whose approach is most rational.
At a tense debate in February at UCLA where Jacobson argued over the merits of supporting nuclear versus ramping up renewables, sharing the stage with nuclear supporters like Environmental Progress' Shellenberger and fellow Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira, the question-and-answer session with the audience devolved into a shouting match.
Some scientists suggest that these differences arise from ideology rather than scientific disagreements.
"In my mind, the word 'renewable' is more of a tribal identifier than a technical basis for energy," said Caldeira, adding that researchers shouldn't inveigh on energy engineering issues in general.
"I don't think climate scientists should be pretending they're in some kind of privileged position to know what kind of technology could meet economic and environmental power restraints," he said.
Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, suggested that some of the strident opposition to 100 percent renewable energy stems from fears over losing public credibility.
"I've encountered folks who have an irrational dislike of renewable energy. Perhaps they associate it with granola-chewing socialists," he wrote in an email. "Who knows -- but it really colors the way that they look at this issue, and leads to an irrational dismissiveness about prospects for meeting much or all of our projected future energy demand through renewable energy."
The 'old geezers' are passing the torch
The divide among scientists has a corresponding fissure among activists.
"To me Jacobson's work seems rigorous and detailed, and more to the point countries like Denmark are now showing it's entirely possible. The technology is there; we need the political will to match," said environmental activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, in an email. "I'm convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that this is possible."
Others argue that the 100 percent renewable energy vision is a luxury afforded by wealth,
"In rich countries, people turn against nuclear," said Shellenberger. "A lot of it is [not in my back yard]-ism. A lot of it is Malthusianism."
"Malthusianism" is often shorthand for population control, building on the ideas of 18th-century scholar Thomas Robert Malthus who projected that without checks, the number of people on Earth would grow faster than the resources available to sustain them.
"In order to maintain the fiction of energy shortages, you have to take nuclear off the table," Shellenberger said.
Other countries that are counting on kilowatt-hours to cut infant mortality aren't so picky, nuclear advocates note, and it would behoove wealthier parts of the world to help them gain access to energy, even if it's not the cleanest available.
The concern now is which vision will be codified in policy. In March, Democrats introduced a bicameral resolution that would set a target of 50 percent clean energy in the United States by 2030, not mentioning whether or not nuclear would fit on the "clean" side of the portfolio (E&ENews PM, March 3).
"What the climate science tells us is that we have to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground," Hansen said. "Unfortunately, our governments have become so dominated by money that both parties are heavily dependent on contributions from industry, including especially the fossil fuel industry."
Ultimately, most of the people who will have to live with the worst consequences of climate change are not old enough to vote, and Hansen argues that they should be the ones that make the final decisions about their energy sources.
"It shouldn't be the old geezers who are running the system now," he said.
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/06/01/stories/1060038117
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Scientists Just Discovered Dozens of New Sources of Air Pollution
May 31, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chelsea Harvey
Scientists may have significantly underestimated a dangerous source of pollution in the atmosphere, new research suggests. A satellite study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, has revealed nearly 40 previously unreported major sources of sulfur dioxide emissions — a pollutant that can cause multiple harmful health and environmental impacts and even exacerbate global warming.
Sulfur dioxide pollution can come from a variety of sources, both natural and industrial, including volcanoes, oil refineries and the burning of fossil fuels. Although it has a relatively short lifespan in the atmosphere — a few hours to a few days — it’s important for scientists to keep track of its presence to help inform air quality and climate models and create pollution-cutting policies.
Until now, scientists have mostly relied on emissions inventories drawing on national reports to identify the world’s sulfur dioxide sources and the amount of pollution they’re putting out. Satellite information has been able to help scientists further quantify sulfur dioxide emissions — but this method has mostly been useful when the scientists already know where the emissions are coming from. That’s because winds can help obscure sulfur dioxide hotspots, making it difficult to pick them out if their location isn’t already known.
But in the new study, researchers from Canada’s environment and climate change department and other institutions in the Unite States and Canada have described a new method that allows them to identify and map sulfur dioxide sources all over the world — including sources that may not have been previously identified or reported. And they’ve found that anywhere from 7 to 14 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide may be missing from global inventories each year.
The new method combines satellite data with wind information to more accurately pinpoint pollution sources.
“For each satellite measurement, we would know wind speed and direction and thus, using both pieces of information together, we can actually detect the location of where the sulfur dioxide is coming from,” said Chris McLinden, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada and the new study’s lead author. “And so we were able to essentially do a global search for these sources.”
The researchers then compared their results with three major global emissions inventories. Overall, they identified nearly 500 major sources of sulfur dioxide emissions, 75 of which were volcanic, and therefore natural, sources. Out of the remaining, human-caused sources, 39 could not be matched to any of the sources already identified in the inventories.
Of these 39 “missing” sources, there was a significant cluster in the Middle East. Fourteen were located there, and 12 of those corresponded with oil and gas operations, such as oil refineries. The rest of the missing locations were spread across the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and corresponded largely with power plants.
“Generally, these previously unreported sources tended to pop up in more developing types of nations where perhaps their legal requirements for reporting are not as rigorous as what we might be used to in the U.S and Canada, for example,” McLinden said.
Altogether, emissions from these 39 missing sources came to about 7 million metric tons annually, or approximately 6 percent of the total amount of sulfur dioxide produced by humans. However, the researchers noted that their method was only able to capture about half of the known anthropogenic sulfur dioxide sources in the world, owing to limitations in satellite technology — meaning that there may actually be twice as many missing sources out there asthe method detected this time around.
“[The satellites] have a relatively coarse spatial resolution — it’s not like these instruments that can picture the head of a dime from space,” McLinden said. “It measures maybe 10 kilometers at a time, 20 kilometers at a time. So you can imagine a very small source that doesn’t emit that much sulfur dioxide would go unnoticed.”
Extrapolating from the 50 percent of known sources that the method was able to capture, then, the researchers suggested that there may be up to 14 million metric tons of missing sulfur dioxide emissions in the world.
In addition to pinpointing sulfur dioxide sources, the authors suggest that the new method may also have the potential to be used for identifying other types of emissions, such as nitrogen oxides. “I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s useful for all pollutions, but I would say the ones that have a fairly short lifetime or residence time in the atmosphere, it should work quite well,” McLinden said. And he added that one of the method’s most useful features is that it’s “independent of political boundaries and source types.”
Identifying these missing pollution sources — both sulfur dioxide and other types of emissions — is especially important for informing global air quality models, McLinden said, which can be used for everything from issuing health advisories to writing pollution and climate policies. The study, then, presents the alarming idea that the models to date have not been informed with the best and most accurate information — and highlights the need both for better monitoring and reporting of pollution sources and the continued improvement of the kind of satellite technology that might aid in those endeavors.
“When you have a large missing source somewhere, then you’re not accounting for that pollution and you’re providing a biased view of what the pollution’s going to look like in the future,” McLinden said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/31/scientists-just-discovered-dozens-of-new-sources-of-air-pollution/
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