Preview Newsletter
PM ACC 7/20/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) Video Documents Road Trip of Plastic-Filled Tiny House
Jul 20, 2016 | Plastics Today
By Norbert Sparrow
Last November, PlasticsToday toured a tiny house in the company of Zack Giffin, co-host of Tiny House Nation on the FYI network, at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. -
EPA Biting Off More Than It Can Chew? Agency Publishes First Year Implementation Plan for New TSCA Legislation
Jul 19, 2016 | JD Supra Business Advisor
By Greg Johnson and Carlos Moreno
On June 29, 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) released its first year implementation plan for the recently-enacted amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (“TSCA”). Faced with the ambitious requirements and timeframes laid out by... -
Product Ingredients at Walmart Changed for the Better. Really.
Jul 20, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Michelle Mauthe Harvey
Today, Walmart released the names of those high priority chemicals, with details as to how the reductions were achieved. The chemicals – butylparaben, propylparaben, dibutyl phthalate, diethyl phthalate, formaldehyde, nonylphenol ethoxylates... -
NTP Seeks Developmental, Acute Toxicity Testing Information
Jul 20, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) is soliciting information on non-animal toxicity testing methodologies. -
Substance ID Provisions Need Improving, Says Study for Commission
Jul 20, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The data requirements for demonstrating a substance’s identification, under REACH, need to be updated or supplemented, says a study done for the European Commission. -
Microfiber Madness: Synthetic Fabrics Harm Wildlife, Poison the Food Supply and Expose You to Toxins
Jul 20, 2016 | Alternet
By Reynard Loki
Doing laundry isn’t something most of us enjoy doing. And now the evidence is clear that the world’s aquatic animals don’t enjoy it either. It turns out that clothes made from synthetic fibers shed tiny plastic microfibers in every wash. This fibrous debris goes... -
Near Exide Plant, Dangerous Lead Levels in Some Yards Are 100 Times Above Health Limits
Jul 20, 2016 | Los Angeles Times
By Tony Barboza and Ben Poston
Homes, schools and at least one day-care center near a shuttered Vernon battery recycler are contaminated with higher levels of brain-damaging lead than previously disclosed, with soil samples at some properties found to be so hazardous they are as much as 100 times... -
Trump's Energy Whisperer
Jul 20, 2016 | PoliticoPro
By Andrew Restuccia and Elana Schor
You might call Harold Hamm the Donald Trump of the oil patch. The Oklahoma oilman will take the stage at the Republican National Convention for a prime-time speaking slot on Wednesday, and like Trump, he brings a flair for showmanship in business and... -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA, Industry in Settlement Talks Over Waste Recovery Rule
Jul 19, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA and the chemical industry are in settlement talks over litigation challenging an agency rule to reduce air toxics from off-site waste and recovery operations, prompting a federal appellate court July 18 to grant a joint motion by the parties to continue to stay the lawsuit. -
Grid Hack Exposes Troubling Security Gaps for Local Utilities
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Energywire
By Peter Behr and Blake Sobczak
When Washington state utility executive Benjamin Beberness dug into what was behind the crippling cybersecurity blackout in Ukraine, the details were chilling, not only because of their malevolent nature but because of how familiar those details were to Beberness. -
CSB Updates ‘Most Wanted’ List of Safety Improvements
Jul 20, 2016 | Safety and Health Magazine
The Chemical Safety Board has added preventive maintenance and emergency response and planning to its Most Wanted Safety Improvement list. -
Hidden Rail Danger: Volatile Crude Oil Train Poses Risks to N.J.
Jul 20, 2016 | NJ.com
By Times of Trenton Editorial Board
Trains hauling dozens of black tank cars filled with highly volatile crude oil go rumbling through New Jersey neighborhoods at all hours of the day. -
Republican Dream of EPA Makeover No Easy Lift
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Robin Bravender
The Republican Party this week unveiled its latest plan to chip away at U.S. EPA. -
McCarthy on HFCs: 'We Have To Get This Over the Finish Line'
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Jean Chemnick
U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy talks about this week's round of high-level negotiations on a key Montreal Protocol amendment the way a distance runner discusses the last leg of a marathon -- if it's downhill.
Industry and Association News
TSCA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News
Environment News
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(ACC Mentioned) Video Documents Road Trip of Plastic-Filled Tiny House
Jul 20, 2016 | Plastics Today
By Norbert Sparrow
Last November, PlasticsToday toured a tiny house in the company of Zack Giffin, co-host of Tiny House Nation on the FYI network, at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Plastics Make it Possible program from the American Chemistry Council (Washington, DC) worked with Giffin to build the ingeniously designed 170-square-foot house that uses a plethora of plastic materials to create an energy-efficient home. Obviously, the same techniques can be applied to larger homes, saving homeowners money while reducing their energy dependence.
Built in Boulder, CO, the tiny house spent three months in Los Angeles and is now on display at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. Plastics Make it Possible has posted a video documenting the home’s cross-country road trip and the friends it made along the way. Ever wonder what a tiny house dance party might look like? Enjoy!
http://www.plasticstoday.com/building-construction/video-documents-road-trip-plastic-filled-tiny-house/28185059424935
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Jul 19, 2016 | JD Supra Business Advisor
By Greg Johnson and Carlos Moreno
This is Part II of our TSCA update following the recent changes to the TSCA legislation.
On June 29, 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) released its first year implementation plan for the recently-enacted amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (“TSCA”). Faced with the ambitious requirements and timeframes laid out by the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (the “Act”), EPA has planned out its implementation activities during the first year. The agency divided up actions into four categories: Immediate Actions, Framework Actions, Early Mandatory Actions, and Later Mandatory Actions (beyond the first year of implementation).
Immediate Actions
From Day 1, EPA has to make an affirmative determination of safety before the manufacture of new chemicals (or significant new uses of chemicals) can commence. For notices received prior to enactment, EPA’s goal is to complete the review within the remaining time under the original deadline, but in any event no later than 90 days from enactment. The first 30 days will see a number of actions related to the Confidential Business Information (“CBI”) process. Specifically, EPA will create a plan for linking confidential business information to a unique identifier, develop an approach for routine review of confidentiality claims, and provide additional information on statements and certifications required for CBI claims. Within the next six months, EPA will issue risk management rules for three solvents: Trichloroethylene or TCE, Methylene Chloride, and N-Methylpyrrolidone or NMP.
Framework Actions
A number of proposed rules expected in the next six months will provide the framework for new regulatory processes required by the Act, including prioritization of chemicals for risk evaluation, evaluation of the risk of high priority chemicals, fee collection, and inventory reporting. In the next six months, EPA also plans to issue the initial list of ten chemicals to undergo risk evaluations and create a new Science Advisory Committee on chemicals.
Early Mandatory Actions
EPA also expects to take action on a number of early mandatory requirements. EPA will publish a list of mercury compounds prohibited from export by mid-September of this year. Within the next six months, the agency will review the “small business” definition for purposes of TSCA and submit the first TSCA implementation report to Congress. Finally, the plan for the first year of enactment also includes publishing the scope of evaluation for the first 10 chemicals, preparing the agency’s first annual plan for risk evaluation of chemicals, and publishing an inventory of mercury in commerce.
Beyond the first year of implementation, EPA will be required to issue additional rules on mercury reporting and CBI substantiation, as well as come up with a strategy for alternative testing methods. There may be some doubt about whether EPA can meet all these aggressive implementation goals, but one thing is for sure: the regulated community can expect a lot of regulatory development in this area for the foreseeable future.
A copy of EPA’s First Year Implementation Plan can be found here.
http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/epa-biting-off-more-than-it-can-chew-54038/
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Product Ingredients at Walmart Changed for the Better. Really.
Jul 20, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Michelle Mauthe Harvey
It’s whack-a-mole time.
In April, Walmart released their 2016 Global Responsibility Report. In it, they noted a 95% reduction by weight in the approximately ten high priority chemicals in home and personal care products covered by their 2013 Sustainable Chemistry policy. Ninety-five percent is a big number, but the substance – the chemical names, the volumes – was missing.
No longer.
Today, Walmart released the names of those high priority chemicals, with details as to how the reductions were achieved. The chemicals – butylparaben, propylparaben, dibutyl phthalate, diethyl phthalate, formaldehyde, nonylphenol ethoxylates, triclosan, and toluene – will not come as a surprise to most who work on these issues; these chemicals have been called out for action by many for quite some time.
If this announcement is met like most environmental stories told by corporations, the mole-whacking will commence shortly. WHACK! Why these chemicals and not those? WHACK! What took so long? WHACK! What about everything else? While companies that do nothing will stay in the shadows, those like Walmart trying to drive needed change usually get whacked for what they haven’t done already.
And of course a lot still remains to be done.
But this story is a good one, and Walmart deserves credit for what they have accomplished. Walmart is the one company in the world that could drive drive over 11,500 tons – 23 million pounds – of chemicals out of so much product in less than 24 months.
What’s extraordinary is that they chose to do so at all, albeit with years of nudging from EDF. Many sustainability wins are also economic wins. Reduce GHG emissions, and you’ll usually see cost savings on energy expenses. Address water use in drought-prone areas, and you avoid costly supply chain disruptions that cause price spikes and unhappy customers.
But chemicals? The business case can be thin to none. Even when the science says it’s time to make a change—that one or more ingredients are no longer as safe as we once thought they were—changing a product formula without changing the product can be really hard.
And slow – 18 to 24 months on average. The ingredients ARE the product – they are the smell, the feel, the way it cleans or softens or does whatever it’s supposed to do. If a product is on Walmart’s and other retailers’ shelves, it’s because it sells. Change it, and you risk a lot of sales if customers reject the alternative. Change a lot of products, and you risk a lot more sales.
Piling on, when you talk about chemicals, people’s eyes glaze over—or they panic. Few-to-no marketing wins exist here. Despite the fact that pretty much everything, humans included, is a chemical mixture, people don’t want better chemistry. They want no chemistry, and keep looking for nonexistent chemical-free products, as if chemicals in and of themselves are the problem (some are, but many are not).
Yet Walmart decided to tackle ingredient chemistry anyway – and they changed the marketplace.
EDF spent years working side-by-side with Walmart associates to scrutinize the science, understand the problem from the retailer and supply chain perspectives, consider possible solutions, ponder potential strategies and metrics, understand the implications of various options, and map a path forward. Many others weighed in along the way.
Then Walmart released their policy, and they went big. Walmart didn’t just call for the ouster of the high priority chemicals. They committed to make the product ingredients transparent to customers. They embraced informed substitution, which means they’re intent on making sure that what goes in is better than what’s been pushed out. And for their private brand products, Walmart set their sights on Safer Choice, a voluntary labeling program administered by US EPA that requires every ingredient to be as safe as possible.
It took EDF six years on-site to reach the September 2013 starting line, when Walmart’s sustainable chemistry policy was released and the clock began ticking. It took less than 3 years for suppliers to remove 95% of the initial chemical targets by weight from their products on Walmart shelves. The journey is far from over, but let’s rest the mole-mallets for a moment and give credit where credit is due.
A lot of heavy lifting lies ahead. Perhaps, in the meantime, start swinging at those companies that are doing nothing.
http://business.edf.org/blog/2016/07/20/product-ingredients-at-walmart-changed-for-the-better-really/
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NTP Seeks Developmental, Acute Toxicity Testing Information
Jul 20, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) is soliciting information on non-animal toxicity testing methodologies.
The agency is requesting available data and information on non-animal approaches and technologies, used for:
· identifying potential developmental toxicants; and
· identifying substances with the potential to cause acute systemic toxicity when swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
Submitted information will be used to assess the state of the science, and to determine technical needs for non-animal test methods.
Information on developmental toxicity testing will be accepted until 15 August. The deadline for receipt of information on acute toxicity testing is 1 September.
https://chemicalwatch.com/48710/ntp-seeks-developmental-acute-toxicity-testing-information
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Substance ID Provisions Need Improving, Says Study for Commission
Jul 20, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The data requirements for demonstrating a substance’s identification, under REACH, need to be updated or supplemented, says a study done for the European Commission.
The study was commissioned, after the first REACH Review in 2013 said the definition of substance identity, and determining the sameness of substances, are a key challenge in ensuring the principle of “one substance, one registration” is met. It aimed to identify common issues faced by registrants, and good practices in the identification of complex substances, especially those of unknown or variable composition, complex reaction products or biological materials (UVCBs).
The preliminary findings were presented at a DG GROW workshop last year.
The study recommends that the Commission consider updating section 2.3 of REACH Annex VI, which lists the analytical data regarded as sufficient to enable substance identification, so that it includes additional “more appropriate” data, such as that obtained by x-ray diffraction or x-ray fluorescence for inorganic substances.
Alternatively, it says a compendium of analytical methods, suitable for different groups of substances, could be compiled.
A more detailed article is available on CW+ Chemical Risk Manager
https://chemicalwatch.com/48718/substance-id-provisions-need-improving-says-study-for-commission
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Microfiber Madness: Synthetic Fabrics Harm Wildlife, Poison the Food Supply and Expose You to Toxins
Jul 20, 2016 | Alternet
By Reynard Loki
Doing laundry isn’t something most of us enjoy doing. And now the evidence is clear that the world’s aquatic animals don’t enjoy it either. It turns out that clothes made from synthetic fibers shed tiny plastic microfibers in every wash. This fibrous debris goes from your washing machine, through the municipal sewage system and ends up in all sorts of waterways—marine, coastal and freshwater—where the tiny fibers are ingested by fish, crabs and other aquatic wildlife. In turn, many of these animals end up in our food supply—and on our dinner plates. It seems we are slowly, and literally, eating the shirts off our backs.
A host of recent studies have sounded alarm bells. One frightening conclusion is that these microfibers—a subcategory of microplastics—are even more pervasive in the environment than microbeads, tiny plastic beads common in beauty products that were recently banned in the United States.
One of first researchers to lift the veil on this environmental crisis was ecologist Mark Browne. In 2011, Browne, now a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales in Australia, published a paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that concluded microfibers from synthetic fabrics like nylon and acrylic make up 85 percent of human-made debris across the world’s shorelines. The vast majority of that synthetic waste is being released from clothing when it’s washed in laundry machines.
Browne’s experiments were eye-opening. He sampled wastewater from domestic washing machines and found that just one piece of clothing can release nearly 2,000 individual microfibers in a single wash. “As the human population grows and people use more synthetic textiles, contamination of habitats and animals by microplastic is likely to increase,” Browne concluded.
After he published his research, Browne reached out to several leading apparel companies, including Patagonia, Nike and Polartec, in the hopes of forging a collaboration to determine the exact movement of these microfibers—from clothing to oceans—and to develop a more sustainable textile design to stop the crisis from growing. His vision, which he presented in 2013, is called Benign by Design, a program supported by a number of scientists and engineers from academic institutions around the world, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Benign by Design, according to its website, “disrupts the current unsustainable pattern by showing companies exactly how textile wear leads to fiber pollution and ways to control their emissions.”
But the companies Browne approached weren’t interested in supporting his idea. “Perhaps it’s my pitch,” Browne told the Guardian. “We want to look for new, more durable materials that do not emit so much microplastic.” Only one firm, Eileen Fisher, accepted his proposal, giving him $10,000 to support his work.
“Any lifecycle issue, especially when it’s about a huge consumer product like clothing, is important,” Shona Quinn, sustainability leader at Eileen Fisher, told the Guardian. “[Browne] is raising an issue no one else has been studying.” Alas, Eileen Fisher isn’t a main source of the problem: 90 percent of its clothing is made from natural textiles. Still, receiving the funding was validation of Browne’s work.
Then, in an ironic twist, Patagonia itself validated Browne’s work when a study it funded that was conducted by researchers at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara was released in June. The researchers analyzed water and sediment samples from around the world and concluded that, indeed, “microfibers are ubiquitous in aquatic environments.” They also analyzed the wash cycles of four different types of synthetic Patagonia jackets (and one budget fleece jacket for comparison).
Here are some of the details of what they found: Finished apparel products contain large quantities of chemical substances… many of which are released from garments during consumer washing. This indicates that microfibers are of particular concern regarding their potential to transport hazardous chemicals into the environment. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) receive large amounts of microfibers daily. While most of these microfibers are removed, a significant amount is still released into the local environment. Aquatic organisms throughout the food chain consume microplastics and microfibers both directly and indirectly. ithin the food chain, these particles have been found to cause physical and chemical impacts, resulting in starvation and reproductive consequences in species. Synthetic fleece jackets release an average of 1.7 grams of microfibers with every wash. Older synthetic fleece jackets shed nearly two times the amount of microfiber than new ones.
Curiously, the Patagonia study found that top-loading washing machines had more than five times the microfiber shedding than front-loading machine in their trials.
The UCSB researchers also noted that, while the main focus of the microfiber pollution research has been on aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems are not immune. “It's increasingly common to apply sewage sludge to agricultural fields so more fibers are being found on land,” they noted.
And there’s more irony. In an effort to reduce waste, Patagonia and other outdoor apparel companies use tiny plastic fibers taken from recycled plastic bottles in their products, to prevent those bottles from ending up in landfills or the ocean. However, as all this research is making clear, this good-intentioned strategy may actually be worse for the environment than leaving those plastic bottles intact. They’ll end up in the ocean anyway, in bits small enough for animals to ingest.
Knowing that aquatic wildlife eat these microfibers is one thing; but seeing the impact on an individual fish brings this crisis to life—or rather, death. Sherri Mason is a professor of environmental chemistry at the State University of New York at Fredonia. She's an expert in plastic pollution, having studied its impact on the Great Lakes ecosystem for several years. But as Leah Messinger recently reported in the Guardian, the first time Mason cut open a fish from the Great Lakes, “she was alarmed at what she found.” The body cavity of the fish was filled with synthetic fibers. Mason said that looking through a microscope, they seemed to be “weaving themselves into the gastrointestinal tract.”
This problem is pervasive and not going away anytime soon. Abigail Barrows is the principal investigator of the Global Microplastics Initiative, part of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, a nonprofit research organization based in Bozeman, Montana. After processing nearly 2,000 aquatic samples covering both freshwater and marine ecosystems, she came to a similar grim conclusion: Microfibers represent about 90 percent of the debris found in aquatic environments.
What's more, recent research has shown that the ingestion of microfibers by wildlife is even worse than previously thought. In 2014, researchers at the University of Exeter in England studied the impact of microplastics on crabs. What they found was extremely concerning. Crabs don’t just ingest microplastics through their mouths; microplastics also enter their bodies through their gills. This discovery was unexpected, and it has serious ramifications not just for the poor, unwitting crabs, but other crustaceans, molluscs and fish—really any animal who has a gill-like structure used for exchanging gases.
This is also bad news for the humans who eat these species. “This is highly important from an ecological point of view, as if these plastics are retained longer within the animal there is more chance of them being passed up the food chain," said Andrew Watts, the study's lead author.
Since aquatic animals ingest these microfibers, and humans ingest those aquatic animals, people whose diet includes fish and crustaceans are likely also ingesting these tiny plastic bits. The UCSB researchers concluded, “Microplastics and microfibers have also been found in marine species directly consumed by humans, the effects of which are unknown.” Their findings just confirmed what Mason and her colleagues have known for years. After her 2012 pollution survey of the Great Lakes, she raised the food chain warning flag: “The world is an interconnected system,” she said. “This is not just about aquatic animals; it is a significant concern to human health as well.”
Gregg Treinish, founder and executive director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, which oversees Barrows' microfiber research, said because of these studies, he has eliminated aquatic animals from his diet.
“I don’t want to have eaten fish for 50 years and then say, ‘Oh, whoops’,” he told the Guardian. But avoiding seafood may not exclude one from harm. The UCSB researchers also detected microplastics in non-animal, marine-sourced food products like sea salt. So, even vegetarians and vegans could be impacted.
In addition to eating animals that contain microplastics, there’s another potential health concern with synthetic clothing, and that is the various toxic chemicals they might contain, such as formaldehyde, brominated flame retardants (PBDEs) and perfluorinated chemicals like Teflon.
Formaldehyde, which the EPA lists as a “probable human carcinogen,” is released by some textile finishes, particularly those that are meant to be wrinkle-resistant, while the garment is new. (That's one reason always to wash new clothing before wearing it.) PBDEs are no better, with the Washington Post reporting that they have been linked to “thyroid disruption, memory and learning problems, delayed mental and physical development, lower IQ, advanced puberty and reduced fertility.”
The National Institutes of Health says that some perfluorinated chemicals like Teflon—which are sometimes added to clothing to make them waterproof—“disrupt normal endocrine activity; reduce immune function; cause adverse effects on multiple organs, including the liver and pancreas; and cause developmental problems.” Some of these toxins are bioaccumulative, so even if you absorb tiny amounts through your skin on a daily basis, after many years, a health impact might arise.
So what can be done? One solution would be to update filters at municipal WWTPs so they can catch microfibers before they are released into waterways. But this is cost-prohibitive. As the UCSB researchers write, “Due to the high capital costs of WWTPs, upgrading WWTPs is not a feasible solution to microfiber pollution in the short term.”
Another solution would be to modify washing machines. The Rozalia Project, a nonprofit ocean conservancy group, has developed what it describes as “the world’s first consumer solution to stop microfiber pollution.” Its patent-pending "microfiber catcher"—a grapefruit-sized ball you can simply throw into your washing machine—collects microfibers that your clothes shed during the wash cycle to prevent them from escaping with the drain water.
But updating the world’s washing machines is a tall order. As Jill Notini, vice president of communications and marketing for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, told the Guardian: “How do you possibly retrofit all of the units that are in the market and then add a filter in and talk to consumers and say, ‘Here is a new thing that you’re going to have to do with your clothes washer?’”
The best solution, then, is to attack the problem on the production side (i.e., make more sustainable textiles that don’t shed microfibers) and the consumer side (i.e., stop buying synthetic garments), simultaneously. It will take time to develop non-shedding synthetic textiles (and get all the main producers on board with the idea), but in the meantime, consumers need to be aware of the issue, because the problem isn’t going away, and it's just going to get worse. Until shed-free synthetics are available, choosing clothing made out of natural fibers like cotton is the best bet, for environmental and personal health.
“This is a human issue,” said Dr. Watts. “We have put this plastic there, mostly accidently, but it is our problem to solve. The best way to do this is to reduce our dependency on plastic. It comes back to the old phrase: reduce, reuse and recycle.” Just don’t recycle plastic bottles into synthetic fleece jackets.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/microfiber-madness-synthetic-fabrics-harm-wildlife-poison-food-supply-and-expose-you
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Near Exide Plant, Dangerous Lead Levels in Some Yards Are 100 Times Above Health Limits
Jul 20, 2016 | Los Angeles Times
By Tony Barboza and Ben Poston
Homes, schools and at least one day-care center near a shuttered Vernon battery recycler are contaminated with higher levels of brain-damaging lead than previously disclosed, with soil samples at some properties found to be so hazardous they are as much as 100 times above California’s health standard, state and county records show.
The public remains largely in the dark about where and at what concentrations the poisonous metal has been detected in neighborhoods near the Exide Technologies plant because state regulators have failed to release pollution readings for the vast majority of properties.
The California Department of Toxic Substances Control says it has tested the soil of more than 2,400 homes. Despite repeated requests from The Times, the agency provided readings for just 269 properties.
A summary of results for 1,190 homes released Friday by the department was not broken down by property or location, but indicated thousands of soil samples were above state health standards and hundreds were at hazardous waste levels.
While the department says it informs individual residents of their test results within two months, the lack of disclosure of sampling data prevents the affected communities and the public from gauging the state’s overall progress in finding and removing lead-contaminated soil across seven southeast L.A. communities, the largest such effort conducted in California.
For three decades, state regulators allowed the plant about five miles from downtown L.A. to operate without a full permit while it racked up environmental violations for spewing lead, arsenic and other dangerous pollutants. They now believe those emissions fouled as many as 10,000 homes within a 1.7-mile radius.
Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that poses the greatest risks to children under younger than age 6. Even small amounts can lower IQs, reduce academic achievement and cause other permanent developmental and behavioral problems.
An analysis by state health officials in April found that children living near the facility had higher levels of lead in their blood than those living farther away.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a soil level of 400 parts per million or higher a health hazard in bare soil in children's play areas. More than half the properties included in the data released to The Times registered lead readings above that threshold, an analysis shows.
California’s health standard for residential soil is even more stringent, at 80 ppm.
More than 98% of homes had levels of lead above the 80 ppm standard, according to data from the state toxics agency and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
The limited soil sampling results, obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act, show that 36 properties had lead readings exceeding 1,000 ppm, a level so high it is classified as hazardous waste. The data was collected during a three-month period that ended in late February.
More than one-third of those homes are in East Los Angeles, with four on South Alma Avenue.
Felipe and Yolanda Soto received a letter from the toxics department in early June warning that their home, about a mile north of the Exide plant on South Alma, is contaminated with hazardous levels of lead and that they should limit their exposure.
The Sotos now keep their six grandchildren, ages 1 through 11, inside and don’t let them play in the backyard. State regulators told them it will be at least a year before their yard is cleaned.
“We are concerned, but what can you do?” said Yolanda Soto, 63. “We are just waiting.”
The state toxics department says more than 235 homes have been cleaned since 2014, when soil testing revealed lead contamination in neighborhoods near the plant.
State officials say the removal of polluted soil from more than 2,000 additional homes cannot begin until next spring, when they expect to complete a lengthy review of the cleanup required under the California Environmental Quality Act. It will take another year to clean those homes at a rate of 50 properties a week, officials say.
As regulators spend $176.6 million set aside for testing and cleanup, they say they will give priority to the most contaminated properties -- those above 1,000 ppm -- as well as those with young children, pregnant women, bare soil and other factors that increase the risk of lead poisoning.
More time and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding will be required to clean thousands of other homes that are likely to be contaminated across the communities of Bell, Commerce, East Los Angeles, Huntington Park, Boyle Heights, Maywood and Vernon. The state plans to seek reimbursement from Exide and any other responsible parties.
Pollution data are considered open records because lawmakers and the courts have decided that the public has a right to know where they may be exposed to a health hazard. The Times began filing public records requests for testing and cleanup data for homes, schools, day-care facilities and parks in March.
The state toxics department provided some soil readings but would not release the addresses of the homes sampled, citing the confidentiality of “personal or private information.” It released no records on which properties have been cleaned.
Officials with the department have told residents at recent community meetings that they are developing a way to post online maps of what areas have been tested and cleaned without publicly posting details that the state asserts would invade individuals’ privacy.
Other agencies have also been slow or inconsistent in their release of soil testing data.
In February and March, contractors hired by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health tested about 500 homes near Exide in Maywood, Commerce and East Los Angeles and found lead concentrations as high as 8,442 ppm in some yards.
County officials released the readings after multiple requests from The Times, but they, too, withheld the locations -- as well as environmental reports and other records detailing how it spent more than $2 million on soil testing and other Exide cleaning efforts.
The county kept that information secret on the grounds that sampling by its contractor, Roux Associates Inc., was, at the direction of its attorneys, done “confidentially” -- and is therefore bound by attorney-client privilege.
Contractors are doing virtually all the environmental testing near Exide. Crews dig up small samples of soil from about 15 locations on each property and analyze them for lead using handheld X-ray fluorescence devices that provide instant results.
The state has also ordered soil testing at parks, day-care centers and schools.
Recently released records show tests last year and this spring found elevated levels of lead at Bandini and Bristow parks in Commerce and at five of 24 schools: Eastman Avenue, Fishburn Avenue, Lorena Street and Rowan Avenue elementary schools and Huntington Park High School.
Los Angeles Unified School District officials said they removed lead-contaminated soil around two trees at Eastman last year. State toxics regulators determined that lead levels at Huntington Park High were not high enough to require cleanup and that more testing is needed at the three other schools.
In residential areas, one of the contaminated sites includes the Arellano Family Day Care on South Hicks Avenue in East L.A., where a dozen children attend, owner Amelia Arellano said.
In September 2014 , the Department of Toxic Substances Control tested the day-care center’s soil and found contamination levels as high as 992 ppm, according to documents provided by Arellano.
The soil has not been cleaned, and she doesn’t know when it will happen, she said. “We haven’t heard anything.”
To protect the children in her care, Arellano has put sand and green synthetic turf over the backyard play area and tries to limit the children’s time outside. She said a blood test detected elevated levels of lead in at least one child she has cared for.
The toxics department did not answer questions about the Arellano family day care or about other contaminated properties and the timeline for cleanup.
Public health experts say that the lead concentrations found at homes near Exide suggest multiple sources of contamination, including air pollution from the plant and lead-based paint from older homes.
“It's very concerning, regardless of what the source is,” said Felicia Rabito, an associate professor of epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “If I found out I had 8,000 parts per million in my yard, I would have a fit. That's really, really high.”
Lawmakers and community groups have also had difficulty obtaining information on what areas have been tested and cleaned and what soil sampling has found.
A month after State Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) asked toxics department Director Barbara Lee for a summary of the soil testing, the department told her it was still putting together the data, Garcia’s office said.
Garcia said residents need transparency about the test results, the cleanup timeline and also a hotline to ensure “that they are not forgotten and will not be left behind.”
Lupe Del Rio, 57, learned in late June that her family’s home on South Alma had lead levels up to 1,700 ppm.
Del Rio raised her three now-grown daughters in the house and now worries that the lead in the yard may have affected their health. And she wonders why the state is notifying people that their yards are toxic with a letter someone might easily toss as junk mail.
Now, in the midst of summer, she would like to be tending her fruit trees and having barbecues in the backyard, she says.
”But we can't because we're thinking, there's something in the soil.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-dangerous-lead-levels-20160714-snap-story.html
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Jul 20, 2016 | PoliticoPro
By Andrew Restuccia and Elana Schor
You might call Harold Hamm the Donald Trump of the oil patch.
The Oklahoma oilman will take the stage at the Republican National Convention for a prime-time speaking slot on Wednesday, and like Trump, he brings a flair for showmanship in business and a shared history of messy divorce proceedings. The bond between Hamm and Trump, both 70 years old, has given the Continental Resources CEO outsized influence on the energy policy of the GOP presidential nominee — leverage that might propel him all the way into the Cabinet next year.
"Harold is very influential," said one oil industry lobbyist with close ties to Hamm, who asked for anonymity to discuss his relationship to the Trump campaign.
While Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) drafted a series of energy policy recommendations for Trump and operates as something of a campaign surrogate, his pull with the Manhattan real estate mogul is limited. "It’s not Kevin Cramer; it’s Harold. It’s always been Harold," the lobbyist said.
Hamm heavily influenced Trump's May speech to an oil industry conference in Bismarck, N.D. — one of only a handful of policy addresses given by the candidate — and he helped coordinate a June meeting of business leaders and lobbyists in New York dubbed the Trump Leadership Council. Hamm has also sought to build support for Trump within the oil industry, where some players have long harbored fears that Trump is an energy policy neophyte.
And so far, the two billionaires are in lockstep on energy issues. Hamm, like Trump, has long called for rapidly expanding U.S. oil and gas development to curb the power of oil-rich OPEC nations, and they've both criticized President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for emphasizing renewable energy over fossil fuels.
"I’m worried about our country. I’m worried about the direction it’s going," Hamm said in an interview, blasting Democrats for "choosing to do away with all fossil fuels. That would put us right back into OPEC’s grasp." He added, "We’re funding Islamic terrorism by buying oil from those countries."
To hear Hamm tell it, Trump has long shown an interest in energy issues. After crossing paths at events in New York City, Trump invited Hamm to Trump Tower about four years ago for their first face-to-face meeting, Hamm told POLITICO.
The New Yorker peppered him with questions about how technologies like horizontal drilling helped his company revolutionize oil and gas development in North Dakota. Hamm said they developed a friendship and regularly kept in touch even before Trump decided to run for president.
During one visit, Trump gave Hamm some of his branded ties. Hamm wore one for a photo that appeared on the cover of a business magazine. Trump was so delighted, Hamm said, that he sent over more ties.
Hamm played a similar role for Mitt Romney in 2012, formally signing on as an energy adviser to the former GOP nominee two months before the ex-Massachusetts governor clinched the nomination. He also gave $985,000 to a super PAC supporting Romney early in 2012 and left the door open to serve in Romney’s administration, just as he has this year with Trump.
Trump’s dependence on the oil CEO for energy counsel is "not surprising to me," another oil industry lobbyist said, "because that's what you know to do — call Harold Hamm. Does [Hamm] know anything outside of drilling for oil? No. Does the Trump campaign care? Probably not."
Hamm says he isn't working directly for the campaign right now, and he's just offering Trump his advice in an informal way. FEC disclosures show he hasn't made any contributions to Trump’s campaign or super PAC. But Hamm attended a Monday reception in Cleveland for the pro-Trump Great America PAC, suggesting that his pocketbook soon could open.
Hamm was coy about whether he'll start pouring his cash into Trump's campaign or the super PAC supporting him. "I’m convinced that we have to change the course that America’s on," he said. "As to how that will materialize in financial support, I just can’t say yet.”
Still, Trump’s campaign did not rule out giving Hamm a prominent spot on the team, before or after Election Day.
"Mr. Hamm is a person Mr. Trump has great respect for and is an expert on energy,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said when asked about Hamm’s future on the campaign or in a Republican administration. “We are excited to have him speak at the Convention and thankful for his support."
His close ties to Trump have sparked furious speculation among Republicans and oil industry heavyweights that Hamm could be tapped as Energy or Interior secretary if the GOP nominee defeats Clinton.
"He’s probably got better than 50-50 odds of being the energy secretary in a Trump administration. That would be my guess. I think he’d be a natural choice," said GOP donor and Trump backer Dan Eberhart, the CEO of the oilfield services company Canary LLC.
Still, some of Hamm's longtime allies in Oklahoma doubt he'd depart from his home state.
“I never got that indication, that he’s interested in going to Washington,” said Triad Energy co-owner Mike McDonald, who has known Hamm for 35 years and serves as president of the Hamm-chaired Domestic Energy Producers Alliance. “He’s just doing this for the good of the country.”
Hamm didn't rule out the possibility of serving in a Trump administration, though he insisted he has no designs on such a role.
"Obviously, I have a pretty full-time job," he said. "But I’d be honored to be asked. I’d have to see what develops there."
Hamm is hardly alone among oilmen in limiting his financial commitment in the presidential campaign this election cycle, though he has given $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and $15,000 to the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission records. He grabbed headlines last year by settling acrimonious divorce proceedings with ex-wife Sue Ann with a personal check for $975 million — more than 30 times the $25 million that Trump reportedly agreed to settle for with ex-wife Ivana in 1991.
Unlike four years ago when oil prices were soaring, the industry is limping through a prolonged downturn that has battered even the biggest companies, which could account for the dearth of contributions to Trump from the industry.
Still, some of Hamm's singular influence on Trump is also a function of lingering skepticism about the nominee-in-waiting among other oil and gas executives, even as they cringe at the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton tilting further to the left on the environment.
“Nothing against either candidate, but we all wish there were better candidates on each side,” Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Hamm wouldn't reveal much about his Wednesday night convention speech, his first remarks at political convention. But he indicated he planned to focus on national security and jobs. He employed both of those themes during the fierce lobbying battle to repeal the four-decade-old ban on exporting U.S. oil, which ended with an industry victory in December when Congress agreed to open the flow of U.S. oil to other countries as part of a bipartisan budget deal.
Williams & Jensen lobbyist George Baker, who worked on the same side as Hamm — although not for him — to repeal crude export restrictions, praised him for his dedication to the cause.
“I know he worked very hard, and the guys who represented him worked very hard, to make sure he got around and tried to educate the Hill, educate others,” Baker recalled.
Using his oil producers' group as a megaphone, Hamm delivered a protectionist case for unrestricted oil exports, accusing foreign-owned refiners in the U.S. of favoring heavier foreign crude over the lighter U.S. shale oil. That might not be out of place in a Trump campaign that has blasted trade deals and called for the U.S. to get "a piece of the profits" from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
"He has long been a leader in increasing domestic production and getting off imported oil and policies that encourage the U.S. to invest more in foreign production than we do in U.S. production," said Denise Bode, a former Oklahoma energy regulator and oil industry lobbyist who has known Hamm for decades. "He’s very much, I would say, a populist in that respect."
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/story/2016/07/trumps-energy-whisperer-124503
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA, Industry in Settlement Talks Over Waste Recovery Rule
Jul 19, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA and the chemical industry are in settlement talks over litigation challenging an agency rule to reduce air toxics from off-site waste and recovery operations, prompting a federal appellate court July 18 to grant a joint motion by the parties to continue to stay the lawsuit.
In American Chemistry Council (ACC) v. EPA, ACC and Eastman Chemical Company have sought judicial review of EPA's national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants (NESHAP) for reducing air toxics from off-site waste and recovery operations. The operations are part of a range of facilities that handle used oil, used solvent or waste, including hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities, chemical plants and refineries.
The NESHAP rule removes an emissions limit exemption for periods of startup, shutdown and malfunction; requires electronic reporting of performance test results; bars emissions releases from pressure relief devices (PRDs) that are safety devices used to reduce pressure in containers when needed; and strengthens requirements for certain valves and lines, according to environmentalists who are intervenors in the litigation.
The litigation, filed in May 2015, has largely been on hold over the past year as the chemical industry also in May 2015 petitioned EPA to reconsider two aspects of the rule. In response, EPA earlier this year gave notice it wouldreconsider one portion of the rule -- PRD requirements -- but not equipment leak reduction provisions.
As a result, both petitioners and EPA filed a joint motion July 14 asking the court to hold the suit in abeyance to allow settlement negotiations to continue. "The Parties have initiated settlement discussions which could moot the need for litigation," the motion says.
The court order granting the motion directs the parties to file status reports every 30 days, beginning Aug. 17.
http://insideepa.com/news-briefs/epa-industry-settlement-talks-over-waste-recovery-rule
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Grid Hack Exposes Troubling Security Gaps for Local Utilities
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Energywire
By Peter Behr and Blake Sobczak
Third of a four-part series. Click here to read part one and here for part two.
When Washington state utility executive Benjamin Beberness dug into what was behind the crippling cybersecurity blackout in Ukraine, the details were chilling, not only because of their malevolent nature but because of how familiar those details were to Beberness.
In early spring of 2015, a "red team" of National Guard cyber experts had taken just 22 minutes to break into Beberness' electricity company, the Snohomish County Public Utility District, north of Seattle. Beberness had invited them in to test the utility's defenses.
"The cyberattack chain that the National Guard used against us, it's almost verbatim what happened in Ukraine," said Beberness, the utility's chief information technology officer.
At the Everett, Wash., utility and at the Ukraine oblenergospower companies, employees recklessly clicked on a phishing email with concealed malware that took the attackers inside the utility's business computers. "It only took one click for somebody to get in," Beberness said of his utility's fate. Once in, the Guard cyber experts found pathways into a test operations network that mirrored the Snohomish control system. After Seattle's power system, Snohomish is the second largest publicly owned utility in the state, with nearly 340,000 customers.
The National Guard exercise prompted new cyberdefense strategies at Snohomish. But the utility's experience gets at the heart of a lingering issue inside the energy and security communities: What if the Ukraine attack had actually hit the United States?
The answer depends on what part of the U.S. power system we're talking about, according to industry officials and cyber experts interviewed by EnergyWire for this series. It also depends on who's regulating the corners of the grid, stretching from coal-fired power stations in Kentucky and Great Plains wind farms to the power lines lighting up the greatest cities and the smallest whistle-stop rural towns.
The 450,000-mile network of U.S. electric generating plants and high-voltage transmission lines crossing the country is subject to mandatory federal critical infrastructure protection (CIP) rules written by the industry-led group charged with creating standards for grid operators, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), and approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The detailed rules are backed by audits and potential $1-million-a-day fines for serious breaches.
Closer to homes and businesses, the 3,300 distribution utilities that deliver power to customers over and under U.S. streets are predominantly governed by voluntary cybersecurity best-practice policies established by state utility commissions, city councils or cooperative utility boards.
Federal cyber regulations would have been far more protective of the high-voltage interstate system than the porous defenses in Ukraine had been there, some leading U.S. experts say. "Our security controls in North America are very different" from Ukraine's, said NERC CEO Gerry Cauley at a congressional hearing in April. "In the unlikely event of a successful cyber or physical attack, I believe that we are well prepared."
In February, NERC sent a confidential survey to power companies on whether they were defending against the tactics used in Ukraine. And earlier this month, the grid overseer started conducting NERC-supervised compliance audits to get more information on the state of the grid.Achilles' heel
But the federal rules don't specifically apply to the local U.S. distribution utilities, the part of the grid we all pull power from when the lights come on in the morning. This was the same corner of the electric grid hackers hit in Ukraine.
Michael Assante of the SANS Institute, a Bethesda, Md.-based cybersecurity training group, who co-authored a definitive report on the Ukraine attack, notes U.S. local and regional distribution utilities don't follow the federal critical infrastructure cyber rules, the CIP standards. Smaller utilities are exempt because of their size.
"There would be very few differences [between U.S. and Ukraine vulnerabilities] at the distribution level," said Assante, NERC's former security chief.
"A lot of people recognize this is almost the Achilles' heel of the electrical sector," said Mark Weatherford, chief cybersecurity strategist at vArmour, a data security firm, and former deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security. "From a government and policy perspective, CIP standards do not apply to distribution."
Duane Highley, an executive at an electric co-op in Arkansas and co-chairman of the industry's national cybersecurity coordinating committee, said, "It's my belief that we'll find a large number of smaller utilities certainly that are not CIP compliant because they are not required to be." That's his personal opinion, he added. "That means that some of these power companies have the kinds of vulnerabilities that attackers preyed on in the Ukraine. Those are deficiencies that will need to be corrected to ensure we don't have those kinds of attacks."
Highley says a successful Ukraine-style attack on a small U.S. distribution utility by itself would not threaten the interstate transmission network. But it could paralyze that utility's city.
Ukraine should be a constant concern for state commissioners, said one regulator in the densely populated Northeast. "If nothing else, it is a wake-up call to jurisdictions, states and to all of us," said Richard Mroz, president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, who chairs the cybersecurity policy panel for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the regulators of the nation's power distribution utilities.
New Jersey has among the most advanced state-level cybersecurity policies in the country, requiring state-regulated utilities to create programs to find and deal with cyber risks to critical systems, conduct risk assessments, carry out attack response and recovery exercises, and report cyber incidents.
"We feel very fairly confident that with what we have put in place here in New Jersey, what our companies are doing, there is a good chance our companies would have detected that threat," Mroz said. But he added, "I can't tell you with complete confidence it would have."
John Dickson, principal at the network security firm Denim Group Ltd., who has consulted for electric co-ops and investor-owned utilities in the past, said an attack on U.S. grid companies is likely to come from nation-backed cyber forces. "They're going to be a sophisticated and sustained threat, with lots of resources. When that's the scenario, which electric co-ops are really ready to withstand that level of a threat?"
Despite alarms from the cyberattack in Ukraine in December, "some smaller guys, co-ops, haven't changed behaviors." Unlike banking or big retailers, many electrical utilities "do not have the daily threat that merits management team focus," Dickson said.
Ukraine showed that "this is not theoretical anymore -- this is real," Dickson said.
Would CIP rules have worked?
The security of the grid's top level, the network of power plants and high-voltage transmission lines, is governed by the voluminous federal critical infrastructure security rules, known as the CIP standards, now in their sixth version. Some outside experts say those standards would likely block or reveal a Ukraine-style attack in the United States, provided power companies met the letter and spirit of the rules.
"It's hard to make the case that CIP isn't making a difference," said SANS Institute manager Ted Gutierrez.
"A compliant NERC CIP program would almost certainly have kept this attack from succeeding," said Terry Schurter, vice president for NERC solutions at the consulting firm SigmaFlow in Plano, Texas. But, he added, "it depends a lot on execution."
"I don't pretend that NERC CIP is perfect, far from it," Gutierrez wrote in a blog post. The strength of the CIP "will always depend on specific design considerations and will be subject to human error, system malfunction, and attacker ingenuity."
One CIP requirement that could have made a big difference is CIP-005, Gutierrez and Schurter said. It requires systems covered by the rules to be sheltered within a regulated utility's "electronic security perimeter," with minimally controlled entry points, Schurter said.
Operators needing to have remote access to controls inside the perimeter must have two totally different authenticating proofs of identity, such as a PIN plus a smart card or an iris scan device, for example.
The CIP rule requires at least two proofs that "you are who you say you are and you have rights to be where you want be," Schurter said. "That wouldn't necessarily guarantee you would obviate the attack. But the whole concept around NERC CIP is to cover all the points, because the accumulation is so hard to get past even if you are really frickin' good."
The Ukraine utilities, in contrast, allowed operators to access grid controls remotely from outside computers, requiring only a single password. The attackers found and hijacked some of the operators' sign-on credentials and were on their way.
Hunting BlackEnergy
But the CIP requirements would not have blocked the opening move of the Ukraine attack: the phishing wave of bogus emails aimed at corporate information technology networks on the business side of the Ukraine utilities. CIP rules don't apply to utility business systems.
"There is nothing CIP does that prevents people from coming into the corporate network and completely infecting it," said Tom Alrich, manager for enterprise risk services for Deloitte Advisory in Evanston, Ill. "Once the corporate network is fully infected, then they're going to find a way to get into the substations one way or another."
While the CIP standards are particular in some places, elsewhere they give utilities leeway. For example, CIP rules do not specifically require regulated utilities to remove the BlackEnergy malware that the Ukraine attackers primarily used to build secret "backdoors" from their business computers into the Ukraine utilities' control systems, in order to seize control of the operators' workstations, experts said.
The Department of Homeland Security alerted U.S. utilities in February that BlackEnergy was suspected as an infection agent in the Ukraine incident. This followed other DHS alerts that BlackEnergy versions have been present in many places in U.S. critical infrastructure for several years at least.
In the DHS February alert, the department said it "strongly encourages" utilities to look for that malware. But DHS has no authority to order the search, and CIP rules don't require federally regulated utilities to heed that advice, although industry officials say they are confident most did.
"As far as the BlackEnergy piece goes, BlackEnergy3 in particular, it's not the easiest thing to find. Your anti-viruses aren't going to pick it up," said Jake Williams, founder and principal consultant at Rendition InfoSec LLC, who has analyzed some of the Ukraine attackers' malware.
"The folks that put this together had pretty good anti-virus evasions built in. Basically, this requires you to be performing network monitoring," Williams said of the Ukraine attack.
"You have to have some mechanism to begin identifying what passed your defenses in the first place, the continuous monitoring piece: Which devices are talking to which other devices, how much data is being transferred?" he said. "That was missing in the Ukrainian power distribution network."
A capable monitoring program could have spotted all the abnormal computer traffic secretly traveling back and forth between the attackers and the Ukraine systems they had infected, months before the final attack, Williams said. "Few U.S. utilities do it now. It's the exception we see and not the rule."
Assante of the SANS Institute agreed. "You need to look at anything trying to communicate out. We find that isn't very commonplace" in the United States. "There is a requirement to conduct secure monitoring. It's not very prescriptive about what needs to be monitored, and how. So there is a blind spot."
CIP-007 requires that regulated utilities "deploy method(s) to deter, detect, or prevent malicious code." The rules don't specify how. That puts the responsibility on each utility to show NERC-approved auditors that they are meeting these requirements, said Lew Folkerth, principal reliability consultant for ReliabilityFirst Corp., in the RF newsletter for March and April. Folkerth's organization is one of the regional grid operating firms auditing CIP compliance.
Although the CIP shield creates a basic line of defense, the overall level of security still hinges on each utility's commitment, Assante said.
"For utilities that are motivated, for those utilities that have invested in people with proper skill sets and equipped them with tools, I think they will look at this incident [in Ukraine], learn from it and do things differently," Assante said.
Utilities that aren't investing, and that don't have high management buy-in for taking cybersecurity measures or the technical skills and teams, are not likely to learn the lessons of the Ukraine attack, he added.
"If they are just doing compliance -- whatever the standard says -- and pick the paths of least resistance in satisfying a requirement, those utilities probably won't benefit from this opportunity," Assante said.
The fourth and final story in EnergyWire's Hack series explores how U.S. grid operators are weighing an old-fashioned alternative to advanced cyberdefenses, one that played a key role in Ukraine's quick recovery.
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2016/07/20/stories/1060040519
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CSB Updates ‘Most Wanted’ List of Safety Improvements
Jul 20, 2016 | Safety and Health Magazine
The Chemical Safety Board has added preventive maintenance and emergency response and planning to its Most Wanted Safety Improvement list.
Preventive maintenance has been added to the list after being identified as the root cause of numerous incidents investigated by CSB, including the 2010 explosion at the Tesoro Corp. refinery in Anacortes, WA, and the 2012 Chevron Corp. refinery fire in Richmond, CA. Problems include inadequate mechanical integrity programs, delayed or deferred preventive maintenance, and the aging infrastructure of equipment. The agency has investigated 11 incidents and has 21 ongoing recommendations related to preventive maintenance at facility, corporate, regulatory program and industry standard levels.
Inadequate or poor emergency planning or response has been another recurring conclusion in CSB investigations of incidents – including the ammonium nitrate explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer Co. in West, TX – prompting the agency to add emergency response and planning to the “most wanted” list. CSB has opened 12 investigations and has 46 recommendations regarding emergency planning and response.
CSB Chair Vanessa Sutherland will lead the preventive maintenance issue, and board member Manuel Ehrlich will head the emergency planning and response issue.
“As a 50-year veteran of the chemical industry, I know far too well the importance of a robust emergency response program,” Ehrlich said in a press release. “I have responded to and investigated numerous chemical incidents in my career and look forward to sharing the important safety information in CSB reports and safety videos.”
http://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/14416-csb-updates-most-wanted-list-of-safety-improvements
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Hidden Rail Danger: Volatile Crude Oil Train Poses Risks to N.J.
Jul 20, 2016 | NJ.com
By Times of Trenton Editorial Board
Trains hauling dozens of black tank cars filled with highly volatile crude oil go rumbling through New Jersey neighborhoods at all hours of the day.
And unless you are one of the unfortunate people stuck at a railroad crossing as one of these lengthy trains pass, you would have no idea of the destructive potential rolling through such a densely-populated state.
Just how destructive these traveling "bombs" can be was illustrated by the 2013 derailment of a 72-car oil train in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic. It caused a horrific explosion and fire that killed 47 people and destroyed about 40 buildings.
That train, like so many crisscrossing New Jersey and the country, was carrying a particularly volatile form of petroleum from North Dakota's Bakken oil fields.
According to the Associated Press, there have been at least 26 oil trains involved in major fires or derailments during the last decade in the United States and Canada, including one in Oregon in June. At least 12 of the oil trains were carrying Bakken crude, and of those, eight caught fire.
It is estimated that up to 30 trains a week transport crude oil through New Jersey, going through communities like West Trenton, Somerville, Newark and Camden.
Mindful of the potential catastrophe these trains pose, the state Senate last month passed a bill (S806) that would require the owners or operators of these highly-hazardous trains to develop plans of actions to deal with spills or the consequences of a derailment or crash. These plans must be filed with the state Department of Environmental Protection for review and approval.
The bill also requires train operators and owners to prove that they have the financial resources to cover cleanup costs and mandates that they make available trained personnel and equipment in case of a spill.
Just as important, the bill mandates that hazardous train operators and owners must offer training to emergency services personnel of every local unit along the route of travel. Some operators offer training on a county level, but local responders need to be included as well, since they will be the first on the scene.
But for the average concerned citizen, a key part of the bill would require the operators and owners of trains carrying volatile crude oil to make the routes public, something New Jersey has been reluctant to do, citing security reasons.
But other states, such as New York, make that information available to the public.
Here is a situation where the public's right to know outweighs security concerns.
With prodding from the federal government, railroad operators are now phasing in newer tank cars that have a thick metal plate on the ends to prevent the ends of the rail car from being punctured in a derailment.
Crude oil trains also must travel at reduced speeds to minimize the risk of a derailment.
But one glaring safety issue that is not being addressed is the volatile nature of the crude oil itself. Bakken crude is a highly combustible mix of natural gases including butane, methane and propane.
North Dakota requires that the volatility of the gas and oil vapors be reduced to below 13.7 pounds per square inch at the wellhead, but critics say even at that level it is too dangerous to ship.
That safety problem needs to be addressed on the federal level as soon as possible.
But for New Jersey, recently passed Senate bill S806 goes a long way to ensuring contingency plans are in place for dealing with a dangerous oil spill and letting the public know who is at risk.
Its companion Assembly bill (A2463) is still in committee. We urge the Assembly to approve the legislation and we urge the governor to sign it.
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/07/hidden_rail_danger_volatile_crude_oil_poses_risks.html
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Republican Dream of EPA Makeover No Easy Lift
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Robin Bravender
The Republican Party this week unveiled its latest plan to chip away at U.S. EPA.
Delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland approved a platform Monday that calls for stripping EPA of much of its power and letting states take the lead in environmental regulation. EPA would then be turned into a "bipartisan commission" with limited authority.
While the plan lacks details, former top EPA officials say the scheme would involve a massive political lift, might lead to a patchwork of environmental policies across the country and could wind up hurting industries rather than helping them.
"This is a profoundly radical proposal. It rejects 40 years of environmental history and success," said William Reilly, who led EPA during the George H.W. Bush administration.
What Reilly calls "radical," other Republicans call "modern."
The GOP platform lays out what it calls a "modern approach to environmentalism" that starts with a "dramatic change in official Washington."
Under that plan, EPA would be similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is headed by commissioners from both sides of the aisle, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It would be a dramatic change from EPA's current structure, where one presidentially picked administrator (now Gina McCarthy) is running the show.
EPA has a staff of about 15,000 employees tasked with implementing laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other laws dealing with hazardous waste management, toxic substances and pesticides. NRC is much smaller, with about 3,500 employees.
The logistics of the overhaul could be theoretically simple, former EPA officials say, although the political realities of the venture could create insurmountable hurdles.
EPA was created by an executive order in 1970 by President Nixon, who wanted to pull various agencies' existing environmental programs under one roof. As environmental laws were passed, like the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972, EPA was tasked with setting national pollution limits and cracking down on violators.
"EPA has a lot of responsibilities under various statutes, and someone would need to think about all of those," said Jeff Holmstead, who was EPA's top air official during the George W. Bush administration.
"If you're talking about legislation, the mechanics of it wouldn't be all that difficult, but the politics might be a different story.
"'Legislative rewiring'
Scott Fulton, who was EPA's general counsel during the Obama administration, said the "substantial amount of legislative rewiring" required for the Republicans' plan could in theory involve a "cross-cutting statute that changes the organizational structure of the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Protection Commission, or whatever they called it."
"In practice, the problem, of course, is that each of the environmental statutes deals with a different environmental phenomenon," added Fulton, who is now president of the Environmental Law Institute. "How you deal with that nuance in a cross-cutting statute of this kind is the question. I think it would be very, very difficult."
The alternative, which "seems even more challenging," he said, is amending each environmental law on its own. "Opening up these statutes tends to become a Christmas tree experience, with everyone wanting their own ornament. Hard to contain or control," he said.
There's certain to be broad opposition from greens and Democrats to any effort to limit federal environmental oversight. It could also be complicated to get congressional Republicans on the same page, even if they control the White House and both chambers of Congress next year.
"When you start trying to legislate in this area, it becomes a pretty complicated matter because of the different stakeholders in the Congress who really have a fair amount of leverage for what happens" with EPA, Fulton said. "There's a large number of committees that have little slices of EPA's jurisdiction under their review."
The specifics of the GOP's plan aren't clear from the one-paragraph description released this week, and experts say it raises a host of questions about the structure of a new commission, whether it would retain the capacity to crack down on polluters and what it might mean for industries.
"The EPA was established in order to provide a uniform uplifting of environmental standards across the country," Reilly said, and to "trump the temptation to forum shop" by corporations. Ultimately, he said, "industry came to like the uniform standards."
Holmstead pointed to the recent congressional overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was welcomed by industry groups. "The business community didn't want to have the prospect of 50 different states regulating chemicals in different ways," he said.
"There's no alternative structure that is identified that would carry out the enforcement responsibilities." He said the plan appears to be "suggesting that enforcement would not be a priority."
Fulton said it's possible to imagine a commission that would be responsible for setting regulations, such as a national air quality standard for ozone, but that decisionmaking would be more complicated with a panel of bipartisan commissioners. And there would be questions about who's responsible for implementing those rules.
"EPA has a lot of implementation responsibility besides just the setting of rules," he said.
Ultimately, Reilly said, he thinks the GOP plan "would have very little likelihood of passing the Congress."
If it did, he warned, "it would create 'sacrifice states' from the point of view of the environment," with some states having weaker regulations than others.
Efforts to hamstring EPA
This is just the latest in a long line of proposals to obliterate or overhaul EPA since the agency's inception. Among others:
· Republican presidential contender Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate the agency if he wins the White House (Greenwire, Oct. 19, 2015).
· In 2014, the conservative Heartland Institute unveiled a report suggesting replacing EPA with a committee made up of state environmental agencies (Greenwire, Aug. 12, 2014).
· Former Republican presidential contender Rick Perry said on the campaign trail in 2011 that he would eliminate EPA. He then backtracked, saying he meant to say that the Energy Department should be eliminated, but that EPA "needs to be rebuilt" (E&E Daily, Nov. 10, 2011).
· Also on the presidential campaign trail in 2011, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) proposed replacing EPA with a more "job-friendly" operation (E&E Daily, Jan. 20, 2011).
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/07/20/stories/1060040565
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McCarthy on HFCs: 'We Have To Get This Over the Finish Line'
Jul 20, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Jean Chemnick
U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy talks about this week's round of high-level negotiations on a key Montreal Protocol amendment the way a distance runner discusses the last leg of a marathon -- if it's downhill.
President Obama's environment chief leaves for Vienna late this week to lead the U.S. delegation in talks Friday and Saturday aimed at teeing up a hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) amendment to the ozone treaty that a wide range of countries have agreed should be adopted in Kigali, Rwanda, in October.
"The work in Vienna on HFCs is important, and we have to get this over the finish line in Rwanda," said McCarthy in an interview yesterday with ClimateWire. But the administrator, a veteran of U.N. climate talks, including last year's high-profile Paris summit, said the Montreal Protocol process is "more straightforward."
The 35-year-old treaty to combat thinning of atmospheric ozone has a history of being "technical" and "nonpolitical," she noted, in a way that the United Nations' broader climate negotiations process has not been.
"I don't see any science deniers of the fact that there's a hole in the ozone layer," she said. "That was accepted, the threat was understood, and the challenge was put out there at a time when nobody knew if you could fix it, because we didn't have alternatives and technologies.
"But because we embraced the science and the threat, we were able to work together as the world economies -- every single country -- to address it," she said.
Last year's Paris deal broke through years of political deadlock to achieve an agreement that all countries would act on goals they set themselves, aimed at drawing down carbon dioxide emissions. Secretary of State John Kerry helped secure the long-sought U.S. goal of breaking down strict divisions of responsibility between developed and developing countries. The State Department announced yesterday that Kerry would attend the Vienna talks, though McCarthy will lead them for the United States.
"Achieving such an amendment would build upon the climate change success achieved last year in Paris, and is one of the most consequential and cost-effective actions the global community can take this year to combat climate change," the State Department said.
Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, said Kerry's presence "shows that the administration is using a full-court press to finish the HFC amendment while Obama is still in office."
U.S. funding more modest, less political
While the French presidency of the Paris climate talks and key players like the United States did much to lay the groundwork for success, there was still some last-minute jockeying before the deal was concluded. But when it comes to the HFC amendment, the very agreement to do it -- which was once opposed by some developing countries -- was the most challenging hurdle.
"Once that decision was made last November in the form of the Dubai Pathway ... there has been quite a lot of focus on how to make that happen," said one State Department official.
Unlike commitments made in Paris, the four proposed HFC amendments would result in a legal requirement that rich and poor countries alike draw down their production of the pollutant according to a schedule. Poor countries would be given more time and financial assistance in making the transition.
HFCs are chemicals used as coolants that can be thousands of times as climate-forcing as CO2 in the short term. The United States estimates that its amendment with Canada and Mexico would avoid 90 metric gigatons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases by 2050 and half a degree Celsius of warming by the end of the century.
"This is really some of the cheapest greenhouse gas reductions we can get, because of how highly global warming HFCs are and how much current technology and chemicals can actually take the place of HFCs without losing any stride in terms of everybody's ability to grow their economy," McCarthy said.
There are still questions to be resolved before a final version emerges in Rwanda. Besides issues of timeline and baseline, wealthy nations are being asked to provide reliable help for poor countries to retool factories and prepare to use less climate-forcing chemicals.
U.S. contributions to the Montreal Protocol fund have not been politicized the way contributions to the United Nations' Green Climate Fund (GCF) generally have been. And they're much more modest. Donor countries only provide about $100 million a year to help poorer countries comply with the ozone treaty, compared with the GCF's $10 billion current price tag. There is no immediate indication that that will change if the treaty is amended to phase down climate superpollutants.
McCarthy mentioned the need to provide certainty of finance among other issues that will be addressed before Rwanda.
HFCs not the end of the line
If October's meeting includes adoption of an HFC amendment, it will rank with Paris as another part of the Obama climate legacy.
The president has been pressing for a phase-down of HFCs since his first term -- armed, McCarthy said, with her agency's policies that have required the introduction of more climate-friendly alternatives domestically. Over the course of his second term, Obama has secured deals with a variety of countries -- including China, India and the Persian Gulf states, which once opposed an amendment -- paving the way for a phase-down under the Montreal Protocol.
But McCarthy and other administration officials resist the idea that an amendment in Rwanda will be the final piece of Obama's international climate change puzzle.
The president, said McCarthy, "has made it pretty clear that we're running across the tape in January, not gliding."
Also in October, the United States and allies hope to secure a market-based mechanism under the International Civil Aviation Organization that would limit commercial airlines' CO2 emissions. And a variety of players, including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, hope that enough countries will join the Paris climate deal this year to help it reach the threshold of 55 countries totaling 55 percent of world emissions required to enter into force. The United Nations will host a summit at its headquarters in New York City on Sept. 21 aimed at stoking support for early entry.
Pledges to join the deal to date make it very likely that nations will cross that threshold this autumn. That would ensure that the accord will be live when a new U.S. president takes office, impeding the next White House's ability to withdraw from it.
The Republican Party adopted a platform at its national convention in Cleveland this week calling for the United States to exit the Paris Agreement, but McCarthy downplayed its importance.
"I know there's a lot of international interest in making sure that Paris is affirmed and moving forward," she said. "I don't think that's going to be changed by any political party's platform, and we'll just keep talking to other countries, not just about our ability to get the Montreal Protocol amendment done, but also about the larger Paris Agreement and getting it in force."
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/07/20/stories/1060040526
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