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ACC PM 11/14/2016

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) The Closed Loop Fund, at Age Two, Goes With the Flow
Nov 14, 2016 | Green Biz
By Joel Makower

It’s been a bit over two years since a group of large companies pooled their money to boost recycling. Their goal: invest $100 million to scale municipal recycling programs. And, in the process, put more recovered materials into manufacturing supply chains.

LCSA News

(ACC Mentioned) Senator Inhofe ‘Confident’ in Trump Administration to Implement TSCA
Nov 14, 2016 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin

Congressional leaders and stakeholders say President-elect Donald Trump's administration will not pose a threat to the implementation of the new TSCA law.
OSHA Weighs in on EPA Proposed Rule Governing the Use of New Chemical Substances
Nov 14, 2016 | Mondaq
By Brent I. Clark, Kay R. Bonza, and Craig B. Simonsen

Dr. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), recently weighed in in favor of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) rulemaking concerning the Significant New Uses of Chemical Substances.

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Slashed Budgets and Toxic Chemicals: Planning for Environmental Carnage Under Donald Trump’s EPA
Nov 14, 2016 | The Intercept
By Sharon Lerner

Environmentalists who were hoping that somehow a Donald Trump presidency wouldn’t be as catastrophic as they feared had those hopes dashed on Friday, when the president-elect announced Myron Ebell as his choice to oversee the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA Moves to Improve Predictability of ToxCast Chemical Testing Methods
Nov 14, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad

EPA scientists have started to incorporate metabolism in the agency's collection of high throughput in vitro assays known as ToxCast, a move that addresses a concern with alternative, non-animal toxicology testing by increasing information about a chemical's toxicity as it processed by the body, agency officials say.
Metals Sector, Advocates Split on EPA San Francisco Bay Selenium Criteria
Nov 14, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Bridget DiCosmo

The metals industry is criticizing EPA's revised numeric water quality criteria for selenium in California's San Francisco Bay and Delta, saying the values are overly strict and would result in a "serious misallocation of resources," while environmentalists are urging the agency to tighten aspects of the criteria to better protect some species.

Energy News

D.C. Circuit May be Bulwark Against Enviro Rule Changes
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Amanda Reilly

A panel of judges in Washington, D.C., that leans liberal could give environmental advocates one bright spot in the next four years under a Trump administration that has pledged to undo a host of Obama administration regulations.
Can Trump Deliver on Immense Energy, Climate Promises?
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Robin Bravender

President-elect Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to topple just about every major energy and environment policy enacted in the past eight years.
White House Rolls Out Global Renewable Energy Funding
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Hess and Christa Marshall

The White House and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz launched new actions to continue the global transition to zero- and low-carbon energy sources today, despite a gloomy outlook for climate action from the next administration.
Final Methane Rule Expected Soon
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Brittany Patterson

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management is expected to release its final rule to curb methane waste from oil and gas wells on federal lands as early as this week, part of a suite of regulations the agency is sprinting to finish before the end of the Obama administration.
How a Low-Carbon Economy Increases Cybersecurity Risks
Nov 14, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Jason Bordoff

Since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, America’s reliance on imported oil has always been the primary energy security concern.

Chemical Security News

Estimate of PFCs Leaked from Air Force Base Revised Upward
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

Potentially dangerous chemicals leaking from a former Air Force base in Oscoda, Mich., might be found in more groundwater than previously thought.

Transportation News - There are no clips to report at this time.

Environment News

Source: Trump Seeks to Exit Paris Agreement on Day One
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Evan Lehmann

The Trump administration is exploring steps to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Jan. 20, 2017, the first day of Donald Trump's presidency, according to a person working on the transition team.
Diplomatic or Deluded? Insiders Say Trump Won't Ditch Deal
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire
By Jean Chemnick

President-elect Donald Trump has long insisted he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, but few climate experts meeting here seem willing to take him at his word.
Sierra Club Challenges EPA Plans for Texas Ozone, NO2
Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly

The Sierra Club is challenging U.S. EPA's approval of parts of Texas' blueprint for meeting the 2008 ambient air pollution standard for ozone and the 2010 benchmark for nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions Nearly Stable for Third Year in Row
Nov 14, 2016 | The Guardian (via Real Clear Energy)
By Arthur Neslen

Global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have seen “almost no growth” for a third consecutive year, according to figures released as world leaders begin to arrive in Marrakech for a UN climate summit.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) The Closed Loop Fund, at Age Two, Goes With the Flow

Nov 14, 2016 | Green Biz

By Joel Makower

It’s been a bit over two years since a group of large companies pooled their money to boost recycling. Their goal: invest $100 million to scale municipal recycling programs. And, in the process, put more recovered materials into manufacturing supply chains.
Since then, the Closed Loop Fund has been finding its way, identifying communities across the United States where a little money can go a long way toward boosting recycling, and doing so profitably.
Today, the fund is issuing its first “impact report” (download PDF), taking stock of its progress and learnings after two years of operations. Some of its initial investments are starting to bear fruit, and CLF’s collective-action model is evolving as a prototype for how the private sector can deploy both money and expertise to build the components of a circular and low-carbon economy, especially in the absence of political leadership, funding and will.
Recycling could use some help. Over the past few years, materials recovery rates have stagnated. In 2013, the most recent date for which the federal government has released data, the national recycling rate (“sustainable materials management,” in the new government parlance) was around 34 percent, not much higher than the 31 percent rate in 2005, according to the U.S. EPA.Private-sector data confirms the stagnation. For example, the 2015 U.S. plastic bottle recycling rate decreased 0.5 percent compared with 2014, according to data from the Association of Plastic Recyclers and American Chemistry Council.
Private-sector data confirms the stagnation. For example, the 2015 U.S. plastic bottle recycling rate decreased 0.5 percent compared with 2014, according to data from the Association of Plastic Recyclers and American Chemistry Council.
Meanwhile, Americans’ overall generation of waste — about 4.4 pounds per person per day in 2013 — was only slightly below where it was in 1990 (4.57 pounds), though U.S. population grew by almost 70 million people. The net result is break-even: Aggregate waste to landfills in 2013 was exactly the same as in 1990 — 134 million tons.
It all amounts to a lost opportunity of significant proportions. Americans toss out $11.4 billion worth of recyclable containers and packaging annually, according to As You Sow, an advocacy group.
All the while, corporate use of recovered feedstocks in products and packaging has increased as companies ramp up sustainability commitments. In 2014, for example, Procter & Gamble committed to double its use of recycled resin in plastic packaging by 2020. Earlier this year, Unilever said it would increase use of post-consumer recycled materials to 25 percent of its plastic packaging by 2025. In 2013, Dell committed to putting 50 million pounds of recovered materials back into its products by 2020. So far, Dell has reused just over 36 million pounds over three years.
Growing demand, stagnating supply
The lack of quality recycled materials can make it a challenge for companies meet such goals. Case in point: Coca-Cola failed to meet its 25 percent recycled- and renewable-content goal last year, coming in at just 12.4 percent, according to its 2014-15 sustainability report.
"The challenge with recycled content today is it's tough to get material," Bruce Karas, vice president of environment and sustainability at Coca-Cola North America, told Resource Recycling, a trade publication. "So we put recycled content in our PET but it's challenging to get ahold of enough to really make a difference."
Meanwhile, a few leadership firms are beginning to probe the potential for next-generation designs and materials flows that, collectively, are referred to as the circular economy. Increasing use of recycled materials is a key part of such strategies.
How do you reconcile growing demand with stagnating supply? That’s the goal of the Closed Loop Fund.
In 2014, a group of companies — 3M, Colgate Palmolive, Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Keurig Green Mountain, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Walmart — each kicked in between $5 million and $10 million to build a fund that would provide municipalities with zero-interest loans and private firms engaged in public-private partnerships with below-market interest rates in order to spur investments in recycling programs.
Over the past two years, the fund has deployed $20 million in project-finance loans, which in turn has leveraged another $60 million for these projects from banks and other financial institutions. And the organization has expanded beyond the original debt fund to add a venture fund for backing early-stage companies and a foundationthat funds R&D of “technologies and business models focused on building the circular economy.” All three entities are now housed under an umbrella organization, Closed Loop Partners.
So far, so good
So, how’s it going? The short answer: So far, so good, though for all its money and ambition, CLF isn’t poised to transform the recycling industry by itself.
“We've been thrilled with the performance of our investments so far,” Rob Kaplan, CLF’s managing director, told me recently. “They are diverting significant tonnage, they're bringing recycling to millions of households that didn't have it before and they're paying back the loans.”
It’s still early days. After spending the bulk of its first year getting organized, the fund has made 10 investments, though only six are operational and only four of those have reported outcomes. The four include an upgrade of an existing municipal recycling facility (or MRF) just outside Chicago; a plastics recovery facility capable of handling harder-to-recycle resins, in Baltimore; new trucks and curbside bins to upgrade an aging system in Portage County, Ohio; and a baler at an existing facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, generating new revenue by collecting and selling materials that would otherwise go to landfill.
Two additional projects — an upgrade of a recycling facility to enable single-stream collection in Scott County, Iowa, home to Davenport; and investing in carts for 105,000 households in Memphis — have only recently come online.
This is decidedly unsexy stuff, the nuts and bolts of waste-recovery systems. But CLF’s investments to date demonstrate the three bottlenecks and barriers in recycling infrastructure that the group has identified and targeted:
Collection (increasing curbside and other programs that address “recycling deserts,” particularly in small towns and rural communities, as well as in low-income, multifamily housing);
Sortation (building or upgrading MRFs to accept a broader range of post-consumer materials, along with innovations to address “problem” materials, such as flexible plastic and films); and
Processing (fostering innovations and infrastructure for turning waste back into raw materials, especially low- and no-value materials such as mixed plastics and mixed glass).
Low prices, high barriers
All this is taking place at a time when low commodity prices are buffeting recycling programs, depressing prices of recycled materials, especially plastics, making them less competitive with their virgin equivalents.
Kaplan believes that while commodity pressure has impacted waste haulers and recycling companies, “Municipalities are still the ones who will benefit from recycling. It almost always makes sense to recycle regardless of where commodities prices are because your alternative is to landfill,” for which cities pay “tipping fees” in order to dump waste.
Still, there’s no question that low prices of petroleum and other raw materials are roiling recycling. As CLF’s impact report notes:
Unprecedented lows in recycled commodities prices have become an “innovation killer” in the near-term, while continued low interest rates reflect a lack of growth and investment opportunities. Our expectation is that the current commodity market trends will reverse or at least stabilize; and those business models that have weathered the storms will emerge stronger and more profitable than those who maintained the status quo. Our hope is that these best-in-class operators from the private and public sectors will have a positive influence on the rest of the system.
Another challenge is that recycling is still a political football in some circles. Those arguing against it make the case that recycling actually increases pollution, thanks to the increased number of collection trucks on roads; that there’s no actual “landfill crisis” that needs to be addressed; and that recycling hurts the economy because it costs cities more money than it saves. All of these claims have factual and, for the most part, compelling counter arguments. But, as we’ve all learned, perception and misinformation often outweigh science and economics, especially when it comes to environmental issues.
Admits Kaplan: “The narrative around recycling has gotten a lot more complicated in the last year or two.”
Smart money
The potential impact of the Closed Loop Fund’s investments extend beyond the individual projects it funds. Its mission includes propagating best practices and creating replicable models other municipalities can emulate. Its new impact report describes under what conditions each of its projects can be replicated, along with the project’s impacts — tonnage diverted, greenhouse gases avoided, the financial benefits to communities and other metrics, both to date and projected through 2025.
Another important role for CLF is to help municipalities understand what it means to be “best in class.” As with most things in the world of sustainability, the answer depends — in this case, on such factors as on-the-ground political leadership, citizen awareness, legacy waste-hauling contracts, existing infrastructure and other factors. It also may depend on breaking through the intransigence of old institutions and traditional ways of doing things, even if they no longer make economic or practical sense.
As a result, CLF loans are what investors often describe as “smart money” — investments that come with consultative expertise.
Consider Memphis, where CLF provided nearly half the $7.5 million needed to purchase 105,000 curbside recycling carts. In addition to the 10-year, no-interest $3.25 million loan, says Kaplan, “We're in regular conversations about how we can help. We help bring in other partners to help with education and things like that.”
“Memphis is a good example of the infrastructure challenge if you don't already have carts out," explains Margot Kane, Closed Loop Fund’s chief investment and financial officer. "Other cities have routing issues, which is an operational challenge that we have helped figure out, which can transform a recycling program from something that's not profitable to something that's profitable.”
The group isn’t afraid to use its influence along with its money. “When we're deciding whether we're going to capitalize a municipality, we look at some of the operational choices that they're making,” says Bridget Croke, who leads external affairs for CLF. “There are certain things that we know work and are going to be operationally and financially more sound and successful. Either we will make strong recommendations and give them guidance, or we'll integrate that into our contract so that we know it's going to be successful and have the impact we need, and also have the payback.”
Adds Kaplan: “It can be very expensive to drive recycling carts to everybody's house if you don't know how to do it efficiently. If you only do parts of the city or you do it in waves at different times, you can waste significant amounts of money.”
Stamp of approval
The presence of CLF’s smart money offers yet another benefit: It can provide assurance to traditional banks and other funders looking to give additional funding to municipal recycling programs. Banks like to co-invest in project financing, and CLF’s money and expertise can be seen as a stamp of approval by an independent party that the project makes sense and will get the guidance it needs to succeed.
“They just made it a more attractive opportunity,” Robert Knecht, director of public works for Memphis, says of CLF. “You can make it happen a little faster if you can obtain a loan from an organization like Closed Loop Fund, who is promoting recycling at a high level and is willing to partner with you with some favorable terms.”
In Chicago, CLF provided funding to upgrade an existing MRF to increase its throughput from 20 tons a day to 20 tons an hour, with increased revenue opportunities and savings for the operator, Lakeshore Recycling Systems. The fund loaned Lakeshore $1.5 million, which leveraged another $7 million coming from Comerica Bank.
The problem was that Lakeshore was collecting more recyclables than it could process. “We controlled 100,000 or so tons of recycled material that we were basically using fairly rudimentary and fairly antiquated sorting technology to harvest,” Alan Handley, Lakeshore’s CEO, explained. “A lot of it we were ultimately unable to harvest. We either had to send it to other parties to have them take the value, or send it to landfills.”
When the 40,000-square-foot high-tech materials recovery facility, called the Heartland MRF, opened in March in Forest View, Ill., just west of Chicago, it became a victim of its own success. When word got out about a new facility, Handley told me, “We found out that there's a massive supply and demand disequilibrium, that there's not enough single-stream recovery assets out there.” The company found it could make more money taking in recyclables from other firms than from processing the recyclables it collected at curbside. Today, the plant runs at capacity with third-party waste from the Chicago region, while workers hand-sort the recyclables Lakeshore collects within its own service area. Clearly, there's a need for even more Chicagoland MRFs.
Pre-competitive collaboration
Closed Loop Fund’s limited partners — the big brands that kicked in the original $100 million — seem satisfied with the results, if Unilever is any indication.
Since 2010, Unilever has had a recycling target as part of its Sustainable Living Plan, which is global in scope. But the company’s U.S. operations were lagging.
“We needed to think more transformatively,” Jonathan Atwood, who heads sustainability for Unilever North America, told me. “We needed to think about something that's going to change the way we do recycling in the U.S. A combination of more recycling systems for residential homes, education programs — all were well-intended, but they weren’t moving the needle fast enough, big enough, and in my mind, systemically.”
The company had tried its own packaging takeback programs. It partnered with a small firm to recycle deodorant packages, but the recycler went out of business.
The deodorant project pointed up the challenge. “The tonnage that would come through was decent, but it wasn't necessarily something that would self-sustain in the longer term if we're trying to produce post-consumer material to feed back into our products,” explained Julie Zaniewski, packaging sustainability manager at Unilever. “We need massive scale to do that and to have a consistent material. It's very difficult to essentially close the loop on your own bottle individually. That's where the wide-scale systemic piece came in.”
When recycled materials flows become available at scale, opportunity follows, says Zaniewski. “Once we have a consistent feedstock of, say, polypropylene, then you can start including it in your packaging at much higher levels. We've seen that market in particular exponentially grow. Ten years ago, we didn't see any recycled polypropylene. Now you see it across a number of different products. That's simply because they're finding value in it where they didn't otherwise look.”
Beyond the material benefits to Unilever is the partnership among CLF’s investors. “This has been just phenomenally important for Unilever North America because it is a pre-competitive collaboration,” says Atwood. “We're regularly getting together. We're reviewing proposals coming in. We’re seeing the value of the due diligence process.”
He continued. “In a pre-collaborative space, not everybody gets exactly what they want by design. Everybody has been very open about what their needs are or what they're focused on, but it doesn't mean that any one company wins and everybody else loses. The whole idea here is, ‘Let's start getting more valued material back and raising the bar for all materials.’"
Buoyed by the collaboration, the deal flow and the initial success of its portfolio, the Closed Loop Fund already is viewing opportunities to leverage its model to support the emerging circular economy. “We are very excited about the potential for a circular economy,” says Rob Kaplan. “Which is why we decided to expand the platform to look at other waste streams like food and organics, as well as electronics and apparel. Which are all substantial pieces of what's going to landfill today.”
As CLF expands its scope, Unilever’s Atwood is all in. “I could envision a day when we have a CLF on biodigesters or a CLF on agriculture. I think this model of corporations and companies coming together and putting financial resources on the table is going to be the driver of transformative change — not waiting for government or others to step in.
“It's like, ‘We want in on this issue. It's important to our company. We don't necessarily know what the end looks like. We've tried on our own and didn't get as far as we want to. Let's do it together.’"
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/closed-loop-fund-age-two-goes-flow

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LCSA News

(ACC Mentioned) Senator Inhofe ‘Confident’ in Trump Administration to Implement TSCA

Nov 14, 2016 | Chemical Watch

By Kelly Franklin

Congressional leaders and stakeholders say President-elect Donald Trump's administration will not pose a threat to the implementation of the new TSCA law.
"The Lautenberg Act is a principal example of regulatory reform, and one of the main purposes of the statute is to bring about consistent regulation across the country," said a spokesperson for the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW).
And, the spokesperson added, Senator Jim Inhofe (R–Oklahoma), chairman of the EPW, "is confident in the Trump Administration's continued implementation of the new law".
"I don't think that there's going to be, in my opinion, a desire to roll things back in the law," agreed Dimitri Karakitsos, former EPW senior counsel and now a partner with law firm Holland & Knight.
TSCA reform has enjoyed credibility from having bipartisan and bicameral support, Mr Karakitsos told Chemical Watch, not to mention the support of major industry groups and NGOs, as well as the Obama administration.
"I don't think the industry or a Republican administration would be interested in throwing that credibility out the window," he said.
Disbanding the EPA?
Nevertheless, during his candidacy Mr Trump made several references to defunding or disbanding the EPA – the agency implementing the TSCA law under a series of tight deadlines.
And such remarks have alarmed many consumer advocates.
"The outcome of this presidential race is deeply disturbing to those of us who work to protect our environment and advance a healthy and just society," said Elizabeth Thompson, president of EDF Action – a lobbying arm of the NGO Environmental Defense Fund.
But Andy Igrejas, director of NGO Safer Chemicals Healthy Families (SCHF), told Chemical Watch it's important to note the range of rhetoric employed during the Trump campaign on the EPA's role.
At one extreme was disbanding the agency entirely, said Mr Igrejas. More recently, however, the emphasis has been on rebalancing the EPA's focus from climate concerns to issues Mr Trump regards as being more core to EPA’s original purpose, like cleaning up water and air pollution. And TSCA, said Mr Igrejas, could well fit into that latter formulation.
"I don't see there's any repudiation of this issue" as a result of the election, he added.
If there were a "general hostility" towards the EPA, then that would portend poorly, he continued. But if the new administration shifts the agency's focus to health and safety issues that could mean the law enjoys support.
David Levine, co-founder and CEO American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), told Chemical Watch if there were to be a dismantling of regulations, or an attempt made to limit the EPA's effectiveness, that would have an impact on TSCA.
But if that happens, said Mr Levine, you'll see an uptick of work by states. And he pointed out that it was this very state-driven "patch-work" approach that drove the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and other industry groups to the negotiating table to reform TSCA in the first place.
"If the EPA is undermined in a way where it can't proceed on chemical assessments, it does leave states the ability to step in and regulate chemicals, which would recreate what some companies and the ACC consider a problem."
Delays in implementation?
One certainty of Mr Trump's presidency, however, is that there will be big changes at EPA, said Mr Karakitsos.
Speaking at the Chemical Watch regulatory summit last month, EDF's Richard Denison pointed out that any transition in leadership and staff at the EPA – even friendly ones – "often necessarily result in some delays."
But Mr Karakitsos said he thinks it's positive that the existing administration is aiming to issue four proposed framework rules and to name the first ten priority substances by December.
"It's good to have people who worked with Congress and who understood the Congressional intent" of the law developing these first majors actions, he said.
"You don't want to jam a new administration in and make them start from scratch on these framework rules."
"I think this administration and EPA will have a foundation built," he added, by the time Mr Trump appoints new leadership in the EPA.
But the EPW spokesperson said the change in administration "brings to light the importance of nominating an experienced individual to be EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention."
Another consideration, as raised by Dr Denison last month, is that it is "critical" the EPA sticks to its intended schedule by proposing the law's major framework rules in the December to January timeframe. If the EPA fails to stick with that, he said, "it's very hard to see how the statutory deadlines of June 2017 are going to be met."
For its part, the EDF will be pushing for the agency to stay on track, said Dr Denison. "A terrible signal would be sent by having the very first major things that EPA is to do under this new law slip beyond that."
Mr Igrejas agreed that SCHF will be closely monitoring the EPA's adherence to statutory deadlines. If the agency begins missing these, he said the NGO will weigh whether it would be productive to enforce the deadlines with citizen suits.
"We'll make that decision if and when it comes to that," he said.
https://chemicalwatch.com/50981/senator-inhofe-confident-in-trump-administration-to-implement-tsca

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OSHA Weighs in on EPA Proposed Rule Governing the Use of New Chemical Substances

Nov 14, 2016 | Mondaq

By Brent I. Clark, Kay R. Bonza, and Craig B. Simonsen

Dr. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), recently weighed in in favor of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) rulemaking concerning the Significant New Uses of Chemical Substances: Updates to the Hazard Communication Program and Regulatory Framework, Minor Amendments to Reporting Requirements for Premanufacture Notices. 81 Fed. Reg. 49598 (July 28, 2016).
We had blogged previously about the passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (Chemical Safety Act). In signing the Bill on June 22, 2016, President Obama indicated that "The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century will make it easier for the EPA to review chemicals already on the market, as well as the new chemicals our scientists and our businesses design."
EPA's regulations establishing workplace restrictions on the use of new chemicals had not previously considered existing OSHA controls. EPA subsequently proposed changes to its regulations governing significant new uses of chemical substances under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to align these regulations with revisions to the OSHA Hazard Communications Standard (HCS), the OSHA Respiratory Protection Standard, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) respirator certification requirements pertaining to respiratory protection of workers from exposure to chemicals. EPA's proposed changes that reference OSHA regulations include: (1) a requirement that persons subject to significant new use rules (SNURs) use engineering and administrative controls to protect workers before resorting to use of personal protective equipment, similar to OSHA's regulation at 29 C.F.R. § 1910.134(a)(1); (2) revisions to require a written hazard communication program that includes criteria for classifying chemical hazards in each workplace, similar to OSHA's regulation at 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1200; and (3) a requirement that any safety data sheet developed to comply with OSHA or other requirements be submitted as part of the reporting requirements under the TSCA.
Assistant Secretary Michaels commented on the record in support of the EPA's proposed revision to 40 C.F.R. § 721.63, Protection in the Workplace, to align with the OSHA's Respiratory Protection Standard, at 29 C.F.R. § 1910.134(a)(1)). "OSHA supports a requirement for those subject to applicable significant new use rules (SNURs) to determine and use appropriate exposure controls per the hierarchy of controls to ensure worker protection." With regard to the respiratory protection requirements in 40 C.F.R. § 721.63, Assistant Secretary Michaels commented that "most manufacturers and processors are already subject to and complying with the most updated NIOSH regulation for testing and certifying respirators. This proposed change also achieves compliance with 29 C.F.R. § 1910.34(d)(1)(ii), OSHA's requirement that employers select NIOSH-certified respirators for the protection of workers should respirators be necessary." Finally, Michaels commented that the EPA's effort to align the classification of chemical hazards with the United Nations' Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals, adopted by OSHA in 2012, provides "a common and coherent approach to classifying chemicals based on their hazardous properties" and will "reduce duplication in effort and burden for those subject to these requirements."
Those in the chemical manufacturing and processing, and petroleum and coal manufacturing industries may wish to keep an eye out to see if EPA's proposed amendments are adopted, as the new rule may ease the regulatory burden of complying with parallel EPA and OSHA regulations.
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/544058/Chemicals/OSHA+Weighs+In+on+EPA+Proposed+Rule+Governing+the+Use+of+New+Chemical+Substances

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Slashed Budgets and Toxic Chemicals: Planning for Environmental Carnage Under Donald Trump’s EPA

Nov 14, 2016 | The Intercept

By Sharon Lerner

Environmentalists who were hoping that somehow a Donald Trump presidency wouldn’t be as catastrophic as they feared had those hopes dashed on Friday, when the president-elect announced Myron Ebell as his choice to oversee the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell, head of both the right wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, has spent most of his career tossing out industry-funded nonsense bombs about climate change.
A non-scientist whose funders have included ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and coal giant Murray Energy Corporation, Ebell has been a consistent taunter of both scientists and environmentalists. As a talking head on TV news, he has for years offered false balance on climate change in the form of views so far outside of the mainstream as to be downright bizarre. For Ebell, Al Gore is “an extremist” who “lives in a fantasy world,” the Pope’s encyclical on climate change is “diatribe against modern industrial civilization,” and current climate patterns indicate an imminent ice age rather than a warming planet.
Since we were already falling short of our climate goalsbefore the election, and since the potential consequences of inaction may be irreversible, Ebell’s leadership in this realm seems to pose the gravest danger. He has already given much thought to how to get out of the Paris Agreement, the global treaty the U.S. signed in September, which is aimed at holding the increase in global temperature rise below two degrees.
There are several ways a Trump administration could do so. While Secretary of State John Kerry is scrambling to get the treaty implemented before President Obama leaves office, Trump is already signaling that he may try to withdraw from the global agreement in his first year, a move that is within his power and could increase the likelihood that other countries would also shirk their obligations.
Also caught in Trump’s crosshairs is the Clean Power Plan, the rules limiting carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants, which his administration could simply fail to enforce. The administration could also resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline and expand drilling on public land.
But there is much more to the EPA than the protection of the climate. And Ebell also runs a pro-chemical industry front group from the website saferchemicalpolicy.org, where you can read about the “life-enhancing value of chemicals” and the absurd idea that man-made toxic chemicals couldn’t possibly cause cancer because the average human lifespan has increased since 1950.
Indeed, Ebell’s hostility seems to extend to all scientific fact and the entire cause of environmentalism, and he will have a range of opportunities to inflict harm on human health and the environment. Still, certain protections of the earth, water, and land will be harder for him to reverse than others.
Here is a brief overview of some of the damage Trump and Ebell can — and can’t — inflict while they control the EPA.
Surrendering to Industry on Rules
Among the most vulnerable of the EPA’s efforts are rules that industry has already attacked through the legal system and are now wending their way through the courts. In any of these suits, the EPA could simply stop defending their rules. Or, worse still, they could reissue them so that they are friendlier to industry and less protective of people and the environment. Some of the most consequential of these rules tied up in ongoing suits are:
Mercury and Air Toxics Standards: In 2013 the EPA issued a rule to limit the emissions of mercury, nickel, arsenic, and other toxins in air pollution around power plants. But several states and at least one coal company sued the EPA challenging the rule, which is in place while the parties fight in court. The new administration could pull the rule back, which would allow power plants not to comply with it moving forward. If it remains in place, the limit on emissions is expected to reduce developmental problems among children living near power plants as well as cancer, heart attacks, and respiratory illnesses in adults.
Waterways: The EPA is in the midst of litigation over the protection of thousands of waterways. The Waters of the United States Rule clarified that certain streams and wetlands are under federal jurisdiction, which would allow the EPA to prosecute people who pollute them using laws such as the Clean Water Act. But after the EPA issued the rule in May 2015, the pesticide, timber, and dairy industry joined forces with the Chambers of Commerce, real estate developers, mining companies and others to challenge it.
Ozone: When it issued a more protective standard for ozone in October 2015, the EPA noted that the noxious gas can cause chest pain, coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath even in healthy people. Weeks later, the coal company Murray Energy Corporation sued the EPA over the rule, calling it “job killing.” Coal production — along with industrial facilities and electric utilities —increases ground level ozone, which is particularly dangerous for people with asthma, children, and the elderly. If the proposed standard takes effect, it is to expected prevent an estimated 11,000 premature deaths.
Oil Refineries: In September 2015, the EPA issued a new rule that to tighten up the regulation of oil refineries. Scheduled to take effect next year, it will require refineries to monitor their emission of airborne chemicals such as the carcinogen benzene. More than six million residents of fenceline communities around these plants, who are disproportionately low-income and people of color, will benefit.
Slashing Budgets
While it’s illegal to fire civil servants for political reasons, a Trump administration could slash budgets for entire programs affecting the environment both within and outside the EPA. Though much of this would require Congressional action, a Republican-dominated Congress working with Ebell could put the funding of certain efforts on the chopping block. Here are a few that have already come under attack:
The Integrated Risk Information System: The chemical industry often rails against this program, which pulls together the toxicity information on chemicals and reports on the health hazards they pose. These findings not only help shape EPA’s policy but are often referenced in state and international laws.
International Agency for Research on Cancer: This branch of the World Health Organization, which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, has become a target for industry groups and conservative lawmakers. IARC has also, not coincidentally, pointed to the carcinogenicity of several blockbuster products, including glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.
Safer Choice: This EPA program provides a label certifying that companies have invested in testing their products to make sure they meet rigorous safety standards and searches for alternatives to toxic chemicals. While some retailers have embraced the program, the American Chemistry Council has waged a fierce campaign that has tried to weaken it.
Shelving Longterm Efforts
Particularly frustrating may be the demise of several of the EPA’s long-term efforts, some of which stretch back for more than a decade, that could be squelched just as they near completion.
Perfluorinated chemicals: In recent months, the EPA has been working on developing analytical methods to measure the amount of perfluorinated chemicals such as PFOA and PFOS in groundwater, soil, and sludge. The cleanup of these toxins, some of which have seeped from firefighting foam used on military bases into nearby ground and drinking water, has become a recent focus of EPA, according to a source within the agency. “It’s very apparent that EPA had to do something,” he told me, adding: “Or at least it was last week.”
Lead: The danger lead poses to children has been well known for decades. And in the wake of the Flint, Michigan, disaster, the EPA has made lead a priority. The agency is in the process of eliminating the leaded fuel used by piston jet planes, which is the biggest source of lead in the air. And it recently announced over 100 enforcement actions aimed at protecting the public from lead exposure. “I feel like we were finally on the cusp of making some headway on lead,” said Eve Gartner, a staff attorney at Earthjustice.
Organophosphate pesticides: The EPA is very close to essentially banning the use of chlorpyrifos, a widely used organophosphate pesticide that is linked to a range of neurodevelopmental problems in children. And because the EPA recently decided to evaluate entire classes of pesticides together, it seemed likely that other organophosphates that cause neurological harm would also be restricted. But that progress may grind to a halt. Dow Chemical, which makes chlorpyrifos, has friends in the new administration, including Dow lobbyist Mike McKenna and Ebell himself, whose think tank received funding from the company.
Beyond Trump’s Reach, At Least for Now
Although candidate Trump threatened to do away with the EPA altogether, he has since walked back that promise, saying that he’s interested in protecting clean air and water. It seems likely that the EPA will continue to exist, at least in name. But even if the Republicans abolished the EPA, it would be more difficult to repeal all the environmental statutes the agency exists to enforce.
Federal Statutes: These laws, which include the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Superfund law, are designed to stand up to rogue leaders. The Clean Air Act, for instance, clearly lists carbon pollution as a danger and requires EPA to take action, and may thus be an important tool in forcing the administration to limit carbon emissions. And while a gutted EPA will likely neglect the day-to-day work of enforcing the laws, the agency can’t disregard them altogether. “It’s not up to the president or EPA whether to take action,” said David Goldston, director of government affairs at NRDC. “They have to address it. If they don’t, they get sued, and the court imposes restrictions.”
Toxic Substances Control Act: Similarly, the agency will be obligated to take some actions set by the recently passed Toxic Substances Control Act. It has no choice, for instance, but to evaluate a certain number of chemicals, though several provisions in the law could be easily abused. One would allow the agency to shield some chemicals from testing by designating them “low priority.” And once chemicals are declared safe by the federal agency, states won’t be allowed to independently regulate them.
Emergency response: The administration will also have to respond to emergencies. “Let’s say we have another BP spill, Trump isn’t going to be able to wake up and ignore it,” said Lisa Garcia, vice president for litigation at Earthjustice. “There will be a legal obligation for someone to go in and try to shut it down and clean it up.”
Although agency rules and guidelines and advisories are easier to reverse than federal law, even those would be difficult and time-consuming to undo. “Everyone hates the bureaucracy but it could be our friend in the next few years,” said Garcia. “There are laws and processes and procedures and you need scientific data and backup in order to do these things. To roll it back takes time.”
Some environmentalists seem to be taking comfort in the fact that the EPA has already survived an internal attack. In 1981, Reagan tasked Anne Gorsuch Burfordwith essentially dismantling the agency from within. But Burford went too far with her budget cutting and downsizing and less than two years after she took the post was forced to resign.
Ironically, the chemical industry may help force the incoming administration to do its job, according to Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center. “Unless EPA delivers meaningful and timely reductions in public exposure to toxic chemicals, then public confidence in the chemical industry will never be restored as they desire. That will mean continued unchecked consumer campaigns and state policy initiatives that require retailers and consumer product manufacturers to end their use of dangerous chemicals,” said Belliveau. “Myron Ebell could be the chemical industry’s worst nightmare in disguise.”
Environmentalists I spoke with agree that public pressure will play a critical role in forcing the EPA to do its job. “If an assault is met with apathy, we’re not going to be as able to stop it,” said Goldston, who predicts that Trump will face a backlash if he goes after environmental safeguards, much as Reagan and George W. Bush did before him.
David Rosner, a historian of public health at Columbia University, reaches even further back for hope that an Ebell-led EPA might not be as destructive as it could be. “Until 1970, we had no federal involvement in environmental protection. This is all very new the idea that the EPA can effect and have any kind of change on the county and world,” said Rosner. “I take solace in the idea that we survived until then.”
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/slashed-budgets-and-toxic-chemicals-planning-for-environmental-carnage-under-donald-trumps-epa/

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EPA Moves to Improve Predictability of ToxCast Chemical Testing Methods

Nov 14, 2016 | Inside EPA

By Maria Hegstad

EPA scientists have started to incorporate metabolism in the agency's collection of high throughput in vitro assays known as ToxCast, a move that addresses a concern with alternative, non-animal toxicology testing by increasing information about a chemical's toxicity as it processed by the body, agency officials say.
The progress comes as the agency faces further pressures to advance its abilities and uses of non-animal testing methods, including language in the recently overhauled Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which directs EPA to use non-vertebrate testing if feasible when it issues new test orders for chemicals and to craft a strategy for using non-animal testing in its decision-making.
Both the new TSCA language and language included in European cosmetics law several years ago are a "little nudge" toward using non-animal testing methods, Tina Bahadori, national program director of EPA's Chemical Safety for Sustainability research program, told a National Academy of Sciences committee Sept. 26.
The sheer number of chemicals that EPA has been asked to address is also a driver, she said. "The bottom line is that in the space of 100,000 chemicals, is it not possible to address chemicals" with animal tests, she said.
Rusty Thomas, director of EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT), said during a recent interview that the concept of a non-animal testing strategy is still new and under discussion at the agency. "The more relevant we can make these assays, the more robust we can make them" to address the agency's new authorities, he said.
The issue of non-animal tests lacking metabolic competence, or an understanding of a chemical's toxicity as it undergoes the metabolic break down process is not new, but it is complicated. Thomas announced last December his staff would be working to "retrofit all [ToxCast] assays with metabolic competence" over the next two years.
"One of the reasons we're investing in this [is because] one of the barriers and challenges laid at screening of chemicals in high throughput is the lack of potential in vivo relevance," Thomas explained in the interview. Responding to that "fair criticism, we've been investing in the past year and a half to tackle that challenge head on," Thomas added, describing a multi-pronged approach with both internal work and an ongoing challenge program for external researchers to develop methods to address the issue. "We don't believe we have all the answers and it will take more than one solution to this challenge."
Thomas explained why adding metabolic competency to the ToxCast assays is important. "When we're exposed to chemicals, we're not just exposed to the parent chemical," he said. As the body metabolizes that parent chemical, it is possible for it to "be bioactivated to a more toxic form," such as something that kills cells or is an endocrine disruptor.
Metabolism "can also lead to detoxification -- if the parent is toxic, the liver can break it down into a less toxic form and excrete them. Our bodies are usually pretty good at that. In other cases, there is no effect" when metabolized, Thomas said. "What EPA is concerned about, because we want to err on the side of caution, we want to be aware of chemicals that can be bioactivated."
Two Approaches
EPA scientists have pursued two approaches in their efforts to add metabolism to the more than 700 in vitro assays included in ToxCast: extracellular and intracellular. They have made the most progress with the extracellular approach to date, Danica DeGroot, an NCCT toxicologist, said during a recent interview. She explained that with the extracellular approach, a liver homogenate, or blob of processed human liver cells, is "attached to a plastic support and lowered into the well plate" that ToxCast assays are performed in. As a result, the approach is known as "liver on a stick," she says.
One benefit of this approach is that it can be used with both cell-free and cell-based assays, DeGroot explains. The collection of ToxCast assays includes both types of assay.
"An example of a cell-free assay is an assay that is protein based and does not include an entire cell," an agency spokeswoman says.
By contrast, the intracellular approach can only be used with cell-based assays, so it cannot be used in all ToxCast assays. But, it is more flexible, said Steve Simmons, a toxicologist within NCCT who leads the lab working on the metabolism project.
In contrast to the liver on a stick, "the intracellular approach directly injects metabolism-related liver enzymes into cells before they are placed on the chemical well plate for screening," an EPA spokeswoman explains.
With this approach, the aim is to "introduce an enzyme to mimic metabolism in a particular tissue. It could mimic the kidney or the lung," DeGroot said. "We can only retrofit about half of the toxcast assays because you need the full cell."
While metabolism largely occurs within the liver, metabolism also occurs in other organs, such as the lungs and skin. With the intracellular approach, "where the actual metabolites are made inside the cell . . . we can mimic other parts of the body," Simmons said. This has benefits for different agency offices, who may be more or less interested in metabolic processes in certain organs depending on the exposure pathways most relevant to their programs. For example, Simmons said, the water office "is interested in the skin and liver. But the air office, they'd be interested in the lung. Metabolizing genes are expressed in the lung differently than the liver."
Adding to the flexibility of the intracellular approach, it can be used to predict metabolic responses from animals as well as humans. This ability could help to bridge in vivo information from animal toxicology studies and human in vitro data, or it could help EPA perform ecological risk assessments, also part of its mandate.
"One of the big differences between species is metabolism for specific species," Simmons said, adding that it is possible to create metabolic responses mimicking that of many animals, depending on the information available about the species' biology. "Human, mouse and rat liver are pretty easy," he said, naming the species with the best understood metabolism. Mice and rats are also traditionally the most common types of animals used in toxicology studies.
The team is preparing to write a pair of papers for publication in peer-reviewed journal articles describing their approaches, starting with the extracellular approach, since it is a little farther along, DeGroot said. They intend to use the first paper to describe how the liver on a stick approach works using one of the ToxCast assays as an example.
For the second paper, the goal is to "look at effects of metabolism to chemicals that interact with an estrogen-receptor parent chemical," DeGroot said.
Grant Program
Meanwhile, the agency's external challenge grant program to develop metabolic competence for the ToxCast assays continues. EPA and other federal agencies launched the Transform Tox Testing Challenge: Innovating for Metabolism last January, offering up to $1 million in total award money to scientists and engineers who could improve high through put screening assays by fully incorporating chemical metabolism. The agency in May awarded 10 semifinalists prizes of $10,000 each and an invitation to continue to the second of three stages.
For the second stage, participants are asked to craft a prototype to demonstrate the proposed idea, with up to five participants being awarded up to $100,000 each, and one selected as a finalist.
In the third stage, the finalist would have to develop "a commercially viable method or technology for EPA and its partners to demonstrate and test. Based on this testing one participant may be awarded up to $400,000 for delivery of a method or device that will result in technologies that can provide metabolic competence to HTS assays," EPA says. The various cash awards combine to the $1 million total awards funding.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-moves-improve-predictability-toxcast-chemical-testing-methods

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Metals Sector, Advocates Split on EPA San Francisco Bay Selenium Criteria

Nov 14, 2016 | Inside EPA

By Bridget DiCosmo

The metals industry is criticizing EPA's revised numeric water quality criteria for selenium in California's San Francisco Bay and Delta, saying the values are overly strict and would result in a "serious misallocation of resources," while environmentalists are urging the agency to tighten aspects of the criteria to better protect some species.
The competing positions are outlined in comments filed recently on the criteria ahead of an Oct. 28 deadline for public input, and indicate the challenges ahead for EPA as it weighs how to proceed.
EPA adopts risk-based water quality criteria under the CWA that sets a safe concentration level for contaminants in water to protect human health and aquatic life. States then craft their own enforceable water quality standards and other regulatory limits based on the criteria, though regulators can, with the agency's eventual approval, modify the criteria or adopt other measures using scientifically defensible methods.
EPA in July issued a proposed rule to revise the current Clean Water Act selenium site-specific water quality criteria applicable to the salt and estuarine waters of the San Francisco Bay/Delta.
The agency says the action is necessary to "ensure that the criteria are set at levels that protect aquatic life and aquatic-dependent wildlife, including federally listed threatened and endangered species such as green sturgeon, Chinook Salmon, steelhead trout, delta smelt, and the California Ridgway's rail."
EPA is proposing selenium criteria in fish tissue as follows: a "whole body criterion" of 8.5 micrograms per gram (ug/g) dry weight (dw), and a muscle criterion of 11.3 ug/g dw, and clam tissue of 15 ug/g dw.
To facilitate "monitoring and regulation of pollutant discharges," EPA is also proposing dissolved and particulate water column selenium criteria of 0.2 μg/L and 1 μg/g, respectively, which are designed to ensure the tissue criteria are met, the agency says in a fact sheet.
The agency's criteria for the Bay/ Delta follows a June 30 final nationally applicable criteria for selenium that tightens the egg-ovary and whole-body tissue values but uses a slightly less stringent measurement for standing water, compared to the agency's 2015 draft.
The final criterion includes an egg-ovary value of 15.1 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) of bodyweight, a whole-body fish-tissue value of 8.5 mg/kg and a muscle measurement of 11.3 mg/kg. The final water column values are 1.5 micrograms per liter (ug/L) for lentic aquatic systems, or standing water, and 3.1 ug/l for lotic, or flowing, waters.
"EPA recommends that when implementing the criterion, the fish tissue elements take precedence over the water column elements, except in certain circumstances," the criterion says. These circumstances include when fish have been extirpated or where physical habitat and/or flow regime cannot sustain fish populations, or in waters with new discharges of selenium where steady state has not been achieved between water and fish tissue at the site, the agency says.
Resources 'Misallocation'
In Oct. 28 comments on the draft Bay/ Delta criteria, The North American Metals Council-Selenium Work Group says, "We are concerned that the low water criteria concentrations will result in a serious misallocation of resources, thereby reducing rather than enhancing the region's ability to address environmental problems in the Bay and Delta."
Specifically, the group "has concerns about the draft criteria claiming that all elements of the draft selenium criteria for the San Fransisco Bay and Delta are equally protective." The group notes that EPA's approach in the Bay/ Delta criteria contradicts is approach in the final national criteria, where the agency recognizes a "tiered" approach in applying the water values, specifying that the fish-tissue values take precedence over the water column numbers.
"This is scientifically the most valid way to prioritize the criteria because the tissue values are the values related directly to toxicity effects in the organism," the comments say, whereas industry argues that the waterborne selenium values and those used to derive the clam criterion are based on modeling from effects observed in fish and "should be tiered appropriately."
Industry also objects to the implementation of the clam or particulate selenium regulatory values, saying there is no precedent for such values, given that they were not included in the national criteria. "The fact that particulate selenium in water, or tissue concentrations of selenium in prey, were not considered important in national criteria draws into question the inclusion of these elements and importance in the present criteria for the San Francisco Bay and Delta."
The industry group says that while it recognizes that selenium concentrations in water and prey might be useful indicators of conditions in the Bay/ Delta, they are inappropriate as criteria of equal status as the fish tissue criterion.
Environmentalists' Comments
Environmental groups, meanwhile, are urging the agency to tighten various provisions of the draft criteria for the Bay/ Delta, for example suggesting in comments that EPA should consider a more stringent fish tissue criteria to protect the green sturgeon, given that it is considered the most sensitive species in the North Bay/ Delta.
"Scientific literature suggests the need for a lower fish tissue criteria, compared to that presented in the Proposed Rule, to protect the green sturgeon, which is considered the most Se sensitive species in the North Bay-Delta," environmental groups, including San Francisco Baykeeper, Our Children's Earth Foundation, Center for Biological Diversity, and others say in Oct. 28 comments.
"However, under the presumption the fish tissue criteria of the Proposed Rule is maintained, we strongly encourage retention of the proposed clam (or prey) criteria, which serves as a defensible and practical monitoring parameter to detect likely exceedances of the fish tissue criteria in the most sensitive bottom-feeding species," the comments say.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/metals-sector-advocates-split-epa-san-francisco-bay-selenium-criteria

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Energy News

D.C. Circuit May be Bulwark Against Enviro Rule Changes

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

By Amanda Reilly

A panel of judges in Washington, D.C., that leans liberal could give environmental advocates one bright spot in the next four years under a Trump administration that has pledged to undo a host of Obama administration regulations.
President Obama is leaving the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit with a 7-4 liberal tilt among its roster of active judges. That figure includes Chief Judge Merrick Garland, who has recused himself from cases while his nomination to the Supreme Court is pending.
Even though all eyes have been on the vacancy in the Supreme Court, the high court justices typically choose to take up only a small percentage of cases. That makes the D.C. appellate court, which has exclusive jurisdiction over many environmental matters, especially important for the future of regulation no matter who fills the empty Supreme Court seat, legal experts said in the wake of the election.
"The courts are far better than they were a decade ago," said David Bookbinder, a consultant who formerly served as chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club. "This is actually going to be an easier situation."
When the George W. Bush administration left office, the D.C. Circuit was made up of six judges appointed by Republican presidents and three judges appointed by Democrats. Two seats were vacant.
Since then, Judges Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle, both appointees of President Reagan, have moved into senior status, hearing cases on a less frequent basis.
During the past eight years, President Obama successfully appointed four liberal-leaning judges to the court: Judges Sri Srinivasan, Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins.
"One of President Obama's legacies is that he left that court markedly different than the way he found it," said Brianne Gorod, chief counsel at the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center.
It's widely recognized that the D.C. Circuit occupies a special place among federal appellate courts when it comes to administrative law.
"As a practical matter, the D.C. Circuit is something of a resident manager, and the Supreme Court an absentee landlord," the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February, once said.
In general, the D.C. Circuit hears many environmental cases because they involve national rules in which the defendant is typically U.S. EPA or another federal agency.
"Under the Clean Air Act, most of the big national EPA rules get litigated there. They have to be litigated in the D.C. Circuit," said David Baron, managing attorney at Earthjustice. "And since the Supreme Court takes only a tiny number of cases every year, the D.C. Circuit is usually the court of last resort on matters under the Clean Air Act, and some other environmental statutes, too."
Along with Clean Air Act rules, the D.C. Circuit exclusively reviews some federal actions brought under other environmental statutes, including the nation's hazardous waste law, the Endangered Species Act, the Oil Pollution Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act. In other instances, petitioners can choose to file challenges in the D.C. Circuit.
"It's almost as though Congress long ago said, 'You be the expert court that deals with these issues because they're so complicated legally,'" said Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland's Environmental Law Program.
The highest-profile environmental case that is currently pending at the D.C. Circuit is a challenge to the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. In a rare move, the court heard arguments in the case en banc, or in front of a panel of 10 judges. A decision is expected early next year.
Other cases pending in the D.C. Circuit involve EPA's new ozone standard, the agency's methane restrictions for oil and gas producers, the renewable fuel standard, hazardous waste regulations, gray wolf protections under the Endangered Species Act, challenges to LNG export projects and the Dakota Access pipeline.
To be sure, D.C. Circuit judges don't always vote along party lines.
"The environmental statutes we litigate are generally pretty strong," Baron said. "Regardless of who the judges are, we very often have a solid basis going into the court to argue against weakening of protections and to argue for strong protections in many cases."
Numbers vary from year to year, but the Supreme Court typically grants around 70 cases a year, or about 1 percent of the petitions it receives for writ of certiorari.
Even with a conservative to replace the late Scalia on the court, justices will still be picky about the cases that they choose to hear, predicted Rena Steinzor, past president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor of law at the University of Maryland.
"They still look the cases over very carefully and only take ones where there's a conflict of the circuits, or they're concerned about the way the lower court ruled," said Steinzor, who has testified in Congress in support of regulations. "I think the D.C. Circuit will be even more important — but it's already pretty important."
Among D.C. Circuit judges, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President George W. Bush, has a "pretty good track record" of writing dissents that signaled to Scalia that the high court should hear a case, Percival said.
But even with a "replacement Scalia," it's unsafe to assume that the high court would merely rule 5-4 against all environmental regulations for which it agrees to hear challenges.
Percival pointed to the 6-2 decision in which the high court upheld EPA's air pollution transport rule — which in turn overruled a D.C. Circuit decision issued before President Obama appointed his judges to the court.
"You still have the possibility of Justice [Anthony] Kennedy or Chief Justice [John] Roberts joining the justices that are more favorably inclined to environmental regulation," Percival said.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045711

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Can Trump Deliver on Immense Energy, Climate Promises?

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

By Robin Bravender

President-elect Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to topple just about every major energy and environment policy enacted in the past eight years.
From torpedoing the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan and international climate deal to expanding oil and gas development and overhauling the regulatory system, the incoming administration has big promises to keep.
But while massive change is expected, Trump will face limits on carrying out his plans.
Even with two friendly chambers of Congress, passing major energy legislation is time-consuming and politically daunting. Writing new regulations is a bureaucratic slog, and those are likely to face protracted legal battles. Trump might also face hurdles unraveling some Obama rules that are already on the books and trying to roll back some executive moves, such as designations of national monuments.
"We know even when presidents win a decisive victory and have majorities in their party in Congress, they don't get everything they want in that first two-year window," said Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. He pointed to President Obama's failure to usher through climate legislation despite Democratic-led chambers of Congress.
"We've gone through now an extended period where, for the most part, new environmental legislation has not been adopted," Rabe said, despite White House attempts. "This is not going to be an exception, and we may see a very aggressive executive effort, ... but it's really hard to know over the course of a two- or four-year window what can be accomplished, even through purely executive action."
Energy and environmental experts also warn that the Trump administration could overreach and spark a public opinion backlash if it doesn't tread carefully on its regulatory rollbacks.
"EPA has extremely powerful statutory responsibilities, and it isn't as though the administration can get up one morning and decide not to follow them," said William Reilly, who led U.S. EPA in the George H.W. Bush administration and who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.
If the Trump administration does take a major shift on environmental issues, "does that really trigger public reaction, public concern?" Rabe said, noting that crises like the Flint, Mich., water problems and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can crop up at any time. "Would a Trump administration overplay its hand and go too far?"
The incoming administration has said it's committed to "conserving our wonderful natural resources and beautiful natural habitats," while simultaneously promoting energy production.
"America's environmental agenda will be guided by true specialists in conservation, not those with radical political agendas," the transition team said.
Here's a look at Trump's big plans on a range of energy and environmental issues, and some of the hurdles he might face:
Clean Power Plan on chopping block
The Obama administration's carbon rules for power plants are in dire straits.
Trump has pledged to "scrap" the Clean Power Plan. He's expected to take action quickly to try to unravel the rule, although it won't be instantaneous.
The federal courts could strike down the rule in pending lawsuits. Even if it's upheld in court, Trump's EPA could go through a lengthy formal rulemaking with public notice and comment to rescind the rule, and the administration would have to give an explanation for reversing course.
A faster way to ax the Clean Power Plan could be with legislation from the Republican-controlled Congress (Greenwire, Nov. 9).
The Trump administration could also scuttle EPA plans to regulate emissions of methane — an especially potent greenhouse gas — from existing oil and gas operations.
WOTUS in hot water
The odds of survival for the Obama administration's contentious Clean Water Rule, known as the Waters of the U.S. rule, aren't good.
"I would submit that the Clean Water Rule is dead," said Brooks Smith, an attorney with Troutman Sanders who is representing Murray Energy Corp. in the ongoing challenges against the rule.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers from implementing the rule, which redefines which streams and wetlands get automatic Clean Water Act protection.
There's a good chance the court will vacate the rule and send the agencies back to the drawing board. But if the 6th Circuit does uphold the regulation, a Trump EPA could eventually repeal the rule, which would require a public notice and comment period. It could also issue a replacement rule to clarify the definition of "waters of the United States" that does not include the controversial changes in the Obama rule.
Congress could also gut the regulation with a bill to repeal it or by defunding the rule through appropriations.
The repeal process could begin before the litigation ends, Smith added.
"This is too high a priority to let it pass," he said.
Inheriting Obama's lawsuits
Ongoing litigation over the Clean Power Plan, WOTUS and other Obama regulations isn't going to go away when the Trump administration takes office.
But what happens to those lawsuits depends on what Trump decides to do with the rules at issue and where in the legal process the cases stand.
"In my experience, it is unusual for a new administration to take a 180-degree turnaround from a position that's already been briefed and argued," said David Baron, managing attorney at Earthjustice.
For rules that the Trump administration is considering eliminating, like the Clean Power Plan, the Justice Department and other parties may ask the courts for delays in litigation.
Getting rid of regulations that are already finalized, however, will require a formal rulemaking — a long process that itself would be met with lawsuits (Greenwire, Nov. 11).
In some ongoing cases, the Trump administration could simply decide not to appeal what it sees as favorable court decisions, similar to the situation that occurred when the Obama administration came into office and didn't appeal a decision eliminating President George W. Bush's air pollution transport rule and mercury standards.
But even in instances where Trump's DOJ decides to stop defending a rule, environmental groups, industry entities or states that have intervened could potentially carry on the suit.
Vow to 'cancel' climate deal
Trump has pledged to "cancel" last year's landmark international climate deal reached in Paris.
He could opt to drop out of the overall climate convention that set the framework for Obama administration pledges on greenhouse gas cuts — although direct withdrawal from the Paris deal is a four-year process.
Trump's transition team and Republican lawmakers argue that leaving the agreement will be simple because it hasn't been ratified by the Senate (ClimateWire, Nov. 10).
Also threatened: a global aviation industry agreement to implement a market-based mechanism to curb emissions from the commercial sector and a nearly 200-country agreement to limit heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
Trump could pause rulemaking efforts related to endangerment findings that obligate EPA to limit emissions from aircraft, and GOP victories in the Senate position the chamber to block the landmark agreement on HFCs and target proposed rules for phasing out HFC-containing refrigerants.
Mission Innovation, an agreement committing 20 nations to double their clean energy investments, is already behind schedule in the United States due to Republican opposition and is unlikely to gain steam. Some experts also expect the Trump administration is unlikely to contribute the $2.5 billion the government still owes to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which is allocated to adaptation.
'Slow-walk' air rules
The incoming Trump administration will have limited leeway to scotch existing regulations aimed at improving air quality.
There's probably no going back, for example, from EPA's rule to limit mercury from power plants, one of the most expensive rules ever issued by the agency. As of April, almost all coal-fired plants were in compliance, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Still, the new administration will have more latitude to drag out implementation of more recent regulations — and to simply avoid offering new ones.
In the first category, industry groups are eager to delay the process for ensuring compliance with the tighter ozone standard put in place last fall.
EPA is further along in implementation of its more stringent 2012 annual air quality threshold for fine particles, but here, too, it could "slow-walk" the compliance process, said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. EPA could also take its time with a fresh review of particulate matter standards now in its early stages, Schaeffer said.
Still awaiting an agency decision: whether to proceed with a rulemaking that would impose a 90 percent cut in the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions limit for heavy-duty truck engines. The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which covers much of the Los Angeles area, had petitioned for the change in June, partly on the grounds that a tighter NOx benchmark was essential for meeting the new ozone standard. Other state and local agencies have signed on.
Monuments, offshore oil and gas
Obama has unilaterally protected more land and water than any other president in U.S. history, creating or expanding 28 national monuments under the Antiquities Act. Environmental groups expect him to create even more before he leaves office.
If Trump wants to undo any of those monuments, he might run into trouble. The Antiquities Act does not expressly authorize a president to abolish existing monuments — and no president so far has tried. If Trump did so, he would likely face a legal battle.
But Congress can do it. It has abolished a dozen or so monuments in the past, usually because it did not find them nationally significant.
Trump faces a similar dynamic for offshore oil and gas leasing. The Obama administration will soon release a five-year leasing program; environmentalists have pushed for it to not include three proposed leases in the Arctic.
A Trump administration could scrap the plan and start over. But Obama has another option: to use an obscure provision of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act in an effort to permanently withdraw Arctic waters. Like the Antiquities Act, OCSLA does not specifically give presidents the ability to undo such a withdrawal (Greenwire, Sept. 27).
Energy on public lands, sage grouse
Trump has more wiggle room to reverse Obama's policies when it comes to energy development on public lands.
The Obama administration has emphasized the need for more renewable energy projects — and as Trump has said he supports an "everything" energy strategy, some of those efforts could continue. For example, a new rule from Interior establishing a competitive leasing process for renewable energy projects could be left untouched.
But Trump has also proposed expanding oil and gas development.
That could put the Obama administration's sage grouse plan in his sights. The 2015 plans from the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service made an area the size of Ohio off-limits to surface impacts, prompting a lawsuit from the oil and gas industry (Greenwire, May 12).
But it's unclear whether Trump can dismantle the plan without running into opposition and legal roadblocks.
The same goes for regulations that cover oil and gas drilling on public lands, such as one upcoming rule to limit methane released by oil and gas operations. A Trump administration would have to propose new rules, carry out public comment periods, then withstand likely legal challenges.
New 'regulatory regime' for coal
After deploring the so-called war on their industry, mining companies are ready for a major regulatory rollback.
"We're looking at executive actions that can be undone by new executive actions that can put us back to where we were before," National Mining Association President Hal Quinn said in an interview. "And then from there, we can move on and look at long-standing impediments to accessing our mineral endowment here in the U.S."
A Trump Interior secretary is expected to quickly rescind the current moratorium on coal leasing, ending a program review about royalties and climate change.
In-progress rulemakings, like self-bonding reform changing how coal companies can promise to pay for potential mine cleanup, could easily be put on the chopping block, and draft Superfund regulations on hardrock mining financial assurances, which EPA is court-ordered to publish next month, will likely undergo a fundamental rewrite.
Changes at the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and the Mine Safety and Health Administration could also undermine the final stream protection rule, overdue for publication. While a new rule would be required to strike new restrictions on coal mining near waterways, implementation would fall into unwelcoming hands.
West Virginia University law professor Patrick McGinley said Trump and a Republican Congress have a chance to create "a whole new regulatory regime for coal," but the problem remains competition from natural gas, which Trump also plans to expand. "I don't see any major jump in coal production in the near future, no matter what regulatory, legislative actions are taken by the new administration."
Renewables, targets for rule rollbacks
While vowing to roll back climate goals and open up public lands to more oil and gas development, Trump has been less clear about his plans for about wind and solar.
While campaigning in Iowa last year, Trump said he supported a wind production tax credit that phases out in 2020, and some industry leaders have said a new administration is unlikely to revise those tax incentives.
Changing or repealing the tax credit also would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, and that could prove difficult. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has said Trump would get a bill through Congress to scrap the wind production tax credit only "over my dead body."
Trump hasn't said he will attempt to repeal incentives for the solar industry that narrow to 10 percent by 2022, but analysts believe that could be on the table.
Analysts suggest a raft of regulations seen as hampering domestic fossil production could be rolled back using the Congressional Review Act (Greenwire, Nov. 9).
Kevin Book, an analyst at Washington, D.C.-based ClearView Energy Partners LLC, in a note to clients this week said targets for rollbacks could include any tightening of the Army Corps' Nationwide Permit 12, the stream protection rule, the Bureau of Land Management's venting and flaring rule, the administration's five-year plan for offshore oil and gas drilling, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement's well control rule.
'Midnight regulations'
Turning back Obama rules that aren't yet final — so-called midnight regulations — is certain to be a top priority of the incoming Trump administration.
It's standard fare for a new president on his first day in office to issue a stop-work order on pending rules by the prior administration, calling for them to be withdrawn and reviewed by new political appointees. President George W. Bush's administration sent out such a memorandumin 2001; the Obama White House did the same in 2009.
Also, Republicans have long wanted to pare down the regulatory state — a goal that could be achieved if Trump signs off on legislation. For example, this week, the House is set to vote on a bill that would allow multiple final rules issued by an administration to be overruled by one joint resolution of Congress.
Trump has his own ideas, as well. As part of his "Contract with the American Voter," the president-elect says that for every new regulation issued, two existing ones must be voided.
Also, on his transition team's website, Trump touts regulatory reform and says he will issue a "temporary moratorium" on new federal rules.
Slashing the federal workforce
Trump also has big plans for the roughly 2-million-strong federal workforce that keeps the government humming.
Also as part of his voter contract, the incoming president plans to institute a hiring freeze on all government employees in order to reduce the workforce's size. His top advisers, like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), are pushing to curb job protections for federal workers and battle with their unions.
Legislation targeting the federal workforce that likely wouldn't be signed into law by Obama could find a new lease on life under Trump. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has pushed a legislative package of several bills that would overhaul the federal government and its workforce.
Trump has also championed reform of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which left military veterans stuck with long wait times for health care. Retiring House Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), reportedly close to Trump's team, led work on a VA reform bill in 2014 that would make it easier to fire federal employees — a change that some worry could spread to other agencies, including EPA and the Energy and Interior departments (Greenwire, Aug. 4, 2014).
RFS, pesticides
The Trump administration will make early decisions about the federal renewable fuel standard, including whether to be more open to making fuel blenders — rather than refiners and importers — responsible for meeting the RFS volume requirements for ethanol and other renewables.
His administration will also decide whether to keep Obama administration Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's program of helping outfit gas stations with pumps for higher-ethanol fuels such as E15 and E85, a program at the secretary's sole discretion, officials say.
Groups with a stake in agriculture policy are also watching for the incoming Trump administration to reduce regulatory hurdles for pesticides and ease environmental requirements on farms.
In addition to overhauling rules, the Trump administration could simply opt to not enforce some policies it doesn't like, stakeholders said, an approach that could apply to a range of regulations like the Endangered Species Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.
Trump wouldn't need legislation, either, to make it easier to use pesticides on farms, or to use a wider array of them. EPA could interpret current standards in a way that leans toward wider use of farm chemicals. That's good news to farm groups that want more responses to chemical-resistant bugs and weeds but bad news to environmental groups worried about the effect on water supplies, wildlife and pollinators.
Trump's Agriculture Department will also craft rules for labeling of foods made from genetically engineered crops, which pit consumer groups against trade associations such as the Grocery Manufacturers Association. That could play out over the next year.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045707

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White House Rolls Out Global Renewable Energy Funding

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

By Hannah Hess and Christa Marshall

The White House and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz launched new actions to continue the global transition to zero- and low-carbon energy sources today, despite a gloomy outlook for climate action from the next administration.
At the United Nations climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, this morning, the United States announced it will be releasing a midcentury decarbonization plan later this week.
It also updated plans for Mission Innovation, a global initiative announced in Paris last year to double clean energy research over five years to fight climate change. The Netherlands and Finland announced they would be the 22nd and 23rd countries joining that effort.
On Wednesday, U.S. representatives are expected to participate in a panel discussion on decarbonization strategies, alongside representatives from Canada and Mexico. All three countries have committed to releasing their plans by the end of 2016.
Mariana Panuncio-Feldman, head of the World Wildlife Fund's delegation at the talks, said the road map "will be a powerful tool to help us visualize not just what a clean-energy-powered future could look like by midcentury, but also the best and quickest routes to get there."
Panuncio-Feldman said: "These long-term plans can unleash the innovation and investments not just of national governments, but also of the private sector, state and local governments, and local communities." She noted that many U.S. companies are already planning a low-carbon economy.
Environmentalists rocked by Donald Trump's victory last week have projected confidence that markets and business trends will support the continued transition to clean energy, even if the Republican president-elect follows through on pledges to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement (E&E Daily, Nov. 10).
Trump has not commented on Mission Innovation specifically, but he is not expected to support funding much of the initiative, considering its ties to President Obama's climate policies.
However, Trump has suggested broadly he might support increased R&D funding. While his comments were not fleshed out, they echo the views of some Republicans who support the idea of doubling basic energy research, despite rejecting much of the Obama administration's overall Mission Innovation plan.
"The federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia," Trump wrote before the election as part of a series of 20 science questions for ScienceDebate.org.
"Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous," he wrote.
Trump also called for "programs such as a viable space program and institutional research that serve as incubators to innovation and the advancement of science and engineering in a number of fields. We should also bring together stakeholders and examine what the priorities ought to be for the nation."
New commitments
Nearly a year after Obama and the leaders of 19 nations stood together in Paris to launch Mission Innovation, the administration released these new commitments:
A partnership between Morocco's energy ministry and the Department of Energy to host a solar decathlon competition in Africa in 2019. Morocco's Solar Decathlon Africa will be the first such competition on the continent.
A pledge from Mission Innovation countries for seven "challenges" in areas ranging from sustainable biofuels to carbon capture and sequestration. The challenges would "complement efforts already underway" in those areas around the world, according to DOE.
A pledge from the United States to host a workshop within a year to "assess barriers" and identify research opportunities to achieve near-zero emissions. DOE also plans to host four workshops — in conjunction with global scientists — in the next 18 months to boost energy research with storage, hydrogen, catalysis and solar energy.
An updated U.S. framework on Mission Innovation. It will focus on maximizing the impact of government energy research, rather than targeting new funding allocations. In February, the Obama administration outlined funding allocations, which Congress has largely rejected in favor of money for nuclear waste and other programs (E&E Daily, April 15).
A partnership between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State to identify clean energy entrepreneurs around the world and link them with investors.
A clean energy data science competition next year to help investors, business leaders and policymakers assess "market potential" of clean energy around the world through new mapping tools. The State Department, consultant Booz Allen Hamilton and tech education firm Galvanize Inc. are leading the competition.
A commitment of $125 million in financing from the Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC) for renewable energy projects in El Salvador and India. In El Salvador, $50 million will go toward a series of eight utility-scale solar projects. In India, $75 million will go toward a utility-scale solar project sponsored by ReNew Power Ventures Pvt. Ltd.
A $20 million distributed solar facility, known as the U.S.-India Clean Energy Finance program (USICEF), that will launch as part of a partnership between OPIC and India's government. The facility, expected to unlock up to $400 million in long-term debt financing, will fund early-stage project preparatory work.
An expansion of Power Africa, with Microsoft Corp., Acumen Fund and the United Nations Foundation joining its "Scaling Off-Grid Energy" challenge, which seeks to invest $36 million to empower entrepreneurs and investors to connect 20 million households in sub-Saharan Africa to clean and affordable electricity. Additionally, USAID announced $4 million in awards to eight household solar firms under the challenge.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045712

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Final Methane Rule Expected Soon

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire

By Brittany Patterson

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management is expected to release its final rule to curb methane waste from oil and gas wells on federal lands as early as this week, part of a suite of regulations the agency is sprinting to finish before the end of the Obama administration.
The rule, an update to existing regulations, would regulate the venting, flaring and leaking of methane gas from tens of thousands of wells on federal and tribal lands in the West.
The proposed rule, released in late January, set requirements for oil and gas operators to adopt best practices and technologies to limit the amount of natural gas that is released into the atmosphere or burned off, also known as flaring (ClimateWire, Jan. 25).
Venting, or releasing natural gas into the atmosphere, would be prohibited almost entirely.
Overall, the proposed rule set out to curb the amount of natural gas released both intentionally and unintentionally from oil and gas wells on federal public lands by about 50 percent. It also gives the agency more flexibility to raise the existing 12.5 percent royalty rate for onshore production, although no royalty hike is currently planned.
The main component of natural gas is the greenhouse gas methane, which is about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. BLM has a mandate to reduce the waste of public resources, including natural gas, and to get a fair return on taxpayer resources. The agency says the methane rule will increase royalty payments by up to $11 million annually, half into federal coffers and half to the states.
Enviros hope for a stronger final rule
Based on the deluge of comments the agency received, as well as language in U.S. EPA's methane rule finalized in May that targets emissions from new and heavily modified oil and gas operations, environmental groups are hoping the final BLM rule is stronger than the proposed in a few key areas.
For example, in what was a surprise move for many, EPA's New Source Performance Standards do not exempt low-producing wells or those that produce 15 barrels of oil equivalent a day. It also contains a requirement that leak detection and repair equipment used throughout a well's total life span will affect its economic viability.
The leak detection and repair stipulations are now more stringent than the proposed BLM rule. Joshua Mantell, carbon management campaign manager for the Wilderness Society, said that signals to him there is room for BLM's final rule to be stronger.
"This is the Obama administration's one chance to finalize rules on existing sources," he said. "It would be helpful for BLM and EPA to get on that same page. That would ensure cooperation between agencies by making sure the rules complement each other."
In public meetings hosted by the agency, environmental groups also asked BLM to up its well inspection schedule to be across the board and quarterly as opposed to linked to the number of leaks a well has on record (ClimateWire, March 2).
They suggested provisions written into the proposed rule, which would exempt well operators with fewer than 500 wells from having to use optical gas imaging to monitor for leaks, should be removed from the final rule. They also advocated that limits on flaring, which are already cut significantly under the proposed rule, should be strengthened. Finally, they said the proposed rule would require operators to create and submit a plan on how they plan to reduce natural gas waste.
Conservative lawmakers and many in the oil and gas industry have come out strongly against the rule.
The House's Interior-EPA appropriations bill included a provision that would block the rule and would prevent the agency from hiking royalty rates for oil, gas or coal (Greenwire, May 24).
Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for the Western Energy Alliance, said the oil and gas industry should be and already is heavily regulated, and the BLM methane rule goes beyond the agency's authority to reduce waste.
If they had stuck with that and just tightened up their regulation, that would be fine," she said. "But they went way beyond their authority, as this administration is want to do, and they are claiming Clean Air Act authority, which only EPA has."
Could Trump derail BLM's plans once final?
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to both increase oil, gas and coal development on federal lands as well as roll back burdensome regulations.
Michael Blumm, a Lewis & Clark Law School professor who previously practiced with EPA, said it would be no easy feat for a President Trump to roll back a finalized BLM methane rule.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an incoming administration needs to provide reasons or evidence that circumstances have changed since the rule was created or show that the reasoning behind the rule was otherwise flawed.
Blumm said President George W. Bush tried to ax a handful of Clinton administration rules and found it difficult. The Supreme Court also set a precedent regarding deregulation in the 1983 case Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., in which the court ruled the Reagan administration improperly revoked a Carter administration rule that new cars be equipped with airbags or automatic seat belts.
The court found the action was "arbitrary and capricious."
"They can't ignore that stuff," Blumm said. "When you're changing things or gutting things, the courts have demanded more."
What the next administration could do to undermine the new methane rule could be to just not enforce it, he said. Additionally, Congress could push through an appropriations rider to strip away money from the agency to carry out the rule.
"Rescinding the rule is not simple. It would take some time and some effort and takes some good layering to do," he said. "There might be easier ways to do it through Congress."
Jon Goldstein, senior policy manager of Environmental Defense Fund's oil and gas program, said it may be too early to draw firm conclusions about what a Trump administration might do but said considering the magnitude of wasted gas from wells on federal lands, the policy may hold up. A recent study by ICF International found in 2013 more than $330 million worth of natural gas through leaking, venting and flaring practices were wasted on federal lands.
"We do know that the BLM proposal is sound policy that will reduce waste of an important domestic energy resource," he said. "Once implemented, this rule will help communities across the West that are impacted by oil and gas operations and protect taxpayers from the waste of their natural resources, a bedrock principal for fiscal conservatives."
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045671

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How a Low-Carbon Economy Increases Cybersecurity Risks

Nov 14, 2016 | Wall Street Journal

By Jason Bordoff

Since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, America’s reliance on imported oil has always been the primary energy security concern. Every president since Nixon has promised “energy independence,” and the goal of reducing oil imports has dominated the energy policy agenda. Transitioning to a low-carbon economy that moves off oil is thus not only necessary to address climate change, but also brings many energy security benefits. Around the world, renewable energy that is locally generated reduces the energy-security risks of fossil fuels that are globally traded.
Yet the transition to a low-carbon economy may bring new and different energy security risks of its own that have so far received relatively little attention. Among the most important is the threat from cybersecurity, as a low-carbon economy becomes more electrified and interconnected.
Electricity is vital to nearly every aspect of our daily life and the economy. Electricity is needed to produce food and purify water. Our financial and telecommunications systems do not function without it. It is key to transportation, energy production, hospitals and emergency services. Reliable electric power is also essential to our homeland security and national defense.
Moving away from fossil fuels is likely to require large-scale electrification, and then the generation of yet more electricity from low-carbon energy sources. The International Energy Agency predicts that the share of electricity in final global energy consumption will increase from 18% in 2014 to as high as 28% in the agency’s low-carbon scenario by 2050. Decarbonization of transportation very likely means more electric vehicles, which are falling in cost, growing rapidly in sales each month, and may even become mandated in many urban areas. Transitioning away from fossil fuels for heating in the residential and industrial sectors also means more electrification.
Along with increased electrification, the digital age also means that our electric devices—from household appliances to electric vehicles to increasingly ubiquitous smart sensors—are more and more interconnected through smart grids and the “Internet of Things.” Nearly 50 billion devices are projected to be connected to the internet by 2020, twice as many as last year, according to an FTC report from January 2015. The economywide benefits of greater interconnectedness are enormous: A recent McKinsey report estimates that digitization of services and physical assets like cars and buildings could add more than $2.2 trillion to the annual GDP of the U.S. by 2025. And increased efficiency and renewable capacity can be achieved through new connected devices and sensors.
But an increasingly interconnected, digital and electrified energy system also poses vast new physical and cybersecurity risks that the next administration must prioritize in its new energy security agenda. A more digitalized electricity system is vulnerable to malicious attacks. Ukraine experienced this firsthand when a coordinated cyberattack targeting regional electricity distribution companies in December 2015 left 225,000 customers in the dark for hours. Incidents of cyberattack aimed at the grid in the U.S. are on the rise.Reported incidents rose 20% in 2015 from the year prior, with the energy sector the second largest target. Speaking of critical infrastructure like power generation, the head of U.S. Cyber Command told Congress “it is only a matter of when, not if, we are going to see something dramatic.”
While smart-grid systems promise energy efficiency gains to both consumers and grid operators as each gain greater control over the energy in homes and businesses, low regulatory oversight and a lack of clear security standards for new devices leaves this digitally connected energy system vulnerable. Last month’s internet outage, triggered by a hack on internet-connected devices like cellphone cameras and baby monitors, was a potent reminder of the risks from billions of connected devices with little or no cybersecurity protections.
Consider the risks presented by electrification and digitalization of the transport sector. In a world of electric vehicles, the consequences of electricity outages would be far more severe, as electricity is more difficult to store than gasoline or oil. Moreover, concerns about car-hacking—both electric and nonelectric models—are real. In the second example, hackers took control of a car’s steering wheel and accelerator from a laptop. Imagine the dire consequences in self-driving cars, which have more possible ways into the cars’ networks. Or the potential for malicious code to be installed and later activated in our vehicles. Will stringent safeguards exist in other countries like China that have ambitious plans to manufacture and export cheap electric vehicles?
Grid-connected renewable energy sources, such as utility-scale solar and wind power plants, and distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar systems, are also vulnerable to cybersecurity risks. To be sure, distributed generation—combined with energy storage—can increase grid resiliency, especially during hurricanes and other weather-related power outages. But as long as these systems are connected to the grid (or a virtual power plant), they present new risks in the form of thousands of potential backdoors for hackers to the electricity grid.
Smart grids, which use intelligent gadgets and two-way communications between electric devices and the grid, are also potential soft targets for cyberattacks—and have received too little attention to date from local utilities. Without proper safety measures, these tools for improving energy efficiency can be used by malicious hackers to shut down entire electricity networks.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels more quickly must be a priority to address the urgent challenge of climate change. And that means a more rapid shift to an electrified and digitalized energy system. While that shift reduces energy security risks we have faced for decades, it also presents many new ones as well that the incoming administration must address with greater urgency through cybersecurity standards and regulations for the new technologies and devices that will power the clean energy economy.
Jason Bordoff (@JasonBordoff), a former energy adviser to President Obama, is a professor of professional practice in international and public affairs and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/11/13/how-a-low-carbon-economy-increases-cybersecurity-risks/

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Chemical Security News

Estimate of PFCs Leaked from Air Force Base Revised Upward

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

Potentially dangerous chemicals leaking from a former Air Force base in Oscoda, Mich., might be found in more groundwater than previously thought.
"Everything we learn about this emerging contaminant is showing us we should be concerned, especially with pregnant women and elderly individuals," said Denise Bryan, public health officer at the local district health department.
The former Wurtsmith Air Force Base likely leaked perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, into the groundwater, leading to drinking water warnings for 60 households in September. Now that number is over 300 and growing.
"These chemicals are not acting like the other chemicals; they're much more extensive," said Robert Delaney, a specialist at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "They don't break down. We don't have a good feeling on where this stuff might be right now and how far it's gone."
It is unclear how many people have been exposed to PFCs in their drinking water. What is clear, Delaney says, is that a solution to dilute the PFC levels is needed now.
"It's going to be expensive to do, and it's not going to be fast," he said.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045689

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Environment News

Source: Trump Seeks to Exit Paris Agreement on Day One

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire

By Evan Lehmann

The Trump administration is exploring steps to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Jan. 20, 2017, the first day of Donald Trump's presidency, according to a person working on the transition team.
"I think this is likely a first-day action," the source said on the condition on anonymity.
Two primary options are being explored to remove the United States from the global climate accord finalized in December with the consent of almost 200 nations. One involves terminating U.S. membership in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the treaty created in 1992 that led to the Paris Agreement.
The other scenario entails issuing an executive order rescinding the United States' participation in the Paris deal. Trump transition officials anticipate that either option would likely ignite fierce opposition from other nations.
"The easiest pathway of getting out of Paris on day one is an executive order removing the signature from the agreement," said the source, who was brought onto the transition team late last week to work on international energy and climate issues. "You will have people argue that is a violation of international law."
The other alternative is somewhat slower, but perhaps more consequential.
A withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention could be finalized one year after Trump gives notice to do so, according to the source. U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement would end simultaneously, potentially as early as Jan. 20, 2018.
The source did not indicate whether one option is preferred over the other. A third option, to let the Senate vote on the Paris Agreement as a way to kill it, appears to be losing favor among transition officials.
The public assertions by Trump officials are timed to get attention. They came as many of the world's climate negotiators are meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, to sketch out the procedural steps forward on the Paris Agreement (see related story).
Those are the kinds of meetings a Trump administration might be absent from if it pulls out of the UNFCCC, which convened this week's Conference of the Parties, or COP.
Some in attendance said they believe Trump could be saber-rattling. He might issue the one-year notice to withdraw from the UNFCCC to gain leverage in trade negotiations, for instance. If the administration receives new benefits, it might relent on its threat, some observers say.
"He seems to be an opportunist, not an ideologue. He takes positions that are expedient to take in any one political moment," said Steve Herz, a top attorney with Sierra Club's International Climate Program, in an interview with E&E News in Marrakech.
Trump made trade a top-tier issue during the campaign, and satisfying those promises might outweigh his political calculations about climate, Herz suggested.
"Climate change is not his priority, one way or the other," he said. "If he sees that it will cost him the ability to deliver on what he sees to be his priorities, he might let it go, right?"
The source on Trump's transition team blamed the Obama administration for rushing to sign the Paris Agreement before the election. If that hadn't been done, it would be easier to withdraw from the deal without threatening to end U.S. membership in the U.N. Framework Convention, that person said.
The Framework Convention was signed by then-President George H.W. Bush. It set the objective to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." And while the body itself set no limits on countries' emissions, it set blueprints for how nations that are party to the treaty could develop protocols to do so — like the Paris Agreement.
Trump officials argue that the Paris Agreement is a treaty and should have been subject to a Senate vote.
"This diplomatic fiasco that may be brewing is not going to be the fault of a Trump administration," the source said. "It's going to be the fault of the Obama administration and the international community for ignoring the U.S. Constitution and related legal requirements."
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045684

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Diplomatic or Deluded? Insiders Say Trump Won't Ditch Deal

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Climatewire

By Jean Chemnick

President-elect Donald Trump has long insisted he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, but few climate experts meeting here seem willing to take him at his word.
Diplomats and environmental advocates assembled for the first U.N. talks since nearly 200 nations struck a landmark climate deal in December acknowledged that the bombastic Republican's victory last week injected substantial uncertainty into the process. But as the dust settled, participants in briefing auditoriums and watering holes of this ancient city offered each other hope that Trump might not walk back U.S. climate participation after all.
"We are not assuming that everything he said in the campaign will be what he does as president, because he's famous for changing his mind and reversing his position, sometimes in the same talk show," said Alden Meyer, climate strategy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. He pointed to Trump's walk-back of a statement made during the campaign that women who have abortions deserve to be "punished."
"Let's not assume he's going to act on the kinds of statements he's made in the past," said Meyer. "Let's give him a chance to evolve."
A number of delegates over the weekend expressed similar hope for a change of heart from Trump. That, though, seems at odds with the incoming president's repeated promises to "cancel" or at least "renegotiate" the Paris deal that capped more than two decades of painstaking negotiations. Trump has called climate change a "hoax" perpetrated by the Chinese to place the United States at a competitive disadvantage and has pledged to withdraw all financial support for U.N. climate agencies and other climate change programs.
A key transition aide told E&E News that the Trump team is in fact looking for ways to withdraw from the accord once the administration takes office (see related story).
But participants in Marrakech note Trump has never held elected office and argue he is likely to be swayed by advisers with a more nuanced view of global policy. He'll be reluctant to harm U.S. clout abroad, they say, as a withdrawal from Paris surely would.
And they celebrated last week's New York Times report that the real estate mogul and his children joined other business leaders in signing an advertisement in that newspaper ahead of the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, urging President Obama to "strengthen and pass United States legislation, and lead the world by example." The House had cleared a cap-and-trade bill ahead of the summit that the Senate was destined never to vote on.
"We need President Trump to be more like Trump the businessman and not like Trump the rabble-rousing Republican candidate on the campaign trail," said Mohamed Adow, Christian Aid's international climate lead. He called it "very encouraging" that Trump's children also signed.
"As new advisers to President-elect Trump, it is good to know they, too, recognized the importance of strong action on climate action in 2009," he said.
'Yes, the U.S. is going to show leadership'
Advocates here took it as a hopeful sign when Trump emerged from Thursday's meeting with Obama saying there were some positive aspects of the president's Affordable Care Act, though a few acknowledged it was concerning when he doubled down on his campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
National delegations were very reluctant to weigh in on the new leader of the world's most powerful nation. They spoke instead of the "moral obligation" the United States still has to both limit its emissions and make good on the Obama team's promises of climate aid — including the $3 billion in funding for the United Nations' Green Climate Fund that the Obama administration has had difficulty eking out of Congress and that is virtually assured now to fall by the wayside.
But Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, said he expected Trump to do a "great job" delivering U.S. commitments on climate change.
"When it comes to developing countries, yes, the U.S. is going to show the leadership in all the global issues including climate change," said Abdulla, who represents a group that faces an existential threat from rising sea levels and has sought both steep emissions reductions and financial assistance as a matter of survival. "I'm sure they will do their fair share in the upcoming administration."
Abdulla and others argued that Trump carried economically disadvantaged states on Election Day not because he promised to dismantle environmental protections but because he pledged to create economic opportunities. And he could spur economic growth more effectively through infrastructure spending, clean energy incentives and foreign climate aid than by trying to resuscitate the U.S. coal industry, they argued.
If concern for the U.S. economy didn't motivate Trump to soften his climate views, zeal for its standing in the world would, many predicted. Bucking international sentiment on climate change could cost him in ways the candidate Trump might not have realized.
"He's had very little contact with world leaders," said Joe Ware, a spokesman for Christian Aid. "He'll now be having weekly contact with world leaders who will all be saying to him, 'Whatever you do, don't go and screw up our planet, thanks very much.'" If he does, it won't help him win their cooperation in other areas.
Abdulla reached for a sports analogy. "If, for example, I'm the leader in football, there's no way that I can pull out. It's just not going to work."
Skeptic: Expect climate reversals. 'It's about time!'
U.S. climate skeptics begged to differ.
"The body of evidence suggests one ought to expect that any executive action on this front from the past eight years will indeed face a sincere effort at modification or reversal," said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher Horner, an outspoken opponent of Obama's climate policies, in an email.
Marc Morano, who publishes the climate skeptic site ClimateDepot.com, said the president-elect was not only "the most strongly skeptical" Republican president or nominee ever but unlikely to be swayed by global pressure.
"Even going back to the 1980s, Trump's political philosophy was a form of 'America first' and not very supportive of international trade or similar agreements," he said.
Morano has attended these summits in previous years to tell participants the United States wouldn't make good on the promises the Obama administration officials made in the negotiating rooms. He arrives in Marrakech this week for events highlighting how "Clexit," as he's termed the U.S. departure from international climate efforts, would play out.
"Climate skeptics are back," Morano said in an email to E&E News. "They now control the House, Senate and ... the Presidency. Expect both international and domestic climate agenda to be reversed. It's about time!"
Trump's transition team is mulling a strategy that includes departure from the Paris Agreement alone or from the broader U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Leaving the underlying convention means the United States would no longer be party to Paris the following year.
That would be a 180-degree shift from the current U.S. stance on climate. Indeed, Obama was credited with helping to bring last year's deal home through persistent bilateral engagement with other countries, especially China.
"When the U.S. is on board, you do notice it," said Liz Gallagher, senior associate at the London-based E3G. "If you look at the diplomatic machinery that the State Department has and the fact that it oriented all that around the climate agenda, that's made a big, big impact here."
China, Germany plow ahead
But the world has been through this before, advocates note, when the George W. Bush administration walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
In fact, the last time the U.N. climate conference was held in Marrakech in 2001, it was a few months after Bush confirmed that position. That left countries the task of plotting a climate strategy that didn't include the world's largest economy.
But the experience of Kyoto showed it is possible to work around the United States, negotiators said. And geopolitical shifts over the last decade and a half make it easier.
"The U.S. never joined the Kyoto Protocol, and the negotiations continued. Obviously, as the largest historical emitter, we hope that they continue to embrace renewables for the economic and environmental benefits they offer. Whatever happens, the international community is determined to go on," Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim said in a statement.
China's delegation to the talks held a briefing with reporters Friday to reaffirm that country's commitment to Paris, a move that led participants to predict the country would take up the mantle of moral leadership in this process if the United States drops it.
"China's climate strategy and policy is in accordance with China's national interest, and is not dependent on the U.S. presidency," said Zou Ji, deputy director-general of China's National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, which has links to the government.
"China has noticed the goodwill that President Obama has generated for the U.S. in recent years because of their leadership on climate change," said Jake Schmidt, international climate director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "That dynamic won't go unnoticed in Beijing."
Also Friday, Germany released its long-term decarbonization plan, which showed a steady phase-down of coal use as Trump pledges to revive it in the United States. And ministers from the High Ambition Coalition of countries including the European Union, islands and other countries, released a joint statement calling Paris a "turning point towards a more prosperous and stable world."
"We'll see what happens, but I'm pretty confident that we'll get somewhere, and it feels like the mood's picked up," E3G's Gallagher said.
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045685

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Sierra Club Challenges EPA Plans for Texas Ozone, NO2

Nov 14, 2016 | E&E Greenwire

By Sean Reilly

The Sierra Club is challenging U.S. EPA's approval of parts of Texas' blueprint for meeting the 2008 ambient air pollution standard for ozone and the 2010 benchmark for nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
EPA formally signed off on the state implementation plan (SIP) in early September via publication in the Federal Register. In the petition for review filed last week with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Sierra Club did not lay out the grounds for its challenge.
But in comments submitted early this year on regulators' proposed approval of the Texas SIP, the environmental group argued the plan failed to address emissions from five coal-fired power plants in East Texas that were partly to blame for the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area's failure to meet the 2008 ozone threshold of 75 parts per billion. Consequently, EPA must disapprove the state plan and require tighter controls on the five plants in question that would cut their contribution "to below the significance threshold," a Sierra Club attorney wrote.
EPA officials disagreed, countering in the Federal Register notice that SIPs are general planning documents for meeting air quality standards and don't require detailed compliance strategies "for each individual area of the state."
With a population of more than 7 million, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is the fourth largest in the country, ranking behind only New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It also has the top rate of adult asthma in Texas, with residents exposed to some of the highest ozone levels in the central United States, according to the Sierra Club's comments, filed jointly with a Dallas environmental group, Downwinders at Risk.
Ozone, a lung irritant that can help trigger asthma, is formed by the reaction of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds in sunlight. The 2008 ozone standard of 75 ppb was tightened last year to 70 ppb; a major source of NOx emissions is coal-fired power plants.
EPA uses NO2 as a stand-in for the broader class of nitrogen oxides.
The primary annual standard of 53 ppb has not changed in more than four decades, although EPA in 2010 added an hourly exposure threshold of 100 ppb. The agency recently recommended keeping both in place as part of its latest review of the standards' adequacy to protect public health (Greenwire, Sept. 28).
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/11/14/stories/1060045710

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Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions Nearly Stable for Third Year in Row

Nov 14, 2016 | The Guardian (via Real Clear Energy)

By Arthur Neslen

Global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have seen “almost no growth” for a third consecutive year, according to figures released as world leaders begin to arrive in Marrakech for a UN climate summit.
After zero growth in emissions last year, researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have forecast a rise of just 0.2% for 2016, signalling a break from the average 2.3% year-on-year increases in CO2 output from fossil fuels until 2013. The rise in 2014 was 0.7%.
Growth in emissions has stalled despite global economic growth exceeding 3% a year, and is mainly down to China burning less coal, according to a study in the journal Earth System Science Data.
“This third year of almost no growth in emissions is unprecedented at a time of strong economic growth,” said Professor Corinne Le Quéré, the director of UEA’s Tyndall Centre and lead on the global carbon budget analysis. “This is a great help for tackling climate change but it is not enough. Global emissions now need to decrease rapidly, not just stop growing.”
The levelling of fossil-fuel emissions dovetails with the government pledges made at the Paris climate summit last year to limit global temperature rises, but still falls short of the actions needed to contain global warming to the UN target of “well below 2C”.
“If climate negotiators in Marrakech can build momentum for further cuts in emissions, we could be making a serious start to addressing climate change,” Le Quéré said.
Several countries are expected to announce new emissions curbs at the Marrakech summit, although off-floor discussion will be dominated by last week’s US election, won by climate-change sceptic Donald Trump.
Trump has disparaged global warming as a Chinese hoax and promised to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement, although that pledge was removed from his official website on Thursday.
The US is the world’s second biggest emitter, responsible for around 16% of the greenhouse gases pumped into the world’s atmosphere.
Climate funding will certainly be another. The US has so far only delivered $500m of a promised $3bn contribution to the Green Climate Fund, which aims to disburse $100bn a year to help poorer countries deal with global warming by 2020.
The EU is the largest contributor to the fund, donating €17.6bn last year, but it is unclear whether it will move to fill any funding shortfall. “It is far too early to say whether there is a possibility, a capacity or the will to step up our climate finance commitment as the ministers have not yet had the chance to discuss this following the US election,” an EU source said.
Much of the official COP22 agenda will be focused on agreeing a rule book to implement the Paris deal. This will have to deal with technical issues such as setting common baselines and methodologies to measure emissions cuts.
Despite the tailing off of emissions growth in polluting industries, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 hit a record high in 2015 and are on track to continue doing so every year until emissions hit near zero.
The Paris agreement itself puts the world on track for a potentially disastrous 3C of global warming, but it also offers hope that this course can be changed by a series of reviews beginning in 2018.
Under the Paris agreement, all governments that have ratified the accord, which includes the US, China, India and the EU, carry an obligation to hold global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. That is what scientists regard as the limit of safety, beyond which climate change is likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.
Stock-takes based on the latest scientific assessments should follow every five years – with the first scheduled for 2023 – offering a chance for the world to adjust its trajectory towards the agreement’s 1.5C goal.
Liz Gallagher, a senior associate at an environmental thinktank, E3G, said: “The best thing that can come out of this summit would be making 2018 a moment on the map. We need to start the next round of ‘ratcheting up’ and we need to come out of this COP with a demonstration that the process is inevitable and unstoppable and that we are winning, as a message to the likes of Trump.”
Bob Ward, a director at the Economic and Social Research Council’s centre for climate change economics and policy said that while global fossil fuel emissions appeared to have peaked “Donald Trump as president could undermine this achievement if he carries through with his threat to scrap the Obama administration’s clean power plan, and encourages an increase in the use of coal for electricity generation”.
According to the UAE research, China, which is the world’s biggest polluter, accounting for 29% of global carbon dioxide output, saw emissions fall 0.7% in 2015 and they are projected to drop another 0.5% in 2016, though the scientists warn of large uncertainties in the figures.
In the US emissions fell 2.6% in 2015 as the country reduced its coal use while increasing gas and oil consumption, and carbon dioxide is expected to fall 1.7% this year.
But the European Union’s emissions rose 1.4% in 2015, against a backdrop of long term declines in pollution, while another major emitter, India, saw emissions rise 5.2%.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/14/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-nearly-stable-for-third-year-in-row

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