Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 12/16/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) President Appoints Members to Board Reviewing Proposed Rail Line Through Rock County
Dec 15, 2016 | Gazette Xtra
By Xavier Ward
The fate of a controversial proposed rail line through Rock County will be decided by a federal board most people know very little about. -
Toxics: EPA Agrees to Review 'Asbestos.' Then What?
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA may have agreed to calls from environmentalists to include “asbestos” among the first 10 substances to be reviewed and possibly regulated under its new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) but the agency is now facing a series of questions... -
Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole with Hazardous Chemicals
Dec 16, 2016 | Washington Post
By Joseph Allen
When new parents see the words “BPA-free” on a baby bottle or sippy cup, they are meant to assume that the product is safe. This may well not be the case — quite to the contrary. -
(ACC Mentioned) Waste: EPA Signs MOU to Boost Plastics Recycling
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA and groups representing chemical manufacturers and environmentalists have signed an agreement that aims to promote reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering plastic film packaging, a product that many municipalities are seeking to limit... -
(ACC Mentioned) Culver City Moves Closer to Having No More Polystyrene
Dec 15, 2016 | Culver City News
By Steve Montgomery
Culver City took another step toward joining other California cities and counties that have outlawed polystyrene at its Dec. 13 meeting. -
ADAO Congratulates Canada on Comprehensive Asbestos Ban by 2018, Sees This as Opportunity for U.S. to Swiftly Follow Suit
Dec 15, 2016 | Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), which serves as a global leader in ending asbestos exposure through education, advocacy, and community, today issued the following statement... -
Perchlorate Regulation: Critical Opportunities for EPA and FDA to Protect Children’s Brains
Dec 15, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
All Americans who have been tested have perchlorate in their bodies. Perchlorate threatens fetal and child brain development by impairing the thyroid’s ability to transport iodine in the diet into the gland to make a thyroid hormone, known as T4... -
EPA Moving Toward Decision on Use of Metal Fluids
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The Environmental Protection Agency has moved a step closer to determining whether it will allow the continued use of certain metal working fluids. -
Even Teethers Labeled BPA-Free May Contain Hormone-Disruptors
Dec 15, 2016 | Reuters
By Lisa Rapaport
Some baby teething toys marketed as non-toxic might contain chemicals that could interfere with hormones involved in normal growth and development, a study suggests. -
(ACC Mentioned) Trump on Energy and Climate
Dec 15, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jeff Johnson and Randy Lee Loftis
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s picks to lead the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency signal a hard-right turn from the recent past for these two agencies. -
24 State AGs Urge Trump to Kill Rule on 'Day One'
Dec 15, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Hannah Hess
Twenty-four states opposing U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan in court called on Vice President-elect Mike Pence and congressional leaders today to kill the regulations before judges rule. -
EPA Makes Last Defense of Carbon Rule Opposed by Trump Nominee
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
Carbon dioxide limits for newly constructed power plants fall squarely within the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act authority, the agency told a federal court, making arguments President-elect Donald Trump's administrator nominee... -
Exporting More Liquefied Natural Gas in America’s National Interest
Dec 15, 2016 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Mark J. Perry
There should be no doubt anymore that exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) is in America’s national interest. But the time to stop talking about our good fortune and start taking action to head off competition from other gas-exporting countries is running short. -
Jordan Cove Will Reapply for LNG Project Approval
Dec 15, 2016 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
Developers of the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export plant that was blocked by FERC earlier this year said today they intend to slim down the project and ask for a do-over. -
Pennsylvania Township Delays Permit for Shell Cracker
Dec 15, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
Potter Township, PA, supervisors have requested more information and delayed approval of a conditional-use permit for Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC's multi-billion-dollar ethane cracker in Beaver County. -
Corpus Christi, Texas, Issues Water Warning After Chemical Spill
Dec 15, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Dan Frosch
Officials in the Texas Gulf Coast city of Corpus Christi warned residents and businesses on Thursday not to use tap water after a chemical spill was suspected of contaminating the municipal water supply. -
DuPont to Pay $50M over Mercury-Contaminated Virginia Rivers
Dec 16, 2016 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Sarah Rankin
Chemical giant DuPont will pay more than $50 million but admit no fault under a proposed environmental settlement after releasing toxic mercury for decades that made its way into Shenandoah Valley waterways, state and federal officials announced Thursday. -
Air: EPA Confirms Deadline for OTC Expansion Response
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA has confirmed a deadline for its responses to a petition from Eastern states calling for significantly expanding the Ozone Transport Commission (OTC)... -
EPA Moves Ahead with Visibility Program Despite Pruitt's Criticism
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Patrick Ambrosio
The Environmental Protection Agency moved ahead Dec. 15 with revisions to its regional haze regulations, a program that has been the target of litigation and criticism from President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the agency. -
How Climate Rules Might Fade Away
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Matthew Philips, Mark Drajem and Jennifer A Dlouhy
In February 2009, a month after Barack Obama took office, two academics sat across from each other in the White House mess hall. -
Trump Team Renounces Climate Change Survey
Dec 15, 2016 | Roll Call
By Aryn Braun
President-elect Donald Trump's transition team declared Wednesday that it had disavowed a 74-part survey sent to the Department of Energy requesting the names of civil servants working on climate change. -
Donald Trump Should Know: This Is What Climate Change Costs Us
Dec 16, 2016 | New York Times
By Michael Greenstone and Cass R. Sunstein
Last week, Donald J. Trump’s transition team sent a startling questionnaire to the Department of Energy. Among other things, the questionnaire asked for the names of all employees and contractors who attended meetings of the Interagency Working Group... -
As Trump Signals Climate Action Pullback, Local Leaders Push Forward
Dec 16, 2016 | New York Times
By Tatiana Schlossberg
The incoming Trump administration appears determined to reverse much of what President Obama has tried to achieve on climate and environment policy. -
Trump Can’t Deny Climate Change Without a Fight
Dec 15, 2016 | Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
The incoming Trump administration will face passionate and hostile resistance if it tries to deny the reality of human-induced climate change. We can already hear the drums of war.
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(ACC Mentioned) President Appoints Members to Board Reviewing Proposed Rail Line Through Rock County
Dec 15, 2016 | Gazette Xtra
By Xavier Ward
The fate of a controversial proposed rail line through Rock County will be decided by a federal board most people know very little about.
The Surface Transportation Board, the agency that has jurisdiction over national rail service, is an independent body made up of presidential appointees who are approved by the Senate.
The board's three current members this week granted Great Lakes Basin Transportation a delay in the environmental review process so the company would have more time to prepare information on the rail line, which would allow trains to bypass Chicago on their way to La Porte, Indiana.
The proposed line would cut down transit times considerably, the company says. However, the plan has garnered opposition from Rock County residents concerned about environmental and other impacts.
Before the Surface Transportation Board Reauthorization Act of 2015, the board was a faction of the U.S. Department of Transportation, wrote Frederick Hill, communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, in an email to The Gazette.
The act established the board as an independent agency and expanded its size from three to five members, Hill wrote.
Under the expansion, President-elect Donald Trump's administration likely will pick two additional members unless President Barack Obama nominates two members before his term ends, said Dennis Watson, Surface Transportation Board press secretary.
Historically, no president has ever attempted to remove a board member before his or her term expires, Hill wrote.
A president also cannot eliminate board members via executive order, Watson said.
“Board members can be fired for cause, but traditionally they serve defined terms that transcend new administrations,” Hill wrote.
The Senate committee is responsible for oversight of the board, and it plays a role in consideration of nominees before the full Senate votes, Hill wrote.
“The constitutional requirement is confirmation by the full Senate," he wrote. "Traditionally, full Senate consideration only comes after a positive recommendation from a vote of the Commerce Committee.”
While the board members are presidential appointees, members must meet certain criteria to be considered, Hill wrote.
Under the 2015 reauthorization bill, at least three members must be in professional standing and have demonstrated knowledge in the fields of transportation, transportation regulation or economic regulation, Hill wrote.
Only three out of the five members may be from the president's political party, said Ian Martorana, press secretary for House Speaker Paul Ryan.
The board's current members are:
-- Daniel R. Elliott III: Elliott was sworn in as the board's chairman June 26, 2015, after his nomination by Obama, according to the Surface Transportation Board website.
Elliott first joined the board in 2009. Before that, he spent 16 years as a lawyer in the transportation field, according to the website.
Elliott's term will expire in 2020 per the five-year term agreement.
-- Deb Miller: Miller was sworn in April 28, 2014, for a term that expires Dec. 31, 2017, according to the website.
Miller is a Kansas Democrat who worked with the Kansas Department of Transportation for many years, according to the website.
-- Ann D. Begeman: Begeman was sworn in May 2, 2011, but recently was nominated for a second term, according to a news release from the American Chemistry Council.
Begeman worked for 21 years as a senior aide on Capitol Hill crafting major transportation legislation. She also served as Republican staff director for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, according to the board's website.
http://www.gazettextra.com/20161215/president_appoints_members_to_board_reviewing_proposed_rail_line_through_rock_county
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Toxics: EPA Agrees to Review 'Asbestos.' Then What?
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA may have agreed to calls from environmentalists to include “asbestos” among the first 10 substances to be reviewed and possibly regulated under its new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) authority but the agency is now facing a series of questions over how it plans to proceed.
J. Michael Showalter, a lawyer at Schiff Hardin, identified some of those questions in a recent article posted on his firm's website. Among them: What asbestos substances will the agency be assessing given that the TSCA definition of “asbestos” applies to six forms of the mineral fiber while courts have accepted a broader definition from the agency? How will EPA regulate a naturally occurring substance? And will the extensive product liability litigation over asbestos complicate the agency's efforts?
As we reported, EPA included asbestos on the list of the first 10 chemicals that it will subject to new risk reviews under the revised TSCA. Under the law, EPA faces statutory deadlines to assess the substances' risks and if it finds that any “present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment,” they must be subject to regulation under TSCA section 6 to restrict their use or otherwise mitigate the risk.
EPA's inclusion of asbestos on the list drew praise from environmentalists and others, who had long pressed the agency to include the substance on the first list in part because it was the agency's failed attempt to regulate the substance that was one of the main drivers for the law's overhaul.
But Showalter says EPA's decision now raises a series of additional questions about how it plans to proceed. For example, what forms of the silicate mineral fiber will EPA be assessing?
TSCA defines “asbestos” to include six fibers, namely chrysotile, crocidolite, amosite, anthophyllite, tremolite, and actinolite.
But courts hearing product liability suits have accepted EPA's argument to use a “broader, yet undefined” definition contained in the Chemical Abstract Service Registry, which defines the substance as “a grayish non-combustible material,” he says.
That was significant in the Justice Department's criminal enforcement suit against W.R. Grace, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 2007 rejected defense arguments that the two substances at issue in the case -- winchite and richterite, also known as “Libby vermiculite” -- were not “asbestos” because they fell outside the TSCA definition.
“EPA sought throughout the Grace litigation to use a broad definition of asbestos. We don’t now know what precisely will constitute 'asbestos' for EPA’s TSCA evaluation,” Showalter writes.
“This creates some confusion surrounding EPA’s November 29 announcement,” he says, noting that EPA's announcement refers to just “asbestos” and the agency's 2014 Work Plan, which is referenced in the announcement, in turn refers to “asbestos & asbestos-like fibers.”
Showalter also questions how EPA will regulate the naturally occurring substance. “By any definition, asbestos is a natural material and is ubiquitous in the environment. That raises questions like how any ban could be implemented. While some substances can be 'banned' simply by halting production, the same cannot be said for asbestos. Because asbestos occurs in nature, requiring product manufacturers or producers to certify that their product contains zero asbestos may not be feasible,” he says.
A related question is how the agency will address “non-asbestiform” minerals, like serpentine, the California state rock. “When 'asbestos' has been regulated in the past, the regulations accounted for the fact that there are some minerals which are chemically similar to asbestos but also occur in different physical configurations or morphologies,” he writes. But policymakers have so far failed to distinguish among them and it is not yet clear whether those efforts will resume.
Finally, Showalter asks how the agency will deal with “pressures from parties whose primary interest in asbestos relates to product liability litigation?” There is a danger, he says, “that the medical doctors, geologists, and toxicologists with expertise in asbestos issues who have appeared in asbestos personal injury litigation will be perceived as partial to one side or the other.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/toxics-epa-agrees-review-asbestos-then-what
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Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole with Hazardous Chemicals
Dec 16, 2016 | Washington Post
By Joseph Allen
When new parents see the words “BPA-free” on a baby bottle or sippy cup, they are meant to assume that the product is safe. This may well not be the case — quite to the contrary.
In fact, in some cases, hormone-disrupting BPA, or bisphenol-A, has simply been swapped for a similar chemical — BPS, or bisphenol-S — that may well pose even greater dangers to child health. In this way, manufacturers have done an end run around on the much-publicized dangers of BPA without addressing the underlying problem.
Even more disturbing: What’s happened with baby products is the tip of the iceberg. It points to a phenomenon known in the world of public health as “regrettable substitution” — the cynical replacement of one harmful chemical by another equally or more harmful in a never-ending game being played with our health.
Over the past four decades, such swapping has become commonplace. Some have compared the practice to a big game of whack-a-mole: Every time one chemical is knocked out, another takes its place. Remember DDT, the pesticide used through the 1970s in the United States? DDT is associated with delayed mental development in children and, when banned, was replaced with organophosphate pesticides, another class of chemicals that can also interfere with a child’s developing brain. (DDT itself was a “safe” replacement for toxic lead arsenate, which had been used as a pesticide since the 1800s.)
Flame-retardant chemicals used in furniture tell a similar story. So-called PBBs were used beginning in the 1970s. PBBs are teratogenic, meaning that they interfere with embryo development, and eventually were banned, only to be replaced by PBDEs, which have a similar chemical structure (one molecule difference). PBDEs, we later discovered, are associated with health effects such as decreased sperm production, failure of testicles to descend in babies, hormone disruption and, recent research I led found, higher rates of thyroid disease. Can you guess what happened with PBDEs? They were subsequently banned in some states beginning in 2003, only to be replaced by other flame-retardant chemicals, including one called “tris.” Tris, it turns out, is carcinogenic and is being replaced. TPP, another replacement, is associated with decreases in sperm concentration. Progress!
But the whack-a-mole analogy fails to capture the scale of the problem. We might better think of the mythical Lernaean Hydra, where each head that is cut off regenerates multiple times. Heard of “C8,” the chemical used to make stain-resistant clothing, furniture and nonstick pans? It was used for more than 50 years before scientists found a probable link to high cholesterol, kidney cancer and testicular cancer. C8, aptly named because it has an eight-carbon chemical backbone, was banned 10 years ago and, as of 2011, there were a stunning 268 variations in the same chemical family — the Hydra problem. (Disclosure: I am serving as an expert witness in litigation involving C8.)
Joseph Allen is an assistant professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he directs the Healthy Buildings program and acts as the faculty adviser to the Harvard Healthy Building Materials Academy.
In all of these cases, and more — from nail polish to flavorings in e-cigarettes — the chemical replacements can be just different enough that they are treated as distinct from a regulatory and market standpoint.
How have we allowed this to happen? Most people assume, incorrectly, that chemicals used in products are thoroughly tested by the Environmental Protection Agency or another federal agency for health safety before they are allowed to be used in commerce. Except for pesticides and pharmaceuticals, this is not the case. Many people are shocked to learn that even asbestos, infamous for causing lung cancer, has never been officially banned by the EPA. It was only last month added to the list of high-priority chemicals for the EPA to evaluate. In the United States, our chemical policy largely follows the approach of our legal system: innocent until proven guilty.
Changes made this year to the woefully outdated 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act left many with the impression that loopholes are being plugged, but that is far from true. While welcome, the new law simply requires the EPA to prioritize chemicals for safety testing. The EPA will review a minimum of 20 chemicals at any one time. It could take decades to evaluate the 80,000 chemicals already in commerce that have yet to be tested, let alone the 2,000new chemicals introduced each year. And it still treats each chemical individually, continuing the saga in which similar, but slightly different, chemicals can be regrettably substituted.
Perhaps most concerning is that even this woefully slow process can still be slowed further. President-elect Donald Trump has indicated his disdain for the EPA and suggested massive budget cuts for the agency. Any reduction in funding or staffing, or a deprioritization of chemical issues, could derail even these incremental approaches to testing chemicals for safety.
Innocent until proven guilty may be the right starting point for criminal justice, but it is disastrous chemical policy. We need to recognize regrettable substitution for what it is: repeated substitution of toxic chemicals with equally toxic chemicals in a dangerous experiment to which none of us knowingly signed on. The Trump administration should recognize the significant health and economic benefits of a strong, fully implemented chemical policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stop-playing-whack-a-mole-with-hazardous-chemicals/2016/12/15/9a357090-bb36-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.a322f1938a54
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(ACC Mentioned) Waste: EPA Signs MOU to Boost Plastics Recycling
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA and groups representing chemical manufacturers and environmentalists have signed an agreement that aims to promote reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering plastic film packaging, a product that many municipalities are seeking to limit but which is relatively costly to recycle because low oil prices undercut revenue for the reused material.
The memorandum of understanding (MOU), recently posted to the agency's website, was signed by EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Office Director Barnes Johnson, along with officials from the industry group American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the environmental group Green Blue Institute.
Under the MOU, the parties will expand a public-private public awareness campaign known as the Wrap Recycling Action Program (WRAP), which aims to increase the volume of plastic wrap, film and bags recycled. It is led in part by ACC’s Flexible Film Recycling Group (FFRG).
“This MOU will establish a framework and understanding that will enable the Parties to work together constructively and collaboratively to share existing resources and information where appropriate, and to improve the effectiveness and reach of EPA and municipal recycling programs for [polyethylene (PE)] film to the greatest synergy and effect,” the Nov. 15 MOU says. The agency says it will incorporate WRAP into its food waste recovery and Trash-Free Waters programs.
PE film is used to produce shopping bags and other items that many state and municipal governments have been seeking to curtail because they do not biodegrade. Many jurisdictions have sought to either ban or tax the bags as a way to limit their use. For example, California voters last month approved a ballot measure that preserved a legislative ban.
But the product is difficult to recycle because low prices for oil, the feedstock for producing PE film, had plummeted, making reused material relatively more costly.
EPA's joint initiative is aimed at decreasing disposal rates by tracking and lowering the overall amount of plastics that are disposed, reducing environmental impacts -- including greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy use -- of plastics throughout their life cycles, and increasing stakeholder capacity to implement sustainable materials management through technical assistance and raising the per capita quantity of plastic recyclables recovered, EPA's website says.
The MOU says the parties share common goals, namely to double PE film recycling to 2 billion pounds by 2020, double the current participation in film recycling, lower by half film contamination in material recovery facilities and increase recycling access for small generators of commercial film. Other goals include boosting the recycling of both low- and high-density PE film, and enhancing “the recovery and recycling of all plastics."
The MOU lays out joint activities and responsibilities for the parties, including building local support and infrastructure for recycling plastic film and engaging municipal and business stakeholders to support WRAP efforts.
For its part, EPA’s responsibilities include using its website and other communication methods to promote WRAP, working with community officials to support the effort, assisting in identifying potential areas and partners for pilot projects and identifying grants and funding sources to offer education materials and support on film recycling, the MOU says.
ACC’s FFRG will, among other things, provide WRAP education tools and resources to municipalities, offer in-kind resources for implementing a certain number of WRAP campaigns, and provide communications support to help EPA promote WRAP initiatives, the MOU says.
The Blue Green Institute’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition has been tasked with reaching out to retailers, brand companies and communities to support using the How2Recycle Store Drop-off label, and helping to enlist retailers to back use of signage or other WRAP materials for consumer education, the MOU says.
The MOU expires at the end of 2019.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/waste-epa-signs-mou-boost-plastics-recycling
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(ACC Mentioned) Culver City Moves Closer to Having No More Polystyrene
Dec 15, 2016 | Culver City News
By Steve Montgomery
Culver City took another step toward joining other California cities and counties that have outlawed polystyrene at its Dec. 13 meeting.
The City Council directed the city’s staff to craft an ordinance that would effectively ban the sale of takeout containers, ice chests, trays, bowls lidded containers and flatware. The ordinance would apply to all local food providers.
In addition, several suggestions that Mayor Jim Clarke last month made regarding anti-littering measures and Ballona Creek waste removal are also on the table.
Environmental nonprofit Ballona Creek Renaissance, whose work in trying to rid the creek of pollutants has been hailed by the entire council, has led the push to ban Styrofoam.
The organization, not known for weighing in on local legislation, has been relentless in its efforts to lobby city officials about a ban for virtually the entirety of 2016.
A ban on polystyrene appears to have widespread appeal to Culver City residents. A recent Survey Monkey poll found that almost 83% of over 660 residents who answered a survey favored a ban.
At an Aug. 8 council meeting, resident David Coles made an argument that environmental groups such as the Surfrider Foundation and Heal the Bay have made regarding the dangers of polystyrene.
“Fish, turtles, birds and other wildlife are imperiled by Styrofoam when they confuse it for food and ingest it. What’s more, there are many more alternatives that are environmentally benign,” said Coles.
Councilwoman Meghan Sahli-Wells, who led the charge as a private citizen before she was elected to convince Culver City leaders to ban plastic bags after years of previous councils being silent on the matter, was thrilled that the council agreed to move toward a creating an ordinance ban polystyrene products.
“When the Ballona Creek Renaissance came forward with this proposal a year ago, I was very enthusiastic then, and am even more so tonight,” she told the audience. “When we passed the ban on single use plastic bags in 2012, I said that polystyrene was next.
“ So I’ve been waiting for this day for a long while.”
Ballona Creek Renaissance is asking that the city use the 2014 Manhattan Beach polystyrene ordinance as a blueprint, which Surfrider endorsed.
“We’re not a political group but we decided that we need to do more than just pick up trash around the creek,” explained Ballona Creek Renaissance Vice President Sandrine Cassidy.
Culver City High School Ballona Renaissance Club president Van Barth says in a group release that although efforts are being made to educate the public about the problem of trash getting into the creek “litter is inevitable, and polystyrene is the worst of it, and that’s why it is important to ban it in the first place.”
The American Chemistry Council, which also opposed Culver City ‘s plastic bag ban as well as the 2014 statewide plastic ban, sent a letter to the council asking that they reconsider an ordinance.
The group claims that “a ban would negatively impact businesses as products made from alternative materials are more expensive than polystyrene and in some cases do not function as well as polystyrene for food handling purposes.”
The council’s actions come a month after Culver City voters overwhelmingly passed a local stormwater ballot measure, CW, on Nov. 8.
Sahli-Wells said what the council had done was a more than just a move to ban polystyrene. “It’s a public health measure. It’s CPR for Ballona Creek,” she said.
If the city decides to ban polystyrene next year, it would become the 100th city/county in California to do so.
Just in time for Culver City’s centennial.
Gary Walker contributed to this story.
http://www.culvercitynews.org/latest-news/culver-city-moves-closer-to-having-no-more-polystyrene/
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Dec 15, 2016 | Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
Statement from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition member Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.
The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), which serves as a global leader in ending asbestos exposure through education, advocacy, and community, today issued the following statement from ADAO President and Co-Founder Linda Reinstein in support of the comprehensive asbestos ban announced today by the Canadian government:
“The Canadian government made a life-saving decision today announcing they will create a new asbestos ban that will prohibit the ‘manufacture, use, import and export’ of asbestos and asbestos-containing products, such as building materials and brake pads by 2018. Despite closing the last of their mines in 2011, Canada has been a major producer and consumer of asbestos for decades and has seen first-hand the devastating impact on human health. Canada’s ban even goes beyond prohibiting further use or import of the known carcinogen, also committing to a comprehensive asbestos strategy that will lead to establishing a registry of asbestos-containing buildings and implementing a transparent transition. Failing to take the next steps after prohibiting use and imports is akin to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. Canada’s impressively cognizant approach reflects a growing trend among governments of not just banning future use but addressing the lasting legacy of asbestos and especially the continuing exposure danger in our built environment and the need for improved detection and treatment of asbestos diseases.
“ADAO has worked with the Canadian ban-asbestos effort since our organization was founded 13 years ago, most recently signing on to an open letter to Prime Minster Trudeau in support of this ban, along with more than 68 fellow stakeholders. While the governance of these two countries is, of course, separate, asbestos knows no borders or boundaries — the challenge posed to North America by asbestos is inextricably connected. ADAO sees this announcement as an opportunity for the U.S. to swiftly follow suit. Recognizing the dangers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently prioritized asbestos for risk assessment and regulatory action, but with decades of research already completed and bans in more than 55 countries, scientifically and medically speaking, the risk assessment is a forgone conclusion. Congress can save the EPA years of work and scarce dollars by passing the Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act, joining ranks with Canada in its commitment to protecting public health and the environment from the present and future scourge of asbestos.
“I look forward to a future where one day, asbestos exposure will be a thing of the past in North America and across the globe. As we celebrate this historic moment for Canada, the ADAO team remains dedicated to ensuring a U.S. ban on asbestos follows quickly.”
http://saferchemicals.org/2016/12/15/adao-congratulates-canada-on-comprehensive-asbestos-ban-by-2018-sees-this-as-opportunity-for-u-s-to-swiftly-follow-suit/
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Perchlorate Regulation: Critical Opportunities for EPA and FDA to Protect Children’s Brains
Dec 15, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
All Americans who have been tested have perchlorate in their bodies. Perchlorate threatens fetal and child brain development by impairing the thyroid’s ability to transport iodine in the diet into the gland to make a thyroid hormone, known as T4, that is essential to brain development. Both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are scheduled to make decisions in 2017 that could significantly reduce exposure to this hazardous chemical.
Based on statements in a new report by EPA, we estimate that at least 20% of pregnant women are already iodine deficient, resulting in T4 levels that put the fetuses’ developing brains at risk. For this population of pregnant women, any perchlorate exposure results in an even greater risk of impaired brain development in their children and potentially a lifetime of behavioral and learning difficulties.
This is why it is critical that our public health agencies take actions to reduce exposure to perchlorate with a focus on this vulnerable population. There are three key decisions to be made in the coming year:
1. EPA will decide in January 2017 whether hypochlorite bleach, an antimicrobial pesticide, degrades to perchlorate in significant amounts. If EPA agrees it does, the agency must set standards to limit that degradation as part of its 15-year update to the pesticide’s registration. Bleach is a widely-used disinfectant in food manufacturing facilities and likely a significant source of perchlorate in contaminated foods. Research shows that reducing hypochlorite concentration limits degradation and this, coupled with expiration dates on the product would significantly reduce exposure to perchlorate.
2. FDA will decide whether perchlorate should continue allowing perchlorate to be added to plastic packaging for dry food at levels up to 12,000 ppm to reduce buildup of static charges. The agency has evidence that the perchlorate migrates from the packaging into food, especially when it flows in and out of the container. In response to a lawsuit filed by public interest organizations, FDA told a court that it aims to make a final decision by the end of March 2017. A 2008 report by FDA indicated that almost 75% of all food types are contaminated with perchlorate.
3. EPA told a court that it will complete external peer review of a dose-response model in October 2017 and sign a proposed rule to regulate perchlorate in drinking water a year later. This model is a critical step in establishing a drinking water standard for perchlorate pursuant to its 2011 determination that an enforceable standard was necessary under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The perchlorate is most likely from contaminated source waters (e.g. from military and defense industry activities and some fertilizer use in agricultural regions) or from degradation of hypochlorite bleach used to disinfect water. EPA acted in response to a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
To guide their decision-making, FDA and EPA collaborated to develop a biologically-based dose-response model to predict T4 levels in pregnant women, fetuses, and infants exposed to perchlorate. EDF and NRDC submitted joint comments on the model and the summary report requesting that EPA ensure protection of fetuses during the first two trimesters for pregnant women with serious iodine deficiencies. These fetuses are particularly vulnerable because their thyroids is not yet functioning. The current fetal model only considers the third trimester when the fetus has a functioning thyroid. The current model fails to adequately protect their vulnerable subpopulations, falling shot of both the EPA's Science Advisory Board recommendation and the Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.
For decades, federal agencies have been charged with protecting children from environmental health risks with the recognition that they are uniquely vulnerable to chemical exposures. The upcoming decisions on perchlorate present critical opportunities to protect what many of us value the most—our children’s health and their ability to learn and thrive to their fullest potential.
http://blogs.edf.org/health/2016/12/15/perchlorate-regulation-critical-opportunities-for-epa-and-fda-to-protect-childrens-brains/
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EPA Moving Toward Decision on Use of Metal Fluids
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The Environmental Protection Agency has moved a step closer to determining whether it will allow the continued use of certain metal working fluids.
Jeff Morris, acting director of the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 14 that his staff would update him Dec. 15 of their progress assessing the risks of seven medium- and long-chain chlorinated paraffins.
Morris declined to speculate on the status of the assessment or when it might be complete.
Chlorinated paraffins are a type of solvent that have been in commerce for decades. The chemicals keep the equipment, wires, nuts and bolts that various industry sectors need moving and protected. They lubricate metals, retard fires in plastics and provide weather resistance for steel construction and industrial flooring.
Existing Chemicals Reviewed as New
The EPA's evaluation of seven medium- and long-chain chlorinated paraffins is unusual because the agency is evaluating five of them as new chemicals even though they have been on the market. The remaining two are new chemicals, meaning they haven't been made or sold in the U.S.
The agency took the new chemicals assessment approach for the five chemicals, identified by their premanufacture numbers, as part of settlements it negotiated in 2012. The settlements resolved new chemical, or “premanufacture notice,” violations involving two companies: INEOS Chlor Americas (now INOVYN Americas Inc.) and Dover Chemical Corp.
In a preliminary conclusion released a year ago, the agency proposed to ban the five chlorinated paraffins that have been in commerce and prohibit the two new ones from entering commerce. The agency proposed these actions saying the chemicals “may present an unreasonable risk” to aquatic organisms following acute and chronic exposures and “may be very persistent and very bioaccumulative.”
A wide variety of industries objected to the agency's proposed ban, which they said would disrupt access to materials needed by the aerospace, automotive, construction, defense, metallurgy, polymer manufacturing and other industry sectors.
The agency has been reviewing those comments and additional use, exposure and other information it has received.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102036887&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102036887&jd=102036887
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Even Teethers Labeled BPA-Free May Contain Hormone-Disruptors
Dec 15, 2016 | Reuters
By Lisa Rapaport
Some baby teething toys marketed as non-toxic might contain chemicals that could interfere with hormones involved in normal growth and development, a study suggests.
Researchers tested 59 solid, gel-filled or water-filled teethers purchased online in the U.S. for 26 different so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
All of the products tested positive for one such chemical, bisphenol-A (BPA), even though most of the teethers were marketed as BPA-free, researchers report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
“BPA has been linked in a wide range of adverse health effects including obesity, diabetes, neurological and developmental disorders,” said senior study author Kurunthachalam Kannan, a researcher at the New York State Department of Health and the State University of New York at Albany.
“We need a stringent regulation to make sure that labels do reflect the reality,” Kannan added by email.
Researchers didn’t identify specific products or manufacturers by name in the study.
BPA, parabens and antimicrobials are widely used in personal care products and plastics.
In animal studies, endocrine-disrupting compounds such as BPA, parabens and antimicrobials have been shown to interfere with hormones and have harmful developmental, reproductive and neurological effects.
As a result, the European Commission in 2011 restricted the use of BPA in baby bottles, researchers note. The U.S. followed suit a year later, banning it from baby bottles and also from children's drinking cups.
Since then, a growing number of consumer products including baby items have been marketed as BPA-free or lacking in endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the researchers note.
But few studies have investigated whether these compounds are used to make teethers or if the chemicals can leech out and be ingested by teething babies.
In lab tests for the current study, researchers found BPA as well as a range of different parabens and the antimicrobials triclosan and triclocarban in most of the teethers.
The study also showed that the compounds leached out of the products' surfaces into water.
Researchers also looked at how long babies might typically use teethers, and based on the body weight of a typical one-year-old they estimated that exposure to BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals might be below levels deemed unsafe by health regulators in Europe.
However, regulators set these thresholds for individual compounds and not every endocrine-disrupting chemical found in the teethers is regulated, the authors point out.
One limitation of the study is that its estimates of exposure to BPA and other chemicals might not reflect regular use for some babies in real life, the authors note.
“BPA-free doesn't necessarily mean that the product is completely nontoxic,” said Dr. Luz Claudio, a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York who wasn’t involved in the study.
“As this study showed, there are other chemicals that also have potential biological effects,” Claudio added by email. “Whether they're actually toxic to children, is not really known.”
Even so, the findings add to a small but growing body of evidence suggesting that a BPA-free label may not protect against exposure to chemicals, said Dr. Martin Wagner, a researcher at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study.
The results should be a reminder to parents to avoid plastics and chemicals as much as possible in their home, Wagner said by email.
“Avoiding chemical exposures today is simply impossible,” Wagner said. “However, parents can significantly reduce their kids’ exposures by reducing the use of plastic materials wherever possible.”
This might mean letting babies teethe on frozen carrots instead of plastic rings, or avoiding pre-packaged meals in plastic containers, or seeking out baby care products without additives, Wagner added.
“Many of these decisions have something to do with convenience,” Wagner said. “If we overcome this at least partly, we will reduce the chemical exposures of our children and help the environment. I would call that a win-win!”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-infants-endocrine-teethers-idUSKBN1442LZ
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(ACC Mentioned) Trump on Energy and Climate
Dec 15, 2016 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jeff Johnson and Randy Lee Loftis
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s picks to lead the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency signal a hard-right turn from the recent past for these two agencies.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, nominated for EPA, has opposed a number of EPA pollution control regulations and federal actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Trump’s pick for energy secretary, also opposes regulations to forestall climate change and has called for the elimination of the department he would head.
Coupled with Trump’s selection of Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as secretary of state, the nominations signal that fossil-fuel interests will be a driving force in the new Administration.
Pruitt, Oklahoma’s chief lawyer since 2010, has on several occasions sued EPA to block regulations. He has fought regulations to toughen rules on toxic air pollutants and the interstate transport of smog-causing emissions. In addition, Pruitt recently opposed agency plans to tighten safety requirements aimed at preventing chemical plant accidents.
Pruitt led efforts by states to overturn the Clean Power Plan, the Obama Administration’s signature program to limit emissions of carbon dioxide. The plan is the main means for the U.S. to meet its pledges under the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international pact to curb human-caused climate change. Pruitt and other opponents have argued that the power plan is not legally allowed under the Clean Air Act.
Pruitt has many supporters, however, including a major chemical industry association—the American Chemistry Council—and other organizations that would like to see EPA regulations checked or rolled back.
If confirmed, Perry would represent a substantial shift from President Barack Obama’s energy secretaries, Ernest Moniz and Stephen Chu, who were world-renowned physicists with long experience with DOE’s network of research facilities. Both were strong advocates for research and commercialization of advanced renewable energy technologies.
Groups such as the American Sustainable Business Council, which represents 250,000 companies, say that U.S. leadership in renewable energy might be in jeopardy. “Perry’s close ties to the oil industry in his home state will likely lead to department policy that tilts the playing field to fossil fuels,” the group says.
However, Perry also promoted wind energy and sought federal funding for carbon capture and storage projects and research in Texas.
“As governor, Perry saw the job creation and business opportunity in clean energy and helped turn Texas into the national leader in wind power,” notes the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group. Still the group remains concerned about his views on climate change.
The Trump transition team upset DOE scientists with a questionnaire seeking detailed information on department activities—from nuclear waste to support for renewable technology development. Many of the 74 questions pertained to department support for climate-change-related activities. One sought the professional society affiliations of staff in DOE’s national research labs.
Most alarming to DOE scientists, the transition team asked for names of scientists attending domestic and international climate change meetings. The department has refused to provide individuals’ names.
However, the transition team last week backed off from the memo, saying the questionnaire was not authorized.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i49/Trump-energy-climate.html
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24 State AGs Urge Trump to Kill Rule on 'Day One'
Dec 15, 2016 | E&E News PM
By Hannah Hess
Twenty-four states opposing U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan in court called on Vice President-elect Mike Pence and congressional leaders today to kill the regulations before judges rule.
"An executive order on day one is critical," wrote West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R), who led the letter with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
Both were in Washington at the end of September for arguments in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court is expected to rule this winter on the legality of the power-sector climate plan.
But the state coalition wants President-elect Donald Trump to take formal administrative action on his first day in office, Jan. 20, to withdraw the plan and related matters in court.
"The order should explain that it is the Administration's view that the Rule is unlawful and that EPA lacks authority to enforce it," they wrote. "The executive order is necessary to send an immediate and strong message to States and regulated entities that the Administration will not enforce the Rule."
Foes of the rule have suggested Trump's Justice Department could file to withdraw the government's advocacy for the rule, but it's hard to predict how the litigation might play out in the D.C. Circuit (Greenwire, Nov. 9).
The regulatory route would take a long time and be fiercely fought by environmentalists, given the record EPA assembled to support its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.
Morrisey and Paxton offer to discuss their plan with the incoming administration in greater detail to determine whether it may be appropriate to seek to stay or resolve pending cases in light of the administrative actions they propose.
Finally, they recommend that Congress and the Trump administration work together to consider adopting legislation to address "the issues giving rise to the Rule." They call for a "longer-term legislative response" to ensure that similar or more "extreme" steps are not attempted by a future EPA.
Most states are on track to meet the plan's early emissions standards for electricity generation, due to the decline of coal and the growth of natural gas and renewable power. Proponents have predicted the energy market will continue its shift to clean energy, regardless of Trump's actions (Greenwire, Dec. 2).
Three of the 27 states suing EPA did not join the letter. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R), Trump's pick to lead EPA, and the top prosecutors in Florida and New Jersey did not sign on.
http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2016/12/15/stories/1060047285
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EPA Makes Last Defense of Carbon Rule Opposed by Trump Nominee
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
Carbon dioxide limits for newly constructed power plants fall squarely within the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act authority, the agency told a federal court, making arguments President-elect Donald Trump's administrator nominee has already rejected (North Dakota v. EPA, D.C. Cir., No. 15-1381, 12/14/16).
The incoming Trump administration will be tasked with defending the new source performance standards for new and modified power plants, which the president-elect has vowed to repeal, when the case heads to argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit April 17, 2017. That is unless the new administration seeks an abeyance of the lawsuit or possibly a voluntary remand of the rule.
In its final bid to defend the regulations, the Obama administration argued in a brief filed Dec. 14 that the carbon dioxide standards, which are a predicate to its comparable limits on the existing fleet of power plants, are a routine exercise of the EPA's regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. The EPA's new source performance standards for new and modified power plants (RIN:2060-AQ91) effectively require new coal-fired units to install some form of carbon capture to comply, a technology that industry groups and states have said is not yet economical or feasible.
“EPA reasonably determined that partial carbon capture and storage is an adequately demonstrated system of emission reduction for new steam units, based on an extensive record of demonstrated projects in operation and under development, as well as vendor guarantees and academic literature,” the EPA said in defense of the requirement.
Pruitt Among Rules’ Challengers
However, the EPA's arguments could all be for naught because Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick to lead the EPA, joined with several other states to challenge the carbon dioxide standards as unreasonable and beyond the scope of the EPA's statutory authority.
Undermining the EPA's carbon dioxide standards for new power plants could also jeopardize the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's carbon limits on the existing fleet of facilities, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate new and modified power plants under Section 111(b) of the act before it can regulate existing units under Section 111(d).
Just because Pruitt is involved in the lawsuits to overturn both sets of power plant standards does not necessarily mean he would withdraw the rules as administrator, if he is confirmed, Jim Rubin, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Washington, D.C., who is not involved with the litigation, told Bloomberg BNA.
“When Pruitt comes in, assuming he's confirmed, EPA will have to take a hard look at how they feel about these particular standards,” he said.
However, Trump has spotlighted the EPA's carbon dioxide regulations as an impediment to domestic energy production that must be rolled back. Nevertheless, the EPA's rule may be difficult for the Trump administration to walk back based on the agency's extensive regulatory record in support of some form of carbon capture, according to one environmental attorney involved in the lawsuit.
“It will be really difficult when the courts have said [Section] 111 applies to carbon dioxide from power plants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA finalizes this really achievable standard that's way below what the industry is already doing right now,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss environmental groups’ efforts to defend the rule. “It will be really hard for a new admin to walk back from that.”
Twenty-four states opposed to the Clean Power Plan called on the Trump administration and the Republican Congress to pull back the rule in a Dec. 14 letter. Though Pruitt had joined legal challenges to the EPA's carbon dioxide regulations, he did not sign the letter.
Ten judges of the D.C. Circuit heard a full day of argument over the Clean Power Plan in September, and a decision is expected in early 2017 (West Virginia v. EPA, D.C. Cir. en banc, No. 15-1363, 9/27/16).
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102036885&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102036885&jd=102036885
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Exporting More Liquefied Natural Gas in America’s National Interest
Dec 15, 2016 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Mark J. Perry
There should be no doubt anymore that exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) is in America’s national interest. But the time to stop talking about our good fortune and start taking action to head off competition from other gas-exporting countries is running short.
With the U.S. now the number one natural gas producer in the world, thanks to the shale revolution, LNG exports are undergirding domestic gas production, enabling producers to actually increase gas output, which strengthens the economy and protects the jobs of gas-field workers.
Importantly, ramping up LNG exports promises to boost the energy security of central and eastern European countries, since they no longer will have to rely so heavily on Russia for natural gas to run their industries and heat their homes, weakening Russia’s near-monopoly grip on the production and delivery of a critically important fuel.
And U.S. shipments of LNG will help the environment by enabling countries like China, Japan and India to switch from dirty coal to natural gas in electricity production, thereby reducing air pollution and global warming emissions.
However, despite growing world demand for natural gas, U.S. LNG exports are miniscule. This year’s exports amount to less than one-tenth of one percent of total world shipments.
Fortunately, U.S. natural gas is the cheapest in the world due to continuing technological innovations in shale production. And theoretically that should put us in the driver’s seat. But our ability to export is seriously compromised by regulatory bottlenecks, which threaten to put the U.S. at a disadvantage compared to other exporting countries, particularly Australia, Russia, and Indonesia, which are ramping up their LNG export capacity, with an eye on the huge Asian market.
Currently, Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana is the only LNG export terminal operating in the United States. Since the first cargo ship headed for Brazil earlier this year, the pace has picked up. In October nine ships left the Cheniere facility.
The U.S. is expected to become a top global LNG producer, behind only Qatar in the Middle East, by 2020. But this hinges on how quickly federal regulators approve the growing list of proposed LNG export projects. The window of opportunity is closing.
Four U.S. export terminals are under construction, but 30 applications for additional terminals are pending before the Department of Energy. Some have been pending for several years. The Energy Department must determine whether each export application is within the country’s national interest, due to a decades-old statute written when domestically-produced natural gas was scarce.
But according to a recent study, a DOE permit to export gas comes after a lengthy process requiring approvals from many other regulatory agencies. For example, the construction and operations of LNG terminals are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Before an LNG export application can even be submitted to FERC, the applicant must file 13 “resource reports” that are then reviewed by 20 separate federal and state agencies, a process that can take several years. Talk about bureaucracy!
Passing legislation to streamline the regulatory process is long overdue. Recently, ambassadors from seven countries in eastern Europe said in a joint letter to Congress that the abundance of U.S. shale gas could be used as a tool to break Russia’s economic grip on their region, and urged our lawmakers to take action.
Then there are the environmental implications as cleaner-burning natural gas comes into wider use and lowers carbon emissions around the world as has happened in the U.S. With Japan building new coal plants to replace the loss of nuclear power following the Fukushima accident, its need for low-carbon natural gas has grown exponentially. The same goes for Germany, which is planning to phase out nuclear power over the next decade and burn more coal instead. China and South Korea are also potentially huge markets for U.S. LNG.
The new Trump administration and Congress need to address the LNG regulatory problem and should enact legislation to break the bottleneck. There’s likely to be push back from some members of Congress who believe that LNG exports would be bad for the economy, arguing that raising the level of exports could push up gas prices and reduce the competitiveness of U.S. business. Dow Chemical, one of the most vocal opponents of exports, maintains that America’s abundant natural gas should be used instead to supply cheap energy for domestic manufacturers and companies like… Dow Chemical.
The American people do not have to worry about our gas resources. According to the Potential Gas Committee, a coalition of utilities and production companies, potential supplies will exceed demand well into the future. In 2015, the committee boosted its estimate of recoverable reserves to nearly 3,000 trillion cubic feet – an amount that would supply U.S. domestic consumption for more than 100 years. Let’s start exporting more U.S. LNG – it’s good for the economy, good for the environment and furthers our geo-political interests in Europe and Asia.
Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan.
http://www.thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/310635-exporting-more-liquefied-natural-gas-in-americas
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Jordan Cove Will Reapply for LNG Project Approval
Dec 15, 2016 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
Developers of the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export plant that was blocked by FERC earlier this year said today they intend to slim down the project and ask for a do-over.
The Oregon-based facility, and an associated pipeline, was initially rejected by FERC in March because it failed to demonstrate that its benefits outweighed the potential harm to landowners. A month later, the developers challenged that rejection, arguing that the project was needed because it had secured five offtake agreements, including a 20-year deal to sell LNG to two of Japan's largest utilities.
FERC rejected the company’s rehearing request last week, saying developers had "every opportunity to demonstrate market need,” effectively closing the agency’s proceeding on Jordan Cove.
“While the decision on Friday was disappointing, we remain committed to this project,” Jordan Cove LNG CEO Betsy Spomer said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Jordan Cove withdrew its application to build a 420-megawatt power plant with the Energy Facility Siting Council. The company says that removing the power plant from the plan “will result in a facility that can be more efficiently and effectively operated with a smaller infrastructure footprint.”
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard
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Pennsylvania Township Delays Permit for Shell Cracker
Dec 15, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
Potter Township, PA, supervisors have requested more information and delayed approval of a conditional-use permit for Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC's multi-billion-dollar ethane cracker in Beaver County.
Shell submitted a thick application for the permit months ago, and the township scheduled a public hearing to consider approving it that stretched over two days this week. The Clean Air Council (CAC) is challenging the application and wants to make sure it is properly vetted and that all stakeholders understand the kind of affects the enormous facility could have on the region.
"The council's goal is to ensure that the information Shell submits is verifiable and that the township seriously considers the impacts to the community -- and not just Potter Township -- but the community at large," said Patrick Auth, an attorney for Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, who's representing the CAC in the matter.
Auth said the supervisors delayed their decision and have requested legal arguments from both Shell and the CAC on why the application should be approved, denied or reconsidered. They've also asked Shell for more information about the Falcon Ethane Pipeline System that would supply the cracker's feedstock, Auth added.
Shell announced in June that it would build the facility. The company has already spent millions of dollars on site preparation and administrative work. The land was once home to a large zinc smelting facility and Shell said in its air quality permit application with the state that it chose the site because of an "appropriate" business and zoning climate, as well as its proximity to rail, water, roadways and wet gas.
The facility would be built on 400 acres next to the Ohio River in Potter and Center Townships, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It would have the capacity to consume about 100,000 b/d of ethane and would be one of the largest facilities of its kind in the country.
Shell and CAC have until Jan. 6 to file their arguments with the township. Auth couldn't say what CAC's next step would be if a conditional use permit is granted. "I don't know right now. I can't answer that. That would depend on if it was approved and the basis for that approval," he said. The CAC has also challenged a state permit for the facility.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was also scheduled to host a public meeting in Monaca, PA, near the site on Thursday evening. That would cover the agency's decision to amend Shell's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, which Shell received from the zinc smelting company and needs to be modified for the cracker. The facility also needs to obtain more emissions credits and DEP must modify its Air Plan Approval to do so.
The agency will take public comment at the meeting and accept written comments until Dec. 26 on those issues. Shell received its air quality permit and other key state permits for the facility last year.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/108753-pennsylvania-township-delays-permit-for-shell-cracker
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Corpus Christi, Texas, Issues Water Warning After Chemical Spill
Dec 15, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Dan Frosch
Officials in the Texas Gulf Coast city of Corpus Christi warned residents and businesses on Thursday not to use tap water after a chemical spill was suspected of contaminating the municipal water supply.
According to Kim Womack, a spokeswoman for the city, the spill occurred late Wednesday in an industrial section of the city of 324,000 and involved an asphalt emulsifier known as Indulin AA-86.
Ms. Womack said between three and 24 gallons of the product leaked into the city’s water system. City officials didn’t yet know if drinking water was soiled by the contaminants but were moving out of an abundance of caution.
Lillian Riojas, a spokeswoman for Valero Energy, which operates refineries in Corpus Christi, said the company believed the spill was caused by a third party operating near the company’s asphalt terminal.
“We believe this issue is isolated to a lateral industrial line. Valero is offering its resources to assist the City in isolating the issue and to help confirm this has not impacted the City’s water supply,” Ms. Riojas said.
City officials haven’t identified a responsible party and said they are investigating how exactly the spill, which was discovered when someone called to report dirty water in the area, occurred.
City Councilwoman Carolyn Vaughn, in whose district the spill occurred, said Ergon Inc., a Mississippi-based company that provides various support services to oil companies, was operating at the site of the spill.
“I’m hoping we get answers soon,” she said.
The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
City officials said they weren’t yet clear on the extent of the contamination but were encouraged from initial testing on the city’s water supply.
Ms. Womack said the city had requested aid from state officials and asked that water be trucked in until the water restrictions are lifted.
Gov. Greg Abbott said on Thursday that he was directing the Texas Department of Emergency Management to coordinate shipments of drinking water to Corpus Christi.
At an afternoon news conference, Ms. Womack said a donor had provided 27,000 cases of water to be distributed to residents and noted that local grocery stores were bringing in additional shipments of bottled water.
“This is just the beginning of what we are doing to help our residents and citizens,” Ms. Womack said.
Meanwhile, the Corpus Christi Parks & Recreation Department said many of its facilities would be closed Thursday and Friday due to the accident, and residents were fanning out to stores to stock up on bottled water.
This isn’t the first time Corpus Christi has grappled with problems with its water.
In May, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ordered the city to issue a boil requirement after low levels of chlorine disinfectant were found in the water system.
A previous boil notice was issued by the city in September 2015 after low levels of chlorine were also found in the water supply.
—Christopher M. Matthews contributed to this article.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/corpus-christi-texas-issues-water-warning-after-chemical-spill-1481837974
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DuPont to Pay $50M over Mercury-Contaminated Virginia Rivers
Dec 16, 2016 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Sarah Rankin
Chemical giant DuPont will pay more than $50 million but admit no fault under a proposed environmental settlement after releasing toxic mercury for decades that made its way into Shenandoah Valley waterways, state and federal officials announced Thursday.
The deal would resolve alleged violations of civil environmental statutes, including the Clean Water Act, related to the pollution from a company factory in Waynesboro. It would amount to the largest environmental damage settlement in Virginia history and the eighth largest in the nation, officials said. The money would go to projects including wildlife habitat restoration, water quality enhancement and improvements to recreational areas.
“In bringing this settlement to a close, we are finally righting a wrong that has impacted the South River and the South Fork of the Shenandoah River for so many decades,” Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe said at a news conference announcing the settlement.
Wilmington, Delaware-based Dupont Co. used mercury in its process of making synthetic fiber at the plant between 1929 and 1950, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality. Strict storage and disposal regulations weren’t in place at the time, and some of the mercury seeped into the South River and flowed downstream to the South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
DuPont discovered the mercury — which accumulates in fish and is especially dangerous to pregnant or breastfeeding women and young children — in the facility’s soil in 1976, officials say.
The pollution impacted over 100 miles of river and thousands of acres of floodplain and riparian habitat, affecting fish, mussels, migratory birds and amphibians, the Department of Justice said in a statement. The pollution also has limited some recreational fishing in Waynesboro, a city of about 20,000 in the Shenandoah Valley.
The terms of the settlement are outlined in a proposed consent decree that was filed in federal court in Harrisonburg on Thursday. It is subject to a 45-day public comment period and must be approved by the court.
The amount of money proposed is “quite impressive,” but mercury is very persistent in the environment and very difficult to remove, said Dr. Thomas Benzing, a professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University who works with a team of researchers who have been monitoring the mercury levels since 2001.
If the settlement goes forward, DuPont would pay slightly more than $42 million toward projects including streamside plantings and erosion control to improve water quality and fish habitat; mussel propagation and restoration; migratory songbird habitat restoration and protection; and recreational fishing access creation or improvement.
The company also will pay for renovations at the Front Royal Fish Hatchery to improve production of warm-water fish such as smallmouth bass, at an estimated cost of up to $10 million.
“Every dollar is going to be used to clean up the land, the source issues and the water, to where it would have been” if not for the pollution, said Assistant Attorney General John Cruden of the Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division.
No one from DuPont — which is awaiting final regulatory approval for its merger with Dow Chemical in a deal to create DowDuPont, a $130 billion conglomerate — spoke at the announcement.
But Mike Liberati, South River project director for the DuPont Corporate Remediation Group, said in a statement that DuPont “is committed to a long-term presence in the Waynesboro area and to maintaining transparency with its citizens.”
The first phase of remediation, involving part of the riverbank in Waynesboro’s Constitution Park could be complete in February. Soil there containing the highest concentrations of mercury is being excavated and hauled away and replaced by clean topsoil, Liberati said.
“It’s going to be a long-term project. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight,” Benzing said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dupont-to-pay-50m-over-mercury-contaminated-virginia-rivers/2016/12/15/1658bf9e-c33c-11e6-92e8-c07f4f671da4_story.html?utm_term=.42e292043610
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Air: EPA Confirms Deadline for OTC Expansion Response
Dec 15, 2016 | Inside EPA
EPA has confirmed a deadline for its responses to a petition from Eastern states calling for significantly expanding the Ozone Transport Commission (OTC), the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region where ozone controls are tougher than elsewhere, though it is not clear how the Trump administration will view the issue.
In a Federal Register notice slated for publication Dec. 16, EPA announces and invites public comment on its Dec. 8 proposed consent decree with the states that would resolve their lawsuit, State of New York, et al. v. EPA, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The suit, filed by OTC member states New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, calls on the court to force EPA to respond to the 2013 petition by the states for a massive westward and southward expansion of the OTC.
States in the OTC region filed the petition to reduce ozone transported into their area from upwind states, asking EPA to enlarge the OTC under Clean Air Act section 176(A). EPA has 18 months under the air law to respond, but failed to do so.
Under the consent decree, EPA would have to issue a proposed determination on the petition by Jan. 18, days before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated, and a final determination by Oct. 27. While industry and GOP lawmakers are urging the incoming administration to roll back EPA's ozone standards, a step that would likely eliminate the need to expand OTC, the president-elect has said he will “refocus” EPA on its “core mission of ensuring clean air.”
Original signatories to the petition were Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, later joined by Pennsylvania.
Currently, the OTC includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, the northern part of Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The petition asked for an expansion under Clean Air Act section 176 (A) to include Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and the remainder of Virginia. EPA is taking comment on the decree for 30 days, through Jan. 15.
The deadlines in the consent decree match those in a Nov. 4 proposed consent decree to resolve a related action, Donald van der Vaart v. Gina McCarthy, brought by North Carolina, which is seeking to confirm that it will not be included in any OTC expansion.
EPA announced that settlement in a Nov. 21 Federal Register, and is taking comment on that decree through Dec. 21.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/air-epa-confirms-deadline-otc-expansion-response
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EPA Moves Ahead with Visibility Program Despite Pruitt's Criticism
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Patrick Ambrosio
The Environmental Protection Agency moved ahead Dec. 15 with revisions to its regional haze regulations, a program that has been the target of litigation and criticism from President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the agency.
The final rule, posted online but not yet scheduled for publication in the Federal Register, gives states an extra three years to submit the next round of plans for improving visibility in national parks and other protected areas. Those plans, originally due in July 2018 but now due in July 2021, would cover state obligations under the second planning period under the regional haze program, which runs from 2018 through 2028.While that deadline extension was welcomed by the state environmental agencies tasked with implementing the regional haze program, the rule contains a number of other regulatory changes that drew criticism by states tasked with implementing the program and utilities that could be the source of required emissions cuts.
Critics of the EPA's proposed version of the rule, which was largely tacked with the revisions contained in the final rule, included Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R), who Trump intends to nominate as EPA administrator once he takes office in 2017. Pruitt joined seven other state attorneys general in a comment letter that identified various alleged legal flaws in the EPA's proposal.
‘Reasonable Progress’ Requirements
One provision of the proposal that drew criticism from states and industry organizations was the handling of reasonable progress requirements in the next round of state plans. The Clean Air Act's regional haze provisions require states to adopt long-term strategies for making reasonable progress toward national visibility goals.
The EPA, in a fact sheet issued alongside the rule revisions, said that it took steps to clarify the agency's “long-standing” interpretation that reasonable progress goals be set based on long-term strategies. In the rule's text, the EPA said that the Clean Air Act requires states to conduct a four-factor analysis during each planning period to determine a reasonable rate of progress, even if the protected areas in those states are on track to meet the program's goal of natural visibility conditions by 2064.
The EPA's rule “completely divorces” controls for reasonable progress from the next planning period, according to Debra Jezouit, a partner at Baker Botts LLP who represents utility sector clients. Jezouit, who serves as deputy department chair of the Environmental Department in the firm's Washington office, said the regional haze rule revisions may force states to require the installation of pollution controls during the second planning period, if those controls aren't actually necessary for areas to stay on track for meeting long-term visibility goals.
“That's going to be a problem for sources and states to try to implement it and try to figure out what EPA really wants,” Jezouit told Bloomberg BNA.
Jezouit said the reasonable progress language codifies the approach EPA took in recent federal implementation plans covering Texas and Arkansas. The agency earlier in December asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to remand the Texas haze plan back to the agency in response to a July court order that stayed implementation of the federal plan (Texas v. EPA, 5th Cir., No. 15-60118, motion filed 12/2/16).Rollback Options Available
While the EPA's rule revisions will likely be published in the Federal Register before President Barack Obama leaves office, the Trump administration will have legislative and administrative options if it wanted to change aspects of the agency's regional haze rules.
For example, the rule must be published in the Federal Register by Dec. 20 in order to go into effect before Inauguration Day 2017. In previous administrations, including at the beginning of the Obama administration, the White House has instructed agencies to consider extending the effective date of published regulations that had not yet gone into effect. The Trump administration could opt to delay effectiveness of the rule and potentially move to reconsider it.
Congress could offer a path for rolling back the regional haze programs revisions, as the EPA issued the rule within the window for consideration under the Congressional Review Act of 1996, which allows for the expedited consideration of resolutions of disapproval in the Senate. Congressional Republican leadership unsuccessfully attempted to use the CRA to pass disapproval resolutions that would have overturned the EPA's Clean Power Plan and Waters of the U.S. Rule. However, with the incoming Trump administration promising to eliminate what it describes as “job-killing regulations” that affect coal and other industries, it's possible that the CRA could serve as an effective tool in early 2017 to reverse regulations issued late in the Obama administration.
While its unclear how extensive Congress’ use of the CRA will be in 2017, even if Congress doesn't act to disapprove of the regional haze revisions, “there's no reason” why new EPA leadership wouldn't be able to seek changes, according to William Yeatman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Yeatman has no involvement with the Trump transition, though two of his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are serving on the transition's EPA review team.
Yeatman, in an interview conducted while the final revisions were still under review at the White House Office of Management and Budget, predicted the new EPA leadership would be interested in revisiting the regional haze regulations, given Pruitt's past criticism of the program.
“I expect Scott Pruitt, given what I know about his history [with regional haze], to take keen interest in it,” Yeatman told Bloomberg BNA.
In addition to the comments criticizing the proposal, Pruitt in 2011 challenged the EPA's disapproval of Oklahoma's state visibility plan, which he said “usurped the right” of the state to set its energy policy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit sided with the EPA in a 2013 opinion (Oklahoma v. EPA, 723 F.3d 1201,77 ERC 1047, 2013 BL 191593, (10th Cir. 2013)).
Some Opposition to Extension
Stephanie Kodish, senior director and counsel of the National Parks Conservation Association's Clean Air Program, told Bloomberg BNA that while it is “unfortunate on so many levels” that the president-elect chose a critic of the regional haze program, national parks are “not a partisan issue.” She said any efforts to stall or reverse progress under the regional haze program would disadvantage the National Park System, as well as the millions of annual visitors to those parks and the nearby communities that benefit economically from that tourism.
“It would be unfortunate and sad for anyone at the helm of the EPA to do anything other than enhance important protections for these beloved places,” Kodish said.
While environmental and conservation advocates largely supported EPA's efforts to update its regional haze regulations to offer greater clarity on expectations, Kodish expressed concerns with two provisions of the rule: The three year deadline extension for the next round of state plans and a change in the process for states to submit progress updates under the program.
Any delay in submitting state plans also would likely delay the emissions reductions that would be achieved under those plans, further delaying the cleanup of air at national parks, Kodish said. In addition, the EPA's decision to no longer require states to submit their progress reviews as a state implementation plan revision removes some formal requirements that ensured transparency and public involvement, she said.
New Deadline to Allow Coordination
State environmental agencies were supportive of the three-year extension, which will allow for states to “integrate and harmonize” its regional haze planning activity with implementation of other clean air programs, according to Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. Becker told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail that the EPA's rule also would remove “process-heavy” requirements on regional haze progress reports that would allow state and local agencies to focus more on the content and substance of those reports than procedural requirements.
Jezouit of Baker Botts said the ability of states to coordinate their regional haze planning with other activity will allow regulated entities to ensure that their compliance strategies are sufficient to meet requirements under multiple programs. For example, decision-making by regulated facilities could be affected if companies can ensure that what they're doing for one program, such as the 2015 ozone standards, also would be sufficient to cover reasonable progress requirements for the next haze planning period.
Clint Woods, executive director of the Association of Air Pollution Control Agencies, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail, that adjusting the regional haze plan due date is a “big deal” for states given all the different Clean Air Act deadlines they face over the next several years. Woods said his organization was still reviewing the EPA's final rule, but said provisions on reasonably attributable visibility impairment, or RAVI, don't appear to directly address state concerns that the process is inconsistent with and duplicative of other regulatory requirements.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102036913&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102036913&jd=102036913
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How Climate Rules Might Fade Away
Dec 16, 2016 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Matthew Philips, Mark Drajem and Jennifer A Dlouhy
In February 2009, a month after Barack Obama took office, two academics sat across from each other in the White House mess hall. Over a club sandwich, Michael Greenstone, a White House economist, and Cass Sunstein, Obama's top regulatory officer, decided that the executive branch needed to figure out how to estimate the economic damage from climate change. With the recession in full swing, they were rightly skeptical about the chances that Congress would pass a nationwide cap-and-trade bill. Greenstone and Sunstein knew they needed a Plan B: a way to regulate carbon emissions without going through Congress.
Over the next year, a team of economists, scientists, and lawyers from across the federal government convened to come up with a dollar amount for the economic cost of carbon emissions. Whatever value they hit upon would be used to determine the scope of regulations aimed at reducing the damage from climate change. The bigger the estimate, the more costly the rules meant to address it could be. After a year of modeling different scenarios, the team came up with a central estimate of $21 per metric ton, which is to say that by their calculations, every ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere imposed $21 of economic cost. It has since been raised to around $40 a ton.
This calculation, known as the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), serves as the linchpin for much of the climate-related rules imposed by the White House over the past eight years. From capping the carbon emissions of power plants to cutting down on the amount of electricity used by the digital clock on a microwave, the SCC has given the Obama administration the legal justification to argue that the benefits these rules provide to society outweigh the costs they impose on industry.
It turns out that the same calculation used to justify so much of Obama's climate agenda could be used by President-elect Donald Trump to undo a significant portion of it. As Trump nominates people who favor fossil fuels and oppose climate regulation to top positions in his cabinet—including Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency and former Texas Governor Rick Perry to lead the Department of Energy—it seems clear that one of his primary objectives will be to dismantle much of Obama's climate and clean energy legacy. He already appears to be focusing on the SCC.
Social Cost of Carbon Underpins Obama's Climate Policies
On Dec. 7, the Department of Energy received a memo from the Trump transition team asking a litany of questions, many of which focused on identifying agency employees and contractors who worked on climate rules. Among its 74 questions, the memo includes a number of detailed requests about the Social Cost of Carbon: who worked on it, what methodology was used to calculate it, and what e-mails and materials could be provided that were associated with it. (A Trump transition official later disavowed the memo, telling CNN it “was not authorized.”)
Trump can't undo the SCC by fiat. There is established case law requiring the government to account for the impact of carbon, and if he just repealed it, environmentalists would almost certainly sue. “Unfortunately, you can't just pull this thing up by the roots,” says Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank in Washington. “While that might actually be a great idea on the merits, you have to address the court cases that will be litigated.”
There are other ways for Trump to undercut the SCC. By tweaking some of the assumptions and calculations that are baked into its model, the Trump administration could pretty much render it irrelevant, or even skew it to the point that carbon emissions come out as a benefit instead of a cost.
Discounts and the Future
The SCC models rely on a “discount rate” to state the future harm from global warming in today's dollars. The higher the discount rate, the lower the estimate of harm. That's because the costs incurred by burning carbon lie mostly in the distant future, while the benefits (heat, electricity, etc.) are enjoyed today. A high discount rate shrinks the estimates of future costs but doesn't affect present-day benefits. The team put together by Greenstone and Sunstein used a discount rate of 3 percent to come up with its central estimate of $21 a ton for damage inflicted by carbon. But changing that discount just slightly produces big swings in the overall cost of carbon, turning a number that's pushing broad changes in everything from appliances to coal leasing decisions into one that would have little or no impact on policy.
According to a 2013 government update on the SCC, by applying a discount rate of 5 percent, the cost of carbon in 2020 comes out to $12 a ton; using a 2.5 percent rate, it's $65. A 7 percent discount rate, which has been used by the EPA for other regulatory analysis, could actually lead to a negative carbon cost, which would seem to imply that carbon emissions are beneficial. “Once you start to dig into how the numbers are constructed, I cannot fathom how anyone could think it has any basis in reality,” says Daniel Simmons, vice president for policy at the American Energy Alliance and a member of the Trump transition team focusing on the Energy Department. “Depending on what the discount rate is, you go from a large number to a negative number, with some very reasonable assumptions.”
Greenstone, who left the White House in 2010 and now teaches economics at the University of Chicago, insists that his team operated under a self-imposed “veil of ignorance” and made decisions without trying to make the final cost of carbon higher or lower. He concedes there is a broad range of values to ascribe to carbon but says that, if anything, they were too conservative in their cost estimates, and that it should be higher than it is. “Just because it can't be written on the back of a napkin doesn't mean the Social Cost of Carbon is not real,” says Greenstone.
Real But Malleable
Most serious policymakers believe the SCC is a valid concept, says Jeff Holmstead, a former senior EPA official under George W. Bush. “The problem is that the number is so malleable, you can almost put it wherever you want.” Putting a specific value on it, Holmstead says, “gives artificial precision to something that is highly uncertain.”
Another issue for those who question the Obama administration's SCC: It estimates the global costs and benefits of carbon emissions, rather than just focusing on the impact to the U.S. Critics argue that this pushes the cost of carbon much higher and that the calculation should instead be limited to the U.S.; that would lower the cost by more than 70 percent, says the CEI's Lewis. But to some, it makes sense to use a global estimate for the SCC, since climate change is worldwide. “This gets at a very basic economic concept of protecting the global commons and the natural resources we all share,” says Kenneth Gillingham, who served as senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House in 2015 and now teaches economics at Yale.
Still, by narrowing the calculation to the U.S., Trump could certainly produce a lower cost of carbon. Asked in an e-mail whether the new administration would raise the discount rate or narrow the scope of the SCC to the U.S., one person shaping Trump energy and environmental policy replied, “What prevents us from doing both?”
At an energy summit sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Texas Public Policy Foundation on Dec. 8, David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow in energy economics and climate change at Heritage and a member of Trump's EPA transition team, laid out one of the primary arguments against the SCC. “Believe it or not, these models look out to the year 2300. That's like effectively asking, ‘If you turn your light switch on today, how much damage will that do in 2300?’ That's way beyond when any macroeconomic model can be trusted.”
For climate economists, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Frances Moore, an assistant professor at the University of California at Davis, has co-authored a paper that suggests the cost of carbon should be much higher, closer to $200 a ton, or about five times higher than current estimates. “It comes down to whether or not you value the future,” she says. “Arguing for a lower number means you inherently don't.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=102036871&vname=dennotallissues&fn=102036871&jd=102036871
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Trump Team Renounces Climate Change Survey
Dec 15, 2016 | Roll Call
By Aryn Braun
President-elect Donald Trump's transition team declared Wednesday that it had disavowed a 74-part survey sent to the Department of Energy requesting the names of civil servants working on climate change.
The questionnaire, which the agency received last week, asked specifically for the names of people who attended United Nations climate meetings and worked on the social cost of carbon, a metric used in crafting energy regulations, Reuters reported.
The survey also requested the names and recent works of employees at the Energy Department's 17 national laboratories.
“The questionnaire was not authorized or part of our standard protocol,” Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said. “The person who sent it has been properly counseled.”
In addition to the department refusing to comply, the Obama administration responded to the unusual transition request.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the request “could have been an attempt to target civil servants.”
In reaction to the survey, Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. and Elijah E. Cummings outlined their concerns in a letter to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is in charge of the transition.
“We are concerned that these efforts may be an attempt to apply an ideological ‘litmus test’ to career civil servants, which runs counter to the principles of a merit-based civil service and the prohibition against discrimination against civil servants on the basis of political affiliation,” Pallone and Cummings wrote.
“While the new administration is entitled to select political appointees who share the President-elect’s views on climate change, any effort to retaliate against, undermine, demote, or marginalize civil servants on the basis of their scientific analysis would be an abuse of authority.”
Pallone and Cummings are Ranking members of the Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform committees, respectively.
Trump, who previously vowed to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, chose former Texas Gov. and climate change skeptic Rick Perry to serve as Energy secretary.
www.rollcall.com/news/politics/trump-team-renounces-climate-survey
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Donald Trump Should Know: This Is What Climate Change Costs Us
Dec 16, 2016 | New York Times
By Michael Greenstone and Cass R. Sunstein
Last week, Donald J. Trump’s transition team sent a startling questionnaire to the Department of Energy. Among other things, the questionnaire asked for the names of all employees and contractors who attended meetings of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, as well as all emails associated with those meetings, and the department’s “opinion” on the underlying issues — a request it essentially refused.
Though Mr. Trump’s transition team later said that the questionnaire was sent in error, it should be understood in tandem with a memorandum, leaked last week, from Thomas Pyle, the leader of the transition’s energy team and president of the American Energy Alliance, which promotes “free market” policies. Mr. Pyle described the steps the Trump administration will probably take to reduce environmental regulations, including “ending the use of the social cost of carbon in federal rule makings.”
If that happens, it will defy law, science and economics.
In 2009, the two of us — one from the Council of Economic Advisers and the other from the Office of Management and Budget — convened the first meetings of the working group to which the questionnaire referred. Our aim was to quantify the social cost of carbon for the United States government by drawing from the latest research in science and economics. This comprehensive measure would reflect the monetary cost of the damage caused by the release of an additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accounting for the destruction of property from storms and floods, declining agricultural and labor productivity, elevated mortality rates and more.
The working group, which consists of officials from agencies throughout the federal government, now estimates that cost at about $36 per ton of carbon dioxide. This figure plays a central role in the cost-benefit analyses that agencies use in deciding whether to issue regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and how stringent such regulations should be. Thus far, it has been used for 79 regulations, including energy-efficiency rules for refrigerators and washing machines, fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks, and the Clean Power Plan, which requires reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants.
Without it, such regulations would have no quantifiable benefits. For this reason, the social cost of carbon can be seen as the linchpin of national climate policy.
And yet not everyone is a fan of this concept. Those who think that climate change is a hoax, or who oppose regulation as a rule, have a major problem with the social cost of carbon, because it indicates that limits on emissions can deliver significant benefits. Others believe that the $36 per ton figure is too high, overstating the benefits of regulations.
But the working group’s process and output have been validated by the courts. In August, a federal court of appeals rejected a legal challenge to the social cost of carbon by a trade association of refrigerator companies. The association contended that the government lacked the legal authority to consider the social cost of carbon and that its judgments were arbitrary.
The court responded that it had “no doubt that Congress intended” to allow consideration of the social cost of carbon and that the government’s judgments were reasonable.
In fact, in 2008, a federal court of appeals ruled that the government essentially had to specify a social cost of carbon: It was not permitted to ignore harms from climate change, the court said, when setting regulatory policy.
The federal government is also required to quantify environmental damages under prevailing executive orders. President Ronald Reagan started the practice in 1981, when he required federal agencies to analyze the benefits and costs of their regulations; his Democratic and Republican successors have followed his lead.
New scientific and economic evidence suggests that climate change probably poses an even greater risk than the $36 figure reflects. For example, the West Antarctica ice sheet appears to be retreating faster than we thought, raising the specter of multimeter sea level rise in the next century. Recent research also found that climate change will lead to shorter and sicker lives, primarily because of the harmful effect of more extremely hot days on health. Extreme heat is also projected to reduce worker productivity and increase energy consumption, while changes in temperature and precipitation globally are expected to increase food prices and violence. Thus, there is a strong case that if anything, the government’s estimate of the social cost of carbon should be higher than it is.
To be sure, the exact number is uncertain, and the Trump administration will make its own judgment. But a credible assessment must be based on the best science and economics, not politics. And there is no justification for a chilling investigation of civil servants who are just doing their jobs.
Ultimately, the social cost of carbon provides a necessary guidepost in decisions about how to balance costs to our economy today with the coming climate damages. Wishing that we did not face this trade-off will not make it go away.
Any effort to eliminate the social cost of carbon would reflect a neglect of science and economics — and it would be quickly struck down in court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/donald-trump-should-know-this-is-what-climate-change-costs-us.html?_r=0
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As Trump Signals Climate Action Pullback, Local Leaders Push Forward
Dec 16, 2016 | New York Times
By Tatiana Schlossberg
The incoming Trump administration appears determined to reverse much of what President Obama has tried to achieve on climate and environment policy.
In position papers, agency questionnaires and the résumés of incoming senior officials, the direction is clear — an about-face from eight years of policies designed to reduce climate-altering emissions and address the effects of a warming planet. The Republican-led Congress appears to welcome many of these changes.
But mayors and governors — many of them in states that supported President-elect Donald J. Trump — say they are equally determined to continue the policies and plans they have already adopted to address climate change and related environmental damage, regardless of what they see from Washington.
“With a federal government that’s hostile to climate action, more and faster climate action work from cities, states and businesses will be required to stay anywhere near on track with our carbon pollution goals,” said Sam Adams, the former mayor of Portland, Ore., and current director of the World Resources Institute United States.Continue reading the main story
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“In many cases, the solutions that help address climate change are what you have to do anyway in a city — transit options so the city doesn’t get gridlocked, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions and unlocks a tremendous amount of economic competitiveness because you don’t have thousands of people stalled in traffic,” Mr. Adams added.
In last month’s election, Seattle, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, voted to expand mass transit. Portland, Ore., which many say is the most environmentally minded city in the country, began a new municipal waste program a few years ago, resulting in higher recycling and composting rates, and smaller amounts of trash headed to landfills. Miami Beach is raising roadbeds and building flood walls to hold back the rising seas.
California, led by the Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, has adopted a cap-and-trade program, which limits carbon dioxide emissions and sets up a market for companies to buy and sell carbon allowances, so companies can meet or come under that carbon dioxide limit. The state has set one of the nation’s most ambitious climate targets — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Hawaii is planning to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2045.
Governor Brown delivered a fiery defense of his state’s environmental policies at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco last week. He scoffed at reports that some Trump transition officials wanted to eliminate the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s system of earth-observing satellites.
“If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”
Though stymied by alternating bouts of congressional gridlock or fossil-fuel-friendly presidential administrations over the last two decades, cities and states have been able to take substantive action. They have fortified themselves against rising seas, switched to renewable sources of energy, expanded mass transit and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever happens or does not happen in Washington, officials say, these projects will continue.
Leaders in some cities feel that without presidential leadership it will be hard to achieve the swift transition that dealing with climate change requires. Many fear that they will not get federal funds or national policies needed to make it happen.
Still, many mayors and state officials are optimistic about their plans already in motion and those that are scheduled over the next few years.
“We feel really good, and we don’t see this election slowing us down,” said Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles. “We’re not going to wait for action from the federal government,” he said. “We’re taking action now and securing our values.”
While experts caution that there are areas where federal regulations can determine what states and local governments are able to accomplish, they maintain that a climate-skeptical administration could not halt all the momentum generated locally over the last two decades.
About 60 percent of Americans live in cities, which generate most of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Cities are where climate change problems originate, and therefore that’s where the solutions are,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who is co-chairman of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and the United Nations’ Secretary General’s special envoy for cities and climate change.
A number of cities have made substantial progress. In Miami Beach, where $400 million has been invested to deal with flooding, roads have been elevated and sea walls have been constructed. Susanne M. Torriente, the city’s chief resiliency officer, said the city had also recently completed its greenhouse gas inventory and now would aim to reduce its emissions, regardless of federal policy.
Whatever policies the Trump administration adopts, she said, “won’t really be a big change for us.”
Republican mayors also govern some cities that are especially vulnerable to climate change. James C. Cason, the mayor of Coral Gables, Fla., is working to protect the city from some of the flooding it is already experiencing and to prepare it for more flooding that will most likely accompany rising sea levels. Florida has a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who has questioned the cause and extent of climate change, but that has not stopped Mr. Cason and other Republican mayors in South Florida from making pragmatic decisions on the issue.
Cities have also seen lots of benefits from networks — the Compact of Mayors, which has been signed by more than 120 American cities, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Climate Mayors and others — most notably, information sharing and solutions, and reaffirming commitments to each other and to their citizens, as many mayors did in a recent letter to the president-elect.
Some policy experts and state officials maintain that state governments, if they are willing to act on climate or energy policy, are where the measurable progress is made.
In most states, governors and legislatures have the authority to regulate the two biggest sources of emissions: power plants and transportation.
States can set automotive fuel-efficiency standards, and in the case of California, effectively set them for the whole country, experts said. Twenty-nine states require that a certain percentage of their electricity comes from renewable sources, known as a portfolio standard, and another eight have voluntary portfolio standards or targets. In addition to California, nine other states, grouped in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, known as R.G.G.I., and 17 governors, mostly from that group of 29, have also signed the Governors’ Accord for a New Energy Future, which commits their states to certain sustainability goals.
New York has also enacted progressive climate policies, rivaling California, largely by engaging market solutions, in particular attempting to reform the state’s utility system.
Republican-led states, which may not be favorable to climate policy, have still achieved meaningful progress, especially when it comes to renewable energy, because of the economics of the wind and solar industries. Texas, for instance, has more wind power than any other state, largely a product of deregulating the utility market, but also of subsidies from the federal government and tax credits.
Robert Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said that there were areas where national policies could hamstring state efforts.
The federal government, he said, can be helpful in getting states to work together, though it is not essential to those efforts, as demonstrated by R.G.G.I. or the Governors’ Accord.
And while achieving meaningful reductions may not be without difficulty, Mr. Perciasepe said, “I’m comforted that we have so much momentum, though we still need to be going faster, and the fact that we need to continue to accelerate may be lost.”
Depending on their state, however, cities are somewhat limited in what they can do from a legislative or regulatory standpoint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/science/local-government-climate-change-efforts.html
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Trump Can’t Deny Climate Change Without a Fight
Dec 15, 2016 | Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
The incoming Trump administration will face passionate and hostile resistance if it tries to deny the reality of human-induced climate change. We can already hear the drums of war.
●The Department of Energy flatly denied a demand from the Trump transition team to supply the names of employees or contractors who have participated in international climate change negotiations in the past five years. Also rejected was a request for names of staff who helped calculate the “social cost” of carbon emissions. The obvious concern is that these workers would be labeled as unreliable, and perhaps shoved aside, by political appointees determined to pretend that climate change does not exist.
●Scientists have begun a frantic effort to archive decades’ worth of climate data, copying it onto servers that are beyond the U.S. government’s reach. The voluminous data sets, compiled by agencies including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, help form the basis for the consensus view that the atmosphere and the oceans are rapidly warming due to heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. There has been no threat from the Trump camp to do anything untoward regarding the data, but the researchers are taking no chances.
●California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said Wednesday that if President-elect Donald Trump tries to impede his state’s vigorous efforts against climate change, “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.” Speaking in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Brown warned that rumored budget cuts might end a NASA program that uses satellites to take measurements of the Earth, including temperature. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” Brown declared, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”
All of this is just the beginning. Trump, who has repeatedly described climate change as a “hoax,” will try to reverse the Obama administration’s progress in limiting carbon emissions. Assuming he follows through, he’ll have a real fight on his hands.
At one of his strongman-style victory rallies Tuesday night, Trump said that “we will cancel the restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas, and clean, beautiful coal.”
Apparently, Trump never met a fossil fuel he didn’t like. And he has announced his intention to appoint the most prominent oil man he could find — Rex Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the largest non-government oil company in the world — as secretary of state.
Trump may renounce the historic Paris agreement, in which the world’s biggest carbon emitters — China, the United States and India — all pledged curbs. He can also eliminate regulations limiting carbon emissions by power plants, encourage more drilling for oil and natural gas, and try his best to revive the moribund coal mining industry, though its decline is due more to market forces than to anything the government has done.
These threatened actions come near the end of what will almost surely be the warmest year on record. Continuing what scientists see as an indisputable trend, 2016 was an absolute scorcher. And yes, I realize that right now it’s cold in much of the country; some scientists believe that rapid warming at the North Pole has destabilized air flow patterns and perhaps made these “polar vortex” cold snaps more common. In any event, the key measurement is the global temperature average, not the local wind chill.
Trump is being advised by a number of vocal climate-change deniers. The data that scientists are rushing to preserve clearly refutes those who say there is no warming — hence the urgency to protect the information. Some deniers acknowledge the fact of warming but say that it is due to some unfathomable natural cycle. But Occam’s razor argues persuasively for the simpler explanation: Since the Industrial Revolution, we have increased the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide — known to trap heat — by an incredible 40 percent.
Much of the rest of the world understands the need to move toward clean energy. The technology isn’t quite there yet, so some breakthroughs will be required. Smart government policy would be to invest in research to make it more likely that these advances are made in Berkeley rather than Bangalore or Beijing.
Dumb policy would be to fire up the smokestacks, stop collecting all that annoying climate data and marginalize federal employees who best understand global warming. This is the direction Trump appears to be headed.
The president-elect threatens to make the United States a second-rate player in the coming clean-energy economy. I guess that’s his idea of greatness, but it’s not mine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-cant-deny-climate-change-without-a-fight/2016/12/15/953207ee-c30a-11e6-8422-eac61c0ef74d_story.html?utm_term=.8ca27fb30fe3
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