Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 12/26/2016
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Proposed Settlement Agreement Requires US EPA to Promulgate Perchlorate Regulations by the End of 2019
Dec 26, 2016 | National Law Review
By Jonathan S. King
US EPA recently agreed in federal court to engage in a rulemaking process over the next three-plus years which would culminate in the promulgation of final perchlorate regulations by December 19, 2019. -
A New Trump Adviser Introduces New — and Unaccountable — Conflicts
Dec 25, 2016 | Washington Post
By Editorial Board
Having held partial or controlling stakes in companies ranging from Phillips Petroleum to American Railcar Industries, billionaire investor Carl Icahn certainly knows a thing or two about how federal regulators deal with business. -
DOE Approves Additional Freeport LNG Export Volumes
Dec 23, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Joe Fisher
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has followed in FERC's footsteps in authorizing what is essentially a true-up of authorized export volumes with production capacity of Freeport LNG's three-train FLEX project. -
Scientists are Trying to Save the Climate from Toxic Cow Burps
Dec 23, 2016 | Washington Post
By Sarah Kaplan
Earth has a cow problem. Cows are ruminants. They break down food by fermenting it in a special stomach packed with microbes, then chewing it again. This process lets them get nutrients out of bland, fibrous grass, but it also makes them, ahem, rather gassy. -
With Dakota Access in Limbo, More Bakken Crude to Move on Trains
Dec 22, 2016 | The New York Times
By Liz Hampton (Reuters)
As oil prices recover and U.S. shale production picks up, energy companies that had planned to ship crude on the Dakota Access Pipeline will turn to rail, a transport method that poses its own risks to the environment and local communities. -
Rex Tillerson Supposedly Shifted Exxon Mobil’s Climate Position. Except He Really Didn’t.
Dec 26, 2016 | Huffington Post
By Alexander C. Kaufman
In December 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. convened a two-day summit of environmental and ethics experts at a rural retreat near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It was nearly a year after Rex Tillerson took over as chief executive, and a month after Democrats had claimed a new majority in Congress. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company found itself in a bind. -
Alaskans’ Cost of Staying Warm: A Thick Coat of Dirty Air
Dec 25, 2016 | The New York Times
By Kirk Johnson
Miners huddled around them to stay warm through the long, cold nights in the Klondike gold rush of the 1800s. Artists have enshrined them in paintings and tourist curios. -
NY Helping Colleges Cut Energy Use, Carbon Emissions
Dec 26, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Associated Press
Colleges and universities throughout New York state can now apply for state help in reducing carbon emissions and improving energy efficiency on campus.
Industry and Association News - There are no clips to report at this time.
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Dec 26, 2016 | National Law Review
By Jonathan S. King
US EPA recently agreed in federal court to engage in a rulemaking process over the next three-plus years which would culminate in the promulgation of final perchlorate regulations by December 19, 2019. Perchlorate remains the only unregulated contaminant for which US EPA has made a final determination to regulate since the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was amended in 1996.
Perchlorate is a highly soluble chemical in water and can move quickly from soil contamination into groundwater. It has been used by the US Department of Defense as an oxidizer in munitions and missiles since the 1940s, and 90 percent of its manufacturing is for the defense and aerospace industries. In a February 2011 declaration, US EPA determined that it should regulate perchlorate in drinking water—giving itself 24 months from that date to propose regulations and another 18 months thereafter to finalize them under the SDWA. However, due in part to the Scientific Advisory Board’s rejection of the model US EPA submitted for perchlorate regulation, these self-imposed deadlines were missed. As a result of the delay, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against US EPA in February 2016 to enforce the deadline for proposed perchlorate regulations for public comment.
In the NRDC case, the Agency acknowledged that it failed its legal obligations to propose and promulgate a maximum contaminant level (MCL) and maximum contaminant level goal (MCLG) as a national primary drinking water standard for perchlorate. US EPA’s agreement to promulgate perchlorate regulations by the end of 2019 is embodied in a proposed settlement agreement. Under the proposed agreement, US EPA will: (1) complete an “external peer review process” by October 18, 2017; (2) propose limits by October 31, 2018; and (3) finalize a rule by December 19, 2019. Given the amount of delay that has already occurred in promulgating federal regulations, it is somewhat surprising that NRDC accepted the length of the proposed schedule. Indeed, despite the pending settlement agreement, NRDC counsel filed its motion for summary judgment on October 12, 2016 and requested that the judge enter an order cementing US EPA’s liability and scheduling reasonable timelines for US EPA compliance.
It is noteworthy that, in likely response to national attention paid to the Flint Michigan crisis, two US House of Representatives Resolutions (H.R. 6116 and H.R. 6140) were introduced on September 22, 2016 that, if passed, would require the US EPA Administrator to publish an MCLG and promulgate a national primary drinking water regulation for perchlorate no later than 12 months following the law’s date of enactment. This proposed legislation amending the federal SDWA has the potential to expedite the rulemaking process outlined in the settlement agreement reached between US EPA and NRDC. Notably, while future federal perchlorate regulations will formally apply to the quality of drinking water measured at the tap in a home or business, the ultimate standard promulgated by US EPA bears watching by companies who are undertaking groundwater remediation associated with industrial activities, for example, as an applicable or relevant and appropriate requirement (ARAR) under CERCLA.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/proposed-settlement-agreement-requires-us-epa-to-promulgate-perchlorate-regulations
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A New Trump Adviser Introduces New — and Unaccountable — Conflicts
Dec 25, 2016 | Washington Post
By Editorial Board
Having held partial or controlling stakes in companies ranging from Phillips Petroleum to American Railcar Industries, billionaire investor Carl Icahn certainly knows a thing or two about how federal regulators deal with business. He also is, at 80, a successful, intelligent, deeply experienced investment pro. Whether his is the ideal résumé for a special adviser to the president on regulatory reform is less clear. Foxes are experts on chicken coops, it is true.
Federal safety, environmental and financial regulations necessarily involve balancing of costs and benefits to the public. The Obama administration’s approach frequently struck the balance in favor of more rules, and there is a reasonable case to be made that pruning regulatory overgrowth could, indeed, help the economy — which, by the way, is doing reasonably well. But Mr. Icahn’s sweeping indictments of the regulatory agencies, voiced repeatedly during the campaign, suggest he would urge President-elect Donald Trump to swing wildly in the opposite direction. “You almost get enraged by some of the stuff,” he told CNBC on Thursday.
The Trump transition team’s statement announcing Mr. Icahn’s new role quoted him as saying that “under President Obama, America’s business owners have been crippled by over $1 trillion in new regulations.” We don’t know where that number comes from, though we did find an estimate from the conservative regulation skeptics at American Action Forum, a think tank, that puts the total cost of major new regulation imposed since the beginning of the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency at $1 trillion. Notably, that study also mentioned $745 billion worth of offsetting social benefits.
No doubt Mr. Icahn speaks from genuine principle. But if someone were to charge him with talking his own book, it would be a hard accusation to refute, because his many companies are so frequently and conflictually embroiled with regulators. Mr. Icahn helped vet Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, even though Mr. Icahn controls an EPA-regulated oil refiner, CVR Energy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Icahn’s American Railcar Industries is suing the Federal Railroad Administration for allegedly unlawfully requiring it to test tank cars for leaks.
How, exactly, are Mr. Icahn and, more importantly, Mr. Trump to be held accountable for the inherent conflicts in this situation? The transition team said Mr. Icahn “will be advising the President in his individual capacity and will not be serving as a federal employee or a Special Government Employee and will not have any specific duties.” Nor will he get a salary. Mr. Icahn told CNBC there is no problem because he will not be making policy, just “basically talking to Donald as I’ve talked before.” If anything, this proposed status only compounds the problematic lack of an institutional check on what Mr. Icahn does when “Donald” is president, with the power to move markets.
Mr. Trump praised Mr. Icahn, extravagantly, “as someone who is innately able to predict the future especially having to do with finances and economies.” Perhaps. Neither man, however, seems able to foresee the quite obvious ethical problems they may be creating for the next administration — and themselves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-new-trump-adviser-introduces-new--and-unaccountable--conflicts/2016/12/25/6f83ee72-c945-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html?utm_term=.b047b7d7b455
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DOE Approves Additional Freeport LNG Export Volumes
Dec 23, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Joe Fisher
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has followed in FERC's footsteps in authorizing what is essentially a true-up of authorized export volumes with production capacity of Freeport LNG's three-train FLEX project.
Last August FLEX (composed of Freeport LNG Expansion LP, FLNG Liquefaction LLC, FLNG Liquefaction 2 LLC, and FLNG Liquefaction 3) asked DOE to amend an existing export authorization for exports from the Freeport, TX, terminal of 146 Bcf/year. Subsequent to that authorization and an approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Freeport determined that the terminal would be capable of producing and exporting more LNG than initially thought.
Because the original DOE authorization is being challenged in court by the Sierra Club, DOE said it cannot be amended. However, the agency said it would construe the current request as one for a new authorization and grant it. DOE effectively added 125 Bcf/year to the previously authorized non-free trade agreement (FTA) export volume.
Now, under three separate DOE orders, FLEX is authorized to export up to 782 Bcf/year of LNG [10-161-LNG; 11-161-LNG; 16-108-LNG]. The volume authorized in the latest order is not additive to the previously authorized FTA export volumes, DOE said.
FERC previously made an amendment -- similar to the one requested of DOE -- to its 2014 initial authorization of the project.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/108849-doe-approves-additional-freeport-lng-export-volumes
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Scientists are Trying to Save the Climate from Toxic Cow Burps
Dec 23, 2016 | Washington Post
By Sarah Kaplan
Earth has a cow problem.
Cows are ruminants. They break down food by fermenting it in a special stomach packed with microbes, then chewing it again. This process lets them get nutrients out of bland, fibrous grass, but it also makes them, ahem, rather gassy. A 2013 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that 44 percent of the methane — a heat-trapping gas 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide — associated with human activity comes from the global livestock industry. Most of it is released through the animals' front ends.
Let me correct myself: Earth has a cow burp problem.
But atmospheric scientist Luisa Molina and veterinarian Octavio Alonso Castelan-Ortega think they have a solution. In a pilot study conducted at four sites in Mexico, they supplemented cows' diets with plants known to contain bacteria-killing tannins (the same bitter-tasting organic compounds found in coffee and tea). At the right dosage, these tannins disrupt the fermentation of methane-producing methanogens, without interfering with the rest of the cows' digestion. The plants were native to the regions where the study was conducted, so they were easy for farmers to acquire, and in some cases they even made the cows more productive. And they reduced the animals' overall methane emissions by as much as a third.
The research, presented last week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, signals progress on a weird but very important front in the fight against climate change: the battle against burps.
Other studies have sought to clean up cows' environmentally hazardous belches by mixing special compounds with their feed or engineering supergrass. But Molina and Castelan-Ortega's program has the advantage of being cheap and customizable. It relied on plants that were abundant in the regions where the pilot study was conducted: the cosmos flower (C. bipinnatus) in temperate regions and the tree Leucaena leucocephala in tropical ones. Since locals were familiar with these plants, it was easy and inexpensive to get their cows to graze on them.
The flower reduced methane emissions by about 16 percent, without impacting milk production. Meanwhile, the animals on the L. leucocephala diet not only belched 36 percent less methane, they made more milk in the process.
With further studies, researchers could identify similarly tannin-producing plants native to other farming regions, so that the cows' new low-methane diet could be tailored to where they live.
“If you can select the native plants, that is the best way,” Molina said.
She and Castelan-Ortega estimate that implementing this program across Mexico could save more than a billion kilograms of methane.
The researchers noted that the project is only a pilot study — it has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal or replicated on a bigger scale. But the Mexican government is funding an expansion of the program, and Molina is optimistic about its potential.
Now if she can just teach the cows to say, “Excuse me.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/12/23/scientists-are-trying-to-save-the-climate-from-toxic-cow-burps/?utm_term=.911422467f95
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With Dakota Access in Limbo, More Bakken Crude to Move on Trains
Dec 22, 2016 | The New York Times
By Liz Hampton (Reuters)
As oil prices recover and U.S. shale production picks up, energy companies that had planned to ship crude on the Dakota Access Pipeline will turn to rail, a transport method that poses its own risks to the environment and local communities.
Sunday's decision by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny Energy Transfer Partners an easement to complete the line means shippers who expected to see another 570,000 barrels of daily Bakken pipeline capacity in 2017 will have to find new ways to move supply.
Rail comprises nearly 65 percent of total crude export capacity in the Bakken, but is currently underutilized because it is more costly and less efficient. In September, only 29 percent of total Bakken oil production moved by rail, according to the latest figures from the North Dakota Pipeline Authority.
"Once the pipes are full, that means more trains. And without DAPL, the pipes get full sooner than they otherwise would have," said Rick Smead, managing director of advisory services for RBN Energy, noting that this scenario is contingent on a big rise in production.
A rise in incidents during the shale boom, and high-profile accidents, such as the explosion in 2013 that killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, has drawn increased scrutiny to the rail industry, prompting the U.S. government to enact more stringent regulations for rail movements.
Overall, oil spills more frequently with pipelines than rail cars, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA). For example, in 2015, there were 252 pipeline spills reported to PHMSA involving crude oil, versus 44 for the rail industry. The year prior, the frequency of spills at pipes was about 62 percent greater than rail, the data shows.
The 1,172 mile (1,885 km) Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to run from western North Dakota to Illinois, and has been the subject of protests for months from Native American and environmental activists concerned about leaks and contamination of water supply.
Incidents involving crude-by-rail peaked in 2014, at nearly 144, versus just one accident in 2006, the data shows.
The rise in accidents followed a surge in volumes moving by rail each day, which hit a high of 29.2 million barrels per month in October 2014. As of September 2016, that had declined to about 10.5 million barrels monthly, according to data from the EIA, as new pipelines displaced rail and production has declined.
With lower volumes, train accidents involving crude are down significantly, with only nine reported this year, according to PHMSA data.
But that could change.
"There are increased chances of accidents, leaks and greenhouse gas incidents when transporting by rail," said Afolabi Ogunnaike, a senior analyst at consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
Bakken oil production is expected at 918,000 barrels per day in December - about 70,000 bpd above current pipeline capacity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A recent deal by OPEC to cut production and stabilize prices could boost drilling activity.
"The Bakken is a tremendous resource. It's going to grow significantly ... There is a need for additional pipeline capacity in years to come," said Ogunnaike.
In North Dakota, there have been no accidents involving crude rail cars this year, versus six in 2015 and five in 2014, according to PHMSA data.
Four spills since 2012 have occurred in Mandan, North Dakota, a city about 40 miles (64 km) north of the proposed route of the Dakota Access pipeline that has been the site of protests.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/12/22/us/22reuters-north-dakota-pipeline-rail.html
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Rex Tillerson Supposedly Shifted Exxon Mobil’s Climate Position. Except He Really Didn’t.
Dec 26, 2016 | Huffington Post
By Alexander C. Kaufman
In December 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. convened a two-day summit of environmental and ethics experts at a rural retreat near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It was nearly a year after Rex Tillerson took over as chief executive, and a month after Democrats had claimed a new majority in Congress. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company found itself in a bind.
For decades, Exxon had funded far-right think tanks that seeded doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change. Under Tillerson’s predecessor, Lee Raymond, the company had aligned itself heavily with Republicans, funneling 95 percent of its political donations to the party from 2000 to 2004, according to Steve Coll’s 2012 book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. Raymond took an aggressive stance against climate science: “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now,” he said in a 1997 speech.
Tillerson and Ken Cohen, Exxon’s PR chief and chair of its political action committee, wanted to broaden the company’s political reach. One step was changing their messaging about climate change, moving away from the denial the company had been attacked for supporting. The Blue Ridge retreat was part of that effort, and brought together more than a dozen guests, which according to Coll’s account, included “two senior energy-policy analysts from the Brookings Institution, a human rights activist at Freedom House, climate specialists, business ethics professors, socially responsible investors, and religious activists.”
As Coll wrote, “Tillerson’s own views about climate science were not greatly different from Lee Raymond’s,” though Tillerson “did not claim or wish to project the same sort of independent scientific expertise that Raymond had offered about climate science.” But Tillerson did see that the company needed to reposition itself.
“All they were saying they were going to do is simply acknowledge that it might exist, as opposed to saying it does not exist,” Jennifer Bremer, an economic development consultant who attended the meeting as a guest, told The Huffington Post. Bremer said Exxon executives had called the retreat so the attendees could give them some advice, not so they could dictate the company’s new policy.
“You don’t just bring in a couple of hippies and start discussing internal deliberations,” Bremer added. “Not if you’re Exxon.”
Not long after the summit, Exxon began to modify its public stance on climate change. Its 2007 Corporate Citizenship report announced that the company would “discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
The company announced its first big investment in biofuels two years later, vowing to spend $600 million on research into algae-based transportation fuels. In 2015, the firm backed the historic climate agreement reached in Paris, a stance it reiteratedfour days before this year’s election.
Tillerson, who President-elect Donald Trump has now nominated as his secretary of state, has gotten a lot of credit for Exxon’s shift away from climate denial. But even as Exxon learned to talk the talk, the $378 billion company has failed to walk the walk.
Tillerson “brought a more clever approach, a more PR-savvy approach, to climate at Exxon, but the company really didn’t change its stripes much,” said Kert Davies, who leads the Climate Investigations Center and was the creator of ExxonSecrets, a Greenpeace program tracking the company’s climate denial. “They managed to drop this campaign of using surrogates, scale that back enough that it took the pressure off.”
In June 2009, the House passed a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions. But that legislation failed to gain traction in the Senate. Exxon undertook an aggressive lobbying campaign that year, spending $27.4 million ― more than the entire environmental lobby combined, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The American Petroleum Institute ― of which Exxon Mobil is a member ― launched its own PR campaign against the legislation.
Meanwhile, Tillerson put Exxon’s new public positioning into action, making headlines when he said publicly he preferred a tax on carbon ― a policy that was not under debate in Congress at the time, but was also politically implausible at best, considering it was in the middle of the Great Recession.
Some environmental leaders said the discussion about a carbon tax at that point was “ “a distraction” from the urgent need to put a cap on carbon emissions. “[W]e can’t wait for lawmakers, industry, and the American people to spend years hashing out the details of an entirely new system,” wrote Frances Beinecke, then-president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Tillerson continued the company’s repositioning on the science as well, testifying before Congress in 2010 that “there is no question the climate is changing, that one of the contributors to climate change are greenhouse gases that are a result of industrial activities.” Six months after his testimony, the Senate climate bill died.
Supporting a carbon tax wasn’t necessarily a cynical ploy to undermine the cap-and-trade bill; there are practical reasons a company like Exxon would support of a carbon tax. A handful of fossil-fuel companies already assign a price to carbon emissions for their internal accounting, including Exxon. As more countries take steps to cut carbon emissions as part of the Paris agreement, Exxon has said it prefers a predictable tax on carbon to a cap-and-trade system that is open to market fluctuations.
But even as recently as last year, Exxon continued to fund organizations that deny or downplay climate science, and proposed solutions to global warming. In 2015, the company spent nearly $2 million on more than a dozen such think tanks and advocacy groups, according to data compiled by Greenpeace and vetted by theUnion of Concerned Scientists. That list ranges from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest industry association, to more radical groups, such as The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, which has called global warming “nothing more than an educated guess,” and the Mountain States Legal Fund, which once described itself as the “litigation arm” of an “anti-environmental” movement.
And unlike many of its industry rivals, Exxon has failed to invest seriously in renewable energy. The company ranked below all of its U.S. and European competitors on reducing emissions and issuing corporate guidance on the risk posed by climate change, according to a November report from the British shareholder advocacy group CDP.
Tillerson has openly mocked the clean-energy industry for years, joking once that he wasn’t “really against renewables” because wind turbine operators bought Exxon’s oil as a lubricant. “The more windmills are built, the more oil we sell,” he said. At a May 2015 shareholders meeting, Tillerson said he hadn’t invested in renewables because “we choose not to lose money.”
Even the company’s touted biofuel efforts have been slow to yield anything concrete. By 2013, Exxon tweaked its approach, refocusing its efforts to produce gasoline from genetically modified algae after spending one-sixth of the $600 million it had pledged to spend on biofuels. In September 2015, the firm kicked off a new partnership with Michigan State University to research algae-based fuels, but devoted just $1 million to the project. In January, Exxon signed a deal with a clean-energy developer to start researching new ways of distilling ethanol. Yet, even for a company whose yearly earnings were roughly halved to $16.2 billion last year by low oil prices, the investments seem like an afterthought. Exxon spent $8.8 million on political lobbying this year.
Nor has Exxon ever fully owned up to the years it spent undermining climate science. That came into full view in October, when InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times published reports revealing that the company understood global warming decades ago and covered it up anyway ― long before Tillerson’s supposed shift. The reports uncovered evidence that Exxon’s in-house scientific experts understood the role that burning fossil fuels played in global warming in the 1980s, yet instead of acting on that science, the company funded a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign.
“Exxon Mobil does not fund climate denial,” Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon, told HuffPost by email, insisting the company views the risk of climate change as real. “We provide funding to a broad range of groups but they don’t speak for us and we don’t necessarily agree with all their positions on any given issue.”
Neither Tillerson nor the Trump administration’s transition team replied to emailed requests for comment.
The Exxon exposé led a coalition of state attorneys general to begin working together to investigate corporations for allegedly misleading the public about climate change. Exxon has aggressively defended itself against the probe, calling it “biased attempts to further a political agenda for financial gain.”
“Tillerson is using half-truths to cover up decades of lies,” Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the environmental group 350.org, told HuffPost. “Saying climate change is real doesn’t absolve you from continuing to fund climate denial. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the world’s largest oil company is good at greenwashing ― they spend more money on it than they do on renewable energy development.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rex-tillerson-exxon-mobil-climate_us_585d6ca1e4b0eb5864863a13
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Alaskans’ Cost of Staying Warm: A Thick Coat of Dirty Air
Dec 25, 2016 | The New York Times
By Kirk Johnson
Miners huddled around them to stay warm through the long, cold nights in the Klondike gold rush of the 1800s. Artists have enshrined them in paintings and tourist curios. For many people in America’s far north, the old-fashioned wood stove — crackling and radiant, and usually cast-iron black — is as Alaskan as it gets. But many Alaskans also see their home state as a natural wonderland, where the expectation of bracingly pristine air is just as deeply ingrained.
Winter has arrived here in a town where St. Nicholas Drive intersects North Santa Claus Lane, and the streetlight poles are painted to look like candy canes. That means wood-fired stoves, interludes of cough-inducing smoke and vehement arguments about who is to blame. It is the season of light, and also the season of soot.
“That guy has got an old stove, right there,” Dr. Jeanne Olson, a veterinarian and air quality volunteer, said on a recent afternoon, pointing from the cab of her four-wheel-drive Toyota toward a spiraling column of thick gray smoke from a homeowner’s chimney. The thermometer inside Dr. Olson’s cab said it was 30 below zero outside, which meant that lots of people in the vicinity were probably putting another log on the fire, or thinking about it, even as she spoke.
Air pollution in winter is different from the ground-level ozone smog that hits cities like Los Angeles in summer. Air over the Salt Lake Valley in Utah can turn a sickly yellow in January. Agricultural areas like the Cache Valley in southern Idaho and the San Joaquin Valley in California can be socked in by chilly, pollution-laced fog. Residents of Beijing are suffering this month through one of that city’s worst stretches of air pollution in a year.
But here in one of the coldest parts of the coldest state, there is an only-in-Alaska pollution story: At about minus 20 Fahrenheit — a fairly regular occurrence here in winter — smoke that goes up comes right back down, to linger at ground level and, therefore, lung level. The average from 2013 to 2015 for dangerous small-particle pollution, called PM 2.5, which can be deeply inhaled into the lungs, was by far the highest in the nation in North Pole, just southeast of Fairbanks, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s all one thing — when you most need the heat is when you’re most apt to create a serious air pollution problem for yourself and the people in your community,” said Tim Hamlin, the director of the office of air and waste at the E.P.A.’s Region 10, which includes Alaska.
And forces are now converging to heighten the tension in this seemingly unlikely pollution story. Civil fines by Fairbanks North Star Borough — which includes the cities of Fairbanks and North Pole, with a total population of about 100,000 — could be assessed in coming days against residential polluters. The E.P.A. could declare the entire area to be in “serious” noncompliance of the Clean Air Act early next year, with potentially huge economic implications, including a cutoff of federal transportation funds.
Some residents said they feared that an overreaching government, locally and in Washington, was out to take away their stoves. Others, like Dr. Olson, who works with racing sled dogs in her veterinary practice and volunteers with Citizens for Clean Air, a local group that has sued the E.P.A. to force a decision on Fairbanks pollution, said the exact opposite.
The government, Dr. Olson said, has been endangering public health by dragging its feet. For six consecutive days in mid-December, the air here was declared “unhealthy,” for high particulate content — the longest streak since the current monitoring system began in late 2015, according to the borough’s air quality division.
“Both sides are digging in their heels,” said the borough’s mayor, Karl Kassel, who has been calling residents to chat about their heating systems and to urge them to upgrade, with financial help from the borough, to more efficient wood stoves. “We have been settieng ourselves up for a crescendo.”
Certainly, no one from the E.P.A. or in local government is saying this part of Alaska is universally polluted. The problem, they say, is often block by block or street by street, because in the deep cold inversions, particulate pollution settles to the lowest areas in a basin surrounded by hills. Fairbanks North Star Borough is about the size of New Jersey, most of it wooded, wild and dazzlingly beautiful in winter.
“We have a weather problem, we have inversions here that trap air, and it’s something that can’t be solved,” said Lance Roberts, a member of the Borough Assembly.
Residents are also trapped, he said, by economics. Natural gas, a much cleaner fuel source, is not widely available in this part of Alaska, and heating oil can be very expensive. Oil also produces particulate pollution, though less than wood. A study for the borough last year said residents here spent, on average, almost four times the national average in annual heating costs.
“People up here tend to be more independent,” Mr. Roberts added. “They came up here to get away from the regulatory environment that’s down in the lower 48, so they definitely see the E.P.A. as coming after wood stoves and trying to cut out that kind of independent lifestyle where you can live off the grid.”
Mr. Hamlin, the E.P.A. official, said his agency was definitely not trying to take away anyone’s wood stove, or make life more expensive. But he said the Clean Air Act, passed by Congress in 1970, requires a standard of breathable air for all Americans. The E.P.A. was given the job of enforcing that standard.
“We don’t want to be telling people what to do, but the standard is what it is, and we want to work with you to be able to get there,” he said.
Critics of government intervention, led by a local representative in the Alaska Legislature, Tammie Wilson, said they were ready to fight back with a lawsuit if the borough started fining homeowners for smoke violations, especially if their homes are far from the monitor that is recording air quality in the community. The North Pole air monitorregularly records some of the highest local concentrations of particulate pollution in the nation.
“They’re allowing themselves to be bullied by the E.P.A.,” said Ms. Wilson, a Republican. “And there’s going to be an uproar. We already have a big group of people who will make sure there is money to take it to court so that we can finally prove that the way they’re doing air quality doesn’t make any sense.”
Some residents are taking action on their own. Morgan Boatman said he had begun to understand local air quality problems more deeply in chatting with Dr. Olson, who cares for his dogs at her veterinary clinic. Last month, he shut down his old boiler system and had a high-efficiency masonry furnace installed in its place, at a cost of about $25,000.
“I’m not big on government, and I think there’s a lot of overreach, but I’m trying to be a good steward,” he said. “I see now that there is a problem.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/us/alaskans-cost-of-staying-warm-a-thick-coat-of-dirty-air.html
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NY Helping Colleges Cut Energy Use, Carbon Emissions
Dec 26, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Associated Press
Colleges and universities throughout New York state can now apply for state help in reducing carbon emissions and improving energy efficiency on campus.
The administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo says it has set aside $2 million for technical assistance grants to help institutions of higher learning create and execute plans for curbing emissions and energy use.
The money can also be used to pay student interns hired to work on the plan.
The 62 colleges and universities that are eligible for the money have signed on to a state initiative intended to increase clean energy.
Cuomo says the state's colleges and universities play a vital role in helping to lead the state's transition to clean energy.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/AP7c266b35ed7348ee801baf5ad2ee4f42
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