Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 12/27/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) PP Pricing Swings Made 2016 a Difficult Year
Dec 27, 2016 | Plastics News
By Frank Esposito
Pricing volatility hit the North American polypropylene resin market hard in 2016 — even as demand for the material looks to be almost flat for the year. -
Greens Gird for Chemical Battle with Trump
Dec 27, 2016 | Politico Pro
By Alex Guillén
Environmentalists are preparing to go to war with President-elect Donald Trump over chemicals. -
This Letter Offers a Clue into How Trump Could Try to Change American Business
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Danielle Paquette
In March, a debate broke out about why Carrier, the air conditioning manufacturer, was planning to move 2,100 jobs from two Indiana factories to Mexico. -
Donald Trump’s Cabinet Picks Disagree With President-Elect on Some Key Issues
Dec 27, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Damian Paletta
Donald Trump has assembled a cabinet and senior staff with divergent views on such issues as the deficit, trade, climate change, and Russia, posing a challenge for his administration as he tries to mold his own sweeping campaign themes into specific policies for governing. -
VW Windfall Could Help Clean Up Dirty Diesel Trains at Union Station
Dec 27, 2016 | Chicago Tribune
By Michael Hawthorne
Commuters are still breathing high levels of toxic diesel pollution trapped inside Union Station, but long-stalled efforts to clean up Metra's fleet of dirty locomotives could get a big boost next year. -
Air: Industry Pins Hopes on Boiler MACT Remand
Dec 27, 2016 | Inside EPA
After 20 years and three failed tries, the wood products industry is hoping that a federal appellate court's decision to remand EPA's boiler maximum achievable control technology (MACT) air toxics rule to the agency will finally ensure a regulation can be finalized that can withstand legal scrutiny. -
CLF's Exxon Suit Tees Up Ruling on Current Climate Effects, Permit Plan
Dec 27, 2016 | Inside EPA
By David LaRoss
Environmentalists are asking a federal judge to rule that recent severe storms and floods are direct effects of climate change, and thus must be part of permit compliance plans at ExxonMobil facilities, hoping to win a novel decision that climate change is not a speculative threat but a concrete one while highlighting charges that the company has long known of the risks but failed to act. -
Scientists Just Ran the Numbers on How Much Trump Could Damage the Planet
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
There has been a lot of speculation since climate change doubter Donald Trump’s election about what the consequences could be for global climate action. Some analysts cite very dire implications, and others suggest that clean energy growth will continue apace.
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(ACC Mentioned) PP Pricing Swings Made 2016 a Difficult Year
Dec 27, 2016 | Plastics News
By Frank Esposito
Pricing volatility hit the North American polypropylene resin market hard in 2016 — even as demand for the material looks to be almost flat for the year.
Through November, price volatility — combined increases and decreases — totaled almost 30 cents per pound, according to the Plastics News resin pricing chart. Regional PP prices now are down a net of 4 cents per pound since Jan. 1.
North American PP sales essentially were flat in the first 10 months of 2016, according to the American Chemistry Council. Domestic sales were down almost 2 percent, while exports surged almost 49 percent.
Prices first rose, then fell, then rose again, as domestic producers dealt with substantial competition from imported material for the first time in many years. Imports were able to access the North American market as tight supplies of propylene feedstock and a lack of new capacity drove up prices for PP resin and led existing PP sites to run at close to full production.
“For a long period of time, North American polypropylene was a global exporter, then it became high-priced vs. the rest of the world because of propylene costs,” Braskem America CEO Mark Nikolich said in October at the K 2016 trade show.
“There had been no new capacity since 2003, so when there was demand growth in 2015 and 2016, it stretched the asset base and made those assets run hard,” added Nikolich, whose firm is North America’s largest PP maker.
After a few months of increased imports, North American prices had fallen to the point where they were no longer able to benefit from North American demand. But without new capacity, Nikolich said the same thing could happen next year — although perhaps in a less extreme way.
“Polypropylene imports are never too far away if domestic producers try to increase margins too much,” said Phil Karig, managing director of the Mathelin Bay Associates LLC consulting firm in St. Louis. “Whatever incremental sales they can squeeze out — which weren’t much at all in 2016 — will regularly face margin pressures. 2017 looks to be much of the same.”
And with low demand growth expected, regional PP makers don’t have a lot of options right now, he added. “Rather than focusing on demand growth in 2017,” Karig said, “the PP market will continue to play chicken with imports in the hopes of making superior margins for short periods of time when the market is tight due to seasonal demand spikes or plant outages.”
The North American PP field “is in kind of holding pattern right now,” according to Craig Blizzard, an industry veteran who now runs Blizzard Consulting in Chevy Chase, Md. “It will need capacity expansions at some juncture, but in the meantime, debottlenecks may have added 200 [million] or 300 million pounds of capacity. On-purpose propylene also should have a positive effect.
“Producers should be more profitable over the course of time, but it’s a slow growth market domestically,” he added. “Bringing back some manufacturing of products like film, fibers and injection molded parts to the U.S. should help, and there are prospects of that, for sure.”
PP’s wild ride
The regional PP market has been on a wild ride since the end of 2014, according to Scott Newell, a market analyst with Resin Technology Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas. “We had the highest price in the world then because [propylene] monomer was short,” he said. “Things improved in 2015 because demand came back and producers were able to add margin.
“Now we’re back to the highest price in world and people couldn’t get material, so imports came and stole demand away,” Newell added. “It hit the market quickly and sent prices down.”
Regional PP demand had benefited from automotive lightweighting, said David Barry, a market analyst with PetroChem Wire in Houston, but auto sales now are slowing down. Additional PP demand growth could come from areas such as clear packaging, he added.
“Polypropylene customers who imported material in 2016 should scale back in 2017,” Barry said. “The industry has healthy margins now — margins on average are 10 cents better than they were in 2013 and 2014.”
At the Global Plastics Summit 2016 in Chicago, IHS Chemical market analyst Joel Morales said high North American PP prices opened the door for lower-priced foreign PP to enter the region in 2016, which he described as “the year of the import.”
As a result, Morales said the pace of capacity debottlenecks will accelerate in North America during 2017.
“Local production is needed to push out imports,” he said. “So [North American PP] will run at full rates in 2017.”
More than 500 million pounds of PP capacity should be added via debottlenecks in North America by the end of 2017. But at the same time, Morales said that reinvestment economics for new PP units are questionable.
Braskem is doing its part to improve North American PP supply by undertaking a feasibility study for a new billion-pound-per-year PP plant in LaPorte, Texas. The plant would open in early 2019 and would be supplied with propylene from a PDH unit operated by Enterprise Products in Mont Belvieu, Texas. The feasibility study will be completed by the end of this year.
Looking ahead, Braskem expects regional PP demand growth of 1.5 to 2.5 percent annually for the next five years. This new demand is expected to come primarily from automotive and industrial applications, with some coming from rigid packaging as well.
“We’re seeing some reshoring and investment from the converter base,” Nikolich explained. “Exports [of PP] got repatriated when the material was needed domestically, but North America is likely to be an exporter again in the future.”
“Two to 3 percent [demand growth for 2017] would be a solid year,” Blizzard said. “Auto builds are expected to be flat, but there should be opportunities in packaging and sheer. Polypropylene is still the meeting point between engineering and commodity based resins.”
Higher demand growth also could drive North American PP operating rates from their current low 90s back to the mid-90s, Newell added. “Packaging should be one of the strong market segments, along with fiber, [biaxially oriented] PP film and injection molding,” he said.
But as is the case with many other materials, a lot of the story comes down to pricing. Morales at IHS said that the overall PP market would benefit from more stable pricing, with less volatility. “You can’t go up 36 cents [per pound] and then down 36,” he said. “You can’t run a business like that.”
http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20161227/NEWS/161229964/pp-pricing-swings-made-2016-a-difficult-year
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Greens Gird for Chemical Battle with Trump
Dec 27, 2016 | Politico Pro
By Alex Guillén
Environmentalists are preparing to go to war with President-elect Donald Trump over chemicals.
EPA already has identified asbestos as one of its top targets for new rules under a tough new chemical safety law Congress enacted this summer, but Trump's past defense of the carcinogenic flame retardant and his anti-regulatory rhetoric has green groups worried that his administration will shirk its responsibility to implement it.
“A lot of people could say that if the World Trade Center had asbestos, it wouldn't have burned down, it wouldn't have melted," Trump said at a 2005 Senate subcommittee hearing, where he was offering his perspective as a real estate developer on proposed renovations to U.N. headquarters. "A lot of people in my industry think asbestos is the greatest fireproofing material ever made."
In his 1997 book, "The Art of the Comeback," Trump called asbestos “100 percent safe, once applied,” and offered a conspiracy theory explaining opposition to it. “I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal,” he wrote. Trump reiterated his 9/11 claim again in a 2012 tweet.
Asbestos became a poster child for the inadequacies in the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act after President George H.W. Bush's EPA attempted to ban the carcinogen only to see that effort blocked by a federal court. "I think we all agree: TSCA is fatally flawed. It has failed to ban even asbestos," Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), an architect of the bipartisan update to the chemical safety law, said in 2015.
Trump’s transition team did not return a request for comment on his past statements or his plan to implement TSCA. Industry officials say they do not believe the updated law should lead to a total asbestos ban.
The new law goes far beyond asbestos in giving EPA much sharper teeth to regulate — and potentially ban — any of the thousands of substances used in myriad products and industries. TSCA reform resulted from years of negotiations among lawmakers in both parties, chemical companies, environmentalists and public health advocates. The final compromise won near universal support when it passed Congress in June, but split the environmental community.
Trump's unorthodox views on asbestos dovetail with past claims that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and his mockery of the well-established link between aerosols in products like hairspray and damage to the ozone layer.
Some environmentalists are alarmed at how a Trump administration will approach TSCA reform's difficult work of studying dangerous compounds and writing rules for how businesses use them.
“There are a lot of decisions that EPA can make during the next four years that, if they’re beneficial for the chemical industry, are going to be bad for public health and the environment,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which opposed the updated law. “TSCA implementation is basically a zero-sum game. It’s not win-win. ... Either the chemical manufacturers are going to win, or protections for public health and the environment [are] going to win.”
Rosenberg added, "Asbestos is a well-known, clearly extremely toxic chemical for which there is widespread exposure. It will be a bad sign for the law if EPA falls short on something that obvious. "
The TSCA reform bill grew out of Democrats’ worries that not enough was being done to restrict harmful chemicals from everyday products, alongside industry concerns that the weak federal TSCA law would lead to more stringent state-level standards in major markets like California and New York that could then become de facto national standards. In giving EPA more power, the reformed law also took steps to prevent individual states from setting standards stronger than any federal rule.
National Wildlife Federation President and CEO Collin O’Mara, who supported the updated law, said that he is taking a “trust but verify” approach to the Trump administration and said the broad pro-TSCA coalition would push Trump to not set lax standards.
“Even though we may see some entities try to slow down or weaken standards, I think folks overall want the certainty and the predictability of the review process,” O’Mara said. “I think there will be as much pressure from the good actors in industry as well as the conservation groups to prevent that from happening.” Industry officials said they see an ally in Trump.
Industry proponents of the new law were optimistic about the Trump team.
“We have every reason to believe industry will be able to work well with the new EPA,” said Michael Walls, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, a key supporter of TSCA reform.
Chet Thompson, president of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, another backer of the new law, said he was "certain we can work with" the Trump administration. He noted that Trump's pick for EPA administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, hails from a state with a sizable petrochemical industry and "certainly appreciates implementing the act the way Congress envisioned.”
Thompson, who previously served as deputy general counsel at EPA under George W. Bush, added that the industry is closely watching who Trump will pick to be the agency’s assistant administrator for chemical safety, the post that will have day-to-day oversight of the issue.
The new chemical safety law is based on risk of exposure, not a declaration that a material is hazardous and should therefore be banned in all uses, Walls noted.
The use of asbestos has declined in recent decades as consumers grew wary of its health risks, but is still used in some applications, such as to make chlorine and as a component of heat-resistant coatings. Industry officials say EPA should continue to allow manufacturers to use asbestos so long as its fibers aren’t exposed to the air. Inhaling asbestos fibers has been linked to respiratory problems such as mesothelioma, a rare form cancer.
Should environmentalists not like how EPA regulates a specific chemical, they are prepared to take the agency to court — though it is not clear how successful those efforts might be simply because the reform law is new and untested.
They are also prepared to build public pressure on the administration, a strategy that has worked well for some chemicals when applied to the private sector in recent years.
“Most of the changes that we saw either came from the states or they came from market pressure, actual public pressure on certain companies to remove flame retardants from their furniture or BPA from baby bottles,” said Madeleine Foote of the League of Conservation Voters, using the initials for Bisphenol A, a plastic ingredient that has been linked to developmental issues in infants and children.
Communicating about climate change is difficult because it is hard for many people to connect it to their everyday lives, Foote added. But the potential for a dangerous chemical to be found in one’s home has proven a powerful motivator of public concern.
That could help build public pressure on the administration to take action, according to NRDC's Rosenberg.
“One thing I know for sure is the public does not want to be exposed to toxic chemicals, they do not favor things that give them or their families cancer or cause developmental delays or learning disabilities,” he said.
EPA has already taken several early steps in implementing the reformed law.
In November, the agency revealed its “top ten” list, the first round of chemicals it will study and potentially restrict or ban. That list included asbestos, along with chemicals like PERC and TCE that are believed to cause cancer and a purple dye thought to harm to aquatic life.
The agency has also already proposed banning some uses of TCE and restricting it for another, and EPA will study even more uses of TCE as it implements the reform law.
EPA has also fast-tracked review of five so-called “bioaccumulative” chemicals that build up in the environment.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration soon will have to finalize a slate of rulemakings required by the reform law that govern the long-term process for reviewing and regulating chemicals.
They include rules governing how EPA will prioritize chemicals to study and how it will evaluate risk, as well as a “reset” of EPA’s inventory of chemicals actually used in commerce, and a rule setting up industry fees to partly pay for these studies.
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/story/2016/12/greens-gird-for-chemical-battle-with-trump-141506
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This Letter Offers a Clue into How Trump Could Try to Change American Business
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Danielle Paquette
In March, a debate broke out about why Carrier, the air conditioning manufacturer, was planning to move 2,100 jobs from two Indiana factories to Mexico. “This is about Carrier chasing Mexican wages at $3 an hour,” Democratic Sen. Joseph Donnelly (Ind.) charged at the time.
That prompted Jim Schellinger, president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, to write a letter to correct the record. While Carrier would indeed pay Mexican workers $3 an hour, plus another $3 in benefits, “extensive federal regulations were the leading factor of the decision to relocate 2,100 manufacturing jobs,” he wrote to Donnelly, according to a copy of the letter released as part of a public record requests.
Carrier's plans sparked national attention after President-elect Donald Trump, who had promised to prevent the offshoring, intervened, securing a deal to keep 800 jobs on American soil in exchange for roughly $7 million in state tax incentives.
That was a sliver of the $65 million the company projected it would annually save after shuttling jobs south of the border, triggering questions about why Carrier agreed to the deal.
The March letter, which was previously reported by Indianapolis television news, may offer a clue. How Trump and Carrier reached an agreement remains murky. Speculation has focused on the company's desire to please the new president and maintain United Technologies' government contracts. But in a company statement, Carrier asserted the Trump administration will “create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate.”
Trump, meanwhile, has promised to scale back regulation.
“Fifty-three new regulations,” Trump said in a Dec. 1 speech at Carrier's Indianapolis plant, repeating a figure that Robert McDonough, the chief executive of Carrier parent United Technologies, had used to explain the regulations his company faced. “Massively expensive and probably none of them amount to anything in terms of safety. … Your unnecessary regulations are going to be gone.” (United Technologies declined requests for comment.)
Neither Trump nor McDonough identified which regulations they think are stymieing enterprise, but Carrier sent a list of Department of Energy efficiency rules to Schellinger, records show.
The Energy Department standards, to be clear, apply to home and commercial appliances sold in the United States. They wouldn't fall away because a business leaves the country.
Francis Dietz, spokesman for the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, the trade group that represents Carrier, said the recent flurry of efficiency regulations under President Obama have jacked up overall costs for companies like Carrier. Seeking cheaper labor, he said, is one way to offset that.
“The point is: When you have a large number of regulations, that ends up costing you a lot of money, and you start looking for other ways to save money,” Dietz said. “This leads companies to move some of their operations to where the cost to produce them is less.”
He produced a list of 52 measures, introduced by the Department of Energy between 2009 and 2016, that seek to alter the way companies make their heating and cooling products — including air conditioners and furnaces.
Trump has vowed to kill the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and saidhe might back out of the Paris climate agreement, moves that dramatically downgrade climate change’s status as a national priority. He has not, however, blasted energy efficiency rules, which save consumers money while also curbing carbon emissions.
Obama’s Energy Department has finalized more new standards for energy efficient appliances than any past administration, pushing improvements for 45 different products, such as refrigerators and light bulbs.
James Sweeney, director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, said if Trump wanted to undo Obama's rules, he couldn't knock them out by himself or quickly. Removing them would require producing new proposals that would have to pass economic analyses and any lawsuits. (Regulations finalized after May, however, could be subject to a speedier congressional reversal, thanks to Republican dominance on Capitol Hill.)
“He’d have to go through the process in reverse,” Sweeney said.
Under Obama's rules, Americans would save an estimated $540 billion in electric and other bill expenditures through 2030, said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. The updates are also expected to annually slash emissions during that period by 210 million tons.
Over the last three years, the DOE has released 28 rules that would impact companies in the heating and cooling space, including Carrier.
John Hurst, vice president of government affairs and communications at Lennox International, which makes products similar to Carrier’s and also operates factories in Mexico, said the energy efficiency rules eat up his company’s money and time.
Developing new products is expensive, he said. Creating an energy-saving air conditioner, for example, is costlier, too — they take up more space and therefore require more copper and steel.
“That,” he said, “can reflect an impact on American jobs.”
Still, he said, Lennox does not advocate for a rollback of rules they’ve already negotiated with the Energy Department. Hurst said he has met with DOE officials at least 15 times over the past two years and a Carrier representative was present to provide input as well.
The company has already made the investments necessary for new products. The manufacturing changes are underway. Regardless of what Trump does, he said, Lennox expects a deceleration of new regulations.
“That's a natural outcome,” he said, “because we've negotiated long-term efficiency regulations with other business leaders. That provides regulatory certainty for the next 12 to 15 years, in most cases.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/27/this-letter-offers-a-clue-into-how-trump-could-try-to-change-american-business/?utm_term=.cee2ed4ebf03
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Donald Trump’s Cabinet Picks Disagree With President-Elect on Some Key Issues
Dec 27, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Damian Paletta
Donald Trump has assembled a cabinet and senior staff with divergent views on such issues as the deficit, trade, climate change, and Russia, posing a challenge for his administration as he tries to mold his own sweeping campaign themes into specific policies for governing.
The president-elect’s pick for budget director, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.), has opposed raising the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump has proposed steep tax cuts and large increases in defense and infrastructure spending that many economists believe will cause the deficit to grow.
Several of his cabinet selections backed a trade deal negotiated by President Barack Obama with Asian nations, which Mr. Trump opposed and has vowed to abandon.
His choice for the State Department, Rex Tillerson, has said he believes science proves climate change is being caused in part by human behavior, something Mr. Trump in the past has called a “hoax.”
Former White House officials said incoming administrations often have to grapple with contrarian viewpoints. In 2008, Mr. Obama selected two of his rivals for the Democratic nomination—Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary—despite differences displayed on the campaign trail. Mr. Obama already had tapped another rival, Joe Biden, as his running mate.
However, Mr. Trump will be surrounded by a plethora of divergent voices from the outset.Thomas Barrack, a longtime Trump friend and chairman of the inaugural committee, said the president-elect manages with an “open door” policy, where aides debate the merits of proposals while Mr. Trump “curates” the information and makes a final decision.
Yet many decisions made by the federal government don’t reach the presidential level, providing vast, independent powers to the far-flung bureaucracies run by the cabinet secretaries and their deputies. Monitoring one potentially rogue agency could be challenging for any new administration, and Mr. Trump may need to keep an eye on several of them to ensure they promote policies in line with his promises and not the preferences of his appointees.
Much could depend on how the president-elect can establish a chain of command, particularly given the horizontal structure of senior staff appointments he has put in place so far.
“No one is a carbon copy of the commander-in-chief,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary in the George W. Bush administration. “The key in the dynamic is the strength of the president and his ability to lead. If a president doesn’t have strong ideas about what to do, the advisers play a much more influential role. When a president has firm ideas, such as build a wall, create jobs in America through energy independence and cut taxes, it’s a lot easier for the advisers to salute and carry out the president’s orders.”
Mr. Trump’s senior White House staff includes several of his campaign aides, such as strategist Steve Bannon and counselor Kellyanne Conway, both of whom are tapped into his base of populist supporters but have taken less pronounced views on specific policy issues.
It is the other advisers, particularly members of his cabinet, where Mr. Trump could see the biggest differences of opinions.
“This is a great, unanswered question,” said David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to Mr. Obama. “It seems that Trump does not come to this with a well-developed philosophy so much as a well-conceived marketing strategy. Now there will be a behind-the-scenes battle to fill in the void that will mirror the battle between factions of the Republican Party. It is not clear how these disputes in the battle to define Trump will be decided.”
Many of his incoming advisers who have the most divergent opinions are those with government or corporate experience.
Wilbur Ross, his selection for commerce secretary; Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who’s been tapped to become ambassador to China; and his selection for defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, have all spoken favorably of the Obama administration’s proposed trade deal with Asian countries, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mr. Trump has promised to end this trade deal as part of his initiative to redraw U.S. trade rules.
His pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has called a federal policy that forces increased use of ethanol and other biofuels into the U.S. fuel supply “unworkable” and backed a 2013 lawsuit challenging the measure.
But, before the first caucuses during his early Republican primary fights, Mr. Trump told Iowans supporting the ethanol mandate he was “with you 100%.” Trump transition officials and senior aides have suggested that the president-elect’s viewpoint on the ethanol mandate haven’t changed.
Senior Trump transition officials have said the incoming cabinet and White House team will set aside their differences and work to implement Mr. Trump’s agenda. Gen. Mattis and Mr. Tillerson declined to comment. Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Pruitt didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“What President-elect Trump is looking for, are people that have been very successful, whether it’s in government, business, academics, or other facets of society, to implement his agenda,” incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters during a recent briefing call. “And it’s his agenda that’s being implemented, not somebody else’s.”
That approach, however, is already being tested.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump focused on toughening the military’s treatment of suspected terrorists, and he said he would bring back waterboarding and implement tactics that he said were even more extreme.
But he recently told the New York Times that he broached these issues with Gen. Mattis, and Mr. Trump’s pick to head the Pentagon said he “never found it useful.” The president-elect said he was surprised by the answer, though he didn’t say whether he had changed his mind on how he would address the subject as president.
Gen. Mattis, who is revered by many in the military, has other foreign policy views that differ from his prospective new boss. He has been sharply critical of Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, while Mr. Trump has deflected criticism about Russian President Vladimir Putin and said he wants to improve U.S. relations with the Kremlin.
Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library who teaches history at New York University, said it isn’t out of the ordinary for presidents to appoint cabinet members with differing viewpoints.
What is unusual about the incoming Trump administration, he said, is that his core White House leadership team doesn’t have the administrative background that’s useful in managing policy differences.
“The key here is not the fact that these are smart, successful people who view the world differently,” Mr. Naftali said. “That’s not new. It’s the fact that the center of the operation has absolutely no experience managing policy differences.”
An additional concern, he said, is that Mr. Trump may permit people to approach him through back channels that disrupt an “orderly policy process.”
Mr. Fleischer said Mr. Trump will likely be confronted with numerous issues where his aides and cabinet disagree, and this can be one of the first tests of his governing style. “There may be some philosophical issues that maybe only the president can resolve,” he said. “There may be some bargaining issues that only the president can decide in order to secure the votes. When the issues are narrower, and more legislatively detailed and arcane, the better course is to let your secretaries and deputy secretaries and White House aides handle the details, otherwise…the presidency gets bogged down.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-cabinet-picks-disagree-with-president-elect-on-some-key-issues-1482847201
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VW Windfall Could Help Clean Up Dirty Diesel Trains at Union Station
Dec 27, 2016 | Chicago Tribune
By Michael Hawthorne
Commuters are still breathing high levels of toxic diesel pollution trapped inside Union Station, but long-stalled efforts to clean up Metra's fleet of dirty locomotives could get a big boost next year.
Illinois will collect nearly $98 million for anti-pollution projects from a federal legal settlement with Volkswagen, the German automaker that installed secret software in nearly a half-million diesel vehicles to make them appear cleaner than they actually were. The agreement stipulates the money must be used to reduce lung- and heart-damaging nitrogen oxides emitted by diesel trains, buses, ferries and equipment.
So far there has been no public discussion of how Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration should spend the VW windfall, though a top aide said Metra, the Chicago Transit Authority and other potential recipients already are clamoring behind the scenes to secure a share.
"We're getting a lot of calls as people figure out this money is going to be out there," said Alec Messina, director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. "We can do a lot of great work with it."
Unlike the CTA, which has made substantial investments in cleaner buses during the past decade, Metra relies on locomotives built in the 1970s that are significantly dirtier than newer models. A 2010 Tribune investigation found that commuters are routinely exposed to spikes of harmful diesel pollution aboard Metra trains and at Chicago's three major rail stations, with the highest levels on the south platform of Union Station.
Metra responded by upgrading its passenger cars to filter out diesel soot. But its decades-old locomotives still emit high levels of pollution that form acrid blue clouds inside Chicago's busiest commuter station.
Money from the VW settlement could revive Metra's plan to scrap 52 of its oldest locomotives and replace them with new engines that emit 90 percent less nitrogen oxides and diesel soot. The transit agency had planned to start buying new locomotives in 2019, but backed off amid the ongoing budget battle between Rauner and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly.
Metra still hasn't received $121 million earmarked in the state's last capital budget for infrastructure projects, said Don Orseno, the transit agency's chief executive. With no sign that lawmakers and the Republican governor are anywhere close to a spending plan for future years, Metra has focused instead on repairs to keep its aging fleet on the rails.
"Our goal is to provide the safest, cleanest commute for our customers," Orseno said. "But we aren't going to be able to make a big difference without new locomotives."
Amtrak, the passenger rail service that owns Union Station, already is taking more dramatic steps to improve air quality for the 130,000 commuters who pass through a facility built in the 1920s for long-distance travelers, not for a daily crush of workers from the suburbs.
During the coming year, 38 of the 54 daily Amtrak trains at Union Station will be replaced with new locomotives that meet the latest federal emissions standards, said spokesman Marc Magliari. The new trains will serve routes between Chicago and Milwaukee, Carbondale, St. Louis and cities in Michigan.
While the rail service also has upgraded ventilation and doors in an attempt to improve conditions within the building, the number of new Amtrak engines is a fraction of the nearly 400 Metra trains that move daily through Union Station. And few think there will be noticeable improvements in air quality until Amtrak, Metra and the city move forward with plans to upgrade the entire station — work that at best is four or five years off.
Most attention to the $14.7 billion VW settlement has focused on compensation to dealers and individual owners of vehicles that emitted up to 40 times the legally allowable pollution levels. The automaker acknowledged in September 2015 that it had installed software to make it appear the vehicles were cleaner during emissions testing.
Of the $4.7 billion to be set aside for cleaner vehicles, $2.7 billion will be directed to states and tribal governments, with each getting an amount based on registrations of illegal VW vehicles. California gets the largest share — $381.2 million — followed by Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Illinois. Wisconsin will receive $63.5 million, Indiana $38.9 million.
Similar to larger settlements with cigarette makers over the health damages of smoking and BP from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, money for states affected by the VW scandal will be distributed by a trust and must be spent on eligible projects. One option would allow states to use the funds to cover up to 25 percent of the cost of a new passenger locomotive through the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, a popular federal law that has replaced or cleaned up thousands of dirty vehicles during the past decade.
"Given the number of people exposed to exhaust from these old Metra locomotives, replacing them is probably the best use of the money," said Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health at the nonprofit Respiratory Health Association of Greater Chicago.
Testing last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confirmed the Tribune's 2010 findings at Union Station. Portable monitors carried by EPA inspectors recorded average levels of diesel soot that jumped from 43 micrograms per cubic meter of air outside the station to 129 on the north platform. Soot levels were significantly higher on the south platform and spiked as high as 299 during rush hour.
But the federal Clean Air Act doesn't allow the EPA to crack down on the owners of dirty locomotives the same way it can force changes at factories or power plants. Efforts to reduce noxious diesel pollution instead rely on replacing older engines with newer, cleaner models, and upgrading other vehicles with soot filters.
"One might argue you're exposed to that exhaust for a couple of minutes each way," said Danish Murtaza, who rides Metra to and from Grayslake every weekday. "But multiply that exposure for the daily commuter, five days a week."
The EPA considers diesel exhaust one of the most dangerous types of air pollution. Breathing even small amounts can inflame the lungs and trigger asthma attacks, researchers have found. Several studies have linked exposure with heart attacks, cancer and premature death.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-union-station-pollution-20161227-story.html
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Air: Industry Pins Hopes on Boiler MACT Remand
Dec 27, 2016 | Inside EPA
After 20 years and three failed tries, the wood products industry is hoping that a federal appellate court's decision to remand EPA's boiler maximum achievable control technology (MACT) air toxics rule to the agency will finally ensure a regulation can be finalized that can withstand legal scrutiny.
“With this ruling, the court has provided an opening for the EPA to quickly address concerns and finalize a rule that supports our industry’s capability to generate essential power from its boilers,” American Forest & Paper Association President (AF&PA) President and CEO Donna Harman said in a Dec. 23 statement.
Echoing that, American Wood Council (AWC) President and CEO Robert Glowinski said: “Hopefully, this decision gets us one step closer to finalizing Boiler MACT. Wood product manufacturers produce approximately three-quarters of their own energy through the use of carbon neutral biomass residuals as fuel in boilers.”
The industry officials were reacting to the Dec. 23 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which granted requests from EPA and environmentalists to reinstate air toxics limits for large “major source” industrial, commercial and institutional boilers that the court vacated in July, remanding the limits to the agency so that it can rework them to address their legal flaws.
In a series of orders, the court not only granted the remand but also rejected environmentalists' request for rehearing en banc by the full D.C. Circuit of the July 29 ruling by a three-judge panel that largely upheld the agency's boiler MACT standards and related rules for incineration units. The 18 numeric boiler air limits that the court vacated in the original ruling were the only major part of the rulemaking that the court had scrapped.
As Inside EPA's Stuart Parker reported, the decision means the incoming Trump EPA will have the chance to try to weaken the limits in line with the president-elect's preference for deregulation. However, the decision also makes clear that EPA must follow the court's order with respect to the methodology on setting the limits, which could prevent any major weakening of the limits.
AF&PA's Harman hopes the agency will now work “as quickly as possible to bring this rule to closure after 20 years and three tries.”
“Our industry has been subject to a roller coaster of regulatory uncertainty that needs to stop. We need and deserve affordable and achievable standards that are not constantly in flux,” she said.
https://insideepa.com/the-daily-feed
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CLF's Exxon Suit Tees Up Ruling on Current Climate Effects, Permit Plan
Dec 27, 2016 | Inside EPA
By David LaRoss
Environmentalists are asking a federal judge to rule that recent severe storms and floods are direct effects of climate change, and thus must be part of permit compliance plans at ExxonMobil facilities, hoping to win a novel decision that climate change is not a speculative threat but a concrete one while highlighting charges that the company has long known of the risks but failed to act.
The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) lays out its argument in a Dec. 20 brief filed in opposition against Exxon’s bid to dismiss the group’s ongoing enforcement suit under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA).
CLF has alleged that the company’s failure to plan for climate change impacts at a Massachusetts oil terminal violates both laws. But the oil giant is claiming that the climate effects CLF has cited are uncertain possibilities that may or may not come to pass, and thus cannot be the basis for a permit mandate.
In their brief, the environmentalists call on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to hold not only that climate change is a proven phenomenon but that its impacts are being felt today, and are thus covered by statutory mandates for facilities to safeguard against imminent threats.
“Exxon’s effort to cast the impacts of climate change as ‘remote’ or ‘speculative’ is belied by established science. While the actual timing and frequency of impacts may be uncertain, the fact of increased frequency and variability has been known for decades, and to Exxon as early as the 1970s,” the brief says.
If courts back CLF’s claims that ongoing severe weather and floods can be directly attributed to climate change, it could force regulators and permittees to consider climate change when they gauge CWA and RCRA compliance in a host of situations, such as when crafting permits and in enforcement actions. Further, advocates would be able to mount citizen suits to charge that particular climate adaptation plans are not robust enough.
And CLF says in its brief that facilities should be required to weigh climate change in their compliance plans regardless of whether EPA has affirmatively required them to do so -- a potentially crucial factor if the incoming administration backs Exxon’s position.
President-elect Donald Trump has broadly opposed the Obama EPA’s climate agenda and pledged to walk back existing rules, as well as to halt development of new policies. “EPA has not taken the position that the CWA does not require consideration of climate change impacts, and even if it had, it would not be entitled to deference,” the brief says.
It argues that the explicit terms of the Exxon facility’s CWA permit and EPA’s implementing rules are enough to mandate measures to deal with rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges as a result of climate change.
And on its RCRA claims, CLF says increased incidences of severe weather and flooding thanks to climate change are enough to show “imminent and substantial endangerment” under RCRA. “Contrary to Exxon’s incorrect assertion that sea level rise is not an immediate threat, sea level rise is already underway and will continue to grow more severe. Because Exxon has not prepared its Terminal for these impacts, the risk of catastrophic effects on human health and the environment is immediate,” the brief says.
It points to a 2010 storm that led to a pollution spill from the terminal as evidence that climate change-related weather is already having a concrete effect. “The very incident that CLF members fear will occur has actually happened at the Terminal and Exxon has failed to take any steps to prevent it from happening again,” CLF argues.
Advocates' Claims
CLF is specifically asking the court to hold that Exxon’s plan for minimizing stormwater discharges from its terminal is inadequate because it does not consider increasing risks of severe weather and floods thanks to climate change. The facility’s CWA permit requires it to craft and follow a stormwater pollution prevention plan (SWPPP), and the groups' brief argues that any such plan must include “good engineering practices” sufficient to guard against severe flooding and other causes of stormwater pollution.
While Exxon said in its motion to dismiss the case that the “good engineering” clause is so broad as to be unenforceable, CLF counters that the permit requirement to implement an SWPPP makes that language binding. “Exxon cannot choose to dismiss 'isolated phrases' of specific Permit conditions as 'general obligations' without force and effect,” the brief says.
And it adds that Exxon in 2012 acknowledged publicly that “good engineering” includes protection against flooding and heavy rains, “Yet Exxon failed to act on that knowledge at the Terminal, in violation of numerous Permit conditions.”
The environmental advocates are also invoking a CWA requirement for permit holders to inform EPA of “relevant facts” on its pollution discharges. “Exxon has known about the impacts of climate change for decades, yet failed to disclose this information to EPA, thereby violating the requirement to disclose and update relevant information,” the brief says.
That passage echoes the broader challenges to Exxon’s climate stances, in particular its decisions to avoid including the possibility of climate change in its accounting and other practices despite having developed its own research that showed the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate.
As such, the suit amplifies pending claims filed by Democratic attorneys general of New York, Massachusetts and other states who charge the company is liable in several venues for continuing to sell high-emitting fossil fuels despite knowing for years that their use exacerbates climate change.
For example, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) and other attorneys general, as well as the Securities & Exchange Commission, are investigating into whether the company adequately accounted for the cost of climate change regulations and the possibility that they could create stranded assets.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/clfs-exxon-suit-tees-ruling-current-climate-effects-permit-plan
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Scientists Just Ran the Numbers on How Much Trump Could Damage the Planet
Dec 27, 2016 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
There has been a lot of speculation since climate change doubter Donald Trump’s election about what the consequences could be for global climate action. Some analysts cite very dire implications, and others suggest that clean energy growth will continue apace.
But number-crunching analyses that actually calculate how much of a dent the election could have on the planet’s temperature have been rare. That’s in part because it’s no simple calculation.
Some have tried, though — and one such analysis from the think tank Climate Interactive, which we’ve unpacked here before, came up with a kind of middle-road result on this question. It found that if the United States delays addressing climate change domestically for four to eight years, this alone would not be enough to push the globe into the climate “danger” zone, which is generally described as allowing temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial level. However, if U.S. backsliding lasted longer, or if it led to corresponding actions by other countries, then the result could be severe for the planet.
A new commentary article published in Nature Climate Change on Monday presents some additional calculations that tend toward a similar conclusion.
Written by Benjamin Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, the paper uses climate models to determine what the consequences would be if an eight-year delay in U.S. climate action, led by Trump, reverberates globally. The paper also considered a doubly bad scenario in which the United States also cuts back on clean energy research and then the world follows suit, and a triply bad scenario in which it also burns more fossil fuels and the world follows.
“Any delays to mitigation or cuts to renewable energy research by the U.S. will likely render the 2 °C target unachievable if a global precedent is set,” the authors write.
Let’s take this in pieces.
First and most important, the analysis finds that if the U.S. delays for eight years taking any climate action — meaning its current emissions remain steady — then that alone wouldn’t harm the planet much. This is basically the same result as the one reached by the Climate Interactive analysis. The United States is just one country and the second largest emitter. Even if it goes rogue, it cannot totally torpedo the planet.
But if the delay by the United States spreads globally — nobody cuts emissions, everybody waits for eight years — then it becomes a bigger deal. The study found that could lead to an additional 350 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, corresponding to a planetary temperature increase of .25 degrees Celsius and a lessened chance of keeping the warming of the planet within the safe range embraced in the Paris climate accord.
“The fear is that the U.S. coming out, or the U.S. having reduced ambitions in the near term would, destabilize the whole agreement,” Sanderson said in an interview.
The problem with such a delay is that there is a finite “carbon budget” before we reach 2 degrees of warming, and each successive year of emissions adds to the budget. So delays make staying within the budget a great deal harder and require much sharper cuts afterward.
In the case of an eight-year global delay (followed by global emissions cuts), that reduces the chances of staying within the 2-degree C goal from 66 percent to 50 percent, Sanderson said.
But it could be worse than that: The United States and globe could not only hold steady on emissions, but could actually emit more. And the United States might delay taking steps to create clean energy technologies better than the ones that we have now, causing a global turn away from clean energy research, including on key technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
The analysis finds that adding these problems for eight years worsens the overall problem still more, putting the 2-degree goal farther and farther out of reach.
“The bottom line is that a very short delay in global action would have very large consequences for the ability to meet these very aggressive targets, even if very globally coordinated and ambitious action happens post-2025,” said Sanderson.
Granted, the authors admit that this is a thought experiment only based on a particular set of assumptions — Trump’s policies don’t exist yet, so they cannot be evaluated directly. Nor can the world’s response to them. “We caution against overinterpreting the numbers of this analysis because of the large uncertainty in how the economic and ideological shift in U.S. governance will affect greenhouse gas emissions,” they write.
Indeed, some aspects of the analysis seem less realistic than others. The idea that the United States could withdraw from the Paris process, and that could then crack things up enough that other countries also slow their own ambitions to cut emissions, is not an unreasonable fear. And as the study shows, that’s a bad enough outcome.
What’s harder to believe, though, is that a global turn away from clean energy research and development could be precipitated by U.S. actions. The clean-energy trend seems too firmly entrenched at this point. In this sector, a U.S. withdrawal seems more likely to give advantages to its competitors (China, Germany, and others) than to lead them to cut back on investments as well.
As for whether an actual increase in emissions could happen globally over the next eight years — that’s also uncertain. In the past three years, global emissions have appeared to flatten but have not yet gone down. Less coal burning in China and the United States appears to be a key driver of this trend. Once again, it’s not clear that the United States’ intransigence alone could set off more emissions growth in a world in which clean energy growth is looking pretty dynamic.
Still, despite using a very different methodology, the new analysis fits with the previous one by Climate Interactive. A Trump administration hostile to international climate agreements cannot substantially change the planet’s temperature alone over eight years — but it can cause considerably more of an impact if it leads other nations to halt their own actions, or to step back from the clean energy revolution.
It is important to reiterate that keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels was already going to be extremely difficult no matter who the U.S. elected president — and that the climate impacts we have seen so far are already pretty grave.
So really, we are on a road to considerable damage no matter what, and likely some impacts that will be irreversible on any human time-scale. In this context, while we can’t know the future, we can definitely say that disengagement by the United States has the potential to make things worse — but that it will depend on how the entire world responds.
It is, after all, global warming.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/27/scientists-just-ran-the-numbers-on-how-much-trump-could-damage-the-planet/?utm_term=.4aea1bcb7062
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