Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 2/15/2017
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(ACC Mentioned) Jungbunzlauer, Green Biologics Partner on Biobased Plasticizers
Feb 15, 2017 | Biomass Magazine
By Green Biologics Inc.
Green Biologics Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Green Biologics Ltd., a U.K. industrial biotechnology and renewable chemicals company, announced Feb. 14 an exclusive collaboration with Jungbunzlauer Ladenburg GmbH, the German operating unit of Jungbunzlauer Suisse AG in Basel, Switzerland. -
Senate GOP Pledges Vote on Pruitt as Trump Chaos Grows
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Joel Kirkland
As attacks on Scott Pruitt's bid to lead U.S. EPA turn up new information tying him to energy companies suing the agency, Senate Republicans are under pressure to push his confirmation toward a final vote. -
Senate Advances Mulvaney as Dems Plot to Stall Pruitt
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Arianna Skibell and George Cahlink
Uncertainty over how fast the Senate will confirm a White House budget director could keep the chamber from taking up U.S. EPA administrator nominee Scott Pruitt this week. -
What is Scott Pruitt hiding? Thousands of Withheld Emails Yet Another Reason his EPA Nomination Should Be Stopped
Feb 14, 2017 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Martha Roberts
Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s pick for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is withholding thousands of emails related to his ties to major energy interests who may have donated to his political causes. -
Report: Trump Aiming to Sign Executive Orders on EPA
Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
President Trump aims to sign executive orders cutting into the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) climate work shortly after his nominee to lead the agency is confirmed by the Senate, according to a report. -
(ACC Mentioned) American Chemistry Council Wants Bigger Say on New EPA Panel
Feb 15, 2017 | Desalination Biz
The American Chemistry Council has called on the US Environmental Protection Agency to expand its new Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) to include representatives from the chemicals industry, reports Chemical Watch. -
What EPA Gets Right
Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Steve Caldeira
The Environmental Protection Agency can be an inconvenient regulator no matter who’s in the Oval Office. If a president’s priority is to quickly create jobs and grow the economy, environmental regulations can be burdensome and costly. If his focus is to fight health and ecological threats, business considerations have to wait. -
Cancer is a Product of Policies on Energy, Buildings, Food, and Manufacturing
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - Pundits Blog
By Devra Lee Davis
Forty-five years ago President Richard Nixon declared that “the time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering cancer.” -
Retailers Must Declare SVHCs in Products, Danish Minister Says
Feb 15, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Clelia Oziel
Retailers must be proactive in sourcing information from their suppliers about harmful substances in products, Denmark’s Environment and Food Minister Esben Lunde Larsen says. -
Echa Adds Environmental Endpoints to Read-Across Framework
Feb 15, 2017 | Chemical Watch
Echa has updated its Read-Across Assessment Framework (RAAF) to include information requirements on human health, environmental endpoints and hazards. -
NARUC Chief Talks Shift Away from Power Plan, Urges Regulatory Certainty
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E TV
By OnPoint
This week, utility regulators from around the country are convening in Washington for the annual winter meetings of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. At last year's meeting, the focus was almost entirely on the Clean Power Plan. What are regulators now most focused on as the Trump administration seeks to move away from the plan? During today's OnPoint, Robert Powelson, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the new president of NARUC, explains how regulators' work is evolving as the political climate in Washington changes. -
Utilities See Demise of Climate Rule, Still Cut CO2
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Emily Holden
Electric companies continue to plan to reduce carbon emissions, even as U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan seems doomed under the Trump administration. -
Collins has 'Concerns' with Move to Block Methane Rule
Feb 14, 2017 | Politico Pro
By Nick Juliano and Anthony Adragna
Sen. Susan Collins says she is not ready to support Republicans’ effort to block an Obama administration rule designed to prod oil and gas companies into capturing excess methane when they drill on federal lands. -
Trump Signs Repeal of Transparency Rule for Oil Companies
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
President Trump signed legislation Tuesday to repeal a controversial regulation that would have required energy companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments. -
Pipeline Foes Race Against Clock
Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline are racing against the clock, with legal action their best hope of stopping the project before oil begins to flow. -
Communities Brace for Budget Cuts if Congress Kills BLM Rule
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
Communities near federal lands that are being mined for oil and gas fear that Congress could be on the verge of trashing a lifeline for strained state coffers. -
EPA Criticizes Atlantic Sunrise Project Review
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Jenny Mandel
An environmental review of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline, which recently won a final sign-off from federal regulators, has drawn criticism from U.S. EPA officials who worry that the quick approval may leave the public without a way to scrutinize portions of the assessment that have yet to be completed. -
Pipeline Explodes in South Texas
Feb 15, 2017 | Fuel Fix
By Associated Press
A natural gas pipeline has exploded in South Texas, in a fiery display that lit up the sky and could be seen for miles. -
Pruitt Seen as Boon for Utilities Hit by EPA Haze Rule
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
Scott Pruitt hadn't long been Oklahoma's attorney general in 2011 when he sallied into his first public clash with U.S. EPA. The target: a proposed clampdown on power plant pollution clouding views at wilderness areas in three states. -
EPA: US Greenhouse Gas Emissions Declined in 2015
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States declined by 2.2 percent between 2014 and 2015, federal officials reported on Tuesday.
Industry and Association News
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(ACC Mentioned) Jungbunzlauer, Green Biologics Partner on Biobased Plasticizers
Feb 15, 2017 | Biomass Magazine
By Green Biologics Inc.
Green Biologics Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Green Biologics Ltd., a U.K. industrial biotechnology and renewable chemicals company, announced Feb. 14 an exclusive collaboration with Jungbunzlauer Ladenburg GmbH, the German operating unit of Jungbunzlauer Suisse AG in Basel, Switzerland. In February 2017, Jungbunzlauer received its first shipment of 100 percent renewable BioPure n-butanol from Green Biologics’ production facility in Little Falls, Minnesota. Jungbunzlauer aims to produce biobased Citrofol BI (tributyl citrate) and biobased Citrofol BII (acetyl tributyl citrate) for its customers with commercial shipments beginning next month.
“Jungbunzlauer is an outstanding collaboration partner for Green Biologics,” said Timothy G. Staub, global vice president of business development for Green Biologics. “As the global leader in natural ingredients built off its core strengths in citric, lactic and gluconic acids, and xanthan gums, Jungbunzlauer has been committed to sustainability for 150 years. We are delighted to be working exclusively with Jungbunzlauer on the global introduction of biobased citrate derivatives.”
Green Biologics announced the start-up of its first commercial production facility for renewable n-butanol and acetone in December, with its first bulk export shipment to Jungbunzlauer in mid-January.
“Our focus is to selectively move our renewable n-butanol and acetone into high-value markets, and Jungbunzlauer is a superb technological and market-facing partner for Green Biologics, particularly in citric-based plasticizers, but in other biobased esters as well,” added Staub.
“Sustainability has been a key principle of Jungbunzlauer since our founding in 1867,” said Hans-Peter Froschauer, product group manager of specialties at Jungbunzlauer Ladenburg GmbH. “With our mission, ‘From nature to ingredients,’ we believe that renewable products are essential for the future success of our customers in many evolving markets, including our Citrofol BI and Citrofol BII customers. The opportunity for biobased plasticizers in personal care, healthcare, biopolymers and many other industrial applications is immense and it is global. We look forward to a long and successful collaboration with Green Biologics.”
Green Biologics is a member of the American Chemistry Council and is building its new green solvents facility to meet Responsible Care standards. The company’s n-butanol and acetone have received 100 percent biobased, USDA BioPreferred status.
Green Biologics’ Clostridium fermentation platform converts a wide range of sustainable feedstocks into high-performance green chemicals such as n-butanol, acetone, and through chemical synthesis, derivatives of butanol and acetone used by a growing global consumer and industrial products customer base. The platform combines advanced high-productivity fermentation with superior-performing proprietary Clostridium microbial biocatalysts and synthetic chemistry to produce a pipeline of high-value green chemicals with optimal performance in downstream formulations.
Jungbunzlauer is one of the world’s leading producers of biodegradable ingredients of natural origin.
http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/14198/jungbunzlauer-green-biologics-partner-on-biobased-plasticizers
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Senate GOP Pledges Vote on Pruitt as Trump Chaos Grows
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Joel Kirkland
As attacks on Scott Pruitt's bid to lead U.S. EPA turn up new information tying him to energy companies suing the agency, Senate Republicans are under pressure to push his confirmation toward a final vote.
Senate confirmation for President Trump's agency nominees is expected to speed up through the end of the week, while Congress juggles daily crises rising out of turmoil inside Trump's White House.
Less than 48 hours after Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser, the White House now faces new revelations about contacts between Trump's campaign team and Russian intelligence services. On Capitol Hill, Republicans are grappling with a tide of scrutiny that puts Trump's nominee for Labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, in jeopardy and raises fresh questions about oil-related conflicts of interest tied to Trump's nominee for secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross.
With heat rising around Pruitt, Republicans shifted to a defensive posture around Trump's nominee for EPA chief.
"As the attorney general of Oklahoma, he's somebody that protected the environment, worked to strengthen the economy and to protect states' rights," Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters.
Pruitt, a Republican, angered Democrats during the confirmation process when he suggested that senators file a state freedom-of-information (FOI) records request with his office if they wanted to read his email communications with energy companies, conservative groups and lawyers hostile to EPA.
Democrats who boycotted an initial vote on Pruitt in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are urging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to postpone a vote on Pruitt's nomination. The group, led by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, pointed to a 400-page batch of emails released by Pruitt's office last Friday in response to a complaint filed in an Oklahoma state court looking to force his office to respond to FOI requests dating back two years.
Other Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, sent a letter Monday to White House counsel Donald McGahn questioning investor Carl Icahn's endorsement of Pruitt for EPA chief.
Icahn, whom Trump named as an unpaid White House adviser on regulatory reform, made his fame and fortune as a corporate raider on Wall Street in the 1980s. Today, his financial empire includes CVR Energy Inc., a domestic oil refiner that incurs costs to comply with EPA's renewable fuels standard. The rule requiring refiners to blend ethanol into gasoline or buy credits has been the target of withering criticism by Icahn.
"Mr. Icahn vocally supported Mr. Pruitt's nomination, and claimed 'he had been consulted,' before President-elect Trump selected him," said the letter, citing a Bloomberg report in December.
"These publicly reported facts suggest a conflict of interest between Mr. Icahn and advice he gave President Trump on the nomination of Mr. Pruitt," said the letter. "They further suggest he will be actively working to change RFS regulations to benefit CVR."
While Pruitt may be muddied up in the process, Republicans say they'll muscle him through confirmation. McConnell said Pruitt; Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry, the former Texas governor; and Interior nominee Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana are up next for Senate votes.
A case of missing emails
The Madison, Wis.-based Center for Media and Democracy, with the help of Oklahoma-based attorneys, went to court on Feb. 7 to force the Oklahoma attorney general's office to respond to nine public-records requests for information dating back to January 2013. They have sought email exchanges between Pruitt, his staff and 29 energy companies, law firms and well-funded conservative groups targeting EPA regulations.
"Scott Pruitt has been evasive in answering questions about his ties to the fossil fuel industry," said Nick Surgey, research director for the center. "He put his history of failing to respond to public records request squarely in view of the Senate EPW Committee."
Lawyers in the public records case will meet tomorrow in a state district court in Oklahoma City for a first hearing. Lawyers suing Pruitt's office plan to argue that the roughly 400 records released Friday fell short of some 3,000 applicable records they say the attorney general's office had previously said existed. As partial evidence that records were left out, the attorneys plan to argue that letters written to Pruitt's office by executives with gas producer Devon Energy Corp. — documents that formed the basis for a New York Times investigation in 2014 — were not included in the 400 documents, suggesting that the office hadn't fully complied with the records request.
E&E News examined the documents released Friday. Much of what's in the emails is correspondence about upcoming speaking events (including for events sponsored by major GOP donor-led political organizations such as Americans for Prosperity) and other run-of-the-mill planning for Pruitt's weeks ahead. Yet other emails are squarely aimed at coordinating Pruitt's phone calls and meetings with out-of-state energy companies pursuing lawsuits against EPA.
In an email dated June 6, 2014, an assistant in Pruitt's office sent a note to Robert Murray on behalf of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). Murray, an ardent critic of EPA, is the CEO of Murray Energy Corp., which was the first company to sue the agency after it released its Clean Power Plan proposal requiring electric utilities to cut carbon emissions. Murray Energy is based in Ohio.
"Senator Inhofe requested that I set up a call between Attorney General Scott Pruitt and yourself to speak about your petition preemptively challenging the EPA's recently announced regulation of existing power plants," said the June 2014 email.
Murray, through a company spokesman, confirmed that the phone call happened. The spokesman said Murray "discussed various strategies for Attorney General Pruitt to join Murray Energy's ongoing litigation against the so-called Clean Power Plan."
"We believe that he will be a valuable asset to the Trump administration," said the emailed comment.
Pruitt's star began rising in conservative circles starting in 2013, in part as a result of the attention he gave to national political organizers and their conferences.
In late September 2014, for example, Pruitt attended the annual meeting of the State Policy Network, an Arlington, Va.-based consortium of libertarian and free-market think tanks.
There, during meetings about how to beat the EPA carbon rule targeting emissions from coal-burning power plants, Pruitt met an executive for St. Louis-based Peabody Energy Corp. At the time, Peabody was the largest private-sector coal producer. It filed for bankruptcy protection last April.
Citing an invitation extended by Pruitt, an executive at Peabody and a lawyer for Tulsa, Okla.-based coal company Alliance Resource Partners LP set up a one-on-one meeting with the attorney general for late October, according to the documents.
Alliance CEO Joseph Craft is one of the largest Republican donors in the country. Peabody has been one of the largest corporate contributors to Clean Power Plan litigation aiming to cripple the rule.
Senate GOP 'abdication'
Pruitt's contentious confirmation process has been par for the course across Trump's Cabinet nominees. Some of them have no government experience, and others are multimillionaires and billionaires answering questions about financial conflicts of interest. Pruitt's potential conflicts revolve around corporate access and a perception that he cannot be an impartial administrator of federal rules he has worked so hard to eliminate.
The Oklahoma AG's office signed onto at least a dozen lawsuits against EPA during Pruitt's tenure. Many of the federal cases seek to overturn air and water rules and are strongly supported or funded by coal companies and powerful electric holding companies.
Pruitt hasn't formally pledged to recuse himself from acting on EPA rules tied up in litigation he pursued as attorney general.
Until the latest records release out of his Oklahoma office, Pruitt has thwarted Democratic senators and journalists seeking information about the influence of corporations and interest groups on his actions in public office. It's unusual in one sense.
"As a general matter, in the past, when members of the Senate involved in a confirmation ask for something that's not deeply personal or over the line, they work it out," said Norm Ornstein, a political scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
"What's been so striking about all this is the abdication of any responsible role across the board by Republicans in the Senate," he said. "The nominees know very well that their confirmation is wired. And the signal from the top with Trump is to basically ignore the conflicts."
Still, Washington, D.C., has a 40-year record of political warfare over Cabinet, agency and judicial nominations, dating to President Reagan's picks for agencies.
James Watt, Reagan's secretary of the Interior, faced contentious confirmation hearings that focused on his record of suing the agency he would soon be running. The Mountain States Legal Foundation battled the Bureau of Land Management's efforts to limit development on public lands during the 1970s. The organization took funding from all of those industries, including oil and gas companies.
Senators demanded more information about potential conflicts of interest. Watt promised at the time not to participate in any lawsuits brought by the organization he ran.
During his confirmation process, Pruitt's decision to slow-walk access to public records has been an underlying frustration for Democrats in Washington.
Joey Senat, an associate professor of media at Oklahoma State University, is an organizer for FOI Oklahoma, an organization meant to improve state public records compliance.
Senat said this is nothing new for Pruitt.
Pruitt was named to the board of FOI Oklahoma when he became attorney general in 2010.
"He showed no interest and never attended a meeting," Senat said. Pruitt was dropped from the board after a three-year appointment ended.
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/02/15/stories/1060050089
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Senate Advances Mulvaney as Dems Plot to Stall Pruitt
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Arianna Skibell and George Cahlink
Uncertainty over how fast the Senate will confirm a White House budget director could keep the chamber from taking up U.S. EPA administrator nominee Scott Pruitt this week.
The Senate took a procedural vote this morning to begin debate on Office of Management and Budget director nominee Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) amid concerns from both sides of the aisle.
The cloture vote generally gives lawmakers up to 30 hours to debate a nominee. But both sides agreed to start the clock ahead of time, despite Democratic and some GOP opposition to Mulvaney.
A final vote on Mulvaney is expected either today or tomorrow. Pruitt is next in line for Senate consideration.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said advancing Mulvaney will help bring fiscal and regulatory "sanity" to the economy after eight years of "stagnation" under President Obama.
"Rep. Mulvaney knows making government more accountable is conducive to economic growth, and getting our fiscal house in order goes hand in hand with compassion" for the most vulnerable, he said.
"It's good to finally see new economic leadership in place atop Treasury and the Small Business Administration," McConnell said. "Now we can chart a better direction for this important budgetary agency as well."
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, praised Mulvaney, calling him a "vigilant budget hawk." He said, "Mr. Mulvaney will play a crucial role in taming the unchecked growth of the federal government."
While Mulvaney is expected to be confirmed, some senators remain uncertain about how they will vote. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) continued to express doubt over Mulvaney's voting record on military spending.
"He's shaping the budget," McCain said this morning. "He wants to cut defense. The president says he wants to increase it. I know the state of our military is in terrible shape thanks to eight years of Barack Obama and [former Secretary of Defense] Ash Carter. But we'll need to get our military restored."
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has also expressed reservations. "I want to be sure he is objective and can look at things as one would: responsibly," he said. "I think we share a lot of the same goals, [like] fiscal responsibility."
The League of Conservation Voters urged the Senate to vote against Mulvaney's confirmation, citing the congressman's denial of climate change.
Mulvaney has also rejected the scientific consensus on other issues like the link between the Zika virus and birth defects, LCV President Gene Karpinski wrote in a letter.
"Mulvaney's hostility toward science, public health and the environment and his extreme anti-government views are disqualifying for a position with significant authority over our system of public protections and the federal budget," Karpinski wrote. "We urge you to oppose his nomination."
Pruitt
Following Mulvaney's final confirmation vote, the Senate could take a procedural roll call on Pruitt's nomination to lead EPA in accordance with a process McConnell set up this week.
Environment and Public Works Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said if Democrats don't yield the 30 hours of post-cloture debate, a final vote on Pruitt would be expected Friday afternoon.
"If they want to give back time, I'm happy to vote sooner," he said.
EPW Committee ranking member Tom Carper (D-Del.) said this morning that Democrats would take a hard line in opposing Pruitt when he comes to the floor this week. Carper said Democrats would use all 30 hours of debate time to protest the pick.
"If the debate occurs this week, I am sure that we will [use all the time]; if the debate is extended to the week after recess, we'll have to wait and see," Carper said.
While Democrats can use the floor time to make their case against Pruitt, there are no signs yet that enough GOP senators would break ranks to deny Pruitt's confirmation.
Several bipartisan congressional delegations are set for overseas travel during the Presidents Day recess, beginning this weekend, so Republicans seem unlikely to keep the chamber in session beyond Friday.
McConnell, however, warned that if Democrats refuse to cooperate in finishing Cabinet nominations this week, "we're going to end up working here well into the weekend."
He also chastised Senate Democrats for stalling nominee confirmations, which has resulted in Trump having the fewest number of Cabinet secretaries "on a percentage basis" at this point since George Washington.
"Our Democratic friends have allowed themselves to be pushed around by the fringe and to a strategy in search of a purpose," he said from the floor.
"They really can't prevent the president's Cabinet nominees from being confirmed," McConnell said, "yet they have undertaken the most unprecedented obstruction of Cabinet nominees in history."
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/02/15/stories/1060050118
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Feb 14, 2017 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Martha Roberts
Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s pick for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is withholding thousands of emails related to his ties to major energy interests who may have donated to his political causes.
Such stonewalling makes it difficult for senators to vote on his nomination since they can’t know if these contacts were appropriate. It is particularly disturbing because Pruitt – who as EPA administrator would be charged with overseeing vital clean air and clean water protections for our nation – has a long history of opposing bedrock safeguards in concert with industry players.
Earlier today, the Center for Media and Democracy filed a report about the absent emails with an Oklahoma court, the latest chapter in the watchdog group’s two-year saga to get a response to its request for records from the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office. An emergency hearing before the court has been scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 16.
Pruitt’s absent emails so concerned Senate Democrats that they have asked that voting on Pruitt’s nomination be postponed until after the Oklahoma court holds its hearing. Meanwhile, questions surrounding Pruitt’s nomination continue to grow.
In January, Environmental Defense Fund filed a Freedom of Information Act request for EPA records relating to development of Pruitt’s bare bones ethics agreement with the EPA. Unfortunately, the request to get these records swiftly, in time to inform consideration of Pruitt’s nomination, was rejected. We continue to wait for these key documents.
What else is out there?
Pruitt’s office has said it identified more than 3,000 emails responsive to CMD’s request. But when CMD finally got a response last week – after two years of waiting, and a hearing before a state judge – Pruitt’s office only provided 411.
Moreover, in at least 27 instances, emails responsive to CMD’s request were previously released in a separate open records request – but not turned over to CMD. All this begs the question: What else is Pruitt’s office withholding from the public?
Pruitt’s past professional behavior is revealing
In 2014, Pruitt was identified as leading an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with big energy interests.
He copied and pasted industry requests and sent them to senior federal officials under the seal of the Attorney General’s office. And his staff fundraised from oil and gas interests during work hours.
Pruitt also routinely joined with major industry players in 14 lawsuits against bedrock EPA clean air and clean water protections that limit dangerous pollutants such as mercury, smog, arsenic and carbon.
Efforts to roll back such protections endanger children’s health. Without these safeguards, our kids would suffer from even more asthma attacks, more brain development risks and other serious health consequences.
Pruitt even refused to answer senators
Meanwhile, Pruitt is even stonewalling U.S. senators charged with taking his testimony under his confirmation process. In written answers to questions posed by senators, Pruitt told them almost 20 times to file open records requests in Oklahoma rather than answering the senators’ questions – the same kind of requests that suffer a two-year backlog in the office Pruitt leads.
In one instance, he even told a senator to file an open records request with his office to get more information – about open records requests in Pruitt’s office.
It’s already clear from the information we do have on Pruitt that he’s entangled in a web of campaign contributions and lawsuits to oppose clean air and clean water safeguards. It’s deeply troubling to consider that there’s even more out there that we just don’t know about.
https://www.edf.org/blog/2017/02/14/what-scott-pruitt-hiding-thousands-withheld-emails-yet-another-reason-his-epa
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Report: Trump Aiming to Sign Executive Orders on EPA
Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
President Trump aims to sign executive orders cutting into the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) climate work shortly after his nominee to lead the agency is confirmed by the Senate, according to a report.
Trump will attend a swearing-in ceremony for EPA Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt at agency headquarters after the Senate confirms Pruitt, Inside EPA reported this week.
At that event, an administration source told Inside EPA that Trump will sign executive orders related to the agency’s climate work and that they could “suck the air out of the room,” according to the report.
The official did not say how many orders Trump will sign or what they will address. But the planned event could be similar to one Trump held at the Pentagon after Defense Secretary James Mattis was sworn in.
At that event, Trump signed an executive order cracking down on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days and halting the U.S. refugee program for 120, including indefinitely banning Syrian refugees.
An administration official said a potential Trump visit to EPA headquarters has yet to be confirmed.
Senate Republicans are aiming to vote on Pruitt’s nomination this week. Nearly every Democrat is likely to oppose Pruitt, but he is expected to have enough Republican support to win confirmation.
Trump has vowed to roll back Obama-era EPA actions, including major climate change regulations like the Clean Power Plan and a water jurisdiction rule opposed by many conservatives.
One executive order, according to Inside EPA’s report, could be aimed at the State Department, suggesting Trump will take a position on the United States's participation in the Paris climate deal. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the Senate last month that he hopes to stay in that climate pact.
Trump’s actions are likely to cheer fossil fuel groups and conservatives who resisted Obama’s climate work. But environmentalists are certain to oppose Trump's efforts.
Responding to the report on Wednesday, the Sierra Club said, “It would mean he is declaring open season on our air, water and climate while further destabilizing our role in the world."
http://www.thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319667-report-trump-aiming-to-sign-sweeping-epa-executive-orders
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(ACC Mentioned) American Chemistry Council Wants Bigger Say on New EPA Panel
Feb 15, 2017 | Desalination Biz
The American Chemistry Council has called on the US Environmental Protection Agency to expand its new Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) to include representatives from the chemicals industry, reports Chemical Watch.
The committee has been formed to provide advice and consultation on implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was amended in 2016 by the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act. Its work will involve reviewing risk assessments, models, tools, guidance documents, chemical category documents, and other chemical assessment products.
The new SACC currently comprises nine representatives from academia, three from state and federal government, four from industry but not chemical firms, and two from non-governmental organisations.
https://www.desalination.biz/news/0/American-Chemistry-Council-wants-bigger-say-on-new-EPA-panel/8669/
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Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Steve Caldeira
The Environmental Protection Agency can be an inconvenient regulator no matter who’s in the Oval Office. If a president’s priority is to quickly create jobs and grow the economy, environmental regulations can be burdensome and costly. If his focus is to fight health and ecological threats, business considerations have to wait.
But since its inception in 1970 under President Nixon, EPA has managed to get the balance right more often than not. Both industry and EPA’s critics agree that our air is cleaner and our water is safer even as business has managed to thrive. What’s needed now is finding enough resources and will to maintain the many respected programs that lawmakers and presidents from both political parties have worked so hard to devise—especially when it comes to chemicals.
For 40 years, the Toxic Substances Control Act or TSCA was ineffective in regulating chemicals used in the U.S. Then last year, President Obama signed into law the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, a bi-partisan measure that overhauled the way chemicals can be brought to the marketplace.
EPA, the business community and environmental groups worked collectively for nearly a decade to update TSCA with this act and all agree that it will reassure consumers that scientists have evaluated the risks from chemicals in an unbiased and timely way.
EPA must now meet specific deadlines to implement the law, but it will need the financial resources to do so. Without adequate funding and staff, the agency will be forced to delay decisions that industry needs for the introduction of innovative new products, hurting consumers and manufacturers alike.
Congress also needs to act by the end of September to reauthorize the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA), the law that governs the EPA approval process for pesticides used in the U.S. It is backed by both business and consumer groups largely because it includes predictable timelines for approval of products that protect Americans from insect-borne diseases like the Zika and West Nile viruses. It also pays for pesticide safety education for farm workers.
PRIA assures consumers that the pesticides they use are effective. Supporters of extending the law include trade groups, environmentalists and state agricultural regulators. Congress needs to act soon.
The Safer Choice Program (previously known as Design for Environment) challenges companies to voluntarily create sustainable products using ingredients on a government-prescribed list. If a product meets the program’s criteria, a company can affix the much-admired Safer Choice logo on its packaging and advertising.
The logo now adorns more than 2,000 products and the program has over 500 industry partners. Companies have invested heavily to reformulate their offerings and consumers, including hospitals, schools and families, have grown accustomed to looking for Safer Choice labeled products.
Safer Choice has provided tangible, bottom-line results for consumers, businesses and environmental advocates. And almost everyone agrees that it should be continued. It is clearly far preferable to having dozens of separate labeling programs managed by groups as dissimilar as retailers, private certification companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local governments. The next EPA administrator needs to lend his support to Safer Choice.
Business leaders have been agitating for years for a new administrator to conduct a thorough regulatory review of EPA. No one doubts that Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s choice for the job, will do so with vigor. What most people don’t realize is that a lot of what Mr. Pruitt will find isn’t controversial at all. He can – and should – take a hard look at what needs to be eliminated or scaled back, but he can also affirm what’s actually working.
Embracing the successes at EPA – as well as rooting out its excesses – will bring certainty and predictability to industry, making it easier to create jobs while also bringing new, innovative, cleaner and healthier products to the marketplace. Mr. Pruitt will soon find that EPA actually gets it right sometimes.
Steve Caldeira is President and CEO of the Consumer Specialty Products Association based in Washington, D.C.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/319550-what-epa-gets-right
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Cancer is a Product of Policies on Energy, Buildings, Food, and Manufacturing
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - Pundits Blog
By Devra Lee Davis
Forty-five years ago President Richard Nixon declared that “the time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering cancer.”
Some four decades and more than $120 billion later Republicans have added more money to the National Cancer Institute budget than requested by President Obama to fund another Cancer Moonshot — bringing the total to more than $5 billion this year.
It might be a good idea to ask what have we won so far? We have made tremendous progress in treating relatively rare cancers of children. Breast and colon cancer are now often chronic diseases.
But rates of childhood cancer today are 50 percent higher than when the war began. Still taking into account the older age and larger size of our population, cancer deaths overall have fallen just five percent —most of this due to declines in smoking.
By now it is clear that curing cancer has nothing in common with what was involved in tapping existing technologies to place Neil Armstrong on the moon. In fact, for more than fifty years we have known a lot about how to prevent cancer from developing.
Much of the past effort against cancer has fixated on the wrong enemies, with the wrong weapons. While scientific research concentrates on the genome within, we are ignoring the exposome– all that we breathe, drink, eat and absorb through our skin. As President Bush’s Cancer Panelreminded us in 2010, the great majority cases of cancer occur in people born with healthy genes as a result of carcinogenic exposures at work, home, and school.
If we want to win the battle against cancer, we can start with what we’ve known for half a century to tackle those things known to cause the disease. Ask yourself this: Why did we wait until nearly forty years after tobacco was understood to cause cancer and other diseases before mounting a major effort to curtail its production and use? What took us so long to reduce the amount of benzene in gasoline or toxic flame retardants in our waters, food, furniture, bedding, fabrics and breastmilk?
The answers have less to do with science, and more to do with the power of highly profitable industries that rely on public relations to counteract scientific reports of risks.
Studies of identical twins tell us that most cases of cancer do not arise because of inherited defects. Only one in 10 women who develop breast cancer is born with defective genes.
This means that most cases come about because of ways that our healthy genes interact with the world around us. The list of workplace causes of cancer provides a litany of largely ignored factors. Women who work at night – like nurses or those who work in electronics – have lower levels of melatonin and higher rates of breast cancer. Men who work with chemicals or electromagnetic fields have higher rates of brain cancer and leukemia. Those who work with wood dust and formaldehyde have higher rates of nasal cancer.
One of the most heavily lobbied efforts of modern time, the latest cancer moonshot provides a sop to the drug industry, as steep upticks in pharma stocks are indicating. The global cancer industry spends $107 billion per year, nearly half in the U.S., with a great deal of those funds going directly to costly drugs and their administration.
In truth cancer is not the business of National Institute of Health (NIH) alone, but a result of policies on energy, buildings, food, manufacturing and even defense. Fossil fuel emissions are not only climate changing greenhouse gases, but also include a soup of toxic agents. The history of American efforts to regulate chemicals makes it clear. It can take three weeks to approve a new chemical and more than thirty years to remove one from the market.
Despite progress in treating relatively rare cancers like chronic myelogenous leukemia, we have made no advances treating the most deadly and advanced forms of the disease such as lung and brain cancer. In many instances of these diseases, costly chemotherapy is little more than a costly form of psychotherapy.
If we want to win the war on cancer, we need to start with the thousand physical and chemical agents evaluated as possible, probable or known human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization — encompassing engine exhausts, pesticides, many synthetic chemicals and hormones, and cell phone and wireless radiation.
To reduce the burden of cancer, we must prevent it arising in the first place, and we have to keep the millions of cancer survivors from relapsing. A true moonshot on cancer would require creating a Cabinet-level cancer Czar charged with ensuring procurement and investment decisions in the public and private sectors to discourage the purchase, use and disposal of cancer-cancer agents, as well as seeking innovations in treatment.
The case for prevention is stronger than ever. No matter how efficient we may become at delivering health care, we must reduce the need for treatment by developing policies that avoid known causes of the disease. If we had acted on what has long been known about the industrial and environmental causes of cancer when this national war first began, millions of lives could have been spared — a huge number of casualties for which those who have managed the effort against the disease thus far must answer.
Devra Lee Davis PhD MPH is internationally renowned for her work on environmental health and disease prevention. A former President appointee to the National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and a National Book Award Finalist for When Smoke Ran Like Water, she is President of the Environmental Health Trust, a nonprofit devoted to researching and controlling avoidable environmental health threats, and the author of the acclaimed book The Secret History of the War on Cancer, as well as Disconnect, the truth about cell phone radiation. Author of more than 200 publications, she is visiting professor of medicine, The Hebrew University and Ondokuz Mayis University.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/healthcare/319532-cancer-is-a-result-of-policies-on-energy-buildings-food-and
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Retailers Must Declare SVHCs in Products, Danish Minister Says
Feb 15, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Clelia Oziel
Retailers must be proactive in sourcing information from their suppliers about harmful substances in products, Denmark’s Environment and Food Minister Esben Lunde Larsen says.
His call follows an inspection which found phthalates - including those on the REACH candidate list of SVHCs - in products at DIY stores, even though the manufacturers had claimed they did not contain SVHCs.
Article suppliers have a “clear obligation” to provide this kind of information, he says. “I encourage retailers to be proactive and contact their suppliers to make sure they have all the necessary information about candidate list substances in their products, so that they can pass on this information quickly to consumers on request.”
Consumers can play an important role in making companies focus more on the need to have such information, he says, simply by asking for it. “The more we ask, the better companies will become at providing [that information], and the easier it will be for everyone,” he says.
A recent study commissioned by the European Commission’s DG Environment said many companies selling construction materials in the EU are not responding to REACH Article 33 requests.
The article requires companies to reply within 45 days, if asked by consumers or their customers about the presence - above 0.1% concentration - of SVHCs in their products.
Between August 2016 and January 2017, the Danish Consumer Council’s ‘Think Chemicals’ programme asked manufacturers and retailers about the content of candidate list substances in tested products. Some companies took 105 working days to reply, it says.
Meanwhile, SME trade body Uepame has urged Echa and the European Commission to look for ways to simplify notification of SVHCs in articles under REACH.
‘Tougher controls’
The Danish Consumer Council’s ‘Think Chemistry’ inspection found 29 out of 58 products tested from DIY stores, such as footballs, garden hoses and other plastic consumer goods, had one or more phthalates, and 24 contained those from the candidate list.
The council reported four non-compliant products to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for investigation.
Now new “controls” will be introduced in the construction market and Mr Larsen has instructed the EPA to carry out further inspections in the spring. They will target soft plastic products, with "a special focus” on products for children found in DIY stores, Mr Larsen says.
He will also meet with the relevant trade associations to discuss the issue of consumer information on the content of harmful chemicals in products.
On 16 February, EU member states are due to discuss, and possibly vote on, a European Commission proposal to identify four phthalates (DEHP, DBP, BBP and DIBP) as SVHCs because of their endocrine disrupting effects on human health.
https://chemicalwatch.com/53573/danish-minister-urges-better-communication-on-chemicals-in-products
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Echa Adds Environmental Endpoints to Read-Across Framework
Feb 15, 2017 | Chemical Watch
Echa has updated its Read-Across Assessment Framework (RAAF) to include information requirements on human health, environmental endpoints and hazards.
Registrants can use it to check the quality of their own read-across cases.
Read-across is the most commonly used alternative method under REACH. It works by using test results for a particular property of a substance to predict that property for another substance. When used correctly, it can help avoid unnecessary testing on vertebrate animals.
The RAAF does not replace the official guidance on read-across for registrants but complements it, the agency says. The first version of the assessment framework covering the human health endpoints was published in 2015.
A document with considerations on read-across, involving unknown or variable composition, complex reaction products or biological materials (UVCBs) and multi-constituent substances, is also in preparation. It will be published in March, Echa says.
Last March experts at a read-across workshop said approaches need to move beyond grouping chemicals based purely on similarities in their structures.
https://chemicalwatch.com/53596/echa-adds-environmental-endpoints-to-read-across-framework
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NARUC Chief Talks Shift Away from Power Plan, Urges Regulatory Certainty
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E TV
By OnPoint
This week, utility regulators from around the country are convening in Washington for the annual winter meetings of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. At last year's meeting, the focus was almost entirely on the Clean Power Plan. What are regulators now most focused on as the Trump administration seeks to move away from the plan? During today's OnPoint, Robert Powelson, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the new president of NARUC, explains how regulators' work is evolving as the political climate in Washington changes.
Transcript
Monica Trauzzi: Hello and welcome to OnPoint. I'm Monica Trauzzi. With me today is Robert Powelson, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the new president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. It's nice to have you here.
Robert Powelson: Monica, great to be with you.
Monica Trauzzi: So regulators from around the country are convening in Washington this week for the annual NARUC winter meetings. At last year's meeting the focus was pretty squarely on the Clean Power Plan. The conversation has since shifted pretty dramatically. What are regulators most concerned about? What are they talking about this week?
Robert Powelson: So right now the buzz is obviously this presidential transition and how NARUC really articulates the issues that are impacting our member states. So Clean Power Plan as we know it I would say is on a hiatus, and with a new Supreme Court Justice I could see us hitting the reset button and looking at alternative ways.
I use my state as an example. Since 2008 we've seen a 32 percent reduction in NOx, SOx and mercury, reductions from our power plants. That's a market-based decarbonization that's happening in lieu of anything known as the Clean Power Plan.
So you couple that with discussions around WOTUS and a lot of people are like, "Ya know, let's be respectful of states' rights." I think there's a buzz at this meeting about our ability to effectuate some real positive changes on Capitol Hill.
Monica Trauzzi: How are you hoping to shape the conversation on the power plan era? Like you said, utilities in many cases are moving forward with plans to reduce emissions and to switch to cleaner sources of energy. So what should regulators be doing in light of all that?
Robert Powelson: So as you mentioned, our generation mixes change radically. I use that year 2008. In my state, we're the second largest natural gas production state in the country. We're not building right now new coal plants in Pennsylvania, but we are concerned about our ability and many other states.
We're getting away from fuel diversity and we're having issues around the viability of nuclear assets. It's great that my state and others have implemented renewable portfolio standards. We've harnessed renewable investment in our state, but most of your RTOs and ISOs will tell you that we've got to have a broader conversation around fuel diversity because we love our shale gas, but I can tell you from dealing with things like the polar vortex back in 2013, very troubling times in the ... power system.
Twenty-five percent forced outage rates of plants, and these are the kinds of things that you need to keep in mind as we're having conversations with Washington. We have a new administration, obviously.
I think that our conversation this morning, by the way, was about infrastructure investment. Here's an industry that says, "We don't need a handout. We don't need a stimulus grant, but what we need is regulatory certainty." That's what I think a lot of the merchant generators across this country are looking for. Regulatory certainty so I can go forward and build my plant and not have to deal with the Army Corps of Engineers coming in at the eleventh hour to halt a project.
Monica Trauzzi: Are you confident or is your sense at this point that the Trump administration is on board with all those things?
Robert Powelson: My dealings with the Trump administration, I think there's a very clear edict. We're going to invest in infrastructure and we are going to do it in a very efficient manner and with respect to environmental protection obviously, but I think if you look at the president's announcement on Dakota Access and TransCanada, very clear and concise where he wants to see infrastructure built and infrastructure cited.
Monica Trauzzi: I want to go back to the Clean Power Plan for a second. There's a lot of talk about what a replacement could look like if there is a replacement. Do you believe the Trump administration will move to replace the Clean Power Plan and, if so, what shape should that rule take?
Robert Powelson: So we're early into this. Recognizing that Secretary Pruitt, he'll have to make a recommendation to Congress whether he wants to litigate or look to say to the states, "Look, let your air regulator deal with it. If you guys want to have a RGGI-like trading mechanism, let's be respectful of that and go about your business." But a heavy-handed Clean Power Plan-like approach I think is really off the table at this point.
I'm not going to argue the fact that the Supreme Court has given the EPA the ability to regulate carbon, but I think what you'll see in this discussion is letting the states really drive —
Monica Trauzzi: Is the Clean Power Plan really heavy-handed, though? Much of what it prescribes has already been achieved.
Robert Powelson: Going back to my example of without it we're seeing sizable reductions in NOx, SOx and mercury emissions across this country. You couple that with the investment around renewables in states like mine and Texas and others that are integrating renewables.
I just think when we talk about the Clean Power Plan, and I've spent a lot of time working with the prior administration on conversations about this, there are a lot of unintended consequences now that are rearing their ugly head. One is price formation around nuclear plants that were supposed to be part of those compliance plans for states.
I think the clear directive in the current outline of the Clean Power Plan is a nationally prescribed renewable portfolio standard for states. That really is what got a lot of this debate started where our ... power system is based on economic dispatch; the least cost unit. Now we're in a regime or we're on hold now, but a discussion around economic dispatch. Here lies these issues. States like mine took early adoption measures to implement things like energy efficiency, renewable investment, not receiving credit for that.
These were the conversations that got a lot of states' legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, in a very combative posture with the EPA.
Monica Trauzzi: So you don't think states need a mechanism like the Clean Power Plan in order to reduce CO2 emissions.
Robert Powelson: I think there needs to be some type of light regulation to allow for states that want to invest in next-generation technology and address climate goals.
California is an example of more recently Governor Brown announcing we're basically doubling down on our renewable portfolio standard, but in doing so we're not going to count nuclear as part of that.
Other states are moving in a much more, I'll call it hybrid approach. We want all the above resources to count.
So again, in a states' rights ... role, I think the states are really the incubation labs for addressing climate.
Monica Trauzzi: There was a meeting last week at the White House about a carbon tax. Is that something you'd be in favor of?
Robert Powelson: Well certainly I have a great deal of respect for Secretary Baker. He is a true statesman. When he speaks, people listen. I think some people in the industry, if there could be industry consensus around a carbon tax, it's the most efficient way to go about this, but I can tell you from sitting through the debate of the cap-and-trade debate, I don't know if there's an appetite in the Congress to address a carbon tax.
Monica Trauzzi: You spoke a lot about infrastructure earlier. Obviously FERC plays a role in that. Are regulators concerned about the lack of quorum at FERC right now?
Robert Powelson: We are. We're very concerned. You have a potential situation where you talk about infrastructure, this could wreak havoc on our interstate pipeline system.
You also have a number of potential LNG export licenses that are being reviewed. You still have the oversight of wholesale power markets. So this agency will conceivably be hamstrung without a quorum.
So I think organizations like NARUC, a number of industry types, other consumer groups, have expressed a concern about this.
Monica Trauzzi: What assurances, if any, have you received from the commission?
Robert Powelson: In terms of the ability to —
Monica Trauzzi: The ability to move forward and have a plan in place.
Robert Powelson: Well, I'm interviewing Chairman LeFleur at NARUC, so I'll find that out in a day here.
Monica Trauzzi: Excellent. Beyond the Clean Power Plan, what are the things, your key priorities moving forward through your year as president?
Robert Powelson: So I outlined three ambitious goals. One is a discussion about infrastructure. You're looking at industries, gas, electric, water, telecom, very capital-intensive. We've got a lot of innovation out there in the market, so innovation is the second theme. Ahead-of-the-meter or behind-the-meter technology.
So recently we had our innovation task force kickoff. It was amazing the presenters at that and the turnout just for a discussion around innovation. We started with the topic of battery storage.
Then the third theme is workforce investment. This industry, whether it's in gas, water, electric circles, we're losing a lot of talented people.
The average lineman in this country, the average age is something like 56 years old. So how do we through a workforce development initiative really retrench, repopulate, retrain people to come into these jobs? Part of that is a focus around military hires and really focusing on things like troops to energy and supporting those type of initiatives. That's where I think NARUC plays a key role in convening the thought leaders to come up with solutions of how do we get more utilities engaged in hiring our veterans.
Monica Trauzzi: We're going to end it right there on that note. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Robert Powelson: Thank you. My pleasure.
Monica Trauzzi: Thanks for watching. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
http://www.eenews.net/tv/videos/2202/transcript
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Utilities See Demise of Climate Rule, Still Cut CO2
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Emily Holden
Electric companies continue to plan to reduce carbon emissions, even as U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan seems doomed under the Trump administration.
That was the message from conservative regulators, a power provider that spans red and blue states, a Fortune 100 business, and an investment analyst speaking to state electricity regulators at a meeting in Washington yesterday.
"In the past three weeks, to me as a Republican appointed by a Republican governor, I'm not reassured by the progress the Congress and the administration are making," said Ted Thomas, chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission.
"If they don't get it together, we're going to have a different administration in four years, and that's when folks might wish they had the Clean Power Plan," he said.
Speaking on the sidelines of a conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, Thomas noted that electric utilities plan decades into the future and face uncertainty when federal policies swing back and forth. He expects that even if President Trump's EPA rescinds the rule, the next administration will pursue much stricter climate standards. With that in mind, utilities in Arkansas are still focused on cutting carbon, he said.
Thomas explained that most of the price risk of the federal climate rule would have come in the second half of the next decade anyway. The Clean Power Plan, which is being reviewed by the courts and is on hold under a Supreme Court order, wouldn't require states to start meeting lower carbon levels until 2022.
"There are still scenarios with a cost of carbon presented," Thomas said. "And to me, a utility commissioner isn't doing their job, given that they make a long-term projection, if they're not including resource diversity that includes non-carbon resources."
Other power-sector experts expressed similar views. While Trump has vowed to bring back coal jobs, no one speaking at the NARUC meeting said he or she expects a revival of the industry. Trump, who signed a measure yesterday relieving coal companies of an obligation to disclose payments to governments, said his administration is "bringing back jobs big league."
"We're bringing them back at the plant level, we're bringing them back at the mine level. The energy jobs are coming back," Trump said, according to a press pool report.
No hope for coal?
Speakers at the conference said the oil and gas and green power industries will create jobs. But they didn't have an optimistic outlook for the coal sector.
Although Republicans have vowed to help coal against the competition, most renewable power is being built in GOP districts, noted Swami Venkataraman, a senior vice president for Moody's Investors Service.
Steve Skarda, global climate and energy leader for Procter & Gamble Co., explained that his company has a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent below 2010 levels by 2020 and to eventually use all renewable power. The company set those targets after reviewing science used by international negotiators who hope to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, he said.
Jonathan Weisgall, vice president of legislative and regulatory affairs for Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co., said more than two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies and more than half of Fortune 500 companies have renewable power or sustainability targets.
Weisgall said corporate demand, technological advances, aggressive state policies and remaining federal tax incentives will all drive carbon reductions, as will a "customer-driven pull," rather than a "mandate-driven push."
"I'm not aware of any utility executive that woke up on the day after the Election Day and said, 'Well, I think now we're going to start looking at coal plants because there's going to be some changed policy,'" Weisgall said.
Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration back that up. While the U.S. power mix is sensitive to policy changes and natural gas prices, coal use will likely stay at about the same level if the Trump administration does not implement the Clean Power Plan, EIA pointed out yesterday based on its annual outlook.
Right now, most power comes from natural gas, with coal trailing close behind. Without the federal climate regulation, coal will be the leading source of electricity by 2019 and retain that position through 2032. Natural gas and renewable power will grow to serve rising demand, according to EIA.
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/02/15/stories/1060050088
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Collins has 'Concerns' with Move to Block Methane Rule
Feb 14, 2017 | Politico Pro
By Nick Juliano and Anthony Adragna
Sen. Susan Collins says she is not ready to support Republicans’ effort to block an Obama administration rule designed to prod oil and gas companies into capturing excess methane when they drill on federal lands.
“I’m still reviewing it, but I have a number of concerns about it,” Collins told POLITICO Tuesday when asked about the Congressional Review Act resolution targeting the Bureau of Land Management regulation.
The Maine Republican is at least the second member of her party not yet on board with blocking the methane rule — Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said last week that he remains undecided — and Democrats who tend to break with their party on fossil fuel issues remain on the fence as well. A vote on the CRA resolution has been put off at least until after next week’s recess, but without additional support GOP leaders risk relying on Vice President Mike Pence for another tie-breaking vote to get it across the finish line.
“I think there’s internal issues with certain Republicans who feel very strongly that maybe this rule should get reviewed and amended but not repealed,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who often joins Republicans on energy votes but has not decided how she will vote on the methane rule.
Heitkamp said she needed to learn more about how overturning the BLM rule would affect similar state regulations and how to strike the right balance between not wasting gas extracted from federal lands. The rule sets standards to limit the venting and flaring of natural gas, and it would modify royalty rates for federal oil and gas production.
“The concern that I have is that this is a valuable mineral owned by the people of this country and it should be captured,” Heitkamp said. “The question is, you know, I know enough about oil drilling to know that not every hydrocarbon can get captured. And for safety reasons there is a need to have flares, and we have a pretty good record of closing that loophole in North Dakota. But we don’t want to face situations where federal minerals are left behind.”
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski said opponents of the rule were tallying votes they could count on and “explaining it to some of our colleagues who are not Westerners why we don’t need it.”
Murkowski did not say directly whether the CRA resolution has the support it needs to pass right now, but she sounded encouraged that her non-Western colleagues would come around.
“I think as a general rule they’re looking at it and saying, 'anything we can do to roll back some of these regs is not going to be a bad thing at the end of the day,'” Murkowski said.
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/story/2017/02/collins-has-concerns-with-move-to-block-methane-rule-148451
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Trump Signs Repeal of Transparency Rule for Oil Companies
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
President Trump signed legislation Tuesday to repeal a controversial regulation that would have required energy companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.
The legislation is the first time in 16 years that the Congressional Review Act (CRA) has been used to repeal a regulation, and only the second time in the two decades that act has been law. It is the third piece of legislationTrump has signed since taking office three weeks ago.
It is the start of one front in an aggressive deregulatory effort that the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are undertaking to roll back Obama-era rules on fossil fuel companies, financial institutions and other businesses that they say have suffered for the last eight years.
The resolution repeals a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule written under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
It was meant to fight corruption in resource-rich countries by mandating that companies on United States stock exchanges disclose the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments.
At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump said the legislation is part of a larger regulatory rollback that he and congressional Republicans are undertaking with the goal of economic and job recovery.“This is a big signing, very important signing,” Trump said, flanked at his desk by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and other lawmakers. “We’re bringing back jobs big league. We're bringing them back at the plant level, we're bringing them back at the mine level. The energy jobs are coming back,” he continued. “A lot of people going back to work now.” Trump then asked Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), the measure’s lead sponsor, to speak about it and regulatory reform in general. “Over 20 years, there’s been 56,000 rules that have been put in place, with very little legislative input or oversight, and it’s time that changed,” he said.
The administration and congressional allies say the SEC rule imposes massive, unnecessary costs on United States oil, natural gas and mining companies, putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage to foreign companies that do not have to comply.
“Misguided federal regulations such as the SEC rule addressed by H.J.R. 41 inflict real cost on the American people and put our businesses, especially small businesses, at a significant disadvantage,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said earlier Tuesday.
“It’s a priority for the Trump administration to fix our broken regulatory system so that it enhances American productivity and well-being without imposing unnecessary costs and burdens,” he said.
“Signing this joint resolution is one more step toward achieving this goal.”
The House passed the repeal measure earlier this month, followed shortly by the Senate.
Democrats and supporters of the SEC rule see the rollback as a victory for corruption.
“The rule they’re trying to repeal protects U.S. citizens and investors from having millions of their dollars vanished into the pockets of corrupt foreign oligarchs,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said earlier this month. “This kind of transparency is essential to combating waste, fraud, corruption and mismanagement.”
Supports argued in part that if the United States takes a leading role on foreign payment transparency, other major nations would follow.
Exxon Mobil Corp., whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now secretary of State, was one of the most vocal opponents of the rule, along with other major oil companies.
The SEC is still obligated under the Dodd-Frank law to write some form of a transparency rule for extractive industries.
But under the CRA, the agency can never publish any rule that is “substantially the same” as the one that has now been overturned.
Both chambers of Congress have also passed a CRA resolution to overturn the Interior Department’s stream protection rule for coal mining, and Trump supports the repeal.
The House has passed numerous other regulatory repeal measures under the CRA, including ones on methane pollution and gun ownership, and the Senate is likely to take up at least some of them.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319488-trump-signs-repeal-of-transparency-rule-for-oil-companies
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Pipeline Foes Race Against Clock
Feb 15, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline are racing against the clock, with legal action their best hope of stopping the project before oil begins to flow.
Lawyers for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will file a motion this week asking a federal judge to rule on the legality of the project. And a separate tribe is suing against the pipeline on religious grounds, saying it threatens water sacred to American Indians.
Dakota Access developers are preparing to lay the final segment of pipe needed to complete the $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile project. They could have it running within two months, raising the stakes for pipeline opponents who have fought against it since last summer.
“Construction has started. We are going to try to get these issues resolved before oil can flow, and so we’re moving very aggressively to put the legal questions in front of the judge and get a determination as soon as we can,” Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice lawyer who represents the Standing Rock Sioux, said after a Dakota Access hearing on Monday.
Up to now, opponents of the pipeline had been asking the courts to temporarily halt work on a span of Dakota Access that would run under Lake Oahe in North Dakota.
Tribes in the region say Oahe has both practical and religious purposes. The lake — which is on the Missouri River — provides drinking water for Standing Rock and ceremonial water for the Cheyenne River Sioux and others in the region.
But the tribes are shifting their strategy now that the Trump administration has issued an easement allowing construction of the pipeline span under the lake.
Dakota Access developers broke ground on the span last week after the easement decision and are aiming to lay the pipeline and begin pumping oil soon, possibly within 45 days, a company lawyer said on Monday.
Hasselman said Standing Rock would file a motion this week asking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to rule on the merits of the pipeline, primarily on the question of whether the project should have gone through an environmental impact statement (EIS) review before moving forward.
Officials did not conduct such a review before approving construction permits last year. Obama administration officials in December ordered an EIS for the line, but President Trump in January issued a memo nixing that review and allowing the project to move forward.
Government lawyers have insisted they do not need to conduct an environmental impact statement of the project and have defended the process that led to the construction permits being approved.
Boasberg gave his preliminary approval as well, when he denied a Standing Rock request to halt construction on the pipeline in September, though that decision was based on a different section of the law.
Dakota Access lawyers say the company has followed environmental laws and protected the region’s cultural sites from the pipeline. The company said it was losing millions of dollars a week before it received the easement, and a lawyer for the company said it doesn’t intend to turn back now.
“The company is moving as quickly as it can to complete the pipeline to make up for lost time over the last couple of months,” lawyer David Debold said during a hearing on Monday. “We’re not in a position where we can agree to any stoppage of the work.”
The company also needs to fend off a challenge from the Cheyenne River Sioux, which is arguing the pipeline violates its religious freedom.
The tribe — whose reservation abuts Lake Oahe on its southern end in South Dakota — uses the lake’s water for religious events like the inipi sweat lodge ceremony. Running a pipeline under the lake, even if it doesn’t leak oil, the tribe argues, would “imbalance and desecrate” its waters.
The tribe believes in the “prophecy of the black snake,” that “some day a big black snake would come and destroy our way of life,” its chairman, Harold Frazier, said. “We feel that is this pipeline, because it could.”
Legal experts question the potential effectiveness of the tribes’ arguments.
Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the Cheyenne River Sioux complaint is likely to run into problems because it hasn’t made a property rights claim on the Lake Oahe crossing.
Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond Law School, said pursuing an environmental impact statement could be a strong argument, but that time is running out.
“I think pressing for the EIS is good; it’s just the timing and all the pressure and what the president has said makes it very difficult,” Tobias said.
“The options are narrow and dwindling. Something could happen, but I don’t know. I don’t see how they move to where they would like to be.”
Defeat in district court for either side is likely to trigger an appeal, so the legal fight over Dakota Access is far from over, a frustrating prospect for developers and their industry supporters.
But pipeline opponents have vowed to put pressure on the project in other ways, including a March rally against the pipeline in Washington.
“Lakota people love to fight, and this tribe will be back to continue this fight,” Cheyenne River Sioux lawyer and member Nicole Ducheneaux said Monday. “We will not quit fighting until this pipeline has stopped.”
http://www.thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319582-pipeline-foes-race-against-clock
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Communities Brace for Budget Cuts if Congress Kills BLM Rule
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
Communities near federal lands that are being mined for oil and gas fear that Congress could be on the verge of trashing a lifeline for strained state coffers.
If the Senate votes to repeal the Bureau of Land Management's Methane and Waste Prevention Rule, states, tribes and federal taxpayers could lose out on millions of dollars in annual revenue that goes to support social services, higher education and other needs, local officials say.
Republican lawmakers are using the Congressional Review Act to repeal the rule, which is designed to reduce flaring, venting and leakage of natural gas from energy operations on public lands.
Industry groups say the revenue total is much less than BLM estimates, given low market rates for natural gas. They say keeping the rule would reduce drilling, effectively lowering taxpayer revenue.
In Moab, Utah, a senior care facility hangs in the balance. The 36-bed Canyonlands Care Center receives two-thirds of its funding from Medicaid and one-third from private pay. But even at 90 percent occupancy, the facility's finances still fell short. Mineral leasing dollars helped fill the gap for a time, but the oil bust dried up that revenue stream, prompting a successful appeal for the support of a new Grand County sales tax.
"You can't rely on oil and gas revenues, and we learned that last year," said Kim Macfarlane, the home's administrator.
But rolling back BLM's rule would deal a fatal blow to the care center's operations, she said. Collections on fossil fuels captured on public lands provide critical support to the facility's budget, and BLM's regulation helps ensure that natural gas withdrawn from federal tracts flows to the marketplace — not the atmosphere, Macfarlane said.
"If the rule were to disappear, then we'd have to close the doors," she said.
Shutting down or limiting the care center's capacity would have a devastating effect on the community, Macfarlane said. The next closest facility is a 2.5-hour drive away.
"If your mom needed to be placed in a care unit, imagine having to go two hours to see her," she said. "It's just not good for anybody."
While the Canyonlands Care Center would suffer the most immediate and severe impact from the BLM rule rollback, there are many other county projects whose debt loads are floated by federal leasing money, said Grand County Council Member Chris Baird. Those include the Moab Recreation and Aquatic Center, the Old Spanish Trail Arena and parts of the local airport. All are at various points of 20- to 30-year debt repayment plans, he said.
"Any reduction in federal leasing revenue certainly puts a lot of stress on local governments and creates the potential to have to raise property taxes," Baird said. "It's a big issue."
The potential environmental implications of rolling back the BLM rule also have financial ramifications, Baird said. Nestled between the Arches and Canyonlands national parks, Moab — population 5,200 — has a robust recreation economy. Its red rocks and blue skies draw more than 1 million visitors to the tiny city each year, according to Moab's website.
"We sell views," Baird said. "When you sell views, air quality is a big part of your economy."
New Mexico
States with economies closely tied to energy production are struggling to keep their programs funded in the face of drastically lower oil and gas prices.
In New Mexico, budget woes have sent many of the state's services into a spiral. Public universities have discussed laying off staff members and shifting tuition costs back to families. The state's courts have proposed halting jury trials due to a lack of funding.
A coalition of grass-roots groups sees the BLM rule as one part of the solution.
"It really is a common-sense solution. I think it's one of those no-brainers," said James Jimenez, executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children. "Here we're taking an asset that is finite in nature, and we're basically throwing it away in ways that fiscally and from a health perspective don't make sense. It's profit-oriented at the expense of our health."
He cautioned that BLM's regulation is not a silver bullet.
"Capturing the methane won't be the sole solution to our budget problems, but it's one of the things that helps," Jimenez said.
New Mexico's Republican governor holds the opposite view.
"Absent a repeal, funding for New Mexico's schools, roads and healthcare will be dramatically reduced on account of the reduction in revenue generated by the oil and gas industry," Susana Martinez wrote in a Jan. 27 letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
If BLM's rule is allowed to stand, she said, new oil and gas development on federal lands will stagnate, reducing royalties paid to state and federal governments.
Budget impacts
The BLM rule's budgetary impact hinges on at least two factors: the market value of natural gas and whether industry would respond to the regulation by stopping production.
In its fact sheet on the Methane and Waste Prevention Rule, BLM cites a 2010 Government Accountability Office finding that states, tribes and federal taxpayers lose as much as $23 million in annual royalty revenue from escaped natural gas. The rule itself offers a much more conservative savings estimate of $3 million to $10 million per year.
The low end of that range is in line with an industry estimate that BLM's rule would result in a $3.68 million benefit, after taking into consideration the value of gas in the marketplace. In 2008, which served as the reference point for the GAO report, natural gas prices rose to more than $13 per million British thermal units.
The market has changed drastically since then, the Western Energy Alliance wrote in its analysis. Natural gas prices hovered just above $3 per MMBtu.
"Adding in the economic marginal impact of the additional volume in a market landscape with heavy inventories it could easily be assumed that all of that volume may be much lower and could have a marginal value approaching $0," the alliance wrote.
Industry interests have also said that the effect of BLM's rule would be to shut in production, resulting in a $114 million drop in tax dollars.
"There's no question that shale development has been a lifeline to these communities, but federal mineral development has not kept pace with private mineral development," said Jackie Stewart, Ohio director for Energy in Depth. "In Ohio's Wayne National Forest, it took the BLM five years just to allow leasing of federal minerals."
BLM has said that the intent of its rule is not to stop extraction. According to the same GAO report, 40 percent of gas now vented or flared from onshore federal leases could be captured using current technologies.
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/02/15/stories/1060050083
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EPA Criticizes Atlantic Sunrise Project Review
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Jenny Mandel
An environmental review of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline, which recently won a final sign-off from federal regulators, has drawn criticism from U.S. EPA officials who worry that the quick approval may leave the public without a way to scrutinize portions of the assessment that have yet to be completed.
In comments submitted Monday to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, EPA underlined the information gaps it saw in a draft environmental impact statement for Atlantic Sunrise that was released for public comment in June. The natural gas project is being developed by a subsidiary of Williams Cos. and would lay 183 miles of new pipeline in Pennsylvania and modify equipment and pipelines in its Transco system in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
FERC approved Atlantic Sunrise last week in a flurry of last-minute activity before the departure of Norman Bay as FERC's chairman, whose resignation left the body short of the quorum it needs to make high-level decisions. FERC has delegated certain authorities to its professional staff and suspended regular public meetings until President Trump nominates and secures the confirmation of at least one more commissioner (Energywire, Feb. 6).
The Atlantic Sunrise approval was granted on Bay's last day, Feb. 3. On Feb. 7, FERC received EPA's comments on the final environmental impact statement, which led off with a laundry list of weaknesses it saw in the previous iteration, including insufficient information and analysis on issues including geology, streams and wetlands, vegetation, endangered species, and cumulative project impacts.
EPA thanked FERC for addressing some of the concerns it had raised, noting that the parties would continue to work on mitigation measures to protect aquatic resources. "It is helpful and assuring that the [final] EIS includes several commitments on detailed studies, public and agency coordination, and additional avoidance and minimization measures, as well as plans that will be completed," EPA wrote.
"We suggest clarifying how the public will be notified when plans or additional information will be available, and if FERC will accept comments on any of these additional materials," the agency added.
Flag on the field
The pointed comments were delivered the same day that the Sierra Club, along with a number of other largely Pennsylvania-based groups, filed for a rehearing on FERC's decision to approve the project.
The request charges that FERC's final EIS does not meet the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. Among the challenges are that the analysis did not make environmental information publicly available, that the commission did not adequately assess whether there is a need for the project, that it failed to consider alternatives to building it as proposed and that it did not fully consider the project's potential impacts on wetlands.
The critics pointed to FERC's approval of the project two months before its deadline as a hurried response spurred by the impending loss of a decisionmaking quorum, and are seeking a stay on project construction while the issue is considered.
One of the groups involved in the rehearing request, Lancaster Against Pipelines, is seeking to harness local opposition to the pipeline project in the spirit of protests aimed at the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.
The group has secured space for a "large-scale encampment" in protest of the Atlantic Sunrise project on farmland adjacent to its route, and following the announcement last week of FERC's approval of the project, said the camping space would open to supporters over the weekend. The group held events there over the last few days, but it was not immediately clear whether there are campers at the site.
http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/02/15/stories/1060050065
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Pipeline Explodes in South Texas
Feb 15, 2017 | Fuel Fix
By Associated Press
A natural gas pipeline has exploded in South Texas, in a fiery display that lit up the sky and could be seen for miles.
Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Nathan Brandley says the explosion occurred early Wednesday near Refugio (ray-FYOO’-ee-oh), a rural community north of Corpus Christi, about 15 miles from the Texas Coast.
Brandley says no one was hurt and that there are no refineries or plants nearby.
He says it’s too early to know what triggered the explosion.
In a prepared statement Kinder Morgan spokeswoman Melissa Ruiz said the fire and natural gas release were discovered at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.
“The company shut down the impacted pipeline segment, dispatched personnel to the site, and regulatory agencies have been notified. The fire has been extinguished, and there are no injuries,” Ruiz added.
An investigation into the cause of the fire is underway, the company said.
Mishaps with transmission lines are not uncommon. In the past two decades, the U.S. government has recorded more than 2,000 accidents on gas transmission lines across the country.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2017/02/15/pipeline-explodes-in-south-texas/
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Pruitt Seen as Boon for Utilities Hit by EPA Haze Rule
Feb 15, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
Scott Pruitt hadn't long been Oklahoma's attorney general in 2011 when he sallied into his first public clash with U.S. EPA. The target: a proposed clampdown on power plant pollution clouding views at wilderness areas in three states.
It turned into a testy legal showdown that fizzled three years later when the Supreme Court refused to hear Oklahoma's appeal of a lower-court ruling in EPA's favor. But with Pruitt, a Republican, now poised to lead the agency he has often sued, his views on what's known as the regional haze program remain unchanged, recent statements suggest.
As EPA administrator, he could offer relief to power companies that cumulatively face billions of dollars in cleanups for older coal-fired plants.
"We're very concerned," said Michael Shea, senior policy associate at HEAL Utah, an environmental group backing EPA's plan to require two 1970s-era plants in the state to install new curbs on nitrogen oxides (NOx). The plants' owner, PacifiCorp, pegs the price tag at $700 million; together with Utah state officials, the firm is suing to void the federal plan in favor of a less stringent state alternative. Should Pruitt win confirmation to head EPA, he could pull the agency out of the lawsuit or roll back enforcement of the plan, Shea said.
Meanwhile, utilities and their allies in state government are buoyed by the possibility of a federal about-face. In a statement, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) said he hoped EPA would reconsider and accept the state plan.
It is a similar story in Arkansas, where Attorney General Leslie Rutledge (R) and Entergy Arkansas are suing to block EPA from requiring new pollution controls at several plants with total costs estimated at $1 billion or more. Last week, Rutledge asked the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the EPA blueprint. In a news release, she voiced hope that Pruitt would scrap it (E&ENews PM, Feb. 8).
The stakes may be highest in Texas, where state leaders and power companies have already forced EPA to retreat on a haze plan that would force seven coal-fired plants to install or upgrade sulfur dioxide scrubbers.
No state's power sector spews more sulfur dioxide (SO2) than that of Texas, which in 2015 released some 260,000 tons of the acrid pollutant, according to the latest official figures. "The regional haze rule would cut that by more than half," said Dan Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University, who in an op-ed in The Hill dubbed it "the most important pollution rule you've never heard of."
But the Texas plan carries a projected $2 billion price tag. After the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals froze implementation last July, EPA is now seeking to voluntarily remand the plan but has infuriated state officials by advancing a fresh proposal that would require controls on many of the same plants under another provision of the haze program (Greenwire, Dec. 12, 2016).
At the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank deeply critical of EPA's approach, Senior Fellow William Yeatman called it "inconceivable" that Pruitt would allocate resources toward an EPA plan for Texas "that makes no sense."
Enforcement results
The heated polemics are a testament to the belated impact of the regional haze program, created by Congress four decades ago but seriously enforced only in the last few years.
The program's overall purpose is to return pristine views to 156 national parks and wilderness areas — most of them in the West — by 2064.
Lawmakers acted out of alarm that man-made air pollution was besmirching the Grand Canyon and other cherished landmarks; nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide are major contributors to the problem. The program has proved to be an unexpectedly powerful backstop for forcing cleanup of older coal-fired plants that had managed to skirt installation of up-to-date pollution control equipment under other EPA programs. The key lever — and the biggest flashpoint — is a requirement that power producers adopt "best available retrofit technology" (BART) for plants that launched operations between 1962 and 1977.
Nationally, the haze program's impact is difficult to gauge because EPA leaves implementation up to its regional offices and makes no apparent attempt to keep tabs on either total costs or benefits. But in a 2014 paper, researchers concluded that requirements already in place would slash SO2 emissions from 35 power plants and other industrial facilities by some 85 percent from a starting figure of 590,000 tons. NOx releases from a slightly larger set of plants would tumble by two-thirds, from 430,000 tons to 130,000 tons, the paper projected. A separate study published the same year found that visibility had improved significantly in many remote parts of the United States since the early 1990s.
At the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, once the nation's single largest source of NOx, regional haze regulations prompted the 2013 retirement of three generating units and requirements for tough new controls on the remaining two.
That work, which carries a projected $630 million price tag, is already under way. Once it's complete, annual NOx emissions, which had run as high as 38,000 tons earlier this decade, are in line to plummet to 3,000 tons, according to Annie DeGraw, a spokeswoman for Arizona Public Service Co., the plant's operator.
More recently, a tentative court settlement with the owners of the Laramie River Station, a 1,710-megawatt plant in Wyoming, could also curb combined NOx and SO2 releases by thousands of tons per year (Greenwire, Jan. 5).
And only last month, EPA signed off on a draft haze plan for Nebraska that would require new controls on the Gerald Gentleman Station, the state's largest source of SO2. That proposal is now caught in a broader Trump administration freeze on new regulations. It must still be published in the Federal Register and put out for public comment, a step "which could result in revisions, withdrawal or full implementation," David Bryan, a spokesman for EPA's Region 7 office, said in an email.
Fierce opposition
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved Pruitt's nomination earlier this month; the full Senate could vote on it as early as this week.
If confirmed to head EPA, Pruitt would not have unfettered freedom to reverse course. Any attempt to undo haze rules already on the books, for example, would have to go through public notice and comment procedures. Environmentalists are already vowing to fight him every step of the way.
In general, "I think we're most likely to see delays, we'll likely see lower stringency required, and I think we'll likely see cost considerations take a much larger role," said Julie Domike, a former EPA enforcement attorney who is now a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of the firm Haynes and Boone LLP.
The backlash from utilities and elected officials has been fierce. Under the Obama administration, they charged, EPA used the haze program as a pretense for slapping new pollution controls on coal-fired power plants — even if the result was little or no visibility improvement. They also say that federal regulators are sidestepping Congress' intent by repeatedly substituting their own cleanup strategies for state plans.
The Obama EPA had "run roughshod" by imposing 15 regional haze federal implementation plans (FIPs), Yeatman said at a congressional hearing last March. That number far outstripped the number of FIPs employed by the three preceding presidential administrations combined under all facets of the Clean Air Act, he said.
No one from EPA testified at the hearing, held by the House Science, Space and Technology's Environment Subcommittee. In an interview late last year just before stepping down, Janet McCabe, the agency's acting air chief, acknowledged that there were situations "where we just couldn't approve the" state implementation plans.
In some cases, McCabe noted, EPA was under the gun from court-ordered deadlines, but she praised the haze program for delivering a "remarkable" amount of pollution reduction at a reasonable cost.
"That's one of the things that's really notable about it, is that for sources that were uncontrolled, there's available technology, NOx controls and SO2 controls, that are very cost-effective that make a huge difference," McCabe said.
To environmental groups that have repeatedly sued to goad EPA into action, federal intervention is a crucial counterweight to the electric industry's political might.
"In state after state, utilities and operators of larger coal-fired power plants have intimidated and persuaded and sometimes colluded with state regulators," said Al Armendariz, the former head of EPA's Region 6 office in Dallas, which pushed the Oklahoma haze plan. "The result has been that plant owners have been able to go decades without installing modern pollution controls." Armendariz is now with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.
Pruitt's fight
At his confirmation hearing last month, Pruitt criticized EPA's handling of the haze program in the context of a broader pattern of trampling on state prerogatives.
"It shows an attitude of indifference," Pruitt said in response to a question from Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), "an attitude of trying to be dictatorial in some respects toward the state's role or manipulative of the state's role in a way that's, I think, counterproductive for air quality." He struck a more conciliatory note in replying to follow-up written questions from committee Democrats, saying he would consider all matters "with an open mind."
But Pruitt's pugnacious side was on full display in March 2011. He had been Oklahoma's attorney general for just two months when EPA officials disapproved a state haze plan on the grounds that it didn't do enough to cut SO2 emissions wafting into parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri.
"Let the EPA be put on notice, as attorney general, I plan to do all that I can to protect and preserve the state's authority and responsibility under the Clean Air Act to craft and implement solutions for our state," Pruitt said in a news release.
Three months later, he took those objections into federal court, arguing that the EPA plan could raise power rates for Oklahoma consumers by as much as 20 percent over three years. The suit was the first of many he has brought against the agency; the reams of legal filings furnish a window into the tensions between state and federal regulators about compliance with BART mandates.
The state, in concert with Oklahoma Gas & Electric Co., argued that requiring the company to burn low-sulfur coal was enough. Pruitt also complained that EPA was eviscerating the state's authority and that requiring scrubbers at two OG&E plants would cost more than $1.2 billion.
EPA fired back with a suggestion that the state was credulously accepting inflated cost estimates from OG&E. "Far from the empty, rubber-stamping role" urged by Pruitt, the Clean Air Act affords EPA "a critical oversight" position, agency lawyers wrote in one brief.
When the time came for oral arguments before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Pruitt personally shouldered the job of presenting the state's case. In a 2-1 decision, the court in 2013 ruled in EPA's favor; the litigation sputtered to an end the next year when the Supreme Court declined to take Pruitt's appeal.
"Oklahoma ratepayers will bear billions of dollars in costs for an onerous federal regional haze plan," he said in a statement at the time.
To date, however, the effect has been limited. OG&E ultimately agreed to install scrubbers on two coal-fired generating units and convert another two to natural gas. The company has also cut its anticipated compliance costs from $1.2 billion to about $700 million.
Because OG&E has not yet sought to recover those expenses through higher rates, there has so far been no effect on electricity prices, Thomas Schroedter, executive director of Oklahoma Industrial Energy Consumers, said in an email this week. For Public Service Co. of Oklahoma, a smaller power producer also covered by the haze plan, rate hikes have averaged about 5.5 percent, Schroedter said.
As attorney general, Pruitt has accepted some $15,000 in campaign contributions from OG&E, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a research clearinghouse. Pruitt was not available for comment, but a Trump administration spokesman said such contributions have never affected his work.
"To suggest otherwise is a politically motivated attack that should not be considered real news," the spokesman, John Konkus said, also by email. "As Mr. Pruitt stated time and again during his confirmation hearing, and as his record indicates, every decision he has made in public life has been based on what is best for the American people."
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060050019
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EPA: US Greenhouse Gas Emissions Declined in 2015
Feb 14, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States declined by 2.2 percent between 2014 and 2015, federal officials reported on Tuesday.
In its annual draft greenhouse gas report, the EPA said total emissions of climate change-causing gases decreased in 2015 after back-to-back years of small growth. The report uses the most up-to-date data about greenhouse gas emissions.
The EPA attributed the overall decline to lower carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, which itself came about because of less coal consumption in favor of natural gas, warmer winter weather that decreased heating fuel demand and lower electricity demand overall.
Carbon dioxide emissions, which make up 82.2 percent of overall U.S. greenhouse gases, decreased by 2.9 percent in 2015, the agency said.
Because fossil fuel consumption accounts for more than 93 percent of those emissions, carbon trends are driven primarily by changes in the energy market. Overall emissions decline when there is decreased demand for energy, as well as a reduction in the carbon intensity of fuels burned for energy.
Those factors have far-reaching implications, given potential changes in American environmental regulations. President Trump, for example, has said he will prioritize policies that support fossil fuel growth, and his EPA is unlikely to pursue the type of power sector carbon regulations pushed by the Obama administration.
Overall, the U.S. produced 6,586.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2015, and annual emissions declined for the first time since 2012. Emissions increased 2.2 percent in 2013 and 0.9 percent in 2014.
The EPA’s draft study previews a final version of its annual emissions report, which is due to the United Nations in April.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319537-epa-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-declined-in-2015
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