Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 4/11/2017
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC: Insulation Contributes $20 Billion to US Economy
Apr 11, 2017 | Plastics News
By Urethanes Technology International
The insulation industry contributes $20 billion a year to the US economy, according to a new economic report from the American Chemistry Council. It also directly helps support about 400,000 jobs, as well as many more in the supply chain. -
With Bolstered TSCA Program, Few Surprised Over Trump Push to Kill IRIS
Apr 11, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad & Doug Obey
The Trump administration's proposal to eliminate EPA's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) chemical assessment program as part of its fiscal year 2018 budget request is surprising few observers of the influential program, especially given the controversy that has surrounded it and the stepped-up efforts to bolster the agency's Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) programs. -
TSCA: The 40-Year Old Virgin
Apr 11, 2017 | Natural Resource Defense Council
By Daniel Rosenberg and Jennifer Sass
Will EPA ever regulate a chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)? Judging solely on the history of the law, it is hard to be optimistic. -
Maryland Bans Lead, Mercury Wheel Weights
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical Watch
Maryland's legislature has passed a bill prohibiting the use of wheel weights containing certain amounts of lead or mercury in state-owned and personal vehicles. -
Wanhua Chemical to Build Isocyanates Plant in Louisiana
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Alexander H. Tullo
China’s Wanhua Chemical plans to build a $1.1 billion methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) plant in Louisiana. -
US SEC to Dial Back Conflict Minerals Rule Enforcement
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
Acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Michael Piwowar has called into question the extent to which the US will continue to enforce its conflict minerals rule. -
No End in Sight for Courtroom Battle
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
The once fever-pitched battle over the Dakota Access pipeline has largely fallen off the public radar in the weeks since the Trump administration approved the project, protesters cleared out and oil began flowing. -
Pipeline Built to Survive Extremes Can’t Bear Slow Oil Flow
Apr 11, 2017 | Fuel Fix
By Bloomberg
Here at the top of the world, January brought a glimpse of the anxious future facing Alaska’s once-mighty oil pipeline. -
Pepsi Plant Spills 7,200 Gallons of Mountain Dew Syrup
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
A Pepsi bottling plant in Howell, Mich., spilled 7,200 gallons of concentrated Mountain Dew syrup last month, creating a "huge foaming event" that raised environmental concerns. -
(ACC Mentioned) Norfolk Southern Confers Safe Shipping Award
Apr 11, 2017 | Railway Age
By Stuart Chirls
Norfolk Southern awarded its 2016 Thoroughbred Chemical Safety Award to 55 customers, recognizing their safe handling of rail-shipped hazardous materials products. -
Rail Supplier News from Dewberry, Lilee, Alstom and GREX (April 11)
Apr 11, 2017 | Progressive Railroading
Dewberry has been tapped to perform surveys and provide grading, drainage and track engineering design services for Veolia Transportation Maintenance and Infrastructure (VTMI Inc.) under its design-build contract to provide new connections between Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) and the South Florida Rail Corridor (SFRC) in West Palm Beach and Miami, Fla. -
EPA Shutting Down Climate Adaptation Program
Apr 7, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire (via Real Clear Energy)
By Timothy Cama
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is shutting down a program at its headquarters that helps states and localities adapt to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels. -
White House Adviser Who Clashed with Pruitt to Leave Agency
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Kevin Bogardus
Don Benton, who led President Trump's "beachhead" team at U.S. EPA, is on his way out at the agency. -
Industry Groups Stump for Cap and Trade
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Debra Kahn
As California debates the future direction of its climate policies, businesses are weighing in in favor of largely maintaining the status quo. -
California Bill Locking in Environmental Rules Faces Industry Push-Back
Apr 11, 2017 | Inside EPA
Some of California's efforts to challenge the Trump administration's moves to roll back environmental regulations are sparking push-back from the state's major industry and business organizations.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News
Environment News
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC: Insulation Contributes $20 Billion to US Economy
Apr 11, 2017 | Plastics News
By Urethanes Technology International
The insulation industry contributes $20 billion a year to the US economy, according to a new economic report from the American Chemistry Council. It also directly helps support about 400,000 jobs, as well as many more in the supply chain.
According to the report, insulation manufacturing was an $11.7 billion business in 2016. The sector directly employs more than 33,000 people across 42 states. Indirectly, through the purchase of raw materials, equipment, services and other supplies, another 42,500 jobs are supported. Polyurethane and polyisocyanurate insulation products represent about a third of the manufacturing jobs.
A further 32,500 jobs are accounted for by the distribution and wholesale. But by far the largest number, nearly 325,000, are in the installation of insulation.
Furthermore, the report claims, through the household spending of the wages and salaries paid to workers in insulation manufacturing and their suppliers, an additional 49,000 payroll-induced jobs are supported. In addition, it claims, the combined economic activity supported by insulation manufacturing contributes $1.1 billion to state and local governments, and $1.9 billion in federal taxes.
Insulation is increasingly important in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program estimates that the average household could save 15 percent on its heating and cooling bills by adding insulation and sealing air leaks.
This is significant, as the Department of Energy estimates that space heating and cooling account for almost half of the energy use in a home, and water heating 18 percent. Meanwhile, the heating and cooling of commercial buildings accounts for nearly 10 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States. Effective insulation plays a vital role in reducing this energy use, and saving money.
“This report makes clear that the business of manufacturing, distributing, and installing insulation generates significant economic output and creates jobs across the country,” says Martha Gilchrist Moore, senior director of policy analysis and economics at ACC and author of the report.
As well as ACC’s Spray Foam Coalition, contributors to the report included the Cellulose Insulation Manufacturers Association, the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association, and the Polyisocyanurate Insulation Manufacturers Association.
“Beyond the report’s findings, which speak to the general economic contributions from this industry, insulation in homes and businesses saves energy, putting more money in the pockets of consumers and business owners,” says Lee Salamone, senior director at ACC’s Center for the Polyurethanes Industry.
http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20170411/NEWS/170419981/acc-insulation-contributes-20-billion-to-us-economy
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With Bolstered TSCA Program, Few Surprised Over Trump Push to Kill IRIS
Apr 11, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad & Doug Obey
The Trump administration's proposal to eliminate EPA's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) chemical assessment program as part of its fiscal year 2018 budget request is surprising few observers of the influential program, especially given the controversy that has surrounded it and the stepped-up efforts to bolster the agency's Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) programs.
But several industry and other sources voiced skepticism that the Trump administration will be able to eliminate the program, given lack of political leadership at the agency.
"What's the realistic prospect this ever gets done?" one industry source asks, pointing to the number of empty political appointee slots at EPA. "Like everything Trump, none of this will happen quickly because nobody is there."
Others also said they expect internal push-back from EPA program offices, as the program's elimination would force them to seek risk and other data for their regulatory decisions from other sources, possibly including stricter values from regulators in California and Europe, and potentially inconsistent use of values across regions and programs.
IRIS has been long criticized by regulated entities for the stringency of its assessments and its opacity.
It has been on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) list of programs at "high risk" of waste, fraud or abuse for its inability to produce assessments in a timely way for several years. Since a critical 2011 National Academy of Sciences review of its draft formaldehyde assessment, the program has produced only a handful of final assessments.
Given the criticisms, and administration efforts to bolster the agency's TSCA programs to implement the new law that the administration's FY18 budget proposes to eliminate IRIS is not surprising, sources say.
"It's not surprising when you think about the GAO work and its fundamental issues over the years, and with this administration and budget cuts," says the first industry source. This source, like others, suggested that building up EPA's toxics office, newly empowered to assess and manage the risks of existing chemicals with the overhaul of TSCA, could better perform work that IRIS was previously tasked with doing.
Another industry source went so far as to suggest that maintaining IRIS while ramping up the toxics program -- one of the few areas where the FY18 budget proposes a nearly $14 million increase -- would be redundant. Further, this source sees language requiring standards of scientific quality in the statute overhauling TSCA as an important improvement for EPA's risk analysis programs.
While several sources questioned whether the administration would be able to eliminate the program, a third industry source also pointed to language in the agency's budget plan that requires responses from program offices regarding the proposal, and a schedule for crafting the EPA's proposal for the administration's final budget proposal.
"It's the first inning. This is from on high, 'These are the places to create savings,'" this industry source says. "Each program office then makes their response. That document will be very interesting. What do program officers feel like they can preserve, because they have to sacrifice something?"
Internal Push-Back
And a former EPA source indicates there will be internal push-back on the proposal because IRIS assessments are requested by program offices. IRIS managers in late 2015 published the program's agenda for the next several years -- after months of cross-agency discussions about program offices' needs for risk values and how best to prioritize them to make IRIS' to-do list.
"There's going to be huge push-back. Within EPA, IRIS is considered wonderful by people that need it, and states that need it," says one former EPA source. But other offices, like the pesticides and water offices, "go their own ways" and are in varying degrees independent.
Details of the agency's budget plan are contained in a March 21 memo from David Bloom, the agency's acting chief financial officer, which indicates how officials plan to implement the administration's proposal to cut EPA's FY18 funding by more than $2 billion -- or 31 percent -- compared to FY16 levels.
It also lays out the deadlines for crafting EPA's budget proposal. Proposed FY 2018 performance target revisions from national program managers were due April 7 and OMB-approved FY17 - FY18 performance measures and targets are due by the national program managers and the chief financial officer's staff by April 18. Pre-dissemination review certification is to be completed by EPA's acting assistant administrators by April 25.
Bloom's memo provides a comprehensive look at what the budget request will mean for scores of EPA programs, among them the proposal to completely eliminate the IRIS program and EPA's usage of IRIS dose-response analyses for setting standards and other decisionmaking.
The memo indicates that the administration proposes dropping the research office's human health risk assessment portfolio by $5.6 million and 105 full time equivalent employees (FTE) in the FY18 budget. "This change reflects the elimination of the IRIS program and the re-focusing on core statutory obligations," the memo states.
A second former EPA source also points out different program offices would be impacted in varying degrees if IRIS were to be eliminated. This source, like the first, noted that the pesticides office has performed its own assessments throughout IRIS' existence and will be little impacted. This source suggests that the toxics office could be affected, because in its short history of operating under the new TSCA, the office has relied on IRIS assessments as the basis for their risk assessments. This is a practice that former Obama administration toxics chief Jim Jones indicated in an interview with Inside EPA shortly before leaving office last January would continue.
But EPA's waste program "would be hit hardest," this source says. "When [these offices] were created in the 1980s, the powers that be decided that there would be no scientific work within these offices, that they would rely on the IRIS program," the source says. "They've never had more than a handful of [technical] people … They're the ones in the most trouble."
Further contributing to the waste office's troubles if IRIS is eradicated is a longstanding policy within that office that several sources pointed out, creating a tiered hierarchy of risk values that can be used by staff. The top tier consists solely of IRIS values, followed by another set of risk values EPA's research office crafts specifically for the waste office, known as the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM), called provisional peer reviewed toxicity values (PPRTVs). Any other assessments are the third and lowest tier.
Richard Denison, a Lead Senior Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, suggests in an April 10 blog that loss of the IRIS program could also harm the toxics program. Denison points out that of the first 10 chemicals that the toxics office has selected to assess for possible risk management six have completed IRIS assessments and IRIS has started an assessment of a seventh. "EPA's ability to conduct risk evaluations under the new TSCA would be severely curtailed by the loss of both expertise and capacity that resides in the IRIS program," Denison writes.
But a former EPA official suggests that if there are no IRIS values, EPA "will default to work that has been done elsewhere," pointing specifically to risk analyses conducted in California and Europe, which the source notes will likely be more strict than regulated entities will like.
"For those people who thought the IRIS work was either too slow or too conservative, they won't have to deal with that any longer, [but] some people might wind up chuckling … when [they] realized that the default then becomes a value that researchers in California came up with or in Europe," the former official adds. "There are a lot of people who ... they say that is a bad program, we ought to eliminate it, and they don't necessarily think about what the consequence is."
EPA Analyses
But one state toxicologist finds that unlikely, noting that EPA and OLEM in particular has a general preference for its own analyses. Still, this source suggested that eliminating IRIS would have little effect. "Every program at EPA has risk assessors and toxicologists that can do that work," says a source with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). "I think the programs can continue on."
The source acknowledged that having multiple offices in EPA perform assessments for their own purposes might lead to "some consistency issues" when different offices used different risk numbers for the same environmental contaminant. "But they'd gotten so unproductive anyway, I don't think the program offices will miss it."
The source says that he and his colleagues would like to be able to use EPA risk numbers. A lot of the values in the IRIS database, however, were 15 or more years old, the source pointed out. He added that he would like to see EPA "productive again, putting out good quality [risk] values," regardless of whether that meant "overhauling IRIS or sending the work back to the program offices. Whatever it takes to get it done. … There's still a need for EPA to do some of this work."
TCEQ is one of a few state agencies with its own staff and resources that can produce risk numbers that form the basis for Texas' regulations. There are a few others, stakeholders note. California has the biggest program of any state, while states like Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Washington have smaller offices devoted to risk analysis. But many smaller states, or those with limited resources, do not have the ability to produce their own numbers, leaving them dependent on other credible agencies' assessments of environmental contaminants that their agencies seek to regulate.
Former EPA sources point to the potential inconsistencies, as well as an efficiency problem created by each program office performing its own risk analyses as problems EPA addressed in the 1980s by forming the IRIS program. "You'll still need a place to harmonize the [risk] values," this source says, reminiscing of IRIS' beginning in 1986. Staff with EPA's research, water and pesticides offices met to discuss the risk values their programs had crafted. Of the total, there were tens of chemicals that all the offices had assessed, the source said, and of these all but one had different values.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/bolstered-tsca-program-few-surprised-over-trump-push-kill-iris
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Apr 11, 2017 | Natural Resource Defense Council
By Daniel Rosenberg and Jennifer Sass
Will EPA ever regulate a chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)? Judging solely on the history of the law, it is hard to be optimistic. Since 1976 when the law was first enacted, EPA has adopted partial restrictions on less than a dozen of 62,000 chemicals. The Agency’s greatest effort and greatest failure was a 10-year rulemaking process to regulate asbestos which was overturned by a federal appeals court. That was in 1991 (when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a new sensation), and EPA did not propose another restriction on an existing chemical under TSCA for the next 25 years.
Now, for the first time since 1991, EPA is on the cusp of banning specific uses of three chemicals—trichloroethylene (TCE), methylene chloride (MC) and n-methylpyrollidone (NMP)—all highly toxic solvents. The health basis for banning these uses is strong. TCE causes a host of health harms including liver and kidney toxicity, reproductive toxicity and multiple types of cancer. The solvents MC and NMP, like TCE are also reproductive toxicants, and cause both acute and chronic neurological impairments that include headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, loss of short-term memory, depression, anxiety, and irritability. Effects can be both acute (at least 56 people have been killed by methylene chloride since 1980) and long-lasting. All these toxic solvents also pass easily from mother’s circulation to the fetal circulation, as well as into breast milk. The Obama Administration proposed the bans in three separate rulemakings—one in December and two in January (two for TCE, see here and here; one for MC and NMP). NRDC and our coalition partners Safer Chemicals Healthy Families submitted comments in support of the first proposed ban which you can read here. We’ll be submitting joint comments in support of the next two bans as well.
The Obama Administration proposed each of these bans under the authority of the newly revised TSCA, signed into law by President Obama on June 22nd, 2016. The revised law, referred to as the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (LCSA) specifically authorized EPA to propose regulations for the three chemicals based upon risk assessments the Agency had already completed. The law also established a set of strict deadlines for EPA to take specific actions to prioritize, evaluate and regulate chemicals. (The “ground rules” for how EPA will prioritize and evaluate chemicals are due to be finalized by June 22nd. See the blog with my colleague Dr. Veena Singla here). If EPA determines, based on its evaluation, that a chemical “poses an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment” from one or more “conditions of use,” then EPA must act to eliminate the unreasonable risk. The re-write of the law raised hopes that the law might finally be used to restrict dangerous chemicals to protect the public. Then Donald Trump became President.
Now what? The EPA is currently under the control of an Administrator, Scott Pruitt (#pollutingpruitt), who has made a career of taking direction from polluters and suing the Agency to block or overturn many of its health-protective actions. He was handpicked by a President who has touted asbestos as “100 percent safe, once applied” (this ignores the unsafe exposures that come from mining, and then from aging, renovations, removal, or disposal); and who, as one of his first acts as President-elect, appointed the head of Dow Chemical—a manufacturer of TCE and MC (and the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos)—as the Chair of his Manufacturing Council. The chemical industry has already received a 30-day extension on the comment period for the TCE rule. Now the industry has filed another extension request for both the TCE and MC/NMP rules—this time for four months! The extension is ostensibly so the industry can redo a study that it plans (sorry, believes) will undercut one of the key studies that links exposure to TCE to fetal cardiac defects. The original industry-sponsored study ran into lab problems and needed to be scrapped. The chemical industry is basically saying “my lab rat ate my homework and I need more time.” The basis for the extension of the MC/NMP rule is, well, they don’t really have any basis for that. Safer Chemicals Healthy Families has filed comments opposing the extension request. But the comment period extensions are just one part of the industry’s Delay Game strategy. Industry was previously pressuring the EPA not to issue the proposed rulemakings, claiming that the Agency has not met the legal requirements under the new law. Part of the industry’s argument is that, now that TCE, MC and NMP have been included in EPA’s list of the first 10 chemicals it plans to evaluate and regulate, the Agency should not move forward with the current proposed restrictions on particular uses.
That is clearly not what Congress intended however, and the delay is unnecessary since EPA has already determined that these specific uses pose an unreasonable risk. If EPA does fulfill its mandate and adopts the three toxic solvent protections, it will be the first glimmer of hope in the sad history of this impotent law. But, based upon Administrator Pruitt’s recent decision to ignore the EPA’s scientists and reverse the agency’s proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, it seems unlikely that, left to its own devices, the Trump Administration will take that step, and it will instead find a way to do the chemical industry a solid and deep-six all three proposals, or simply take no action and leave the public unprotected for the foreseeable future.
That would leave TSCA still stuck at first base, with no date for certain restriction of a dangerous chemical in sight. The fundamental problem of the moment is that for TSCA to deliver health and safety to the public, the President and the Administrator of EPA need to be willing to take actions that the chemical industry opposes. Given the current state of affairs, it looks like meaningful action under TSCA might be off the table for another four to eight years.
So, TSCA may end up being a 50 year-old virgin. But that doesn’t mean that the public must wait another decade to be protected. That can happen right now. The uncertainly of how the Trump EPA will implement the revised TSCA, and the length of time it will take for any meaningful actions to take effect, underscore why individual states, product manufacturers, and retailers must take action now to get dangerous chemicals—including but not limited to these three toxic solvents—out of products and off of store shelves.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/daniel-rosenberg/tsca-40-year-old-virgin
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Maryland Bans Lead, Mercury Wheel Weights
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical Watch
Maryland's legislature has passed a bill prohibiting the use of wheel weights containing certain amounts of lead or mercury in state-owned and personal vehicles.
HB66 bans external wheel weights composed of greater than 0.1% lead or mercury by weight for all new and used vehicles registered in the state after 1 January 2020.
It also seeks to ensure that no vehicles purchased for the state fleet after 2019 come equipped with these weights. For vehicles currently in the state fleet, government agencies must have any of the items removed during tyre replacements or balances beginning in 2018.
The bill passed the Senate by a 32-14 margin, and the House by 99-39 on 8 April. If the governor signs it into law, it will take effect on 1 October.
A number of states have already passed wheel weight restrictions, including California, New York, Illinois and Washington. Others, such as Iowa and Connecticut, have considered, but not passed, similar legislation.
Maryland also recently passed a bill (HB504) banning the sale to consumers of electric switches, electric relays and gas valve switches containing mercury from 1 October 2018.
https://chemicalwatch.com/55089/maryland-bans-lead-mercury-wheel-weights
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Wanhua Chemical to Build Isocyanates Plant in Louisiana
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Alexander H. Tullo
China’s Wanhua Chemical plans to build a $1.1 billion methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) plant in Louisiana.
Wanhua is the world’s largest producer of the polyurethane raw material, which is also made by U.S. and European firms such as BASF, Covestro, Dow Chemical, and Huntsman Corp. According to the consulting firm IHS Markit, Wanhau’s 1.8 million metric tons of annual MDI capacity represents about 24% of the world’s total.
MDI is reacted with polyols to make the polyurethanes used in rigid insulation, adhesives, and other applications.
The Chinese company hasn’t released details about the project, including the size of the plant or the start-up date. It expects to wrap up site selection later this year. It will foot about $950 million of the bill itself. An unnamed partner will invest about $170 million.
Wanhua operates two MDI plants in its home country. In 2011, it branched out overseas with the $1.7 billion purchase of the Hungarian polyurethanes maker BorsodChem. Its sales in 2015 were about $3 billion.
Last year, Wanhua CEO Zengtai Liao told C&EN that the firm was considering building a plant on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
A company that prides itself on safe and efficient operations, Wanhua suffered an explosion at its Yantai, China, plant last year that killed four. The plant was undergoing maintenance at the time.
Louisiana state officials have been discussing the project with Wanhua since 2013. The company chose Louisiana over potential locations in Texas in part because of incentives including a $4.3 million grant to help offset site infrastructure costs.
At the IHS Markit World Petrochemical Conference in Houston last month, IHS Markit senior analyst James Elliott noted that more MDI capacity would be needed over the next five years to keep up with demand, which is growing at around 4% per year globally.
The situation is particularly acute in North America. “From 2011 to 2016, we have seen a fallow period of MDI additions,” Elliot said. On the horizon for the region are incremental expansions of existing BASF and Huntsman facilities. In addition, Huntsman has been studying building a 400,000-metric-ton plant at its Geismar, La., complex since 2014.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/04/Wanhua-Chemical-build-isocyanates-plant.html
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US SEC to Dial Back Conflict Minerals Rule Enforcement
Apr 11, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
Acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Michael Piwowar has called into question the extent to which the US will continue to enforce its conflict minerals rule.
Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act requires publicly traded companies to conduct due diligence and report to the SEC on whether their sourcing of tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold (3TG) is supporting armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), or neighbouring countries.
But following last week's final judgement in a long-fought litigation over the constitutionality of the law, Mr Piwowar issued a statement. In it he said it is "difficult to conceive of a circumstance that would counsel in favour of enforcing" a section of the law that requires a company to submit enhanced disclosure on its due diligence efforts.
The 7 April statement says that the "primary function of the extensive and costly" due diligence requirements is to enable companies to make a disclosure that the court found to be unconstitutional – that is, whether a substance is or is not 'DRC-conflict free'.
And, he said, there are ongoing consultations from the SEC and the Department of State on how to best support the responsible sourcing of conflict minerals.
"In light of the foregoing regulatory uncertainties, until these issues are resolved, it is difficult to conceive of a circumstance that would counsel in favour of enforcing Item 1.01(c) of Form SD," he said.
Accompanying Mr Piwowar's statement was a separate one issued by the SEC Division of Corporation Finance. It said it "will not recommend enforcement action" for companies that only file disclosure under the provisions of paragraphs (a) and (b) of Item 1.01. These require a reasonable country of origin inquiry (RCOI) and for a company to include a disclosure if it finds its minerals not to have been sourced from the DRC.
Impact on reporting?
IPC – the Association Connecting Electronics Industries – said the statement indicates the SEC is suspending enforcement of the costliest requirements of its conflict minerals rule.
"Companies will not be required to conduct a due diligence review or an audit, which are both part of the process used to determine the origin of the minerals," said an IPC blog post. "However, companies will still need to furnish reports and do origin inquiries, as they have been doing."
Michael Littenberg, a partner at law firm Ropes & Gray, told Chemical Watch that companies are still grappling with how to address the new interpretation.
He said many will choose to wait and see if the SEC further refines its position in coming weeks. And considerations around "NGO and socially responsible investor pressure, messaging to commercial customers and consumers, internal corporate social responsibility values and best guestimate[s] as to where the rule and market practice will be heading over the next year" will factor into companies' decisions in how they report.
Nonetheless, he expects to see a wider variation in the level of disclosure that companies include in this year's reports relative to past years.
Meanwhile, Sasha Lezhnev, associate director of policy at the NGO Enough Project, said the commissioner doesn't have the authority to change the conflict minerals law or regulation unilaterally.
"Companies are still legally required to file conflict minerals reports and disclose their due diligence, according to the law that Congress passed and the SEC rule that the courts upheld," said Mr Lezhnev.
The NGO says it is "concerned about the apparent attempt to gut the essence of conflict minerals due diligence without authority or cause."
https://chemicalwatch.com/55097/us-sec-to-dial-back-conflict-minerals-rule-enforcement
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No End in Sight for Courtroom Battle
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
The once fever-pitched battle over the Dakota Access pipeline has largely fallen off the public radar in the weeks since the Trump administration approved the project, protesters cleared out and oil began flowing.
In the courtroom, however, the clash continues. Tribes and allies have staked out their positions against the government and the pipeline company, and a snarl of legal claims remains unresolved.
"Everybody is writing epitaphs and moving on, but there is still a very active court case here," said Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice lawyer who has represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its legal battle since July.
Indeed, the central environmental claims in the case have yet to get full airing in court. While a federal judge in Washington has rejected legal maneuvers based on historic preservation and religious freedom arguments, he has not issued any rulings on the environmental issues that sparked the litigation last summer.
According to the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, the Army Corps of Engineers violated federal law and tribal treaties by conducting an overly narrow review for the project — even though the oil pipeline crosses a portion of the Missouri River just a half-mile from Standing Rock's reservation.
The tribes are now seeking what's known as summary judgment, asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to decide the environmental claims in their favor. If they win, Dakota Access could face huge disruptions.
"If the permits were granted illegally, as we believe, then the pipeline will have to be turned off until the process is fixed," Hasselman said.
Beyond DAPL
Lasting legal fallout over the Dakota Access pipeline remains to be seen, but other impacts of the conflict have already taken hold.
Chief among them: a greater sense among developers of the risks of rapid public organizing against a project.
"They don't want to attract the attention of the protests more than anything else," said Brandon Barnes, litigation analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. "The companies are used to contending with permitting and legal challenges. These things happen all the time. But the new variable now is social media."
Organizing and campaigning against projects that affect Indian Country may be more important than any courtroom battle, activist Chase Iron Eyes said.
"It's pretty clear that United States jurisprudence doesn't really have a grasp or a respect for Native nations," he said. "We're not going to win by hiring the best lawyers. That's not how this works."
Following the Dakota Access battle, alleged impacts to American Indian tribes have featured more prominently in opposition efforts targeting other oil and natural gas projects, including the Atlantic Coast pipeline in the Mid-Atlantic and the Sabal Trail pipeline in the Southeast.
"Tribes definitely have their antenna up now, and they're paying attention to these infrastructure projects around them," said John Dossett, general counsel for the National Congress of American Indians. "It seems to me more likely that tribes are going to hear about these things earlier, pay attention earlier, are going to get engaged more quickly."
Dossett noted that the Dakota Access drama put federal agencies and developers on notice, too.
"Litigation isn't in anyone's best interest, so hopefully there will be more effort to involve the tribes early, work with them and avoid whatever problems the tribes want to avoid," he said. "If that doesn't happen, there may be some future litigation, and I think the tribes will be better prepared for it the next time around."
Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier, who has helped lead opposition against Dakota Access, said tribes are talking to one another more about how to effectively engage with industry and the federal government.
Tribes that generally welcome oil and gas development and other extractive industries will have to play a careful balancing act, said Kevin Washburn, former assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department during the Obama administration. The Dakota Access battle has meant increased pressure on leaders of many of those tribes to push back on some development proposals.
"The fury that has been focused on the DAPL developers may well be turned on others in the future, including tribal officials if they appear supportive," Washburn, now at the University of New Mexico, said in an email. "In sum, these kinds of developments might be viewed as toxic in Indian country even if they are proposed by developers who work more collaboratively and constructively with tribal communities."
Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who is leading the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe through the long legal war against the Dakota Access pipeline, said those outside-the-courtroom impacts aren't fading anytime soon.
"These big infrastructure projects that run directly contrary to tribes or that threaten reservations are going to be radioactive for a long time," he said.
Nagging legal uncertainty
Some court watchers are skeptical about how far the tribes' claims will go. In any case, the legal uncertainty nags as the project nears commercial service.
In a dizzying number of court filings in recent months, the two tribes have filed separate requests for summary judgment, the Army Corps has filed cross-motions against both tribes, and Dakota Access has filed a cross-motion against Cheyenne River and joined in the Army Corps' motion against Standing Rock.
They all want the same thing: a court decision resolving the crux of the case in their favor. Judge James Boasberg is likely to schedule a hearing soon to consider arguments from both sides.
The tribes' main request has remained the same throughout the litigation. They want the Army Corps to perform an in-depth environmental impact statement (EIS) for the pipeline rather than relying on a less-detailed environmental assessment (EA) completed last summer.
Obama officials in December agreed to do an EIS to consider tribal impacts and alternative routes. The Trump administration reversed that decision this year.
"The EIS process would put us exactly where we were before in making our case to the government and to the public that this was the wrong place to put a pipeline," Hasselman said.
But the tribes may have an uphill battle in the district court. Though Boasberg has not yet ruled on any environmental claims, he has been receptive to previous Army Corps arguments that the agency followed its standard process in reviewing parts of the pipeline.
The corps is also entitled to some deference from the court on how it conducts standard permitting.
"The issues the tribes are raising in terms of why [the EA] was improper fall squarely into: This agency has a lot of leeway on the scope of the review," Bloomberg Intelligence litigation analyst Brandon Barnes said. "Under the current case law, that's right. This is the province of the Army Corps to decide how expansive this review should be."
Barnes says a win for the tribes could represent a major expansion of the agency's obligations when considering whether to approve water crossings for infrastructure projects like Dakota Access.
"From a common-sense perspective, what you're asking the court to do is tell Army Corps that from now on when they have pipeline crossings, even though it's running next to an existing pipe and it's going underground, they have to do a full EIS for each one of those," he said. "This is wading into generally accepted EA territory."
But if Boasberg does side with the tribes and agrees that the EA was faulty, the question becomes the proper remedy. The tribes have asked the court to order a new EIS, vacate existing permits and halt pipeline operations.
It's possible, though, that the pipeline will be able to continue operating even if the tribes win.
"It's going to depend on what he deems the failure to be and whether or not it is so substantial that it needs to be dealt with only in the context of the stay," ClearView Energy Partners analyst Christi Tezak said.
Tezak noted that, in 2014, a federal court remanded a natural gas pipeline's environmental review to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the line was allowed to remain in operation while the agency conducted additional analysis.
Moving pieces
While the core conflict moves forward, several smaller but significant battles are also playing out in the district court.
Boasberg last week resolved a bitter dispute between the tribes and Dakota Access over whether certain spill-response documents should be withheld from the public (Greenwire, April 7).
He's also weighing requests from both tribes to update their legal complaints — initially filed last year — to include religious freedom claims and arguments that the Trump administration illegally reversed Obama officials' decision to conduct more in-depth review for the pipeline.
Up at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, lawyers for Cheyenne River continue to push the tribe's complaint that the presence of the pipeline desecrates Lake Oahe waters used in religious sacraments. The district court rejected the argument last month, and the tribe appealed.
The D.C. Circuit has denied a request for an emergency freeze on pipeline work while the case moves forward. Briefs in the appeal are due in May and June.
Finally, the district court has a stack of claims to consider from other Sioux tribes. The Yankton Sioux and Oglala Sioux, both of South Dakota, filed separate lawsuits challenging the Army Corps' approval of Dakota Access, and their claims were recently consolidated with Standing Rock's case.
And after the district court issues a final decision on the various tribes' claims against the project, another round of litigation is likely to follow at the D.C. Circuit.
Sweeping impacts?
Despite the complex legal tangle, Tezak says investor concern has leveled off in recent months.
"From the investors' perspective, folks are keeping an eye out on the long view because it's something that's unresolved," she said. "But do I think they see it as a huge vulnerability? No. I think they keep an eye on it in case it goofs up."
Barnes agreed, asserting that the Army Corps' arguments have an edge in the case largely because he expects the court to defer to the agency's judgment on the proper scope of review.
Still, he said, a win for the tribes could have huge impacts for pipeline backer Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and other developers.
"It's never 100 percent sure if you're still in court," he said. "An adverse decision for ETP here would potentially expand the scope of these reviews for Army Corps that would flow into other pipelines. You balance that against the new administration coming in and putting its people into place, and there's a tension there."
Craig Stevens, spokesman for the pro-pipeline Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now, dismissed the ongoing legal battle as "the cost of doing business."
"Unfortunately, fighting unwarranted litigation of these lawful infrastructure projects has just become part of the cost of doing business in the United States," he said. "Companies and government agencies follow the letter of the law just to be hauled into court and go through the procedural motions.
"While it won’t stop energy and infrastructure development, it will add costs and potentially restrain economic growth," he added.
Hasselman noted that a courtroom victory could still be a narrow one — without sweeping implications for other pipelines. The broader precedent is already in motion, he said.
"Oil may be in the pipeline, but nobody at Energy Transfer looks at this and thinks, 'What a great success it's been,'" he said. "They have lost many hundreds of millions of dollars. Their name and reputation has been greatly damaged. It's not like anybody's out there thinking, 'Oh, great, we can walk all over Indian tribes now.' I don't think anything ever happens again that looks like this."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/04/11/stories/1060052897
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Pipeline Built to Survive Extremes Can’t Bear Slow Oil Flow
Apr 11, 2017 | Fuel Fix
By Bloomberg
Here at the top of the world, January brought a glimpse of the anxious future facing Alaska’s once-mighty oil pipeline.
The 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline System was built for extreme conditions. But as the state’s oil production declines, the pipeline faces a new challenge: flows so sluggish operators worry the line may become unusable, cutting off access for hundreds of North Slope oil wells.
With the mercury dipping as low as negative-60 Fahrenheit, workers in January fired up heating units across the system. It worked, but if the brutal cold had lasted or the oil flow had slowed further, the pipeline would have been in uncharted territory. Four decades after it opened, Alaska’s pipeline — once a symbol of independence for an oil-strapped nation — is facing a midlife crisis. The line now moves a quarter of the volume it carried at its peak. And as the flows slow, the risks are rising.
“We’re already at the stress point,” said Tom Barrett, president of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the system. “We don’t have the kind of cushion you’d like to have.”
While new discoveries have raised hopes recently, Alaska’s oil production has been falling for years. Most of the easy crude has been sucked out of Prudhoe Bay, the mammoth field on the state’s North Slope. And the availability of cheap shale in the lower 48 states means there’s less incentive for explorers to open new fields farther north, where drilling can be three times more expensive.
The result: Alaska’s output was 565,000 barrels a day last month, down from a peak of more than 2 million in 1988, according to state data.
Lower volumes mean crude travels more slowly through the pipeline, losing heat along the way. And at low temperatures, crude behaves badly. Ice crystals form that can damage pumping equipment. Carbon molecules, meanwhile, coalesce into paraffin, a waxy residue that, if not cleared out, can gunk up the line “like a big, frozen tube of ChapStick,” said Betsy Haines, Alyeska’s oil-movements director.
The pipeline opened for business on June 20, 1977, an American response to the OPEC oil embargo that brought the U.S. economy to a halt earlier in the decade. Some 70,000 workers trooped north to build the line, surmounting three mountain ranges, 30 rivers, howling Arctic winds and permafrost that crumpled steel pilings.
The project touched off a boom that left Alaska permanently tied to the fortunes of petroleum. State residents still get an annual check based on oil revenues. But as production and prices have tumbled in recent years, the state’s economy has suffered. State lawmakers in Juneau are grappling with a $3 billion budget deficit this year, along with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.
“We’re all concerned,” Governor Bill Walker said in a telephone interview. “We need to see oil in that pipeline. That’s our cash register. That’s what generates the revenue.”
At Prudhoe Bay’s Pump Station One, where oil starts its journey south, engineers are trying to keep the barrels moving. Outside, the station’s squat, olive-painted buildings sit amid an endless expanse of snow and ice. Inside, a maze of pumps and pipes collects oil flowing from wells across the North Slope. The lines are warm to the touch and even warmer to the wallet — at current prices, about $30 million worth of crude flows through the station daily.
Alyeska heats oil at Pump Station One to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with a goal of keeping it above 37 degrees by the time it reaches the export terminal at Valdez, Alaska.
A joint partnership led by the North Slope’s top producers, BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips, Alyeska has spent about $200 million upgrading equipment at Pump Station One alone. The partnership has added heating units up and down the route and raised buried sections of the line above ground. Another contingency plan calls for the injection of methanol, the chemical used in antifreeze, to keep supplies flowing.
Every four days, a device known as a pig, a sort of industrial Q-Tip, is sent hurtling through the 48-inch-wide pipeline to scrub out debris.
So far, that’s kept the oil moving. But it comes at a price: higher transport costs for a product that’s already at an economic disadvantage to other supplies around the globe. Alyeska’s technical fixes should allow the pipeline to keep operating at volumes as low as 300,000 barrels a day, a threshold that could be reached by the middle of the next decade, according to state estimates. Below that point, it’s unclear what will happen, Barrett, the Alyeska president, said in an interview from his Anchorage offices.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty about how we would solve that problem in a way that’s technically feasible and economically viable,” he said.
Recent discoveries by Caelus Energy LLC and Repsol SA have raised hopes of opening up new, multibillion-barrel fields. Conoco, Exxon and BP, meanwhile, are doing all they can to squeeze more oil out of existing wells. The Big Three have borrowed techniques from shale frackers in the Lower 48, injecting torrents of natural gas and seawater underground to force up more oil.
But those efforts merely halted production declines, they didn’t reverse them. It may take years before the new finds ship significant quantities of oil — and then only if they prove economic in a world where prices have been locked in at around $50 a barrel.
West Texas Intermediate crude has traded in a range near that level since late last year. The U.S. benchmark was down 0.5 percent at $52.81 a barrel as of 10:21 a.m. New York time on Tuesday.
“It’s all really a function of the oil price,” said Scott Digert, BP’s head of reservoir management in Alaska. “How long can you continue to operate an increasingly marginal field?”
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2017/04/11/pipeline-built-to-survive-extremes-cant-bear-slow-oil-flow/
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Pepsi Plant Spills 7,200 Gallons of Mountain Dew Syrup
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
A Pepsi bottling plant in Howell, Mich., spilled 7,200 gallons of concentrated Mountain Dew syrup last month, creating a "huge foaming event" that raised environmental concerns.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality came to the site after a tank ruptured and the thousands of gallons of syrup went through a floor drain and into the plant's internal sewer system.
"A spill of this magnitude is highly unusual," said DEQ Senior Environmental Quality Analyst Carla Davidson.
Davidson said the high-sugar syrup can have a toxic effect on aquatic life if it ends up in rivers, lakes or streams.
Most of the March 10 spill was contained. While PepsiCo and city officials say they used the proper procedures to clean the spill, Davidson disagreed.
"They have an equalization basin; they knew there was a spill, and they could have tried to isolate it, then have that wastewater hauled away to protect the integrity of their pretreatment system," she said.
Davidson said the plant managers tried to treat the spill without outside help for two days, until the system was overwhelmed by the foam created when the syrup mixed with wastewater.
"As far as impact to the environment, I think Pepsi is cleaning it up, and we'll be working with them to prevent discharges like this from happening in the future," Davidson said. "There was not a release to surface water that we know of, so that's also a positive".
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/04/11/stories/1060052913
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(ACC Mentioned) Norfolk Southern Confers Safe Shipping Award
Apr 11, 2017 | Railway Age
By Stuart Chirls
Norfolk Southern awarded its 2016 Thoroughbred Chemical Safety Award to 55 customers, recognizing their safe handling of rail-shipped hazardous materials products.
In total the companies safely shipped 208,503 carloads of chemical products over the railroad’s network in 2016.
The award recognizes chemical manufacturers and plants that ship at least 1,000 carloads of hazardous products over the railroad without a single incident during the year. Fifty-two corporations and three plants achieved the standard for 2016.
Norfolk Southern voluntarily participates in the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care Partner Program, meeting strict standards to identify, reduce, and manage process risks from the environmental, health, safety, and security perspectives.
Customers earning the 2016 Thoroughbred Chemical Safety Award are:
Altivia Petrochemicals; Apex Terminal; ArcelorMittal USA; Archer Daniels Midland, Decatur, Ill., plant; Ascend Performance Materials LLC; BP Products North America Inc.; Buckeye Partners L.P.; Cargill Inc.; Chemtrade Logistics Inc.; CHS Inc.; Covestro LLC; Crestwood Equity Partners LP; Delaware City Refining LLC, Reybold, Del., plant; Elbow River Marketing Ltd.; ERCO Worldwide; ExxonMobil Chemical Company; Flint Hill Resources LP; Formosa Plastics Corporation U.S.A.; Green Plains Inc.; Horsehead Corporation; Hunt Refining Co. Inc.; INVISTA S.à r.l; Imperial Oil Limited; Irving Oil;
Kemira Chemicals Inc.; Kemira Water Solutions Inc.; Lima Refining Company (Husky); Linde LLC; Marathon Petroleum Co. LP; Marquis Energy LLC; Midwest Terminals of Toledo; NGL Energy Partners LP; Norfalco Sales, Glencore Canada Corporation; NOVA Chemicals Corporation; Nucor Corp.; Olin Corporation; One Earth Energy LLC; Pacific Ethanol Pekin; Paulsboro Refining Company, Paulsboro, N.J., plant; Phillips 66; Plains Midstream Canada ULC; Plains Marketing Van Hook Crude Terminal; Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan; Reagent Chemical & Research Inc.;
Shintech Inc.; Southwest Iowa Renewable Energy LLC; Sunbelt Chlor Alkali Partnership; Sunoco Partners Marketing & Terminals; The Chemours Company FC LLC; The Dow Chemical Company; The International Group Inc.; TransMontaigne Product Services Inc.; United Refining Company; Valero Energy Corporation; and Vopak Terminal Savannah.
http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/freight/class-i/55-earn-norfolk-southern-safe-chem-shipping-award.html
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Rail Supplier News from Dewberry, Lilee, Alstom and GREX (April 11)
Apr 11, 2017 | Progressive Railroading
Dewberry has been tapped to perform surveys and provide grading, drainage and track engineering design services for Veolia Transportation Maintenance and Infrastructure (VTMI Inc.) under its design-build contract to provide new connections between Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) and the South Florida Rail Corridor (SFRC) in West Palm Beach and Miami, Fla. The work is part of the South Florida Freight and Passenger Rail Enhancement Project, which will help accommodate existing freight traffic, potential future passenger service and projected growth in freight-rail operations following the Panama Canal expansion and freight intermodal improvements at Port of Palm Beach, Port Everglades and PortMiami. The overall project is divided into three phases, with the final phase expected to be completed in 2018. Brightline — FECR's planned passenger-rail service — is slated to begin service between West Palm Beach and Miami this summer. To learn more about Brightline's launch, read this feature in Progressive Railroading's April issue.
OSIsoft LLC and Lilee Systems have entered into an alliance aimed at improving safety and equipment health of rail and transportation networks through "Big Data" and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The companies are working on embedding a commercial off-the-shelf connector for transferring data from Lilee's IoT gateways to OSIsoft's PI System to help rail operators achieve positive train control (PTC) goals. The connector will transfer data regarding speed, acceleration, vibration or other parameters. Technicians will be able to use the information to prevent potential equipment failure or identify safety risks, Lilee officials said in a press release.
Alstom signed a $265 million contract to provide 30 Coradia trains to French state-owned rail operator SNCF Mobilites Group. The new units are expected to arrive beginning in September 2018. The trains will be used on several SNCF routes, including the Paris-Amiens-Boulogne route and service to Montlucon from Paris and Bourges. The units are in addition to the 34 Coradia Liner trains delivered in October 2013.
Georgetown Rail Equipment Co. (GREX) has appointed David Friss director of process improvement. He's responsible for streamlining processes as GREX continues to develop new technologies, company officials said in a press release. Friss also will partner with department leaders to identify process improvement opportunities. He reports to GREX Chief Operating Officer Greg Grissom. Friss has 25 years of experience in various roles related to rail data business applications, reliability, engineering and vehicle electrical design. He most recently served as director of reliability engineering at BNSF Railway Co., where he worked on key rail business model development projects.
http://www.progressiverailroading.com/supplier_spotlight/news/Rail-supplier-news-from-Dewberry-Lilee-Alstom-and-GREX-April-11--51328
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EPA Shutting Down Climate Adaptation Program
Apr 7, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire (via Real Clear Energy)
By Timothy Cama
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is shutting down a program at its headquarters that helps states and localities adapt to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels.
An EPA official said a team of four staffers within the EPA’s policy office who had worked on the adaptation responsibilities are being reassigned. But the official stressed that regional offices will continue their climate adaptation efforts.
It’s part of the EPA’s shift away from climate change programs, which President Trump previewed last month in his first budget request.
Trump proposed eliminating major climate programs as part of a 31 percent cut to the EPA’s budget, though those changes would not be effective until later this year, if Congress approved them.
Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, told reporters last month that Trump does not believe climate is a worthwhile cause for federal spending.
“I think the president was fairly straightforward — we’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that,” he said.
Bloomberg BNA first reported the news about shutting down the EPA’s adaptation programs Friday.
The official said regional offices in areas especially susceptible to the effects of climate change, like the South, have always taken the lead on adaptation and will continue to do so.
“It was redundant. A lot of the regions are already doing a lot of this work,” the official said.
“This is not something that should be controlled from inside Washington, D.C. This is something that the regions themselves know how to deal with, and have been dealing with the entire time.”
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/327854-epa-shutting-climate-adaptation-program
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White House Adviser Who Clashed with Pruitt to Leave Agency
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Kevin Bogardus
Don Benton, who led President Trump's "beachhead" team at U.S. EPA, is on his way out at the agency.
In an announcement last night, the White House said that Trump intends to nominate Benton for director of the Selective Service System, the independent agency that would oversee a potential military draft.
Benton was EPA's White House senior adviser who butted heads with Administrator Scott Pruitt and his team after Pruitt's Senate confirmation in February. The Washington Post reported that the EPA chief had frozen Benton out of meetings, and one source told E&E News that "things are a mess" at the agency due to infighting among top officials (Greenwire, March 20).
Benton was Trump's campaign chairman in Washington state. He served as a state senator there for 20 years and was also director of the Clark County Environmental Services Department from 2013 to 2016.
Benton was considered a character on the local political scene, called by some colleagues a "tornado-like force in the Senate." He sometimes feuded with other lawmakers, and one fellow Republican alleged that Benton called her a "trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl" (Greenwire, Jan. 24).
An EPA spokesman wished Benton well.
"We wish Don the best of luck on his new assignment!" said J.P. Freire, the EPA spokesman, in an email about Benton's nomination.
Benton didn't respond to messages from E&E News asking for comment for this story.
The ex-Washington state senator earned praise from his fellow transition team members.
Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former head of the EPA transition team, said the president made "a great choice" by nominating Benton and he would be "a valuable addition to the Trump administration."
David Schnare, who served on the EPA beachhead team, said Benton's "dedication to public service is deep and his enthusiasm for good government is unmeasurable."
With Benton's coming exit from EPA, at least three members of Trump's beachhead team will no longer be at the agency. David Kreutzer and Schnare have also left EPA in recent weeks.
Schnare, a former longtime EPA employee and then general counsel for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, resigned from the agency last month under a cloud of controversy. He said then the story behind his departure is "extremely complex" and involves the "misuse of federal funds, failure to honor oaths of office, and a lack of loyalty to the President" (Greenwire, March 16).
Schnare told E&E News today that he has now retired and is working on a book about "the ancient role of the steward and the failure of environmentalism."
Kreutzer, who left his post as EPA's deputy associate administrator for policy, economics and innovation at the end of March, said today that he has returned to the Heritage Foundation (Greenwire, March 31).
Kreutzer worked on energy and climate change before joining the beachhead team. He is now in a new role focused on labor, trade and energy issues, a Heritage spokesman confirmed to E&E News.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/04/11/stories/1060052935
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Industry Groups Stump for Cap and Trade
Apr 11, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Debra Kahn
As California debates the future direction of its climate policies, businesses are weighing in in favor of largely maintaining the status quo.
The state has launched a wide-ranging consideration of which policies it should use to meet its 2030 target of 40 percent below 1990 emissions levels. One of the key questions is whether the state will retain a cap-and-trade system as its main backstop to ensure it reaches the goal or whether it will amend or replace it with a carbon tax or more-direct regulations on emitters.
Public comments that were due yesterday on the plan reveal a range of concerns. Industry groups are urging the state's Air Resources Board to continue and even expand the use of cap and trade, rather than abandon it as environmental justice groups are advocating.
The passage last year of a law that requires ARB to "prioritize" direct reductions from stationary and mobile sources is motivating industry to try to avoid direct cuts from oil refineries, as the state is considering as one of its options in the "scoping plan" that will guide emissions reductions through 2030.
"ARB should eliminate the proposed refinery measure and reassure policymakers that the cap-and-trade program will result in direct GHG emissions reductions at individual facilities," wrote Cathy Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association. "There is no need for additional direct measures to satisfy A.B. 197 requirements."
Lawmakers are still figuring out what kind of imprimatur they want to put on the program, thanks to the possibility that cap and trade will sunset in 2020 absent further authorization. Last year's S.B. 32 extended the state's overall emissions targets to 2030 but did not explicitly permit cap and trade to continue.
A hearing on one of the two bills that have been proffered, A.B. 378, is scheduled for later this month in the state Assembly, and amendments fleshing it out are expected next week.
Within the cap-and-trade debate, groups are split on whether to allow carbon offsets, which are reductions that businesses can pay for from forests, farmlands and other sectors outside the cap. The petroleum association and offset provider groups spoke up in favor of the policy, but the Sierra Club did not.
"Allowing regulated sources to purchase offsets enables them to continue emitting carbon dioxide and also increase emissions of conventional air pollutants from these sources without a corresponding decrease in emissions from other polluting facilities, which harms environmental justice communities in particular," wrote Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California.
Environmental justice groups, which argue that cap and trade could allow businesses to increase conventional air pollution at individual facilities, advocated for a flat fee instead, starting at $50 per ton. Barring that, they asked for the elimination of offsets and a restriction on emissions trading at facilities in disadvantaged communities.
"Close these loopholes in the current cap and trade program because they have been to the detriment of low-income Latinos, Blacks and Asians living next to industrial facilities," wrote a coalition of EJ groups, led by Amy Vanderwarker, co-executive director of the California Environmental Justice Alliance.
Automakers question ZEV sales targets
Another major debate is over how to reduce emissions from transportation. Auto manufacturers raised concerns about the state's plans to continue sales targets for zero-emission vehicles.
"There are likely smarter, more comprehensive approaches that can be used to promote a pathway from petroleum-based to electric-based miles," wrote Julia Rege, director of environment and energy for Global Automakers.
The group has already taken aim at the federal version of the state's greenhouse gas standards for vehicular tailpipe emissions, which has resulted in President Trump moving to reopen a federal review of the standards for model years 2022-25 (Climatewire, March 27).
Rege's letter called the current state-level regulations "challenging" and said the creation of standards beyond 2025 also should be considered in a wider context of land-use patterns and development. "It is important that the regulations strike a balance between offering affordable vehicles that consumers want to purchase with future environmental goals," she wrote.
Environmentalists pushed back against any attempt to dilute requirements for automakers.
"It is unclear how CARB will be able to increase ZEV adoption if automakers and auto dealers continue to do a poor job of marketing and making the vehicles available to consumers," Phillips of Sierra Club California said. "CARB and other California agencies need to consider available tools to motivate automakers and dealers to use best marketing and sales practices to genuinely comply with zero-emission vehicle rules."
Academics warned that if the Trump administration interferes with the state's waiver to enforce its tailpipe standards under the Clean Air Act, it could cost the state 52 million metric tons of CO2 emissions through 2030.
The state is also banking on about 111 million metric tons of reductions from the destruction of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under its plan to address short-lived climate pollutants. About half of those reductions could be in jeopardy if the Trump administration abandons last year's Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol for ozone-depleting chemicals, the academics said, for a total of about 15 percent of the cumulative reductions the state needs to achieve by 2030.
"[T]he prospects for the Trump Administration following through on this international agreement are dim," wrote Mason Inman, Michael Mastrandrea and Danny Cullenward of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University law professor Michael Wara. The administration recently defended a 2015 rule from U.S. EPA that eliminated some uses for HFCs in recognizance of the international agreement, however (Greenwire, Feb. 17).
ARB plans to vote on the scoping plan at its board meeting in June.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2017/04/11/stories/1060052908
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California Bill Locking in Environmental Rules Faces Industry Push-Back
Apr 11, 2017 | Inside EPA
Some of California's efforts to challenge the Trump administration's moves to roll back environmental regulations are sparking push-back from the state's major industry and business organizations.
Take a pending bill in the California legislature that would require state regulators to maintain environmental standards at least as stringent as those required by federal law before President Donald Trump took office. A growing number of industry groups are charging the measure threatens to create a litany of legal and policy problems.
As Inside Cal/EPA's Curt Barry reports, the industry complaints are forcing the bill's supporters to weigh clarifying amendments.
The measure, SB 49 -- the California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2017 -- co-authored by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D) and Sen. Henry Stern (D), cleared the state's Senate Environmental Quality Committee April 5 and now awaits a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
SB 49 would preserve existing federal environmental quality standards and require state-level protections for species currently listed as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. It aims to counter Trump administration and congressional efforts to weaken federal climate, air, water and other regulations by ensuring California would maintain and not soften standards in effect because of Trump's inauguration.
But major industry and business groups -- including the California Chamber of Commerce, California Farm Bureau Federation, California Manufacturers & Technology Association, California Building Industry Association and Western States Petroleum Association -- have come out in strong opposition to the measure, as reflected at the recent environmental quality committee hearing.
Louinda Lacey, a lobbyist with the chamber, listed multiple concerns about the bill, including that its definitions of "federal standards," "stringent," and "backsliding" are "vague and ambiguous.” She also questioned whether the bill would apply standards that are only being implemented by EPA Region 9, what would happen if a standard is changed based on new science or technology, and how the state would handle conflicting federal court rulings on certain rules or policies.
Industry groups also attacked SB 49's private right of action to sue. The measure “now creates private right of action at the state level if any changes are made to any of those laws," said Noel Kramers, representing the farm bureau at the recent hearing. "And that creates significant uncertainty for businesses in California."
But Stern claimed that SB 49 contains "no new private rights of action. There are existing federal private rights of action under all these laws. This is not adding anything new to the existing litigation landscape that doesn't already exist. It is simply preserving that authority should the feds" withdraw it.
Nevertheless, Republican committee member Patricia Bates charged that the bill is likely to create a “tsunami” of litigation over several issues, including if the state attempts to maintain federal rules that have been found by the courts to be illegal.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/california-bill-locking-environmental-rules-faces-industry-push-back
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