Preview Newsletter
ACC PM 4/24/2017
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Repeal Deadline Looms as Congress Returns
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
As lawmakers return from April recess today, they face the final countdown on their opportunity to rescind an Obama-era rule controlling natural gas flaring, venting and leaking from energy operations on public lands. -
Court Review of EPA Rule Would Be 'Exercise in Futility' — DOJ
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
A federal court should not consider litigation over U.S. EPA's methane standards for new oil and gas operations while the agency rethinks the regulation, government lawyers say. -
States, Greens Attack EPA Bid to Freeze Mercury Litigation
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
More than three dozen cities, states and advocacy groups are pressing an appellate court to reject U.S. EPA's bid for an open-ended delay in litigation over a pillar of its decision to limit power plant mercury emissions. -
Adviser Says Trump Administration Backs LNG Exports, Gives Nod to Jordan Cove
Apr 21, 2017 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
A top adviser to President Trump said the administration supports liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and wants to issue permits for more LNG export facilities -- including, reportedly, one on the south-central Oregon coast that has been rejected twice by FERC. -
White House Opts for Aggressive Cyber Strategy, Sources Say
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Peter Behr
A White House executive order on cybersecurity will emphasize the need for "hunt and destroy" strategies to find and eliminate malware that threatens critical infrastructure and government agencies, according to people familiar with the plans. -
Pruitt Faults Obama EPA's Work on Flint Crisis
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Mike Lee
U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said his agency should have responded faster to the lead contamination in Flint, Mich., and he considered taking emergency action to deal with a similar crisis in East Chicago, Ind. -
RGGI Will Cut More Carbon — But by How Much?
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Storrow
The nine Northeastern states that constitute the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have been working their way toward a reduced carbon cap for more than a year. -
Bloomberg: Nations Should Continue Climate Work Despite Trump
Apr 24, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing foreign leaders not to follow President Trump's lead on climate change.
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Repeal Deadline Looms as Congress Returns
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
As lawmakers return from April recess today, they face the final countdown on their opportunity to rescind an Obama-era rule controlling natural gas flaring, venting and leaking from energy operations on public lands.
Industry groups say they are still actively advocating repeal of the Bureau of Land Management's Methane and Waste Prevention Rule under the Congressional Review Act, even as the Interior Department begins a separate process to review and potentially walk back the regulation (Energywire, March 30).
The clock on the CRA resolution, which remains stalled in the Senate, is widely thought to run out the week of May 8.
"Revisiting the BLM rule at the agency level, instead of through the congressional review process, would require months of staff work and would likely face vigorous legal challenges from political activist groups, which could delay this rule's repeal for up to two years," said Neal Kirby, spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
IPAA has been conducting outreach to Senate offices on what it sees as the drawbacks of the BLM rule, such as the potential for shutting in marginal wells (Energywire, Feb. 21). The rule was a "top issue" last month during IPAA member companies' meetings on Capitol Hill, Kirby said.
Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma said she is optimistic the Senate will take up the CRA vote this week.
"We're hoping leadership will take it up, but it's now or never," she said. "There's not that much time left on the CRA, and they might as well bring it up to a vote."
Though Senate leadership has not lost the desire to bring the CRA resolution to a vote, the challenge will be ensuring that Republicans have the support of a simple majority in the upper chamber, said Robert Dillon, spokesman for the American Council for Capital Formation.
Republicans hold a slight majority in the Senate, which has helped this Congress pass 13 CRA resolutions. But a handful of GOP lawmakers have expressed doubt that the CRA is the right tool to address the BLM methane rule due to the statute's provision preventing an agency from introducing a rule that is "substantially the same" as a disapproved rule (Climatewire, March 7).
Recently, CRA proponents have focused on persuading Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to vote in favor of repealing the regulation, Dillon said.
"I don't see any loss of enthusiasm from Congress or the administration," he said. "It's just about whipping the vote."
Joshua Mantell, deputy director of the Wilderness Society's Energy & Climate Program, said he's not convinced Republicans can scrape together the votes they need to pass the CRA.
"If it does go to a vote, the lines are pretty clearly drawn," he said. "This is a vote either to help the oil and gas lobby and special interests or to support taxpayers and stop the waste of public resources."
With Interior moving forward with a review of the rule, it's unclear why GOP lawmakers would continue their push to scrap the rule themselves, Mantell said.
"If an administration of your party is committed to a review, then I would think they would trust the administration to do what is best," he said. "Such an extreme measure of tying this administration's and future administrations from making any kind of rulemaking on this issue in the future is problematic and extreme."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053436
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Court Review of EPA Rule Would Be 'Exercise in Futility' — DOJ
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
A federal court should not consider litigation over U.S. EPA's methane standards for new oil and gas operations while the agency rethinks the regulation, government lawyers say.
In a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Justice Department lawyers on Friday argued that moving forward in court would disrupt EPA's reconsideration process for the New Source Performance Standards and waste everyone's time.
"At the very least, such a rulemaking proceeding could substantially narrow or change the issues the Court may eventually need to decide," DOJ lawyers wrote. "Under those circumstances, it would be a poor use of the Court's and the parties' resources to brief and argue the merits of these challenges, especially since the United States' position on some issues may change as the result of a reconsideration proceeding."
Environmental and state intervenors that support the effort to slash methane emissions from new oil and gas operations have urged the court to allow the litigation to continue. They say the case involves broad legal issues that must be resolved regardless of whether the rule ultimately changes (Energywire, April 18).
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Wednesday that the agency will begin a formal reconsideration process to address certain concerns raised by industry petitioners about the new standards.
DOJ lawyers say the reconsideration process shows that the rule is likely to be "meaningfully revised in the near term." Judicial review of the Obama-era standards would be "an exercise in futility," given the likelihood of a revised rule, they told the court.
Similar debates are happening in litigation over several other Obama-era regulations the Trump administration is reviewing, including the Clean Power Plan and rules for hydraulic fracturing on public lands.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053451
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States, Greens Attack EPA Bid to Freeze Mercury Litigation
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
More than three dozen cities, states and advocacy groups are pressing an appellate court to reject U.S. EPA's bid for an open-ended delay in litigation over a pillar of its decision to limit power plant mercury emissions.
EPA's motion "does not come close to supplying the requisite 'extraordinary cause' to continue a case that has already been set for oral argument," lawyers for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Sierra Club, NAACP and more than a dozen other organizations wrote in a filing late Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Allied with them are Virginia, Massachusetts and some 20 other state and local governments.
"There is simply no basis — extraordinary or not — for this court to delay oral argument while EPA evaluates, yet again, whether to reconsider" its original decision to create what are formally known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), those governments said in a separate opposition motion also submitted Friday.
Oral arguments in the case, which centers on EPA's "supplemental finding" that it adequately considered compliance costs in deciding to proceed with MATS, are currently scheduled for May 18.
EPA sought the indefinite postponement Tuesday, partly on the grounds that the agency wants to revisit its position following President Trump's March 28 executive order to reconsider any environmental regulation that could "potentially burden" the use or development of fossil fuel resources (Greenwire, April 19).
EPA is not proposing a firm timetable for the review but instead wants the appeals court's permission to file status reports every 90 days until a decision is reached. Backing the proposed delay are Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy Corp.; Oklahoma; and some 20 other firms, states and trade groups that are challenging the supplemental finding.
Scott Pruitt, sworn in two months ago as EPA administrator, previously served as Oklahoma's attorney general.
EPA published the finding last April to address a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that left the mercury standards in place but faulted agency regulators for failing to duly consider the potential compliance costs in making their decision that it was "appropriate and necessary" to regulate power plant releases under the Clean Air Act.
With a yearly price tag initially projected at $9.6 billion, the standards ranked among EPA's most expensive air rules ever. In the finding, however, agency officials concluded that the expected minimum health benefits of $37 billion easily justified the cost.
Compliance with MATS has meanwhile yielded "massive reductions" in hazardous power plant emissions, according to Friday's filing from Massachusetts and its allies in state and local governments. Regardless of Trump's executive order, they said, EPA has no authority to remove power plants from a list of regulated pollution sources without meeting stringent health and environmental protection requirements.
Any such removal would be needed to roll back both the supplemental finding and the mercury standards, they added. Given the extensive record of the harm caused by power plant pollution, "it is doubtful that EPA could meet those requirements in order to delist power plants lawfully," they said.
Another complication could be EPA's tenacious defense of the standards up to now. In a brief filed March 22, six days before Trump's executive order, lawyers for the agency derided various parts of challengers' arguments as "a grab bag of assertions" riddled with inaccuracies.
The supplemental finding litigation is among at least five cases before the D.C. Circuit in which EPA has recently sought to delay oral arguments, a roster that includes another package of lawsuits related to the mercury standards.
Earlier this month, a three-judge panel agreed to freeze a legal battle over the agency's 70-parts-per-billion ground-level ozone limit, albeit with a bit of grumbling that the court "disfavors" postponements in oral arguments (Greenwire, April 12).
A somewhat different panel is scheduled to hear the May 18 arguments in the combined MATS litigation. In February, the appellate court had rejected a request from Murray Energy and other plaintiffs for a 45-day delay in proceedings to buy time for the new administration to consider a settlement (E&ENews PM, Feb. 9).
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053464
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Adviser Says Trump Administration Backs LNG Exports, Gives Nod to Jordan Cove
Apr 21, 2017 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
A top adviser to President Trump said the administration supports liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and wants to issue permits for more LNG export facilities -- including, reportedly, one on the south-central Oregon coast that has been rejected twice by FERC.
Gary Cohn, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said the administration also supports coal, natural gas and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). But those pale in comparison to bigger, overarching issues -- specifically, job creation, free markets and energy independence -- that Trump has hammered on since his days on the campaign trail.
"Those things have to work together," Cohn told attendees of the Institute of International Finance (IIF) Policy Summit in Washington on Thursday, according to a video of the interview posted by Bloomberg. "Different feedstocks have different economics to them, and we're allowing the free market to be the free market."
Cohn said the biggest energy policy issue currently facing the administration "is energy independence and making sure that we can control our own destiny." When pressed by the a moderator, IIF CEO Tim Adams, if he meant for the United States or North America, he said both are important.
"We're mostly concerned about the U.S., but then we care about North America," Cohn said, adding that it is "good" that the United States has started exporting LNG and is building more export terminals.
"We happen to have a feedstock, or a Btu component, that the rest of the world needs," Cohn said. "More and more LNG is needed, and we have a huge excess supply of gas, so we're going to permit more and more of these LNG plants.
"We're going to let these different feedstocks compete in the United States, and we're going to be supportive of them. Part of creating jobs and creating manufacturing in the United States is [asking]: What is your competitive advantage? We have a big competitive advantage: We have cheap energy. We need to keep and promote our cheap energy and use that us a competitive advantage."
According to the Washington Post, Cohn added that "the first thing we're going to do is we're going to permit an LNG export facility in the northwest. Just think of the transport time from the northwest to Japan versus anywhere else. Then we've got to put facilities on the East Coast to get from the East Coast to Germany."
Cohn also said, according to the Post, "the one place we're going to permit in the northwest, it's been turned down twice already." That prompted the newspaper to seek clarification from the White House, which confirmed that he was talking about the proposed Jordan Cove LNG export terminal at Coos Bay, OR, whose main backer in Calgary-based Veresen Inc.
Michael Hinrichs, spokesman for Jordan Cove Energy Project LP, a Veresen subsidiary, told NGIon Friday that "it's refreshing to hear the administration reinforce their commitment to quality energy projects here in the U.S.
"What makes us confident...is similar to what [Cohn] expressed, in that Jordan Cove represents a huge opportunity to leverage the nation's abundant natural gas resources -- to create jobs, build infrastructure, grow economies here at home, but also reach Japanese and Asia-Pacific markets directly...It's nice to hear that from the White House."
Veresen spokesman Riley Hicks told NGIon Friday that the company had no comment.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the $7.5 billion export project in March 2016. At the time, the Commission cited a lack of contracts from buyers for the 1 Bcf/d capacity facility, as well as problems with Veresen's Pacific Connector, a 232-mile transmission pipeline designed to tap natural gas supplies from western Canada and the U.S. Rockies. FERC denied a request for a rehearing last December.
Despite the earlier setbacks, FERC approved a pre-filing application from Jordan Cove in February. The next month, Veresen said the company now expects a final investment decision on the project in 2019, with the terminal and pipeline beginning service in 2024. Jordan Cove plans to re-file its application for the project in the second half of 2017.
Earlier this month, Veresen executives said the company was in advanced talks with an undisclosed Japanese buyer for 1-2 million tons of LNG annually. If successful, it would be the third Japanese entity to purchase LNG from Jordan Cove; JERA Co. Inc. and Itochu Corp. have signed long-term capacity agreements to each annually purchase 1.5 million tons of LNG.
Veresen also said it was considering selling up to a 40% equity interest in the project to offtakers.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/110212-adviser-says-trump-administration-backs-lng-exports-gives-nod-to-jordan-cove
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White House Opts for Aggressive Cyber Strategy, Sources Say
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Energywire
By Peter Behr
A White House executive order on cybersecurity will emphasize the need for "hunt and destroy" strategies to find and eliminate malware that threatens critical infrastructure and government agencies, according to people familiar with the plans.
The administration strategy is said to promote a more aggressive search for sophisticated cyberwar software weapons that have penetrated control room systems, coupled with development of tools to neutralize or destroy the intrusions.
A headline lesson from the Christmas week 2015 cyber blackout of three power utilities in Ukraine is the vital importance of detecting out-of-the-ordinary operations of control systems, which could reveal hackers' penetration and preparation of a damaging attack, according to an analysis issued by the SANS Institute and the Electricity Information Sharing Analysis Center, the cyberthreat center for U.S. power utilities.
A second element in active defense is controls that prevent attackers who get inside control systems from secretly exporting operating data that would be corrupted and reintroduced into control room computers to carry out an attack, the SANS Institute researchers emphasize.
If President Trump's executive order makes a priority of hunt and destroy methods, it would align the administration's focus with the beginnings of a similar shift among electric utilities, said Michael Assante, a SANS Institute director who co-authored the analysis of the Ukraine blackout.
"I'm noticing more willingness by utilities to take the next step," Assante said in an interview. More utilities are beginning to "wrestle with the reality" that the best attackers, backed by nation-state resources, may be able to get through, he said.
Active defense was endorsed by Gerry Cauley, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the grid's security monitor, speaking at a grid conference in October.
"When facing an overwhelming number of enemies, you need to figure out a way to constrict them, constrict their avenues of attack, to very narrow corridors," Cauley said. "If you can find that, it's almost like hunt and kill," he added. "It's as crude as that" (Energywire, Oct. 20, 2016).
So far, however, significant investments in cybersecurity personnel, training and analytical tools for active defense have been limited to a few of the largest U.S. utilities, Assante said.
"Many utilities are still building walls," he said. Finding malware inside utility systems is particularly challenging because grid control systems must run around the clock. They can't be taken offline to conduct searches, cyber experts note.
"We don't have a lot of tools today for continuous monitoring of transmission and distribution power systems, for example," Assante said.
A high-priority Department of Energy research project called Consequence-Driven Cyber-Informed Engineering aims at identifying the most vulnerable pathways in critical infrastructure systems that attackers might exploit and creating "tripwires" that could detect intrusions. Utilities would then need engineering solutions that would find and isolate attack malware while their systems kept operating, Andrew Bochman, senior cyber and energy security strategist at the Idaho National Laboratory, said at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (Energywire, April 5).
Supporting the development of better cyberattack detection tools is one area where the Trump administration can make a difference, Assante said. Another is better defining when and how the Defense Department will come to the aid of civilian infrastructure companies that are facing a nation-state cyberwar campaign, he added. The "war game" exercises run by the electric power industry and other critical infrastructure sectors could be expanded to include a DOD role in the worse attack scenarios, he suggested.
A third is the need to keep improving cyberthreat information that integrates high-level government intelligence.
The concept of active defense took a major step forward in 2011 with the publication by Lockheed Martin Corp. of "kill chain" analysis that described the succession of moves in a sophisticated cyberattack and the series of countermoves needed to checkmate and defeat such campaigns. Assante and SANS Institute colleagues have published a kill chain primer for utilities and industries that operate with industrial control systems.
Starts and stops
The Trump administration cybersecurity executive order has moved in fits and starts to this point.
In early January, Trump received a top-level intelligence briefing on Russia's campaign to disrupt the U.S. presidential election, including the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. He promised then to deliver a new cyber strategy as a first order of business.
"Whether it is our government, organizations, associations or businesses we need to aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks. I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office," Trump said. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was named to head an outreach effort for new cyberdefense ideas, while some experts said continuity with existing strategies was the urgent priority.
An initial draft of a White House cyber executive order was leaked in January just prior to an expected release but then pulled back without explanation.
The draft described a plan to create teams of experts from DOD, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to map the nation's most critical cyber vulnerabilities and assess capabilities of potential U.S. cyber adversaries, with strategies for confronting the threats (Energywire, Jan. 30).
A revised version of the executive order circulated in February revealed an intention to hold heads of federal agencies accountable for identifying the greatest cybersecurity risks to their computer systems, so that effective protection could be deployed.
DHS made a move last year to strengthen its capacity for "proactive hunting" for cyber weapons, by combining several government cyberdefense units to create the Hunt and Incident Response Team, under the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. The team can send experts to the aid of critical infrastructure companies under attack. That is the tone the administration wants to set now, insiders say.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053454
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Pruitt Faults Obama EPA's Work on Flint Crisis
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Greenwire
By Mike Lee
U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said his agency should have responded faster to the lead contamination in Flint, Mich., and he considered taking emergency action to deal with a similar crisis in East Chicago, Ind.
He decided not to take federal action after working with Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R), Pruitt said Friday at an Earth Day event here.
Pruitt spoke for about 20 minutes and took two questions from reporters in the audience before leaving. He mentioned Flint and East Chicago when an Oklahoma City reporter asked him how his agency would respond to problems with the public water system in Hugo, Okla. (Greenwire, April 18).
EPA should have used its emergency authority under Section 1431 of the Safe Drinking Water Act to intervene in Flint, Pruitt said.
"I believe the EPA should've responded much more aggressively to the situation on the ground in Flint to avoid what happened there, and there are situations like that across the country," he said.
"Frankly, the situation in East Chicago, we were considering that two weeks ago," Pruitt said. "I was working with the governor in Indiana to ensure that filtration systems were being put on the water system there to make sure that there weren't lead levels in the water that were going to affect individuals. And they did that, so we didn't have to take 1431 authority."
East Chicago is home to a complex of abandoned lead smelters, and EPA has declared the plants and surrounding homes a Superfund site. As part of that cleanup, EPA in December tested household tap water and discovered the municipal water system wasn't doing enough to prevent lead from leaching out of old pipes.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and local community groups in March filed an emergency petition with the agency under the Safe Drinking Water Act to compel the city and state to address contamination beyond the Superfund site.
The Indiana Department of Environmental Management began sending filtration systems to some households in the area April 10, according to a news release.
Pruitt visited East Chicago as part of his "back to basics" tour, in which he has sought to refocus EPA on working with states to tackle long-standing air and water pollution.
He made similar comments in Dallas in front of a largely sympathetic crowd. His appearance was set up as an interview, moderated by Ryan Sitton, a Republican who sits on the three-member commission that regulates oil and gas in Texas.
Pruitt said the Trump administration may include funding for water projects as part of its plan to increase infrastructure projects around the nation.
He said he wants to increase monitoring of air pollutants at the county level, providing better data to help EPA and state agencies lower ozone and other pollutants that affect about 40 percent of the U.S. population. He didn't address how the administration's budget cuts would affect the proposal.
Three protesters were escorted out after shouting questions at Pruitt about climate change and the Trump administration's proposed cuts to EPA's budget. Pruitt defended the Trump administration's approach to environmental issues.
"This past administration, where are their efforts that were so good?" he said. "Yet here we are at the beginning of our term, and we're trying to set a new path forward of actually having objectives to provide outcomes that are tangible."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053465
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RGGI Will Cut More Carbon — But by How Much?
Apr 24, 2017 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Storrow
The nine Northeastern states that constitute the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have been working their way toward a reduced carbon cap for more than a year.
But where the task was more of a bureaucratic afterthought, it has now assumed greater urgency for climate hawks. President Trump's presence in the White House means the regional cap-and-trade system is one of the only avenues in America for meaningful carbon reductions.
Meanwhile, a host of the group's biggest states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, are gearing up to make deep mandated emission reductions. It remains to be seen if those states will be able to convince their RGGI counterparts to use the regional carbon-cutting program as a vehicle to make steeper reductions, or if they will be forced to go it on their own.
The compact's planners gave a better indication of where they were headed last week. Updated modeling unveiled in a Thursday webinar considered annual reductions in the region's carbon cap of 2.5 percent, 3 percent and 3.5 percent. The cuts would be imposed starting in 2020, when current cap reductions are currently scheduled to cease.
The cuts are in line with what has been previously proposed. What was notable, environmentalists said, were revised projections showing emissions falling quicker than anticipated.
"The states are committed to moving forward with RGGI and doing more," said Bruce Ho, a consultant with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The question is how far and how fast."
Scant opposition
Environmentalists say the results show states can go further and reduce the cap by 5 percent annually.
Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former RGGI board chairman, called the proposed reductions "significant" and said discussions are moving in the right direction.
But he added, "I do think that more would be the most desirable."
The debate has been notable for a lack of any serious opposition. Maryland, which last year raised concerns over a 5 percent reduction, has largely been silent on the lesser reductions. So, too, have New Hampshire and Maine, which are led by Republican governors who have expressed skepticism about the program.
Business groups have largely been mum. The New England Power Generators Association has not taken a position on the cap reduction, said Dan Dolan, the association's president.
The trade group, which represents power plant operators, is more focused on whether RGGI is the best vehicle for complying with deep carbon cuts required in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, all of which have mandates to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Right now, those states are largely relying on large individual renewable procurements to make emission reductions, he said.
"We would certainly prefer a price on carbon put on the market and have investment decisions made from there," Dolan said. But whether RGGI states outside New England would go for a carbon price is unclear, he said.
"We're supportive of meeting the state mandates and recognize the need for pricing that externality in a meaningful way," Dolan said.
Decision slated for summer
Emissions in the RGGI region have long been in decline. The Acadia Center, an environmental group, estimates carbon levels have fallen 37 percent since 2008. Transportation now accounts for a larger share of the region's emissions than the power sector.
As a result, the nine-state compact is largely unaffected by Trump's plan to repeal the Clean Power Plan. Modeling results released last week project emissions in the region will largely be the same with or without the regulations.
The scenarios considered Thursday included proposals to adjust the number of allowances power plants are allowed to bank under the cap. Adjusting the allowances essentially means counting the credits toward the cap, effectively making the standard more stringent. RGGI planners have also raised the prospect of increasing the price at which extra carbon credits could be allowed onto the market in the event of a spike in power prices.
"It's good, but in the context of everything that has happened since November, we need to take this good tool and make it better," said Phelps Turner, a staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation. "The program is already established and running well for a decade; with a little bit more of ambitious cap, more carbon pollution could be avoided."
A planning timeline calls for a decision on the cap to be made by late summer. By then, climate hawks will have a better sense of how much carbon RGGI really can cut.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2017/04/24/stories/1060053433
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Bloomberg: Nations Should Continue Climate Work Despite Trump
Apr 24, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing foreign leaders not to follow President Trump's lead on climate change.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Bloomberg said other countries should continue pursuing the goals laid out in the international Paris climate accord, regardless of whether Trump pulls the U.S. out of the pact, something the White House is still considering.
“Washington won't determine the fate of our ability to meet our Paris commitment," Bloomberg, who in 2014 was appointed a United Nations special envoy on climate change, told the AP.
"And what a tragedy it would be if the failure to understand that led to an unraveling of the agreement. We hope this book will help to correct that wrong impression — and help save the Paris deal."
Bloomberg and former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope are releasing a book about climate change, which he said is not a political statement but rather a way to urge citizens and policymakers to focus more on the environment.
“I'm not running for office," Bloomberg told the Associated Press. The 75-year-old billionaire, who has championed liberal causes despite his political independence, repeatedly mulled presidential runs during his tenure as New York’s mayor.
Bloomberg’s book reportedly takes aim at the coal sector, of which he writes, “I don't have much sympathy for industries whose products leave behind a trail of diseased and dead bodies … for everyone's sake, we should aim to put them out of business."
Bloomberg told the AP he will donate $3 million to groups that help out-of-work cost miners find jobs and distressed coal country communities revive their local economies.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/330211-bloomberg-countries-should-continue-climate-work-despite-trump
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