AM ACC 7/13/2017

Industry and Association News

1. (ACC Mentioned) Waste Definition Ruling Prompts Mixed Reaction, Uncertainties Over Impact

   Jul 12, 2017 | Inside EPA

   By Suzanne Yohannan
   
   
   The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit's recent ruling that vacates aspects of the Obama EPA's definition of solid waste (DSW) rule is prompting varied reaction, with the hazardous waste...
2. Trump Picks Banker, Executive as Energy Undersecretaries

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Renee Schoof
   
   
   President Donald Trump's pick to be the Energy Department's third-ranking official is an energy attorney and executive at an energy company in which billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has a controlling stake.
3. Texas Lawmaker Sees NAFTA Labor Provisions Attracting Votes

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Rossella Brevetti
   
   
   A vote on a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will attract more Democrats than past trade deals since NAFTA 2.0 will contain upgrades to labor and environmental provisions, Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said.

LCSA News

4. EPA to Release New Chemical Control Rules Within Month: Official

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Pat Rizzuto
   
   
   The EPA will release new chemical control rules within the next month, clearing part of the logjam of company requests to register new chemicals, an agency official told Bloomberg BNA July 12.

Chemical Management News

5. Does the World’s Top Weed Killer Cause Cancer? Trump’s EPA Will Decide

   Jul 13, 2017 | Bloomberg Businessweek

   By Peter Waldman, Lydia Mulvany, Tiffany Stecker, and Joel Rosenblatt
   
   
   Every year, farmers spray, on average, almost a pound of the herbicide glyphosate on every acre of cropland in the U.S., and nearly half a pound on every acre of cropland worldwide.
6. California Designates First Priority Product under SCP Programm

   Jul 13, 2017 | Chemical Watch

   California's Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) has designated its first priority product under the Safer Consumer Products (SCP) programme.
7. The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese

   Jul 12, 2017 | New York Times

   By Roni Caryn Rabin
   
   
   Potentially harmful chemicals that were banned from children’s teething rings and rubber duck toys a decade ago may still be present in high concentrations in your child’s favorite meal: macaroni and cheese mixes...

Energy News

8. EPA, Industry Cite Methane NSPS Review, Delay Plans to Back Recall Bid

   Jul 12, 2017 | Inside EPA

   By Abby Smith
   
   
   EPA and several industry groups are intensifying their calls for a federal appellate court panel to recall its mandate requiring the agency to immediately implement Obama-era methane limits for oil and gas facilities, charging the court's immediate issuance of its mandate...
9. Calif. in Crosshairs as Panel Wrangles over Development

   Jul 13, 2017 | E&E Daily

   By Rob Hotakainen
   
   
   As the Trump administration moves to open the oceans to more oil and gas drilling, California Democratic Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán offered a blunt warning yesterday: "Stay off my California coastline."

Chemical Security News

10. Chemical Safety Board Avoids Funding Cut in House—For Now

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Sam Pearson
    
    
    House lawmakers’ decision to leave the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's funding flat in fiscal 2018 is a small reprieve after the White House proposed eliminating the agency earlier this year.

Transportation News - There are no clips to report at this time.

Environment News

11. (ACC Mentioned) A Little Less Science for EPA’s Science Advisory Boards

    Jul 12, 2017 | Undark Magazine

    By Zack Coleman
    
    
    Revelations about relationships between industry and the Trump administration officials, and how they relate to policy, are emerging almost weekly.
12. Groups Sue EPA Over Ozone Implementation Delay

    Jul 13, 2017 | E&E News PM

    By Sean Reilly
    
    
    A dozen environmental and public health groups sued U.S. EPA today over its decision to roll back implementation of its 2015 ground-level ozone standard by a year.
13. Appropriations Bill Advances With Cuts for EPA, Interior

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Alan Kovski and Tiffany Stecker
    
    
    A spending bill with cuts for environmental and public lands agencies was approved July 12 by a House subcommittee, over Democratic objections that the cuts were too big.
14. Bill to Boost Carbon Capture Tax Credit Resurfaces in Senate

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Brian Dabbs
    
    
    The recent collapse of high-profile carbon capture project at Mississippi's Kemper plant isn't deterring Senate lawmakers from pushing forward with a new policy to provide an incentive for that technology.
15. Trump Set for Climate Confrontation in Paris

    Jul 13, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire

    By Devin Henry
    
    
    President Trump’s visit to Paris this week will put him face-to-face with French President Emmanuel Macron, perhaps Europe’s loudest critic of his climate agenda.
16. Governor Scrambles for Support as Climate Deal Inches Onward

    Jul 13, 2017 | AP (In The Washington Post)

    By Jonathan J. Cooper 
    
    
    A plan to extend California’s signature climate initiative for another decade is scheduled to go before legislative committees Thursday, despite opposition from some environmental advocates.

Industry and Association News

1. (ACC Mentioned) Waste Definition Ruling Prompts Mixed Reaction, Uncertainties Over Impact

   Jul 12, 2017 | Inside EPA

   By Suzanne Yohannan

   The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit's recent ruling that vacates aspects of the Obama EPA's definition of solid waste (DSW) rule is prompting varied reaction, with the hazardous waste recycling industry concerned it will bring new uncertainties -- particularly if environmentalists push for rehearing -- and the chemical industry saying it will encourage more recycling.

   Sources who follow the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) rule point to ambiguities they see in the ruling, unsure, for instance, of how far the court went in vacating one of the "legitimacy" factors that determine whether valid recycling is taking place, and whether EPA will be further challenged on the transfer-based exclusion to waste handling requirements that the court reinstated.

   Chemical industry proponents say they think the ruling will result in increased recycling of hazardous secondary materials, although a source with the hazardous waste recycling industry sees the ruling as adding uncertainty for the industry.

   And an attorney for environmentalists stressed what the source sees as the practical effects of the decision, noting "we're still concerned," given the "serious problem" of hazardous waste not being controlled. Without controls, waste can get into groundwater and poison people, cause explosions and other repercussions, the source says.

   In a statement released to Inside EPA, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which represents the chemical industry, called the ruling positive for its members' "ability to recycle secondary materials. Additionally, it will benefit the environment by encouraging more recycling and reclamation, which is one of RCRA's key goals for materials management," it says. ACC did not respond by press time to specific questions on the ruling.

   But a source with a group that represents companies that recycle, treat and dispose of hazardous wastes says the decision creates uncertainty. "For the hazardous waste industry, . . . we were hoping for finality and certainty in the RCRA recycling program," the source says.

   The court's 2-1 ruling in American Petroleum Institute, et al. v. EPA primarily sided with industry when it vacated most of the verified recycler exclusion (VRE) contained in the Obama EPA 2015 DSW rule, instead reinstating a more relaxed Bush-era exclusion for third-party recyclers of hazardous secondary material that allows them to avoid stringent regulation as solid or hazardous waste. The ruling, however, allows two aspects of the VRE to remain -- its emergency preparedness requirements and an expanded containment requirement.

   The decision also sided with industry with regard to factor 4, one of four criteria the agency applies to determine if recycling of hazardous materials is legitimate, and not sham recycling. Factor 4 -- which is generally known as the "toxics along for the ride" test -- requires that a recycled product be comparable to a legitimate product or intermediate, and if the former contains higher levels of contaminants, it requires additional procedures and tests. The court though found those procedures to be "draconian" and vacated factor 4 "insofar as it applies to all hazardous secondary materials via [section] 261.2(g)," the section of the waste regulations that defines sham recycling.

   In his dissenting opinion, Judge David S. Tatel questioned the majority's findings on this, saying if such requirements qualify as draconian, "then so too would countless other run-of-the-mill requirements that entities file applications and keep certificates on hand: like those for pilots, . . . elevator operators," and others.

   But ACC says it is "pleased to have prevailed" on two aspects of the rule it had joined other industry parties in challenging -- the VRE and factor 4 of the "legitimacy test."

   On the VRE, ACC says it "had argued that generators of secondary materials should not be subject to a new, more stringent requirement to obtain a RCRA permit or a RCRA variance in order to qualify for an exclusion." ACC says its arguments "resonated with the Court," as it vacated the VRE -- except for the emergency and containment provisions -- and reinstated the so-called transfer-based exclusion (TBE) that was created in a 2008 DSW rule during President George W. Bush's term.

   But the hazardous waste recycling industry source says the court's elimination of the VRE and factor 4 creates uncertainty, adding "I suspect that's not the end of the story" because environmentalists had challenged the TBE when it was part of the 2008 rule, and entered into a settlement agreement with EPA over it. Now that the TBE is being reinstated, "I don't think [environmentalists are] going to take this lying down," the source says.

   The attorney for environmentalists declined to say whether environmentalists will petition the court for rehearing. They are under a 60-day timeline to do so. Environmentalists had sued EPA over its 2008 rule, claiming it was too lax. EPA settled with environmentalists, providing for EPA to "get rid of" the transfer-based exclusion and issue something in its place, according to the environmental attorney.

   The source, however, declined to comment on the potential conflict between the settlement terms and the new ruling reinstating the TBE, questioning whether there is a conflict. Further, the source argues that while the court reinstated the TBE, it is "not endorsing" it, with the source noting that the court found that EPA had not sufficiently explained the basis for the VRE.

   Some sources are raising questions on the reach of the ruling vacating factor 4, noting the language at the conclusion of the majority opinion that says it is vacated insofar as it relates to all hazardous secondary materials via the rule's definition of sham recycling.

   One industry attorney interprets this to mean that the factor is not voided for other separate exclusions that specifically require that the recycling be "legitimate." These, for instance, would include the generator-controlled exclusion and an exclusion that covers materials recovered from spent material primarily from mining processing, the source says.

   The environmental attorney is unsure of this interpretation of the ruling on factor 4.

   The industry attorney also notes that the court did not reinstate the 2008 rule's legitimacy requirements -- where two of the factors were mandatory and two were merely to be considered by regulators in reaching a decision. This source therefore believes that 2008 legitimacy structure is gone.

   The hazardous waste recycling source reads the factor 4 language in the ruling as the court indicating the factor was too broad. EPA needs to narrow its application, developing categories to which it applies, the source says.

   On the factor 4 ruling, ACC says the group agrees with the court "that the mere presences of a small amount of hazardous constituents within a recycled product does not make the recycling process itself illegitimate. We likewise agree that to create a useful and 'legitimate' recycled product firms should not be compelled to extract tiny amounts of hazardous constituents -- a very difficult and costly undertaking -- where failing to do so presents no health or environmental risk."

   The July 7 ruling also dismissed environmentalists' challenge to EPA's approach to maintaining 32 pre-2008 exclusions for various materials, products and processes from the definition of solid waste and hazardous waste regulation. While the agency proposed in a draft rule subjecting facilities under these exclusions to new legitimacy, containment and notification requirements, in the final rule, EPA decided only to apply the legitimacy conditions and deferred any decision on the two other requirements to a future time. The D.C. Circuit found that it could not consider the merits of this challenge because it lacks jurisdiction, given EPA deferred action.

   One RCRA legal expert for industry finds this aspect of the ruling "absolutely ludicrous," with the source arguing that EPA is in fact taking an action by promulgating a regulation. The source believes this could make it harder for parties to challenge a rule in the future if EPA simply defers action.

   Unless reversed, this ruling would "allow EPA to escape direct judicial review in the future any time it decides to forgo including a proposed provision in a final RCRA rule by simply claiming it is 'deferring' a decision to include that provision to some unspecified future date," the source says in an email response.

   But the first industry attorney says the ruling regarding deferral "didn't strike me as odd." If the court were to review that issue now, what could it order EPA to do? the source asks. The court would not be allowed to substitute its own decision for the agency's, and the agency has not yet rendered a judgment, the source says. The source notes that there are provisions in RCRA requiring EPA to review rules every three years that can be enforced by citizen suits. In addition, groups can petition for rulemakings, to which case law requires the agency to respond in a "reasonable period of time," the source says.

   The environmental attorney deflected questions on the legal aspects of this part of the ruling, instead stressing the practical effects of EPA allowing for exclusions covering thousands of facilities but not mandating notification requirements on those exclusion claims.

   https://insideepa.com/inside-epa/waste-definition-ruling-prompts-mixed-reaction-uncertainties-over-impact
   

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2. Trump Picks Banker, Executive as Energy Undersecretaries

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Renee Schoof

   President Donald Trump's pick to be the Energy Department's third-ranking official is an energy attorney and executive at an energy company in which billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has a controlling stake.

   The position to which Mark Wesley Menezes is expected to be nominated is the No. 3 spot, Energy Department press secretary Shaylyn Hynes told Bloomberg BNA. The Energy Department did not have a person in the role during the latter part of the Obama administration.

   Menezes is vice president of federal relations for Berkshire Hathaway Energy. He previously was a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams, heading its energy practice group. Before that he served as chief counsel for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during the enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

   Scott Segal, an energy attorney who heads the policy group at Bracewell LLP, told Bloomberg BNA in an email that he knew Menezes well because they shared clients and worked on the same issues in private practice. Segal said Menezes’ familiarity with the energy regulatory system makes him well qualified for the position.

   “Mark also has a sensitivity to the nexus between energy and environmental policy with understanding of what policy means for affordability and reliability,” he said.

   Menezes was the lead staff negotiator on the 2005 energy bill and in private practice has represented utilities, trade associations and others whose business is regulated by federal agencies such as the EPA and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Fred Eames, a partner at Hunton & Williams who worked with Menezes on the firm's Regulated Markets and Infrastructure Team, told Bloomberg BNA. “He's an excellent lawyer,” Eames said.

   Menezes was a registered lobbyist as of 2016 for Hunton & Williams, whose clients include electric and gas and renewable companies; for American Electric Power (AEP), an investor-owned electric utility located in 11 states; and for Central and South West Corp., a Texas-based utility bought by AEP, according the Center for Responsive Politics.

   Undersecretary of Science

   The position is one of three undersecretary positions described in the department's organizational law. The others are undersecretaries for science and nuclear security.

   The Trump administration late July 11 also announced the choice Paul Dabbar, an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and a former nuclear submarine officer, as undersecretary for science. Both must be confirmed by the Senate.

   Dabbar conducted environmental research at the North Pole during a deployment there, and he also conducted research at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the White House said. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the U.S. Naval Academy and an master's of business administration degree from Columbia University.

   The role of undersecretary for science by law requires a background in science or engineering and involves monitoring the department's research and development programs.

   Daniel F. Stenger, a partner at Hogan Lovells US LLP who worked with Dabbar on energy projects, told Bloomberg BNA by phone that Dabbar was “very knowledgeable about nuclear power as well as other types of generation.”

   “He was really the architect of how to buy and sell existing nuclear power plants when that market was created as a result of electric utility restructuring. Paul was probably involved in the purchase or acquisition of most of the nuclear plants that were bought or sold and other merger and acquisition transactions in the nuclear area,” Stenger said. “He had a lot to do with really creating a robust market for buying and selling nuclear generation facilities.”

   The position also involves oversight of department offices of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Fossil Energy, Nuclear Energy and others, the department's website for Office of Undersecretary for Science and Energy says.

   Dabbar, who is managing director for mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan—the investment banking division of JPMorgan Chase & Co.—has been involved in more than $400 billion worth of investments “across all energy sectors,” including renewable energies and oil and gas. He “led the majority of all nuclear transactions,” the administration's announcement said.

   Dabbar also is a member of the board that advises the department's Environmental Management Office, which is in charge of cleaning up radioactive sites remaining from nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear research.

   Dabbar has been a donor to Republican presidential and congressional candidates in the past, including Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and the Republican National Convention.

   —With assistance from Rebecca Kern.

   http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446701&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446701&jd=116446701
   

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3. Texas Lawmaker Sees NAFTA Labor Provisions Attracting Votes

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Rossella Brevetti

   A vote on a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will attract more Democrats than past trade deals since NAFTA 2.0 will contain upgrades to labor and environmental provisions, Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said.
   
   “There's going to be a labor section in NAFTA,” Hurd said, adding that pro-trade Democrats who view labor and environment as critical pieces in trade deals will “probably be happy with it.” The pre-election rhetoric on NAFTA was in line with what some Democrats would like to see in future trade agreements, he said at a July 12 event sponsored by American Society/Council of the Americas.

   Mexico's government also wants to see labor and environmental provisions beefed up “and I think they're going to be in line with some of the issues that our folks on the left want to see,” he added.
   . 
   The 1994 NAFTA addressed labor and environmental issues in side agreements that have been widely criticized as unenforceable. Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), a key Democratic voice on labor issues, has said NAFTA 2.0 will fail to get the votes needed to pass if it does not address labor issues.
   
   Voting on the NAFTA redo will be “very different” than other trade pacts because of the U.S.'s important relationship with Mexico and Canada, Hurd said. “You will actually get a couple more votes just because it's NAFTA,” he said, contrasting the situation with the opposition faced by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership from some Democrats. 
   
   Hurd said governors should take a lead role in articulating the importance of NAFTA. “Our governors have to speak up and they also have to create an environment to get those [votes] on legislation that has to come through the House and Senate,” he said. Hurd's remarks come in advance of the National Governors Association's summer meeting in Rhode Island, which starts July 13, and is expected to highlight the agreement's importance to the three NAFTA countries. 

   Withdrawal Threat Remains

   The lawmaker's comments capped a panel of business representatives and trade analysts, including former commerce and U.S. trade representative official Christopher Padilla who warned that the NAFTA talks could blow up and reach an impasse. “The threat to pull out of NAFTA was not a negotiating tactic. It was quite real,” Padilla said, adding that the possibility of withdrawal remains. He also was skeptical that labor and environmental improvements would help secure Democratic votes for the pact because previous efforts on labor and environmental provision have not attracted support from Democrats such as Levin. “Labor and environment might help with some Democrats, although I doubt it,” he said.

   Padilla, a vice president for government and regulatory affairs at IBM Corp., said it is possible to achieve a positive result by taking enhancements from the TPP—such as digital trade commitments, disciplines on state-owned enterprises, and better intellectual property provisions—and incorporating them into NAFTA. Tweaking NAFTA rules of origin can be done in a way to help U.S. manufacturers, which would fulfill a key commitment made by President Donald Trump, Padilla said. “It will require some changes in supply chains. Not everyone will be happy about that. But that's a political path to success,” he said. Rules of origin guide determinations about which goods qualify for preferential tariff treatment under NAFTA.
   
   “NAFTA is absolutely essential to our members,” said Ann Wilson, senior vice president for government affairs at the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA). Wilson, whose organization represents vehicle suppliers, said motor vehicle parts and components cross the border multiple times. MEMA's position is that a change in the rules of origin could jeopardize all members of the supply chain. Wilson said there would be “some real serious back and forth” on the issue. Vehicle suppliers are the largest manufacturing sector in the U.S., directly employing over 871,000 Americans, according to MEMA.

   Eric Miller, president of Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, said both Canada and Mexico have their “red lines” in the negotiations. For Canada, the red line is NAFTA Chapter 19, which addresses dispute settlement in dumping and countervailing duty cases, while Mexico's is maintaining duty-free and quota-free access to the U.S. market, Miller said.

   Antonio Ortiz-Mena, Albright Stonebridge Group senior adviser and a former official of the Mexican Embassy in Washington, said the Mexico-U.S. bilateral relationship is at stake in the talks. Failure to reach a satisfactory conclusion could cause a break down in cooperation on security and immigration issues.

   The TPP template would be a natural place to start but trade offs among the three NAFTA countries would differ from those among the 12 TPP partners, Ortiz-Mena said. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the TPP, which also included Canada and Mexico, in the early days of his administration.

   http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446713&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446713&jd=116446713
   

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LCSA News

4. EPA to Release New Chemical Control Rules Within Month: Official

   Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Pat Rizzuto

   The EPA will release new chemical control rules within the next month, clearing part of the logjam of company requests to register new chemicals, an agency official told Bloomberg BNA July 12.

   The Environmental Protection Agency also is working to post in its ChemView database consent orders it has negotiated with chemical makers. These will date from the June 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act, according to a chemicals official who asked not to be identified because the official is not authorized to speak publicly.

   The consent orders will be stripped of any proprietary, confidential information, but they'll offer chemical makers and other groups insight into the types of data the agency is seeking as it reviews new chemicals and sets restrictions to prevent risky uses.

   The EPA July 10 released its first package of 29 significant new use rules, or SNURs, since the TSCA overhaul. 

   Backlog of Company Requests

   Any company wanting to make or process the chemicals without these restrictions or protections would first have to notify the EPA, which would have 90 days to review the company's intended use of the chemical and determine whether it would pose an unreasonable risk.

   The original manufacturer of each of the new chemicals already agreed to the restrictions through consent orders it negotiated with the agency.

   The EPA also is waiting to hear from several dozen chemical manufacturers about the near-final consent orders it has negotiated with them, the agency official said. Some companies quickly sign the negotiated agreements while others take months, the official added.

   For months the EPA has been working to clear a backlog of company requests to make new chemicals, called pre-manufacture notices. The backlog peaked at about 600 notices at the end of 2016 following the overhaul Congress made to TSCA, Jeffery Morris, director of EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, previously told Bloomberg BNA.

   The agency has pledged to eliminate that backlog by the end of July.

   As of July 3, the EPA had made 922 new chemical determinations since TSCA was amended. That volume is comparable to the roughly 1,000 new chemicals the agency reviews annually.

   http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446699&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446699&jd=116446699
   

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Chemical Management News

5. Does the World’s Top Weed Killer Cause Cancer? Trump’s EPA Will Decide

   Jul 13, 2017 | Bloomberg Businessweek

   By Peter Waldman, Lydia Mulvany, Tiffany Stecker, and Joel Rosenblatt

   Every year, farmers spray, on average, almost a pound of the herbicide glyphosate on every acre of cropland in the U.S., and nearly half a pound on every acre of cropland worldwide. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, a huge source of income for its manufacturer, Monsanto Co., and the foundation for its epochal foray into genetically modified organisms. If you know nothing else about GMOs and Monsanto, know this: The St. Louis-based company reengineered the DNA of corn, soybeans, and other crops for the primary purpose of making them resistant to Roundup.

   Farmers spray the chemical on crops grown from Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds. The weeds die, harvests expand, and expensive, laborious tillage is no longer necessary. Large-scale agriculture is built on this model, and not only in the U.S., which is why Bayer AG, the German drug and chemical company, agreed in September to buy Monsanto for $66 billion, pending regulatory approvals. Other than government antitrust objections, about the only thing that could mess up the purchase would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reverse its position on the active ingredient of Roundup, glyphosate.

   Last December, the EPA convened a panel of outside scientists to peer-review the agency’s long-standing conclusion that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer. The peer reviewers, a mix of academics, federal scientists, and chemical industry consultants, gathered at an EPA conference center in Arlington, Va. From the agency’s point of view, this was something of a formality. Federal law requires an EPA health-effects review for every pesticide at least once every 15 years, and glyphosate has enjoyed a clean bill of health since 1991, when the agency cleared the way for Monsanto’s GMO breakout by classifying the herbicide as noncarcinogenic to humans.

   Its use in global agriculture has soared almost fifteenfold since Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready seeds in 1996. As a result, traces of glyphosate have been detected in cookies, crackers, chips, breakfast cereals, and honey, and in human urine and breast milk. Monsanto says it’s nothing to worry about. “Glyphosate is about half as toxic as table salt and more than 10 times less toxic than caffeine,” the company says on one of its websites. More than 1,000 farmers and other agricultural workers stricken with non-Hodgkin lymphoma disagree. They’re suing Monsanto in state and federal courts across the country, claiming Roundup caused their cancer. Monsanto is vigorously contesting the claims. “There’s never been a more studied herbicide in the history of farming,” says Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president for strategy. “In more than 700 studies, not one has associated cancer with the use of glyphosate. And in the more than 160 countries that have registered glyphosate for use, not a single government agency has found glyphosate is a carcinogen.”

   December’s Scientific Advisory Panel meeting followed the typical script for a federal peer review, with some twists. Officials from the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs opened the public hearing by laying out 45 years of study data and describing why, in the agency’s view, they indicate that glyphosate is an unlikely human carcinogen at current exposure levels. The agency’s conclusion, elucidated in a 227-page issue paper released the previous September, reflects the “weight of evidence,” Jack Housenger, then chief of the pesticide office (he retired this year), told the panel. “Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think of our analysis,” he said, “and hopefully put the subject to bed so we can move on.”

   and Innovation in 1998, the company’s ag-biotech enterprise has been the closest thing America has to a Japanese-style strategic industry. From Clinton to Bush to Obama, successive administrations mobilized federal agencies and embassies around the world to promote GMOs, often against the vehement opposition of environmentalists and food purists, particularly in Europe. Dozens of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show how U.S. missions received special funding from Congress to advocate for genetically engineered products and how Monsanto prevailed on American diplomats to lobby on its behalf when problems arose. In Argentina, for example, when the ministry of defense banned the use of glyphosate on its urban farmland in 2009, the U.S. embassy intervened, according to a diplomatic cable to Washington. “Post contacts within the Secretariat of Agriculture assure us that Argentina will continue to support biotechnology,” said the cable, signed by Thomas Kelly III, deputy chief of mission at the time.

   The first breach in Monsanto’s fortress opened in 2015, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer labeled glyphosate a probable carcinogen. IARC, a France-based arm of the World Health Organization, has no regulatory power, but its carcinogenicity studies are widely cited in court cases and government health assessments worldwide. The agency’s assessment, based on published, peer-reviewed research, foreshadowed many of the concerns the EPA’s scientific advisory panel expressed last December. IARC acknowledged the studies were all flawed in different ways, but it concluded that their findings pointed toward cancer and couldn’t be dismissed. This led California on July 7 to list glyphosate as a known carcinogen, over Monsanto’s objection.

   The question now falls to the Trump EPA and the courts. Led by Administrator Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who sued the EPA more than a dozen times to stop environmental regulations, the agency has already canceled an Obama-era proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to cognitive damage in farmworkers and children. The chances that Pruitt will move against glyphosate, with all the attendant repercussions for industrial agriculture, appear slim.

   The considerations are much different, however, for U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. The judge is presiding over multidistrict litigation composed of 310 plaintiff lawsuits against Monsanto filed by cancer victims around the country. (It will likely consolidate hundreds more suits.) Chhabria has told both sides that the question of whether Roundup can cause cancer will turn on the scientific evidence presented at trial, not on what agencies such as IARC and EPA say. In this instance, the difference between Roundup and glyphosate is crucial. The EPA focuses on the latter. The plaintiffs in the court case claim that Roundup contains ingredients that exacerbate the effects of glyphosate alone.

   Chhabria has allowed the plaintiffs wide latitude to collect evidence on Monsanto’s health-effects research over the years, which the plaintiffs hope will show the company manipulated the data. In March he unsealed dozens of Monsanto’s confidential documents for the public to see. The records show internal deliberations on how to present the science on glyphosate’s health impacts and manage a global public-relations campaign to assure consumers and regulators that Roundup is safe.

   Monsanto documents show the company commissioned scientists to publish papers rebutting IARC. Reminiscent of tobacco companies, it also funneled money to front groups, according to a plaintiffs’ court filing. The groups, with names such as Genetic Literacy Project and American Council on Science and Health, published articles praising the EPA and attacking IARC, which they called on Congress to defund. The plaintiffs claim that Monsanto established a program called Let Nothing Go, through which it made payments to people with no apparent industry ties to post online comments defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs in news articles and Facebook posts. “That’s simply false,” says Monsanto’s Partridge. “We don’t need to do that type of stuff.”

   In Washington, where Monsanto has spent almost $60 million on lobbying since 2008, the company cultivates allies on both sides of the aisle and in the relevant federal agencies. It deployed five lobbyists in 2015 to trash IARC’s findings at the White House, Congress, and the agencies. Monsanto employees are regular visitors to the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, according to logs obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

   Relations were warm, even jocular. “So Jess called me out of the blue this morning,” wrote Monsanto’s lead EPA liaison, Dan Jenkins, to William Heydens, the company’s chief of regulatory research, in an April 2015 email released in the court case. Jess was Jess Rowland, a senior official in the EPA’s pesticide office who was chairing the agency’s cancer assessment of glyphosate at the time. Heydens had emailed Jenkins the day before, asking his colleague to reach out to the EPA and find out “what area they see as most problematic (e.g., human epidemiology vs. animal bioassays vs. genotoxicity), or just ask if there is anything that would help them defend the situation?”

   Rowland was all set, Jenkins reported back to Heydens. “We have enough to sustain our conclusions,” Rowland told Jenkins on the phone, according to Jenkins’s email. “I am the chair of the [cancer review],” he added, “and my folks are running this process for glyphosate.”

   On the same call, Jenkins wrote, Rowland said he was working to control a separate glyphosate assessment by another federal unit, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If I can kill this, I should get a medal,” Jenkins quoted Rowland as telling him.

   “Wow!” Heydens wrote back to Jenkins. “That’s very encouraging. Thanks for the news update.”

   In April 2016, as Rowland was preparing to retire after 26 years at the EPA, his assessment that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer leaked online—just in time for Monsanto’s lawyers to cite it at an important court hearing in San Francisco. The EPA quickly characterized the report as “preliminary” and “not final,” but Monsanto’s lawyers still told Judge Chhabria, “the scientists have spoken.” As for the ATSDR review, another internal Monsanto document reported that the CDC division had “agreed, for now, to take direction from EPA.” This May, EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins Jr. confirmed he’s investigating if EPA employees colluded with Monsanto. Through his lawyer, Rowland declined to comment for this story. Monsanto’s relationships with Rowland and other EPA employees were professional and proper, Partridge says.

   Bayer and Wall Street are betting none of this matters. Monsanto has built the kind of virtuous circle that management experts and business school professors rave about. More sales of Roundup Ready seeds beget more use of Roundup; more herbicide use drives up demand for Monsanto’s GMO seeds. The global chemical dependency could be too big to kick.

   It’s hard to quantify what a shift to glyphosate-free farming would look like. A study by chemical industry consultants in the U.K., where about a third of the nation’s wheat fields are sprayed with the herbicide, estimated that yields of the grain would fall 12 percent if glyphosate were banned. A study last year by Andrew Kniss, an associate professor of plant sciences at the University of Wyoming, showed the yields from organic farms were roughly two-thirds of those from conventional farms for corn, wheat, soybeans, and barley, and less than half for grapes, tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions.

   Kniss did another study that found planting genetically modified sugar beets saved farmers $200 an acre, equal to about 15 percent of their revenue, compared with planting non-GMO seeds. With no glyphosate, farmers would have to resort to using more-toxic chemicals for weed control, Kniss says, or revert to grueling tillage by hand. “Getting rid of glyphosate would have a major impact on farmers and their bottom lines,” he says. “It’s not like there’s a risk-free scenario here.”

   Robert Fraley grew up on a farm in Hoopeston, Ill., in the 1950s and 1960s, and one of his earliest memories is of the fields turning black each November. He recalls tractors churning up a foot of dark topsoil to keep the weeds from taking over. His dad cranked up the tractor every morning by 4 a.m. and plowed until Fraley got home from school and took over until midnight. In summers the boy walked the rows of beanstalks with his friends and cousins, pulling the weeds by hand. Fraley, now 64, helped develop Roundup Ready seeds and is Monsanto’s chief technology officer. “Any kid my age who spent time on the farm, the first thing you realize is the greatest challenge is weeds and bugs,” he says. “We freed America’s farm youth.”

   By 1980, when Fraley joined Monsanto as a 27-year-old with a doctorate in microbiology and biochemistry, scientists were experimenting with recombinant DNA in yeast and animal cells, but no one had introduced a new gene in a plant. Fraley’s team, working with a germ called agrobacterium, which normally causes blight in plants, isolated the part of the germ that binds to plant cells and can inject its DNA into plants, and eliminated the blight-producing sequence. They worked with petunia plants to fine-tune a gene insertion process, using the flower’s color genetics to map the plant’s chromosomes. It took more than a decade to develop commercially useful traits such as resistance to insects and glyphosate. The breakthrough finally made glyphosate, which was invented in 1970, a significant commercial power.

   Even as environmentalists vilify Monsanto for its link to GMOs, its mantra internally remains stewardship and sustainability. “We get to enjoy more of our forest and wetlands and prairies because we’ve increased yields on the land we’re already farming,” Fraley says. The alternative to genetic engineering and the accompanying chemicals, he says, is plowing up an additional 30 million or 40 million acres of land to feed a hungry planet.

   That probably overstates the trade-off. Land spared from cultivation is seldom set aside for conservation. And there are alternatives to Roundup Ready farming other than going organic. “It’s such a Monsanto-based perspective to say food prices will spike if we use less glyphosate,” says Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are other methods, besides organics, that are just as productive as conventional farming and don’t rely on toxic chemicals that endanger lives and harm the environment.” A more realistic alternative, she says, is finding middle ground between the industrial and organic farming models. Researchers at Iowa State University, for example, have shown that rotating diverse crops in three- and four-year cycles and controlling weeds with limited herbicide spraying produce similar yields and profits to conventional farming—with only 1 percent of the water toxicity. And such alternatives are becoming necessary anyway, because weeds are developing resistance to glyphosate at an accelerating rate.

   Nonetheless, a lot of farmers are deeply committed to glyphosate. “The cancer issue doesn’t concern me at all,” says Paul Jeschke, 64, who farms 4,000 acres of corn and soybeans with his brother-in-law and nephew in Mazon, Ill. Before he started using Roundup in the 1980s, Jeschke says, his topsoil, after constant tillage, would wash away in the rain. The quack grass would get so bad some farmers would have to put up a fence around their fields and turn the pigs loose, losing a year’s harvest. “Every one of us takes risks every day when we take our car on the road or get on an airplane or dump table salt into something we’re cooking,” Jeschke says. “Looking at the cost-benefit ratio, I’m extremely reluctant to give up glyphosate.”

   The first cancer concerns came from within the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs in 1984. This was despite the traditionally close relationships between the agency and the companies it regulates. Pesticide makers, called registrants, pay the office to review their compounds for registration. In 2016 they provided $47 million, or 28 percent, of OPP’s budget. The OPP is also the only EPA branch that does its own health assessments; the agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment is in charge of evaluations for the other EPA branches. The OPP’s studies are based, by law, on data provided by pesticide registrants themselves. This has fueled intra-agency criticism that some of its cancer reviews are too lax.

   Still, its scientists did come down hard on glyphosate early on. In February 1984, EPA toxicologists sounded the alarm internally when a Monsanto-sponsored study showed that 4 of 100 mice that were fed large amounts of glyphosate developed rare kidney tumors called tubular adenomas, compared with zero of 98 mice given little or no glyphosate. Monsanto insisted glyphosate wasn’t the cause, invoking an argument that would become a pillar of its—and the EPA’s—defense of the chemical for the next 30 years. The mice with the tumors weren’t the problem, the company said. The healthy mice were. The control group ought to have had more tumors.

   An OPP statistician was having none of it. “Our viewpoint is one of protecting the public health when we see suspicious data. It is not our job to protect registrants from false positives,” wrote Herbert Lacayo, who analyzed Monsanto’s complaints in a memo in February 1985. A week later, OPP’s toxicology branch cited the mouse tumors in a “consensus report” naming glyphosate a possible human carcinogen.

   Monsanto was apoplectic. The Roundup Ready world that was coming to life inside Fraley’s gene-splicing lab depended on the copious use of glyphosate. To change the EPA’s mind, the company solicited 10 outside experts to examine the mice in the control group. One of the scientists, who’d been a Monsanto consultant for many years, reported to the company that he’d found cellular changes in the kidney of one mouse. Monsanto argued it was another adenoma. If so, it would render the four tumors in the exposed mice statistically insignificant. The other experts then supported the finding of the single scientist.

   The EPA’s toxicology branch recut new sections of all the mouse kidneys for another look. Its scientists reconfirmed there was no control adenoma. Nevertheless, in February 1986, the EPA’s scientific advisory panel overruled the agency scientists, asserting that the “vast majority” of pathologists who’d looked at the control kidney in question saw a tumor. If the reviewers knew those experts were brought on by Monsanto, they didn’t care. The panel reclassified glyphosate as a chemical of uncertain carcinogenicity. Five years later, another EPA panel looked at the same data and a new rat study and reclassified glyphosate again, this time as noncarcinogenic to humans.

   By 1999, with Roundup Ready soybean, cotton, and corn seeds already changing global farm markets, Monsanto was facing questions about how glyphosate affected animal genes. Emails unsealed in March by Judge Chhabria show that the company hired James Parry, a prominent genetic toxicologist at Swansea University in Wales, to publicly advocate that the chemical wasn’t genotoxic—that is, it didn’t have a destructive effect on DNA and RNA. But after reviewing studies that Monsanto provided, Parry reached the opposite conclusion.

   He wrote a report for Monsanto that said glyphosate appeared to damage genes through a biochemical process called oxidative stress—the same cancer-causing mechanism IARC identified 16 years later. He recommended Monsanto do a series of studies to find out. If glyphosate was confirmed to be genotoxic, Parry said, the company should analyze the lymphatic cells of exposed humans to check for chromosome damage.

   Monsanto scientists deliberated for weeks about their consultant’s unwelcome advice. The company was in a “genotox hole,” wrote senior toxicologist Donna Farmer in a September 1999 email. “I am concerned about leaving Parry out there with this as the final project/his final impressions.”

   “Maybe you should invite Parry to St. Louis to get him more familiarized with the complete database,” suggested another Monsanto toxicologist.

   In an email Monsanto must surely regret, Heydens, the regulatory research chief, wrote that changing Parry’s mind would be expensive and probably not worth it. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here,” Heydens wrote to Farmer and two others. “We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators and Scientific Outreach operations when genetox issues arise. My read is that Parry is not currently such a person, and it would take quite some time and $$$/studies to get him there. We simply aren’t going to do the studies Parry suggests.”

   Parry’s report was never submitted to the EPA. (He died in 2010.) The episode points to an ongoing concern at Monsanto, which was concisely stated by Heydens in a later email: “Data generated by academics has always been a major concern for us in the defense of our products.” Partridge says Heydens sometimes made “an unfortunate choice of words,” but that subsequent studies by Monsanto resolved Parry’s concerns.

   The transcript of the EPA’s scientific advisory panel meeting runs 1,300 pages. Reading the document is the only way to know that four of the six reviewers charged with evaluating the crucial epidemiological data lambasted the EPA. (The four critics are all biomedical researchers at major universities; the two who supported the EPA’s evaluation are private consultants.) The agency disregarded all but one meta-analysis of the epidemiological data, because agency evaluators said the results weren’t statistically valid. When several of the panelists reran the pooled data, they found the EPA was plain wrong. Not only were the meta-analyses statistically significant, but they also showed farmers exposed to glyphosate had an elevated risk ratio for non-Hodgkin lymphoma of 1.27 to 1.5, meaning they were at 27 percent to 50 percent higher risk than control groups.

   “For a human epidemiologic study, an association of 1.2 or 1.3 is very meaningful and impactful,” says Mount Sinai’s Taioli. At the meeting, she pointed out that millions of American women no longer take estrogen after menopause, because studies found that it increased the risk of breast cancer by about 22 percent. Sheppard, the biostatistician with the University of Washington, said at the meeting that the EPA’s evidence assessment was “highly imbalanced” and that the agency downplayed statistical findings in favor of other criteria. “The agency’s conclusion is seriously flawed and needs to be strongly revised,” she said.

   Several panelists asserted that while glyphosate probably doesn’t initiate cancer by causing gene mutations, it appears to promote malignancies by spurring tumor growth. Such a carcinogen is more dangerous to humans than to rodents, because people live much longer and thus accumulate more lesions susceptible to glyphosate’s catalytic effect, panelist Barbara Parsons, a molecular toxicologist with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said at the meeting. She warned that mixing a tumor promoter such as glyphosate in formulations with other chemicals that have “any genotoxic potential would be a significant public-health concern.”

   That argument is the crux of the plaintiffs’ case in the consolidated federal suits. Their lawyers say they have evidence that Monsanto knew for years that some of the nonactive ingredients in Roundup are carcinogenic, and thus the danger of those chemicals is compounded when they’re combined with glyphosate. They say that the OPP, by focusing its concerns on the active ingredient instead of on the formulated product, has let Monsanto off the hook. Partridge denies any Roundup ingredients are genotoxic and says potentially carcinogenic impurities in the product are strictly controlled.

   The doubt invading Monsanto’s prize product is as strong as it’s ever been, even as Roundup has become instrumental in industrial agriculture. Farmers and consumers have reaped huge savings from productivity gains made possible by taming the scourge of weeds. Improbable as it seems, suppose the EPA now moves glyphosate from the category of unlikely carcinogen to suggestive or even likely. That would trigger extensive cost-benefit analyses. Then the questions get really difficult.

   https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-07-13/does-the-world-s-top-weed-killer-cause-cancer-trump-s-epa-will-decide
   

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6. California Designates First Priority Product under SCP Programm

   Jul 13, 2017 | Chemical Watch

   California's Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) has designated its first priority product under the Safer Consumer Products (SCP) programme.

   Children's sleeping items containing the flame retardants TDCPP or TCEP have been listed as a priority product effective 1 July. Their manufacturers have 60 days to register with the department and begin a statutory alternatives analysis to determine if a safer alternative is possible.

   The DTSC announced in July 2016 that this would be its first priority product designation under the SCP programme. But during the rulemaking process, some in industry questioned its necessity, given that many manufacturers have already phased out the use of these substances.

   The rule applies to polyurethane foam-padded products such as nap mats, bassinet foam, and play pens containing tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCPP) or tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP). It does not apply to mattresses, mattress pads or child restraint systems.

   TDCPP has been listed as a carcinogen under California’s Proposition 65 since October 2011. TCEP has had such a designation since 1992. The DTSC also links the substances to reproductive toxicity, endocrine toxicity and several other hazard traits.

   Both substances are included in the chlorinated phosphate ester cluster of flame retardants being assessed by the US EPA prior to TSCA reform. The agency released a problem formulation and initial assessment of the cluster in August 2015.NGO petition

   In June, the agency denied an NGO petition calling for mandatory testing of the cluster of flame retardants. The substances are not included in the first ten chemicals subject to risk evaluation under the new law, although the cyclic aliphatic bromide cluster (HBCD) of flame retardants is.

   The DTSC's proposal for its second priority product, spray polyurethane foam, has been strongly opposed by industry. Paint strippers containing methylene chloride are slated to be named the third priority product, but a formal rulemaking for this has not yet begun.

   In June, the DTSC issued guidance for performing alternatives analyses under the SCP programme. The DTSC's Green Ribbon Science Panel will convene on 17 July to discuss this guide, as well as other issues related to the programme.Children's sleeping items containing the flame retardants TDCPP or TCEP have been listed as a priority product effective 1 July. Their manufacturers have 60 days to register with the department and begin a statutory alternatives analysis to determine if a safer alternative is possible.
   

   The DTSC announced in July 2016 that this would be its first priority product designation under the SCP programme. But during the rulemaking process, some in industry questioned its necessity, given that many manufacturers have already phased out the use of these substances.

   The rule applies to polyurethane foam-padded products such as nap mats, bassinet foam, and play pens containing tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCPP) or tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP). It does not apply to mattresses, mattress pads or child restraint systems.

   TDCPP has been listed as a carcinogen under California’s Proposition 65 since October 2011. TCEP has had such a designation since 1992. The DTSC also links the substances to reproductive toxicity, endocrine toxicity and several other hazard traits.

   Both substances are included in the chlorinated phosphate ester cluster of flame retardants being assessed by the US EPA prior to TSCA reform. The agency released a problem formulation and initial assessment of the cluster in August 2015.

   NGO petition

   In June, the agency denied an NGO petition calling for mandatory testing of the cluster of flame retardants. The substances are not included in the first ten chemicals subject to risk evaluation under the new law, although the cyclic aliphatic bromide cluster (HBCD) of flame retardants is.

   The DTSC's proposal for its second priority product, spray polyurethane foam, has been strongly opposed by industry. Paint strippers containing methylene chloride are slated to be named the third priority product, but a formal rulemaking for this has not yet begun.

   In June, the DTSC issued guidance for performing alternatives analyses under the SCP programme. The DTSC's Green Ribbon Science Panel will convene on 17 July to discuss this guide, as well as other issues related to the programme.

   https://chemicalwatch.com/57624/california-designates-first-priority-product-under-scp-programme
   

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7. The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese

   Jul 12, 2017 | New York Times

   By Roni Caryn Rabin

   Potentially harmful chemicals that were banned from children’s teething rings and rubber duck toys a decade ago may still be present in high concentrations in your child’s favorite meal: macaroni and cheese mixes made with powdered cheese.

   The chemicals, called phthalates, can disrupt male hormones like testosterone and have been linked to genital birth defects in infant boys and learning and behavior problems in older children. The chemicals migrate into food from packaging and equipment used in manufacturing and may pose special risks to pregnant women and young children.

   The Food and Drug Administration has not banned their presence in foods, though a 2014 report to the Consumer Product Safety Commission urged federal agencies to assess risks “with a view to supporting risk management steps.” The report concluded that food, drugs and beverages, and not toys, were the primary source of exposure to phthalates.

   Now a new study of 30 cheese products has detected phthalates in all but one of the samples tested, with the highest concentrations found in the highly processed cheese powder in boxed mac and cheese mixes.

   “The phthalate concentrations in powder from mac and cheese mixes were more than four times higher than in block cheese and other natural cheeses like shredded cheese, string cheese and cottage cheese,” said Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center, one of four advocacy groups that funded the report. Others were the Ecology Center, Healthy Babies Bright Futures and Safer States.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEWELLA Call for Action on Toxic ChemicalsJULY 1, 2016WELLCould Environmental Chemicals Shape Our Exercise Habits? JUNE 29, 2016Home Depot Says It Will Phase Out Chemical Used in Vinyl FlooringAPRIL 22, 2015

   The groups tested 10 different varieties of mac and cheese, including some that were labeled organic, and found high levels of phthalates in all of them.

   The tested products were purchased in the United States and shipped in the original packaging to VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium, where fat extracted from each product sample was analyzed for 13 phthalates using validated test methods, Mr. Belliveau said.

   Some two million boxes of mac and cheese, a relatively inexpensive food that can be whipped up in minutes, are sold every day in the United States, according to 2013 figures from Symphony/IRI Group. Mr. Belliveau said consumers would have a hard time avoiding the chemical.

   “Our belief is that it’s in every mac ‘n’ cheese product — you can’t shop your way out of the problem,” said Mr. Belliveau, who is urging consumers to contact manufacturers and pressure them to investigate how phthalates are getting into their products and take steps to eliminate it. Nine of the cheese products tested were made by Kraft, which makes most of the macaroni and cheese products sold, though the group did not disclose the names of specific products tested. Officials with Kraft did not respond to requests for comment on the report and its findings.

   Devon Hill, a lawyer in Washington who has experience with companies that make phthalates, said many phthalates have been phased out of food processing and packaging, and that those still in use result in very low exposures. The cheese tests looked for the presence of 13 different phthalates and detected all but two, with some food items containing up to six different phthalates in a single product.

   Environmental and food safety groups petitioned the F.D.A. last year to remove all phthalates from food, food packaging and food processing and manufacturing equipment, though the petition has been delayed temporarily for technical reasons, said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund, which is coordinating the petition process for 11 advocacy groups, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Working Group and others.

   “A chemical is not allowed in food unless there is a reasonable certainty it will cause no harm,” Mr. Neltner said, adding that because of all the evidence regarding the potential harms of phthalates, “We don’t think the F.D.A. can say there is a reasonable certainty of no harm.”

   An F.D.A. spokeswoman said the agency regulates all substances in food contact materials that can be expected to migrate into food, including phthalates, and said there must be “sufficient scientific information to demonstrate that the use of a substance in food contact materials is safe under the intended conditions of use before it is authorized for those uses.” The spokeswoman said: “The F.D.A. continues to monitor literature and research on these compounds as it becomes available.”

   Phthalates are not deliberately added to food. They are industrial chemicals used to soften plastics and are used as solvents, in adhesives and in ink on packaging.

   The chemicals migrate into food from food processing equipment like plastic tubing, conveyor belts and gaskets and other plastic materials used in the manufacturing process, and can also seep in from printed labels or plastic materials in the packaging.

   Since they bind with fats, they tend to build up in fatty foods, including not just cheese but baked goods, infant formula, meats, oils and fats, and fast food, studies show.

   Europe has banned many phthalates from use in plastics that come into contact with fatty foods, including baby food, but the F.D.A. allows the use of many phthalates in such materials and classifies them as indirect food additives.

   Although the concentration of phthalates in food may be quite low, measured in parts per billion, they are still present at higher levels than the natural hormones in the body, said Heather B. Patisaul, a professor of biological sciences at the Center for Human Health and the Environment at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

   There is strong evidence that phthalates block the production of the hormone testosterone. “That means there is less testosterone available to the developing male fetus, and since testosterone is absolutely vital to build his reproductive organs, the worry is that you will get malformations and other kinds of problems that translate to health effects later,” Dr. Patisaul said. Those include “infertility, low sperm counts, altered male reproductive behavior and changes in the area of the brain that are important for sex differences between men and women,” as well as a heightened risk of testicular cancer later on, she said.

   “If you asked most scientists about the top 10 or 20 endocrine-disrupting chemicals they worry about, phthalates would be on that list,” Dr. Patisaul said. “We have an enormous amount of data.”

   Emerging research has also suggested links between early childhood exposure to phthalates and neurodevelopmental and behavior problems in young children, including aggression, hyperactivity and possible cognitive delays, said Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, who studies phthalates.

   If you’re pregnant or planning a pregnancy, have young children or want to reduce your family’s exposure to phthalates for other reasons, here are some suggestions:

   ■ Eat more whole fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, and minimize the amount of processed food you eat. “Avoid anything you find in a box that could sit around for many years,” said Dr. Sathyanarayana. “There are so many steps to get to that boxed product, and every step along the way, there’s usually plastic involved.”

   ■ Choose low-fat dairy products such as skim milk and low fat cheeses, and avoid high-fat foods such as cream, whole milk and fatty meats. “We know these more toxic phthalates accumulate in fat,” Dr. Sathyanarayana said.

   ■ Use glass, stainless steel, ceramic or wood to hold and store food instead of plastics, Dr. Sathyanarayana suggested, and if you are using sippy cups and baby bottles made from hard polycarbonate plastics, don’t put hot liquids in them.

   ■ Wash your hands frequently, and take your shoes off at home to avoid household dust that may be contaminated with chemical traces. Vacuum and wet dust frequently.

   ■ Food isn’t the only source of exposure. Many fragrances contain phthalates, Dr. Patisaul said, so choose unscented personal care products, from cleansers, moisturizers and cosmetics to shampoo and detergents as well.

   ■ If you’d like to try making your own macaroni and cheese, here are a few recipe options from the Cooking section of The New York Times: Creamy Macaroni and Cheese; Crusty Macaroni and Cheese; The Best Macaroni and Cheese.

   https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/well/eat/the-chemicals-in-your-mac-and-cheese.html?_r=0
   

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Energy News

8. EPA, Industry Cite Methane NSPS Review, Delay Plans to Back Recall Bid

   Jul 12, 2017 | Inside EPA

   By Abby Smith

   EPA and several industry groups are intensifying their calls for a federal appellate court panel to recall its mandate requiring the agency to immediately implement Obama-era methane limits for oil and gas facilities, charging the court's immediate issuance of its mandate vacating EPA's stay risks undercutting the agency's reconsideration of the rule and is unreasonable given agency plans to further stay the requirements.

   “[T]he short duration of EPA's stay and the fact that Petitioners have prevailed on the merits (at this stage) should not be dispositive of whether the Court takes the unusual step of mandating that EPA and the regulated community immediately comply with the Court's decision,” EPA writes in a July 12 reply brief.

   “The short duration of EPA's stay presents all parties, Petitioners and Respondents alike, with a risk that a favorable, final decision may not translate into effective relief,” the agency adds.

   EPA's brief seeks to support its July 7 motion to recall a mandate from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the agency to immediately lift its 90-day administrative stay of the Obama-era oil and gas methane new source performance standards (NSPS).

   The agency has asked the court for “at least” 52 days before it must implement the Obama-era rule. Some of the rule's compliance deadlines, including a requirement for regulated entities to submit initial monitoring surveys, have already passed, so how the court addresses the issue could determine whether industry must comply with any of the rule's requirements.

   The D.C. Circuit in a split July 3 ruling vacated the stay, with the majority siding with environmentalists' arguments that EPA did not properly use its authority under section 307(d)(7)(B) of the Clean Air Act to pause the rule's provisions.

   Environmentalists and supporting states, in July 11 responses, opposed the recall motion, suggesting it would be counter-intuitive for the court to grant EPA the time it is seeking because it “would effectively nullify the Court's decision by allowing EPA to run out the clock.” The immediate timing of the mandate, they argue, was required due to the short duration of EPA's 90-day stay in order to properly grant petitioners the relief they were seeking.

   Environmentalists also charged that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's “dilatory and irregular approach” to staying the rule's requirements -- which took almost seven weeks to be released, two days after the rule's June 3 compliance deadline for initial monitoring surveys -- for any problems that industry might face in complying.

   But both EPA in its July 12 reply and industry intervenors in a July 11 response supporting the recall motion argue that the D.C. Circuit's decision to immediately issue its mandate “deprived” them “of the opportunity to explain to the Court why expedited issuance of the mandate would be unwarranted."

   They also argue such a scenario “relieved” environmentalists of their “obligation” to show why a hastened issuance was justified.

   According to the briefs, the court typically does not issue such a mandate until one week after the timeframe during which EPA can seek rehearing expires, thus a 52-day window.

   'Whipsaw'

   Industry intervenors -- including the American Petroleum Institute, GPA Midstream Association, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, Texas Oil & Gas Association, Western Energy Alliance, Independent Petroleum Association of America and others -- are explicitly asking the court to withdraw the mandate until that 52-day timeframe has expired.

   EPA's request is less specific, seeking either the “standard period” or “such other reasonable period as the Court deems appropriate.”

   The agency and industry sharply refute the arguments from environmentalists and states. They argue, in part, that lifting the stay would lead to only “incremental” emissions reductions that do not justify the risk to industry from the costs of immediate compliance.

   EPA also suggests that the court's immediate issuance of the mandate could undercut its reconsideration and review of the methane NSPS, countering an argument from environmentalists that the action would not affect such a process. The D.C. Circuit in its July 3 ruling also noted its vacatur of the stay that “nothing in this opinion in any way limits EPA's authority to reconsider the final rule.”

   But EPA charges, “By Petitioners' own estimate, there are more than 14,000 wells that are subject to compliance with the 2016 Rule and which may incur costs of compliance; to the extent they must do so, this circumscribes the meaningfulness of EPA's grant of reconsideration of the 2016 Rule.”

   Industry groups, in their July 11 response, also argue that because the D.C. Circuit did not rule on environmentalists' request for a judicial stay of EPA's administrative stay, it did not properly weigh the balance of harms -- which they argue should impact the court's decision to issue an immediate mandate.

   “Because this Court specifically declined to decide whether to grant an emergency stay, which would have required it to apply the four-factor test, there are no judicial findings regarding what harm would occur if the stay is vacated. The lack of judicial findings is significant given that both EPA and the Industry Intervenor-Respondents contested the Movants' claims of harms,” the industry brief reads.

   The industry groups also specifically link the issue to EPA's two pending proposals to delay the methane NSPS requirements by three months and by two years. Because EPA could be in a position to finalize such actions “within just a few short weeks,” it is “unreasonable” for the D.C. Circuit to immediately require the agency to lift its 90-day stay, as the requirements “may again be stayed” shortly after they are implemented.

   “This whipsaw could accomplish little in the way of environmental protection during the remaining days of the 90-day stay period, but would impose very significant costs and implementation burdens on affected facilities,” the industry brief says. “By granting summary disposition, the Court has not considered these important factors. They weigh heavily here against an immediate mandate.”

   Nonetheless, environmentalists are also attempting to link the D.C. Circuit's actions on the 90-day stay with the pending EPA proposals, suggesting the latter is an unlawful extension of the agency's earlier effort that has now been vacated by the court.

   Other observers have said a key flaw in EPA's proposed two-year delay is that it links the move to the agency's reconsideration proceeding. Environmentalists and other observers say air act section 307 only allows the agency to stay rulemakings linked to a mandatory reconsideration process -- in other words, one required by the two-pronged test -- for no longer than three months.

   Thus, because EPA is proposing to delay the methane NSPS provisions for an additional two years, beyond the 90-day stay that has now been vacated by the court, environmentalists say EPA could find its action difficult to defend.

   Pruitt Weighs In

   Environmentalists claimed the D.C. Circuit's July 3 ruling as a first victory over Trump EPA efforts to roll back Obama-era climate and environmental regulations, and many observers say the ruling could have an impact in pending litigation over EPA attempts to delay other Obama-era rules -- including methane standards for landfills.

   But EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in a recent interview with Reuters appeared to downplay any connection between the methane NSPS litigation and other efforts, both to delay rules and to roll them back.

   “That was a case about our authority to stay certain rules. That's distinct from withdrawing rules,” he told Reuters. “I think that our section 307 stay that we used there was because we were up against the compliance time and [tried] to use authority that we thought was well established.”

   Pruitt said EPA will “respond accordingly” to the July 3 ruling, suggesting the agency is considering options for appeal, but he described the methane NSPS litigation as a “case focused on the facts of that particular case,” seeking to distance it from other delay efforts.

   “I don't think it says anything to us with respect to authority we have to stay under section 705 of the Administrative Procedure Act or section 307 of the Clean Air Act,” Pruitt said. “Those are well established procedures we have. We will use them accordingly as necessary.”

   https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-industry-cite-methane-nsps-review-delay-plans-back-recall-bid
   

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9. Calif. in Crosshairs as Panel Wrangles over Development

   Jul 13, 2017 | E&E Daily

   By Rob Hotakainen

   As the Trump administration moves to open the oceans to more oil and gas drilling, California Democratic Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán offered a blunt warning yesterday: "Stay off my California coastline."

   At a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing, Barragán and other Democrats made clear they want nothing to do with President Trump's plans to allow more energy development off U.S. coasts. They fear it will cause too much damage to tourism and the environment.

   But Republicans and administration officials who back the effort say California's experience shows exactly why more drilling should be approved.

   "California is one of the greatest consumers of petroleum products," Katharine MacGregor, acting Interior assistant secretary for land and minerals management, told the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources. She added that tourism in the state also relies heavily on both motor and jet fuel.

   In 2016, California got 11 percent of its crude oil supply from Alaska and imported more than 54 percent from foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Oman, according to the California Energy Commission.

   That represented a dramatic turnaround from 25 years earlier, in 1991, when the state received 46 percent of its oil supply from Alaska and only 4 percent from foreign sources.

   "These shocking figures demonstrate the importance of accessing and developing American natural resources, both on and offshore, in order to eliminate dependence on unfriendly foreign countries," the subcommittee's majority said in a report released at the hearing.

   Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas highlighted the issue at the hearing, asking MacGregor what could be done to reduce the dependence on foreign oil in the nation's most populous state.

   On April 28, Trump signed an executive order to reverse an Obama administration ban on drilling in much of the Arctic Ocean while opening the door for more offshore oil and gas leasing in parts of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico (Greenwire, April 28).

   As of March, 16 million acres of the outer continental shelf was under lease, accounting for 18 percent of domestic oil production and 4 percent of gas production.

   But MacGregor told the subcommittee that the Obama administration made 94 percent of the outer continental shelf off-limits to "responsible development," ignoring interest from industry leaders and state and local governments.

   Subcommittee Chairman Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said Trump's order to reopen Interior's five-year drilling plan and consider adding areas in the Arctic, Atlantic, and the western and central Gulf of Mexico would help an industry that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and "serves as an important facet of coastal life."

   Opponents said that more drilling would be a costly mistake, certain to lead to more oil spills. Many of them cite the 2010 BP PLC accident off the Louisiana coast that killed 11 workers and released millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

   California Democratic Rep. Alan Lowenthal, the subcommittee's ranking member, said Trump's order was an attempt to "make things easier and more profitable" for Exxon Mobil Corp. and other energy companies while posing a risk to the public.

   "I fear it will be just a matter of time before we see a repeat of that horrible day seven years ago," he said.

   Barragán called Trump's plans "dangerous," telling her colleagues that the record high heat in Los Angeles recently demonstrated the need for the U.S. to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

   "Climate change is real, it's happening, and we need to act now to stop it, not to go the other way and open up our coastline," she said.

   So far, more than 100 lawmakers — including Democrats and Republicans — have sent letters to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke opposing expanded offshore drilling.

   Many opponents worry that marine life could be threatened by seismic testing, which involves the use of airgun blasts used to search for oil and gas deposits below the seafloor.

   "There is nowhere for the impacted mammals like whales, dolphins and sea turtles to escape the noise, and we know the noise negatively affects mammals' ability to communicate, navigate, feed and mate," said Margaret Howell, founder of a group called Stop Offshore Drilling in the Atlantic.

   Howell told the panel that 126 East Coast municipalities have already passed resolutions or written letters opposing drilling expansion plans, including every mayor in every coastal city and town in her home state of South Carolina.

   Georgia Republican Rep. Jody Hice said opponents of seismic testing were engaged in "alarmism" and said there's no definitive proof that animals would suffer.

   "It is important that we reduce the red tape that is associated with seismic surveying," he said.

   https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/07/13/stories/1060057306
   

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Chemical Security News

10. Chemical Safety Board Avoids Funding Cut in House—For Now

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Sam Pearson

    House lawmakers’ decision to leave the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's funding flat in fiscal 2018 is a small reprieve after the White House proposed eliminating the agency earlier this year.

    Appropriators would allow the CSB to continue operating, largely unchanged, if the $11 million funding level for the agency that the House Appropriations Committee released July 11 makes it into Congress’ final spending bill.

    Lawmakers posted the fiscal 2018 Interior-Environment Appropriations bill July 11 to fund the CSB along with other agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department, both of which would see hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts. Lawmakers on the Interior-Environment Subcommittee approved the legislation by voice vote July 12.

    The White House proposed closing the board earlier this year, with a budget document describing it as “duplicative.” Not only did lawmakers decide the CSB should keep running, but their proposal would keep funding flat at $11 million. The CSB said in its own budget request May 23 it needed $11.629 million for the upcoming fiscal year.

    In a statement July 11, Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) said the bill “responsibly supports the agencies and offices we rely on to preserve our natural resources for future generations, and prioritizes our limited funding to programs that protect environmental safety, such as the Chemical Safety Board.”

    The Senate Appropriations Committee is also working on spending legislation. A spokeswoman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who heads the Interior-Environment Subcommittee, did not respond to Bloomberg BNA's request for comment July 12.

    CSB Left in the Dark

    CSB Chairperson Vanessa Sutherland told Bloomberg BNA July 11 the board was in the dark this week about its appropriations, despite months of meetings with congressional aides and other interest groups to try to educate them about the agency's value.

    Organizations like the National Association of Chemical Distributors (NACD), American Society of Safety Engineers, National Safety Council, and others sent letters to members of Congress supporting the CSB, Sutherland said. The board sent staff to three investigations since the White House proposed its elimination, something Sutherland said will continue.

    Letting the CSB determine the circumstances and root causes of chemical accidents instead of OSHA or the EPA is preferable “to allow for as much transparency as possible in investigations,” Jennifer Gibson, NACD's vice president of government affairs, said in an email to Bloomberg BNA July 12. She said the board's work made the chemical industry safer.”

    The White House budget request in March “was a bombshell, because it was completely unexpected,” Thomas Zoeller, CSB senior adviser, told Bloomberg BNA. 

    Not a Done Deal

    Stephen Brown, vice president of government affairs at Tesoro Corp., which recently had one of its California refineries investigated, said in an email to Bloomberg BNA while lawmakers believe CSB's functions should be maintained, Congress could consider broader changes in the future.

    “How best to fulfill the mission and function of the CSB, and if it needs to be kept at the CSB, is likely an open question that Congress will now start to consider,” Brown said, “and Tesoro looks forward to being a part of that conversation along with other stakeholders.”

    The CSB's benefits extend not just to chemical plant workers or people who live nearby but to broader populations like high school students in chemistry labs, where the CSB has published documents on how teachers can perform safe laboratory experiments, Michael Wright, health and safety director for the United Steelworkers union, said. He added Frelinghuysen's ties to New Jersey, a significant chemical producing state where the CSB has performed three investigations, may have also helped.

    “For God's sake,” Wright said, “it's only $11 million a year.”

    http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446700&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446700&jd=116446700
    

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Environment News

11. (ACC Mentioned) A Little Less Science for EPA’s Science Advisory Boards

    Jul 12, 2017 | Undark Magazine

    By Zack Coleman

    Revelations about relationships between industry and the Trump administration officials, and how they relate to policy, are emerging almost weekly. Those ties could grow even more complex and consequential with the reshaping of independent advisory panels that recommend public health standards on everything from ozone pollution to pesticide exposure.

    The Environmental Protection Agency in particular has been culling scientific advisers, worrying many in the scientific community that the Trump administration intends to replace their voices with industry-friendly ones. More recently, agency officials have taken an axe to EPA’s Congressionally-mandated Scientific Advisory Board and its subsidiary Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.

    These advisory positions — often (though not always) unpaid — are influential in their ability to offer input on EPA rules, and members have traditionally been drawn from academia and the wider scientific and research communities. But in an announcement late last month seeking nominations for new advisers, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt expressed interest in “scientific viewpoints from a full range of stakeholders” — a phrasing that many observers took to be an open call for nominations of industry representatives.

    The announcement also pointed explicitly to a recent Government Accountability Office report, which found that EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) “has never provided advice on adverse social, economic, or energy effects” of air pollution standards. “Moving forward,” the agency’s statement declared, “EPA will ensure the CASAC addresses this serious deficiency and fulfills its complete duties.”

    While the administration has decried the financial costs of regulations on industry, environmental advocates note that the federal standards-setting process calls for protecting the public health first. Regulators then consider cost and technical capabilities to meet the standard through policy and risk and exposure analyses. Opening the scientific process to industry and state regulatory input would invite conflicts of interest, critics of the recent EPA moves argue — potentially allowing them to insist on weaker limits.

    “We’ve heard those arguments before and essentially our response remains the same: The Clean Air Act says to consider public health, period. You don’t consider the cost,” Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of national policy with the American Lung Association, told Undark.

    Nolen and other critics point to other worrying signs, including deep ties between industry and the administration’s government-wide deregulatory effort. A top scientist on the agency’s scientific review board has also publicly said that Pruitt’s chief of staff tried to influence her testimony at a Congressional hearing. Other reports have documented meetings between administration officials and business leaders preceding regulatory decisions that favored those firms. And a former American Chemistry Council official now at EPA reshaped a chemicals law to benefit industry clients for which she used to lobby.

    At the same time, some stakeholders welcome a shakeup of the EPA’s science advisory boards because they say the panels are bereft of expertise in the actual implementation of environmental regulations and the social and economic impacts that come with them. Quite aside from industry representatives, that sort of expertise can be delivered by local, tribal, and state environmental regulators, said Clint Woods, executive director of the Association of Air Pollution Control Agencies, whose members are state and local air regulators.

    “You have a fairly clear directive from Congress that you want to have diverse perspective,” Woods told Undark. “I would not undersell state environmental regulatory experts.”

    Woods’ group is launching a website next week at www.cooperativefederalism.org, which he called a “one-stop shop” for his members to find out when and where federal advisory committees were meeting. Woods said the goal of the website, which is currently in a pilot run, is to enable state, local, and tribal officials to more easily make their voices heard.

    The ongoing battle regarding standards for ground-level ozone, or smog, is perhaps the most instructive example of what’s at stake. The EPA delayed the Obama administration’s 2015 proposal to tighten the standard, arguing that states needed more time to craft implementation plans.

    Industry, along with GOP-leaning states, contend that the new, tougher emissions standards would cripple manufacturing, and Congressional Republicans have long cited the ozone standard as a reason for overhauling the EPA’s advisory boards — an argument that Woods happens to agree with. He noted that of the 22 members on the science panel working on the ozone standard, just one came from a state or local perspective.

    
    But public health and science experts are concerned the Pruitt-led EPA is less interested in a diversity of voices for its own sake, and more committed to simply convoluting the rulemaking process by including industry voices and state officials who might well be influenced by economically important businesses they regulate. That the EPA delayed implementation of the new ozone standard even though many states would have had to do very little — or in many cases, nothing — to meet the new limit sets a troubling precedent, environmental advocates say.

    “We’re concerned about every step of the process,” Nolen said of the ozone standard process. “Including who reviews it.”

    https://undark.org/2017/07/12/epa-science-advisory-board-pruitt/
    

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12. Groups Sue EPA Over Ozone Implementation Delay

    Jul 13, 2017 | E&E News PM

    By Sean Reilly

    A dozen environmental and public health groups sued U.S. EPA today over its decision to roll back implementation of its 2015 ground-level ozone standard by a year.

    The lawsuit was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In a related motion, the plaintiffs charge that the decision flouts a timetable in the Clean Air Act and will harm public health if left in place. They ask the court to either vacate the delay or stay it and give the suit fast-track review.

    EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt had announced the delay in attainment designations in a letter to governors early last month, citing a provision in the act that permits a delay if the agency has "insufficient information" to proceed.

    But environmentalists have said the agency has all the data it needs to proceed with the designations, which would start the clock on bringing areas that don't meet the threshold of 70 parts per billion into compliance.

    "EPA claims it needs more time, but this move is a dangerous step backward when it comes to cleaning up smog in communities," John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement today.

    Like the agency's attempt to stay implementation of methane curbs on new oil and operations, which was vacated last week by the D.C. Circuit, he said, "this unwarranted delay will meet the same fate and be overruled by the courts."

    Other plaintiffs include West Harlem Environmental Action Inc., the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

    Ozone, a lung irritant that is the main ingredient in smog, is spawned by the reaction of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides in sunshine. Researchers have linked exposure to asthma attacks in children and added breathing difficulties for emphysema patients.

    Then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy set the 70 ppb benchmark in October 2015, citing a requirement to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety. After states turned in their attainment recommendations last fall, agency officials had initially been scheduled to make the final decisions by the beginning of October.

    Those designations are now scheduled for October 2018, according to a follow-up Federal Register notice published late last month. EPA is meanwhile continuing to ponder possible changes to the standard, according to a court filing submitted this week in a separate package of litigation.

    Among the reasons for holding off, Pruitt said, EPA needs to better understand the role of "background ozone" resulting from stratospheric intrusions, wildfires and other forces outside regulators' direct control, as well as the impact of ozone wafting into the United States from abroad.

    In response to a congressional directive tacked on to a fiscal 2017 omnibus spending bill passed this spring, the agency has also created an "Ozone Cooperative Compliance Task Force" to come up with "additional flexibilities" for states to comply with the ozone benchmark, Pruitt said in the letter.

    In a recent email, EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham described the task force as an internal working group of agency staff "who have relevant expertise that is working to develop the congressional report and the guidance by which we will address concerns related to ozone." Under the language attached to the spending law, the group has three months to report back.

    https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/07/12/stories/1060057287
    

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13. Appropriations Bill Advances With Cuts for EPA, Interior

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Alan Kovski and Tiffany Stecker

    A spending bill with cuts for environmental and public lands agencies was approved July 12 by a House subcommittee, over Democratic objections that the cuts were too big.

    The proposed legislation from House appropriators would cut the EPA budget by about 7 percent, which was less than what was proposed by President Donald Trump.

    The fiscal year 2018 spending bill for the Interior Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and related agencies was approved by voice vote of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. Democrats on the panel signaled their dissatisfaction over the cuts through their silence during the vote and their criticisms beforehand.

    “The cuts are just, in my opinion, too deep,” said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), ranking member of the committee. She was especially bothered by the reduction in EPA funding.

    The bill would reduce funding to $31.4 billion from $32.37 billion for Interior, the EPA, and some other agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service. That funding level is $4.3 billion above what was included in Trump's budget request.

    The bill set EPA spending at $7.5 billion, or $528 million less than current spending levels. That would leave $1.9 billion more for the EPA than what the Trump budget request proposed, however.

    Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chairman of the subcommittee, stressed bipartisan aspects of the bill, notably elements that would ignore or minimize reductions the administration proposed.

    The expectation on Capitol Hill is appropriations bills are headed toward an omnibus bill rolling them up together later in the year.

    Water Funding Cuts Sought

    The bill would provide $1.14 billion for the clean water state revolving fund, an 18 percent cut from the current fiscal year. Funding for the drinking water state revolving fund would remain roughly flat at $863.2 million.

    The two funds provide for state-run loans for communities to fix sewers, water treatment plants, and other infrastructure. For the fledgling Water Infrastructure Financing and Innovation Act program, which supplements the revolving funds, the bill would appropriate $25 million.

    The proposed budget by the White House sought $2.3 billion for the state revolving funds, about $300 million, or 13 percent, more than the funding House appropriators proposed. For WIFIA, the White House sought $20 million.

    For geographic programs, such as the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay, Congress did not support the White House's request to zero out funding. House appropriators proposed $397 million for geographic programs, including $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, unchanged from fiscal 2017.

    In the current and prior fiscal years, Congress has supported $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and about $73 million for the Chesapeake Bay program.

    Cuts Spread Through Interior

    The bill would cut spending in many Interior agencies, but the reductions would be far less than what the Trump administration requested.

    The Bureau of Land Management would receive $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2018, a cut of $46 million or 4 percent from the current year, including a $20 million cut for land acquisition.

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would receive $1.5 billion, a $38 million or 2 percent decrease. The legislation prioritizes funding to reduce the endangered species delisting backlog and to fight invasive species, among other things.

    The bill provides $275 million for Land and Water Conservation Fund programs, down $125 million or 31 percent from the current level despite the fact that many Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are reluctant to reduce spending from the fund.

    The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, regulating surface coal mining, would receive $213 million, down $40 million or 16 percent. That would include $75 million to continue a pilot program to accelerate the reclamation of abandoned mine lands—a program the Trump administration had proposed zeroing out.

    Fighting Fires, Conserving Land

    Overall, the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service would receive $3.4 billion for wildfire fighting and prevention. It would match the 10-year average for wildland fire suppression costs.

    The legislation includes $575 million for hazardous fuels management, which is $5 million above the fiscal year 2017 level. Fuels management—including timber harvests and controlled burns—is where the sticking points arise as environmental activists fight logging.

    The bill would make a big cut in the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses money from offshore oil and gas development to pay for conservation activities.

    Spending from the fund would be set at $275 million, a $125 million or 31 percent reduction from current spending levels, despite the fact that many Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress support the fund's work. The primary disagreements come over federal acquisition of additional land.

    EPA Regulations Targeted

    McCollum objected to what she described as 16 partisan riders in the bill that, in her view, threatened to undermine environmental protections and benefit polluters.

    The bill contains language identical to what is in an energy-water spending measure that would allow the Trump administration to accelerate the withdrawal of the 2015 stayed Clean Water Rule, also known as the “waters of the U.S.” rule.

    Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the full committee, singled out the Clean Water Rule rider as a “poison pill.”

    The administration would be allowed to roll back the rule “without regard to any provision of statute or regulation that establishes a requirement for such withdrawal.” The administration would be allowed to expedite the process by skipping the public notice and comment period normally required under the Administrative Procedure Act for a federal rulemaking.

    Another rider would maintain exemptions from Clean Water Act dredge-and-fill permitting for farming and forestry when adjoining wetlands or streams are drained or filled.

    The spending measure also would further delay the next step in implementing the 2015 ozone standards. The Trump administration already delayed its decision on what areas do and don't meet the 70 parts per billion standards, originally scheduled to be done this fall, until October 2018. The ozone language in the appropriations bill would bar the EPA from making those decisions, which would trigger additional pollution-control planning and permitting requirements in areas that don't meet the 70 ppb limits, until 2025.

    Mining Finance Rule Hit

    The bill would eliminate funding for the EPA to implement a financial assurance rule under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also known as Superfund.

    The proposed financial assurance rule (RIN:2050-AG61) would require hardrock mining operations to prove that they could finance cleanup in the event of an environmental disaster involving contaminants from their facilities.

    In the agency's perspective, the rule would reduce the amount of federal funds spent at Superfund sites by ensuring responsible parties can pay for cleanup themselves. The bill specifies that “none of the funds made available by this or any other act” may be used to finish, implement, or enforce the proposed rule. The EPA is still under a court order to issue a final rule on the matter by Dec. 1.

    The bill would prohibit spending on any proposal to list the greater sage grouse as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and it would bar the use of funds to treat the gray wolf as an endangered or threatened species anywhere in the 48 contiguous states.

    The bill includes a provision that would define energy from forest biomass as carbon-neutral. The forest industry has long pushed to establish wood burning as carbon neutral, saying that trees that provide plant matter for energy reabsorb the carbon emissions that are released in the burning of the vegetation.

    —With assistance from Amena Saiyid, Patrick Ambrosio, and Sylvia Carignan.

    http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446688&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446688&jd=116446688
    

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14. Bill to Boost Carbon Capture Tax Credit Resurfaces in Senate

    Jul 13, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By Brian Dabbs

    The recent collapse of high-profile carbon capture project at Mississippi's Kemper plant isn't deterring Senate lawmakers from pushing forward with a new policy to provide an incentive for that technology.

    Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) spearheaded the introduction July 12 of a carbon capture and sequestration tax credit extension, and a bipartisan Senate group is already plotting a path forward for the measure.

    The as-yet unnumbered legislation would boost credits already in place and allow power plants to claim the credit for 12 years following installation of the equipment.

    Mississippi regulators ordered utility owner Southern Co. on July 6 to come up with a deal that would have the Kemper plant—once hailed by the Obama administration as the future of coal—running as a natural gas-fired generator. The Kemper failure cost $7.5 billion over a seven-year period.

    “Had we invested in this technology, [Kemper] might have had greater success,” Heitkamp said.

    Heitkamp pointed to Petra Nova, a joint venture between NRG Energy, Inc. and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp., outside of Houston, as a success story. 

    Bipartisan Effort

    Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), unlikely allies on environmental policy, also sponsored the legislation, as did Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).

    The measure would raise existing credits for sequestered carbon tonnage from $20 to $50.

    For those companies that use carbon for enhanced oil and gas recovery, which involves extraction from stranded, subterranean locations, the legislation would bump up the credit from $10 to $35 per metric ton used.

    Heitkamp, speaking at a news conference July 12 along with other sponsors, said an energy tax credit package is likely the most viable strategy to move the carbon sequestration measure forward. That package would include a nuclear production credit extension, as well as the revival of lapsed small wind turbine, fuel cell, geothermal and other credits under Section 48 of the tax code.

    “We love it when we have mutual interests so it expands our ability to get this across the finish line,” Heitkamp said. But “I think all of this is being wrapped around the wheel a little bit with tax reform.”

    A comprehensive rewrite of the tax code is a major Trump administration priority, but few details have so far emerged.

    http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=116446696&vname=dennotallissues&fn=116446696&jd=116446696
    

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15. Trump Set for Climate Confrontation in Paris

    Jul 13, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire

    By Devin Henry

    President Trump’s visit to Paris this week will put him face-to-face with French President Emmanuel Macron, perhaps Europe’s loudest critic of his climate agenda. 

    Macron has issued a series of provocative statements against Trump’s decision to renege on the United States’ commitment to the Paris climate agreement, inviting American scientists to continue their work in France, highlighting a climate alliance with China and even mocking Trump with a Twitter hashtag fashioned after the U.S. president’s campaign slogan.

    Trump and Macron are due to hold a round of bilateral meetings and a joint press conference later this week, making it likely the two will confront the Paris agreement and the state of climate and energy diplomacy in light of Trump’s decision to pull out of the accord.

    “I think Macron has made the legacy of the Paris agreement, and its implementation, a core part of his agenda,” said David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute.

    “Exactly how it will come up between the leaders is hard to say, but it’s hard to imagine that Macron wouldn’t want to address it in some fashion.” 

    Trump’s June 1 decision to pull out of the Paris agreement set the tone for his relationship with Macron, who had taken office only two-and-a-half weeks prior. 

    Trump called the accord “very unfair” because of greenhouse gas emissions goals and financing provisions that he said benefit foreign nations, including France, over the United States.

    “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said in an address at the White House Rose Garden.

    “It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — along with many, many other locations within our great country — before Paris, France.”

    International recriminations began piling up immediately after Trump’s announcement, but few were as loud or defensive as those from Macron. 

    Macron delivered a live statement that night — in English — decrying the decision and inviting “engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States” to move to his country. 

    The next day, his government released a video fact-checking the White House’s talking points on the deal. 

    Macron later launched a website designed to attract U.S. climate scientists — “faced with the climatic skepticism of the new government of the United States” — to his country to continue their research. The site was called “Make Our Planet Great Again,” a phrase Macron has frequently deployed on Twitter to poke at Trump over the Paris agreement.

    During the Group of 20 summit last week, the French president said he would host a climate conference in December and pledged to continue pressing Trump on the Paris agreement, setting the stage for a debate on the matter this week. 

    The White House has said the meeting with Macron will focus on Syria and counterterrorism, though a senior administration official said this week that Trump is bracing for climate issues to come up as well.

    “The conduct of the bilateral session ... is based on topics that were coordinated with the French president,” the official said earlier this week. 

    “It’s entirely possible that President Macron will raise the issue, and if he does, [Trump] has spoken on the issue a number of times and he’ll be ready to engage in that, as well.”

    A joint press conference could serve as another venue for climate questions to Trump and Macron, especially for French reporters looking to probe Trump’s position on the Paris agreement.

    On issues ranging from national security to trade to climate change, Trump’s foreign policy agenda has followed the “America First” platform on which he based his presidential campaign. 

    That means it’s unlikely anything Macron says will sway Trump from his anti-Paris agreement position, something that has endeared him to American conservatives and nationalists skeptical of both the science behind climate change and the global efforts to fight it.

    “President Trump might not even mind a bit of public disagreement on this point, as two-thirds of Republicans say they support the president’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” Center for Strategic and International Studies experts wrote in a preview of the meeting this week. 

    The U.S. was the only country not to sign a G-20 declaration on climate change and the Paris agreement last week, but Trump officials say the go-it-alone stance doesn’t diminish American work on environmental issues.

    “Everyone accepted that, very early, that we chose to get out of the Paris agreement,” National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn told reporters after the meeting.  

    “But we do go out of our way to say in there that that doesn’t mean that we don’t support the environment, and we’re still working for the environment.”

    Macron’s rhetorical broadsides against Trump underline an aggressive diplomatic and domestic agenda, designed both to boost the Paris agreement and pressure the U.S. on international climate work. 

    During the G-20 summit last week, Macron and Chinese President Xi Jinping used a bilateral meeting to reaffirm their support for the Paris agreement and discuss new renewable energy projects, Macron’s office said. 

    Macron later tweeted that “to defend the Paris agreement, France and China are united,” adding to international warnings that Trump’s Paris decision cedes a key American leadership role to China and others instead.  

    Domestically, Macron has proposed ending new oil and gas drilling leases in France and its overseas territories as part of a push to focus instead on renewable energy. French officials said last week that they will aim to end the sale of gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles in the country by 2040. 

    American climate advocates say they’re optimistic about Macron’s approach.

    “It’s obviously in Macron’s interest to talk about climate change, to talk about the Paris agreement,” Sierra Club Global Climate Policy Director John Coequyt said. 

    “I think he has begun to back up that rhetoric with action, but he’s a very new president like Trump, and time will tell. So far, so good.”

    http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/341758-trump-set-for-climate-confrontation-in-paris
    

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16. Governor Scrambles for Support as Climate Deal Inches Onward

    Jul 13, 2017 | AP (In The Washington Post)

    By Jonathan J. Cooper 

    A plan to extend California’s signature climate initiative for another decade is scheduled to go before legislative committees Thursday, despite opposition from some environmental advocates.

    Gov. Jerry Brown and top lawmakers have struggled to line up support with Democratic legislative leaders indicating Wednesday that climate and air quality negotiations had expanded to include the state’s lack of affordable housing.

    Brown is pressing lawmakers to extend California’s cap-and-trade legislation, which puts a limit on carbon emissions and requires polluters to obtain permits to release greenhouse gases. The governor touts the program around the world as an effective way to affordably address climate change, but its legal authorization expires in 2020. The current proposal would expand the program until 2030.

    However, environmental justice advocates say concessions he made to the oil industry and other polluters will harm the environment. The bill prohibits local air quality districts from further restricting carbon emissions of stationary sources like oil refineries.

    Environmentalists also have been unmoved by companion legislation that aims to monitor and improve air quality around major sources of pollution. The air quality bill, though, is sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, who has pushed for any cap-and-trade deal to focus on local air pollution. She hasn’t publicly commented on the full cap-and-trade deal.

    The governor is courting lawmakers from both parties for the climate initiative, which needs the support of two-thirds of lawmakers. The air quality bill needs only a simple majority to pass.

    Brown met with about 10 Republicans in his office this week to discuss the cap-and-trade bill, Republican Assemblyman Rocky Chavez said.

    Chavez, of Oceanside, has been leading the effort to craft a cap-and-trade deal Republicans can back.

    They’ve already won a repeal of the fire prevention fee and tax exemptions for power companies in the legislation. But they also want the spending provisions of the bill to sunset in five years, so lawmakers have another chance to determine how money from cap and trade should be allotted.

    Chavez said he’s told Brown he could pick up between nine and 14 Republicans with the right deal.

    “We recognize that climate change is a real issue that needs to be addressed,” Chavez said.

    Legislative leaders said they’ve scheduled cap-and-trade votes in the Assembly and Senate for Monday, delaying a decision that had been expected to come Thursday evening.

    The delay “will also allow our discussion on long-term housing affordability solutions in California to catch up to the climate effort,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said in a joint statement.

    In the past, Brown has vetoed bills to fund subsidized housing, saying he prefers to axe regulations that slow and increase the cost of housing production. Brown’s eagerness to pass a cap-and-trade bill could give lawmakers leverage to strike a deal with him on affordable housing funding.

    Democratic lawmakers pushing to address the housing crisis have put forth measures to reduce local regulation of housing construction and to fund subsidized units for low-income people.

    Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, who wrote one of the major housing proposals, said he hopes several bills to address both funding for affordable housing and streamlining of housing construction will advance in the legislature in a package as early as next week.

    “I do have colleagues, particularly in the Assembly, who are advocating linking cap and trade and housing but I can’t speak to where those discussions are,” said Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat.

    Lawmakers have struggled to respond to California’s affordable housing crunch.

    The average California home costs more than twice the average U.S. home and average monthly rent in the state is 50 percent higher than the rest of the country, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report from 2015. Many Californians lack access to affordable housing because of the high costs and low housing supply.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/energy-environment/governor-scrambles-for-support-as-climate-deal-inches-onward/2017/07/13/be5160d8-67a7-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.html?utm_term=.fdcfdfbd24be
    

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