Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 10/6/2017
-
(ACC Mentioned) CPG Giants Reaffirm Commitment to New Plastics Economy, Pledge $150M for Plastic-Free Oceans
Oct 5, 2017 | Sustainable Brands
With 8 million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean each year, we urgently to change the way we make and use plastics, so that they don’t become waste in the first place. -
Trump Picks Former Inhofe Aide for Deputy Chief
Oct 5, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Kevin Bogardus
President Trump has picked a former aide to Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R) for U.S. EPA's deputy administrator. -
Right Thrilled as Trump Taps Former Coal Lobbyist for Top Post
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Kevin Bogardus
All good things come to those who wait. Or at least a nomination. -
Energy Department, Pipeline Nominees Sail Through Senate
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
The Energy Department's reliability office will get new leadership as Secretary Rick Perry pushes a plan to reward power plants—particularly coal and nuclear—that keep 90 days’ worth of fuel on site. -
(ACC Mentioned) Rhode Island Joins States to Ban Flame Retardants in Furniture
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
Furniture suppliers have two years to stop delivering products to Rhode Island that contain flame retardants banned by a new state law. -
(ACC Mentioned) 20 Chemicals Added to Washington Kids’ List Reporting
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Paul Shukovsky
Manufacturers of children's products sold in Washington state will have to report the presence of 20 more compounds, many of them flame retardants linked to cancer that are used in furniture, baby carriers and car seats. -
Chemicals Management Is Good, but Not Considered a Sustainability Strategy, Report Finds
Oct 5, 2017 | Environmental Leader
By Jennifer Hermes
Sustainability is increasingly important on industry’s agenda, but chemicals management is often not directly linked to a company’s sustainability strategies, according to a study. -
Trump Administration Set to Argue Clean Power Plan Rule Violates Law
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
The Trump administration will formally propose repealing former President Barack Obama's sweeping plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by arguing it went beyond the bounds of federal law, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News. -
EPA Bid to Repeal, Replace CPP Faces Legal Hurdles from Many Sides
Oct 5, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
EPA's plan to begin moving as soon as this week on a repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP) and seek input on a replacement faces legal hurdles from many sides, with environmentalists eyeing the legal justifications and details of any replacement... -
Courts Thwart Administration’s Effort to Rescind Obama-Era Environmental Regulations
Oct 6, 2017 | New York Times
By Eric Lipton
The rapid-fire push by the Trump administration to wipe out significant chunks of the Obama environmental legacy is running into a not-so-minor complication: Judges keep ruling that the Trump team is violating federal law. -
U.S. Gulf Oil Producers Curtail Output Ahead of Tropical Storm Nate
Oct 5, 2017 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Ernest Scheyder and Marianna Parraga
Oil and natural gas operators began evacuating staff and halting production at U.S. Gulf of Mexico platforms on Thursday ahead of Tropical Storm Nate, the second storm in as many months to rattle the Gulf Coast energy corridor. -
Appalachia Selling Supply Diversity, Petrochem Benefits in Wake of Gulf Coast Storms
Oct 5, 2017 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
As another tropical storm formed in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday and with the effects of Hurricane Harvey still being felt throughout the energy value chain, those working to attract more petrochemical operations to the Appalachian Basin... -
Senate Moves Closer to Opening Up ANWR
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Daily
By George Cahlink
The Senate Budget Committee yesterday adopted a partisan fiscal 2018 budget plan that moves Congress a step closer to permitting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. -
Federal Regulators Criticize Energy Rule for Distorting Markets
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rebecca Kern
Two of the three members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have publicly criticized an Energy Department proposal that aims to subsidize nuclear and coal plants in the wholesale markets, suggesting it could “destroy” the markets. -
Chemours Knew N.C. Discharges Toxic, Landowner Charges in Suit
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew M. Ballard
DuPont Co. and the Chemours Co. knew they were discharging toxic substances into the water at their Fayetteville, N.C., facility, a North Carolina property owner alleges. -
CSX Official Who Urged Christie Oil Train Veto to Lead Oil Train Regulator
Oct 5, 2017 | NJ.com
By Curtis Tate
A former CSX executive who lobbied Gov. Chris Christie to veto an oil train transparency bill this year is now poised to lead the federal agency that regulates oil trains. -
State AGs Threaten Lawsuit over Ozone Standard Delay
Oct 5, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
Attorneys general from 13 states joined advocacy groups in warning U.S. EPA of a possible legal challenge over the agency's failure to hit a key compliance deadline for its 2015 ozone standard. -
EPA Could Do More to Address Delaware's Ozone Concerns: Judge
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
Federal regulators have not done enough to address Delaware's concern that giving the areas surrounding Philadelphia more time to clean up their air pollution will burden the state, a federal appeals court judge says. -
Environmentalists Cite Methane Ruling to Help Boiler MACT Case
Oct 5, 2017 | Inside EPA
Environmentalists suing over EPA's boiler maximum achievable control technology (MACT) air toxics rule are citing a recent ruling by the court rejecting the agency's stay of methane air rules to show that the agency cannot exceed its Clean Air Act authority... -
Trump Administration Will Propose Repealing Obama’s Key Effort to Combat Climate Change
Oct 5, 2017 | Washington Post
By Brady Dennis
The Trump administration plans to scrap former president Barack Obama’s signature plan for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from the nation’s power plants, arguing that the previous administration overstepped its legal authority, according to a 43-page proposal obtained by The Washington Post. -
My Company’s Carbon Footprint is the Size of a Small Country. We Need to Act.
Oct 5, 2017 | Washington Post
By Stephen Badger
Global businesses are, quite rightly, under scrutiny for what they are doing to tackle challenges such as climate change and poverty. L -
EPA's Climate Rule Withdrawal Will Include Big Changes to Cost Calculations
Oct 5, 2017 | PoliticoPro
By Emily Holden
The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation... -
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Fall 2 Percent in 2016, Led by Power Industry: EPA
Oct 5, 2017 | Reuters
By Valerie Volcovici
Greenhouse gas emissions from America’s largest industrial facilities fell 2 percent in 2016 to 2.99 billion tonnes, led by a large cut from the power sector, according to data published on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation and Infrastructure News
Environment News
-
Oct 5, 2017 | Sustainable Brands
With 8 million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean each year, we urgently to change the way we make and use plastics, so that they don’t become waste in the first place. A host of announcements from major CPG companies and NGOs today from the Our Ocean 2017 conference in Malta signal the ongoing momentum behind the issue.
In May, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) and the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit launched the $2m New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize. Today at Our Ocean, the Prize, funded by Wendy Schmidt as Lead Philanthropic Partner of the EMF’s New Plastics Economy initiative, announced the winners of the first phase of the prize - the $1m Circular Design Challenge, run in collaboration with OpenIDEO. The Challenge focused on the 30 percent of plastic packaging that is either too small or too complex to be recycled and often find their way into the ocean – such as shampoo sachets, wrappers and coffee cup lids. More than 600 innovators from over 60 countries from across the world participated.
The Circular Design Challenge winners fall into three categories:
Rethinking grocery shopping. Today’s supermarkets are full of single-use plastic packaging to keep our groceries safe and fresh. Yet by rethinking the way we get products to people around the world, innovators can design out waste.
· MIWA (Czech Republic) introduces an app that lets shoppers order the exact quantities of the groceries they need, which are then delivered in reusable packaging from the producer to their closest store or to their home.
· Algramo (Chile) offers products in small quantities in reusable containers across a network of 1,200 local convenience stores in Chile.
Redesigning sachets. Hundreds of billions of sachets are sold each year to get small quantities of personal care and food products, such as shampoo and soy sauce, to people mostly in emerging markets. While companies such as Unilever are developing technologies to recycle sachets, they are currently not recycled and many end up polluting the ocean.
· Evoware (Indonesia) designs food wrappings and sachets made out of a seaweed-based material that can be dissolved and eaten.
· Delta (UK) offers a compact technology that allows restaurants to make and serve sauces in edible and compostable sachets.
Reinventing coffee-to-go. More than 100 billion disposable coffee cups are sold globally every year, yet today almost none of them (nor their lids) are recycled.
· CupClub (UK) introduces a reusable cup subscription service, in which reusable cups can be dropped off at any participating store.
· TrioCup (US) offers a disposable paper cup made with an origami-like technique that removes the need for a plastic lid. The team has chosen a 100 percent compostable material and is working on an alternative that is 100 percent recyclable.
Starting in 2018, the winning innovators will join a 12-month accelerator program in collaboration with Think Beyond Plastic, where they will work with mentors and expert advisors from the plastics industry and investor community to refine their design prototypes and scale them to become marketable solutions.
The Circular Design Challenge is the first part of the New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize. The winners of the second part, the Circular Materials Challenge, will be announced at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in January 2018.
While the winning innovations represent the type of solutions needed to build a plastics system that works, these entrepreneurs cannot drive the transition alone. Major businesses, governments, and investors must make clear commitments and collaborate towards a circular economy for plastics.
Six participants in the EMF’s New Plastics Economy initiative - MARS, M&S, PepsiCo,The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Werner & Mertz - are pledging (or reiterating a pledge) in Malta today to use 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 at the latest. This is a major step forward, and the EMF is calling on the whole industry to follow their lead, as well as to make commitments that ensure all packaging is not just recyclable, but also in practice recycled, reused or composted.
One critical action is to increase demand for recycled materials. Consumer goods producer Werner & Mertz’s pledge today to use 100 percent recycled content in all its consumer packaging by 2025 sets a great example for others to follow. A critical mass of such commitments is essential to move towards a new plastics economy in which no plastic becomes waste.
"Plastics in the ocean are a clear sign of a broken system, as this was never intended to happen. That is why rethinking the way we make and use plastics is so crucial: how can we capture the material’s benefits, retain its value and make sure it does not end up where it does not belong?” Dame Ellen MacArthur said. “Designers and innovators responding to our challenge have displayed tremendous creativity.
“The combination of the winning entries announced today and the companies committing to 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 will help us get closer to a waste-free circular economy."
Also at the Our Ocean event, Ocean Conservancy — along with partners including the Trash Free Seas Alliance®, Closed Loop Partners, PepsiCo, 3M, Procter & Gamble, the American Chemistry Council, and the World Plastics Council — announced an initiative to raise over $150 million for a new funding mechanism to prevent plastic waste from leaking into the oceans.
The initiative is designed to fund waste management and recycling solutions in Southeast Asia, with a focus on investments to improve collection, sorting and recycling markets. Nearly half of the plastic that flows into the ocean every year – an estimated 8 million metric tons – escapes from waste streams in just five rapidly developing Asian economies (Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and China).
“This is a major breakthrough in the fight for trash-free seas,” said Susan Ruffo, managing director of international initiatives at Ocean Conservancy. “Our research has found that by improving waste management in Southeast Asian countries, we can cut the flow of plastic going in the ocean by half by 2025. A funding mechanism will take this goal from dream to reality, and support efforts by governments and local groups on the ground to improve their livelihoods and wellbeing, while also improving ocean health.”
Scientists estimate that over 150 million metric tons of plastics are currently in the ocean today, entangling wildlife, polluting beaches, and costing coastal communities hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. That number could grow to 250 million metric tons in less than a decade if immediate action isn’t taken.
The new funding mechanism will be operated by Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm that invests in companies, technology and recycling facilities to turn waste into value and advance the circular economy. The new mechanism will catalyze new investments from the private sector, governments and development finance institutions; demonstrate ecosystem solutions; and build a pipeline of bankable waste management projects to demonstrate investment viability and maximize recycling profitability.
“Through this initiative, we will invest in and support the municipalities, entrepreneurs, investors and NGOs working to reduce ocean plastics and improve waste management in Southeast Asia,” said Rob Kaplan of Closed Loop Partners. “Our investments across North America — from recycling collection in Tennessee to developing new end markets for waste plastics in Louisiana — have resulted in tangible improvements to waste collection and recycling. Our model is to take the best practices in waste management investment, leverage the world’s largest consumer goods supply chains, and marry them with on-the-ground partner expertise and work.”
Effective waste management reduces plastics waste leakage, leads to healthier citizens, creates jobs, and reduces emissions of toxins and carbon. It is also a critical component to making a circular economy function, ensuring that materials can be recovered for reuse and recycling. This initiative aims to solve the root causes of plastics in the ocean by investing in the systems and emerging technologies needed to capture and transform waste into valuable commodities before it reaches marine environments, while also providing tangible benefits to communities.
Consumer goods companies and plastics manufacturers support the project. Early commitments from PepsiCo, 3M, Procter & Gamble, the American Chemistry Council and the World Plastics Council have fully funded the design phase of the fund.
“P&G is proud to be a part of this initiative,” said Jack McAneny, Director of Sustainability at P&G. “Plastics play an important role in commerce, but they clearly don’t belong in our waterways and oceans. Thanks to the vision of Ocean Conservancy, we now have a multi-stakeholder collaborative effort that can drive the kind of innovation and scale that we need to stop the flow of plastics to the environment and ideally give these materials a second life.”
The initiative aims to share the results of its initial phase of work within the next year to help build the field of investors looking to deploy capital into this market.
Speaking of P&G, the company made an announcement of its own today from Our Ocean, as it unveiled its new Fairy Ocean Plastic bottle made completely from post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic and ocean plastic, created in partnership with recycling expert TerraCycle, which will reach British consumers in 2018. The UK launch will include 320,000 bottles, the largest production run of recyclable dish soap bottles in the world made using ocean plastic. The innovative bottle will be made from 10 percent ocean plastic, collected from the ocean and beaches around the world, and 90 percent post-consumer recycled plastic.
Click to enlarge.
The project aims to drive awareness of the issue of ocean plastic pollution, inspire consumers to physically participate in beach clean-ups and recycle household waste.
“As the world’s no. 1 dishwashing liquid globally and a much-loved brand in the UK, we want to use Fairy to raise awareness about the plight of our ocean and raise awareness about the importance of recycling,” said Virginie Helias, VP of Global Sustainability at Procter & Gamble. “Our consumers care deeply about this issue and by using ocean plastic we hope to show that the opportunities are endless when we rethink our approach to waste.’’
‘’We are proud to be working with an iconic brand like Fairy to launch a fully recyclable bottle made from 100 percent recycled plastic and ocean plastic,” said TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky. “The issue of ocean pollution is a pertinent one, we hope other brands will be inspired to think creatively about waste and make the circular economy a reality.’’
‘’We are thrilled that P&G is raising awareness of ocean plastic pollution amongst their consumers. P&G’s leadership on this issue, including through their participation in the Trash Free Seas Alliance, is critical to solving the ocean plastic crisis,” Ruffo said. “We are excited that in addition to its work to reach consumers directly through the Fairy bottles, they are also addressing the source of ocean plastic by supporting our initiative to raise over $150 million over the next five years to improve waste collection, sorting and recycling in key ocean plastic economies.”
The P&G Fairy Ocean Plastic bottle is the latest development in the company’s effort to divert plastic waste from landfill and the ocean – in January, it released the world’s first recyclable shampoo bottle made from up to 25 percent recycled beach plastic, also developed with TerraCycle, for its Head & Shoulders brand. In an effort to extend the initiative across other brands and regions, P&G will continue to divert 8,000 metric tonnes of plastic from landfill for use in transparent plastic bottles, using an average of 40 percent Post-Consumer Recycled plastic content across 481 million of its transparent dish care bottles globally. If stacked, these bottles would be 11 times the height of Mount Everest.
http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/next_economy/sustainable_brands/cpg_giants_reaffirm_commitment_new_plastics_economy_p
-
Trump Picks Former Inhofe Aide for Deputy Chief
Oct 5, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Kevin Bogardus
President Trump has picked a former aide to Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R) for U.S. EPA's deputy administrator.
The White House announced today that it had sent to the Senate the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be the agency's No. 2.
If confirmed by the Senate, Wheeler would join the army of former Inhofe aides who now run the agency. He was previously staff director and chief counsel at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee when Inhofe was chairman of the panel.
Inhofe said he was pleased that Wheeler was chosen to be deputy administrator.
"There is no one more qualified than Andrew to help Scott Pruitt restore EPA to its proper size and scope. When he served as my Staff Director of the Environment and Public Works Committee, he provided me with invaluable guidance, and in turn became a close friend," Inhofe said in a statement.
Wheeler was also an energy adviser to Trump's presidential campaign.
Currently a principal at Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting, Wheeler has lobbied for coal giant Murray Energy Corp., led by vocal Trump supporter Robert Murray.
Trump's selection of Wheeler to be Administrator Scott Pruitt's deputy ends a monthslong wait for who would fill the No. 2 slot. The president has already picked deputies for other key energy and environmental agencies, such as the departments of Energy and the Interior.
Wheeler was suspected to be Trump's pick for the deputy job at EPA months ago. Earlier this year, however, some of the president's conservative supporters pushed back against another potential nominee for the position, Jeff Holmstead, arguing he would not carry out the president's agenda at EPA (Greenwire, June 19).
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/10/05/stories/1060062829
-
Right Thrilled as Trump Taps Former Coal Lobbyist for Top Post
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Kevin Bogardus
All good things come to those who wait. Or at least a nomination.
Yesterday, the White House sent to the Senate the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be deputy administrator for U.S. EPA. The agency has been waiting for nearly nine months under the Trump administration for its No. 2 to be announced.
"We wish it hadn't taken so damn long," Myron Ebell, who led Trump's transition team at EPA, told E&E News about Wheeler's nomination.
Wheeler, a former top aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and now energy lobbyist, has been the long-rumored pick to fill the agency's deputy spot behind Administrator Scott Pruitt.
In March, reports emerged he was in line for the job. By June, however, Jeff Holmstead was under consideration, which sparked a backlash by Trump's conservative supporters. By July, Wheeler was again considered the likely nominee.
In a statement yesterday, Pruitt praised his incoming deputy. "Andrew will bring extraordinary credentials to EPA that will greatly assist the Agency as we work to implement our agenda," Pruitt said.
He said Wheeler spent his career "working to improve environmental outcomes for Americans across the country and understands the importance of providing regularity certainty for our country."
Before Wheeler, Trump had announced his picks to lead several offices at the agency, including air, chemicals, enforcement and water, as well as a general counsel nominee. Pruitt remains the only Senate-confirmed official in place at EPA.
Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, cited Wheeler's long record in environmental law and policy on why he would be a good fit for EPA leadership.
Wheeler spent six years as the Republicans' chief counsel and staff director on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which Inhofe chaired. The nominee also served at the agency during the early 1990s.
"He has the experience at both EPA and EPW that will serve him well in the job," Ebell said. "We know he's committed to fundamental reform of the way the agency is managed and organized. He has the necessary experience to accomplish that."
Prior to working for the full EPW panel, Wheeler was a staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and Nuclear Safety. He also has been chief counsel for Inhofe.
Wheeler started his career at EPA working on toxic chemical and pollution prevention issues, where he earned the agency's Bronze Medal several times for his service.
Wheeler, a Case Western Reserve University graduate, has his law degree from Washington University School of Law and a Master of Business Administration from George Mason University.
Coal's man in Washington
While Wheeler's administration and congressional experience will come in handy as EPA's deputy chief, his lobbying record will likely come under the most scrutiny during his Senate confirmation.
He left the EPW panel in 2009 and joined what is now known as Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting. Records show he has represented more than a dozen clients at the firm, including big names like the Nuclear Energy Institute and Xcel Energy Inc.
Wheeler has also been a longtime lobbyist for Murray Energy Corp., run by vocal Trump supporter Bob Murray. He first registered to lobby for the coal giant in 2009.
Murray is an ardent critic of EPA and especially of the Obama administration. His company has sued the agency several times, including one suit to block the Clean Power Plan, which Pruitt is working to reverse.
Last year, the coal CEO pulled no punches when assessing Obama's legacy. In an emailed response to E&E News, Murray gave the prior administration "a resounding F," adding, "President Obama has been the greatest destroyer that America has ever seen" (Greenwire, Sept. 15, 2016).
Murray Energy has been a campaign donor to political groups associated with Trump, as well as Pruitt when the EPA chief was Oklahoma attorney general.
Wheeler's eight years of lobbying for Murray will be a point of contention for environmental groups and Democrats during his confirmation process.
The Environmental Defense Fund has already included him on "a growing list of polluter lobbyists" looking to join EPA.
Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club, said that Wheeler's nomination was "absolutely horrifying."
Wheeler has parted ways with Murray. He is no longer acting as a lobbyist for his remaining clients, including the coal company, according to amended records released this August.
Managing the agency
If the Senate confirms him as deputy EPA administrator, Wheeler may be saddled with some of the more unpopular tasks at the agency.
Mike Flynn, a career official who is currently EPA's acting No. 2, has often been the deliverer of bad news to employees. For example, Flynn's memo this past April announced this summer's round of buyouts, which led to hundreds leaving the agency as part of the Trump administration's governmentwide reorganization effort (Greenwire, April 19).
"In any downsizing of EPA, the Deputy Administrator would play an essential role in managing that across the agency, both framing and making critical choices about how to carry that out. But ultimately, final responsibility and accountability always rests with the Administrator," Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy administrator from 2014 to 2017, said in an email to E&E News.
Wheeler would also have to mesh with Henry Darwin, who has been brought on earlier this year as EPA's deputy assistant administrator. Essentially the agency's No. 3 in charge, Darwin has been called EPA's chief operating officer — a moniker typically applied to the deputy chief.
Meiburg said, "Some Administrators have become more engaged in management issues than others. The relationship between the Deputy Administrator and the Chief of Operations position created by this administration will have to be worked out."
Meiburg also said the deputy chief needs to "have a solid network of trust and communication with both the political appointees and the senior career officials in the agency."
Ebell said Wheeler will be ready to work with the career staff at EPA in order to move forward on Trump's agenda. "Andrew knows that you have to engage and work with the career civil servants to get anything done," Ebell said.
Wheeler would be effective at EPA, according to a former Capitol Hill Republican aide who worked with him. The former aide called Wheeler "a very balanced guy. Not a knee-jerk guy. He wants to hear all the facts."
"He can keep the trains running on time, just make sure that the business of the agency is running smoothly," said the ex-colleague.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/10/06/stories/1060062849
-
Energy Department, Pipeline Nominees Sail Through Senate
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew Childers
The Energy Department's reliability office will get new leadership as Secretary Rick Perry pushes a plan to reward power plants—particularly coal and nuclear—that keep 90 days’ worth of fuel on site.
Bruce Walker will serve as assistant secretary of energy for electricity, delivery, and energy reliability after he was confirmed Oct. 5 as the Senate was wrapping up its business for the week. The Senate also approved by voice vote the nomination of Howard “Skip” Elliott to lead the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Walker is a 25 year veteran of the energy industry and founder of Modern Energy Insights Inc., a company that assesses electric grid security. Previously, Walker worked at National Grid USA, an investor-owned energy company operating in the northeastern U.S., and Consolidated Edison Co. of New York, Inc.
Walker joins the reliability office as Perry touts his proposal to give extra payments to power plants that store fuel on site in order to make America's electric grid more resilient.
Elliott, the new head of the pipeline safety agency, was vice president of public safety, health, and environment at CSX from 2004 until he retired earlier this year. During his confirmation hearing, he promised greater transparency with first responders and a focus on safety technologies.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766642&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766642&jd=121766642
-
(ACC Mentioned) Rhode Island Joins States to Ban Flame Retardants in Furniture
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
Furniture suppliers have two years to stop delivering products to Rhode Island that contain flame retardants banned by a new state law.
The measure (S. 199), which slipped quietly into law Oct. 4 without a signature or veto from Gov. Gina Raimondo (D), bans organohalogen flame retardants from furniture, mattresses, and upholstered bedding that is manufactured or sold by wholesalers or retailers in the state beginning July 1, 2019.
The ban, and similar laws in other states, was pushed by a coalition of environmental advocates and firefighters, who link an increase in firefighter cancer rates to exposure to the chemicals. Environmental and health advocates say the chemicals are dangerous to the nervous system.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission voted Sept. 20 to study how to restrict organohalogens in consumer products. Some companies, including Crate and Barrel, Ikea, La-Z-Boy, and Macy's, reacted to consumer concerns and California's proposals by removing the chemicals nationwide from their products years ago.
Fines in Rhode Island
The Rhode Island law bans organohalogens in home furniture above certain concentrations. Businesses face a $5,000 fine for a first violation and a $10,000 fine for any additional violations.
Environmental advocates tried twice before to pass a bill banning the chemicals, Johnathan Berard, R.I. director of Clean Water Action, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 4 . This year, they joined with firefighters and first responders and that made the difference, Berard said.
The American Chemistry Council opposed the Rhode Island bill, arguing that flame retardants make furniture safer.
“This law will remove a critical layer of fire protection and could increase the vulnerability of the citizens of Rhode Island when fires occur. The people of the state certainly understand well how devastating fires can be, given that 100 people were killed and 230 injured at the Station Nightclub in West Warwick in 2003,” Bryan Goodman, spokesman for the council, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 4, in an email. Flame retardants provide important protection during fires, he said.
Berkshire Hathaway, which has a large furniture division, did not reply to a request for comment.
Maine approved a ban in August. Similar bills are pending in Connecticut and Massachusetts. With Rhode Island, 14 states have flame retardant restrictions on furniture although they differ in each location, according to Safer States, an advocacy organization. Of those, only Maine's ban is comprehensive, and will prohibit all flame retardants in 2019.
“Our hope is that with Rhode Island passing this bill, those two states [Connecticut and Massachusetts] will catch on,” Berard said.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766646&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766646&jd=121766646
-
(ACC Mentioned) 20 Chemicals Added to Washington Kids’ List Reporting
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Paul Shukovsky
Manufacturers of children's products sold in Washington state will have to report the presence of 20 more compounds, many of them flame retardants linked to cancer that are used in furniture, baby carriers and car seats.
The Washington Department of Ecology's addition of the compounds to its list of “Chemicals of High Concern” that product manufacturers must report brings the total number to 85—surpassing the 66 on similar lists maintained by Oregon and Vermont, Kara Steward, who manages the list for the department, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 5.
Industry representatives say the listing of the compounds doesn't mean they are harmful. But a nonprofit group that has led efforts to expand the list believes otherwise and said the reporting requirement could encourage manufacturers to abandon using them in children's products.
The compounds, which the department added to its list under a revised ruleSept. 29, include 13 flame retardants, bisphenol F and biphenol S used in making polycarbonate products such as sports and baby bottles and linked to hormone disruption, perfluorooctanoic acid used in stain- and water-resistant applications and linked to cancer and hormone disruption, and four phthalates used in a wide variety of personal care products and cosemetics and linked to reproductive problems in males.
Under the Sept. 29 revised rule, manufacturers will no longer have to report the presence of three compounds that, based on new evidence, are not harmful to children, Steward, the department's lead writer of the revised rule, told Bloomberg BNA in an Oct. 4 telephone interview.
These include: molybdenum and molybdenum compounds used to make metal alloys; octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (D4) used in making silicon products; and phthalic anhydride used in making plastics.
‘Important Victory’ for Children
Industry representatives say the mere listing of these compounds doesn't mean they pose threats.
“Just because these products are being reported doesn't mean they are harmful,” Tim Shestek ,senior director of state affairs for the American Chemistry Council, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 4. “That's reiterated not once or twice but a few times in Department of Ecology publications. It's important to note to consumers that because these chemicals are being reported in these products, it shouldn't be an indication that consumers should be afraid of purchasing those products.”
Toxic-Free Future, which identifies itself as a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the health of children and the environment from toxic chemicals, disagrees with that characterization.
“This is an important victory for protecting the health of children in Washington state and beyond,” Toxic-Free Future Executive Director Laurie Valeriano told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 4. “The companies that have to report these chemicals are global companies. When Washington added these chemicals, the companies that use them in their products have to take notice, provide information and hopefully it should compel them to phase them out.”
Several of the newly listed chemicals were proposed for inclusion by Toxic-Free Future, which included data with its submission in support of the proposed listing, Steward said.
Valeriano rejected Shestek's characterization of the safety of listed chemicals, saying: “That's bogus. These are really concerning flame retardants. Carcinogens. Decreasing IQs.”
She pointed to recent U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission actions in which it warned against the use of organohalogens in children's products.
And while the inclusion does not mean the chemicals are banned, recent history shows a listing can lead to banning.
Steward said the state Legislature in 2016 banned five flame retardants that were on the Chemicals of High Concern list as a result of having access to data collected in the listing process, much of it gathered by Toxic-Free Future.
Steward she she does not anticipate another update to the list for three to five years.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766648&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766648&jd=121766648
-
Chemicals Management Is Good, but Not Considered a Sustainability Strategy, Report Finds
Oct 5, 2017 | Environmental Leader
By Jennifer Hermes
Sustainability is increasingly important on industry’s agenda, but chemicals management is often not directly linked to a company’s sustainability strategies, according to a study. Development of more sustainable chemical management is driven more by regulatory requirements, customer expectations or by companies’ business strategies. The study, commissioned by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), indicates that companies consider compliance with relevant regulations as a baseline, providing a “licence to operate” in their business fields, but they do not link this work directly to their sustainability strategies.
Good quality information in companies’ REACH registration dossiers was not considered a commercial asset. Dossier quality actually does not have a role in industry’s compliance programs, and the 19 companies participating in the study said they do not have specific goals (e.g. key performance indicators) or strategies to deal with dossier quality.
However, REACH is seen as contributing indirectly to profitability or as benefitting a company’s brand values in the long run. Companies striving for the sustainable use of chemicals particularly appreciate the predictability of regulatory action in order to stay “ahead of the game.” The study shows that the Candidate List of substances of very high concern is a major driver of innovation and substitution to less hazardous chemicals. In general, market demand for more sustainable products and production processes is increasing and is most apparent in consumer-facing businesses. Retailers play an important role in conveying trends in consumer demand.
‘Crucial but Indirect…’
The report also found that REACH and CLP regulations have a crucial though only indirect impact on a company’s sustainability and business strategies. The Candidate List in particular impacts market demand and is being used as a measure for investors to benchmark the sustainability performance of companies. Market and investor demands in turn have a direct impact on industry’s integrated corporate business strategies, including sustainability strategies.
The study encourages companies to include good chemicals management in their integrated corporate sustainability strategies by developing reporting tools and benchmarks.
https://www.environmentalleader.com/2017/10/174495/
-
Trump Administration Set to Argue Clean Power Plan Rule Violates Law
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
The Trump administration will formally propose repealing former President Barack Obama's sweeping plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by arguing it went beyond the bounds of federal law, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News.
The Environmental Protection Agency will not prescribe an immediate replacement for the plan and instead will soon ask the public to comment on how best to curb carbon-dioxide emissions from coal and natural gas power plants, according to a draft of the proposed rule and other government documents.
The proposal, set to be unveiled in coming days, is a first step to delivering on President Donald Trump's promise to rip up the Clean Power Plan, which served as the cornerstone of Obama's climate change agenda. Trump moved to pull the U.S. out of the global Paris climate accord, and he has dismissed global warming as a hoax.
Obama's initiative was designed to cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Because of legal challenges, it never actually took effect: The U.S. Supreme Court put it on hold in February 2016.
Broad Latitude for States
The Obama-era rule dictated specific carbon-cutting targets for states based on a complex formula tied to their 2012 power plant emissions, giving the states broad latitude on how to achieve those reductions, including energy conservation efforts.
The EPA's other air pollution regulations, promulgated under the same provision of federal law, are based on a system that “can be applied to or at a single source,” the draft proposal says. The Trump administration is arguing that such forced “generation shifting” is inconsistent with EPA authority under the Clean Air Act.
“The Clean Power Plan departed from this practice by instead setting carbon dioxide emission guidelines for existing power plants that can only realistically be effected by measures that cannot be employed to, for, or at a particular source,” the document says.
In his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, joined leaders of roughly two dozen other states in arguing the Clean Power Plan violated federal law by imposing broad energy market changes instead of individual requirements on specific power plants.
The administration's rationale suggests any replacement will have to focus on what can be done at individual power plants, which would lead to more modest requirements on utilities.
Separate Steps
The administration will take two separate steps—repealing and then, possibly, replacing.
First, in coming days, it will issue its proposed rule to rescind the earlier regulation.
Later, it will issue a formal notice asking the public to comment on whether the EPA can or should develop a replacement rule, and, if so, what options are legal, feasible and appropriate for curbing emissions of power plants. That could mean requiring modest efficiency upgrades or the installation of carbon-capture technology at the sites.
The EPA has not determined whether it will promulgate a new rule to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, according to the documents.
The Trump administration is set to argue that repealing the Clean Power Plan could save an estimated $33 billion in compliance costs in 2030. Details of that economic analysis were not immediately available.
The EPA declined to comment on the authenticity of the documents.
“The Obama administration pushed the bounds of their authority so far that the Supreme Court issued a stay—the first in history—to prevent the so-called ‘Clean Power Plan’ from taking effect,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said by email. “Any replacement rule that the Trump administration proposes will be done carefully and properly within the confines of the law.“
—With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766633&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766633&jd=121766633
-
EPA Bid to Repeal, Replace CPP Faces Legal Hurdles from Many Sides
Oct 5, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
EPA's plan to begin moving as soon as this week on a repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP) and seek input on a replacement faces legal hurdles from many sides, with environmentalists eyeing the legal justifications and details of any replacement while some conservatives may seek to target the agency's broader greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
For example, if EPA seeks to repeal the CPP without offering a solid legal justification, as it is seeking to do in a proposal to repeal its Clean Water Act jurisdiction rule, “We think that would be really flagrantly illegal,” says one environmentalist attorney.
“But if they take a position that [they] think the CPP was contrary to the statute, then that has some advantages for them in terms of laying out a reason. But on the other hand, it's very testable in court, if they stick with it in a final rule.”
EPA is expected to issue both a proposed CPP repeal rule and either a narrower proposed replacement or an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) to seek input on a new rule this week or next, according to press reports about a leaked EPA “October 2017 Tiering List” that says the repeal rule is a high priority for the air office.
The agency faces an Oct. 6 deadline to file its next status report with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in West Virginia, et al., v. EPA, et al., in which critics are challenging the Obama-era rule that has been stayed by the Supreme Court. The D.C. Circuit has continued to hold the suit in abeyance without issuing a ruling.
The environmentalist says it remains unclear what, if any, rationale EPA will offer for its expected repeal plan and strategy to replace the regulation with a rule that could set targets based only on heat-rate improvements at coal plants rather than relying on fuel switching and other measures in the CPP that extend far beyond a power plant's fenceline.
Most experts believe the agency will say the CPP exceeded the agency's Clean Air Act authority as justification for its repeal.
EPA could also face pressure from conservative groups that are opposed to any GHG regulation of the power sector. For example, one conservative policy group is urging EPA to use its pending proposal to seek input on the GHG endangerment finding that underpins the rule, arguing that the Obama EPA wrongly issued the rule without a risk finding specific to the power sector.
If the agency quickly moves forward with a narrow replacement, that might require it to accept the prior administration's position that it does not need to issue a sector-specific GHG risk finding to give it authority for the rule -- potentially drawing a legal challenge from conservatives.
One energy industry lobbyist says that the proposed rule or ANPR will offer a preferred, inside-the-fenceline approach that would achieve limited GHG cuts based on boosting a coal plant's heat rate, but that it will also seek comment on a range of other options.
This source says EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has opted to “pull the trigger” and move forward with a replacement, so the source hopes to see a proposed rule rather than an ANPR, which would slow the process by several months.
EPA Announcement
The environmentalist attorney says an ANPR that includes a preferred approach could create the perception that EPA is dragging its feet on the issue, and is also hoping to see a formal proposal.
EPA is under significant pressure from the utility industry and others to issue a replacement that gives them regulatory certainty, and the agency appears to be coalescing around a facility-specific approach that utility and labor groups are backing, including in a Sept. 21 letter to Pruitt from seven labor unions calling for targets to be based on power plant efficiency improvements.
An EPA spokeswoman said Oct. 5 that she had no information about a proposed repeal, replacement or court update at this time.
The environmentalist attorney says EPA's unveiling of the plan is not clear. “If they think it's something they want to make a big deal out of, along the lines of 'Repeal CPP/Promises Kept,' then they may do something more public, but I don't know. I've heard they think they ought to do something before the next [court] abeyance period ends, but even that I don't know.”
That date arrives next week, though the D.C. Circuit did let an earlier abeyance expire for a time before extending it. The expiration date is different from the Oct. 6 deadline for EPA to submit a status report to the court, and many expect the agency to use that deadline to detail its next steps, including issuing the repeal and replacement plans.
Environmental groups are already gearing up to oppose any EPA plan, with the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) warning that it is “expected to be a gift to the coal industry lobbyists” and could have “a particularly big impact in the South.”
And the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) warns that the expected actions “would not only flout EPA's clear obligation under our nation's clean air laws to protect Americans from harmful climate pollution, they would also cost American lives, harm public health in myriad other ways, and threaten job creation in our vibrant clean energy sector.”
EDF adds that if the agency chooses an ANPR approach, that “would not commit EPA to replace the [CPP] on any particular time frame, and would likely lead to years of delay.” It says repealing the rule “without any meaningful replacement that is equally or more protective would be arbitrary -- and would blatantly disregard EPA's obligations under our nation's clean air laws.”
SELC attorney Frank Rambo says that EPA faces a complicated task in unraveling the Obama-era rule and replacing it with something more narrow. “My best guess is that they're going to put something out that puts a lot of things on the table. And I don't know how much they're going to indicate a direction or a preference.”
However, he adds that regardless of the level of detail, “I think it is going to be replacing it with an inside-the-fenceline approach. And by that I mean in particular I think the framework would be building block 1” from the CPP, which based on boosting coal plants' efficiency.
Procedural Requirements
Rambo adds that no matter what Pruitt seeks to do to provide industry certainty, he cannot completely foreclose any re-interpretation by a future administration. “He can try, but there are limits because we are talking about a regulation here, subject to certain procedural requirements.” Just like Pruitt's current moves, “any future administration has an ability to unravel what the previous administration did in the regulatory arena.”
The CPP, as written by the Obama administration, includes compliance targets out to 2030. It also developed an extensive record to defend against the possibility of a future EPA rolling it back.
That means Pruitt will face some hurdles in what he is trying to do, but it likely would not completely prevent him from narrowing the rule. However, he also will not be able to prevent a future administration from undoing his work, Rambo says. “There is nothing he can do to lock it in.”
But he says a successfully delay of power plant GHG cuts by Pruitt is “definitely lost time. Everybody, we think, gains from having [the CPP] framework in place that sets a number and allows states and stakeholders to get together and decide how to meet it. Now we're going to be seeing some further extension of this limbo when what we really could be doing . . . is really setting that arc, getting it in place and lowering it down.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-bid-repeal-replace-cpp-faces-legal-hurdles-many-sides
-
Courts Thwart Administration’s Effort to Rescind Obama-Era Environmental Regulations
Oct 6, 2017 | New York Times
By Eric Lipton
The rapid-fire push by the Trump administration to wipe out significant chunks of the Obama environmental legacy is running into a not-so-minor complication: Judges keep ruling that the Trump team is violating federal law.
The latest such ruling came late Wednesday, when a federal magistrate judge in Northern California vacated a move by the Department of Interior to delay compliance with rules curbing so-called flaring, a technique oil and gas companies use to burn off leaking methane. Flaring is blamed for contributing to climate change as well as lost tax revenues because the drilling is being done on federal land.
It was the third time since July that the Environmental Protection Agency or the Interior Department has been found to have acted illegally in their rush to roll back environmental rules. And in three other environmentalcases, the Trump administration reversed course on its own after lawsuits accusing it of illegal actions were filed by environmental groups and Democratic state attorneys general.
The legal reversals reflect how aggressively Mr. Trump’s critics are challenging the administration’s efforts to rescind regulations enacted during the Obama administration, not only related to the environment, but to immigration, to consumer protection and to other areas.
Yet even as the list of failed or at least stalled rollbacks continues to grow, the Trump administration, in many other cases, continues to move ahead, often taking multiple steps related to the kill the same rule, meaning these early setbacks do not necessarily mean the matters are settled.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEE.P.A. to Spend Nearly $25,000 on a Soundproof Booth for Pruitt SEPT. 26, 2017Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say AUG. 11, 2017Trump Nominates a Coal Lobbyist to Be No. 2 at E.P.A. OCT. 5, 2017
“The Trump administration is confident in its legal positions and looks forward to arguing — and winning — before the federal judiciary,” Kelly A. Love, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This is in stark contrast to the previous administration, which may be the worst win rate before the Supreme Court since the Taylor administration in the early 1850s.”
Still, the string of court rulings and administrative reversals — even some conservative legal scholars agree — is a sign that the Trump administration has been in such a rush to undo the Obama legacy that it is almost inviting legal challenges.
“If I were in this administration, this should be seen as a warning sign,” said Jonathan H. Adler, the director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “The message is clear: Guys, we have a problem here. We are trying to do stuff that is hard and we are not crossing our i’s and t’s.”
Environmentalists see it as proof that Mr. Trump and his team care little about honoring federal law.
“It shows serial lawbreaking and sloppiness by a Trump administration bent on rollbacks,” said John Walke, the director of the clean air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is sad they have to have their comeuppance in courts rather than doing what was right.”
But this is hardly the first administration to have administrative decisions overturned as a result of court challenges. Environmentalist challenging the moves by George W. Bush to loosen air pollution rules won 27 court rulings during his eight-year tenure.
And the Obama administration itself was repeatedly challenged by environmentalists. In a recent decision related to two billion tons of coalleases on federal land in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, for example, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit concluded that the Democratic administration’s decision to approve the leases was “arbitrary or capricious” because it did not adequately consider the effect mining all this coal would have on climate change.
But even within the White House, there is awareness that the agencies need to be more careful to avoid further stumbles.
“There are concerns,” Neomi Rao, the head of the Office of Management and Budget division that oversees major federal rules, said in an interview this summer, shortly after she assumed her post. “Agencies want to move quickly to get things done.”
Policy experts say the reversals also underscore the fact that crucial positions within the E.P.A. and the Interior Department remain unfilled, and that a lack of trust exists between political appointees and career staff members.
“The career people at E.P.A. and D.O.J. are top-notch lawyers,” said Richard J. Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University. “But you have political people come in, and they don’t trust them at all and try to do it without them.”
Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, who has been perhaps the most aggressive of the state officials suing to challenge Trump administration rollbacks, said he hopes the White House is getting the message.
“No man, no woman is above the law,” Mr. Becerra said in an interview, shortly after the California magistrate judge ruled that the Interior Department had illegally postponed the enforcement of the methane flaring rule. “You have to follow the rule of law. It makes no difference if you are in the White House or not.”
Each of the rules at the center of these legal challenges has major public implications.
The Department of Interior methane rule reinstated by a federal court on Wednesday will annually eliminate the equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from about 950,000 vehicles, according to an Obama administration estimate, while also generating millions of dollars in extra federal revenues because oil and gas companies right now do not pay royalties on methane they flare off in giant torches that light the sky.
But the Interior Department, under new leadership, argued that these environmental benefits were not worth the costs.
“Small independent oil and gas producers in states like North Dakota, Colorado and New Mexico, which account for a substantial portion of our nation’s energy wealth, could be hit the hardest,” Katharine MacGregor, a senior Interior Department official, said in a statement this spring.
The federal court judges were not impressed by the legal arguments the Interior Department and E.P.A. made as they separately moved to repeal the Obama-era rules related to methane, which is considered a major factor in climate change.
Efforts by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, to postpone his agency’s methane rule were “unlawful,” “arbitrary” and “capricious,” a three-judge panel said in July.
“Agencies obviously have broad discretion to reconsider a regulation at any time,” the judges ruled. “To do so, however, they must comply with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), including its requirements for notice and comment.”
There are signs that the Trump administration is hearing this message. As in three other recent cases, the administration has given up efforts to roll back rules after lawsuits were filed to challenge them even before any judges had ruled on the merits of the arguments.
Those reversals involve rules intended to reduce asthma-causing ozone pollution, toxic mercury contamination in water supplies and a requirement that state transportation departments monitor greenhouse gas emission levels on national highways and set targets for reducing them.
Kyle Danish, who represents oil and gas companies and electric utilities for the law firm Van Ness Feldman in Washington, said the administration is learning an important lesson: even rolling back regulations involves bureaucracy.
“There’s an irony here that an administration that is upset about the administrative state is going to need multiple rules just to change the rules. But that’s the reality,” he said.
Not everyone is concerned by the court setbacks. Matt Letourneau, a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called them “relatively minor blips in a much larger, longer-term effort,” and he noted that the Department of Energy has won recent cases against environmental groups related to the transport of liquefied natural gas.
Even with these setbacks, the list of environmental rules that have been delayed or reversed is considerable, including reversing freezes on new federal coal leases, offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and lifting mining restrictions in Bristol Bay, Alaska.
And just because courts are ruling against the Trump administration, it does not mean the fights are over.
On Thursday, for example, the day after the court overturned its effort to delay the flaring rule, the Interior Department posted a new notice in the Federal Register indicating its intent to delay the date again, until January 2019. This time, though, the agency is inviting public comments on the delay.
But there is no doubt the legal challenges are slowing down the march to roll back the Obama legacy. And it could complicate other even higher profile pushes to repeal rules, like the Clean Power Plan — intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants, a move that will generate another wave of legal challenges that will build off arguments made in recent cases.
Mr. Lazarus said some problems might be alleviated once Mr. Trump nominates and the Senate confirms more high-level appointees, who have more experience in handing complicated legal steps needed to rollback rules.
But filling these jobs has been slow.
“There are a lot of fabulous Republican lawyers out there,” he said, “and a lot of them don’t want to be tainted by this administration.”
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/climate/trump-administration-environmental-regulations.html
-
U.S. Gulf Oil Producers Curtail Output Ahead of Tropical Storm Nate
Oct 5, 2017 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Ernest Scheyder and Marianna Parraga
Oil and natural gas operators began evacuating staff and halting production at U.S. Gulf of Mexico platforms on Thursday ahead of Tropical Storm Nate, the second storm in as many months to rattle the Gulf Coast energy corridor.
Nate, which has killed at least 10 people in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and caused intense rainfall, is forecast to scrape Honduras and Mexico, enter the Gulf and strengthen into a hurricane before making landfall this weekend in Louisiana, near several major refineries.
That path takes it through an area populated by offshore oil and natural gas platforms, which pump more than 1.6 million barrels of crude per day (bpd), about 17 percent of U.S. output, according to government data.
About 14.6 percent of U.S. Gulf oil production equaling 254,607 bpd was offline on Thursday, the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) said. About 6.4 percent of natural gas output in the area also was shut.
Forecasts for Nate have shifted westward in the past 24 hours. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) had forecast on Wednesday that the storm would make landfall in the Florida panhandle.Continue reading the main story
BP Plc and Chevron Corp were shutting production at all Gulf platforms, while Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Anadarko Petroleum Corp suspended some production and some drilling activity in the Gulf. [L2N1MG2AB]
Exxon Mobil Corp, Statoil and other producers have withdrawn personnel from their platforms.
Marathon Oil Corp and ConocoPhillips said they were monitoring Nate's path but have taken no action yet.
Nate, the 14th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, comes less than two months after Hurricane Harvey tore through the Gulf, denting about a quarter of oil production there, according to government data.
Several Texas ports are still unable to allow large tankers to enter after Harvey as they await dredging. Some large tankers have been rerouted to Louisiana ports, some of which are now in Nate's projected path.
The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), an offshore gathering hub for production platforms and crude imports from tankers, has not suspended operations and vessel activity around it continues as normal, officials said on Thursday.
All Louisiana ports were open as authorities and the U.S. Coast Guard monitored the storm, according to the Port Association of Louisiana.
REFINERS PREPARING
Refiners in Louisiana also have been scrambling ahead of Nate.
Shell was reducing production on Thursday at its 225,800-bpd Norco refinery and Phillips 66 was considering temporarily shutting the 247,000-bpd Alliance refinery or placing it on standby, according to sources.
At least three other refineries were preparing to continue operation through Nate, sources familiar with plant operations said. PBF Energy Inc's Chalmette, Louisiana, refinery planned to remain in operation, sources said.
PBF declined to discuss operations at the Chalmette refinery. Shell spokesman Ray Fisher said officials at its refining and chemical plants were monitoring the storm.
Chevron said its Pascagoula, Mississippi, refinery was monitoring the storm's progress. Exxon said the same about its refinery and chemical plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Marathon Petroleum Corp declined to discuss operations at the company's Garyville, Louisiana, refinery.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/10/05/world/americas/05reuters-storm-nate-oil.html
-
Appalachia Selling Supply Diversity, Petrochem Benefits in Wake of Gulf Coast Storms
Oct 5, 2017 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
As another tropical storm formed in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday and with the effects of Hurricane Harvey still being felt throughout the energy value chain, those working to attract more petrochemical operations to the Appalachian Basin are raising their voices about supply diversity and the region’s other benefits.
“I think we have in the Northeast a window of opportunity right now to get our message out and let people know what our advantages are -- the cheapest natural gas prices in the industrialized world, abundant water, closeness to markets, we’ve got a world-class workforce,” said Shale Crescent USA Marketing Director Greg Kozera. Shale Crescent was formed last year by a group of business leaders in the Appalachian Basin to attract global attention and top energy-consuming businesses to the Mid-Ohio Valley, a region near the Ohio River that includes parts of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
“That area is prone to hurricanes. That’s what happens down there,” Kozera said of the vast petrochemical and refining complex along the Gulf Coast. “What Harvey did is remind people that if you’re going to build something on the Gulf Coast, there’s a risk you need to be thinking about. It’s opened up some doors for us to at least get people thinking more about whether they want all their eggs in one basket.”
Kozera and his organization are not alone in their thinking. Sources working in the Appalachian region mourned the disaster and stressed they weren’t being opportunistic. But they also said petrochemical and refined product supply diversity is a topic that has repeatedly come up in the weeks since Harvey made landfall, swamping the Greater Houston area with rainfall and damaging energy infrastructure.
IHS Markit estimated that the damage from Harvey is projected to be between $60-100 billion, which would make it the second most destructive storm on record after Hurricane Katrina. At a damage estimate of $30 billion, Hurricane Irma is expected to rank sixth.
“The area recognizes that we do have a lack of redundancies in the United States,” said NAI Spring’s Bryce Custer, a petrochemical and energy services broker at the commercial real estate firm in Canton, OH. Custer has been working to attract more petrochemical operations to a portion of the Ohio River Corridor that stretches from western Pennsylvania to northern West Virginia.
“For the last year or two, most everybody I’ve been talking to, the common theme is redundancy. Specifically, site redundancy for things like power, product materials and the supplies that are crucial to keep things up and running,” he said.
Slightly more than half of all U.S. refinery capacity is on the Gulf Coast, according to the Energy Information Administration. The region also provides about two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemicals for use in plastics and other manufacturing.
Texas chemical plants declared force majeures, evacuated personnel and endured explosions in the wake of Harvey. But those operations came roaring back to life, with most plants back online within days or weeks of the disaster. They’ve grown increasingly resilient over the years after the lessons learned from past weather events.
“The big difference this time was the amount of water associated with this event,” said Jim Cooper, senior petrochemical adviser at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers association. Cooper said Gulf Coast petrochemical and refining facilities made extraordinarily quick turnarounds after the hurricane, and he said they’ll likely make further upgrades and buttress preparation processes as a result.
With minimal asset damage, the chemical production sector has been able to recover quickly. But the supply chain is long and inter-dependent. The bottlenecks caused by Harvey are likely to persist into the first quarter of 2018 for propylene and polyethylene supplies that were already tight, according to IHS. That’s likely to push prices up for some chemical products.
While supply diversity isn’t necessarily a critical factor in siting new petrochemical projects, Cooper said, things like feedstock, energy and shipping costs are. Appalachia currently has all those benefits, Custer said, but redundancy has at least made the area and recent discussions “much more interesting. I don’t want to say attractive yet, but it makes it much more interesting.”
A unit of Royal Dutch Shell plc is currently constructing a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker that would consume about 100,000 b/d in western Pennsylvania to make ethylene and polyethylene. Four other similar facilities have been proposed for the region as well.
Shell has said it decided to build in the region because of the abundant feedstock, market proximity and local support. PTT Global Chemical pcl (PTTGC) spokesman Dan Williamson said the same, adding that the Thailand-based company likes the area for its “low natural disaster risk.” PTTGC is expected to make a final investment decision later this year on a 65,000 b/d ethane cracker it’s proposed for southeast Ohio.
“There’s this dichotomy right now if you look at a map of where all the plastics manufacturers are, they’re all in the Northeast and in population centers around the country,” said Pittsburgh Regional Alliance (PRA) President David Ruppersberger during a panel discussion at the Shale Insight conference last month. The PRA has played a key role to help develop the downstream opportunities the region hopes for with Shell’s cracker and others like that it could be built there.
“If you look at where all the polyethylene pellets are currently produced, it’s literally almost all on the Gulf Coast,” he added. “There’s absolutely an advantage to having a source of polyethylene close to those manufacturers. Recent events in the Gulf have reinforced how critical it is to have alternative sources.”
About 70% of the North American marketplace for polyethylene is within a 700-mile radius of Shell’s site along the Ohio River. The Appalachian region is already home to some of the world’s largest plastics companies, but more plastics converters are expected to come to the area by the time Shell’s cracker enters service in the early 2020s.
Since Shell announced last year that it would move forward with the cracker, local, state and federal officials have stepped up their efforts to overcome a variety of challenges they see standing in the way of petrochemical growth in the region. Good land for large manufacturing operations must be identified, a workforce developed and a storage hub for natural gas liquids is seen as one of the most important factors to any sustained development.
“An Appalachian storage hub would certainly help expand and strengthen the domestic market and improve America’s export capacity,” said Tyler Hernandez, a spokesman for Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV). Capito has introduced legislation that would require federal agencies to study the feasibility of an underground storage hub in Appalachia. Her colleague, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has also introduced a bill that would make such a hub eligible for funding through the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program.
Kozera, who travels the country to get the Mid-Ohio Valley’s “open for business” message out, said he sometimes senses hostility from those working on the Gulf Coast about Appalachia’s plan for more petrochemicals. He said it’s as if the message he sometimes receives is “we have the infrastructure, you send us the raw material.”
Kozera doesn’t view it that way. He tries to explain that the regions can complement one another, with Appalachia supporting additional domestic production and the Gulf Coast focusing more on exports to serve a growing global plastics market. He also acknowledges the massive petrochemical expansion that is continuing along the Gulf Coast, with several facilities in various stages of development in Texas and Louisiana.
“We’re not going to overtake the Gulf Coast, it’s just not going to happen,” he said. “All we want are the crumbs to fall off the table. We don’t need 10 or 11 crackers, just build two or three and we’ll be happy as a clam.”
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/111981
-
Senate Moves Closer to Opening Up ANWR
Oct 6, 2017 | E&E Daily
By George Cahlink
The Senate Budget Committee yesterday adopted a partisan fiscal 2018 budget plan that moves Congress a step closer to permitting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The panel approved, 12-11, a proposal designed to ease the way for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts backed by congressional Republicans and the White House.
It's due on the Senate floor the week of Oct. 16, where Democrats plan to fight a push to pay for a chunk of the tax cuts with revenue from opening up part of the 19-million-acre refuge for energy exploration.
"The message we really wanted to focus on today was what a horrendous bill it was in terms of draining our national Treasury for the wealthy while hurting middle-class Americans," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a member of both the Senate Budget and the Environment and Public Works committees, said after the markup.
While the Budget Committee considered more than 20 amendments during a five-hour session, none of them touched on the hot-button issue of ANWR or environmental topics. Instead, almost all were failed Democratic attempts to scuttle the tax overhaul.
The panel did approve a noncontroversial amendment to support providing disaster relief to hurricane-ravaged Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It did not direct any specific funding to those areas, even as new aid requests emerged this week from the White House.
Merkley said he expects Democrats will push to remove the ANWR language and call for action on climate change once the plan moves to the floor.
Under budget rules, the Senate holds hours of roll-call votes on various policy amendments, in a process known as a vote-a-rama, before adopting a final fiscal blueprint.
In the past, it has featured votes on support for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, calling for a carbon tax and acknowledging the human link to global warming.
Democrats are expected to try to strip out a provision that would direct the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, by Nov. 13, to come up with $1 billion in tax savings over a decade. Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has said expanded energy exploration in ANWR is where she's likely to find that revenue.
Moving tax reform through the process of budget reconciliation will allow it to move in the Senate without the threat of a Democratic filibuster. Republicans control 52 seats in the Senate, and if united could move their tax plan without any Democratic support.
Earlier in the day, the House approved its own budget plan with similar language that could lead to opening ANWR (Greenwire, Oct. 5). But the Senate is seen as the higher hurdle for that issue, with the chamber's Democrats and moderate Republicans in past years scuttling House-backed bids to expand drilling.
"It looks like it's up to the Senate to reject any budget that will open the Arctic Refuge to drilling — it's bad for birds, it's bad for people, and it's just bad math," said David Yarnold, CEO of the National Audubon Society.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said that Republicans are trying to "hijack" the budget process to undo "more than 30 years of protections for one of our nation's last great wildlands."
She also raised doubts about whether selling energy leases in ANWR could meet the revenue targets, noting a large chunk of any leasing income would go to the state.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/10/06/stories/1060062851
-
Federal Regulators Criticize Energy Rule for Distorting Markets
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rebecca Kern
Two of the three members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have publicly criticized an Energy Department proposal that aims to subsidize nuclear and coal plants in the wholesale markets, suggesting it could “destroy” the markets.
“We will not destroy the marketplace,” Robert Powelson, a Republican member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in a speech at the Organization of PJM States’ annual meeting in Arlington, Va., on Oct. 4. Powelson's office confirmed the statement.
Democratic FERC Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur supported Powelson's comment, saying in an Oct. 4 tweet, “Great message!”
Powelson and LaFleur's comments are the first public reactions from FERC members to the Energy Department proposal and its potential effect on the wholesale energy markets, which FERC oversees. FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee (R) has not publicly commented on the proposal.
Market Challenges
The Sept. 28 Energy Department proposal directed FERC to address market challenges facing coal and nuclear plants. The proposal would allow generators with a 90-day supply of fuel on site—which would include coal and nuclear facilities—to recover their operating costs at “a fair rate of return.”
“FERC does not do politics. We don't do energy politics,” Powelson said at the meeting, which was first reported by SNL.
When it comes to politics, some congressional Republicans have weighed in against the DOE proposal, too.
“I really trust the free market. If a power source will survive the market, that's what the people should get,” Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 5. “This is sort of picking winners and losers, saying, ‘I'm going to pick coal and nuclear.’ That's not what's good for the consumer.”
William Nelson, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance wholesale power analyst, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 5 that the comments from the two commissioners were “the rational response that I think most people expected.”
“FERC historically has taken a pro-market, slow-and-steady, apolitical approach to any potential rulemaking.” So, he added, “This was the probable and likely outcome that they would meet this with a form of skepticism that suggests that the sky's not going to fall.”
FERC has set an expedited public comment deadline of Oct. 23 on the proposal. The independent agency published a list of questions on Oct. 4 that it suggested could be addressed in comments, including questions about eligibility requirements and how the proposal would be implemented.
The Energy Department gave FERC 60 days to act—a time period that will not begin until a notice is published by the department in the Federal Register.
The Energy Department “determined that FERC must reform the markets to address system resilience and long-term grid reliability,” Maria Korsnick, the Nuclear Energy Institute's president and CEO, told a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Oct. 3. “I cannot overstate the need for FERC and the [regional transmission organizations] to expeditiously implement … DOE's recommendations.”
Not Good for Consumers
But consumer advocates in the wholesale energy markets who testified in at an Oct. 5 House hearing all opposed the proposal and fast track for it.
“We are dead set against this proposal,” John Hughes, president and CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, which represents industrial manufacturers that are large consumers of electricity, said at the hearing, which the Energy and Commerce Committee held on consumer perspectives on improving electricity markets.
“We believe that it will destroy the [regional transmission organization] and [independent system operator] markets, if not destroy the competition in those markets,” he said. “The attempt here is to create a big ATM machine for uneconomic, obsolete coal and nuclear markets.”
Hughes estimated that out-of-market subsidies proposed in the Energy Department's rule would lead to increased costs to consumers ranging from $800 million to $3.8 billion a year.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance's Nelson also said consumers would face increased costs.
“If you impose another constraint on market and force out-of-market subsidies, in 99 percent of cases, you end up with higher costs overall,” he said.
“Intuitively, if we're keeping uneconomic units online, then it's going to cost more for consumers,” he added.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766640&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766640&jd=121766640
-
Chemours Knew N.C. Discharges Toxic, Landowner Charges in Suit
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrew M. Ballard
DuPont Co. and the Chemours Co. knew they were discharging toxic substances into the water at their Fayetteville, N.C., facility, a North Carolina property owner alleges.
In a lawsuit filed Oct. 3, Brent Nix claims that, based on their previous experiences at their Parkersburg, W. Va., facility, the companies were aware the Teflon-related chemicals being released posed health and environmental risks (Nix v. The Chemours Co. FC, LLC, E.D.N.C., No. 2:17-cv-00189, 10/3/17). Nix seeks class action certification for his lawsuit and payment for property loss and diagnostic health testing.
In February, Dupont and its former unit Chemours agreed to pay $670.7 million to settle personal-injury lawsuits stemming from water supplies in Ohio and West Virginia that were contaminated from the release of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) at Parkersburg. Nix claims that the companies therefore knew that the releases of PFOA and related chemicals—including GenX at Fayetteville—were toxic.
The compounds at issue are used to make stain resistant coatings for carpets, rain gear, fast food wrappers, and frying pans. Sufficient exposure to PFOA has been linked to thyroid disease, high cholesterol, early signs of liver damage, and testicular and kidney cancer, among other health effects, according to a 2012 paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Regulators May Pull Permit
State and federal officials are investigating the issue of contamination in the Cape Fear River from GenX and other chemicals released from the Fayetteville facility. Chemours has stopped discharging GenX and two other compounds due to concerns about their potential health risk and is providing bottled water to local residents whose drinking water wells are contaminated with the compound.
North Carolina regulators also have initiated a legal action against Chemours over the matter and, on Sept. 5, gave the company a 60-day notice that they intended to suspend the facility's discharge permit, which would affect normal operations.
Jamie Kritzer, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Quality, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 5 that the state's investigation is ongoing and Chemours continues to provide testing data and other information related to the matter. In addition to stopping the discharge of GenX, the company has been ordered to stop releases of two other compounds, both of which are perfluoroethersulfonic acid byproducts, he said.
Chemours representatives did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg BNA.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766645&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766645&jd=121766645
-
CSX Official Who Urged Christie Oil Train Veto to Lead Oil Train Regulator
Oct 5, 2017 | NJ.com
By Curtis Tate
A former CSX executive who lobbied Gov. Chris Christie to veto an oil train transparency bill this year is now poised to lead the federal agency that regulates oil trains.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved the nomination of Howard "Skip" Elliott to become head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The agency is responsible for enforcing tougher regulations enacted two years ago in response to a series of fiery oil and ethanol train derailments throughout North America.
It is also charged with completing new rules that would require railroads to establish oil spill response plans and share them with state officials. The agency could also determine how much information about oil shipments by rail the public is, or is not, allowed to see.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to ease federal regulations and has appointed industry officials to numerous prominent posts in charge of regulating the environment, safety and health.
As chief of the agency that regulates hazardous materials transportation by pipeline and rail, Elliott would be in a position to decide whether information about oil trains should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and state sunshine laws.
Those are the very same laws that have enabled news organizations to glean information about the shipments that otherwise wouldn't be available.
Railroads have fought back against disclosure of the information, claiming that it's both proprietary and security sensitive. Some states, including New Jersey, have agreed, while others, including New York and Pennsylvania, either did not agree or were challenged by news organizations to release the information under open-records laws.
The federal government has mostly stayed neutral on the subject, leaving it to the states to decide whether and how much oil train information is appropriate to release.
Until recently, CSX shipped millions of gallons of crude oil through New Jersey every week, from North Dakota's Bakken shale region to a refinery in South Philadelphia. News organizations obtained the routes and volumes of the trains from other states.
It isn't clear from Elliott's testimony last week to the Senate Commerce Committee how he'd approach the issue as a federal regulator. But as a CSX executive, he advocated the railroad's point of view.
Elliott, most recently vice president for public safety, health and environment at CSX, was among a group of railroad officials and lobbyists who met with senior Christie administration officials urge a veto of the oil train bill, S-806, which the state legislature approved in March.
The Record and NorthJersey.com reported on the meeting in August after obtaining the names of the participants through a state Open Public Records Act request.
After the May meeting with representatives from CSX, Norfolk Southern and Conrail, the state's three largest freight railroads, Christie vetoed the legislation in July.
The bill's lead sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, has vowed to seek an override of Christie's veto, though it's not clear whether she has the votes. No veto override attempt has succeeded during Christie's two terms in office.
CSX declined to comment on Elliott's nomination. Christie's office has repeatedly declined to comment on planned attempts by lawmakers to override his veto.
Weinberg said lawmakers would still attempt to override Christie's veto before he leaves office in January. If not successful, she said they'd vote on her bill again next year.
It isn't uncommon for presidents to nominate agency heads who are responsible for regulating the same industries where they once worked. That's been true regardless of political party.
In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Cynthia Quarterman to lead the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. As a lawyer at a prominent Washington law firm, Quarterman's clients included pipeline company Enbridge and freight rail hauler BNSF.
Quarterman faced questions about whether she could impartially regulate companies she once represented. She recused herself from involvement in an investigation of Enbridge, after one of the company's oil pipelines ruptured in Michigan in 2010.
In 2012, the agency fined Enbridge $3.7 million over the Michigan spill, a record sum.
She did not, however, recuse herself when BNSF, CSX and other railroads began experiencing fiery oil train derailments in 2013. Her department was tasked with crafting tougher regulations for oil shipments by rail, including stronger tank cars and proper classification of hazardous materials. Quarterman stepped down in 2014.
http://www.northjersey.com/story/news/watchdog/2017/10/05/csx-official-who-urged-christie-oil-train-veto-lead-oil-train-regulator/735768001/
-
State AGs Threaten Lawsuit over Ozone Standard Delay
Oct 5, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
Attorneys general from 13 states joined advocacy groups in warning U.S. EPA of a possible legal challenge over the agency's failure to hit a key compliance deadline for its 2015 ozone standard.
"As of today, EPA has failed to promulgate" nationwide attainment designations for the 70-parts-per-billion standard, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) said in a letter to EPA chief Scott Pruitt released this afternoon.
"Accordingly, the states intend to file a lawsuit in federal district court to compel EPA to comply with its obligations" under the Clean Air Act, the letter said.
The letter launches a 60-day waiting period before a suit can actually be filed. Also signing the letter were attorneys general from 12 other states and the District of Columbia. All are Democrats.
Their letter came two days after 10 public health and environmental groups also served notice of a possible lawsuit (Greenwire, Oct. 4). EPA spokespersons, who have previously declined to discuss potential litigation, did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment this afternoon.
EPA set the 70 ppb limit in October 2015, after an extensive scientific review concluded that the previous threshold of 75 ppb was not stringent enough to adequately protect the public from the health effects of ozone exposure.
Under a Clean Air Act timetable, EPA was supposed to issue attainment determinations by Oct. 1. Those designations would mark a starting point for states to come up with long-term cleanup plans for areas that are out of compliance.
While states turned in their attainment recommendations about a year ago, EPA had yet to release the final decisions as of this afternoon. The agency has offered no explanation for the delay, apart from saying that it's continuing to work with states.
In June, however, Pruitt sought to impose a blanket one-year extension that would have pushed back the due date for the designations until October 2018. After many of the same attorneys general and advocacy groups sued, Pruitt retreated in August and has since sought to have that litigation dismissed as moot.
EPA officials have also not responded to questions on whether the agency has a revised timetable for making the designations. In recent days, members of Congress involved in air pollution issues have either said they also have no information on the agency's plans or have not responded to questions left with press aides.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the former chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee whose former chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, now holds a comparable post at EPA under Pruitt, said in a brief interview this afternoon that he did not know the reason for the delay.
"I don't have anything further on that," Inhofe said. "Sorry."
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/10/05/stories/1060062825
-
EPA Could Do More to Address Delaware's Ozone Concerns: Judge
Oct 6, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
Federal regulators have not done enough to address Delaware's concern that giving the areas surrounding Philadelphia more time to clean up their air pollution will burden the state, a federal appeals court judge says.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Judith Rogers at oral argument Oct. 5 suggested the Environmental Protection Agency could have granted the Philadelphia region—which also includes portions of Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware—an extra year to meet the federal ozone air quality standards set in 2008 while at the same time imposing new pollution control requirements on those states (Delaware v. EPA, D.C. Cir., No. 16-1230, oral argument 10/5/17).
Delaware, which had sued the EPA over the extension, was concerned that the additional time would allow more pollution from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey to interfere with the downwind state's efforts to improve air quality and comply with federal air rules.
Overturning the one year extension would mean the EPA would be required to “bump up” the severity of the Philadelphia region's air quality designation, which would force all four states to redo their plans to reduce pollution. That could mean new pollution control requirements for large industrial facilities or vehicles in those regions. Delaware had argued the other three states’ plans were insufficient to improve air quality and protect public health.
EPA Lacked Options
Justice Department attorney Phillip Dupre responded that the EPA did not have that option available to it. The agency could have either granted the extension or “bumped up” the area. Dupre argued Delaware had made it clear it strongly opposed a “bump up” and it was unclear exactly what the state wanted the EPA to do.
But Valerie Edge, deputy attorney general for Delaware's Department of Justice, argued that if the EPA had denied the extension, it would have placed the obligation back on the states to take greater steps to meet the ozone controls.
“EPA did not fix the problem,” she said. “The extension year causes more problems by alleviating the requirement [for those states] to do anything.”
While Rogers suggested the EPA could have done more, she and other judges were also skeptical of Delaware's claim that the EPA lacked authority to grant the one year extension altogether—noting Congress gave the agency discretion to do so. And the judges appeared to suggest that Delaware must say why the EPA's response to its concerns is “insufficient,” and it had not in its legal challenge.
In its complaint, Delaware argued that the EPA could not grant the extension unless all states in the region requested it. Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania requested the extension, but Delaware did not.
But the three-judge panel noted that limit was not outlined in the statue. “The language says ‘any’ state, not ‘all’ states,” Judge Thomas Griffith said.
He later suggested Delaware could have had more success arguing the EPA's actions lacked grounding in the law, rather than a “procedural challenge based on this tortured reading” of the Clean Air Act.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121766639&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121766639&jd=121766639
-
Environmentalists Cite Methane Ruling to Help Boiler MACT Case
Oct 5, 2017 | Inside EPA
Environmentalists suing over EPA's boiler maximum achievable control technology (MACT) air toxics rule are citing a recent ruling by the court rejecting the agency's stay of methane air rules to show that the agency cannot exceed its Clean Air Act authority, which the environmentalists say EPA did in how it set the MACT.
Environmentalists in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suit over the MACT say EPA's use of a carbon monoxide (CO) threshold of 130 parts per million to determine when air toxics from boilers are sufficiently controlled is unjustified and unlawful. They further challenge EPA's use of “work practice standards” instead of numeric emissions limits during boiler startup and shutdown.
The court heard oral argument in the case Sept. 15, where a three-judge panel wrestled with what one judge called EPA's “black box” scientific rationale for setting the CO limit in the rule.
In an Oct. 4 letter to the court advising of additional authorities, environmental groups seek to bolster their case in Sierra Club v. EPA by citing the court's prior ruling in the methane case.
The D.C. Circuit's July 3 ruling in Clean Air Council, et al. v. EPA, et al. rejected EPA's stay of Obama-era methane regulations as exceeding the agency's air law authority. Environmentalists in the letter quote that ruling, saying “it is ‘axiomatic’ that ‘administrative agencies may act only pursuant to authority delegated to them by Congress.’”
The groups contend that EPA lacks such authority to set work practice standards for all large “major source” boilers, because the agency could have set tougher startup and shutdown conditions for at least some boilers.
Clean Air Council “provides further support for petitioners’ position that, because” the Clean Air Act “delegates only limited authority to set work practice standards for a 'particular class of sources' that cannot measure emissions, EPA lacked authority to set work practice standards for a larger class of sources comprised wholly or in part of sources that can measure emissions,” the groups write.
“At argument, the Court asked if EPA’s characterization of boilers as a 'heterogeneous' category amounts to a claim that it was impossible to distinguish between boilers that can and cannot measure emissions,” the groups say.
If EPA had made such a claim, Clean Air Council “would not allow EPA to exceed the limited authority Congress delegated to it,” they write. However, EPA never claimed it was “impossible” to distinguish between boilers in this way, only that if lacked information to do so. The groups say that the court could stay its mandate “for a reasonable time” to allow EPA to gather the information required.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/environmentalists-cite-methane-ruling-help-boiler-mact-case
-
Trump Administration Will Propose Repealing Obama’s Key Effort to Combat Climate Change
Oct 5, 2017 | Washington Post
By Brady Dennis
The Trump administration plans to scrap former president Barack Obama’s signature plan for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from the nation’s power plants, arguing that the previous administration overstepped its legal authority, according to a 43-page proposal obtained by The Washington Post.
The proposal, which is expected to be made public over the coming days, comes months after President Trump issued a directive instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to begin rewriting the controversial 2015 regulation, known as the Clean Power Plan, as part of a broader effort to obliterate his predecessor’s efforts to make combating climate change a top government priority.
In a copy of the proposed repeal, first reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA does not offer an alternative plan for regulating emissions of carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled that the agency is obligated to do. Rather, the agency said it plans to seek public input on how best to cut emissions from natural-gas and coal-fired power plants.
“Any replacement rule that the Trump Administration proposes will be done carefully and properly, within the confines of the law,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said in an email.
A central piece of Obama’s environmental legacy, the Clean Power Plan aims to slash the greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists agree are fueling the planet’s rapid warming. It also was an integral part of the commitment U.S. officials made as part of a historic international climate accord signed in late 2015 in Paris, from which Trump has said he intends to withdraw.
The Clean Power Plan directed every state to form detailed plans to reduce CO2 emissions from such sources as coal-fired power plants, with the goal of decreasing carbon pollution by about one-third by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. But the regulation has been a lightning rod since its inception.
Environmental groups and other supporters have called it a much-needed measure to help nudge the nation toward cleaner sources of energy. Representatives of the oil and gas industry and other opponents argue that the EPA’s regulations would unfairly force power-plant owners to shut down or essentially subsidize competing clean-energy industries.
From the start, the effort has been mired in litigation.
The central case in that fight, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, has had an unusual legal path. Early last year, the Supreme Court blocked the regulation’s implementation after 27 states and a host of other opponents challenged its legality. Its 5-to-4 decision, which did not address the merits of the lawsuit, came just days before the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
With the Clean Power Plan’s future on the line, a 10-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last September held a marathon day of oral arguments on the case, trying to decipher whether the Obama administration’s proposal went too far in trying to compel power plants to cut carbon-dioxide emissions.
But that court failed to issue a ruling before the Trump administration took office and requested time to reconsider the Clean Power Plan’s future.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who in his previous role as Oklahoma attorney general sued the agency over the Clean Power Plan, has long argued that the Obama administration acted unlawfully. In particular, he and other opponents argued that the regulations required power plants to take actions “outside the fence line,” rather than regulating activities that only take place on a particular facility. In addition, he argued that the Clean Power Plan set emissions limits that could be met only by subsidizing the creation of massive new amounts of wind and solar energy, while also limiting consumption of coal- and gas-powered electricity.
The EPA’s effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan is almost certain to meet with another wave of legal challenges.
“We had a Clean Power Plan. What we’re getting is a Dirty Power Plan,” said David Doniger, senior attorney for climate and clean air at the Natural Resources Defense Council, adding that refusing to crack down on emissions could “leave tens of millions of Americans in greater danger from extreme weather and other climate impacts. And it will cause tens of thousands of early deaths and sicken hundreds of thousands more.”
Doniger vowed that his group and others will again take to the courts.
“EPA is pretending the power industry still looks like those first isolated plants back in the days of Thomas Edison, serving only the immediate area around them,” he said. “The courts are going to look at this very, very hard, and they are not going to buy this fictional view of the way the industry works. Nor are they going to let EPA cook the books on science and economics.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/10/05/trump-administration-will-propose-repealing-obamas-key-effort-to-combat-climate-change/?utm_term=.fe9f44d47b9b
-
My Company’s Carbon Footprint is the Size of a Small Country. We Need to Act.
Oct 5, 2017 | Washington Post
By Stephen Badger
Global businesses are, quite rightly, under scrutiny for what they are doing to tackle challenges such as climate change and poverty. Last month, the United Nations asked business leaders the same questions we’ve heard countless times: What are businesses doing to help deliver on the Paris climate agreement? How can business and government work together to drive change at scale?
One of the key characteristics of the Paris agreement is that it extends beyond governments to engage businesses. Corporations should seize this opportunity to have a seat at the table and do their part to address critical global challenges. In time, they will realize the returns on investment in a sustainable future.
You have only to look at the carbon footprint of my own company, Mars Inc., to see the effect business has on the world: Our footprint is equivalent to that of a country roughly the size of Panama. With this scale comes responsibility. Mars, and companies like ours, must be as engaged as governments in delivering reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
That’s why I attended Climate Week and U.N. General Assembly events in New York in September, and talked there with leaders in business, government and nongovernmental organizations. As a private, family-owned business, we’ve not traditionally had a high-profile presence at such events. But if there were ever a time in Mars’s more-than-100-year history for us to find our voice and join the chorus calling for action, this is it.
Without a doubt, our society has done some excellent work to address climate change in recent years. But after a week of engaging with global experts in a range of disciplines, it’s clear that this incremental progress will not put us on a trajectory to deliver the Paris agreement or the United Nations’ sustainable- development goals. Now is the time for industry to transform how we look at our role in creating a more sustainable world. This is why Mars has launched our new Sustainable in a Generation Plan to invest $1 billion over the next few years to tackle urgent threats facing society.
In New York, people often asked me if there really is a sound business case for tackling issues such as climate change and poverty. The answer is an unqualified yes.
First, investment in operating sustainably delivers cost savings. Mars is already capitalizing on the falling prices of renewable energy and the long-term cost savings of clean technology. This has helped to reduce the carbon emissions of our 150 factories around the world by 25 percent. We are already using enough renewable energy to make all our M&M’s. In fact, we now purchase enough renewable energy to fuel our entire operations in five countries and plan to make that 11 countries in 2018. All of this is delivered at the same cost, or lower, as fossil fuel.
Second, for a company such as Mars that is dependent on agriculture, our investments are creating a more resilient and resource-efficient supply chain where smallholder farmers and others can thrive. By working with our suppliers to source raw materials in a way that lowers climate risk and creates opportunity for people, we can increase crop yields and ensure affordable ingredient supplies, reduce our impact on natural resources and ensure a generation of future farmers.
Finally, there are rewards for doing the right thing. It makes us a more attractive partner to customers, governments and NGOs, and it ensures our relevance to consumers as well as current and future Mars associates. If we are to remain relevant for the next 100 years, we must drive an agenda that is forward-looking and focused, demonstrating what we stand for through our actions as a business.
This is a call to action for all in business to double down in support of the Paris agreement and the sustainable- development goals. Business not only has a seat at the table; it has a vested interest in collaborating with everyone at the table. So let’s grab this opportunity with both hands.
Stephen Badger is chairman of Mars Inc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-companys-carbon-footprint-is-the-size-of-a-small-country-we-need-to-act/2017/10/05/e13c2cea-a93d-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?utm_term=.5383c3bd4d81
-
EPA's Climate Rule Withdrawal Will Include Big Changes to Cost Calculations
Oct 5, 2017 | PoliticoPro
By Emily Holden
The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation, according to multiple sources familiar with recent drafts.
In nixing the Clean Power Plan, EPA will suggest changing the benefits it counts, which would bolster its arguments that the rule’s economic burdens would outweigh its gains from cleaner air, reduced illnesses and greater energy efficiency.
President Donald Trump has long vowed to erase Obama’s restrictions on coal plants, and then announced he was pulling out of the Paris climate accord, so it's no surprise he plans to eliminate the rule. But the fine print will have big implications for the inevitable yearslong legal fights to come. It could anger environmental advocates while satisfying some industries and conservative states.
“It may seem like inside baseball, but this is going to set the tone,” said John Larsen, a director at the analysis firm Rhodium Group. “We haven’t seen the details of any sort of regulatory plan from this administration yet on climate.”
EPA could release its withdrawal proposal in the coming days, while leaving the door open to eventually replace the rule with one that would pose minimal costs but provide few climate benefits, as POLITICO reported last month.
Among other changes, Trump’s EPA will drastically alter how it uses the social cost of carbon, a metric for assigning a monetary value to curbing emissions. The agency will decline to consider any social or economic benefits the rule creates outside the United States — unlike the Obama administration, which included worldwide impacts in its calculations.
And it will count far fewer of the health benefits that might have come from reducing air pollutants that cause premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma hospitalizations.
Taken together, the sources say, the recalculations eliminate tens of billions of dollars of the rule’s benefits, which Obama’s EPA had contended would outweigh the costs of enforcing a faster shift away from coal-fired power. The new numbers could be meant to aid EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s legal case for scrapping the rule.
The rule’s supporters are already accusing Trump and Pruitt of promoting fake math. They say the administration is ignoring the reality that power companies are making the transition to green energy even faster than Obama anticipated.
“Like so many things, they seem to be completely ignoring what’s happening in the real world,” Janet McCabe, who led EPA’s air office under Obama, said of Trump’s team. “Every other story is about how costs are coming down, about how emissions are reducing, about how power companies are making choices to close their coal plants or run them less because they’re so expensive.”
David Doniger, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “the courts are going to look very, very hard at this kind of cooking of the books.”
“There are two kinds of ways to get the law wrong, to play fast and loose with science and facts or with the economics, and you can lose for either or both reasons,” he said.
But EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that if anyone's numbers were questionable, it was Obama's.
“While it appears you are writing a piece based on rumors about CPP, the facts are that the Obama administration’s estimates and analysis of costs and benefits was, in multiple areas, highly uncertain and/or controversial," she said in an email Thursday night.
The businesses and states that opposed Obama’s regulation say it’s about time EPA reconsidered the costs. For example, it’s reasonable to count only the rule's U.S. benefits since Americans would be paying the costs, said Jeff Holmstead, an industry lawyer who was EPA’s air administrator under former President George W. Bush.
The math surrounding the rule has long been a political lightning rod.
The Obama-era EPA said the rule would be a net gain for society because shifting to cleaner energy sources would slow climate change and reduce pollution-related illnesses, among other benefits. In contrast, studies financed by conservative groups estimated that the regulation would cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars during the same time frame.
The rule sought to cut the U.S. power industry’s carbon pollution 32 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels — and as of two years ago, the country was more than halfway there. The regulation was the centerpiece of Obama’s pledge that the U.S. would fulfill its part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Trump has since announced he’s pulling the United States out of Paris, unless he can “negotiate” a more favorable deal, and he’s ordered EPA to undo a host of Obama-era regulations, chief among them the Clean Power Plan.
He has also directed his agencies to recalculate Obama’s math on the social and economic impacts of climate change.
In a March executive order, Trump disbanded an interagency team that had been working on revising the social cost of carbon.
He also told his agencies to revert to White House guidance from 2003, which directed regulators performing cost-benefit analyses to “focus on benefits and costs that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States.” Any look at international implications should go into a separate report, the George W. Bush-era guidance said.
That “America First” approach to regulation is a big departure from Obama’s methods, which considered the worldwide effects of reducing U.S. carbon pollution, but it will help Trump’s EPA justify repealing the rule.
In the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration had estimated that each metric ton of carbon dioxide imposes about $40 of costs on society. That means the plan would yield about $30 billion in global climate benefits by 2030 — but only $2 billion to $7 billion in domestic gains, less than the rule’s estimated cost, according to the think tank Brookings.
Experts who support the international strategy say going back is misguided. Michael Greenstone, the chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, told lawmakers in March that using a social cost of carbon that incorporates only U.S. benefits is "essentially asking the rest of the world to ramp up their emissions."
Noah Kaufman, an economist for World Resources Institute’s climate program, said that “because climate change is a global problem, it requires a global solution.”
“If countries try to solve it only for themselves, not taking into account how U.S. emissions affect the global community, and the global community doesn’t consider how it affects us … you’re just never going to solve the problem,” Kaufman said.
EPA will also refuse to count many of the health benefits that the Obama administration estimated would arise as side effects of reducing carbon emissions, the sources said. Specifically, Obama’s regulators accounted for the fact that levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter — pollutants already regulated by other EPA rules — would decline along with the greenhouse gases.
In contrast, Trump’s EPA won’t count those ancillary reductions if the pollutants were already below levels that the agency has deemed safe in other standards.
Environmental advocates say that logic is wrong, because further curbing those pollutants means people will be even healthier. But Holmstead said that while it’s legitimate for EPA to look at the other pollutant reductions the rule might achieve, the agency shouldn’t count them to offset costs.
The changes to the cost-benefit analysis will come in a regulatory impact analysis that aims to highlight a wide range of cost estimates for the rule. The analysis will accompany EPA’s proposed rule for rescinding the Clean Power Plan and its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on options to replace the regulation.
Obama's critics estimate the rule would force consumers to pay $200 billion more by 2030 and saddle electricity customers with double-digit price hikes in many states, according to a study contracted by the conservative American Energy Alliance’s Institute for Energy Research.
The Obama-era EPA and many academic institutions and think tanks have argued that the rule would cost far less, between $5 billion and $8 billion in 2030 by the agency’s previous calculations. Plus, they have said, the social benefits of reducing carbon levels, slowing climate change and ratcheting down illness-causing air pollution would far offset the costs, achieving $26 billion to $45 billion in net benefits by 2030.
Advocates say costs are already proving to be even lower than expected as power companies move away from coal on their own.
The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law this week released a paper compiling multiple studies that have found that Clean Power Plan compliance costs have fallen dramatically since the rule came out in 2015. That included an analysis from the American Petroleum Institute that estimated lower costs than EPA’s original expectations.
“The takeaway from this should be, if we’re going to do anything with the Clean Power Plan right now, given these trends we should be strengthening the goals,” said Jack Lienke, an author of that paper and regulatory policy director for the institute. “Emissions can be reduced much more cheaply. That’s a reason to set more aggressive targets, not to weaken targets or repeal them altogether.”
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/story/2017/10/epas-climate-rule-withdrawal-will-include-big-changes-to-cost-calculations-163069
-
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Fall 2 Percent in 2016, Led by Power Industry: EPA
Oct 5, 2017 | Reuters
By Valerie Volcovici
Greenhouse gas emissions from America’s largest industrial facilities fell 2 percent in 2016 to 2.99 billion tonnes, led by a large cut from the power sector, according to data published on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The decline, which came in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, brings the total drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial facilities over the past five years to nearly 10 percent.
The decline in emissions in 2016 was led by a 4.6 percent cut from U.S. power plants, to 1.88 billion tonnes from 1.97 billion tonnes in 2015, according to the data. That marks an 18 percent decline from five years ago, when the EPA started gathering data.
Emissions from the natural gas and oil sectors, however, including pipelines and gathering systems, rose to 283 million tonnes in 2016 from 233 million in 2015.
The EPA’s mandatory greenhouse gas reporting program requires all facilities that emit over 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year across all sectors to report their emissions to the agency.
President Donald Trump has blasted limits imposed by Obama on the emissions scientists blame for climate change, saying they are too costly for industry. Trump has sought to roll them back, and has also announced he will withdraw the country from a global pact aimed at countering global warming.
The EPA this year removed many pages on its website dedicated to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions information, but kept the page for the reporting program because Congress requires it.
The 2016 greenhouse gas emissions results appeared on the site without notice or a press release. An EPA official did not respond to a request for comment.
For 2016, 7,631 facilities ranging from power plants to oil refineries submitted a report to the program, by a March 31 deadline.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-usa-emissions/u-s-greenhouse-gas-emissions-fall-2-percent-in-2016-led-by-power-industry-epa-idUSKBN1CA2V7
Industry and Association News
LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation and Infrastructure News
Environment News
Add recipients
Suggested