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ACC PM 11/24
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Senate Eliminates EPA Chemical Risk Assessment Programme
Nov 24, 2017 | Chemistry World
By Rebecca Trager
EPA Integrated Risk Information System, which identifies and characterises chemical health hazards, will dissolve if Senate spending bill is enacted -
(ACC Mentioned) Congress Must Vote For Public Health Protection And Reject The Nomination Of Dourson To EPA Post
Nov 24, 2017 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Linda Reinstein
As a mesothelioma widow, I am outraged that the Trump administration has nominated Michael Dourson to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP). But I am not alone. Every reputable institution and organization fighting for toxic chemicals reform agree: Mr. Dourson is uniquely unfit to lead the war against toxic chemicals. -
Monsanto Wants California To Drop Expensive Labeling Regs On Herbicides
Nov 24, 2017 | Bizpac Review
By Tim Pearce
A free market legal group joined Monsanto Co. Tuesday in the company’s legal battle to free glyphosate, an ingredient in a popular herbicide, from regulations under California’s Proposition 65 labeling law. -
Editorial: Should Virginia Join The Carbon-Trading Club?
Nov 24, 2017 | Richmond Time-Dispatch
Virginia has made some modest steps toward reducing total carbon emissions, but it could be doing more — and should. The question is how.
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Senate Eliminates EPA Chemical Risk Assessment Programme
Nov 24, 2017 | Chemistry World
By Rebecca Trager
EPA Integrated Risk Information System, which identifies and characterises chemical health hazards, will dissolve if Senate spending bill is enacted
The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) embattled Integrated Risk Information System (Iris) programme, through which the agency identifies and characterises the health hazards of chemicals in the environment, will be eliminated under a spending bill for 2018 released by the Republican-led Senate on 20 November. If enacted, the legislation also would reduce the budget of the EPA’s chemical safety and sustainability programme by $15.4 million (£11.58 million).
An explanatory statement accompanying the bill says resources would be transferred within the EPA from Iris to help implement the updated Toxic Substances Control Act (Tsca), which gives more authority to the agency to regulate new and existing chemicals in the US. The best-case scenario is that a small fraction of the Iris programme’s responsibilities – and only one-third of its funding – would be reallocated to the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, according to organisations like the Environmental Defense Fund.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the Senate expressed concern that this legislative proposal would impose the Iris workload onto the recently-reformed TSCA programme, which was not designed to accommodate the breadth of its responsibilities. They also say that the bill would allow the EPA to implement an additional $68 million in programme cuts with no restrictions, and that the measure includes funding to enable the Trump administration to cut a full quarter of EPA’s current staff of scientists and public health experts.
Any 2018 appropriations bill has to pass both chambers of Congress before it can be forwarded to the White House action, and there is recent movement on the House side to do away with the Iris programme.
The step to disband Iris follows tough talk in September by Republicans who sit on the House of Representatives’ science, space and technology (HSST) committee. During a hearing, they questioned whether the Iris programme should exist at all, arguing that it is not based on sound science and that it provides duplicative as well as conflicting chemical safety information.
In October, Republican leaders on the HSST panel wrote to the head of the EPA and expressed concern about the scientific merit of past Iris assessments, including those on trichloroethylene and chloroprene. They suggested that these two cases represent just two of the more ‘well-document failures’ of the Iris programme to take into account additional scientific information, and request a briefing on the matter from EPA staff.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/senate-eliminates-epa-chemical-risk-assessment-programme/3008341.article
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Nov 24, 2017 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Linda Reinstein
As a mesothelioma widow, I am outraged that the Trump administration has nominated Michael Dourson to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP). But I am not alone. Every reputable institution and organization fighting for toxic chemicals reform agree: Mr. Dourson is uniquely unfit to lead the war against toxic chemicals.
Dourson’s deep-rooted ties to the chemical industry and his repeated calls to significantly weaken chemical safety standards is all the evidence required to determine where his allegiances will fall if the Senate confirms his nomination. His research firm, Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), is known for conducting industry-backed studies that are widely questioned by the scientific community. TERA’s clients include Big Chem giants Dow, Monsanto and many more.One by one, the EPA’s offices are being filled with veterans of the American Chemistry Council (ACC). Early this year, Nancy Beck, formerly Senior Policy Director at ACC, was installed as the Deputy Assistant Administrator in the EPA’s OCSPP. Truly, the foxes are already guarding the henhouse
Sound science and the EPA’s ability to review and regulate asbestos as well as 80,000 other chemicals in our homes, schools, workplaces and environment are at risk.
I know. I buried my husband. In 2004, Alan was diagnosed with mesothelioma. Like most people, I had never heard of this asbestos-caused cancer and thought asbestos had been banned long ago. With our 10-year old daughter and me by his side, Alan fought a courageous three-year battle and endured an unimaginable surgery to remove a rib, lung, strip off the lining of his heart, and surgically replaced his diaphragm in hopes for more time. The Grim Reaper hovers over those exposed to asbestos.
For more than a decade, I have seen countless other patients and families care and bury their loved ones who were diagnosed with asbestos-caused cancer of the lung, larynx, ovaries, mesothelioma, and other diseases such as asbestosis.
Each year, asbestos-caused diseases claim the lives of up to 15,000 Americans, yet imports of asbestos not only continue, but have doubled in the last year. Without a ban, asbestos remains legal and lethal used today by industry. Worse yet, in 1989, the chemical industry fought to block a ban instituted by the George H.W. Bush administration, and won. Today, the ACC is lobbying the Trump EPA for another exemption as the agency considers whether to finally ban the deadly substance.
Data from the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that 705 metric tons of raw asbestos were imported last year, compared to 343 metric tons in 2015. The only remaining user of raw asbestos in the U.S. is the chloralkali industry, which uses it to “manufacture semipermeable asbestos diaphragms.”
Lobbyists from the ACC, on behalf of the chloralkali industry, are now pushing for an exemption from the new chemical safety law that would allow it to continue to import and use asbestos just as it does today. To be clear, asbestos is a known carcinogen and there is no safe or controlled use of asbestos in mining or manufacturing. Even the smallest fiber, if inhaled, can lodge in the lungs and ultimately trigger the disease that killed my husband and hundreds of thousands of other Americans.
The possibility of Mr. Dourson taking control of protecting the public from dangerous and deadly toxic chemicals has created a bipartisan chorus of opposition in the Senate. This week, North Carolina’s Republican Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis said they would also oppose Dourson’s nomination.
With the passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century (LCSA), the hurdles to banning asbestos have finally been removed. The time is now to ensure the EPA can finally get the job done -- and ban asbestos without exemptions or loopholes. If the EPA can’t ban asbestos – TSCA has failed, again.
When the Senate convenes to vote to confirm or deny Dourson’s appointment, I urge them to look closely at his long career defending toxic chemicals as well as the legacy of asbestos in this country that has destroyed the lives of so many.
A vote against Dourson is a vote for public health protection and the robust chemical safety authorities that now exist at the EPA.Linda Reinstein is the President/CEO and Co-Founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO).
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/361593-congress-must-vote-for-public-health-protection-and
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Monsanto Wants California To Drop Expensive Labeling Regs On Herbicides
Nov 24, 2017 | Bizpac Review
By Tim Pearce
A free market legal group joined Monsanto Co. Tuesday in the company’s legal battle to free glyphosate, an ingredient in a popular herbicide, from regulations under California’s Proposition 65 labeling law.
The Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) asked the California Court of Appeals to reverse a trial court decision that upheld the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s (OEHHA) decision to list glyphosate as “known to the state to cause cancer.” OEHHA’s decision subjects Monsanto’s decades-old herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate, to strict labeling laws, according to a WLF press release.
“Glyphosate is a safe, environmentally sustainable and cost-effective tool for farmers,” Monsanto’s vice president of global strategy Scott Partridge said in a statement after Monsanto initially appealed the trial court decision last week. “This labeling requirement would do nothing more than compel false warnings about a safe product and unnecessarily increase food prices for consumers.”
California listed glyphosate as a cancer-causing chemical based on a 2015 ruling by World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The organization determined glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic,” Reuters reports.
The IARC was criticized by farm industry groups for the decision. The evidence that glyphosate caused cancer in humans was limited, and conflicted with a report by the Agricultural Health Study, the Scientific American reports.
Stronger evidence that the chemical caused cancer in mice was sufficient for the listing, however, according to the Scientific American.
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2017/11/24/monsanto-wants-california-drop-expensive-labeling-regs-herbicides-567268
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Editorial: Should Virginia Join The Carbon-Trading Club?
Nov 24, 2017 | Richmond Time-Dispatch
Virginia has made some modest steps toward reducing total carbon emissions, but it could be doing more — and should. The question is how.
The worst approach is, thankfully, off the table. In one of the few sensible things it has done over the past year, the Trump administration scrapped the Clean Power Plan — a top-down, heavy-handed, overly complex gift to federal bureaucrats that would have done shockingly little to mitigate global warming.
The best approach involves a refundable carbon tax, which would force polluters and those who use their products to internalize formerly nonmonetary social costs inflicted by power generation, transportation, and so on. The tax would raise the cost of goods and services, but the cost to consumers could be offset either by a corresponding reduction in taxes elsewhere, or by remitting the proceeds to citizens directly.
While that would offer the most efficient way to address the greenhouse effect, it faces steep political obstacles, and might need to be applied nationally to work properly.
That leaves the remaining option: a cap-and-trade system. Several Northeastern states have established one, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. The system sets a cap on total carbon emissions and requires power companies to purchase emission allowances, or credits, which they can resell among one another.
Because large generators tend to be more efficient and operate at greater economies of scale, they generally can bring emissions down below the level set by their allowances — and then sell the remaining allowances to smaller, more carbon-intensive generators. The smaller operators come out ahead because the allowances cost them less than the price of reducing their emissions.
As the carbon ceiling slowly ratchets down, the price of carbon allowances slowly rises, giving everyone an incentive to reduce emissions. But the system affords generators more flexibility and uses market forces to maximize efficiency.
Last week Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board approved a new rule that would bring Virginia into the RGGI market. The proposal has been written in a way that skirts the General Assembly, where any talk of environmental regulation runs into Republican opposition. That might not matter as much come January, when the GOP finds its numbers in the House of Delegates much reduced, but the air board could not have predicted the huge Democratic gains on Nov. 7.
Joining RGGI through executive fiat is likely to invite legal challenge, and the challenge conceivably could succeed. In that case, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam and Democrats in the General Assembly should push legislation to join RGGI through statute. In fact, they probably should do so anyway; a legislative solution is preferable to an executive edict.
Either way, Virginia ought to join RGGI. In the absence of a national carbon tax, it represents the most efficient way to go about the necessary business of cutting carbon emissions.
http://www.richmond.com/opinion/our-opinion/editorial-should-virginia-join-the-carbon-trading-club/article_2df1ed57-8292-5ed7-8e74-39c214277f4b.html
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