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ACC AM 2/6/18

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Mortgage Bankers Association Lobbyist Heads To Eris Group
Feb 5, 2018 | Politico
By Theodoric Meyer And Marianne Levine

.. Off Hill Strategies also signed the American Chemistry Council as a new client. They'll be lobbying on "Open Competition in Infrastructure Projects," according to the filing.

LCSA News

EDF Urges EPA to Broadly Apply Pending TSCA Fee Rule
Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is urging the Trump administration to ensure a pending EPA rule allows the agency to collect industry fees to support a broad array of chemical reviews under the revised toxics law, opposing chemical sector recommendations that the rule only authorize fees to review industry's requested conditions of use.

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) IRIS Staff Seek To Defend Program From Industry Challenges In NAS Review
Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad

Top staff leaders of EPA's embattled Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) are defending the program and outlining progress they say has been made to address past critiques from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and others, in the face of industry's ongoing criticism and questions over the program's future at the agency.
(ACC Mentioned) Corporate Power, Not Public Interest, At Root Of Upcoming Science Committee Hearing
Feb 6, 2018 | Environmental Health News
By Carey Gillam

U.S. Rep Lamar Smith, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, & Technology, has slated a full committee hearing for Feb. 6 with an agenda aimed squarely at attacking some of the world's top cancer scientists.
Insurers Have No Duty to Defendant in Criminal Asbestos Case
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Peter Hayes

Insurers had no duty to defend a policyholder against a criminal charge of negligently releasing a hazardous air pollutant, a New York appeals court ruled.
Merged Lawsuit Filed Against DuPont and Chemours in North Carolina
Feb 5, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Marc S. Reisch

Lawyers have filed a new class action lawsuit against DuPont and Chemours claiming that the two firms contaminated the Cape Fear River in North Carolina with fluorosurfactants

Energy News

Energy Trade Should Stay Duty-Free in New NAFTA, U.S. Envoy Says
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Josh Wingrove and Greg Quinn

The U.S. wants energy to remain duty-free in a reworked North American Free Trade Agreement and would consider a stand-alone chapter for the sector, a top diplomat said.
Louisiana Tax Breaks May Not Be Deal Breaker for Energy Projects
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Nushin Huq

The generous tax incentives Louisiana offers energy companies to lure large projects into the state may not be essential.
Canada’s U.S. Natural Gas Import Volumes Up 25%, Prices Rise 33% in First Nine Months of 2017
Feb 5, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Gordon Jaremko

Canadian natural gas imports from the United States increased 25% in volume and 33% in price during the first three quarters of 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) latest trade scorecard.
Fracking Comes With Risks, But It Can Benefit The Economy — And The Environment
Feb 5, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Daniel Raimi

For only two previous months in its history, late in 1970, did domestic producers pull more than 10 million barrels of oil from the rock formations which — for much of the 20th Century — made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil. But it’s about to happen again, and most experts expect growth to continue.
Halliburton Takes Fracking Fight From Oil Field to Patent Office
Feb 6, 2018 | Bloomberg
By Susan Decker , David Wethe , and Christopher Yasiejko

“They’re the two big dogs in the space,” said J. David Anderson, an analyst at Barclays. “Halliburton and Schlumberger have been battling for that top spot in North American services for a decade, so the fact they’re going after each other with patents is not surprising.”

Chemical Security News

Floods Are Getting Worse, and 2,500 Chemical Sites Lie in the Water’s Path
Feb 6, 2018 | The New York Times
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Nadja Popovich, Blacki Migliozzi And Andrew W. Lehren

Anchored in flood-prone areas in every American state are more than 2,500 sites that handle toxic chemicals, a New York Times analysis of federal floodplain and industrial data shows. About 1,400 are located in areas at highest risk of flooding.
Safety Board to Ask Congress for Funding After Trump Closure Call
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson

Members of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board have a plan in place to ask Congress to keep its funding ahead of a White House budget proposal expected to again call for closing down the small agency charged with investigating major industrial accidents.

Transportation and Infrastructure News

Trump Call for Faster Infrastructure Permits Faces Uncertain Road
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Alan Kovski

Several federal agencies are working to speed permitting of infrastructure projects, even though it remains to be seen whether Congress will act on President Donald Trump's related request to move things along.
Amtrak Crash Highlights Looming Deadline For Rail Safety System
Feb 6, 2018 | Reuters
By Ian Simpson

Only about a quarter of U.S. railroad tracks that carry passenger trains have an anti-crash system that safety officials say could have prevented a fatal weekend crash, even though a year-end deadline to finish installing it is just months away.

Environment News

Practitioner Insights: Environmental Auditing in New Regulatory Era
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Timothy A. Wilkins and Ryan M. Eletto

To read the popular press in recent months, one may have the impression that recent activities of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump have environmental law in full retreat and that the proverbial foxes are guarding the henhouse.
White House Seeks Economic Data Before Supporting Coolant Deal (1)
Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith

A top White House energy adviser wants to be convinced that a global deal to limit potent greenhouse gas refrigerants will boost the U.S. economy, and he's asking the refrigeration and chemical industries for the numbers to prove it.
EPA Hedges On Changes To Carbon Cost, Health Benefits In CPP Analysis
Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves

Despite making many significant departures from Obama EPA cost-benefit analysis used to justify the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Trump EPA's analysis of its proposed CPP repeal hedges on some key issues, including possibly using Obama-era estimates for the social cost of carbon (SCC) due to “uncertainty.”
Green Group Threatens To Sue State Dept. Over Absent Climate-Change Report
Feb 5, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green

An environmental group on Monday threatened to sue the State Department if it doesn't produce its overdue U.S. Climate Action Report to the United Nations.
Hartnett White Exit Spurs Hope Of Easier Approval Of Nominees
Feb 6, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk

Republicans are hoping the Environment and Public Works Committee will have an easier time moving U.S. EPA nominees now that a controversial pick has withdrawn her nomination.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Mortgage Bankers Association Lobbyist Heads To Eris Group

Feb 5, 2018 | Politico

By Theodoric Meyer And Marianne Levine

MORTGAGE BANKERS ASSOCIATION LOBBYIST JOINS ERIS GROUP: Bradford Cheney, who was previously an associate vice president at the Mortgage Bankers Association, is joining the Eris Group as a lobbyist. He’ll focus on outreach to Democrats on financial services issues and will continue to work with the Mortgage Bankers Association, which is a client of the Eris Group. Cheney spent more than eight years at the trade group. He worked for Hillary Clinton while she was in the Senate, and later served as chief of staff to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.). “I joined MBA at the height of the housing crisis and I’m honored to have played a small part in the work MBA has done to repair our industry and rebuild our nation’s housing finance system,” Cheney wrote in an email announcing the move.
CROSSROADS LOBBYIST JUMPS TO PRIME POLICY: Elizabeth Hart Thompson is leaving Crossroads Strategies to join Prime Policy Group as a managing director. She’ll lobby on health care, financial services and technology issues, according to the firm. During her time at Crossroads, she lobbied for clients including Airlines for America, Dropbox, Expedia, Google, Morgan Stanley, Spotify and Visa, according to disclosure records. Before joining Crossroads, where she was executive vice president, she served as chief of staff to former Reps. John Carney (D-Del.) and Melissa Bean (D-Ill.).
Good afternoon, and welcome to PI. Tips always welcome: mlevine@politico.com and tmeyer@politico.com. You can also follow us on Twitter: @theodoricmeyer and @marianne_levine.
** A message from the Household & Commercial Products Association: The household and commercial products industry generates $180 billion in sales, employs 200,000 workers and can boast a 19-year U.S. trade surplus, a trend that’s on track to be repeated this year and for the foreseeable future. READ MORE:http://politi.co/2FCqroJ **
CENTER FOR UNION FACTS HIRES OFF HILL STRATEGIES: The Center for Union Facts has hired Off Hill Strategies to lobby on legislation that would amend the National Labor Relations Act to restrict labor union activity. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) introduced the so-called Employee Rights Act last year. The bill would allow workers to withhold any fees that do not go toward collective bargaining and would require unions to hold recertification elections when high turnover occurs, among other provisions. It would also roll back a 2014 rule from the Obama administration’s NLRB that intended to speed up the union election process.
— In a brief interview with PI, the Center for Union Facts’ founder, Richard Berman, did not elaborate on why he chose Off Hill. In addition to Off Hill, the Center for Union Facts retained the Brimley Group and CGCN Group last year to lobby on the bill.
— Off Hill Strategies also signed the American Chemistry Council as a new client. They'll be lobbying on "Open Competition in Infrastructure Projects," according to the filing. The trade group, which spent $7.4 million on lobbying last year, also retains nearly a dozen other Washington lobbying firms.
CATO ON GOOGLE: David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, had an op-ed in USA Today on Sunday considering Google’s position as the company that spent the most on Washington lobbying last year. Even “if a company such as Google starts out lobbying defensively, it can get sucked into Washington's parasite economy and start using its new lobbyists to game tax laws, tariffs, regulations and subsidies to get an edge on its competitors,” Boaz writes. Here’s the full op-ed.
IF YOU MISSED IT THIS WEEKEND: “In mid-April, hundreds of members of the payday lending industry will head to Florida for their annual retreat featuring golf and networking at a plush resort just outside Miami,” The New York Times’Alan Rappeport reports. “The resort just happens to be the Trump National Doral Golf Club. It will cap a year in which the industry has gone from villain to victor, the result of a concentrated lobbying campaign that has culminated in the Trump administration’s loosening regulatory grip on payday lenders and a far friendlier approach by the industry’s nemesis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” Full story.
‘WE WERE ON THE INSIDE’: “A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build,” The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles reports. “The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States. … ‘We were on the inside,' said Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google who is heading the new group. ‘We know what the companies measure. We know how they talk, and we know how the engineering works.’” Full story.
JOBS REPORT
— Audible has added Micaela Klein as senior manager for international government affairs. She was previously a fellow in Sen. Brian Schatz’s (D-Hawaii) office, working on technology and telecommunications issues.
— Emily Schillinger is vice president for public affairs at the American Investment Council. She was previously communications director for the House Ways and Means Committee.
— Travis Van Horn is now an associate with Crosscut Strategies. He was previously coordinator for communications and media relations at the National Grocers Association.
— Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting has promoted Kevin Brennan and Skip Stitt to principal and Josh Andrews to senior director. Brennan and Stitt were previously senior directors. Andrews was previously a director. All are based at the firm’s Washington office.
— Joshua Shields was promoted to senior manager of governmental affairs forBlack Hills Corporation. He was previously manager of government affairs for the company.
NEW JOINT FUNDRAISERS:
None
NEW PACs:
America Progress Committee (Super PAC)
Americans Revive And Renew PAC (Super PAC)
PetsPAC (PAC)
NEW LOBBYING REGISTRATIONS:
Arent Fox LLP: American Psychological Association Practice Organization
Bethany Christian Services: Bethany Christian Services
CrossFit Inc.: CrossFit Inc.
Etherton and Associates Inc.: Revision Military
Hannegan Landau Poersch & Rosenbaum Advocacy LLC: City of McAllen, Texas
K&L Gates LLP: Trans-Atlantic Business Council
Kadesh & Associates LLC: City of Compton
Lavender Consultants: Jones Walker LLP on behalf of Greater New Orleans Inc.
Leavitt Partners LLC: The Individual Market Coalition (IMC)
Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas Inc.: Association of Psychology Postdoctoral & Internship Centers (APPIC)
Off Hill Strategies LLC: American Chemistry Council Inc.
Off Hill Strategies LLC: Center for Union Facts
Pike Associates LLC: Born Free USA
Porter Group LLC: Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE)
The Ferguson Group LLC: Databouy Corporation

NEW LOBBYING TERMINATIONS:
Bracy Tucker Brown & Valanzano Inc.: Willis North America Inc.
Ernest C Baynard IV: Dentrust Dental
Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs: F5
Kelly Services Inc.: Kelly Services Inc.
Mrs. Lou Linehan: Burlington Capitol [sic] Group
O'Keeffe Strategies LLC: Alliance Of Automobile Manufacturers
Panuzio & Giordano: Ceruzzi Properties
Samantha Stone: Hualapai Tribe
Shenker Russo & Clark LLP: Center for Disability Services
** A message from the Household & Commercial Products Association:Members of the Household & Commercial Products Association employ 200,000 people in the U.S. Their efforts help consumers and workers lead cleaner, healthier and more productive lives. HCPA members make and sell $180 billion annually of products that clean, protect, maintain and disinfect homes and work environments. READ MORE: http://politi.co/2FCqroJ **
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2018/02/05/mortgage-bankers-association-lobbyist-heads-to-eris-group-093863

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LCSA News

EDF Urges EPA to Broadly Apply Pending TSCA Fee Rule

Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is urging the Trump administration to ensure a pending EPA rule allows the agency to collect industry fees to support a broad array of chemical reviews under the revised toxics law, opposing chemical sector recommendations that the rule only authorize fees to review industry's requested conditions of use.
EDF on Jan. 31 met with EPA and White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials reviewing the agency's “Service Fees for the Administration of the Toxic Substances Control Act” (TSCA) rule and reiterated calls for the agency to quickly issue a rule that allows EPA to collect industry fees to support a broad array of chemical reviews.
“EPA needs to proceed expeditiously with a rulemaking to collect fees to defray the costs related
to administering sections 4, 5, 6, and 14,” of TSCA, EDF said in comments last year on EPA's Draft Strategic Plan that the group recently submitted to OMB officials. “EPA will need those funds to meet all of its obligations under amended TSCA”
According to its 2018 plan of chemical reviews, EPA plans to propose in early-mid fiscal year 2018 a rule allowing the agency to collect industry fees to support implementation of the revised TSCA, a measure industry observers have said is necessary to ensure timely chemical reviews in the face of expected budget cuts.
EPA in December forwarded the proposed rule for OMB inter-agency review, which generally takes 90 days.
The June 22, 2016 revised TSCA allows EPA for the first time to establish a fee structure under the statute to defray the costs of reviewing the risks of new chemicals, and to pay for a range of actions on existing chemicals by collecting user fees from chemical manufacturers and processors.
EDF and other environmental groups have long faulted a series of Trump administration rules creating a framework for reviewing existing chemicals under the new law as inappropriately narrowing the scope of uses that EPA will consider in reviews of existing chemicals, and opposed industry calls for similar limitations on the scope of reviews for which the agency may collect industry fees.
In the meeting with OMB, EDF reiterated calls from the group's comments in 2016 and 2017 on EPA's strategic plan and TSCA implementation to ensure that the fees rule defrays the cost of comprehensive reviews, rather than granting industry calls to only charge fees on reviews of the conditions of use that a company requests.
In Aug. 24, 2016 comments submitted to OMB during the meeting last week, EDF argues that the revised TSCA requires that fees for industry-requested chemical reviews establish the fee at a level “sufficient to defray the full costs [or 50 percent of the costs]” for the review.
“This requirement applies regardless of whether or not the requesting manufacturer manufactures the chemical for only a subset of the conditions of use included in the scope of the risk evaluation,” EDF argues.
EDF's comments urge EPA to clarify that the agency has sole responsibility and authority to establish the scope of all risk evaluations, including those requested by manufacturers, and that the EPA rule should not allow companies to seek an expedited review in exchange for a higher fee, among other concerns.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/edf-urges-epa-broadly-apply-pending-tsca-fee-rule

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) IRIS Staff Seek To Defend Program From Industry Challenges In NAS Review

Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Maria Hegstad

Top staff leaders of EPA's embattled Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) are defending the program and outlining progress they say has been made to address past critiques from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and others, in the face of industry's ongoing criticism and questions over the program's future at the agency.
“We do believe this work is really, really critical. And the option of walking away from it does not exist. There's no other program that can do the work we do better than we do,” Tina Bahadori, director of EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) told members of a new NAS committee charged with reviewing EPA's progress in responding to calls from previous panels on how to improve the program.
Bahadori and IRIS Director Kristina Thayer spoke at length with the new committee during its kickoff workshop Feb. 1-2 in Washington, D.C, where the two IRIS leaders -- who assumed their roles about a year ago -- sought to make the case that the IRIS program has strengthened its scientific approach to producing its risk analyses and is making changes to address longstanding concerns about the program's output as well.
“Until I joined NCEA . . . I did not really, really appreciate and understand the complexity . . . and the importance of its role,” Bahadori said. “IRIS assessments by design contribute to decisions across EPA but also across many of the other health agencies both in the U.S. and internationally as well.”
Bahadori argued that while EPA's toxics office -- which some have suggested could incorporate IRIS -- is in the process of developing its own program to evaluate chemicals' risks as directed by the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), IRIS is significantly broader.
“Sometimes it's misunderstood the breadth of the statutes that the IRIS program provides the science for. That includes the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Food Quality Protection Act, and all the Superfund related acts ... as well as TSCA. A lot of our work provides broad work into a lot of agency's goals with children's health and environmental justice, so as such, we work very closely with those offices which are housed in the Office of the Administrator,” she said.
Bahadori's defense of the program and its import comes as IRIS staff are awaiting decisions from political leaders in the Trump administration and Congress about the program's fate. While the program and its assessments have long been influential in the environmental health sphere, IRIS has also long been dogged by widespread concerns about its productivity -- the program in recent years has produced no more than two final assessments -- as well as critiques from NAS and regulated entities about its scientific approaches.
More recently, the administration's 2018 proposed budget -- yet to be addressed as Congress moves from one short-term spending bill to another -- indicated plans to reduce the IRIS program. For example, 2018 budget bills have proposed defunding the program or consolidating EPA's risk analysis programs.
As such, the NAS workshop has been viewed by some observers as a critical activity in the midst of such decision making.
Industry's Concerns
But the chemical industry has raised a series of concerns about the scope of the NAS committee and its membership.
An American Chemistry Council spokesman released a Feb. 2 statement saying the group has “serious concerns about the direction and substance of many of the comments made by EPA and many public commenters throughout the workshop,” adding that EPA speakers and some public comments “veered into unrelated issues...”
“We trust the professionals on the NAS committee will adhere to the scope of this review and produce a full and fair scientific assessment of whether EPA has made any substantive or procedural changes to the IRIS program and if those changes adequately address the past recommendations,” the spokesman adds. “The value of the IRIS and its future within EPA should be left to Congress and EPA leadership to determine.”
IRIS leaders worked during the NAS workshop to describe what they see as a series of changes to process and substance that they believe address key NAS recommendations, as well as calls from Congress' watchdog agency, which has also written several critical reports about IRIS program's lack of productivity.
“IRIS assessments are not regulatory decisions. They have no direct bearing on the implementation of the regulations, what they do is provide the science that informs the regulation,” Bahadori reminded committee members in her opening remarks Feb. 1. “For that reason IRIS is fully housed within the Office of Research and Development.”
Bahadori also reminded the committee of IRIS' history. The agency created IRIS in 1985 because prior to that, individual EPA program offices and regions developed their own risk numbers as needed. This led to a lack of consistency, and also uncertainty for stakeholders and agency risk managers, Bahadori said.
The two officials also described their efforts over the past year to make substantive changes to IRIS to improve its productivity, enhance its scientific credibility and address recommendations from NAS as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
For example, Bahadori said that IRIS leaders have been working with GAO staff to “really functionally improve our operations and work flow to and to reduce the vulnerability we create for the agency when we can't function...”
A major outcome of reviewing the program was the decision that IRIS can no longer produce its famous comprehensive assessments, Bahadori said, noting that the program will now seek to develop more targeted “portfolio assessments.”
She said IRIS leaders have gone back to EPA program offices and regions to question them more closely about their specific needs from the list of a score of prioritized chemicals that past NCEA and IRIS leaders -- Kenneth Olden and Vincent Cogliano -- released in 2015 as the assessments that IRIS would next undertake.
“When Kris and I came to the agency and looked at the resources available to us ... it became evident that it would be next to impossible to meet the promise of this agenda,” Bahadori said. “We started reaffirming with our partners, what is it you actually need? Do you really need every pathway, every eventuality of exposure, every form of that substance, every attribute of the population accounted for, or can we prioritize and take on what we are calling a portfolio approach. ... To the credit of the agency risk managers, they've worked with us over the past year to develop this portfolio approach so that our assessments will move away from one size fits all.”
Formaldehyde Assessment
One product that IRIS hopes to advance -- and demonstrate its reforms -- is the program's long-delayed assessment of formaldehyde, with Bahadori announcing that the next draft assessment of formaldehyde will “hopefully” be ready for NAS review “within the year.”
EPA's last formaldehyde assessment was critically reviewed by NAS in 2011, and an extra chapter beyond its charge outlined a series of recommendations for the IRIS program as a whole, launching a series of EPA efforts to address NAS' concerns.
Bahadori says the new draft assessment “will be a really good example of how we have really addressed and taken to heart the committee's” recommendations while also explaining that it is “a one-size fits all assessment. We're very proud of that assessment, but moving forward we're going to peel it into smaller components of assessments, release those as they become ready, and then continue work on other parts or other chemicals as they become important.”
Another change the IRIS leaders highlighted is what they described as deeper connections with staff in other environmental and public health agencies, state and federal, and greater use of their products in performing IRIS assessments. “We've also taken away a little bit of our haughtiness … the attitude that if it wasn't built in the IRIS program it didn't count, we've built broad collaborations with the other federal agencies, with the other health agencies, and the state environmental protection agencies,” Bahadori said, adding that “for many of our assessments we'll create efficiencies where appropriate to start with an existing assessment and build on that with systematic review to meet the broader needs of the agency.”
Committee members peppered the IRIS leaders with questions, including about the “portfolio” approach. Committee member George Daston, a research fellow at Proctor & Gamble Company, noted that there are “limitations” to moving to a portfolio approach. “Every problem won't have the same solution,” he said.
“It's very classic at EPA to put out an approach and then have nothing to show for it. So my approach is to do it, show it, and address challenges,” Bahadori replied.
Thayer, responding to questions from Lauren Zeise, director of California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, said that EPA's use of assessments from other agencies will vary. It will depend, Thayer said, on the source, “if a systematic review has already been completed; we can lift more of it if the evidence and the question is what we need it to be.”
Thayer said if an assessment comes from an agency like the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) or a state agency, “we can at least take the literature search.” She pointed to the recently released assessment plan for an IRIS assessment of uranium as an example, where EPA intends to build off a 2013 ATSDR toxicological profile.
“We'll be relying heavily on state agencies and the federal family,” Bahadori agreed, noting that officials have spent “a lot of time” with New Jersey environment officials and are hoping to reach out to Texas officials next. “It is a fallacy to think we could go it alone,” she said.
Systematic Review
Bahadori and Thayer also spoke extensively of their efforts to implement systematic review approaches in all ongoing IRIS assessments -- a key recommendations from several NAS committees, including two that followed the 2011 report. Still, Bahadori said that “even with all those changes, even as successful as we might be there, it's not going to make a trichloroethylene assessment more popular. It won't make the formaldehyde assessment any easier to process. And it's not going to … reduce the likelihood that we will be, and expect to be continually challenged about the quality, the effectiveness and the science of our assessment.”
Various stakeholders spoke during public comment sessions at the NAS workshop describing IRIS' importance, or raising concerns about its past performance -- with several pointing to the most recent draft and final assessments EPA released in 2017 -- and ongoing limited output. Bahadori acknowledged that draft IRIS assessments of ETBE and TBA peer reviewed last summer do not include many of the new improvements implemented in the past year. She argued that the documents were too close to completion and that if she and Thayer had halted every assessment without meeting and building trust with NCEA staff, it could have paralyzed the center. “We hope through peer review to strengthen the documents,” she said.
Committee chairman Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, asked “when you will be ready to produce the first IRIS 2.0 assessment?” In response, Bahadori said that, “We won't be releasing any more [assessments] that aren't 2.0.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/iris-staff-seek-defend-program-industry-challenges-nas-review

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(ACC Mentioned) Corporate Power, Not Public Interest, At Root Of Upcoming Science Committee Hearing

Feb 6, 2018 | Environmental Health News

By Carey Gillam

Score another point for corporate power over protection of the public
U.S. Rep Lamar Smith, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, & Technology, has slated a full committee hearing for Feb. 6 with an agenda aimed squarely at attacking some of the world's top cancer scientists.
Given the fact that cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, it seems obvious that our lawmakers should be supporting cancer science rather than trying to thwart it. But Smith's action comes after the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer ( IARC) angered Monsanto Co. when it declared the pesticide glyphosate, a key ingredient in Monsanto's weed killing products, to be a probable carcinogen.
Though the hearing is titled "In Defense of Scientific Integrity: Examining the IARC Monograph Programme and Glyphosate Review," the irony of the descriptor is not lost on those who have been following Smith's efforts to derail and defund this cancer research agency.
In letters to IARC's leadership, Smith has repeated false narratives and inaccurate news stories planted by Monsanto and chemical industry allies, and cited the "serious nature of these concerns related to expenditures of taxpayer dollars."
It's worth noting that the plan to put the International Agency for Research on Cancer on the hot seat was put into motion roughly three years ago when Monsanto predicted the international cancer scientists would find its weed killer to have carcinogenic potential. The company said as much in internal communications brought to light through recent litigation.
The documents also show that it was February 2015, a month before the IARC classification, when Monsanto executives laid out a strategic plan to discredit the cancer scientists. The plan was designed to "orchestrate outcry with IARC decision."
The efforts to manipulate public perception about IARC ramped up last summer when Monsanto allies spoon-fed a false narrative to a Reuters reporter who produced a news story that shot around the globe and has been a key talking point for the chemical industry attack against IARC.
The story relied on the deposition of an IARC scientist named Aaron Blair and reported that Blair withheld critical information that would have altered the IARC glyphosate classification. Reuters never provided a link to the deposition, which at that point was not filed in any court and was not publicly available.
Chairman Smith ran with the story, stating that Blair "admitted to knowing that this research could have prevented" the classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.
Anyone taking time to actually read the deposition, which is now public, would see that Blair never said any such thing, and in fact protested multiple times that the data in question was not fully analyzed and not published and thus was not suitable to be considered by IARC.
A similar false narrative pushed by the chemical industry and repeated by Smith accused IARC of deleting assessments finding no connection between glyphosate and cancer from its final report. Smith and team either don't know or don't care that IARC's deletions were of Monsanto assertions that the cancer scientists said could not be substantiated.
IARC officials have detailed the falsehoods perpetuated against them by the chemical industry but the defense has fallen on deaf ears.
Monsanto needs to discredit the international cancer scientists because it was the IARC finding that triggered waves of lawsuits against Monsanto, and prompted moves to ban the chemical in some European countries.
But while Monsanto and other chemical industry interests are concerned about the billions of dollars in revenues they rake in annually from glyphosate-based products, the attack on this independent science group should have all of us concerned.
Approximately 39 percent of men and women living in the United States are expected to be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes, according to the National Cancer Institute.
For this year alone, the American Cancer Society has estimated there will be more than 1.68 million people newly diagnosed with cancer and more than 600,000 deaths from cancer. Worldwide, there are more that 14 million cases of cancer occurring each year, and that number is expected to hit nearly 22 million by 2030.
Cancer "affects almost everyone's life, either directly or indirectly," and beyond the toll on life and health it costs the United States more than $200 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In order to reduce deaths from cancer we have to put more emphasis on preventing it in the first place, and a big part of that "primary prevention" according to a 2016 report by the HHS National Toxicology Program (NTP) "is to identify the carcinogens."
Clearly, the companies that sell chemicals linked to cancer prefer to see IARC defunded and dismantled. They've said as much through the disingenuously namedCouncil for Accuracy in Public Health Research (CAPHR), a nonprofit established by the American Chemistry Council a year ago with the specific goal of promoting the "reform" of IARC.
But to see our lawmakers so eagerly promoting corporate interests when such dire public safety interests are at stake marks perhaps a new low in American politics. These are literally life and death matters.
Our public servants must be held to account, to support the scientists who work to identify carcinogens, and push back against the corporate interests who want to discredit the science that threatens its profits.
Scientific integrity should mean exactly that.
Carey Gillam is a former Reuters journalist and author of Whitewash - The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science. She directs research into the agrochemical industry for the consumer advocacy group U.S. Right to Know. Gillam was one of seven invited experts to testify at the European Parliament in October 2017 regarding glyphosate concerns.

http://www.ehn.org/monsanto-cancer-iarc-weedkiller-science-2530759419.html

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Insurers Have No Duty to Defendant in Criminal Asbestos Case

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Peter Hayes

Insurers had no duty to defend a policyholder against a criminal charge of negligently releasing a hazardous air pollutant, a New York appeals court ruled.
Certified Environmental Services, Inc. will have to bear its own costs of defending the criminal charges, the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Fourth Department said.
CES pleaded guilty in May 2015 to negligently releasing asbestos into the ambient air, thereby placing other persons in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury.
The company was engaged in the business of conducting air monitoring and sampling and performing laboratory analysis before, during, and after asbestos abatement projects.
The Justice Department alleged that CES conducted shoddy air sampling and laboratory analysis for illegal asbestos abatement projects.
Under the terms of one policy, the insurer owed no coverage because there was no “suit,” which is defined as a “civil proceeding,” the appeals court said.
Under the other policy, there was no coverage because there was no “claim” filed against CES, the court said.
The court rejected CES's argument that the insurer had a duty triggered by the company's “claim” demanding insurance coverage.
Judges John V. Centra, Erin M. Peradotto, Stephen K. Lindley, John M. Curran, and Shirley Troutman, issued the per curiam opinion.
Camardo Law Firm P.C. represented Certified Environmental Services.
Traub Lieberman Straus & Shrewsberry LLP represented American Safety Casualty Ins. Co., and Indian Harbor Ins. Co.
The case is Certified Envtl. Servs., Inc. v. Endurance Am. Ins. Co., 2018 BL 36872, N.Y. App. Div., 1510 CA 17-01125, 2/2/18.

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Merged Lawsuit Filed Against DuPont and Chemours in North Carolina

Feb 5, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News

By Marc S. Reisch

New suit seeks to compensate residents for fluorosurfactant-tainted drinking water from the Cape Fear River
Lawyers have filed a new class action lawsuit against DuPont and Chemours claiming that the two firms contaminated the Cape Fear River in North Carolina with fluorosurfactants. The river is a source of drinking water for much of the southeast part of the state.
The filing, made late last month, consolidates and updates three class action suits filed since October by lawyers representing thousands of people who claim they are ill or could get ill because they drank water from the Cape Fear River and from wells surrounding the plant, now run by DuPont spin-off Chemours. A judge in the U.S. Federal District Court in Wilmington, N.C., ordered the consolidation in early January to streamline the effort to try claims.
The consolidated suit charges that DuPont dumped potentially toxic fluorosurfactants from the Fayetteville, N.C., plant starting in the 1980s. It also claims that DuPont knew that some of those fluorosurfactants, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), had toxic effects on laboratory animals as far back as the 1960s.
DuPont acknowledges that the lawsuits and ongoing federal and state investigations “could result in penalties or sanctions,” according to documents it has filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Chemours says in its SEC filings that it believes discharges from the Fayetteville site “have not impacted the safety of drinking water in North Carolina.”
In February 2017, the two firms agreed to pay $670 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits in Ohio and West Virginia by residents who say they were sickened by drinking water that was contaminated with PFOA released from what is now Chemours’ Parkersburg, W.Va., site.
Chemours recently began capturing all of its fluorochemical production wastewater at Fayetteville and sending it to Texas for disposal in a deep injection well. But the suit charges that the chemicals in the river and wells persist and have caused complications including colon cancer, stomach cancer, and ulcerative colitis.
The suit seeks funding for an epidemiological study to gauge the impact of PFOA, other polyfluoroalkyl substances, and GenX—which Chemours considers a safer alternative to PFOA—on residents along the Cape Fear River. It also seeks undetermined compensatory and punitive damages for illness, reduced property value, and the cost of water filtration.
“We will make these companies take responsibility for what they have put in the local air and water, for ensuring that the air and water are safe going forward, and for addressing the serious harms their actions have caused,” says Steve Morrissey, plaintiff counsel at the law firm Susman Godfrey.
In an unusual twist, the suit picks up on new reports that the plant has emitted GenX into the air. At least one of the wells containing traces of GenX is uphill from the Fayetteville plant, plaintiff attorneys say. According to local reports, the state has expanded its testing program of wells outside the plant to a radius of 4 km from an earlier 1.5 km.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/web/2018/02/Merged-lawsuit-filed-against-DuPont-and-Chemours-in-North-Carolina.html

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Energy News

Energy Trade Should Stay Duty-Free in New NAFTA, U.S. Envoy Says

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Josh Wingrove and Greg Quinn

The U.S. wants energy to remain duty-free in a reworked North American Free Trade Agreement and would consider a stand-alone chapter for the sector, a top diplomat said.
Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said the energy industry should be supported in a renewed NAFTA that “locks in” Mexico's domestic energy-market reforms.
“The United States wants NAFTA modernization to strengthen the North American energy revolution and promote North American energy security and self sufficiency,” Craft said Feb. 5 at an industry conference in Ottawa. “But a separate energy chapter must add value, not duplicate obligations found in other chapters.”
The remarks from U.S. President Donald Trump's appointee come between rounds of talks among the three nations to rework the 1994 trade pact. Negotiators say they're making some progress without solving some big obstacles such as local automobile content rules. Craft appeared with her Canadian counterpart David MacNaughton, who said he hoped to see some form of NAFTA agreement-in-principle by the end of March.
No ‘Red Line’
MacNaughton said Canada had proposed adding a specific energy chapter to the deal, but the broader agreement is the priority.
“We would like to see the energy relationship between Canada and the United States expanded, but it can't happen in the absence of an overall agreement on how we're going to move forward on the economic relationship overall, which includes NAFTA,” he said. “Is it a red line or something? No, but the energy relationship is a really important one.”
U.S. oil industry leaders have been cool to the idea of a separate energy chapter, but still want any new NAFTA to codify the 2013 and 2014 constitutional reforms that opened up Mexico's energy market to greater foreign investment. The push drew urgency after presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador signaled he would assess already awarded energy contracts, potentially including five of the eight deep-water oil and gas blocks awarded to U.S. businesses in December 2016.
MacNaughton also said he is pushing for an agreement by the end of March, in part because afterward talks will run into the politics of Mexico's presidential election. He said there are “four or five sticking points” but some kind of a “broad understanding” on NAFTA by next month is possible.
“If we roll up our sleeves and work hard on them, we can at least get to the point where we've got an understanding, whether it be an agreement in principle or whatever it is” by the end of March, he said.
--With assistance from Jennifer A. Dlouhy.

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Louisiana Tax Breaks May Not Be Deal Breaker for Energy Projects

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Nushin Huq

The generous tax incentives Louisiana offers energy companies to lure large projects into the state may not be essential.
The infrastructure needs of a particular petrochemical or liquefied natural gas facility matter much more than billions of dollars in tax breaks when considering where to locate, according to professionals in the industry. And local governments in Louisiana may be giving up millions in tax revenue for projects that likely would set up there anyway because of special site considerations.
Don Pierson, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development, told Bloomberg Tax that financial incentives don't top the list of considerations for companies looking to move or set up a project—but they are considered.
“All other states are going to deploy these kinds of assets, and perhaps the theoretical economist might say in a perfect world we would operate much better without them,” Pierson said. “In the real world, there is competition, and if anyone were to eliminate their incentives, they would put themselves at a strong disadvantage and that would cause their economy to stall.”
Manufacturing companies bring with them tremendous economic potential for the local economy, resulting in jobs not only in the plant, but also outside the facility, Pierson said. The promise of those jobs makes the projects valuable enough for cities and counties to forgo tax revenue to attract them.
Incentives, however, almost never determine where a company expands or locates, Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, told Bloomberg Tax.
“That's true because they can't, because they're too small,” LeRoy said.
Energy Projects Need Special Sites
Energy projects, such as petrochemical plants or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, have specialized requirements that dictate where they locate.
When companies are doing site selection, their No. 1 priority is access to cheap feedstock, or raw materials, and access to the product market, Steve Zinger, senior vice president of petrochemicals at energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, told Bloomberg Tax.
“If you don't have that, then all that other stuff, it's nice, but the incentives aren't enough to push these projects into a profitable state without the feedstock and product market access,” Zinger said.
In terms of access to cheap feedstock, Texas and Louisiana are pretty much tied. Although Texas has a slight advantage because of the developments in the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin, both oil and natural gas geologic basins located in-state, Zinger said.
The U.S. is also a net exporter of chemicals, so being near a port is important for most new projects, Zinger said.
Infrastructure, Footprint
A company's existing infrastructure and footprint within a state often factors into its site selection.
For example, a company such as the Dow Chemical Co. or Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LLC or Exxon Mobil Corp. have big chemical footprints in Louisiana, but a bigger footprint in Texas, Zinger said.
“That's probably been the primary driver for them to invest in Texas because they are using a lot of the existing infrastructure that they have rather than build new infrastructure,” Zinger said. “That ranges everywhere from rail yards, rail spurs to product storage, to synergies with other existing facilities to operational synergies. “
The most important factor is infrastructure, especially roads, according to PetroChem Wire, a petrochemical price reporting agency, which recently studied the factors that go into a company's decision when picking a location or restarting an idle plant.
“Can they handle large machinery and vehicles?” Samantha Hartke, product manager for PetroChem Wire, asked Bloomberg Tax. “We have heard anecdotally from several firms that some of the sites in Louisiana have been challenging for some of their larger vehicles. The roads are too narrow, too congested. They're sharing it with farm equipment, school buses.”
Companies need good rail connections and access to water and export terminals, she said. For some plants, pipeline access is also important, for example, if it's using ethane for feedstock, Hartke said.
When Tax Breaks Help
Meanwhile, tax incentives are most helpful to attract newer companies that don't already have infrastructure in a state, Zinger said. He has heard from clients who say Louisiana has more attractive tax incentives than Texas.
One of Louisiana's largest business tax incentives is its industrial tax incentive. While not the only tax incentive Louisiana offers, it's noteworthy because it's a tax abatement for local property taxes paid to a parish and doesn't affect the state budget.
Louisiana's Industrial Tax Exemption Program, often referred to as ITEP, has been used to give property tax abatement for new manufacturing facilities, and it can be renewed for routine upgrades. The abatement isn't just for new plants or expansion, but for all capital investments, including routine capital investment.
For example, over a 20-year span, Exxon Mobil's plant in East Baton Rouge alone received almost $700 million in property tax abatement, according to an investigation by The Advocate.
Exxon Mobil didn't respond to Bloomberg Tax's request for an interview.
Local Voice
Louisiana's ITEP is unique because the decision to abate certain local property taxes was made by a state board and not by a local authority, according to Broderick Bagert, an organizer with Together Louisiana, a coalition of civic and faith-based organizations.
In 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) issued an executive order giving parishes a voice in deciding whether a company can receive the abatement.
It's still too early to see what kind of effect the changes ITEP will have, Pierson said.
The executive order is significant, Bagert said, because whether the lost tax dollars are worth it was something parishes couldn't decide for themselves. Now they can.
For heavily industrial parishes with a small populations, such as Cameron parish, the tax breaks likely won't change their approach to the program, Bagert said. But for industrial parishes with large urban centers, such as East Baton Rouge, parish leaders are going to probably take a harder look at the value of the incentives, he said.
‘Real Money’ to Local Governments
All state and local taxes combined represent approximately less than 2 percent of overall cost structure for a U.S. company, LeRoy said.
Conversely, property taxes mean a lot to local governments, LeRoy added. They would comprise about a third of the revenue base of a state if the state has income and sales tax.
For example, Louisiana's Cameron Parish—where Cheniere Energy Inc. and Cameron LNG have a presence—has forgone $4.2 billion in property taxes from 2011 to 2016, according to an investigation by The Advocate.

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Canada’s U.S. Natural Gas Import Volumes Up 25%, Prices Rise 33% in First Nine Months of 2017

Feb 5, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

By Gordon Jaremko

Canadian natural gas imports from the United States increased 25% in volume and 33% in price during the first three quarters of 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) latest trade scorecard.
Northbound cross-border pipeline deliveries hit 693 Bcf from January through September, up from 556 Bcf in the comparable 2016 period, said the DOE’s regulation and international engagement office.
Prices fetched by U.S. gas flowing into Canada jumped to an average US$3.09/MMBtu at the international boundary for the first nine months of 2017 from $2.32/MMBtu for the same period the year before.
Canadian pipeline deliveries into the United States remained the biggest volume block in the North American gas trade but recorded almost no growth.
Canadian exports, at 2.302 Tcf, rose by only 1% in first three-quarters of 2017 from 2.265 Tcf in the same period of 2016.
Setbacks in first nine months of last year included traffic interruptions for construction and maintenance that cut flows by 2 Bcf/d on TransCanada Corp.’s Alberta and British Columbia (BC) supply collection network, Nova Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL).
Prices fetched by Canadian pipeline exports made up for their lack of volume gain by recovering to a 2017 first nine-months average of $2.53/MMBtu, up 30% from the lean times low of$1.95/MMBtu suffered a year earlier.
Canadian exporters consistently underachieve price averages received by their American counterparts because their deliveries go to widely varying markets across the continent. U.S. exports flow to Canada’s highest-value destinations in Ontario and Quebec.
The Canada-U.S. gas trade started to change in the last three months of 2017, although the new pattern remained an evolving unknown.
NGTL’s traffic interruptions ended, the construction increased the network’s capacity, and TransCanada inaugurated a deep toll discount on its long-distance Mainline from Alberta and BC to Ontario, Quebec and U.S. border crossings.
U.S. southbound exports to Mexico increased half as fast as the northbound flows into Canada, rising by 12% to 1.139 Tcf in first three quarters of 2017 from 1.015 Tcf in the same 2016 period. Mexican border prices rose by 32% to $2.24/MMBtu.
The fastest-growing item in international trade in North American production continued to be U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Overseas tanker shipments increased by 337% to 464 Bcf in first nine months of 2017 from 106 Bcf a year earlier. LNG export prices were flat at an average $4.65/MMBtu.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/113267-canadas-us-natural-gas-import-volumes-up-25-prices-rise-33-in-first-nine-months-of-2017

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Fracking Comes With Risks, But It Can Benefit The Economy — And The Environment

Feb 5, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Daniel Raimi

The United States has — or will soon — surpass its record high in crude oil production.
For only two previous months in its history, late in 1970, did domestic producers pull more than 10 million barrels of oil from the rock formations which — for much of the 20th Century — made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil. But it’s about to happen again, and most experts expect growth to continue.
Over roughly the last decade, a suite of innovations have been applied to shale and other “tight” rock formations, including high-volume hydraulic fracturing (better known as “fracking”), precise horizontal drilling, and other technologies which together have led to the “shale revolution,” making the United States once again the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons.
Supporters and opponents of fracking relentlessly debate the benefits and risks of these new technologies. Unfortunately, partisans of both sides of the debate often exaggerate the research that supports their view while ignoring evidence that cuts against it.

In reality, the shale revolution offers a mix of risks and benefits. But more importantly, it offers up a suite of opportunities which can strengthen local communities, improve public health, and even combat climate change — if policymakers, companies and the public take well-informed actions
Managing risk, seizing opportunity
Consider the health effects of shale development. Several studies have offered fairly compelling — though not definitive — evidence that there may be health risks of living in close proximity (about half a mile) to a shale well. At the same time, low-cost supplies of natural gas have displaced coal-fired electricity, reducing emissions of particulate matter, mercury, and other pollutants that contribute to tens of thousands of premature deaths each year.
Smart policy and responsible development can enhance these benefits by ensuring wells are not drilled too close to homes and by requiring companies to capture the most dangerous gases (such as volatile organic compounds) that flow to the surface during their operations. At the state and federal level, policymakers can further improve air quality by encouraging more displacement of coal by natural gas and along with nuclear, wind, and solar power.
The economic impacts of the shale revolution follow similar contours. Having visited every major oil and gas play in the United States over the last five years, I can say with certainty that growth in this development has transformed dozens of communities from Williston, North Dakota to Cotulla, Texas. These cities and many others like them have been supercharged by investment in the oil and gas sector, providing new employment opportunities, windfall royalty revenue for landowners, increased funding for schools and local governments, and more.
But the oil and gas industry is famously volatile. Repeated booms and busts in regions without a diversified economy can do long-term damage to productivity in other sectors. Just ask residents of Midland, Texas, who have seen multiple cycles of boom-bust, and where a common bumper sticker reads: “Dear Lord, Give me just one more oil boom. I promise not to piss it away this time.”
For Midland and other beneficiaries of the shale revolution, the near-term economic benefits are to be celebrated. At the same time, today is the day to identify other economic sectors that can thrive alongside the oil and gas industry, boosting economic diversification and protecting against volatility.
A climate opportunity
Perhaps the largest opportunity brought about by the shale revolution is also the most counterintuitive. How could a boom in oil and gas production offer an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The answer lies again in the displacement of coal-fired electric power.
In 2016, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions were at their lowest levels since the early 1990s, and the displacement of coal by low-cost natural gas has been the primary driver. But coal still provides roughly 30 percent of domestic electricity, and policies that encourage switching from coal to natural gas, nuclear, and renewables would drive emissions down further. The availability of low-cost natural gas, along with continued cost reductions in wind and solar, makes these policies easier and less costly to implement.
But over the longer term, multiple studies have shown that lower oil and gas prices brought about by the shale revolution also encourage people to use more energy, which increases emissions. What’s more, emissions of methane, which is the primary component of natural gas and also a potent greenhouse gas, reduce the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas.
Some states such as Colorado, California, and Pennsylvania have implemented policies to reduce methane emissions, and many companies have taken voluntary measures to do the same.
But to take full advantage of the shale revolution’s climate opportunity will require smart policies at the federal level — ideally, a steadily rising price on carbon emissions, coupled with investments in R&D for the energy technologies of the future.
Fracking has provided enormous opportunities for hundreds of communities, the nation as a whole, and the international community’s efforts to tackle climate change. Seizing those opportunities will require policymakers at multiple levels to understand the complex mix of benefits and risks these technologies provide. Then, they need to act.
Daniel Raimi is a senior research associate at Resources for the Future. He teaches energy policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and is a faculty affiliate with the University of Michigan Energy Institute. He is the author of the new book, “The Fracking Debate: The Risks, Benefits, and Uncertainties of the Shale Revolution.”
http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/372402-fracking-may-come-with-risks-but-it-can-benefit-the-economy-and

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Halliburton Takes Fracking Fight From Oil Field to Patent Office

Feb 6, 2018 | Bloomberg

By Susan Decker , David Wethe , and Christopher Yasiejko

“They’re the two big dogs in the space,” said J. David Anderson, an analyst at Barclays. “Halliburton and Schlumberger have been battling for that top spot in North American services for a decade, so the fact they’re going after each other with patents is not surprising.”
Halliburton has long been the top North American contractor while Schlumberger has dominated international markets, but they’ve been increasingly encroaching on each other’s turf as crude recovers from its worst crash in a generation.
In North America, Schlumberger is directly challenging Halliburton’s title as the top fracker after recently acquiring roughly 1 million horsepower-worth of rock-crushing pumps from Weatherford International Plc. Meanwhile, Halliburton grew at a faster pace in all international markets than Schlumberger in the final three months of last year.
Fracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, blasts water, sand and chemicals underground to release trapped oil and gas.
Oilfield service providers such as Halliburton and Schlumberger are being asked by their customers for greater technology to help them do more with less so they can be more prudent with spending and return cash to shareholders.
“Everybody’s fighting for that small little edge,” said James Wicklund, an analyst at Credit Suisse in Dallas. “You’re already so deep in technology it’s ridiculous.”
Patents can help provide an edge and Halliburton has racked up some early wins. Since December, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has agreed to review the validity of six Schlumberger patents after making a preliminary finding that Halliburton had shown a “reasonable likelihood” of winning its arguments.
Schlumberger has given up on one of the patents; and the board is considering Halliburton challenges on four others. Final decisions on the patents under review are expected by the end of the year.
Among the Schlumberger patents Halliburton has challenged are those covering the use of fiber optic tools to monitor interior well conditions, sensors to collect temperature readings across a broader area and ways to more precisely control where the fracking fluid goes.
Halliburton, in several petitions, said the patents are simply “a classic
situation where known elements are combined according to known methods to yield predictable results.”
Emily Mir, a spokeswoman for Houston-based Halliburton, said the company focuses its own research “on products and services that will improve efficiency and enhance production while reducing costs for its customers.” As for the Schlumberger patents, the company “cannot comment on pending disputes,” she said.
Schlumberger, in filings with the patent board, rejected Halliburton’s characterizations. In individual responses, one patented invention provided “many advantages and efficiencies” while another was “a significant advance” over earlier techniques, company lawyers wrote.
Officials with Schlumberger, based in Houston and Paris, didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.
There’s no guarantee that the patent board will invalidate Schlumberger’s patents, despite its reputation as a “death squad” with a high rate of ruling against patent owners. Baker Hughes Inc. tried to challenge one owned by Schlumberger’s Smith unit, for a drill bit to widen a hole. In a Feb. 1 decision, a three-judge PTAB panel said Baker Hughes hadn’t proven its case.
Even as it attacks Schlumberger’s patents, Halliburton is on a record pace to obtain its own, putting it in the neighborhood of tech heavyweights like Oracle Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. The company received 738 patents last year, making it No. 44 in the list of recipients, according to a study by IFI Claims Patent Services, a unit of Fairview Research LLC.
It was the only oil-and-gas company in the list of IFI’s top 50 recipients, which was dominated by companies involved with electronics, software and automobiles. Baker Hughes, now controlled by General Electric Co., was No. 74 on the list, with 496 patents, and Schlumberger was 86, with 434 patents.
“It is striking how fast Halliburton has grown” since 2009, said Larry Cady, a senior analyst with IFI who took a look at Halliburton’s patenting. Schlumberger and Baker Hughes “do not show the same trend.”
Among the patents Halliburton received last year were ones for modeling software to improve the efficiency of fracking, a downhole tool that limits hydraulic pressure, and a gel breaking system that Halliburton says is more environmentally acceptable.
It can take two or more years to obtain a patent, so the new ones reflect years-old investments. Halliburton also is getting patents through acquisitions as it tries to keep up with the next-generation upstarts that are developing new ways to boost output and avoid downtime in old wells.
So far, there’s no sign that Schlumberger is striking back at Halliburton’s patents. Instead, in October it challenged a patent owned by EnerPol LLC, founded by a former ExxonMobil Corp. researcher, that had filed a patent-infringement suit over technology to create wide fractures near the wellbore.
Schlumberger said in its petition that fracturing for oil and gas wells is a 70-year-old technology, and EnerPol’s patent covers “well-known fracturing steps.”
Other suits last year included ones by Canada’s Trican WellService Ltd. against Preferred Proppants LLC, over the material that keeps the fractures open once they’ve been created. Technologies that have been the subject of patent disputes also include a type of equipment called a dart that creates a seal, a step required for fracking. The patented method allows for higher hydraulic pressure than known methods.
Those types of disputes have been going on for decades and rarely result in any definitive blow against a competitor, Wicklund said. That doesn’t mean they don’t have value to the challengers.
“The longer you can keep your opponent off balance, then the more opportunity you have to grab that small part of market share,” Wicklund said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-06/promised-land-for-gas-drillers-turns-into-glutted-no-man-s-land

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Chemical Security News

Floods Are Getting Worse, and 2,500 Chemical Sites Lie in the Water’s Path

Feb 6, 2018 | The New York Times

By Hiroko Tabuchi, Nadja Popovich, Blacki Migliozzi And Andrew W. Lehren

Anchored in flood-prone areas in every American state are more than 2,500 sites that handle toxic chemicals, a New York Times analysis of federal floodplain and industrial data shows. About 1,400 are located in areas at highest risk of flooding.
As flood danger grows — the consequence of a warming climate — the risk is that there will be more toxic spills like the one that struck Baytown, Tex., where Hurricane Harvey swamped a chemicals plant, releasing lye. Or like the ones at a Florida fertilizer plant that leaked phosphoric acid and an Ohio refinery that released benzene.
Flooding nationwide is likely to worsen because of climate change, an exhaustive scientific report by the federal government warned last year. Heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency.
At the same time, rising sea levels combined with more frequent and extensive flooding from coastal storms like hurricanes may increase the risk to chemical facilities near waterways.
The Times analysis looked at sites listed in the federal Toxic Release Inventory, which covers more than 21,600 facilities across the country that handle large amounts of toxic chemicals harmful to health or the environment.
Of those sites, more than 1,400 were in locations the Federal Emergency Management Agency considers to have a high risk of flooding. An additional 1,100 sites were in areas of moderate risk. Other industrial complexes lie just outside these defined flood-risk zones, obscuring their vulnerability as flood patterns shift and expand.
The presence of chemical sites in areas vulnerable to flooding is a holdover from an age where the advantages to industry of proximity to rivers and oceans — for transportation and trade, or for a ready supply of cooling water — seemingly outweighed the risks.
“Waterfronts are changing as a result of sea level rise,” said Jeanne Herb, an environmental policy expert at Rutgers University who has researched hazards posed by climate-related flooding to industries in New Jersey. “More often than not, these are facilities are on the water for a reason,” she said. “So how do we make sure that there are protections in place? That’s the big question.”
Federal law does not explicitly require sites in floodplains that handle toxic chemicals to take extra precautions against flooding. Nor do most states or local governments have such requirements.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2015requiring planners of federally funded buildings, roads and other infrastructure to account for the impact of possible flooding from rising sea levels or more extreme precipitation. President Trump rescinded those rules last year.
The Times analysis focused on facilities on the federal toxic release database, which tracks sites handling chemicals that could be harmful to health and the environment if released. The list does not include properties like Superfund sites or wastewater facilities, or chemical sites where the predominant risks are fire or explosion, as opposed to toxic pollution.
The Times also examined reports of oil and chemical spills tallied by the National Response Center, which is run by the Coast Guard. Companies are required by law to report spills to the N.R.C., although that database has been criticized as incomplete.
Still, the data does provide a glimpse into the thousands of spills that occur across the country each year.
By the time the murky flood waters had receded from the sprawling Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown, 34,000 pounds of sodium hydroxide and 300 pounds of benzene — both highly toxic — had escaped through a damaged valve. The plant, a joint venture between Chevron and Phillips 66, is one of many that filled the region’s streets with a stew of chemicals, debris and waste in the days after Hurricane Harvey and its torrential rains.
Employees later pumped some of the tainted water into 80 steel tanks. But most of the product “was lost in the floodwater,” David Gray, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesman based in Dallas, said in an email.
A Chevron Phillips spokesman, Bryce Hallowell, declined to give further details of the spill. He stressed that the plant “was at the center of this incredibly powerful storm.”
The chemical site lies in a moderate-risk flood zone, defined by the government as having a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in any year. It was at least the third time in three years that the Chevron Phillips facility blamed heavy downpours for chemical leaks.
The spills underscore the vulnerability of America’s coastal industries to rising sea levels and extreme weather. This is the case along the Gulf Coast because the country’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries are concentrated there.
At least 46 facilities reported an estimated 4.6 million pounds of airborne emissions beyond state limits between Aug. 23 and Aug. 30, 2017, the week spanning Harvey’s approach and landfall in Texas. The Chevron Phillips plant also reported one of the largest Harvey-related emissions of chemicals into the air.
But even as flooding risks increase, chemical companies continue to build in vulnerable areas. A boom in plastics manufacturing has brought billions of dollars of investment to the Gulf shoreline. The Chevron Phillips site had been in the midst of adding a new $6 billion ethane processor, one of the biggest investments in the Gulf’s fast-growing petrochemicals industry.
Despite repeated flooding, the chemicals manufacturer still considered the site, at Cedar Bayou, to be “the optimal location” for its new ethane facility, Mr. Hallowell said. He declined to detail protections that have been considered or installed, or whether they were designed to withstand future floods.
When Tropical Storm Debby brought torrential rain to north and central Florida in mid-2012, it triggered a release of phosphoric acid from a chemical plant in White Springs that produces phosphates, which are used to make fertilizer.
Flooding knocked out the power supply to its pumping system, causing water mixed with chemicals to spill into a storm-retention pond, which eventually also overflowed into a creek that feeds the Suwannee River. Released in large quantities into the environment, phosphates and phosphoric acid can cause uncontrolled algae and duckweed growth, causing oxygen levels in lakes and rivers to drop precipitously.
“It was like the biblical flood,” said Mike Williams, a spokesman for Nutrien, which runs the phosphates plant in an area dotted with high-risk flood zones, defined by the government as having a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. The plant had prepared for the storm by lowering water levels at the ponds, but the flooding was “well off the charts,” he said.
Since then, the plant has invested in pumps and backup generators that would allow it to more effectively control excess flood water. Still, “the lesson learned is that every now and then there will be something that’s more than we planned for,” Mr. Williams said.Alabama:
Plastics Plant
Floods, and the risks they pose to industrial sites, are not confined to the coasts or even to areas the government considers flood-prone.
Record-breaking rains brought flooding to wide swathes of Alabama in May, inundating storage ponds at a Sabic Innovative Plastics plant on the banks of the Alabama River. About 4,500 pounds of sodium hydroxide escaped into a tributary.
The same plant, which is not on land considered flood-prone under federal guidelines, had flooded in 2011, releasing 125 gallons of tetrachloroethylene, according to a cleanup agreement reached with regulators. Tetrachloroethylene is a carcinogen and can affect the nervous system.
Shelia Naab, a Sabic spokeswoman, said the plant had been inundated with “extraordinarily high levels of rain in a very short period of time” and that levels in its ponds had reached unprecedented levels. “We do not believe there was a significant environmental impact as a result of this incident,” she said. The plant has since updated a stormwater bypass that stops rainwater from overrunning its storage ponds, she said.
The flooding at Sabic underscores how floodplain designations may be increasingly outdated as rains intensify and weather patterns change.
Heavy rains in northern Ohio in June 2015 inundated Toledo Refining, near the banks of the Maumee River, causing a leak of several million gallons of wastewater from its treatment ponds. The site, run by PBF Energy, one of the country’s largest suppliers of transportation fuels and heating oil, also reported a release of benzene.
James Lee, a spokesman for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said the leak was not thought to have reached major bodies of water. Toledo Refining did not respond to requests for comment.
“Companies need to think carefully about the risks of flood, and the increased risks from climate change,” said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Saying ‘We’ve always done it this way’ doesn’t work anymore.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/06/climate/flood-toxic-chemicals.html

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Safety Board to Ask Congress for Funding After Trump Closure Call

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Sam Pearson

Members of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board have a plan in place to ask Congress to keep its funding ahead of a White House budget proposal expected to again call for closing down the small agency charged with investigating major industrial accidents.
The board has approved its own budget request for fiscal year 2019 but will not release it before the week of Feb. 12, CSB spokeswoman Hillary Cohen told Bloomberg Environment in an email.
The agency is one of few authorized under federal law to send a so-called bypass funding request to Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget. The move comes after reports that OMB notified the chemical board in November 2017 it intends to propose eliminating the agency in the president's budget request, expected to be released next week.
According to an agency document sent anonymously to Bloomberg Environment, the board considered asking for $12.104 million for fiscal 2019. That funding level would represent the board's highest-ever congressional appropriation.
Cohen said the document Bloomberg Environment received was an agency record but may not be the agency's final plan. She said the CSB could not discuss the contents of the final request until its official release.
The draft document calls for increased funding that would allow the agency to increase staff, boost travel spending by 18 percent, and invest more than $120,000 on new computer servers and software.
Alternate Request Made Last Year
Under agency procedures, a majority of CSB members must vote to approve issuing a budget request before the agency can submit it.
The board made a similar move last year, requesting $11.629 million for fiscal 2018—an increase of 5.72 percent from fiscal 2017. Congress has kept the agency's funding flat at $11 million.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.
It is typical for agencies such as CSB to wait until after the White House publishes its budget request to release their own, even if the document has already been completed, Evan Hollander, a spokesman for Rep. Betty McCollum, (D-Minn.), told Bloomberg Environment Feb. 5. McCollum is ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, which crafts spending legislation for CSB.
Aides to other House and Senate appropriators with jurisdiction over the CSB — Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies — did not respond to requests for comment Feb. 5.

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Transportation and Infrastructure News

Trump Call for Faster Infrastructure Permits Faces Uncertain Road

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Alan Kovski

Several federal agencies are working to speed permitting of infrastructure projects, even though it remains to be seen whether Congress will act on President Donald Trump's related request to move things along.
There is much that agencies can do within the restrictions of existing laws, though they can expect legal challenges to many permits for roads, ports, dams, pipelines, airports, and other basic infrastructure.
The Environmental Protection Agency has a role in administrating the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, among other environmental laws. The agency will make environmental permitting decisions within six months under a program the agency plans to launch at the end of 2018, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told state agriculture officials Jan. 31.

As the primary manager of federal land, the Interior Department has a large role in energy development as well as permitting for anything crossing federal lands. Interior's Bureau of Land Management posted an instruction memorandum Jan. 31 with details on expediting oil and gas leasing.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a big role in Clean Water Act permitting, is working on permitting improvements. During the Obama administration the Corps set a target for completing project feasibility studies in three years, a target that was then written into the Water Resources Reform and Development Act of 2014. If the Corps achieves that goal, it will be a substantial change.
Agencies Work on It
Federal agencies across the administration are working on permitting improvements, said Jimmy Christianson, vice president of government relations at Associated General Contractors of America.
“This hasn't been done to the same degree ever before, and we welcome it,” Christianson said.
“I think that there's a lot of common-sense proposals put out by the administration,” he said. “The conversation has to begin somewhere, and we think the administration has taken a holistic approach.”
Environmental impact statements can take two years or more and amount to thousands of pages, because the writers try to cover every possible objection out of fear of lawsuits. Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt issued a memorandum last year setting a target of one year for completing an environmental impact statement, with flexibility to go beyond as needed.
Christianson said the lawsuits happen anyway, so federal officials might as well write much shorter documents in much less time—months rather than years, and hundreds of pages rather than thousands—then learn in the inevitable court case what fixes need to be made.
Complications Entangle Highways
If Trump was referring to environmental permitting alone, it is possible to streamline the process to under one year, said Daniel Blevins, principal planner at the Wilmington Area Planning Council, which coordinates transportation investments in two adjacent counties of Delaware and Maryland.
It took federal agencies, his group, and the Delaware Transportation Department, however, four years to complete the environmental permitting for a 14-mile U.S. 301 highway project that spans the Delaware and Maryland state line, Blevins said.
The highway projects can include analysis of affected wetlands and protected species, noise, and vehicle pollution, as well as consideration of such things as impacts on burial sites, Blevins said.
Federal highway legislation in recent years has not overlooked expedited permitting for some categories of work, such as emergency repairs.
Some Moves in Congress
Lawmakers see some opportunities for legislation to expedite permitting. The latest move came from Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), who introduced a bill with bipartisan support Jan. 30 to strengthen existing financial assistance programs for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.
The bill, Securing Required Funding for Water Infrastructure Now Act (S. 2364) was written in part to simplify and speed up the federal approval process. Boozman's co-sponsors were Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
The bill was referred to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who has said infrastructure investments should be a priority.
Also awaiting Senate action is the Energy and Natural Resources Act of 2017 (S. 1460), a bipartisan compromise bill sponsored by Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). It builds on a bill that passed the Senate 85-12 in 2016 but stalled in bicameral negotiations.
The bill includes provisions intended to pick up the pace of permitting for natural gas pipelines, gas exports, oil and gas drilling permits, and the addition of hydroelectric turbines to existing dams. It especially requires more coordination of action between agencies, and the setting of schedules, with a lead agency designated to ride herd over the process.
The ideas on agency coordination follow a pattern set by highway and water infrastructure bills in recent years.
“Any infrastructure plan should include streamlining,” Barrasso said recently. But that leaves the question of how much streamlining would be found acceptable to Democrats, who could block a bill with a filibuster.
A Question of Money
Whether Congress will provide the appropriations needed is to be determined.
“Congress doesn't have the will to find the money to do infrastructure,” said Scott Slesinger, legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.
Trump hasn't proposed a spending boost. In the State of the Union address, he called for an infrastructure bill that will “streamline the permitting and approval process, getting it down to no more than two years, perhaps even one.”
His references to infrastructure investments have left open the question of supporting greater appropriations or settling for steady spending levels with money redirected to infrastructure.
Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was possible that some sort of language concerning permitting could be added to a spending bill, but then he added, “I don't see a spending bill passing this year.”
Snape said he doesn't think Congress has any interest in changing the Clean Water Act or other fundamental environmental laws. He added, in reference to some of the categories of highway projects, “They already have abbreviated and truncated permitting.”
Big Projects, Many Impacts
Large water projects take longer. They ought to take longer, in the view of environmental advocates, because they can have very elaborate implications for river systems, wildlife, and people living in the region.
The Army Corps of Engineers has a backlog of more than $90 billion in authorized projects, most with completed environmental impact statements—and it has annual funding of about $5 billion, said Slesinger. There again, the holdup is funding—not environmental reviews—in his view.
Airport projects also can have many ramifications. The delays are almost never over the National Environmental Policy Act, said Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Airport projects are complicated by community-related issues such as property rights, noise abatement, and state and city zoning—in addition to environmental laws, Snape said. He questioned whether Congress would want to tangle with such things as property rights and zoning laws to speed permitting.
—With assistance from Amena Saiyid and Jennifer Lu.

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Amtrak Crash Highlights Looming Deadline For Rail Safety System

Feb 6, 2018 | Reuters

By Ian Simpson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only about a quarter of U.S. railroad tracks that carry passenger trains have an anti-crash system that safety officials say could have prevented a fatal weekend crash, even though a year-end deadline to finish installing it is just months away.
The technology, known as positive train control, or PTC, is in operation on only 45 percent of tracks owned by freight railroads and 24 percent of tracks owned by passenger railways, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Congress has mandated full implementation by Dec. 31, 2018, after granting a three-year extension.
The project has lagged in part because of the $14 billion cost of installing it on 60,000 miles (96,000 km) of track and 18,500 locomotives, an industry group has said. Rail operators also had to develop and deploy a new radio system and back-office infrastructure, the Association of American Railroads said.
Allan Rutter, a railroad infrastructure specialist at Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute, said the system has to be compatible across dozens of different railroads to be effective, another hurdle to be crossed.
“The simple answer is, it’s really, really hard,” Rutter said. “It’s not like you can go down to Best Buy and buy this stuff.”
PTC is designed to prevent derailments or crashes caused by excessive speed. The National Transportation Safety Board says at least 81 fatal accidents since 1969 could have been prevented with PTC.
The Association of American Railroads did not respond to a request for comment, but on its website it called PTC “an unprecedented technological challenge.” It said the biggest U.S. railroads “are on track to meet all statutory deadlines to install and implement PTC.”
Amtrak, the government-owned passenger rail carrier, has PTC on about two-thirds of its own tracks, but many of its trains travel on tracks owned by other operators, the Federal Railroad Administration says. By comparison, CSX Corp CSX.N, the third largest U.S. railroad, has 45 percent of its 9,600 miles (15,400 km) of track under PTC operation.
The pace at which railroads have installed PTC has come under increasing scrutiny after a series of crashes involving U.S. passenger trains in recent years.
In the latest deadly accident, the fourth involving an Amtrak train since early December, the passenger train struck a parked CSX freight train on a siding in South Carolina, killing two people. Safety officials say a padlocked switch on the CSX-operated tracks sent the Amtrak train down the siding.
The three-year extension granted by Congress followed lobbying by major railroads. The Transportation Department can extend the deadline again to 2020.
Senator John Thune, a Republican who chairs the Commerce Committee, which oversees rail safety, told Reuters last month that railroads needed to meet the deadline.
“We pushed it now a couple different times and they need to get there,” Thune said.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao last month sent a letter to railroads and transit agencies urging them to meet the PTC deadline.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-train-safety/amtrak-crash-highlights-looming-deadline-for-rail-safety-system-idUSKBN1FQ019

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Environment News

Practitioner Insights: Environmental Auditing in New Regulatory Era

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Timothy A. Wilkins and Ryan M. Eletto

To read the popular press in recent months, one may have the impression that recent activities of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump have environmental law in full retreat and that the proverbial foxes are guarding the henhouse. As such, some observers might be forgiven for thinking that industry's internal environmental compliance auditing function—commonly built, at least in part, to help companies stay one step ahead of vigorous agency enforcement efforts—has become less important with the change in administration.
Seasoned environmental professionals understand, however, that robust compliance programs remain critical. Most of the fundamentals of environmental law that have been in place for decades remain unchanged. The administration's dramatic slowing of aggressive new environmental regulations, however, does offer important opportunities—to “stop scrambling just to keep up,” and to reflect on new ways that environmental law is being implemented and enforced. The slowing also affords an opportunity to examine how environmental auditing efforts can best be adapted to suit regulatory circumstances that have changed significantly over the past decade.
Background
An entire profession of environmental auditing arose in the 1980s and 1990s as environmental laws and regulations adopted in the previous decade reached full bloom. Conceptually, environmental auditors identify statutory, regulatory, and permit requirements applicable to facilities and evaluate how companies perform relative to those requirements. Identified gaps in compliance lead auditors to provide recommendations to the audited company or facility for corrective actions. Different companies choose to audit for varying reasons, but in general, auditing helps to verify compliance and better enables companies to avoid compliance gaps that can lead to costly enforcement actions, penalties, and injunctive relief.
The benefits of finding and fixing problems are fairly obvious. The potential costs, however, are significant. In addition to the direct costs of paying internal or external auditors for their investigatory work, audits can also prove burdensome by interrupting and distracting ongoing operations and compliance efforts. Also importantly, written reports prepared by environmental experts that list a facility's failures to comply with legal requirements create significant legal risk.
Although audit reports are not quite a legal confession of noncompliance, they can nonetheless be a very serious source of concern. Designed in significant part to reduce a company's environmental enforcement exposure, the compliance-related findings of an environmental audit report can—in the wrong circumstances—actually become evidence that can instead increase that risk.
Audit Privilege and Leniency Issues
State privilege and immunity laws: Beginning in roughly 1993, many states began adopting environmental audit privilege laws and policies designed to give industry greater incentives to self-police with respect to their compliance with environmental law (Susan J. Spicer, Turning Environmental Litigation on Its E.A.R.: The Effects of Recent State Initiatives Encouraging Environmental Audits, 8 VILL. ENVTL. L.J. 1, at 1 (1997)). Generally, these privilege and immunity statutes take two forms:
1. statutes providing a limited evidentiary privilege for reports created in conjunction with environmental audits such that audit findings could not be used against companies in certain enforcement or litigation matters; and,
2. statutes or policies granting immunity or leniency from penalties for violations discovered in an environmental audit, corrected, and voluntarily reported to authorities. (Id.) Twenty-nine states, including Texas, have adopted privilege laws, immunity laws, or both, according to the EPA, with an additional 15 states adopting nonstatutory policiescovering these issues.

EPA Audit Policy: While disagreeing with audit privilege and statutory immunity concepts, the EPA nonetheless has viewed auditing as an important function, and the agency also has taken some steps at the national level to help incentivize self-policing. Since 1986, the EPA has attempted to avoid discouraging auditing by claiming that it would not “routinely seek” audit reports for use as evidence in enforcement cases. In 1995, the EPA adopted a leniency policy, developing it more fully in the agency's April 2000 audit policy, “Incentives for Self-Policing: Discovery, Disclosure, Correction and Prevention of Violations,” which remains in effect today. The audit policy provides incentives for regulated entities to voluntarily discover, disclose, and correct violations of federal environmental laws and regulations by providing for significant penalty reductions and agreeing not to recommend criminal prosecution for qualifying audit disclosures (EPA's Audit Policy, (last updated Jan. 17, 2017)).
Current state of play: On Dec. 9, 2015, the EPA announced an update to its audit policy by creating a centralized, web-based “eDisclosure” portal to receive and automatically handle self-disclosed civil violations of environmental law. The EPA suggests that the automated eDisclosure system will allow businesses to quickly resolve their more routine types of disclosures. The agency's approach to disclosure and streamlined processing for a limited subset of potential violations (i.e., certain limited violations of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, like Tier II reporting omissions) appears to meet this promise; however, for most categories of violations, the EPA under its new policy effectively receives and holds disclosures without performing any review or processing, leaving companies that disclose violations somewhat in regulatory limbo. Despite these changes, both environmental auditing and federal and state audit disclosure opportunities remain an important part of any compliance toolkit and a feature of environmental law that companies should carefully consider.
Changing Realities of Environmental Enforcement
In recent years, a number of new trends have emerged in EPA and state environmental enforcement that would seem to have important implications for environmental auditing efforts that are designed to help reduce enforcement risk. As part of a new enforcement regime, for example, the EPA under the previous administration established a Next Generation Compliance (“Next Gen”) initiative, which seeks to modernize the EPA's compliance protocols by utilizing new tools and approaches while strengthening enforcement of environmental laws. Among the elements of Next Gen were the use of advanced monitoring technologies and increased electronic reporting.
In terms of advanced technologies, thermal imaging devices such as forward-looking infrared (FLIR) optical gas imaging cameras are able to visually detect emissions that can be harmful to the environment from industrial and petrochemical plants in real time. Fenceline monitoring and flyovers also represent examples of advanced technology EPA and other environmental agencies are utilizing to sharpen the teeth of their enforcement efforts. Industry is beginning to learn that the EPA will use the results of this advanced monitoring—which generally goes well above and beyond what is required in the applicable regulations and permits—to commence enforcement actions based on that monitoring, even where the tests for compliance set forth in the regulations and permits (AP-42 emission factors, for example) are being met on their face.
The EPA also has resorted to greater use of electronic reporting requirements rather than paper submissions. In addition to increased efficiency and ease of access, electronic reporting has allowed the EPA to use data mining techniques rather than the more painstaking reading of each submission to identify potential bases for enforcement actions. A recent initiative in EPA Region 6 involved the agency electronically comparing high-volume hazardous waste shipments with the self-reported waste generator status of the companies generating the wastes, readily identifying self-described “small quantity generators” who were shipping waste volumes suggesting they should have been “large quantity generators” subject to much more rigorous regulation.
More broadly, the EPA and the state agencies appear to be increasing their use of self-reported information as the basis for enforcement action, as opposed to physical site inspections. Self-reported deviations in Title V reporting, exceedances noted in discharge monitoring reports, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act release reporting seem to more frequently trigger enforcement actions based almost exclusively on information provided to the agencies by the regulated entity in question. This trend has led some to characterize these practices by the EPA and other environmental regulatory authorities as “desktop enforcement,” in which enforcement actions are based almost entirely on a company's environmental paper trail reviewed in agency offices rather than as a result of inspector boots on the ground.
A related trend is the EPA's increased aggressiveness in propounding information requests on the regulated community. Rather than the EPA broadly investigating facts that could lead to the discovery of potential violations, the agency increasingly appears to be sending requests for industry to divulge potentially inculpatory information, in some cases even asking the request's recipient for admissions of particular violations and the duration thereof. Again, there is an appearance that the agencies are attempting to conserve resources by having the regulated community build the enforcement case against itself and provide the supporting evidence for that case to the agency.
Finally, the EPA in recent years has greatly increased its use of the so-called “general duty clause” (GDC) in Section 112(r)(1) of the Clean Air Act, finding violations—especially in the wake of incidents or releases—based on a company's generalized failure to prevent or minimize hazards, as opposed to finding violations of specific regulatory commands. The GDC is a performance-based authority recognizing that owners and operators have a general duty and responsibility to prevent and mitigate the consequences of chemical accidents at any facility where extremely hazardous substances are present (General Duty Clause under the Clean Air Act Section 112(r)(1), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (updated March 9, 2017).
Given these changing realities in the agencies’ enforcement approach, we believe that industry's approach to self-auditing needs to be adapted in order to remain effective in helping companies stay ahead of the enforcers. In today's enforcement landscape where unauthorized emissions can be detected by a special camera instead of the mechanisms specified in one's permit, reportable upsets become almost automatic enforcement actions. In addition, a “violation” is something that appears to not be as safe as it should in the eye of the agency beholder, and the traditional “regulation checklist” approach to auditing is no longer sufficient preparation.
Adapting Compliance, Auditing to Fit New Enforcement Climate
If federal and state agencies are approaching environmental enforcement initiation and evidence differently, and if environmental self-auditing is—at least in part—an effort to minimize enforcement risk by addressing issues of likely interest to enforcers before the enforcers have a chance to do so themselves, environmental auditors need to rethink the traditional approach to auditing.
As noted, enforcement triggers and evidence now rely significantly on advanced monitoring technologies that go beyond what permits and underlying regulations require in a number of respects: (i) desktop evaluations of electronic reporting and other periodic and event-driven reporting requirements, (ii) frequent and searching information requests to companies, and (iii) application of “general duty” concepts in addition to traditional regulatory and permit commands. If auditors are going to help their clients and employers get ahead and stay ahead of the enforcers, audits need to be targeted to these exposures in addition to the regulatory and permit checklist.
As discussed above, any form of regulatory compliance self-audit is fraught with legal issues—for example, the fact that documentary evidence laying out information reflecting potential non-compliance inherently gives rise to risk. But companies have learned to structure these traditional compliance audits as legal investigations subject to attorney-client privilege or applicable state law audit privileges to help protect their audit information.
Audits that apply new approaches to try to address the enforcers’ new tactics may not be so easily protected. Obviously, to the extent, an audit can be fashioned to help identify risks that lead to reportable events or deviations, those efforts might help reduce enforcement exposure. But before commencing work, careful consideration of how to design an audit program to protect information generated by FLIR photography or fenceline monitoring, for example, is warranted. Assessing hazards using a comparatively standardless “general duty” or “incident prevention” approach may have merit in terms of inspection readiness, but where does one draw the line on what corrective actions may be required (or merely suggested) in the face of such observations? And how should audit reports that include such elements be written up to minimize the risk of adverse evidentiary use?
Separately, pursuing audits based on these new approaches is especially tricky if one is determined to take advantage of the audit disclosure policies and statutes that are available to provide penalty relief. If one detects a risk from hazardous chemicals or emissions visible in a FLIR image that would otherwise not run afoul of any specific regulatory or permit requirement, would one in an abundance of caution craft a written audit disclosure claiming to have discovered a violation of the Clean Air Act's GDC or claiming the discovery through the audit of specific unauthorized emissions? Such disclosures seem potentially complicated to prepare. Perhaps more importantly, by submitting such an audit disclosure, has one effectively admitted that similar “risk” issues of visible detections at other facilities are violations subject to enforcement absent a disclosure, exposing the company to a greater risk of enforcement over what before might have been standardless allegations readily contested as such?
We do not pretend that there is a “one size fits all” answer to the sorts of complexities and choices available to a given facility, company, or industry arising from decisions on auditing and audit disclosure involved where these new tools and approaches are available both to the enforcers and to the auditors. But we strongly recommend that companies take the opportunity first to carefully consider with the advice of their inside and outside environmental professionals and counsel how these new approaches to enforcement may impact the objectives of their audits and then to develop auditing approaches and audit disclosure principles that are suited to these new realities.
Timothy A. Wilkins is the managing partner of Bracewell LLP's Austin office, where he handles strategic environmental permitting assistance, the defense of environmental enforcement actions, and assistance with the environmental aspects of major transactions. He has overseen environmental compliance audits involving thousands of locations, handled hundreds of environmental audit disclosures, and pioneered the development and use of EPA's audit policy for new owners.
Ryan M. Eletto is an associate in Bracewell LLP's Washington office, where he focuses on environmental strategy, energy regulation, regulatory matters and public policy issues. He advises clients in litigation, investigation, enforcement and compliance matters.

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White House Seeks Economic Data Before Supporting Coolant Deal (1)

Feb 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Abby Smith

A top White House energy adviser wants to be convinced that a global deal to limit potent greenhouse gas refrigerants will boost the U.S. economy, and he's asking the refrigeration and chemical industries for the numbers to prove it.
“We understand that there's broad industry support, but we really want to understand in a more concrete way a few things: how this benefits U.S. companies; how it preserves and creates U.S. jobs; and how it can help the trade balance and foster exports to other countries,” David Banks, special assistant to President Donald Trump on international energy and environment, said during remarks at a Feb. 5 Hudson Institute forum.
Banks said economic impact—predominantly as it relates to manufacturing jobs and trade—is the primary focus for the Trump administration's foreign policy team as it weighs whether to support the Montreal Protocol's Kigali Amendment, a 2016 global deal to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, highly potent greenhouse gases often used as refrigerants. Trump, if he decides to back the deal, would submit it to the Senate for ratification.
“One of my responsibilities is to ensure U.S. companies are allowed to continue to lead in innovation and do not face discriminatory practices in international fora that unfairly disadvantage them,” Banks said.
The administration has no timeline for when it will make a final decision on the Kigali deal, he added.
Competitiveness, Manufacturing Impacts
Banks said his team is focused on how Kigali ratification would “enhance U.S. competitiveness"—as well as the potential impact on domestic manufacturing if the administration decides not to ratify the deal.
White House officials, as well as independent groups, are working on an economic analysis of the amendment, Banks told reporters after his remarks. The White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Commerce Department will be the major players in crunching the numbers, he said.
But it is unclear at this point whether any final analysis will be made public.
“I don't know what Commerce's rules would be or [Council of Economic Advisers'] rules would be as far as releasing economic analysis,” Banks said. “I would like to say yes, but I just don't know.”
Industry is crunching its own numbers to attempt to sway the White House. Two industry groups, the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy, are developing an “economic forecast” of the amendment's impacts, with an eye toward manufacturing, Steve Yurek, head of the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, said at the forum.
U.S. refrigeration and chemical companies support the Kigali deal because it offers predictability, and they want to defend American leadership in the sector, Yurek said.
China, Japan, and Europe are “heavily involved” in this industry, “and they see if we step away from this leadership, they will step into that breach wholeheartedly,” Yurek added.
Implementation Questions
The Kigali deal amends the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 treaty to address ozone-depleting chemicals, to set production and consumption limits for HFCs, which served as the replacement for many ozone-depleting chemicals. Under the Kigali deal, the U.S. and most other developed countries would be required to begin reducing HFCs in 2019.
Another key question is how the administration would implement the amendment, and whether that can be done without additional legislative authority, Banks said. Domestic policy officials are “working to determine if available authorities exist.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last summer struck down Obama-era regulations limiting HFCs. The full court Jan. 26 denied a request from environmental groups and chemical companies to rehear the case.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is “seriously considering” asking the Supreme Court to review the D.C. Circuit's decision and will decide in the coming weeks, David Doniger, the group's climate and clean energy director, said.
The Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration issued two rules under the Significant New Alternatives Policy program to ban several HFCs. If the D.C. Circuit decision stands, the agency would be unable to use those regulations to implement the Kigali limits.
Existing Authority
Some policy observers say the EPA has authority to implement the HFC limits, as long as the Senate ratifies the Kigali Amendment.
Jeff Holmstead, former EPA air chief in the George W. Bush administration, pointed to a provision in the Clean Air Act section implementing the Montreal Protocol that specifies the “more stringent” limits “shall govern” in any conflict between domestic regulations and the treaty. That would allow the EPA to implement the Kigali deal, Holmstead, now an attorney with Bracewell LLP, said.
But critics of the Kigali Amendment are skeptical. The Clean Air Act section on the Montreal Protocol deals specifically with ozone-depleting chemicals, Pat Michaels, science director with the Cato Institute, said. He questioned whether using Holmstead's suggestion would open the door to amendments limiting other pollutants such as fine particulate matter outside the traditional scope of the protocol.
“As a practical matter, I'm not sure your concern is a legitimate concern,” Holmstead said in response, adding the air act authority is “pretty clear and not limited to ozone-depleting substances.”
Tentative Support
During a global meeting on the Montreal Protocol in November, it appeared the administration offered tentative backing for the Kigali deal.
“The United States believes the Kigali Amendment represents a pragmatic and balanced approach to phasing down the production and consumption of HFCs, and therefore we support the goals and approach of the Amendment,” Judith Garber, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans, environment, and science, said in Nov. 23 remarks.
Asked about Garber's remarks, Banks told reporters the statement was meant to allow “flexibility” for Trump to decide what to do.
“State's job is to keep options open for the administration as we move forward. State didn't say, ‘We support the Kigali Amendment.’ There's a difference between that and saying, ‘We support the goals,’” Banks said. “It's about maintaining flexibility in the negotiations.”
But Banks is already offering a contrast between the Kigali deal and the Paris Agreement, which Trump has announced plans to pull the United States out of.
The Kigali deal has “pretty united” industry support, and “there may be a very persuasive economic argument that the president would support,” Banks told reporters.
“The administration should be supportive and [shouting] it from the rooftops,” Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes Magazine, said. “This is about as good as it gets. We should get it done and move forward.”
(Updates with additional reporting throughout.)

http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=127821787&vname=dennotallissues&fn=127821787&jd=127821787

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EPA Hedges On Changes To Carbon Cost, Health Benefits In CPP Analysis

Feb 5, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Dawn Reeves

Despite making many significant departures from Obama EPA cost-benefit analysis used to justify the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Trump EPA's analysis of its proposed CPP repeal hedges on some key issues, including possibly using Obama-era estimates for the social cost of carbon (SCC) due to “uncertainty.”
The agency's draft regulatory impact analysis (RIA) also suggests that it might alter its assumptions that there are no health-related co-benefits of reducing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) below the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) alongside the rule's targeted pollutant of greenhouse gases.
It is far from clear whether these hedges will affect EPA's final rule to repeal the CPP, but sources say EPA is leaving itself wiggle room to possibly retreat from its effort to dramatically lower the SCC by only considering domestic climate damages using a much higher “discount rate” that further reduces the cost estimates.
The details of EPA's draft RIA remain relevant because the agency extended the public comment period on its proposed CPP repeal to April 26, from its original deadline of Jan. 16.
Former Obama EPA Deputy General Counsel Ethan Shenkman, who is now with Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, noted on a recent American Bar Association webinar that the “central economic case” for the CPP repeal includes changes to key assumptions for the SCC as calculated by the Obama administration's Interagency Working Group (IWG), which President Donald Trump disbanded.
But Shenkman noted that in the appendices of the draft RIA EPA includes some alternatives to its new SCC metric such as some options that use global benefits and a lower discount rate.
“So they put all possibilities out there,” he told the webinar. “One could argue [it was done] in an effort to be transparent.” Or it could be EPA “hedging its bets” in the draft RIA, he said.
He was referring to the appendices of the draft RIA that address, “Treatment of Uncertainty in Interim Domestic SC-CO2 Estimates” and acknowledge “various sources of uncertainty in the SC-CO2 estimates used in this RIA. Some uncertainties pertain to aspects of the natural world, such as quantifying the physical effects of greenhouse gas emissions on Earth systems. Other sources of uncertainty are associated with current and future human behavior and well-being.”
The document adds that the uncertainty is considered “by calculating the domestic SC-CO2 based on a 2.5 discount rate, in addition to the 3 and 7 percent used in the main analysis.” Using the 2.5 percent rate, the average domestic SCC ranges from $9 to $10 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, while the benefits in 2020 are between $550 and $650 million, and rise to between $3.8 and $3.9 billion in 2030.
And it notes that in addition to the quantifiable uncertainty, there is scientific and economic literature about other sources of uncertainty such as model sensitivity, while further uncertainty remains due to data limitations. “Additional research is needed in order to expand the quantification of various sources of uncertainty” in the SCC, including to explore the use of a declining discount rate, the document says.
Megan Ceronsky, a former Obama energy adviser who is now running the new Center for Applied Environmental Law & Policy, called Shenkman's observations “interesting” and said it will be fascinating “to see what they actually finalize from the panoply of what was included in the RIA and supporting documents. That's a stay tuned. The central case they are providing is probably an indication of where they'd like to go, but we'll see.”
Ceronsky said that perhaps the most important SCC change is altering the discount rate, which went from a range of 2.5, 3 and 5 percent; to 3 and 7 percent. “The implications is, because climate change is having effects out into time and the most severe effects are” in the future, “the number you use to discount the value of those impacts to get to a new present value matters a lot. Because you can effectively have the world end in 300 years but the discount rate could show a tiny cost today.”
Health Benefits
Among the other changes from the Obama analysis is that the RIA floats a scenario in which EPA would not count the benefits of criteria pollutants that are reduced to levels below the NAAQS.
Ceronsky addressed this issue on the Jan. 23 webinar, saying that “science shows there are benefits below” the PM2.5 NAAQS. The change reflects “an argument from folks” who say “that because the NAAQS are set at a level that is supposed to provide safety, you shouldn't count benefits of reducing below that level.”
All of these changes, if they are included in a final RIA accompanying a final CPP repeal, could have implications for other rules the Trump EPA is seeking to scale back, including non-climate air rules such as the mercury & air toxics standards and the stricter ground-level ozone NAAQS issued in 2015. The SCC changes would also affect methane rules for the oil and gas industry, according to Shenkman.
Also, Ceronsky noted that the RIA references new modeling being done that has not yet been released. Instead, the proposal uses 2017 Energy Information Administration data to address changes in the sector since the CPP modeling was done to support the 2015 rule. All of the changes are in the direction of lower emissions and moving to cleaner generation, which has an effect on costs and benefits. The new modeling and its findings remains to be seen, making it difficult to comment on in this proceeding, she noted.
Another environmentalist who has closely read the proposed RIA says the significance of including a higher SCC in the appendices is unclear, given that Trump disbanded the IWG and “trashed the work they did, told the government not to rely on it and reverted back to” an old Office of Management & Budget document called Circular A-4, which provides general guidance on cost-benefit analysis.
This source is more worried about the PM2.5-related change to count no benefits for reductions below the NAAQS saying that goes “blatantly against every scientific journal and every expert's view and even the agency's own statements when issuing the PM rule.”
The source says EPA found massive benefits of going below the PM2.5 NAAQS during its most recent revision. The difference in a reduction of 1 microgram per cubic meter, from 12 to 11, resulted in between $6.7 billion and $20 billion in monetized health benefits. “It's not correct to say going below the NAAQS has no health benefits using EPA's own words. . . . But now they are saying that has no value at all,” the source says.
EPA offers this scenario in the RIA but says “they have to do more modeling. But you can't base a rule on modeling that hasn't been done yet.”
Everything in the new draft RIA “seems designed to obfuscate the truth, and even after all of that they say repealing the CPP will result in 4,500 premature deaths per year.” EPA does not acknowledge that in those exact words, but reading the RIA carefully, “it seems fairly obvious to anyone who is standing on two feet that if you repeal a rule that will save 4,500 lives, you are likely to cause those premature deaths,” the source says.
The source also notes that the RIA relies on a questionable study finding that people who live near power plants and are concerned about their health will move. This is from an unrelated economic study citing people's willingness to pay for clean air in real estate prices, and according to this source, “completely disregards the fact that people who live near power plants can't afford to move and are disproportionately affected.”
Finally, the source notes the new RIA does not discuss non-monetizeable benefits that the CPP would bring, such as reduced visits by children and infants to emergency rooms; reduced hospitalizations of the elderly; and reduced damage to landscape trees. The original RIA had “tables of those” types of benefits provided by the rule.
The new RIA drops those tables and instead includes a few sentences in the appendices. These issues are “given short shrift. Anything the couldn't monetize they assume has no value,” this source says.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-hedges-changes-carbon-cost-health-benefits-cpp-analysis

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Green Group Threatens To Sue State Dept. Over Absent Climate-Change Report

Feb 5, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Miranda Green

An environmental group on Monday threatened to sue the State Department if it doesn't produce its overdue U.S. Climate Action Report to the United Nations.
In a letter, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) asked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to produce the seventh annual report on climate change that is mandated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The report was due Jan. 1.
"The State Department has failed to submit the Seventh Climate Action Report by the mandated due date, much less issue any statements of the report’s preparation, draft texts, and notifications of public comment opportunities for the report’s final issuance — a process that has, in the past, taken over a year," the letter read.
The report is a requirement for countries that are part of the UNFCCC, which was created with the goal of stabilizing the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Participants, of which the U.S. is one, are obligated to submit “national communications” on their greenhouse gas emission inventories and develop mitigation plans.
This year's Climate Action Report would need to contain both the national communication and a biennial report, according to the letter sent by the CBD.
"Accordingly, unless the State Department commits to complete these steps expeditiously, the Center for Biological Diversity intends to file suit to compel the State Department’s action to issue the final report for UNFCCC compliance," the letter read.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the report is forthcoming, saying in a statement Monday, “The State Department intends to submit a National Communication to the UNFCCC. The report is under development.”
The State Department has also yet to commence the public comment period necessary before releasing the report.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/372331-green-group-threatens-lawsuit-over-missing-state-dept-report-on

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Hartnett White Exit Spurs Hope Of Easier Approval Of Nominees

Feb 6, 2018 | E&E Daily

By Nick Sobczyk

Republicans are hoping the Environment and Public Works Committee will have an easier time moving U.S. EPA nominees now that a controversial pick has withdrawn her nomination.
Kathleen Hartnett White over the weekend withdrew from consideration to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality after months of controversy over her stance on climate change (Greenwire, Feb. 3).
EPW Committee ranking member Tom Carper (D-Del.) had said last week that it would be difficult to move EPA nominees — including Andrew Wheeler, President Trump's pick for deputy EPA administrator — as long as Hartnett White's nomination was still on the table.
But Republicans yesterday were optimistic that her withdrawal would grease the wheels on the committee.
"There's a lot of resistance to her, and there are some on our side too," said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). "And I think anyone who watched the hearing where we had Andrew Wheeler and her, unfortunately for her that contrast wasn't very good."
Carper yesterday called Hartnett White's withdrawal a "positive development" but cautioned that Democrats are hoping for further dialogue with EPA leadership before committing to moving any nominees through the full Senate.
Either way, the EPW Committee looks poised to pass Wheeler's nomination when it meets for a markup tomorrow (E&E Daily, Feb. 5). Wheeler passed the committee in November, but Trump had to renominate him last month after the full Senate failed to take up his nomination.
"He was unanimously supported by the Republicans last time, and I expect that's going happen again this time," EPW Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said yesterday.
But, "the question is how quickly does that nomination move through the Senate," Carper said, adding, "there are some other issues we need to resolve."
Barrasso, meanwhile, said yesterday that he still has a hold on the nomination of Anne White, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Energy's legacy nuclear waste cleanup. Barrasso is concerned about DOE's releases of excess uranium, saying the practice has driven down uranium prices and led to slower production in his home state and elsewhere.
Barrasso said he has talked to Energy Secretary Rick Perry about his concerns but that he isn't yet ready to move forward on the DOE nominee.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/06/stories/1060072945

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