Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 2/15/2018
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(ACC Mentioned) Global Chemical Production Ends 4th Quarter on a Strong Note, ACC Says
Feb 14, 2018 | Chemical Engineering Online
By Scott Jenkins
Data collected and tabulated by the American Chemistry Council (ACC; Washington, D.C.;www.americanchemistry.com)] shows that growth in global chemical production ended the fourth quarter on a strong upward trend... -
(ACC Mentioned) Dems Tout Evidence of Political Meddling in Advisory Posts
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA political leaders overrode career employees' recommendations for filling vacancies on a key air quality advisory panel in favor of two appointees flagged for possible conflicts of interest and lack of relevant experience, two Senate Democrats charged yesterday. -
(ACC Mentioned) BASF Joins the World Plastics Council
Feb 15, 2018 | British Plastics
By John Carlon
BASF, the global chemicals group, has joined the World Plastics Council (WPC), a global organisation of key leaders in the plastics industry. -
(ACC Mentioned) If You Want a Glimpse at Future Transportation, Visit an Art College
Feb 14, 2018 | Plastics News
By Audrey LaForest
To the fortune tellers with crystal balls, I ask this question: What will tomorrow's vehicles look like? -
Trump’s 2019 Spending Plan Scares Science Supporters
Feb 14, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Andrea Widener
President Donald J. Trump’s spending proposal for 2019 was anticipated to be a horror show for science. But a last-minute congressional funding boost means the proposal is more mixed for science agencies. -
Energy Adviser Quits over Failure to Get Security Clearance
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Hannah Northey
The White House's top energy adviser and most vocal proponent of engaging in the Paris climate accord resigned today after failing to obtain a permanent security clearance. -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Urged to Use Existing Prioritization Approach for New TSCA Reviews
Feb 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
The chemical industry, the Defense Department (DOD) and others are urging EPA to build on its existing approach for prioritizing chemicals for risk evaluation as it crafts a “pre-prioritization” plan for assessing existing chemicals under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)... -
(ACC Mentioned) Formaldehyde Dataset Has Changed Significantly, Industry Analysis Concludes
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The "scientific landscape" for the US EPA's ongoing revision of its 2010 draft assessment of formaldehyde is "very different" now, according to industry-funded analysis of the key data. -
CPSC Updates Testing Exemption, Lab Specs to Match Phthalates Ban
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Julie A. Miller
The US Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has published two administrative regulations, to make testing exemptions and procedures conform with its October 2017 regulation banning five phthalates in toys and other children's products. -
US NGO: Short Review Period for New Chemical Use 'Illegal, Unreasonable'
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Julie A. Miller
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has flagged as a troubling precedent the US EPA giving only 15 days for public comment on a proposal to allow a new use of a chemical that poses potential workplace hazards. -
Options Remain for Late REACH Registrants, Says Law Firm
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
There are still options for companies that fail to register their substances under REACH by the 31 May deadline, according to specialised law firm REACHLaw. -
Fracking Foes Target Gulf Coast in Latest Lawsuit
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Chris Marr
Wastewater discharges from offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are the latest target of an environmental group that has challenged similar operations along the California coast. -
New Colorado Pipeline Rules Won't Require Mapping
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
New rules for certain oil and gas pipelines in Colorado will give local governments better tracking data, but they don't require mapping of existing underground lines, something environmentalists say is necessary to protect the public following a April 2017 home explosion... -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Budget's Chemical Security, Oil Spill Help Fees Face Skepticism
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
High-risk chemical plants and facilities susceptible to oil spills could get additional compliance assistance financed through user fees under the Trump administration's budget proposal, although it's unclear whether they want the help. -
Energy Department Creates Cybersecurity, Energy Security Office (1)
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sara Merken and Rebecca Kern
The Energy Department established a new office for energy security and cybersecurity, which aligns with President Donald Trump's fiscal year 2019 budget request for $96 million to support the department's security efforts. -
Lawmakers Aren't Sold on Specifics of Trump Plan
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
President Trump yesterday hosted a bipartisan meeting to pitch his $200 billion infrastructure plan, but lawmakers aren't sold on the specifics and came away with the usual talking points. -
Amtrak CEO: How We Are Making Amtrak Safer
Feb 14, 2018 | The Hill - Opinion
By Richard Anderson
Recent high profile accidents have understandably shined a spotlight on Amtrak. Each reflect different situations and unique risks, and we should be careful not to rush to judgment or make broad assumptions about Amtrak’s safety culture. -
EPA Drops Proposed Rule on Implementing 2015 Ozone Standard
Feb 14, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA, under legal pressure to finish the remaining attainment designations for its 2015 ground-level ozone standard, has dropped a proposed rule that would have spelled out the cutoff points for determining how significantly areas are out of compliance. -
House Lawmakers Prepare for NSR 'Reform' Debate
Feb 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
The House Energy & Commerce Committee's environment panel will hear testimony later today on the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers' push to ease the burden of EPA's new source review (NSR) air permitting program... -
4 Things to Know About the Trump Budget’s Environmental Cuts
Feb 15, 2018 | Washington Post
By Joshua Busby
Like last year’s budget, the Trump administration’s 2019 budget proposes large cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. And it eliminates explicit climate change programs in other parts of the government and cuts spending for climate change-related monitoring... -
A Spy’s Guide to Climate Change
Feb 15, 2018 | New York Times
By Justin Gillis
The Trump administration is seeking to withdraw the United States from the international accord reached in Paris in 2015 to fight climate change. -
Leaked U.N. Draft Report Sees ‘Very High Risk’ the Planet Will Warm Beyond Key Limit
Feb 15, 2018 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
A draft United Nations climate science report contains dire news about the warming of the planet, suggesting it will likely cross the key marker of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of temperature rise in the 2040s, and that this will be exceedingly difficult to avoid.
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(ACC Mentioned) Global Chemical Production Ends 4th Quarter on a Strong Note, ACC Says
Feb 14, 2018 | Chemical Engineering Online
By Scott Jenkins
Data collected and tabulated by the American Chemistry Council (ACC; Washington, D.C.;www.americanchemistry.com)] shows that growth in global chemical production ended the fourth quarter on a strong upward trend, boosted by a synchronized upswing in the global economy. ACC’s Global Chemical Production Regional Index (Global CPRI) shows that global chemicals production rose 0.5 percent in December, following a 0.6 percent gain in November. During December, production gains were fairly broad-based although the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and the Asia-Pacific region slipped back. The Global CPRI was up 3.7 percent year-over-year (Y/Y) on a 3MMA basis and stood at 116.1 percent of its average 2012 levels in November. Note that all data are on a three-month moving average (3MMA) basis.
During December, capacity utilization in the global chemical industry gained 0.2 percentage points to 87.6 percent. This is up from 84.9 percent last December but is below the long-term (1987-2017) average of 86.5 percent.
ACC’s Global CPRI measures the production volume of the chemical industry for 32 key nations, sub-regions, and regions, all aggregated to the world total. The index is comparable to the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) production indices and features a similar base year where 2012=100. This index is developed from government industrial production indices for chemicals from over 65 nations accounting for about 98 percent of the total global chemical industry. This data are the only timely source of market trends for the global chemical industry and are comparable to the US CPRI data, a timely source of U.S. regional chemical production.
http://www.chemengonline.com/global-chemical-production-ends-4th-quarter-on-a-strong-note-acc-says/
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(ACC Mentioned) Dems Tout Evidence of Political Meddling in Advisory Posts
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA political leaders overrode career employees' recommendations for filling vacancies on a key air quality advisory panel in favor of two appointees flagged for possible conflicts of interest and lack of relevant experience, two Senate Democrats charged yesterday.
Recently obtained agency documents suggest that EPA chief Scott Pruitt and his designees "are disregarding normal procedures and advice from career staff," Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a letter to the Government Accountability Office.
"By doing so, they are avoiding the procedures put in place by the agency to ensure compliance with federal law and risk undermining the integrity and impartiality of these boards," the letter said.
At lawmakers' request, GAO has already launched a review of EPA's handling of appointments to its almost two dozen federal advisory committees.
The letter sent yesterday, however, focused on just one: the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a seven-member body that furnishes outside expertise during the legally required reviews of the federal standards for ozone and five other pollutants.
Attached to the letter are two briefing summaries that EPA career employees prepared last September for Richard Yamada, named by Pruitt last year to the No. 2 post in the Office of Research and Development.
The briefings examined several options for making new appointments to the CASAC. Included in those options were the names of 11 nominees — almost all of them from academia — rated as "most qualified."
According to the summaries, however, Yamada then asked for more information on other candidates of his choice. They included Tony Cox, a Colorado-based consultant, and Larry Wolk, a physician who heads the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
In summing up their pros and cons, the career employees noted that Cox had expertise in quantitative risk assessment and had previously served on national scientific panels.
But they added that he might have a conflict of interest or "appearance of a lack of impartiality" because of his past consulting work for industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and American Chemistry Council.
Wolk, with a background in pediatrics and adolescent medicine, had "no direct experience in health effects of air pollution, epidemiology, toxicology," the briefing added.
Not long after, however, Pruitt named both Cox and Wolk to the CASAC. He also unveiled a directive barring active EPA grant recipients from serving on agency advisory panels on the grounds that the ban is needed to preserve members' independence. That policy is now the subject of three lawsuits, all still in their early stages.
In yesterday's letter, Carper and Whitehouse asked GAO to explore several other questions in its review. Among them: whether it is typical for the EPA administrator or political underlings "to reject the advice of career staff on appointments to science advisory boards" like the CASAC. "If not," they continued, "has EPA articulated a credible process for changing that practice now?"
Carper is the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; Whitehouse holds the comparable post on the EPW Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety.
Yamada is a former professional staffer on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. The panel is chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a longtime critic of EPA's use of science.
Yamada joined EPA last spring as deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Research and Development (E&E News PM, June 13, 2017). He did not reply to an emailed request for comment sent early yesterday evening.
The documents released yesterday by Carper and Whitehouse also show that Yamada sought consideration for Robert Phalen, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine, who once told an interviewer that "modern air is a little too clean for optimum health" and that children need exposure to contaminated air to help their lungs ward off pollutants (Greenwire, Nov. 6, 2017).
Phalen, who has stood by those comments, did not get a seat on the CASAC. Pruitt did name him, however, to the Science Advisory Board, another influential EPA panel that advises the agency on a variety of topics.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/15/stories/1060073965
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(ACC Mentioned) BASF Joins the World Plastics Council
Feb 15, 2018 | British Plastics
By John Carlon
BASF, the global chemicals group, has joined the World Plastics Council (WPC), a global organisation of key leaders in the plastics industry. The WPC intends to promote industry topics of global relevance like the responsible use of plastics, efficient waste management and solutions to marine littering.
Raimar Jahn, President Performance Materials, BASF, said: “Doing business in a sustainable manner is an integral part of BASF’s strategy and has been a central inspiration already since its foundation. For example, using by-products of one plant as raw materials for another does limit waste generation and increase efficiency. This Verbund principle is part of BASF’s identity. Additionally, we are involved in initiatives addressing global challenges and engaging entire value chains such as Operation Clean Sweep. We implement this international program designed to retain plastic pellets from getting lost in the environment - joining the WPC is a way to be further involved in creating a world that provides a viable future with enhanced quality of life for everyone.”
BASF is a member of American Chemistry Council and PlasticsEurope that are associate members of the WPC and working towards a more sustainable, circular and resource-efficient economy. The WPC does not replace national or regional plastics associations. Instead, it focuses on issues that require global or at least multi-regional solutions. For a company such as BASF, present in all markets, these widespread actions can be implemented throughout all the regions to contribute to circular economy and a cleaner tomorrow.
https://www.britishplastics.co.uk/News/basf-joins-the-world-plastics-council/
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(ACC Mentioned) If You Want a Glimpse at Future Transportation, Visit an Art College
Feb 14, 2018 | Plastics News
By Audrey LaForest
To the fortune tellers with crystal balls, I ask this question: What will tomorrow's vehicles look like?
It is a question I keep hearing over and over from people like me who enjoy planning ahead and avoiding the chaos of the unknown whenever possible.
It is also a question automakers at January's North American International Auto Show tried to answer with concept vehicles — Volkswagen's electric crossover SUV concept, known as the I.D. Crozz, was decked out with autonomous tech, for example. But it was two presentations at the Plastics in Automotive conference that really got me thinking: When it comes to future mobility, are we looking for answers in the right places?
Take Steven Lee, 25, and Johnathan Gill, 27, two art students at the College for Creatives Studies (CCS) in Detroit, who presented their visions of future transportation during the Jan. 16 conference organized by Plastics News.
The students worked with the American Chemistry Council during a fall semester studio class, where they were asked to design a lightweight level 5 autonomous vehicle with plastic components for the city of Detroit in 2030. The finished vehicle designs from Lee and Gill offered a look at what the next-generation is forecasting for tomorrow's automotive industry.
My generation — ah, the influential and mysterious millennials — is the largest age cohort in the United States, surpassing Generation X and the baby boomers, according to U.S. Census Bureau population projections. Just as we have helped shape the evolution of the online world, especially social media — raise your hand if you remember the heydays of MySpace, LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger — we are also going to influence the evolution of the automobile.
And if these examples from Lee and Gill are to be taken seriously, future transportation will be multifunctional, yet imaginative, and durable, yet environmentally friendly. Well, maybe there will be some hands-free selfie technology on the interior, too, since millennials are (allegedly) massive narcissists.
"Millennials and younger generations that have grown up with technology will drastically influence what these future vehicles will look like and also how they function," Lee wrote in a Feb. 12 email.
"With fewer youths getting [driver's] licenses and a decreased average in interest in cars as a whole, how can the future accommodate those who still want to drive and those who wish to be autonomously transported to their destinations?" he asked. "That will be the task for the new generation of car designers."
Giving artists a mobile medium
For the studio course, Lee, who is majoring in transportation design at CCS, created an autonomous car of the future that pays homage to Detroit's automotive history and its art culture.
The two-passenger vehicle is essentially a mobile art gallery. Screens on the exterior are constructed with plastic organic LED (pOLED) on polycarbonate and project multimedia art. The car can also convey marketing messages, such as information about an upcoming art exhibit or a sponsor's advertisement.
The body panels are made from ABS thermoplastic for dent-resistance and longevity, while a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer forms the structural support of the car frame. Thermoset plastic adhesives allow for reversible bonding and swappable body styles, so the "vehicle will change as the market changes and buyers' needs change," he explained.
"Without plastics, this car would not be possible," said Lee, who earned a bachelor's degree in biopharmaceutical sciences from the University of Ottawa.
"I think the auto industry needs to make dramatic changes and focus on solving actual problems and come up with solutions instead of just styling," he added. "[The] car industry is a relentless industry and only the most innovative and adaptive ones will thrive."
Environment remains a priority
Gill told me that when he thinks about future transportation, he's less concerned with the aesthetics.
"In this type of future — one with autonomous living rooms, shuttles and single-passenger eggs — the appearance is less important," he wrote in a Feb. 8 email. "We know populations are increasing way too quickly. The approach should be their capabilities, efficiency, purpose and, of course, environmental impacts."
"The looks of a vehicle," he added, "are nothing more than a way to influence people into an emotion that makes them desire it."
Gill's modular vehicle concept highlights two key aspects: efficiency and longevity. With interchangeable parts and systems, his autonomous vehicle can be whatever the riders need it to be.
"The beauty about a modular system is its permanent adaptability," Gill said during his Jan. 16 presentation. "One day, it can be a two-seater, long-bed pickup truck. The next, it can be a dump truck or, the next hour, a four-seater … a people-moving SUV."
The vehicle is a "true plug-and-play design," utilizing "strong, rigid and lightweight thermoplastics that increase design potential, keep weight down and minimize overall size," he said, adding that he used bioplastics where applicable.
"We could make a part and then through the next 100 years, continue to use that part through a whole array of uses to get the best environmental lack of impact possible," Gill said.
While Gill and Lee prepare for life after graduation — or "adulting," as some millennials like to call it — I'll be looking for that crystal ball at art colleges like CCS because, who knows, maybe one of those autonomous vehicle sketches hanging up in the hallway will look pretty dang close to the driverless vehicle picking me up for work in the future.
http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20180214/BLOG12/180219949/if-you-want-a-glimpse-at-future-transportation-visit-an-art-college
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Trump’s 2019 Spending Plan Scares Science Supporters
Feb 14, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Andrea Widener
President Donald J. Trump’s spending proposal for 2019 was anticipated to be a horror show for science. But a last-minute congressional funding boost means the proposal is more mixed for science agencies.
The surprise additions to the budget would save basic science supporter agencies from big cuts. Several, including NIH and NSF, are essentially flat. However, some agencies still face cuts of well over 30% for work on energy and environmental issues.
“We’re discouraged to see yet another White House proposal that indicates either the administration’s continued lack of understanding about the crucial benefits scientific research provides to Americans or, worse, their persistent disregard of the value of science to society,” says Christine McEntee, CEO of the American Geophysical Union, echoing the statements of many science supporters.
The administration had originally proposed cuts averaging over 20% for science. But days before the budget was to be released, Congress passed bipartisan legislation that sets higher spending limits for fiscal 2019 as well as for fiscal 2018, which Congress has not yet fully funded. The Trump administration responded by tacking an addendum onto its 2019 proposal that would provide more money to some agencies.
The proposal might not mean much in the long run. Congress tends to ignore the President’s budget and propose its own funding levels. Even in bad budget times, science has traditionally had strong support from Congress.
However, the budget proposal is important because it shows the President’s priorities. And the regulation of or support for energy and the environment are clearly not among them.
Take the EPA, for example. Overall, Trump wants to slash EPA’s budget, which is about $8 billion this year, to $6 billion in 2019. EPA spending was last at $6 billion in 1991.
EPA’s science and technology support would drop about 40%, to $424 million in 2019. The plan would eliminate EPA’s climate change research, programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and efforts to reduce radon exposure. It would zero out the agency’s Science to Achieve Results research grants and graduate fellowships.
EPA’s spending on the review and registration of pesticides would decrease to $93.3 million, a loss of around 20% compared with 2017. Some of that decrease would be made up with about $48 million in industry-paid user fees. But there’s a catch. Congress must first renew EPA’s authority to collect the fees, which expired in September.
The agency would receive $58.6 million plus additional funds paid for by industry fees to implement the revised Toxic Substances Control Act. EPA received the same amount in 2017, without the industry fees.
The Department of Energy also faces proposed cuts to its energy and environment programs. Fossil energy R&D would receive almost $500 million, nearly $100 million less than 2017. Energy efficiency and renewable energy science would get less than half of 2018 levels. The proposal eliminates several DOE energy-focused programs by arguing they should be funded by private entities. One is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a $300 million program that supports breakthrough technologies that are unlikely to obtain private funding.
Overall, funding for DOE’s science activities would reach $14 billion with almost half going to nuclear weapons-related work. Basic science would receive about $5.3 billion, similar to 2018.
Another hard-hit agency is NIST, which faces an overall cut of 37% from 2017 to $628 million. That includes a 14% cut to its laboratory programs to $516 million, including support for many chemists. The Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which supports small and medium businesses, would also be eliminated in the proposal.
USDA would see its R&D budget fall to $2.1 billion, a decrease of 18.5% compared with 2017. USDA’s primary competitive research grants program, the Agriculture & Food Research Initiative, would remain flat at $375 million.
NSF spending would remain flat from 2017 at $7.5 billion. But Research & Related Activities support, including almost all grant funding, would get a 2% increase.
In the initial proposal, NIH had faced proposed cuts of more than 20%, but it ended up with an increase of around 4% from 2017 to $35.5 billion. Much of the extra funding would go to fight the opioid epidemic. Some individual institutes were still slated for cuts.
For the second year, the Trump administration proposed eliminating the Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents. Its funding would be $9 million for 2019 to finance the closing of CSB’s operations.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i8/Trumps-2019-spending-plan-scares.html
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Energy Adviser Quits over Failure to Get Security Clearance
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Hannah Northey
The White House's top energy adviser and most vocal proponent of engaging in the Paris climate accord resigned today after failing to obtain a permanent security clearance.
George David Banks, the special assistant at the National Economic Council and National Security Council focused on international energy and environment, confirmed that the White House counsel's office had told him he would not receive a permanent clearance because he admitted to smoking marijuana in 2013. Politico first reported his resignation.
When asked how old he is, Banks, 50, said, "I aged 15 years in one year at the White House."
Before joining the Trump administration last February, Banks worked at the State Department as a diplomat, as a CIA analyst and as an adviser in the George W. Bush administration's Council on Environmental Quality. He also served as a deputy Republican staff director of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and was executive vice president of the American Council for Capital Formation.
He's the third White House official to resign in a week, following CEQ speechwriter David Sorensen and White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who left amid allegations of domestic abuse. Both deny the allegations.
Banks' exit today triggered speculation about who — if anyone — would fill his post, and sparked climate advocates' anger about the fate of future negotiations.
"This is a blow to anyone who cares about climate protection within the Trump administration," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser and strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute. "George is a tremendous professional ... a conservative Republican but one who recognizes climate change is a serious problem. I think he's going to be hard to replace."
In recent months, Banks has walked a tightrope, reiterating his support for engaging the Paris climate accord while emphasizing the Trump administration's push for "energy dominance."
Last fall, Banks held court at a fossil fuel event in the midst of the international climate talks in Bonn, Germany, as State Department officials continued their behind-the-scenes negotiations over the 2015 Paris accord (Climatewire, Nov. 15, 2017).
But energy industry sources said that while Banks will be difficult to replace, they saw little substantive change to the Trump administration's push for increased use of domestic coal and gas abroad with the resignation.
Barry Worthington, executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, said efforts underway to boost the use of "clean coal" abroad — something Banks oversaw — aren't in jeopardy, and an industry source close to the administration's efforts to boost exports of domestic gas echoed that sentiment.
"I don't think it'll be in jeopardy because that was an administration issue, it wasn't something that was just Dave's personally," Worthington said. "I think the efforts internationally to support coal and fossil fuels more broadly will continue."
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/02/14/stories/1060073927
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Urged to Use Existing Prioritization Approach for New TSCA Reviews
Feb 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
The chemical industry, the Defense Department (DOD) and others are urging EPA to build on its existing approach for prioritizing chemicals for risk evaluation as it crafts a “pre-prioritization” plan for assessing existing chemicals under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), saying it would be the most pragmatic approach.
Environmentalists, however, are concerned about the amount of time EPA is taking in developing the plan, and they fear that it will mean lengthy delays for the toxics assessments required under the updated TSCA.
EPA in its recent plan for complying with the toxics law in 2018 said it anticipates starting by year’s end a process to select 40 existing chemicals for review. In TSCA parlance, existing chemicals are those that were on the market when the original TSCA took effect in 1976 -- and were largely grandfathered from regulation under that version of the law -- plus those chemicals that have since been added to the TSCA inventory.
EPA calls the process pre-prioritization because of the strict time line surrounding what the statute describes as prioritization for chemical risk evaluation. TSCA requires EPA to have at least 20 chemicals under evaluation by December 2019.
To ensure it stays on schedule, EPA says that in 2018 it expects to have crafted a process for identifying chemicals for prioritization, with the goal of identifying at least 20 high-priority and 20 low-priority chemicals to ensure staff will have started the high priority chemicals’ risk evaluations by deadline.
The Obama administration's draft rule describing prioritization, one of four framework rules implementing the new TSCA statute, proposed a pre-prioritization process. But the final version of the rule issued by the Trump EPA last June removed this step, stating that there were too many conflicting comments upon it and that as a result, EPA needed to take more time and input to consider its approach.
Working from its existing work plan chemicals approach and an approach based on the agency's Safer Chemical Ingredients List (SCIL) were among the half-dozen approaches that EPA laid out in a proposal released last November for public comment.
EPA’s first proposal would continue to use the prioritization process developed for the Obama EPA’s TSCA workplan program. The Obama EPA developed the approach in 2012 to help it begin regulating existing chemicals under TSCA while waiting for congressional action on reforming the original statute.
The approach, however, received push-back from some in industry, with the chemical industry at the time even floating an alternative prioritization tool they pressed EPA to adopt. But the agency chose not to do so.
Otherwise, EPA proposes a series of new methods that it could develop -- one based on the approach the Canadian government adopted for use in 1996 and often heralded by industry as a model for EPA; two approaches based on chemical structure and functionality; an approach using alternative toxicity methods and an approach for designating low priority chemicals taken from SCIL.
Obama Approach
In recent comments on the proposal, stakeholders including academics and industry are urging EPA to take a pragmatic approach to crafting the pre-prioritization approach, pointing to the TSCA Work Plan approach that the Obama EPA developed in its attempt to more strictly regulate existing chemicals while awaiting congressional action on TSCA reform.
The Obama approach, last applied to existing chemicals in 2014, selected more than 80 chemicals for EPA’s toxics office to evaluate. Several also noted the SCIL, identified by EPA’s Design for the Environment (DfE) program, as tagging chemicals that could make up EPA’s low-priority list.
The University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment coordinated comments that scores of academics have signed onto, saying “EPA has already developed sound approaches for identifying priority chemicals of concern (the TSCA Work Plan Methodology) and chemicals of low concern (the [SCIL]),” in their Jan. 25 comments. “The Agency’s resources are best spent modifying these existing approaches to feed into the prioritization process according to the requirements of amended TSCA, with a larger focus on high priority substances.”
Similarly, the downstream industry users coalition known as the Chemical Users Coalition (CUC) urges EPA in its undated comments to “further its consideration of ways to update and build upon the work that has already been performed by EPA staff in the context of the Work Plan efforts. This provides a sensible starting point given the statutory requirement that substances identified for Risk Evaluation . . . must consist to a large extent of Work Plan chemicals until all substances on the 2014 edition of that list have undergone such evaluations.”
The American Chemistry Council (ACC), which represents chemical manufacturers, similarly calls on EPA to consider efficiency and the benefit of building off an existing program in its Jan. 25 comments. “ACC believes in its next round of identifying potential candidates for prioritization, the most pragmatic and efficient approach -- near term -- is for EPA to update its TSCA Work Plan methodology (both the methodology and its underlying data and information) and to integrate within it (in its updated form) certain practical aspects of Canada’s Chemical Management Plan (CMP) approach.”
DOD also echoes in Jan. 25 comments the industry stakeholders, suggesting that the chemical’s functional category approach that EPA proposed “should be considered but with consideration for leveraging the lessons learned from Canada’s experience and how they evolved their Chemical Management Plan … exposure information for conditions of use should be used for prioritization to the extent possible to reduce uncertainty regarding exposure. If elements from the strategy to identify Workplan chemicals is used it should be updated with new information to reduce uncertainty to the extent possible.”
'Not Appropriate'
But Environmental Defense Fund Senior Scientist Jennifer McPartland argues that Canada’s approach is not appropriate for TSCA to emulate. Among other concerns, she points in her undated comments to “large numbers of the chemicals” that Canada reviewed that didn’t have enough information to prioritize. She says that “no attempts were made to fill those data gaps. The net effect was the indefinite setting aside of thousands of information-poor chemicals. Given that TSCA now gives EPA strong information generation authorities, adopting Canada’s approach to identify candidates for prioritization is not appropriate.”
UCSF, like McPartland, also urges EPA to set aside the chemicals’ functional category approaches EPA proposed. Further, UCSF urges EPA to direct its focus on chemicals’ hazard potential over exposure considerations, arguing that “chemical uses can change over time, thus altering the anticipated exposures. … EPA should not use the Functional Category approaches (Approaches 4 and 5 in the discussion document) for pre-prioritization because: (1) they rely heavily on exposure potential considerations based on current functional uses ... Further, uses of chemicals can and do rapidly change which would render a prioritization relying solely on current uses inaccurate.”
UCSF adds that the two functional category approaches EPA proposes “appear to consider factors related to the viability of alternatives to high priority chemicals, a non-risk factor which TSCA 6(b) explicitly prohibits."
And environmentalists are also concerned that EPA has waited too long to develop its approach. They are worried that this extended time line does not give EPA the time it needs before the deadline to develop a good second list of existing chemicals that EPA will begin to evaluate in 2019.
“The Agency’s lack of progress in creating a procedure for identifying and evaluating candidates for listing will inevitably weaken the quality of the listing decisions to be made in 2019 and leave EPA unprepared to conduct risk evaluations on those chemicals that it lists as high priority,” writes the Safer Chemicals Healthy Families (SCHF) coalition in its Jan. 25 comments.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-urged-use-existing-prioritization-approach-new-tsca-reviews
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(ACC Mentioned) Formaldehyde Dataset Has Changed Significantly, Industry Analysis Concludes
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The "scientific landscape" for the US EPA's ongoing revision of its 2010 draft assessment of formaldehyde is "very different" now, according to industry-funded analysis of the key data.
The analysis was conducted by consultancy Ramboll Environ, with funding from Hexion, which describes itself as the "leading global supplier of formaldehyde".
It concludes that the currently available evidence – the data used for the draft assessment, plus data published since – does not imply a causal link between formaldehyde and leukaemia.
Formaldehyde is used in adhesives for a wide range of wood products including:
· furniture;
· flooring;
· cabinets;
· bookcases; and
· building materials, such as plywood and wood panels.
A range of expert and regulatory bodies in the US and elsewhere have concluded that the substance is carcinogenic.
The US National Toxicology Program, for example, lists formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen in its Report on Carcinogens. The listing is based on the work of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (Iarc), which in 2009 concluded that formaldehyde is a group 1 substance – "carcinogenic to humans" – under its categorisation system. Meanwhile, the European Commission, has imposed a mandatory carcinogenic 1B classification – under EU CLP.
But the draft assessment produced by the EPA under its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) programme US attracted strong criticism from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which criticised the process taken by the programme and leading to an overarching review of risk assessment practices.
The American Chemistry Council issued a press release for the new paper, saying that "in the six years since the NAS report, significant new epidemiological, toxicological and mechanistic studies have been published". It added that these studies fill critical knowledge gaps and address many of the questions raised by the NAS.
An EPA spokesperson said "We have no further updates to provide at this time."
The analysis was led by Kenneth Mundt and is published as a 'commentary' in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.
https://chemicalwatch.com/63937/formaldehyde-dataset-has-changed-significantly-industry-analysis-concludes
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CPSC Updates Testing Exemption, Lab Specs to Match Phthalates Ban
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Julie A. Miller
The US Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has published two administrative regulations, to make testing exemptions and procedures conform with its October 2017 regulation banning five phthalates in toys and other children's products.
The regulation was published on 27 October and will take effect on 25 April. The phthalates affected are:
· diisobutyl phthalate (DIBP);
· di-n-pentyl phthalate (DnPP or DPENP);
· di-n-hexyl phthalate (DnHP or DHEXP);
· dicyclohexyl phthalate (DCHP); and
· diisononyl phthalate (DINP).
DEHP, BBP and DBP were already banned above de minimis levels in children's products, so the CPSC regulation now affects eight substances in total.
The commission took a separate action last August, to exempt seven plastics from the requirement to conduct independent testing to demonstrate compliance with its phthalates restrictions. That rule came into effect on 29 September 2017.
A proposed regulation, published on 26 January, updates the exemption to specify that it covers testing for the five additional phthalates banned in October.
The expanded exemption was published as a direct final rule. Unless adverse comments are received by 26 February, it will become effective on the same date as the new phthalate ban.Laboratory standards
Alongside the October phthalates ban, the CPSC published another proposed administrative rule updating its requirements for testing laboratories accredited by the agency. This is so that they would conform with the new phthalates regulations.
The agency published a final rule, making small changes in response to comments it had received on 1 February. It will go into effect on 25 April along with the other phthalates regulations.
https://chemicalwatch.com/63826/cpsc-updates-testing-exemption-lab-specs-to-match-phthalates-ban
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US NGO: Short Review Period for New Chemical Use 'Illegal, Unreasonable'
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Julie A. Miller
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has flagged as a troubling precedent the US EPA giving only 15 days for public comment on a proposal to allow a new use of a chemical that poses potential workplace hazards.
"I fear this is going to be their mode of operations going forward. It's completely illegal under their regulations and completely unreasonable," Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the EDF, told Chemical Watch.
The EPA approved the use of oxazolidine, 3,3′-methylenebis[5-methyl- as a metalworking fluid in September 2012.
In its original investigation, the EPA "identified concerns for systemic toxicity and severe skin and eye irritation," and toxicity to aquatic organisms at sufficient concentrations. However, under the conditions of use described in the pre-manufacture notice (PMN), "worker exposures are not expected as the substance is used in an enclosed system, and the substance is not released to surface waters."
The EPA allowed manufacture of the substance, but issued a significant new use order (Snur), requiring notification for different uses.Significant new use notice
However, on 12 April 2017, the EPA received a significant new use notice (Snun). This proposed using the substance as an anti-corrosive agent in oilfield operations and hydraulic fluids.
Based on "test data on the substance and on new data regarding the expected release of formaldehyde from the substance," the EPA raised concerns about "skin and eye irritation, neurotoxicity, mutagenicity, oncogenicity, allergic responses, and developmental toxicity."
The agency issued a consent order requiring the Snun submitter to provide protective equipment and training for workers and use the substance in enclosed systems. It also allows only the studied uses, in oilfield operations and metalworking. The modified Snur would apply the requirements of the consent order to other potential manufacturers and continue to require notice for other uses.
The proposed rule was published on 8 February, and it is to be effective 15 days later. The EPA said this is justified because "the rule largely relieves a restriction," and because it pertains only to new uses, no companies "need time to adjust existing operations."
However, the EDF argues in written comments, the EPA position addresses only potential impact on industry, not the public's right to review and comment on the new use of the chemical. The EPA's regulations for chemical reviews establish a 30-day comment period for Snurs, the NGO said.
"It’s the first time I know of that EPA has provided a 15-day notice," Dr Denison said. "When dealing with a complex issue, even 30 days isn't enough."
In addition to the short time limit, the online docket is "incredibly incomplete," he said, arguing that this is commonplace in both online documentation and documentation the EDF has requested on specific chemicals that the EPA had cleared for manufacture.
"The two things together make a mockery of the public comment process," Dr Denison said.
https://chemicalwatch.com/63962/us-ngo-short-review-period-for-new-chemical-use-illegal-unreasonable
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Options Remain for Late REACH Registrants, Says Law Firm
Feb 15, 2018 | Chemical Watch
There are still options for companies that fail to register their substances under REACH by the 31 May deadline, according to specialised law firm REACHLaw. But the hurdles involved are substantial and the potential business impacts serious, so the advice remains to register on time if possible.
Writing in February's Global Business Briefing Frederik Johanson, sales partner at REACHLaw, says resubmitting a pre-registered substance with a compliant dossier will be impossible after 31 May. This is because pre-registrations will have ceased to be valid and Siefs disbanded.
And companies should not rely on selling stocks of unregistered substances that were manufactured in, or imported into, the EU/EEA before the deadline, as downstream users many not want to use them.
Any registrations submitted from 1 June onwards will first have to go through the inquiry procedure. Echa uses this to verify substance identity and place the registrant in contact with the lead registrant. No registration can be submitted before this happens.
"Therefore, when preparing the inquiry dossier, the registrant should contact the lead registrant or consortium and purchase access to the joint submission of the substance through a letter of access," Mr Johanson says. Once access is granted, Echa has accepted the inquiry and the registrant has prepared a compliant co-registration dossier, the registration can be submitted.
Mr Johanson warns that matters are even more complex, when the failed registrant is a lead registrant acting within a Sief. Other Sief members cannot submit their co-registrations if the lead registrant dossier is rejected. They will not have a valid registration until the dossier is accepted and passes the business rules check.
Lead registrants thus have liabilities to co-registrants in case of failure, which may have to go to law. They should keep in regular contact with other Sief members as the lead dossier develops, potentially enabling a lead registrant to be replaced before 31 May if problems arise.
According to the Directors' Contact Group, communicating with Echa in these situations may allow a new lead registrant to submit an incomplete dossier by the deadline. Passing the business rules, though, is essential, Mr Johanson says.
Echa may then offer an extended deadline for delivering the complete dossier on a case-by-case basis. However, it will only issue the registration, once the dossier has passed all the checks and is considered compliant. And this delay may well have business implications downstream, with users uncertain of the compliance status of a substance.
https://chemicalwatch.com/63978/options-remain-for-late-reach-registrants-says-law-firm
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Fracking Foes Target Gulf Coast in Latest Lawsuit
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Chris Marr
Wastewater discharges from offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are the latest target of an environmental group that has challenged similar operations along the California coast.
The Center for Biological Diversity has repeatedly sued to block offshore oil drilling—particularly hydraulic fracturing—and the group's latest legal salvo argues that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to account for possible harms to wildlife when it renewed a permit letting drillers discharge wastewater in the western part of the Gulf of Mexico.
The environmental group is considering another lawsuit that would target a similar permit issued for drilling operations in the eastern half of the Gulf as well.
Major oil companies including BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil, operate oil and gas platforms in the western part of the Gulf and could be affected by any changes to the wastewater permit. BP and ExxonMobil referred comments to the American Petroleum Institute, which didn't respond to a request for comment. Chevron didn't respond to a similar request.
The latest lawsuit, filed Feb. 14 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenges the EPA's Sept. 19, 2017, decision to renew the discharge permit (NPDES General Permit No. GMG290000) for the western Gulf.
The EPA's permit renewals come “at a time when fracking is increasing in the Gulf of Mexico and at a time when we have an administration that has no regard for environmental risks,” Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Bloomberg Environment.
Wildlife Effects Not Considered
The renewed general permit “allows oil companies to dump unlimited amounts of produced water, including chemicals used in fracking and other well stimulations” into the Gulf, the environmental group said in a Dec. 7 letter notifying the EPA of its intent to sue.
The agency should have consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to evaluate the drillers’ potential effect on protected species like sperm whales and sea turtles and critical habitats for loggerhead turtles, Gulf sturgeon, smalltooth sawfish, and others, the group argued.
An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment to Bloomberg Environment, but the agency defended its decision in its response to public comments on the draft permit.
“While the EPA agrees that potentially toxic chemicals are used in offshore oil and gas extraction, no evidence has been found to show that there has been a significant impact to aquatic life when exposed under normal conditions to the concentrations discharged consistent with the permit's terms and conditions,” EPA staff wrote in response to the center's comments on the permit.
West Side, Now the East Side
Environmental advocates are now weighing plans to challenge a similar general permit for oil drillers in the eastern part of the Gulf (NPDES General Permit No. GEG460000), which took effect Jan. 20.
“We are also looking at that permit and have concerns, but EPA in Region 4 did more of a review,” Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Bloomberg Environment. Region 4 covers three Gulf states and most of the Southeast.
This is the environmental group's latest lawsuit over offshore drilling discharges. The Center for Biological Diversity had previously reached a settlement with the federal government in January 2016 to halt fracking off the California coast pending an environmental review.
The center sued again arguing the Interior Department's subsequent review of environmental impacts was inadequate. A separate case in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California is awaiting decisions on motions for summary judgment.
The case is Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. EPA, 5th Cir., No. 18-60102, 2/14/18.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128266881&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128266881&jd=128266881
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New Colorado Pipeline Rules Won't Require Mapping
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
New rules for certain oil and gas pipelines in Colorado will give local governments better tracking data, but they don't require mapping of existing underground lines, something environmentalists say is necessary to protect the public following a April 2017 home explosion linked to an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. well.
The rule changes, approved by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Feb. 13, apply to underground flowlines, a type of pipeline connecting oil and natural gas wellheads to production facilities.Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) directed the commission to improve the state's regulations following the explosion in Firestone, Colo., which was caused by a leaking natural gas flowline that ignited. The explosion killed two men replacing a water heater in the basement of a home and critically injured the wife of one of them.
The rule changes impose new requirements for the design, installation, maintenance, testing, tracking, and abandoning of flowlines. They also require companies to participate in the state's “one-call” 8-1-1 program to ensure a centralized home for all data on flowline locations and access to that information.Locations Unknown
But they fail to address one of the chief problems of these underground lines, which is that in many cases, their location underground is unknown, environmentalists say.
“Colorado is one of the fastest growing states in the country, and oil and gas activity is going on in the fastest growing suburbs in the state,” Sara Loflin, executive director of the League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans, told Bloomberg Environment Feb. 14. “Simply documenting the start point and end point of lines and requiring companies to participate in ‘Call Before you Dig’ are insufficient when trying to decide where to put a housing development.”
At public hearings for the rules, industry representatives said they do not know the locations of hundreds of miles of existing pipelines, especially older, abandoned lines. Mapping all of them would be costly, they said.
Terrorism Risk
Furthermore, providing public access to the maps would reveal company proprietary information and put pipelines and other oil and gas facilities at risk of attack by terrorists, companies said.
After the incident in Firestone, Hickenlooper ordered inspections of all flow lines within 1,000 feet of an occupied building, as well as a review of existing rules governing such lines.
The rule changes include new requirements for more detailed tracking, location data, and record-keeping for flowlines that carry fluids away from a specific oil and gas location, such as lines that may travel from a well to a storage tank not co-located on the same wellpad.
Locked, Marked
They also require that any flowlines not in use but not yet properly abandoned are locked and marked. All such lines must continue to undergo integrity testing under the same standards as active lines until abandonment. Any pipes rising above ground that are associated with abandoned flowlines must be cut below grade.
The rules also include more detailed requirements for operators to demonstrate flowline integrity, including updated standards for integrity testing lines, more testing options that align with newer technology, and the elimination of pressure-testing exemptions for low-pressure lines.
Under the changes, the commission can share more specific geospatial information with local governments through confidentiality agreements.
Representatives of the energy industry called the new rules tough but said the additional oversight will further enhance the safety and integrity of the state's pipeline infrastructure.
Safety of Communities
“Safety is our industry's top value and that includes the safety of our workforce and the communities where we work and live,” Dan Haley, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, which has representatives of Anadarko, Noble Energy Inc., and PDC Energy Inc. on its board, said in a Feb. 13 statement.
“By strengthening these rules, Colorado will have the most stringent flowline safety regulations in the country; while at the same time promoting the importance of following a safe digging process to homeowners and professional excavators,” Tracee Bentley, executive director of the Colorado Petroleum Council, a division of API, said in a Feb. 13 statement.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission also directed its staff to form a group representing a cross-section of interests to review current and developing instrument-based technologies and methods for preventing or detecting leaks and spills from flowlines.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128266901&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128266901&jd=128266901
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Budget's Chemical Security, Oil Spill Help Fees Face Skepticism
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
High-risk chemical plants and facilities susceptible to oil spills could get additional compliance assistance financed through user fees under the Trump administration's budget proposal, although it's unclear whether they want the help.
The Environmental Protection Agency's fiscal year 2019 budget request released Feb. 12 envisions charging the facilities fees for extra help with two programs that require planning for accidental releases of chemicals and oil spills.
If Congress approves the budget with the fees intact, then the EPA would have to write regulations setting up a procedure for setting and collecting them.
The fees would “better align appropriated resources to the Agency's core mission, provide dedicated funding sources for specific activities and to better align program costs with beneficiaries,” the budget request said.
But companies have not indicated that they want the assistance, nor is it clear that the EPA has put thought into developing the plan, Stephen M. Richmond, a principal and environmental lawyer at Beveridge & Diamond PC's office in Wellesley, Mass., told Bloomberg Environment.
If the EPA wants to follow through with the proposal, then it should develop a program that's useful to companies, Richmond said, and include provisions that restrict information shared with compliance assistance staff from being used in future enforcement actions.
Put Systems in Place
The program for chemical facilities requires companies using large quantities of certain high-risk substances to develop a system to manage the hazards, complete a risk management plan, and submit the information to the EPA.
Meanwhile, the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure regulation, under the Clean Water Act as amended in 1989 after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, requirescompanies to develop plans for preventing, preparing for, and responding to oil discharges at stationary facilities.
Some of these operations must complete facility response plans if an oil spill could cause substantial harm to the environment.
About 540,000 facilities are subject to the spill-prevention regulation, while 4,600 are required to file facility response plans, according to the EPA. About 12,500 facilities that handle high-risk chemicals above certain levels must file risk management plans every five years.
$20 Million
The agency could collect up to $20 million from risk-management program fees in fiscal 2019, the document estimated. It's not clear how much the EPA thinks it could take in from helping with oil facility response plans. The agency didn't respond to a request for comment.
The shift to compliance assistance comes as the EPA mulls how to replace an Obama administration overhaul of the risk management program.
The agency issued a regulation in early January 2017, before President Donald Trump was inaugurated, setting new emergency response and training requirements and mandating more information sharing with local responders.
The rule was a response to the findings of an interagency working group convened after a Texas fertilizer explosion killed 15 people in 2013.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt delayed the rule's effective date to Feb. 19, 2019, an action that safety and environmental groups are challenging. Oral arguments are scheduled at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in March.
Impact Unclear
More compliance assistance could help smaller facilities with less understanding of how regulatory programs improve safety, Judah Prero, counsel at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington who focuses on chemical management laws, told Bloomberg Environment.
Trade organizations already perform this kind of work but the EPA could also help, Prero, a former general counsel for the American Chemistry Council, said.
The council did not respond to a request for comment Feb. 13.
“Clearly, the devil's going to be in the details in how useful a program this is and also how much it costs,” Prero said.
‘Hard to Tell’
Industry may want to sit down with the EPA if the proposal is serious, Beveridge & Diamond's Richmond said, but at the same time it is “hard to tell from the budget document if this is the beginning of that proposal, or if it's just that someone thought of this as a way to put $20 million into the plus column.”
Increased compliance assistance could have merit as long as it does not come at the expense of enforcement action, Mathy Stanislaus told Bloomberg Environment. He served from 2009 to 2017 as assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management, which oversees the program.
Effective enforcement of the risk management and Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure regulations must target the small number of facilities at risk of causing the greatest harm, Stanislaus said in a Feb. 12 email.
Without real oversight by the EPA, companies have “no incentive for implementing the operational changes” the compliance assistance could identify, he said.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128266877&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128266877&jd=128266877
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Energy Department Creates Cybersecurity, Energy Security Office (1)
Feb 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sara Merken and Rebecca Kern
The Energy Department established a new office for energy security and cybersecurity, which aligns with President Donald Trump's fiscal year 2019 budget request for $96 million to support the department's security efforts.
The Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) will work on energy infrastructure protection and the Energy Department's role in national security, the agency announced Feb. 14.
“DOE plays a vital role in protecting our nation's energy infrastructure from cyber threats, physical attack, and natural disaster, and as secretary, I have no higher priority,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a statement. “This new office best positions the department to address the emerging threats of tomorrow while protecting the reliable flow of energy to Americans today.”
In the White House's fiscal year 2019 budget request, the Energy Department is proposing to split its Office of Energy Delivery and Energy Reliability.
A separate Office of Energy Delivery would focus on grid reliability and was allocated $61 million, and the Office of Cyber Security, Energy Security and Emergency Response, focused on cybersecurity, was allocated $96 million, according to an Energy Department fact sheet. The budget was proposed Feb. 12 and the outlook in Congress is still unclear.
“I think elevating the mission is the correct step to take,” Frank Cilluffo, the associate vice president and director of the George Washington University's Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, told Bloomberg Environment. “Everyone has been opining and admiring the challenge and the problem,” he said, “but now to follow it up with the necessary proposed resources is a step in the right direction.”
Support From Industry, Regulators
The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, stressed the importance of the partnership between the electric industry and the government, as the majority of the country's electricity infrastructure is privately owned.
“Protecting the nation's energy grid from all threats is the top priority for America's electric companies and is a responsibility shared by both the electric power industry and the government,” Tom Kuhn, EEI's president, said in a Feb. 14 statement. “We value the Department of Energy's partnership as the electricity industry's sector specific agency, and expect the new CESER office will play an essential role in coordinating government and industry efforts to address evolving threats to the energy grid.”
The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents state public utility commissioners, commended the Energy Department's announcement, saying in a Feb. 14 statement, “The issues under CESER's purview are critical to the operation of a safe, reliable and resilient grid needed to support the nation's energy infrastructure.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128266888&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128266888&jd=128266888
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Lawmakers Aren't Sold on Specifics of Trump Plan
Feb 15, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
President Trump yesterday hosted a bipartisan meeting to pitch his $200 billion infrastructure plan, but lawmakers aren't sold on the specifics and came away with the usual talking points.
House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said the meeting — which lasted about an hour and a half — was "preliminary." Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member Tom Carper (D-Del.) called it "refreshing."
But it's clear that both sides of the aisle see the broad changes to permitting, as well as the top-line numbers in the plan, as more of a guideline than a list of demands.
Some of the sharpest criticisms from the left so far have come in reaction to Trump's proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws.
Among other things, his plan would slap a two-year time limit on NEPA permitting, require the White House Council on Environmental Quality to rewrite its NEPA guidance, and make changes to the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
Bishop said that while those proposals are in line with GOP goals on permitting, the stipulations are far from set in stone.
It might not be necessary, for instance, to put a strict time limit on NEPA. Instead, designating a lead federal agency could help reach the administration's two-year goal for the permitting process, Bishop said.
"There are different ways you can approach it," he said. "Some ways you can beat people over the head with it, some ways you can just kind of finesse the situation so that people feel more comfortable with it."
Indeed, a NEPA shot clock could be difficult to fit into a compromise bill that could pass the Senate, especially with environmentalists already pushing Democrats to reject it.
Greens say a time limit could end up affecting other environmental laws — like the Endangered Species Act — even if they aren't addressed directly in Trump's plan.
"A lot of these other laws, the issues that trigger them arise during the NEPA process," said Raul Garcia, senior legislative counsel for Earthjustice. "So the idea that you're not attacking a law because you're not explicitly mentioning it is not true."
Some Democrats have jumped on board with those complaints.
"It's disappointing that he's also seeking to gut environmental protections in order to pursue his plan," House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters this week.
And some, like Carper, have pointed out that the executive branch has yet to implement all the changes from the last two congressional efforts to reform permitting, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act in 2012 and the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act in 2015.
That could mean Trump's proposed changes will be unnecessary — and even duplicative — once the federal agencies finish working out implementation of the last two infrastructure bills.
"He doesn't know that we did environmental streamlining in 2012," Carper said yesterday after the White House meeting. "He doesn't know we did it again in 2015, and we're still trying to implement those provisions that we adopted."
'Not enough money in the world'
Other significant hurdles involve pay-fors and financing.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are still scratching their heads over the federal investment featured in Trump's plan, which would aim to leverage $1.5 trillion from state and local governments and the private sector with a $200 billion federal investment.
The administration says it wants to pay for the $200 billion with cuts across the board in the federal budget. Some critics see that idea as ironic, given that Trump's fiscal 2019 budget plan seeks to cut the Transportation Department by 19 percent and zero out funding for the popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant program.
"At the same time he's proposing this plan, he's slashing critical infrastructure funding in his budget by cutting the Department of Transportation by nearly 20 percent, cutting funding for the Army Corps of Engineers by 22 percent and undermining essential investment in infrastructure throughout the government," Hoyer said.
Appropriators rejected similar ideas last year, and they're unlikely to go along with them this time around.
That leaves tough choices on the table. On the administration side, Trump yesterday surprised Republicans by suggesting raising the gas tax — which hasn't been hiked since 1993 — by 25 cents a gallon to help pay for the federal piece.
But his own administration remains hesitant about the move, even if it hasn't taken an official position.
"The gas tax, like many of the other pay-fors that are being discussed, isn't ideal. There are pros and cons," Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao told reporters this week. "The gas tax has an adverse impact, a very regressive impact on the most vulnerable within our society."
A hike would likely be dead on arrival on the Hill. Republicans who have a big say in the infrastructure push — like Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) — have strongly objected to it.
And others warn that it would not be a viable way to fund infrastructure into the future, with per-car gasoline consumption declining and electric vehicles set to become more common in the next few decades.
Bishop, for his part, cautioned that it's still early and said there could be other ways to generate new revenue or use gas tax money more efficiently.
"You can't explore everything and come up with details," he said of the White House meeting. "And there were senators there, so you can't even actually come up with a rational idea in an hour and a half. You have to spell it out very slowly, in monosyllabic words."
Outside of the federal pay-for issue, Chao said she would like to see creative ways to fund infrastructure projects, such as using more tolls or public-private partnerships.
Democrats and environmentalists have scoffed at those ideas. New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, yesterday blasted Trump's proposal.
"This week he announced his initiative, which as far as I'm concerned is no initiative at all," said Pallone, who spoke at the National Congress of American Indians' 2018 State of Indian Nations conference in Washington.
"I think this is a total non-starter," Pallone said, adding that states, localities and tribes do not have the money to invest in such a massive undertaking.
That's becoming a common refrain among Democrats, who have also expressed concern about public-private partnerships that could mean more tolls on highways.
But Chao said that someone has to pay the price for new infrastructure.
"These are tough decisions," she said. "We all want better infrastructure, but unfortunately there's not enough money in the world."
'Give and take'
For now, Trump's push looks unlikely to bear fruit, even if lawmakers continue to tout the bipartisan nature of infrastructure bills.
Infrastructure will be a heavy lift with the midterm elections fast approaching and Congress grappling with spending issues in a seemingly endless cycle.
Still, Senate Democrats who will be key voices in the push — like Carper and Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Bill Nelson of Florida — haven't yet publicly rejected Trump's permitting reform proposals, even if they remain skeptical on the funding side.
"There may be some things we can do — hopefully some commonsense things — but also make sure we're protecting our environment," Carper said.
One idea floating around on Capitol Hill is to split Trump's plan into a handful of bills that might be more palatable, though Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) rejected that idea this week.
"There will be different pieces that'll probably have to get melded together, but I would expect it to be one bill at the end," Thune said.
Either way, Republicans acknowledge that not every piece of Trump's plan will be included in whatever bill emerges, especially when it comes to contentious laws like NEPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
"I think there will be give and take," Thune said. "We'll have our input into that, and it's got to be a bipartisan bill, so we have to get enough Democrats to vote for it."
Reporters Geof Koss and Kellie Lunney contributed.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/15/stories/1060073957
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Amtrak CEO: How We Are Making Amtrak Safer
Feb 14, 2018 | The Hill - Opinion
By Richard Anderson
Recent high profile accidents have understandably shined a spotlight on Amtrak. Each reflect different situations and unique risks, and we should be careful not to rush to judgment or make broad assumptions about Amtrak’s safety culture.
As the company’s new CEO, I can assure our customers that Amtrak is safe and working every day to be even safer. However, Amtrak runs a complex rail system that relies heavily on support and cooperation from our partner railroads, particularly freight carriers. Additionally, Amtrak is in critical need of additional resources to address our aging infrastructure and fleet.
Every day Amtrak runs more than 300 trains nationwide, traveling through cities, rural communities and mountain ranges. We operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week through all types of terrain and weather. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, most of the 20,000 miles of track we traverse is owned by some 30 host railroads. This complicated network involves many players, often with competing interests, and requires us to have a broad view of the rules and practices that govern safety.
While recent incidents indicate we have more work to further drive the safety of our trains across all parts of this complex system, we already have significant efforts completed or underway — from the operation of inward-facing video recorders to monitor locomotive and engineer operation to enhanced training, inspections and safety protocols. Most significantly, we have been a leader in the installation of Positive Train Control. PTC is an automated braking technology that matches train speeds with track conditions and can prevent many head-on collisions and derailments.
More than 300 people have died in preventable rail incidents since Congress first mandated in 2008 that PTC be installed on most major rail lines in the United States. The initial deadline of 2015 was later extended to 2018 or in some cases 2020. Many lives since could have been saved if the technology was installed. Some of these victims were riding on Amtrak trains, so we know firsthand the devastation of a preventable, fatal accident.
Amtrak started installing PTC in 2000, before the federal mandate. Since then, we have deployed PTC almost universally where we control the rails outright including on most of the Northeast Corridor. We have pledged to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao that we will meet the 2018 deadline for complete implementation on all the tracks we control.
However, Amtrak cannot, on our own, deliver the installation of PTC everywhere for the simple reason that the tracks must be equipped with the right hardware for this system to work and we do not own or control most of the tracks on which we operate.
PTC has been debated and delayed long enough. It is past time for the entire industry, including our commuter and freight railroad partners, to finish PTC deployment as soon as possible. Failure to do so risks even more lives.
We are also working to improve how we think about and manage safety. Amtrak recently hired as its new chief safety officer an internationally-recognized safety expert from the aviation industry. We are adopting best practices from the aviation and health care industries by developing a Safety Management System (SMS). This activity will result in a continual system-wide audit of our risks and safety practices.
Safety compliance has always been a priority for our front line employees; it’s a condition of employment. But an SMS drives safety at the broader organizational level, changing our safety practices from reactive to proactive, and eventually predictive.
I have seen SMS work when I was CEO of Delta Airlines. Great things can be achieved when management, employees and stakeholders work together toward a common goal. In fact, America’s commercial aviation system accomplished the remarkable feat of zero fatalities last year.
Simply put, the nation relies on Amtrak for mobility during a time when road and airport congestion add stressful delays and inconvenience to daily travelers’ lives. We are making strategic investments in the safety of our infrastructure, equipment and operation. But the future of rail in the U.S. not only depends on Amtrak advancing safety and infrastructure improvements — it also depends on stronger relationships with our partner railroads and with federal and state governments who are prepared to make investments to accelerate progress in America’s passenger rail system.
We must all act quickly and work together to make the nation’s rail system the safest in the world just as has been accomplished in our aviation industry.
Richard Anderson is the president and CEO of Amtrak.
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/373913-amtrak-ceo-how-we-are-making-amtrak-safer
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EPA Drops Proposed Rule on Implementing 2015 Ozone Standard
Feb 14, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA, under legal pressure to finish the remaining attainment designations for its 2015 ground-level ozone standard, has dropped a proposed rule that would have spelled out the cutoff points for determining how significantly areas are out of compliance.
The agency, which had sent the proposed supplemental rule for "nonattainment area classifications" to the White House Office of Management and Budget for a standard review last September, withdrew it yesterday, according to the Reginfo.gov website.
Instead, the agency will move ahead "as soon as possible" with a classifications approach embedded in a proposed implementation rule published in November 2016, EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones said in an email today. EPA currently classifies nonattainment areas on a 5-point scale ranging from "marginal" to "extreme," depending on the ambient ozone concentrations.
Proceeding with the 2016 proposal, which has already been put out for public comment, will avoid added delays in implementation of the 70-parts-per-billion standard, Jones said.
Under a Clean Air Act timetable, EPA was supposed to have made all attainment designations for that standard by last October. While the agency in November deemed the bulk of the country effectively in compliance with the 70 ppb threshold, it has yet to make designations for Los Angeles, Houston and other heavily populated areas that are likely to be out of compliance.
It now plans to make most of the remaining decisions by the end of April but wants until early August to wrap up work on an eight-county area in and around San Antonio, according to court filings in lawsuits brought both by public health and environmental groups and a coalition of Democratic-led states.
Some of the plaintiffs had questioned whether EPA's bid to adopt a supplemental classifications system was in fact another stalling tactic. In those quarters, the decision to withdraw it was today guardedly viewed as a positive.
"We welcome that EPA is moving forward to implement the overdue and unlawfully delayed implementation of the ozone health standard," Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association, said in an email this morning.
The group is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ordered the agency to file a status report by May 15 (Greenwire, Feb. 7).
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/02/14/stories/1060073919
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House Lawmakers Prepare for NSR 'Reform' Debate
Feb 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
The House Energy & Commerce Committee's environment panel will hear testimony later today on the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers' push to ease the burden of EPA's new source review (NSR) air permitting program, which is seen as an essential reform by industry advocates but derided as a license to pollute more by environmentalists.
The Trump EPA has already moved to take administrative steps to ease NSR burdens, with the issuance of a guidance memo by administrator Scott Pruitt last year deferring to industry's projections of likely emissions increases.
EPA air chief William Wehrum has flagged this as the first in a series of targeted actions on NSR reliant mainly on guidance, rather than an all-encompassing reform requiring extensive regulation. Such a comprehensive reform push failed during the George W. Bush administration, under the tenure of Jeffrey Holmstead as EPA air office chief and later, when he was replaced by Wehrum as acting head of the office.
Holmstead in his prepared remarks says, “Over the years, the NSR program has become a complicated mess that makes it more difficult for companies to do things that we should all want them to do -- like maintaining the reliability and safety of their facilities and making them more efficient. In some parts of the country, it effectively bans the construction of new facilities even if they use state-of-the-art pollution controls."
Holmstead supports legislation, such as H.R. 3127 sponsored by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), to enable companies to boost plants' energy efficiency without triggering onerous NSR review, and possibly tougher pollution controls. A second bill from Griffith, H,R. 3128, would alter the definition of “modification” to determine when projects are subject to NSR, excluding more projects from review.
Paul Noe, an official with the American Forest & Paper Association, will tell the panel in prepared remarks that NSR “needs a substantial re-examination.” EPA “should focus the NSR program on larger projects that have a greater potential to impact air quality,” Noe says, offering a range of technical solutions to improve the program's functioning, such as better air quality modeling.
Stuart Spencer, an Arkansas air regulator representing the Association of Air Pollution Control Agencies (AAPCA), in his testimony supports Pruitt's memo that “clarifies that EPA will not second-guess a facility’s preconstruction emissions analysis. This will help ensure that both regulators and the regulated community have certainty in the process."
Spencer further supports a Justice Department memo from Jan. 25 prohibiting civil enforcement of noncompliance with other agencies’ guidance documents, which “has significant implications for NSR enforcement.” Spencer says, “Enforcement of the NSR program should not be based on guidance that can be revised over time as agency staff changes.”
But John Walke, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), in his statement condemns both the Pruitt memo and Griffith's bills as measures to enable greater air pollution. Griffith's bills would have “extremely harmful consequences,” he says.
“By effectively promising industrial lawbreakers that EPA will not enforce certain Clean Air Act NSR requirements, Pruitt’s memo represents a Trump administration attempt to grant amnesty from these requirements,” Walke says, condemning the “Amnesty memo” as a “reckless” reversal of longstanding EPA policy.
And Emily Hammond, a law professor with George Washington University, concurs, saying in her statement, “EPA has decided to wholly abdicate its duties as a guardian of clean air under the NSR program,” by deferring to industry judgments about when NSR should apply.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/house-lawmakers-prepare-nsr-reform-debate
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4 Things to Know About the Trump Budget’s Environmental Cuts
Feb 15, 2018 | Washington Post
By Joshua Busby
Like last year’s budget, the Trump administration’s 2019 budget proposes large cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. And it eliminates explicit climate change programs in other parts of the government and cuts spending for climate change-related monitoring, alternative energy, energy efficiency and flood prevention.
These drastic cuts may not really happen once Congress steps into the budget process. Still, the 2019 budget blueprint is a statement of the administration’s priorities and preferences.
For those who are concerned about climate change, the best-case scenario is that Congress ignores many of the proposed cuts — this is what happened last year. On some level, the presidential budget blueprint appears to have little bearing on congressional appropriations and thus may constitute elaborate trolling by OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.
However, the Republican-led Congress has already dramatically cut Obama-era international climate assistance. And morale among many U.S. agencies is low. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, for instance, recently announcedits intent to roll back a ruling on methane leakage, a move that could demoralize career staff who are committed to climate protection.
Although Congress may disregard many of the proposed cuts to environmental programming, climate programs remain vulnerable. Here are four areas where potential budget cuts would mean a significant loss in U.S. capacity to understand, prepare for and respond to climate change.
1) Overall EPA funding:
Overall attrition at the EPA — and other departments — is on the rise as employees unhappy with the current direction of the agency and its high-flying administrator leave the government. About 700 of 15,000 EPA employees, including 200 scientists, have left since the beginning of the Trump administration.
The Trump budget blueprint proposes a $2.8 billion reduction, a 34 percent cut to the EPA budget. Some media reports, though, put the percentage as somewhat lower. Last year, President Trump proposed a 31 percent cut to the EPA’s budget and a reduction in 3,200 positions, more than 20 percent of the EPA’s workforce.
But the 2018 House Republican proposal cut only 6 percent, suggesting that the Mulvaney OMB budget is not the template for appropriations. Since Congress just enacted a two-year omnibus budget and has yet to complete a fiscal 2018 appropriations bill, it is unclear whether Trump’s 2019 budget will have any bearing on congressional deliberations.
2) State Department international climate funding:
Republicans in Congress may respond favorably to Trump’s proposed elimination of the Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI). As part of the GCCI, the Obama administration had pledged $3 billion to support the South Korea-based Green Climate Fund to fulfill a commitment made in Paris, yet was able to deliver only about $1 billion before President Barack Obama left office. Congress and the Trump administration largely left that effort moribund by dramatically downsizing appropriations to a mere $160 million in 2017, down from Obama’s proposed $1.3 billion for that year.
GCCI in the past was the umbrella platform for international climate efforts — including support for the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, the U.S.-China Climate Change Working Group, the Clean Energy Ministerial and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. The GCCI in recent years supported the U.S. contribution to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (the secretariat that oversees the 1992 treaty) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In September, despite the Trump administration’s objections, the Senate included $10 million for this U.N. secretariat as well as money for the IPCC. This funding could be a live fight again.
The White House justification for these cuts is based on the perception that the Paris agreement “unfairly places the U.S. at a financial disadvantage.” Moreover, the argument goes: “Instead of using such funds to help other countries address climate change, even while many of them plan to increase their emissions, the U.S. should invest in our own economic growth.”
This led Lisa Friedman of the New York Times to ask on Twitter, “So … taking this at face value, what is it the administration is saying here? Not just China but India, Brazil, South Africa … should act on an equal par with the United States?”
For his part, Neil Bhatiya of the Center for a New American Security wrote, “That criticism doesn’t deal with the fact that Paris NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions] are structured to reduce the Kyoto distinctions between developed and developing states. Even that was a diplomatic haul to accomplish.” That critique echoes the argument I made here in the Monkey Cage when Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris agreement.
3) Scientific programs to help monitor climate change:
Nature reports that the budget blueprint cancels $133 million for five NASA Earth science missions that the White House failed to cut last year, including the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Earth-observing mission, among others. These missions give the United States situational awareness of climate processes.
4) Energy programs to boost renewables and efficiency:
Nature also reports cuts to the Energy Department, with a 65 percent drop (about $696 million) in the budget of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which apparently includes $120 million that Congress added back in the latest budget deal.
Trump would again like to eliminate more than $300 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which is intended to promote riskier technology bets in energy such as battery storage. Congress instead topped up ARPA-E last year with more money, so this proposal may again be a dead letter.
And there’s a bigger picture at stake
There’s less money for flood-hazard mapping — which drops from $178 million to $100 million — on the premise that money needs to be directed to the Department of Homeland Security’s “core missions.”
Moreover, the president this week also unveiled his long-awaited infrastructure planto make good on a campaign pledge to provide more than $1 trillion for rebuilding America’s bridges and roads, as well as other infrastructure projects. The administration’s $200 billion infrastructure proposal was intended to crowd in private-sector and state and local government resources. Whether that is viable remains to be seen, as the plan is funded largely by cutting other popular programs. The proposal also departs from past practice, wherein the federal government and state and local governments typically split the costs 50-50. Trump’s proposal sees the federal government proportion fall to 20 percent.
rom a climate change perspective, any infrastructure proposal that fails to take into account climate risks could be an expensive mistake. As the American Society of Civil Engineers noted, much of U.S. infrastructure is vulnerable to sea-level rise, hurricanes and other climate forces, and the country cannot afford to build its infrastructure twice.
With Congress and the administration prepared to embrace deficit spending through a combination of tax cuts and more spending, it will be interesting to see whether the Trump blueprint informs congressional deliberations or merely baits the environmental community and clean-energy advocates to express their displeasure.
Joshua Busby is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Find him on Twitter @busbyj2.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/15/4-things-to-know-about-the-trump-budgets-environmental-cuts/?utm_term=.5e238f5d5fd4
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A Spy’s Guide to Climate Change
Feb 15, 2018 | New York Times
By Justin Gillis
The Trump administration is seeking to withdraw the United States from the international accord reached in Paris in 2015 to fight climate change. It is trying to rescind regulations on the issue. It has even scrubbed mentions of global warming from government websites. Yet its attempt to suppress the facts has not entirely succeeded, with federal agencies continuing to issue warnings, including in a major climate report published last year.
The latest climate alarm came this week in a Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Here is what the document, issued by Daniel R. Coats, the director of national intelligence, said about climate change and other environmental problems, with my annotations:A real problem
The impacts of the long-term trends toward a warming climate, more air pollution, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity are likely to fuel economic and social discontent — and possibly upheaval — through 2018.
Only six weeks into the year, this is already coming true. Cape Town, the second-largest city in South Africa, is so low on water after an extended drought that it may be forced to shut off the taps in early April. Water scarcity is a factor in the violent conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and in both countries, control of water supplies is being used as a weapon of war.Social disruptions
The past 115 years have been the warmest period in the history of modern civilization, and the past few years have been the warmest years on record. Extreme weather events in a warmer world have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to raise the risk of humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, and power outages. Research has not identified indicators of tipping points in climate-linked Earth systems, suggesting a possibility of abrupt climate change.
After running through an accurate summary of the warming trend and the risk it poses, the document appears — though the language is ambiguous — to suggest the possibility of sudden climate change of the sort that might cause global upheaval. Most scientists say that over the next few decades, at least, the likely prospect is a gradual worsening of climate-related problems. But beyond a few decades, they are less willing to rule out catastrophes like the disappearance of polar sea ice, which could potentially cause profound climatic disruption.Threats to political stability
Worsening air pollution from forest burning, agricultural waste incineration, urbanization, and rapid industrialization — with increasing public awareness — might drive protests against authorities, such as those recently in China, India, and Iran.
The document does not explicitly mention the burning of fossil fuels, but that is a main cause of the poor air quality the plagues many cities in the developing world, and has even caused deteriorating air quality in places like London. Burning coal and oil not only causes climate change, it throws particles into the air that can cause asthma, heart attacks and other health problems. The World Health Organization estimates that three million people die prematurely every year because of outdoor air pollution, and over four million more because of indoor exposure to dirty fuels used for heating and cooking.Critical systems at risk
Accelerating biodiversity and species loss — driven by pollution, warming, unsustainable fishing, and acidifying oceans — will jeopardize vital ecosystems that support critical human systems. Recent estimates suggest that the current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the natural extinction rate.
As the document implies, scientists are not entirely sure how much the rate of extinction has sped up because of human activities, but they do think it has accelerated. Some of them fear that we have entered the early stages of what will become the sixth mass extinction of organisms in Earth’s history.Conflicts between nations
Water scarcity, compounded by gaps in cooperative management agreements for nearly half of the world’s international river basins, and new unilateral dam development are likely to heighten tension between countries.
The biggest thing missing from this document is any explicit attribution of the cause of global climate disruption. Scientists have largely ruled out any natural explanation, concluding that the human release of greenhouse gases explains basically all the warming that has occurred since the 19th century. The two great culprits are the burning of fossil fuels and the chopping down of forests.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/guide-climate-change.html
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Leaked U.N. Draft Report Sees ‘Very High Risk’ the Planet Will Warm Beyond Key Limit
Feb 15, 2018 | Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
A draft United Nations climate science report contains dire news about the warming of the planet, suggesting it will likely cross the key marker of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of temperature rise in the 2040s, and that this will be exceedingly difficult to avoid.
Temperatures could subsequently cool down if carbon dioxide is somehow removed from the air later in the century, the document notes. But that prospect is questionable at the massive scales that would be required, it observes.
The 31-page draft, a summary of a much-anticipated report on the 1.5 degrees Celsius target expected to be finalized in October, was published by the website ClimateHomeon Tuesday. The website said the document had been “publicly available on the U.S. federal register over the past month.” Last month, several news outlets, including Reuters, quoted from the draft but did not publish it in full.
The 1.5 C target is crucial to small island nations worried about rising seas, and other nations particularly vulnerable to warming, and was explicitly included in the Paris climate agreement as the more ambitious of two climate goals, the other being 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The draft document states that there is a “very high risk” of the planet warming more than 1.5 degrees above the temperature seen in the mid-to-late-19th century. Maintaining the planet’s temperature entirely below that level throughout the present century, without even briefly exceeding it, is likely to be “already out of reach,” it finds.
Jonathan Lynn, spokesman for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is producing the study, cautioned that the draft is a work in progress.
“The text is highly likely to change between this draft and the final approved summary for policymakers,” he said.
Duke University climate expert Drew Shindell, who is listed as one of the drafting authors of the document, also noted that the draft summary was a very early version of the full report.
“It’s much rougher and much more preliminary than even the underlying document,” he said.
Although worrying, the conclusion will not be surprising to those who have followed a growing body of research on just what it would take to stop warming short of 1.5 degrees Celsius. The planet has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius or more.
In some places, the report notes, the temperature increase has already exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius. In general, warming is more intense over land than over the oceans and is particularly intense in the Arctic.
The document finds that a warming of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would pose substantially larger risks in many respects than 1.5 degrees C — but it also finds that severe risks will be present at 1.5 degrees, too.
A serious risk is already emerging to highly sensitive marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, the document states, and 1.5 C may already be too much for them. Reefs “are at risk that at 1.5 C and at 2 C they will no longer be dominated by corals,” the draft report notes.
The chance that Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet will tip toward irreversible retreat is present at both 1.5 C and 2 C, the study finds — but at 2 C, the likelihood of commitment to major sea level rise grows larger.
What’s most striking is the radical nature and rapidity of the changes that would be required to somehow preserve a world below 1.5 degrees.
The document finds that the world has 12 to 16 years’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions left, from the start of 2016, if it wants a better-than-even chance of holding warming below 1.5 degrees.
Two of those years have already elapsed, as of this writing. A third will have nearly elapsed by the time the draft report is finalized and released in October. (In December in Poland, it will feed into a broader United Nations deliberation about the adequacy of countries’ current promises to cut emissions.)
And once this “carbon budget” for 1.5 degrees Celsius is used up, emissions would have to plunge to zero to preserve the 1.5 degree goal — something that would almost certainly never happen, as it would sharply impair the world economy.
Since such rapid and severe cuts aren’t likely, the report notes that it’s virtually unavoidable that the planet will “overshoot” 1.5 degrees Celsius. To cool Earth afterward and avoid staying at dangerously high temperatures for long, it would then be necessary to remove carbon dioxide from the air at a massive scale — but that, too, is highly problematic.
Carbon removal scenarios generally involve reforesting large amounts of land, or growing trees or other plants on that land and using it for energy, and storing the resulting carbon dioxide emissions underground. But “increased biomass production and use has the potential to increase pressure on land and water resources, food production, biodiversity, and to affect air quality,” the draft notes. “Therefore, the scale and speed of implementation assumed in some 1.5 C pathways may be challenging.”
“Avoiding a 1.5 C warming would be very, very difficult without a significant overshoot,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, noting that he was commenting solely on the state of the science itself, rather than the leaked document. “Such a warming would cause increased bleaching and perhaps destruction of living coral reefs at some locations, although at other places, reefs would probably survive a warming closer to 2 C.”
“Some of the high level messages I think come as no surprise, in that we are not on track anywhere near toward 1.5 C, and getting there would require enormous changes,” added Shindell, noting that he was not speaking as an author of the draft report or on behalf of the IPCC, but simply as a scientist with expertise in the matter. “That basic conclusion, I think it’s okay to say that it’s not a surprise to anybody. Any climate scientist would have told you that even without the report.”
The document’s leak has become a standard affair for major United Nations climate science reports, because they are seen by so many reviewers.
In 2013, a leaked draft of part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report helped lend credence to the questionable idea that global warming had slowed or “paused,” based on a brief passage suggesting that the rate of warming had declined somewhat between 1998 and 2012. The final draft addressed the issue with more nuance, largely undermining the notion of any significant slowdown.
The authors have until May 15 to include any new published material in the report. Still, it’s unlikely to change the fundamental conclusion that there is too little time to avert 1.5 C degrees of warming — barring some massive technological intervention.
“There is … no documented precedent for the geographical and economic scale of the energy, land, urban and industrial transitions implicit in pathways consistent with a 1.5 C warmer world,” the draft report notes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/02/14/leaked-u-n-draft-report-sees-very-high-risk-the-planet-will-warm-beyond-key-limit/?utm_term=.3784f0086c8d
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