Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 2/28/2018
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(ACC Mentioned) Scott Pruitt Kills Agency That Studies Chemicals Harmful to Children
Feb 27, 2018 | Mother Jones
By Kevin Drum
Those of us of a certain age will remember the dynamic duo of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch during the Reagan years. As Secretary of the Interior and administrator of the EPA, respectively, they did everything they could to make America friendly to polluters... -
EPA Targets Research Staff for Reorganization (1)
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sylvia Carignan
The EPA is considering forming a new “resource management” office with existing scientific research program staff in an effort to streamline the agency—a move one watchdog said would “delegitimize” science. -
U.S. Recycling Woes Pile Up as China Escalates Ban
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Tens of thousands of tons of recyclables have been diverted to U.S. landfills in recent months as the reality of China's new ban on certain types of imported waste takes hold. -
EPA Shifts Staff Away From ‘Safer Choice’ Chemical Labeling Program (1)
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment
By Pat Rizzuto
A third of the EPA's pollution prevention staff in the chemicals office is being transferred to other responsibilities in the same office. -
OMB Reviewing EPA's CBI Guidance for States
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has begun reviewing a draft version of EPA's pending guidance for states and other local government entities allowed access to certain trade secret information the agency collects on chemicals under 2016 revisions... -
EPA's FY19 Budget Continues IRIS Review but Slashes Assessment Funds
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's fiscal year 2019 budget proposal continues the Trump administration's review of the agency's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), preserving for now a program that some Republicans are seeking to eliminate, but the plan seeks an almost 50 percent cut... -
Glyphosate Cancer Warnings Temporarily Blocked in California
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Carolyn Whetzel
California can't require cancer warning labels on Roundup and other weedkillers with glyphosate until Monsanto Co.'s latest lawsuit against the state is resolved. -
2018 REACH Dossier Submissions Higher Than Expected – Echa
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
With three months to go before the final REACH registration deadline on 31 May, Echa says its has received a total of 16,175 dossiers – 17% more than it had anticipated by this time. -
‘No Sense’ Abandoning ECHA, EU Agencies – UK Opposition Leader
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Luke Buxton
In a major speech on future relations with the EU, UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has backed continued British membership of European agencies such as Echa and Efsa, and urged a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union. -
WHO Cancer Agency “Left out Key Findings” in Benzene Review
Feb 28, 2018 | Reuters
By Kate Kelland
In the spring of 2015, chemical engineer Melvyn Kopstein wrote to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to alert it to what he thought were serious flaws in its work. -
EU Publishes Sodium Dichromate Authorisation Decision
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The European Commission has published its decision to authorise the use of sodium dichromate as a corrosion inhibitor, following an application by Total Raffinerie Mitteldeutschland. The recommended review period expires on 21 September 2029. -
For Many Republicans, Trump’s Offshore Drilling Plan and Beaches Don’t Mix
Feb 28, 2018 | Washington Post
By Darryl Fears
After waiting in the morning chill for other lawmakers to speak, state Rep. Nancy Mace finally took the microphone. She was the General Assembly’s newest member, only four weeks on the job, “a baby among these folks,” she told the crowd. -
After Years of Work, Pruitt Plan to Replace CPP Sparks Major New Fissures
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves and Lee Logan
Comments on the Trump EPA's plan to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP) utility greenhouse gas rule reveal fissures -- including among like-minded groups -- on nearly every issue, underscoring that Administrator Scott Pruitt's decision to reconsider the rule... -
Texas Energy Advocates Eager to Build on 2017 Gas Export Growth
Feb 28, 2018 | Platts
By Harry Weber and Ross Wyeno
Texas energy boosters urged the Trump administration Tuesday to strengthen, rather than diminish, the North American Free Trade Agreement to protect the flow of natural gas exports from the US to Mexico as output is surging because of billions of dollars of investment... -
Oklahoma Toughens Oil Fracking Rules After Shale Earthquakes
Feb 28, 2018 | Bloomberg
By David Wethe
Oklahoma is tightening its rules for fracking after studying a new cluster of earthquakes in one of the hottest U.S. regions for drilling. -
Chemours Told to Cut Fluorocarbon Air Pollution from North Carolina Plant
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Cheryl Hogue
Chemours is facing costly demands from North Carolina regulators to curb atmospheric releases of fluorinated chemicals from the company’s factory outside of Fayetteville. -
Lawmakers at Loggerheads over Trump Plan
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Sam Mintz
A House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing yesterday served as a battleground as Democrats and Republicans sparred over President Trump's infrastructure plan, but at least one member appeared open to crossing over enemy lines for compromise. -
Moderate Dems Huddle with White House as Outlook Dims
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Moderate Democrats want the White House to know they're interested in working on infrastructure, even as the congressional outlook dims for President Trump's plan. -
Two-Thirds of U.S. Commuter Railroads May Not Meet Crash Technology Deadline: Report
Feb 28, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By David Shepardson
As many as two-thirds of the 29 U.S. commuter railroads may not meet a deadline to install an anti-crash technology by the end of the year, according to a report by a government watchdog seen by Reuters. -
Interior-EPA Bill Will See Funding Boost
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss and George Cahlink
Agencies funded under the Interior-Environment appropriations bill will see increased spending levels in fiscal 2019 under budget caps guiding the construction of the omnibus spending bill, key senators said yesterday. -
Republican Climate Caucus Members Get Low Environmental Marks
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter
Some House Republicans have bucked their party on climate change—not only acknowledging it's real, but vowing to fight the problem as well. But one environmental group says they still have poor voting records.
Industry and Association News
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(ACC Mentioned) Scott Pruitt Kills Agency That Studies Chemicals Harmful to Children
Feb 27, 2018 | Mother Jones
By Kevin Drum
Those of us of a certain age will remember the dynamic duo of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch during the Reagan years. As Secretary of the Interior and administrator of the EPA, respectively, they did everything they could to make America friendly to polluters in particular and corporate interests in general. In the end, Watt resigned after mocking a coal-leasing panel (“I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”). Gorsuch resigned after being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over Superfund records.
Today we have Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt. Zinke has already slashed the size of two beautiful national monuments and gotten in trouble over his travel habits. Scott Pruitt, meanwhile, has been busy rescinding the Clean Power Plan and getting in trouble over his travel habits—and much more. In fact, Pruitt is so bad that Rebecca Leber’s profile of him, “Making America Toxic Again,” is on the cover of our current issue. Here’s a bit of it:
Another accomplishment on Pruitt’s list was “science board transparency”—a reference to one of the more obscure ways in which well-established facts have come under relentless assault….On Halloween, to an audience that included few reporters but several industry reps—including Steve Milloy, the former policy and strategy director of Murray Energy and a prominent climate denier—Pruitt announced a new plan. No scientist who received agency grants could serve on the boards.
….To replace the departing scientists, Pruitt appointed industry supporters,including Michael Honeycutt, a toxicologist from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who has built his career arguing that the impacts of air pollution are overstated. He is now the chair of the Science Advisory Board. Pruitt picked more than a dozen people to fill the empty seats of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors and 15 others for the 47-member Science Advisory Board, many of them former executives and staffers from organizations that have a stake in limiting the EPA’s chemical and air quality work, such as the utility Southern Co., Phillips 66, Total, and the American Chemistry Council.
All of this leads up to Pruitt’s latest effort to make America not just toxic, but specifically toxic to children:
A federal environmental program that distributes grants to test the effects of chemical exposure on adults and children is being shuttered amidst a major organization consolidation at the Environmental Protection Agency. The National Center for Environmental Research (NCER) will no longer exist following plans to combine three EPA offices, the agency confirmed to The Hill on Monday.
….The NCER is largely known for the funding it provides through its premiere program, Science To Achieve Results (STAR). Under the STAR program, grants are given to the Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Centers, which were established in 1988 to discover methods to reduce children’s health risks from environmental factors….A report released by the National Academy of Sciences last year that was compiled at the EPA’s request championed the STAR program for its “numerous successes.”
You can see the problem, of course. The STAR program has been successful. That means it identifies chemicals that might be harmful to children. And that in turn means trouble for the companies that make those chemicals. We can’t have that, can we?
I don’t remember who said this last night about the Trump administration, but it’s as if they’re in a contest to see who can be the most evil. For the moment, it looks like Pruitt is in the lead.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/scott-pruitt-kills-agency-that-studies-chemicals-harmful-to-children/
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EPA Targets Research Staff for Reorganization (1)
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sylvia Carignan
The EPA is considering forming a new “resource management” office with existing scientific research program staff in an effort to streamline the agency—a move one watchdog said would “delegitimize” science.
Environmental Protection Agency staff could be reassigned to different labs or offices, but the reorganization “would not affect anyone's employment or status and the management of research grants will continue,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the agency, told Bloomberg Environment.
The new Office of Resource Management would fall under the EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD), which oversees the agency's environmental health research. That research contributes both to general scientific knowledge and supports EPA's various regulations.
The National Center for Environmental Research is one of the ORD programs being considered for consolidation, according to a Feb. 26 report in The Hill, but the agency declined to provide further details about what functions or programs could move to the new office. The agency previously proposed cutting a category of research grants that fall under the center's purview.
Advocates Challenge Move
The proposed reorganization falls in line with Administrator Scott Pruitt's efforts to “delegitimize” science and take science out of agency decisions, Kyla Bennett, director of the New England office of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told Bloomberg Environment.
“Clearly they're not going to be having the same function that they had before,” said Bennett, a former EPA wetlands official. “Who [will assess] which grants are worthy of funding and which scientific issues need to be worked on?”
The proposal comes from EPA's career and political leaders, Bowman said. ORD is currently taking input from EPA employees about the proposal, she added.
Eliminating Grants
The National Center for Environmental Research's “Science To Achieve Results” (STAR) program provides grants to academic and nonprofit organizations to support environmental research. The agency's fiscal year 2018 and 2019 plans propose eliminating the grant program because they are not part of EPA's core mission.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine assessed the STAR program last year and found the grant-funded research to be beneficial. The research helps regulated industries that can use new technologies to reduce pollution at lower costs, and state governments that can use improved monitoring and modeling methods to meet EPA mandates.
“The program filled a very unique niche, and a very important niche, in terms of generating evidence of the impact of environmental factors on health,” Ana V. Diez Roux, dean and epidemiology professor at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health, told Bloomberg Environment. Diez Roux was a member of the National Academies board that reviewed the STAR program.
The program's budget in 2016 was about $39 million, according to the National Academies. At the time, the program was about 8 percent of the total budget for the EPA's ORD.
The program is currently funded at about $28 million for fiscal year 2018 according to this year's annualized continuing resolution on agency appropriations.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128866184&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128866184&jd=128866184
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U.S. Recycling Woes Pile Up as China Escalates Ban
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Tens of thousands of tons of recyclables have been diverted to U.S. landfills in recent months as the reality of China's new ban on certain types of imported waste takes hold.
The ban, which went into effect Jan. 1, covers imports of 24 types of solid waste, including unsorted paper and the difficult-to-recycle types of plastic, including polyethylene terephthalate (PET), commonly used in plastic bottles.
And China's import restrictions become even tighter March 1, increasing the sense of urgency U.S. recyclers feel to find new outlets for their products. At the same time, some industry officials say the situation could be a blessing in disguise if it eventually prods the U.S. toward processing more of its own recycling.
“What we're seeing now is really unprecedented,” said Julie Miller, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).
China has been by far the largest market for U.S scrap exports—in many cases the recyclable materials Americans put in curbside containers. China's crackdown, now three months old, has both U.S. and global waste collectors scrambling to find new markets for their recyclables to avoid disrupting curbside collection services.
Landfill Waivers
Starting last September, Oregon's (DEQ) established a short-term waiver process to help alleviate the anticipated backup of materials at recycling separating centers, known in the industry as material recovery facilities, or MRFs. Since then, Oregon DEQ has approved 14 separate waivers to dump 6,107 tons of erstwhile recycling into landfills, with more waivers yet to come, Miller told Bloomberg Environment.
“The amount of materials coming into the MRFs have not slowed down,” said Miller. “This is going to lead to changes in programs in some cities about what you can and can't recycle.”
Massachusetts has also approved more than 40 landfill waivers since November.
Likewise, public works officials in Boise, Idaho, recently suggested the city stop accepting mixed paper recycling for a year, until better options open up. If that happens, the city estimates about 640 tons of paper would end up in landfills every month.
Other Shoe Drops March 1
China is also severely tightening standards for the imports it will continue to take. Previously, China would accept bales of mixed paper containing up to 2 percent impurities—which could be everything from bits of garden hose, to diapers to propane tanks. But starting March 1, the impurity threshold falls to 0.5 percent for both mixed paper and plastic bales.
Once recyclables have been collected, they are brought to a MRF to be separated, decontaminated and compressed into bales for shipment to mills that can make them into new products.
Some recycling centers say China's stricter standard will prove virtually impossible for U.S. facilities to meet over the short term.
“I think there is going to be a tremendous amount of paper going to landfills,” said Nina Bellucci Butler, CEO of More Recycling, a recycling consulting firm based in Sonoma, Calif. “The 0.5 standard is just unworkable.”
Bellucci Butler says MRFs are doing everything they can to increase the purity of their bales by slowing down sorting lines, which decreases volumes and increases costs. Those costs will ultimately have be passed on to customers when new contracts are negotiated.
In some cases recyclers are stockpiling inventory, hoping that new domestic and international markets can open up, a move that Bellucci Butler says is a short-term solution at best.
“MRFs are chasing this idea of a perfectly clean paper bale, but that is nearly impossible to achieve,” she said, “and building new capacity to process recycled paper doesn't happen overnight.
India, Malaysia Fill Some of Void
China is the largest market for U.S. recycling exports, accounting for more than 40 percent of all recycled commodities in 2016, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.
As China closes its doors to recovered materials as part of that country's broad campaign against “yang laji,” or “foreign garbage,” new markets in Southeast Asia are absorbing some of those materials.
“As China started to drop off, we've really ramped up volumes of mixed paper going to India,” Brent Bell, president of recycling for Waste Management, the largest U.S. landfill and recycling company, told Bloomberg Environment.
According to Bell, of the nearly 2 million tons of recycling Waste Management processed in the fourth quarter of 2018, only 800 tons was diverted to a landfill, all in Massachusetts.
“In general the global economy hasn't gone down, which means the demand for recycled feedstocks is still there,” he said, “We're seeing these alternative markets really stepping up.”
Malaysia nearly quadrupled its U.S.-sourced imports of mixed plastics last year, jumping from about 9,600 metric tons in 2016 to nearly 38,000 metric tons, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Malaysia also imported substantially more recycled polyethylene, as did Thailand and Vietnam.
But others caution that the ability of emerging markets to fill China's shoes may be limited, because shipping costs will likely be much higher than they were in sending goods to China.
Sending recyclables to China is cheaper because it travels on ships that would “otherwise be empty” when they return from delivering consumer goods in the U.S. and European Union, said Brad Lovaas, executive director of the Washington Refuse and Recycling Association. “It's been a circular economy that we've relied on for decades.”A Blessing in Disguise?
While more paper and plastic ending up in landfills is not desirable, industry officials said it could ultimately drive the U.S. to process more of its own recycling.
“We need to take an active role in creating more demand for the materials our members are processing,” said David Biderman, executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America, which represents more than 9,500 public- and private-sector professionals in solid waste management.
The association has created a recycling task force to assist U.S. and Canadian companies, as well as local governments, concerned about the future of their recycling programs.
“Now that China's waste import restrictions have taken effect, reducing contamination will be an obvious focus,” Biderman told Bloomberg Environment. “However, the task force will also evaluate strategies for increasing demand, such as mandates for recycled content, and federal and state funding for recycling.”
Oregon recently approved $500,000 in materials management grants to promote the prevention, reuse or recovery of solid wastes.
Neighboring Washington recently expanded a campaign to grow the market for 100 percent recycled containers. Participants including Coca-Cola Co., Campbell Soup Co., and Keurig Green Mountain Inc. have signed commitments to identify and utilize products with 100 percent recycled containers in their facilities.
Contamination Starts in the Bin
Many recyclers point to a conflict between “single-stream” recycling, which allows unsorted recyclables to be placed in one receptacle, and the recent push to limit bale contamination.
“The public tends to drop a lot of things off that we can't take. And it's not cost-effective for us to spend a lot of time sorting it out,” said Mike Wolf, the office manager at Pacific Steel & Recycling in Missoula, Mont.
Recyclers point to the need to better communicate which products don't belong in single-stream. First on the list is plastic bags, which when tossed in with the rest of the recycling routinely jam the machines at recycling plants. City officials in Phoenix estimate they lose about $1 million a year because of improper recycling, mostly because of flimsy plastic bags.
“Plastic bags and the switch to lighter shipping materials,” like the inflatable air pillow film used in some packaging, “are wreaking havoc in traditional recycling facilities,” said Bellucci Butler.A growing number of grocery stores, including national chains like Target Corp., allow customers to recycle plastic bags at their retail locations. So far, California is the only state with a ban on single-use plastic bags.
Bellucci Butler said another potential solution to the contamination question is “secondary MRFs,” such as those being used in Los Angeles, which are optimized to dig deeper into bales after they've gone through conventional sorting.
She worries about recent talk by some cities about eliminating certain kinds of paper or plastic recycling.
“If we start telling the public to throw things away instead of recycling, we're never going to get that material collected later,” she said. “In order to keep it out of landfills and develop new markets, we need to maintain a steady supply.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128866177&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128866177&jd=128866177
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EPA Shifts Staff Away From ‘Safer Choice’ Chemical Labeling Program (1)
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment
By Pat Rizzuto
A third of the EPA's pollution prevention staff in the chemicals office is being transferred to other responsibilities in the same office.
EPA's pollution prevention staff—which run its Safer Choice product labeling program that has proven popular with companies—will be cut from 15 to 10 people to boost the number of staff working on other chemical programs, including the many new responsibilities the agency has under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) amendments of 2016, sources said.
Transferring staff to focus on TSCA makes sense given the agency's heavy workload in implementing the law, yet cleaning and household product companies continue to support the Safer Choice program, industry officials from those sectors told Bloomberg Environment.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Safer Choice program, formerly known as Design for the Environment, allows qualifying cleaning and other products to carry one of the Safer Choice logos offered for various products that meet environmental criteria. Specifically, products must be certified to show each ingredient is among the safest for the function it provides, according to the Safer Choice website.
The EPA's chemicals office announced the transfer in staff duties at a Feb. 27 town hall, according to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg Environment and discussed with agency and industry officials familiar with its details.
The Trump administration's fiscal 2019 budget request seeks to eliminate the entire pollution prevention program, despite the popularity of the Safer Choice program among sectors of the industry.
Amway Corp., BASF Corp., and Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., are among the chemical producers, cleaning product manufacturers, and retailers that received Safer Choice awards in 2017 recognizing goods they made and sold.
‘Strategic Choice’
The EPA is making “smart strategic choices” by reassigning existing staff to work on one of its top priorities—implementing TSCA—Steve Caldeira, president & CEO of the Household & Commercial Products Association, told Bloomberg Environment.
Without adequate funding and staff for its core chemical responsibilities, the EPA could be forced to delay decisions that could help useful new products reach the market, he said.
“Safer choice has worked; is working,” Caldeira said. Yet, there may be room to tweak the program to make it more effective, he said. “We remain optimistic that it will continue and will continue to grow.”
The association is exploring the potential creation of a coalition that would work to create more awareness of Safer Choice, he said. “The coalition is not about securing additional funding or new funding for Safer Choice, but about explaining the benefits of the program,” to consumers, lawmakers, and other parties, Caldeira said.
Brian Sansoni, vice president of sustainability initiatives at the American Cleaning Institute, told Bloomberg Environment the EPA's decision to shift staff isn't ideal, but it's pragmatic.
Ideally, the EPA would have sufficient staff to manage its chemical responsibilities and the Safer Choice program, which the cleaning institute's members support, he said.
“A fully implemented chemical safety act will speed innovative chemistries and products to market,” Sansoni said, referring to the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, which amended TSCA in 2016. “We hope it would have a robust safer choice program, which a lot of our members participate in and value.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128866176&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128866176&jd=128866176
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OMB Reviewing EPA's CBI Guidance for States
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has begun reviewing a draft version of EPA's pending guidance for states and other local government entities allowed access to certain trade secret information the agency collects on chemicals under 2016 revisions to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
OMB received the guidance document for review Feb. 23, according to its website. To date, no meetings have been scheduled on the draft guidance.
The document is intended to assist those entitled by new language Congress inserted in section 14 of the original 1976 TSCA to gain access to health and safety-related information about chemicals that had previously been held only by EPA as confidential business information (CBI).
The revised TSCA allows states, tribes, local governments, emergency responders and other health and environmental professionals access to such information, provided that they can provide the same level of security to the information as EPA does.
Readers of Inside EPA first learned of the guidance's development last spring, when Alex Dunn, then the executive director and general counsel of the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS), discussed the need for such a guidance.
“To obtain access to CBI under the new law, because this is new authority, states will have to set up an agreement with EPA,” said Dunn, who is now the regional administrator of EPA's Region 1, covering six New England states.
“EPA will have to agree [that states] have the same level of security as EPA,” she added.
To assist states, ECOS asked EPA to provide guidance on what requirements would be necessary to protect CBI, Dunn said. At the time, she described the guidance in progress as a checklist of elements that states will need to have in place, and said that EPA planned to have a final version completed in the fall. She did not discuss the possibility of OMB review.
During the interview, Dunn noted that one issue will be a problem for some states, and some may require a legislative fix: the fact that some states have broad Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws. "Some states may need to do a regulatory fix or a [legislative one]."
Dunn said state officials are "really pleased" that EPA is developing the guidance, which she said will save states a great deal of time in preparing to be CBI-compliant. "The alternative is for each state to submit [their application] and be told" that it does or does not meet EPA's requirements.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/omb-reviewing-epas-cbi-guidance-states
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EPA's FY19 Budget Continues IRIS Review but Slashes Assessment Funds
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA's fiscal year 2019 budget proposal continues the Trump administration's review of the agency's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), preserving for now a program that some Republicans are seeking to eliminate, but the plan seeks an almost 50 percent cut to the larger human health risk assessment research program that houses IRIS, which would significantly undermine key assessment efforts.
The congressional justification accompanying the Trump administration's FY19 budget proposal for EPA slashes the agency's human health risk assessment program from $40.5 million that was appropriated in FY17 -- the last year for which Congress approved a full appropriation bill -- to $22.3 million.
The document indicates that includes a $13.9 million and 65.5 full-time employee equivalent (FTE) cut, though it is unclear how that cut would be distributed across the various programs within the Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) program, which include the IRIS program; the Integrated Science Assessments program, which supports the National Ambient Air Quality Standards; the Provisionally Peer-Reviewed Toxicity Values program for Superfund remediation and research intended to support the other programs.
The National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA), which operates the programs in the HHRA budget documents, includes 180 people, NCEA Director Tina Bahadori told members of a new National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing the IRIS program earlier this month.
The rest of the $15.2 million cut to the program is explained by a budgeting slight of hand, wherein $2.3 million and 15.2 FTE are proposed for "rebalanc[ing] to the Superfund appropriation within this program for IRIS." Those same amounts of money and FTEs, however, appear to merely shift to a different account that the HHRA program receives funding from, the "hazardous substance Superfund" funding account.
While HHRA is cut, the proposal does not eliminate the IRIS program, or transfer it to EPA's toxics office, as many had worried would occur in the face of proposals from congressional Republicans. Report language attached to a proposed Senate spending bill for EPA would end IRIS, which is now housed in EPA's research office. By contrast, the House directed EPA in its spending bill to consolidate its risk assessment programs, presumably within the nascent toxics office, which is standing up a new, far more active program in response to Congress' 2016 reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
The budget justification appears to leave the door open to acting on lawmakers' calls. "The Agency is currently reviewing IRIS to ensure it supports the Agency's highest public health decision-making, and its role in supporting the TSCA program, while continuing to support all of EPA's programs," the document says.
The description explains that in 2019, HHRA's activities will support EPA's implementation of the reformed TSCA, which greatly expanded EPA's responsibilities regarding industrial chemicals; "supporting the Agency's implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act"; "supporting the Agency's implementation of the Clean Air Act"; "targeted support for program and regional offices, states and tribes"; and supporting Superfund.
The major cuts the Trump EPA proposes to the HHRA program from the FY18 annualized continuing resolution -- because Congress has yet to finalize EPA's FY18 spending bill -- are expected to impact the program's ability to perform the activities described in its FY19 performance plan.
Risk Assessment
But the agency acknowledges the cuts would have a significant adverse effect on EPA's risk assessment efforts. The program description explains that if finalized, the large cut "[s]ignificantly reduces the HHRA research program's ability to develop assessments to support Agency decisions, which will not only impact the number of FTEs, but also the composition of the multidisciplinary teams assembled to address the needs of complex Agency decisions."
The cut would also reduce "the HHRA research program's ability to provide daily technical support to program and regional offices and states and tribes, including during emergencies and urgent circumstances."
The justification document also includes a series of tables referred to as "performance measures and data," which are intended to record the achievements of the various EPA programs.
The IRIS program has long struggled with output -- and as a result has remained on the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) High Risk list of programs at risk of waste, fraud and abuse since 2009, though the justification says IRIS has worked with GAO to address its recommendations and made progress on them in FY17.
"In FY 2017, ORD's HHRA Research Program completed 100% (2 of 2) of its research outputs as planned," the performance measure states. "The outputs included release of two final IRIS assessments, IRIS Evaluation of the Inhalation Carcinogenicity of Ethylene Oxide and the IRIS Assessment of Benzo[a]pyrene."
The justification also includes a performance measure called an annual performance milestone for the release of draft IRIS assessments and one for publishing final assessments. The scores are weighted based on the importance of the assessment. IRIS scored 11 out of 40 in FY17 for completing draft assessments, an improvement over its FY15 and FY16 scores. For completed assessments, the program scored 4 out of 15, a slight decrease from its FY15 and FY16 scores in this category.
"Though the target was not met, key assessment products completed for HHRA include three IRIS Assessment Plans (nitrate/nitrite, chloroform, and ethylbenzene) and two external review drafts for IRIS assessments (ethyl tert-butyl ether, tert-butanol)," the document explains.
"In FY 2017, the IRIS pipeline was placed on hold while new EPA and ORD leadership was being appointed. In addition to this, the implementation of NAS and [GAO] recommendations, notably development and application of systematic review methodologies, introduced competing priorities that contributed to the challenges in meeting this goal. The scoring method used for this measure was developed many years ago and does not reflect significant IRIS programmatic changes that began in 2011."
The performance measures also describe IRIS' leaders focus on better supporting "policy and regulatory decisions for EPA's programs and regions, as well as state agencies, IRIS is reconfirming their priority chemicals and product needs, and aligning those with appropriate allocation of resources. In addition to Superfund, water, air, and children's health drivers, IRIS has sharpened its focus on the new [TSCA] law, and has been providing the needed scientific support to meet its expedited timelines."
As part of its review of chemicals prioritized for the pipeline, the pipeline itself, and risk managers' needs, "a decision was made to sunset two products. As an alternative, new, more relevant and responsive replacement products were proposed," the document adds. It does not say which assessments were sunsetted.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epas-fy19-budget-continues-iris-review-slashes-assessment-funds
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Glyphosate Cancer Warnings Temporarily Blocked in California
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Carolyn Whetzel
California can't require cancer warning labels on Roundup and other weedkillers with glyphosate until Monsanto Co.'s latest lawsuit against the state is resolved.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California issued a preliminary injunction Feb. 26, blocking the consumer warnings required once the state identifies a chemical as causing cancer.
California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment added the chemical to the list of carcinogens it maintains under Proposition 65—the state's landmark right-to-know law—in July. That listing triggers the law's warning requirements if businesses expose the public to unsafe levels of a chemical.
After failing to block the listing in state courts, Monsanto, farming groups that use the herbicides, and others turned to the federal court.
The lawsuit alleges the Proposition 65 listing and warning requirements violate their First Amendment rights. The plaintiffs said the listing and warning labels would require them to make false and misleading statements that glyphosate causes cancer.
“Glyphosate is a vital tool that growers have trusted to provide safe, affordable food,” Chandler Goule, chief executive officer for the National Association of Wheat Growers, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a Feb. 27 statement.
District Court Judge William Shubb found that while plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the First Amendment claim as to the listing, they could prevail on the warnings claim. There is “evidence in the record that glyphosate is not in fact known to cause cancer,” so “the required warning is factually inaccurate and controversial,” he said.
“We are pleased that the listing of glyphosate remains in effect, and we believe our actions were lawful,” Sam Delson, a spokesman for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, told Bloomberg Environment Feb. 27.
The office's listing decision is based on the International Agency for Research on Cancer's determination that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.
In their complaint, plaintiffs said California has not conducted a reasonable scientific review of glyphosate and that dozens of studies by global regulatory and scientific agencies have found the chemical is safe to use.
The case is N.A. of Wheat Growers v. Zeise, E.D. Cal., No. 17-2401, 2/26/18.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=128866189&vname=dennotallissues&fn=128866189&jd=128866189
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2018 REACH Dossier Submissions Higher Than Expected – Echa
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
With three months to go before the final REACH registration deadline on 31 May, Echa says its has received a total of 16,175 dossiers – 17% more than it had anticipated by this time.
Companies have submitted dossiers for 6,875 substances – 4,508 of which have been registered for the first time, the agency has said.
The number of companies submitting new registrations has reached 2,966, and SMEs have submitted 17% of all registrations, it added.
The agency had estimated that by the 2018 deadline up to 60,000 registrations would be prepared for up to 25,000 substances – three times more than for either of the previous deadlines in 2010 and 2013.
But earlier this month, Echa officials told industry not to be alarmed about a putative shortfall in new substances, as the numbers were from a research activity conducted about 15 years ago.
By the end of January, the agency had received dossiers for 6,500 substances, 4,200 of which were registered for the first time.
https://chemicalwatch.com/64417/2018-reach-dossier-submissions-higher-than-expected-echa
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‘No Sense’ Abandoning ECHA, EU Agencies – UK Opposition Leader
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Luke Buxton
In a major speech on future relations with the EU, UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has backed continued British membership of European agencies such as Echa and Efsa, and urged a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union.
The remarks by the Labour party leader mark his first substantive address on Brexit since the UK referendum.
Speaking on Monday Mr Corbyn said it makes "no sense" for the UK to abandon EU agencies and tariff-free trading rules "that have served us well" in supporting industrial sectors, protecting workers and consumers, and safeguarding the environment.
"If that means negotiating to support individual EU agencies, rather than paying more to duplicate those agencies here then that should be an option, not something ruled out," he said.
Singling out Echa, he added that the agency carries out the "vital task" of evaluating and authorising chemicals as safe for use, and that the European Food Safety Authority "plays a vital role" in monitoring substances used in manufacturing or growing food.
For 45 years, the UK economy has become "increasingly linked" with the EU, he said. Many national regulations are set and monitored by joint European authorities. And many businesses have supply chains and production processes "interwoven throughout Europe".
New customs union
Mr Corbyn is known to be ambivalent about the EU. His speech comes after growing pressure within the parliamentary Labour Party, which has a clear majority of MPs wishing to remain as close to the internal European market as possible.
However, senior government ministers endorse leaving the customs union and, at a meeting last week, set out a 'three baskets' approach, comprising areas where the government:
· will adopt EU rules;
· will adopt EU goals, but achieve them through its own rules; and
· wants to be free to set its own rules.
The government is said to have suggested several industry sectors for the first basket, including chemicals.
The Labour party, Mr Corbyn said, would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to make sure that there are no tariffs with Europe. But he added that this would need to ensure the UK has a say in future trade deals – something the European Commission and member states are likely to reject.
Such an agreement, he said, should come with "no new impediments to trade and no reduction in rights, standards and protections".
Labour would negotiate "a new and strong relationship with the single market that includes full tariff-free access and a floor under existing rights, standards and protections", Mr Corbyn said.
The government’s leaked impact assessments show that deals with the US or China are not likely to compensate for a "significant loss" of trade with trading neighbours in the EU. They would also, he argued, compromise existing human and environmental protections.
"Both the US and China have weaker standards and regulations that would risk dragging Britain into a race to the bottom on vital protections," Mr Corbyn said.
UK chemicals industry position
Throughout the country’s Brexit negotiations, the chemicals industry has advocated regulatory and trade continuity.
In a 2017 position paper, the UK Chemical Business Association said it wants Brexit negotiations to ensurethe UK's continued membership of the single market and customs union, or some arrangement that delivers the same benefits.
A joint statement in November from Cefic and the UK Chemical Industries Association (CIA) said new and divergent customs procedures and requirements will add administrative "burden and costs" for companies.
UK prime minister Theresa May is expected to outline plans for the UK’s future relationship with the EU in a speech on 2 March.
https://chemicalwatch.com/64418/no-sense-abandoning-echa-eu-agencies-uk-opposition-leader
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WHO Cancer Agency “Left out Key Findings” in Benzene Review
Feb 28, 2018 | Reuters
By Kate Kelland
In the spring of 2015, chemical engineer Melvyn Kopstein wrote to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to alert it to what he thought were serious flaws in its work. Kopstein believed the agency, a semi-autonomous part of the World Health Organization, had made errors in reviewing benzene. The agency had underplayed human exposure to the carcinogenic chemical, he believed, and it needed to correct matters.
Three years on, he’s still trying to get IARC to address his concerns. In emails seen by Reuters, the agency agreed with Kopstein that its review of benzene had limitations; but an email from one of its senior scientists also said: “We do not plan to amend (it) or take any further action.”
Kopstein, from Maryland in the United States, has decades of experience in analysing evidence on chemicals. He says he was taken aback. “It was totally unexpected,” he said in an interview. “After all, they – IARC – are supposed to be the go-to source around the world of unbiased scientific information on the carcinogenicity of products and chemicals.”
It’s a tale that sheds new light on how the cancer agency operates, and comes at a time when it is facing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers over its methods and transparency.
Reuters revealed last year how IARC, in reviewing the weedkiller glyphosate, excluded some data and findings that the chemical was not linked to cancer in people: In other words, how the agency may have overplayed evidence of carcinogenicity. In the case of benzene, Kopstein claims IARC did not consider important evidence that exposure to the chemical is higher than IARC suggests: In other words, he argues, the agency may have underplayed potential cancer risks.
The disclosures are significant because they give rare insight into IARC’s methods. The agency does not publish details of how it makes its assessments and forbids observers invited to its meetings from talking publicly about the proceedings.
The Kopstein dispute centres on a report - Monograph 100F - in which IARC classified benzene as able to cause cancer in humans, but said people’s potential exposure to it at work had generally been below recommended daily limits since the 1980s. In Kopstein’s view, the agency failed to properly evaluate the evidence on human exposure to benzene.
Millions of workers around the world – from car mechanics to cabinet makers to shoemakers, print workers and painters – use benzene-containing products such as adhesives, solvents and cleaning agents, sometimes in poorly-ventilated factories or workshops. In the United States, some workers are pursuing personal injury lawsuits claiming serious harm from benzene.
Kopstein has acted as an expert witness for plaintiffs who believe exposure to benzene in products at work made them ill. He says peer-reviewed scientific evidence shows that occupational exposure to benzene can be significantly higher than IARC’s assessment suggests. When he became aware in 2015 of the detail of IARC’s benzene assessment, he wrote to the agency.
In emails spanning several months, reviewed by Reuters, a senior IARC staffer and a scientist involved in IARC’s assessment of benzene told Kopstein that the agency’s evaluation of the chemical did indeed have limitations. Kurt Straif, the head of the IARC “Monograph” unit that assesses the carcinogenicity of substances, said the exposure section of the benzene study was “condensed” due to cost and time constraints, and was not intended to be “exhaustive.”
Martyn Smith, a member of the IARC working group that reviewed benzene and other substances, told Kopstein in an email the review had “tried to cover too much ... so I’m not surprised it has left out key findings or focused on the wrong studies.” Smith did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
IARC's monographs – scientific reviews that classify human carcinogenic hazards – are cited by governments, courts and regulators worldwide as the reference “bible” of what causes, probably causes, and possibly causes cancer in people. Yet here were IARC insiders telling Kopstein that one of its own reviews was not comprehensive.
Kopstein regards such limitations as a serious flaw because, he says, government regulators, public health officials and others need “balanced and accurate” information from IARC.
Reuters sent questions to IARC’s Straif this month and the agency replied on his behalf. In response to whether its assessment of benzene had shortcomings, IARC said it did not. “In general, the exposure section of the IARC monographs does not contribute to the overall evaluation of the agent,” the agency said in an emailed response to Reuters. “Therefore, the section on exposure is not intended to exhaustively review the existing literature, but to describe human exposure situations that are pertinent to the evaluation.” (In other words, IARC’s classification of a substance depends on animal and human studies of its ability to cause cancer, not on how much people are exposed to it.)
What troubled Kopstein most, he said, was IARC’s reluctance to take action, even though the agency knew its statements on benzene exposure were being cited in litigation in the United States, and even though Kopstein was not the only scientist to have raised concerns about them. Another expert in the field had already published a commentary also saying the assessment was flawed because it was based on an incomplete review of the scientific evidence.
In a “note to reader” in its report covering benzene, IARC, which is based in Lyon, France, says that “every effort” is made to ensure its monographs are conducted as accurately as possible but that “mistakes may occur.” It asks any readers who find errors to communicate them to staff at its monograph section, “so that corrections can be reported in future volumes.”
Yet in an email on April 28, 2015, Straif told Kopstein there was no plan to amend the IARC monograph that evaluated benzene.
Dissatisfied, Kopstein decided to make his exchanges with the cancer agency public. He told Reuters: "IARC is foolishly burying its head in the sand, assuming this is going to go away. But I'm a very obstinate person. I'm going to see this through."
EXPOSED
Despite its global influence, IARC is a relatively small organization with a budget of 43 million euros ($53 million) a year. The agency is funded by around 24 IARC member states, and since 1985 has received more than $48 million from American taxpayers via grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Some $22 million of the NIH funding has gone to IARC’s monograph program.
Since 1971, IARC has looked at more than 1,000 substances and has designated many as unclassifiable in terms of cancer-causing potential. It has classified around 500 as either carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, or possibly carcinogenic to humans. Only one substance – an ingredient in nylon called caprolactam – has been classified by IARC as probably not causing cancer.
Some of the agency’s assessments – particularly recent ones on red and processed meats, coffee, the weedkiller glyphosate and mobile phones – have sparked global controversy and fuelled investigations into IARC by U.S. congressional committees. Last year’s Reuters reports on IARC’s glyphosate assessment also provoked strong reactions, from both activists opposed to genetically-modified crops and business-friendly Republicans in the United States. The passions reflect the influence of IARC’s monographs, and how interest groups across the political spectrum seek to exploit them to their own advantage.
“INCOMPLETE REVIEW”
The agency’s monograph reviews also regularly play a part in so-called “toxic tort” litigation cases in the United States – personal injury lawsuits in which plaintiffs claim that exposure to a chemical or substance caused them injury or disease.
One report cited in litigation is IARC’s Monograph 100F – the findings of a review conducted in 2009 of 33 chemicals, including benzene, and occupations related to them. The 100F benzene assessment had already attracted criticism from Peter Infante, one of the expert scientists on the IARC working group that had carried out the assessment.
Infante, who has studied benzene for 40 years, was formerly a director at the
U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which sets standards for workplace safety. He was dissatisfied with the way IARC’s assessment had been conducted and with its result. In 2011, he published a detailed critique in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, which said the IARC benzene assessment was the result of an "incomplete review and discussion of the data,” and that some of its conclusions were “contradictory.”He recommended that IARC hold a further monograph meeting dedicated to a full review of benzene on its own. Infante, who also frequently testifies as an expert witness for workers in benzene litigation, declined to comment for this story.
In response to Infante’s 2011 critique, Straif, the head of IARC’s monograph program, sent a joint letter with two other senior IARC staff to the journal. It said that the 2009 IARC meeting had suffered from restraints on time and resources, but that the discussions on benzene had been “the most extensive discussions at the meeting” and that IARC had “great confidence” in the ability of its expert panels “to reach sound evaluations.”
In answer to questions from Reuters this month, IARC said its 2011 letter had responded to Infante’s concerns. That letter, published as a commentary in the same journal as Infante’s critique, also said IARC was planning to schedule a benzene-only review to examine the chemical in more depth. Yet several years later, nothing had changed – as Kopstein discovered while working on litigation involving benzene.
In late 2014 and early 2015, he was an expert witness in two cases where people who had worked with benzene were claiming their exposure to it had caused them to become sick. In one case, plaintiffs were suing their employer for compensation, and in the other, they were suing product manufacturers. Kopstein was an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Experts for the defendants cited IARC’s 100F benzene review, conducted in 2009, whose full findings had been published in 2012.
IARC told Reuters it had no control over how its assessments are used in litigation.
In the 100F review, IARC had classified benzene in its highest rank of human carcinogens – Group 1 – mainly due to evidence that it can cause leukemia. But digging into its detail on potentially hazardous exposure, Kopstein found the IARC assessment relied heavily on a few studies which, he says, suggested the majority of occupational exposure levels were generally low. The studies did this, he says, because they limited their examination to products, such as honing oil used in grinding metal, which contained only small amounts of benzene and were not commonly used. So, while IARC was correctly gauging the danger of benzene itself, he concluded, the agency was giving unrealistically low estimates of how much of the carcinogen workers are exposed to in everyday jobs.
Like Infante before him, Kopstein struggled to understand why IARC had given little regard to wider scientific evidence on benzene exposure.
He also wondered why nothing appeared to have changed despite Infante’s concerns and IARC’s response to them. There had been no benzene-only review conducted; IARC’s 2009 assessment remained unaltered; IARC staff had not sought to alert readers of Monograph 100F to its potential limitations; and the monograph was being cited in litigation by companies seeking to show that workers suing them had not been unreasonably exposed to benzene.
Kopstein took the matter up with Straif, the head of IARC's monograph section, first writing to him on March 18, 2015. Getting no response, Kopstein followed up with a series of further emails – to Straif; to IARC’s director, Chris Wild; and to some of the agency’s U.S. funders.
He says he received little substantive response. “It was clear to me that they didn’t take me seriously,” Kopstein said.
IARC told Reuters it had “responded to all of the scientific issues Dr Kopstein raised.” Kopstein disputes that claim.
Kopstein also sought the attention of Martyn Smith, another experienced expert witness in U.S. litigation cases who has also served on IARC working groups. Smith promised to discuss Kopstein’s concerns with Straif and get back to him.
In an email to Kopstein on May 15, 2015, Smith said Monograph 100F had “tried to cover too much (too many chemicals)” and “was hurriedly put together.” The task on benzene alone was substantial: There were at least 20 years of new scientific literature to review since the last time IARC had assessed evidence on the chemical in 1987.
“So I’m not surprised it has left out key findings or focused on the wrong studies,” Smith wrote in his email to Kopstein. “The problem now is how to correct it given all the other things IARC is doing with very limited resources."
Smith did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Straif, too, eventually replied to Kopstein. In a June 2015 email he said the exposure section of the benzene monograph had been “condensed” to “contain cost,” and that the review of the scientific literature on exposure was not “exhaustive.” Straif assured Kopstein: “Your recent correspondence and suggested literature sources will certainly be considered if the carcinogenicity of benzene is re-evaluated in the future.”
Nothing happened in time for the two legal cases involving Kopstein and people claiming they had been harmed by benzene exposure. The cases were settled out of court with undisclosed agreements.
AT ODDS
An opportunity to address the limitations of Monograph 100F came in October last year when IARC fulfilled its 2011 promise to Infante by holding a benzene-only review. For a week, 27 scientists selected by Straif and other IARC staff met at the agency’s headquarters in Lyon.
Kopstein had written a critique of the Monograph 100F benzene review, which he had published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal New Solutions. Knowing the meeting was coming up, he sent the critique in an email on Sept. 16, 2017, to the scientists due to be on the IARC panel the following month. He wanted them to be able to read about his concerns and take them into account. On Sept. 18, he also sent the critique to Straif and IARC director Chris Wild.
Asked by Reuters whether the working group for this new benzene review – known as Monograph 120 – had considered Kopstein’s views, IARC indicated that it didn’t. It said Kopstein’s article was a commentary, not a study. “The Working Group of the Vol. 120 Monographs meeting considered all scientific articles eligible,” IARC said. “This includes original data published in scientific journals, but not commentaries and letters to the editor as these are viewpoints.” Kopstein said this was contrary to what Straif told him in the 2015 email which promised his correspondence and suggested literature sources would “certainly be considered.”
A summary of the October 2017 meeting’s conclusions, published online in the Lancet Oncology journal on Oct. 26, said benzene would remain classified by IARC as a Group 1 human carcinogen, mainly due to evidence that it causes leukemia. On exposure – the section criticised by Kopstein for lacking rigor and detail – the IARC summary had only brief, unreferenced statements. It said the working group experts had “noted” that benzene exposures in indoor and outdoor settings had generally declined.
According to Kopstein, the statements are “totally at odds” with the published evidence he has pointed out to IARC and cited in his correspondence with IARC staff. “It showed me that IARC was not interested in arriving at the facts and communicating the facts to governments around the world,” he told Reuters.
Infante, the benzene expert and former Occupational Safety and Health Administration director who criticised IARC’s 2009 benzene review, has continued to work with IARC and supports the agency’s monograph program.
He was asked to attend the October 2017 meeting as an “observer” and, IARC said, was allowed to speak at it but not to vote on the review’s conclusions. IARC forbids observers from recording events or talking publicly about what goes on at its meetings. IARC says this is intended to “provide an atmosphere conducive to free and frank discussion.”
In several emails to Infante, Reuters asked whether he was satisfied with the outcome of the 2017 benzene review, and in particular with the section on exposure, which says “benzene concentrations have declined over time” and that occupational exposures are less than 1 part per million. Infante declined to answer.
IARC told Reuters it and its working group members “stand fully behind the scientific integrity of the process and the evaluations” of the 2017 benzene review.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc-benzene/
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EU Publishes Sodium Dichromate Authorisation Decision
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The European Commission has published its decision to authorise the use of sodium dichromate as a corrosion inhibitor, following an application by Total Raffinerie Mitteldeutschland. The recommended review period expires on 21 September 2029.
It was made on the basis that the socioeconomic benefits of its use outweigh the risk to human health and there are no suitable alternative substances or technologies for the applicant before the sunset date.
Earlier this month, the Commission authorised applications for three uses of the substance. And at the REACH Committee meeting from 19-20 February, member states backed applications for several uses of chromates.
https://chemicalwatch.com/64413/eu-publishes-sodium-dichromate-authorisation-decision
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For Many Republicans, Trump’s Offshore Drilling Plan and Beaches Don’t Mix
Feb 28, 2018 | Washington Post
By Darryl Fears
After waiting in the morning chill for other lawmakers to speak, state Rep. Nancy Mace finally took the microphone. She was the General Assembly’s newest member, only four weeks on the job, “a baby among these folks,” she told the crowd.
She was also a proud Republican in this very red state, the first woman to graduate from The Citadel military college, a former campaign worker for President Trump, a fiscal conservative who championed his tax overhaul — not the kind of politician demonstrators gathered at a rally organized by liberals were accustomed to hearing.
But the words she roared into the mic set off a round of whistling, shouting and fist pumps. Like several GOP legislators who joined Democrats in stirring the crowd, Mace broke sharply with the president over his plan to offer oil and gas companies leases to drill a few miles off beaches that bring $20 billion in annual revenue to South Carolina and support 600,000 tourism jobs.
“Eight to 10 million tourists a year come down to Charleston. They don’t want to come to see oil drilling off the coast,” said Mace, who represents an area that includes the city. The former military cadet laid down a gauntlet: “Ain’t gonna happen. Not on my watch!”
As the Interior Department hosts public “listening sessions” through early March to explain its proposed five-year lease plan — which would open 95 percent of the nation’s outer continental shelf to potential drilling — a growing chorus of bipartisan opposition is finding its voice. At least a half-dozen similar rallies have taken place in other cities where sessions were held, including in New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Oregon and California.
Mace’s defiance is an indication of how deep the opposition goes. Atlantic and Pacific coast governors, congressional delegations and attorneys generaldelivered the first waves of protests. Now state lawmakers, mayors and city councils are mobilizing in an attempt to stop the administration’s plan.
From the front steps of South Carolina’s capitol, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was targeted by Republicans and Democrats alike for exempting Florida from the leasing plan less than a week after it was announced. Zinke said Florida was spared because its geology is different, although he offered no scientific studies to support his claim.
Sen. Chip Campsen (R) was outraged. “If Florida is unique, we’re more unique,” he said a few days after speaking at the mid-February event. “We have the most beautiful and historic coastline on the East Coast.”
Oil and gas representatives say energy development off that coast could provide the state $2.7 billion in annual economic growth, 35,000 jobs and potentially lower costs for residents struggling to pay their heating bills.
But Campsen focused on what they fail to say: Oil and gas drilling could permanently scar the state’s pristine coast. Refineries, chemical plants, sea-to-shore pipelines and storage tanks would be built and placed near and on beaches. Roads would be needed for a parade of diesel trucks to haul material away.
“We have a lot at stake, a lot to protect, a lot in danger,” said Campsen, an avid outdoorsman whose district also overlaps Charleston. “People need to understand that if you are going to have offshore drilling, you have to industrialize a huge portion of your coast.”
Along the Gulf Coast, oil and gas companies control leases on 14 million acres as part of a long history of drilling. And the country relied on the Gulf Coast for its gas reserves after the 1970s Arab oil embargo hobbled the U.S. economy.
The Atlantic coast, by contrast, developed a beach tourism economy. But when Congress decided to lift a 40-year ban on exporting American crude oil in 2015, the industry began searching for oil to put into the world market and increased its demand to drill in the Atlantic.
“We don’t want it. We don’t need unsightly oil rigs and the smelly pipelines sprawled across our beaches and coast,” said Rep. Robert Brown (D), known to butt heads with Republicans who also represent parts of Charleston. “Why allow this dirty industry to devalue our most valuable property?”
The Trump administration’s drilling plan came under fire minutes after it was announced in early January, and the fury only intensified when Zinke traveled to Florida, met with its GOP governor, Rick Scott, and assured him that the Sunshine State would be excluded.
Other governors along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts immediately demanded the same consideration, and their attorneys general sent a letter to Zinke asking him to back off the plan or, some warned, face lawsuits.
Zinke has been accused of favoring oil and gas interests over nearly everything else. Between February and November of last year, top Interior officials had nearly 180 meetings with industry representatives, according to an analysis of the department’s visitor log by the nonprofit organization Friends of the Earth.
“You always know these meetings are happening, but the sheer volume was shocking,” said Nicole Ghio, fossil fuels program manager for the group, which leans to the political left. It undertook the analysis, she said, because opposition to the drilling plan was so immediate, strong and bipartisan on both coasts that Friends of the Earth wondered how the administration put it together.
The secretary’s effort to justify the plan since its rollout is “striking,” according to Ghio. “You look at the immediate exemption of Florida; it looks political,” she said. “There’s no legal rationale. Florida is important, but I say the same about California, my state. “
The meetings at the Interior Department contrast with the listening sessions the department is holding in 23 cities in coastal states, from Boston, Trenton, N.J., and Tallahassee to Olympia, Wash., Salem, Ore., and Sacramento. The sessions are far different from the sometimes boisterous public hearings they replaced: After a video presentation about the drilling plan, anyone in attendance can log comments into a bank of computers.
The powerful emotions at Columbia’s rally fizzled under the new format, which included experts from the department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management quietly answering questions one on one in a hotel meeting room. Only once did the volume rise, when a man with a bullhorn leaped on a chair. “Mic check!” yelled Drew Hudson, a local resident opposed to the drilling. “This process is a sham!”
Renee Orr, chief of the bureau’s Office of Strategic Resources, said the new format is a better way to exchange ideas as opposed to the shouting and booing that often characterizes public hearings. But across the country, participants have disagreed, including a New Jersey protester who described the listening session as “dodging democracy.”
But standing in a hallway outside the session, two of the Interior Department’s supporters talked about the plan’s pluses. Tim Page, executive director of the Consumer Energy Alliance, said drilling off the South Carolina coast could help “keep energy prices low for consumers so they won’t have to choose between heat and groceries,” he said.
Mark Harmon, the director of a state unit of the American Petroleum Institute, stressed a different point. “Ultimately it means the potential for jobs and reinvestment in the community,” he said.
When the state’s newest legislator took her fight against drilling to her Facebook page, Mace heard from one of the oil industry’s powerful backers. And in a comment posted to the page, U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) lit into her.
“I believe that if natural gas were discovered at distances over the visible horizon, in abundant recoverable resources, this conversation would be different,” wrote Duncan, who favors seismic testing to determine how much oil and gas might lie off the state’s coast. “But having a closed mind about offshore activities is shortsighted. Everyone likes their gasoline and natural gas supplying industries like Alcoa and Nucor Steel — as long as it is produced elsewhere.”
Mace replied: “Thank you Congressman Jeff Duncan for offering your thoughts here. However, every municipality along the coast disagrees with you.”
Indeed, South Carolina’s opposition and support for drilling is largely a divide between people who live on the coast and those who don’t. “It’s easy for the upstate to support offshore drilling when it ain’t in your back yard,” Mace added in her reply. “Coastal communities ought to have input on this decision.”
The comment thread on the Facebook page filled with remarks from people who said that she was out of step, that they didn’t know she would take such a stand against a Republican agenda, that they would reconsider their support for her.
Mace shrugged them off. “I worked for President Trump . . . in several states. I support his agenda,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean like a blind sheep I will agree with everything. I represent the Charleston area.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/for-some-south-carolina-republicans-trumps-offshore-drilling-plan-and-beaches-dont-mix/2018/02/27/a953dc98-1359-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?utm_term=.f805f2af81eb
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After Years of Work, Pruitt Plan to Replace CPP Sparks Major New Fissures
Feb 28, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves and Lee Logan
Comments on the Trump EPA's plan to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP) utility greenhouse gas rule reveal fissures -- including among like-minded groups -- on nearly every issue, underscoring that Administrator Scott Pruitt's decision to reconsider the rule puts the agency back at square one despite years of work by the Obama EPA.
Issues drawing significant disagreement include the scope of EPA's authority to set GHG targets, whether federal standards should be “binding” on states as they develop compliance plans, whether to “subcategorize” the industry to set targets and whether facilities can use emission trading to comply.
For example, many industry and other critics of the Obama rule are arguing that any new GHG standard must be limited to steps that can be taken within a facility's fenceline -- a central dispute in the original CPP rulemaking that continues in the Trump administration's effort to reconsider the measure.
“EPA must take care not [to] rely upon measures, as it did in the CPP, that cannot be 'applied' to the affected source itself,” says Feb. 26 comments from the Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG).
The Obama EPA, UARG argues, considered a wide variety of measures that owners and operators of a source “theoretically could take to contribute to collective state-wide and grid-wide emission reduction requirements. Those measures where then used to set nationally applicable emission rates for existing [electric generating units (EGUs)] that no single EGU could actually 'achieve' on its own.”
However, Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents the nation's investor-owned utilities, explicitly does not weigh in on that issue in this proceeding and also notes in its Feb. 26 comments that its “member companies had -- and continue to have -- differing views on both the extent of EPA’s legal authority to adopt the final CPP under [Clean Air Act section] 111(d) and the relative stringency of the goals in the final CPP.”
Environmentalists argue that an “inside-the-fenceline” approach is unlawfully restrictive, but that it would even allow for several GHG-reduction strategies, including some adopted in the CPP. They also warn that a limited approach could be more expensive and achieve fewer GHG cuts.
Overall, they charge that the advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) is unnecessary because it takes the agency back a decade, and instead urge EPA to simply implement the CPP.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in its Feb. 26 comments asks EPA to “abandon its misguided effort to repeal” the CPP, and withdraw the ANPR. “Almost [11] years after the Supreme Court first recognized EPA's authority and responsibility under the [Clean Air Act] to address the urgent threat of climate change, it is long past time for EPA to implement and strengthen the” CPP. The group also calls the ANPR a “protracted and unnecessary process . . . clearly designed to ensure that any 'replacement' for the CPP, if it is completed at all, will deliver limited or no benefits for our climate and public health.”
Despite EPA's proposed repeal of the CPP and its plan to issue a narrower replacement, utility sector GHGs continue to fall. Estimates show the CPP targets are likely to be met even in the absence of the rule, which was designed by the Obama administration to reflect industry trends moving away from coal.
EPA proposed the ANPR Dec. 28 and accepted comments through Feb. 26, rejecting numerous extension requests including several from states run by conservative governors. It is separately accepting comment through April 26 on its repeal proposal.
'Minor' GHG Cuts
While most commenters call for a CPP replacement -- with industry seeking regulatory certainty and environmentalists noting EPA's statutory duty to limit GHGs -- Indiana in its Feb. 16 comments says it “fully supports a repeal of the [CPP] with no replacement. Indiana believes that U.S. EPA overstepped its authority in the promulgation of the [CPP] and that, when legislating the Clean Air Act, Congress never intended for U.S. EPA to regulate” GHGs.
In the comments reviewed by Inside EPA, the overarching split is over whether a replacement rule must be limited to “inside the fence” steps, as well as what measures would qualify as such. For example, some industry groups argue such an approach would be limited to a modest heat rate improvements at coal plants while environmentalists say it could include a range of options extending to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
“EPA cannot lawfully confine its consideration to heat-rate measures that EPA has already determined can only achieve minor emissions reductions (or might, in practice, even increase emissions),” says Feb. 26 commentssigned by more than a dozen national environmental organizations. “EPA must comprehensively analyze every available means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants, including those approaches that fit even the agency's improperly constrained reading of the statute,” such as reducing utilization of high-emitting units, fuel switching and co-firing, and CCS retrofits.
The groups add that any best system of emission reduction (BSER) -- the air act formula for setting targets -- “that does not achieve the maximum feasible emissions reductions will be legally and factually unsupportable.”
The ANPR also floated the notion that a CPP replacement might not be “binding” on states, allowing them to set plant-specific standards that are weaker than the federal limit based on a range of factors including the remaining useful life of plants.
Several power sector groups embrace this notion, with UARG arguing that EPA must recognize that states retain the standard-setting authority, while EPA is limited to issuing “guidelines” rather than explicit limits.
However, a coalition of states and cities supporting the CPP, led by New York, say in Feb. 26 comments that the air law requires EPA to set a meaningful GHG limit that must be achieved by the rule, and says states have the flexibility to choose the manner of compliance -- not the stringency.
“EPA is wrong in asserting that it has 'discretion' to 'choose[]' whether to make federal emission guidelines applicable to power plant [GHGs] binding on the states,” the coalition says, citing the Supreme Court's 2011 ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut that held EPA is the “expert agency . . . best suited to serve as primary regulator” of GHGs.
Another emerging split is over whether EPA should subcategorize power plants when setting BSER. The Obama rule broadly created standards for coal- and natural gas-fired power plants.
But UARG says existing power plants are “exceptionally diverse, making subcategorization difficult.” The range of capacity, annual emissions and emission rates for coal-fired units alone are “highly diverse” and driven by multiple factors “rather than any one overriding consideration. . . . UARG was unable to identify a way to further subcategorize coal-fired EGUs and natural gas combined cycle units into groups of units for purposes of determining a BSER.”
But the state of Arkansas concludes the opposite in its Feb. 26 comments, arguing that any CPP replacement “should rely on a subcategory-specific BSER. Coal-fired steam turbines, natural-gas-fired combined cycle systems, and natural gas combustion turbines are designed differently, may have some differences in feasible retrofit control systems, and have different emission profiles based on the design and fuel. Therefore, any Potential Replacement should determine a subcategory-specific BSER for each of those three types of EGUs.”
GHG Trading
Several power sector groups are also pushing EPA to including GHG trading as a flexible compliance option. “To the extent states would like to trade or demonstrate compliance across borders, EPA should allow them to develop such trading or multi-state programs as part of their compliance plans,” EEI says. “Broad trading markets can facilitate least cost compliance.”
Similarly, UARG says that “there is nothing in section 111(d) that could prohibit states from including flexible options in their plans to meet that standard.”
It notes that the Bush-era Clean Air Mercury Rule -- which was vacated on unrelated grounds -- set pollution standards based on specific control technology but then “established a trading program as an implementation tool to assist sources in meeting their performance standards.”
However, a coalition of labor unions known as Unions for Jobs & Environmental Progress (UJEP) argues that “the use of emission trading in this rule should be extremely limited” to preclude trading between power plants because such an approach “appears to be inconsistent with prior agency rulemaking under section 111(d).”
And environmentalists are also questioning the legality of allowing trading for compliance if GHG standards are narrowly set based on efficiency improvements but exclude broader power sector shifts toward cleaner generation.
For example, EDF charges that it “would be logically inconsistent and arbitrary for EPA to recognize that such mechanisms are available for compliance while, at the same time, determining that they cannot be considered in determining the 'best system' and establishing emission guidelines.”
EDF says that if a facility “can lawfully meet a 'standard of performance' by obtaining credits representing reduced emissions from other affected sources, there is no logical reason why such transactions -- and the emission-reducing activities that those transactions represent -- should not be considered as a potential 'system of emission reduction' when crafting the emission guideline.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/after-years-work-pruitt-plan-replace-cpp-sparks-major-new-fissures
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Texas Energy Advocates Eager to Build on 2017 Gas Export Growth
Feb 28, 2018 | Platts
By Harry Weber and Ross Wyeno
Texas energy boosters urged the Trump administration Tuesday to strengthen, rather than diminish, the North American Free Trade Agreement to protect the flow of natural gas exports from the US to Mexico as output is surging because of billions of dollars of investment in the Permian Basin and midstream infrastructure.
Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association, made the comments as the group released its annual analysis of the impact of the state's energy industry on the market and the economy.
The report comes at a time when producers and pipeline operators are eager to build on the two countries' relationship, which ultimately benefits Texas when production increases.
About $11 billion in taxes and royalties was paid to the state in fiscal 2017, compared with $9.4 billion the previous year, Staples said.That growth could be jeopardized depending on the outcome of talks over renegotiating NAFTA.
"We think NAFTA should be a permanent document," Staples told reporters during a conference call. "A sunset provision doesn't do any good for those that are making the kinds of investments that are required."
Total exports of gas, including to Mexico, are expected to account for 55% of all new US gas demand over the next five years, S&P Global Platts Analytics data showed.
As Mexico retools its power generating fleet to rely more heavily on gas and draws on US supplies to fill in for falling domestic production,
Platts Analytics expects that total US exports to Mexico will rise to 6.9 Bcf/d by 2023, a 2.7 Bcf/d build over 2017.
US LNG exports overall are expected to reach 10.5 Bcf/d by 2023, an 8.3 Bcf/d increase over 2017 levels. By comparison, domestic gas demand is expected to rise 8.7 Bcf/d above 2017 levels to 81.2 Bcf/d by 2023.
Because of its production fields and expansive Gulf Coast infrastructure, Texas is a major component of those growth forecasts.
"Policy that encourages growth of the entire oil and gas sector is key to the whole story," Staples said. "We have a lot at stake as we continue to provide energy resources to our neighbors."
In recent months, other industry groups and some pipeline operators have weighed in. Sempra Energy, which is developing pipelines in Mexico through its IEnova subsidiary, said in December it was concerned about proposals to reduce investment protections, limit the ability to use international arbitration procedures, and talk of a sunset clause to allow NAFTA to be terminated after five years.
Such proposals could cause some companies to cut back on long-term production and infrastructure plans.
Staples said that's the last thing Texas energy interests need, especially as the progress of new gas pipeline construction on the Mexico side of the border is already lagging that on the US side.
"Aligning these ... is a growing pains process, but it is one that is essential to the economic prosperity of Texas and our relationships with Mexico," Staples said.https://www.platts.com/latest-news/natural-gas/houston/texas-energy-advocates-eager-to-build-on-2017-21427552
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Oklahoma Toughens Oil Fracking Rules After Shale Earthquakes
Feb 28, 2018 | Bloomberg
By David Wethe
Oklahoma is tightening its rules for fracking after studying a new cluster of earthquakes in one of the hottest U.S. regions for drilling.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission announced that all explorers within certain areas must use equipment known as a seismic array, which detects movement underground. The regulators also lowered the quake threshold for pausing work from 3.0 magnitude to 2.5, a level where humans can feel the earth move. The mandated delay is for at least six hours.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, loosens hydrocarbons from shale by blasting water, sand and chemicals underground. Since December 2016, Oklahoma officials have counted 74 earthquakes of at least 2.5 magnitude that may be linked directly to fracking, said Matt Skinner, a commission spokesman, in an email last month.
"While more study needs to be done, the indications are that those operators who have their own seismic arrays and took actions when there were seismic events too small to be felt decreased the risk of having multiple, stronger earthquakes,” said Tim Baker, director of the commission’s oil and gas conservation unit, in a statement Tuesday.
The new rules are designed to slow quakes in the so-called SCOOP and STACK shale plays, where wastewater disposal, long thought to be the main culprit for larger, more prevalent tremors in the northern half of the state, isn’t as much of an issue. That opens up the idea that fracking itself may be to blame.
For Oklahoma, it’s a cautious move forward, limiting though not hamstringing an oil industry that has tripled its output in the past decade to 497,000 barrels a day and created thousands of jobs in the state.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-27/oklahoma-toughens-oil-fracking-rules-as-shale-earthquakes-climb
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Chemours Told to Cut Fluorocarbon Air Pollution from North Carolina Plant
Feb 28, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Cheryl Hogue
Chemours is facing costly demands from North Carolina regulators to curb atmospheric releases of fluorinated chemicals from the company’s factory outside of Fayetteville. Chemours is installing emission controls to reduce its releases of hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA) and other poly- and perfluorinated compounds to air, the state says.
HFPO-DA and other fluorochemicals, collectively called GenX by North Carolina regulators, have tainted groundwater near the Chemours plant and public drinking waterdrawn from the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, N.C., 110 km downstream of the facility. While information about the toxicity of these substances is incomplete, a growing body of research suggests that they are more toxic than a previous generation of hazardous and widespread industrial fluorochemical pollutants that includes perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA).
To protect drinking water drawn from the river and delivered to hundreds of thousands of people, North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) in November revoked the permit that allowed the plant to discharge wastewater into the river from its fluorochemicals production unit. Chemours now hauls all wastewater from this part of the facility to Texas for disposal in a deep injection well.
DEQ announced in late February that it found GenX in rainwater collected at 10 sites within 4.7 km of the plant. “These findings lend weight to our belief that airborne GenX contributes to contamination of private wells and lakes near Chemours’ facility,” Michael S. Regan, secretary of DEQ, says.
“This observation isn’t overly surprising to me,” says Cora J. Young, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto who studies the atmospheric chemistry and transport of fluorinated compounds. “For over a decade, we have had evidence of atmospheric emissions of other poly- and perfluorinated substances around fluorochemical manufacturing facilities.” Additionally, DuPont researchers in 2007 published a study of how airborne PFOA is transferred from the atmosphere to the ground by rain (J. Environ. Monit.DOI: 10.1039/b703510a).
The ammonium salt of HFPO-DA is a commercial product, officially called GenX, which DuPont introduced as a “sustainable replacement” for PFOA in 2010. DuPont then spun off its fluorochemicals business into a separate company, Chemours, in 2015. Like PFOA, GenX is a surfactant used to aid in polymerization of fluoropolymers. PFOA was phased out because of concerns about its toxicity and persistence in the environment.
DEQ says it is directing Chemours to install, on a trial basis, carbon adsorption technologyat stacks at its vinyl ethers unit and polymer processing agent facilities. The state chose carbon adsorption because these systems are relatively easy to obtain, says Jill Warren Lucas, a DEQ spokesperson. Engineering estimates indicate that the equipment will cut emissions of the fluorinated compounds by 90%, DEQ says.
The technology is not designed to control process emissions—it is intended to scrub fluorinated chemicals from indoor air at the factory, the agency says. Young of York University says activated carbon has been used to effectively remove poly- and perfluorinated substances from air samples.
North Carolina will evaluate performance of the trial system before determining what final emission control strategy it will require Chemours to use at the Fayetteville plant, DEQ’s Lucas says, noting that other technology is also under consideration.
Chemours provided to the state data showing that the plant emits about 30 different fluorochemicals into the air, including HFPO-DA and HFPO-DA fluoride, says Detlef Knappe, a North Carolina State University engineering professor. He is concerned about which of these compounds will be used to determine the performance of the emission control system and what level of release to the atmosphere will be considered an acceptable level.
In addition to requiring air pollution controls, DEQ has ordered Chemours to excavate or otherwise remediate polluted ditches at the plant so they no longer are sources of fluorochemicals into the Cape Fear River through runoff or into groundwater through infiltration of rainwater.
Chemours did not respond to requests for comment for this article. It and DuPont face class action lawsuits from people claiming they are or could get ill from drinking water tainted with the fluorochemicals.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i10/Chemours-told-to-cut-fluorocarbon-air-pollution-from-North-Carolina-plant.html
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Lawmakers at Loggerheads over Trump Plan
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Sam Mintz
A House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing yesterday served as a battleground as Democrats and Republicans sparred over President Trump's infrastructure plan, but at least one member appeared open to crossing over enemy lines for compromise.
The president's $200 billion proposal suggests sweeping changes to the National Environmental Policy Act and other permitting rules, including for energy projects, and aims to leverage private investment (Greenwire, Feb. 12).
The general line from Republicans is that it's a strong starting point, while many Democrats say the White House framework is not well thought out and won't be effective.
Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said that while there are difficult details to work out, he thinks there is "support for a broad infrastructure bill."
"We're thinking outside the box to see where we can make the most progress with limited federal funds. We're focused on fixing the regulatory environment, encouraging public-private partnerships and strengthening our workforce," Walden said.
But his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, called the plan a "bait-and-switch" that does not offer any new funding and won't boost the economy.
"Calling the Trump plan worthless isn't partisan, it's the reality," Pallone said.
Another Democratic member of the panel seemed to strike a tone of compromise on the permitting provisions, which most liberals have panned.
"We hear all the time from businesses and investors that the regulatory system can cause uncertainty and a lengthy delay can cause projects not to get built or be more expensive or result in investors not wanting to take risks," said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), who has been a strong supporter of hydropower in particular.
"I don't think we do ourselves any favors on this side of the aisle by not thinking about what we can do" to fix that problem, he said.
Representatives from several energy sectors, including electricity and hydropower, pitched the committee on supporting their industries during the process.
"To support and protect the 21st-century economy, we need a stronger, more regionally integrated transmission grid," said Brian Slocum, vice president for operations at ITC Holdings Corp., the largest independent transmission company in the country.
"Investing in this grid now will help protect the resilience of our electric system and economy, and allow us to take advantage of resource diversity across the nation," he said, "all while keeping electricity prices low for consumers and businesses."
Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton said that he hopes the infrastructure plan focuses on letting the private sector take the lead.
"I think you could argue that if you look at public-sector infrastructure like highways and bridges ... compared to private-sector infrastructure like pipelines, refineries, transmission lines, the private sector is doing a better job," Barton said.
"I think it's important to look at permitting reforms and things like that, but if it's not broke, don't fix it."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/28/stories/1060074943
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Moderate Dems Huddle with White House as Outlook Dims
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Moderate Democrats want the White House to know they're interested in working on infrastructure, even as the congressional outlook dims for President Trump's plan.
Members of the New Democrat Coalition yesterday huddled over lunch with D.J. Gribbin, a special assistant to the president who has been serving as the Trump administration's point person on infrastructure.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the group's chairman, said the group wanted to let the administration know it is open to negotiation, even if infrastructure looks more and more unlikely to get finished this year as the days tick by consumed by other issues.
The task looks especially difficult with the midterm elections tempting Democrats to reject every piece of Trump's agenda. But Himes said he wants to go out on a political limb.
"All of us are conscious of the fact that we're getting into primary season, and next thing you know we'll be looking at November," he said. "But the reason we wanted to have this meeting was to tell the White House that we're willing to take some political risks around an issue that is pretty essential to the country."
The White House has proposed spending $200 billion in federal money to leverage $1.5 trillion in total investment, an eye-popping number that many in both parties on Capitol Hill see as unrealistic
.Is a gas tax hike on the horizon?
The administration hasn't said much about how it would pay for the federal piece. Himes said the New Democrats laid out some of their ideas at the meeting with Gribbin, including a potential hike for the federal gasoline tax and user fees on electric vehicles.
At least one member of Democratic leadership, too, has endorsed the idea of increasing the gas tax. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said yesterday that he wants a hike, taking the opportunity to pan Republicans for passing a tax cut bill without a plan to pay for infrastructure.
"It's very nice to say you're for infrastructure or you're for this, that or the other, but if you're unwilling to provide revenue sources to accomplish that objective, it's somewhat of an empty promise," Hoyer told reporters.
It would be difficult to get Republicans to go along with a gas tax hike, even if House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) and Trump have both endorsed the idea.
And both Himes and Hoyer acknowledged that the gas tax — which hasn't been increased since 1993 — has its drawbacks.
"We're also going to be living in a world of electric cars," Himes said. "So it's an idea that is not just politically hard to get excited about, it's actually substantively hard to get excited about."
But, he added, "Republicans have been more traditionally accepting of user fees as opposed to taxes."
He's hoping to get a chance to make that pitch to Shuster. The group is looking to invite him to a similar lunch meeting in the coming weeks.
The group will also likely want to talk to Shuster about permitting, which will be a key area of compromise if Congress churns out an infrastructure bill this year. Among other things, the White House has proposed putting a two-year shot clock on reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act and making changes to the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
"We're very open-minded about ways to streamline regulation," Himes said. "Now, that doesn't mean we're going to sign onto Republican ideas of short-circuiting environmental reviews."
Next steps?
The immediate next steps are clear, but some in Congress — like Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and John Thune (R-S.D.), both members of leadership — are growing skeptical that anything will pass this year.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said yesterday that lawmakers wouldn't draw up any new legislative language. Rather, they plan to pull from bills that have already passed through various committees with jurisdiction over infrastructure.
"We've been working on it from day one," Walden said.
On the Senate side, the Environment and Public Works Committee will hear from Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on the infrastructure plan today.
EPW Committee ranking member Tom Carper (D-Del.) said he wants to focus on the permitting reform element of Trump's plan and ask Chao why her agency hasn't done more to implement the environmental streamlining provisions from the last two big infrastructure bills, the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act of 2015 and the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act of 2012.
As for congressional grumblings that there won't be time to finish an infrastructure bill this year, Carper said he's holding out hope.
"This administration has talked so much about infrastructure, transportation, broadband deployment, water," Carper said. "If we can't figure out a path forward on this, shame on the president, shame on the administration, shame on the Congress."
Reporters Geof Koss and George Cahlink contributed.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/28/stories/1060074969
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Two-Thirds of U.S. Commuter Railroads May Not Meet Crash Technology Deadline: Report
Feb 28, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By David Shepardson
As many as two-thirds of the 29 U.S. commuter railroads may not meet a deadline to install an anti-crash technology by the end of the year, according to a report by a government watchdog seen by Reuters.
The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office is expected to be released on Thursday at a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the technology known as positive train control (PTC).
It follows a number of recent train accidents that the National Transportation Safety Board has said could have been prevented with positive train control, including deadly crashes in South Carolina and Washington State.
In 2008, Congress required that PTC be implemented across the country by the end of 2015. It then extended the deadline to the end of 2018. The government can stretch the deadline to 2020 to complete some aspects of the system if railroads have met certain requirements.
The technology automatically stops a train to prevent a derailment or crash but it is in operation on only 45 percent of tracks owned by freight railroads and 24 percent of tracks owned by passenger railways.Continue reading the main story
The GAO report said 13 of the 29 U.S. commuter railroads had told auditors they planned to seek extensions of the 2018 deadline. It also found that 19 of the 29 commuter railroads may not meet the deadline or may not qualify for an extension, partly because of the time needed to conduct adequate testing.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) may grant an extension beyond 2018 for commuter railroads that have not completed testing if they have met other benchmarks. It could impose fines if it does not approve extensions, but the agency told the Government Accountability Office that it "has yet to determine how it will handle railroads that do not meet the deadline or receive an extension."
FRA officials have met since January with all major railroads to discuss PTC. “We're going to keep pushing them,” the agency's acting deputy administrator Juan Reyes told Congress.
American Public Transportation Association chief executive Paul Skoutelas told a recent Congressional hearing that full PTC implementation for commuter railroads "is estimated to be approximately $4 billion," a figure that does not include operating and maintenance costs of $80 million to $130 million annually.
For publicly funded commuter railroads "this number is staggering," he said.
Senate Commerce Committee chairman John Thune told Reuters that the report showed some commuter railroads "are on track to meet requirements." Others that are behind must "recommit their organizations to doing what is necessary to get the job done," he said.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said that a December derailment near Seattle of an Amtrak train in which three people were killed could have been prevented with operating PTC. The NTSB has said that 150 crashes since 1969 that claimed almost 300 lives could have been prevented by PTC.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has vowed to push railroads to meet PTC deadlines.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/02/28/us/28reuters-usa-railways.html
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Interior-EPA Bill Will See Funding Boost
Feb 28, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss and George Cahlink
Agencies funded under the Interior-Environment appropriations bill will see increased spending levels in fiscal 2019 under budget caps guiding the construction of the omnibus spending bill, key senators said yesterday.
Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, declined to discuss that panel's 302(b) allocation setting its spending limit for the year but acknowledged it was "definitely more than last year."
In fiscal 2017, that subcommittee received roughly $32 billion for the agencies under its purview, which include U.S. EPA and the Interior Department.
Subcommittee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) acknowledged the fiscal 2018 allocation represented an increase over the current year but declined to discuss it further.
"I think within the Interior account we're going to try to do right by all the priorities that we have," she told reporters yesterday. "And from my perspective I'm glad that we're just getting to this."
House and Senate appropriators have been waiting months for the allocations, which were informally distributed to subcommittee leaders last week but still await formal approval.
Appropriators are generally reluctant to make details of their spending levels public before panel votes, but Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a senior appropriator, said he expected nearly all the fiscal 2018 bills to receive increases above their current levels as a result of the recent budget deal.
He said the exception could be the legislative branch bill — which funds congressional operations — because lawmakers might not want to be seen as raising their own budgets. Congress has until March 23 to prevent a government shutdown.
While Murkowski said she had received her final allocation, she said it was unclear how an extra $10 billion for infrastructure that was agreed to in principle for fiscal 2018 would fit within that allocation (E&E Daily, Feb. 9).
Some of those funds are intended to be used on wastewater and park upgrades, she noted, with another $10 billion intended to be spent for the same purposes in fiscal 2019.
"Obviously we want to respect the directive of the deal, so that's what we're working for right now," Murkowski said.
Riders in play
Environmentalists, meanwhile, continue to mobilize against the inclusion of policy riders that they say would roll back a variety of environmental protections.
"Republican leaders' insistence on the inappropriate inclusion of anti-environmental or other ideological policy riders will only heighten the risk of yet another continuing resolution or government shutdown," said Alex Taurel, the deputy legislative director for the League of Conservation Voters.
Green groups are betting on Senate Democrats getting many of the riders stripped because they would still have the ability to filibuster the bill.
Defenders of Wildlife has listed 86 riders it's watching in fiscal 2018 spending bills, with the bulk of those proposed in the House and Senate versions of the Interior-EPA bill.
Environmentalists are most concerned about several forest riders proposed by Murkowski, including one related to a management plan for Alaska's Tongass National Forest and another rolling back roadless rule protections. They say the Alaska appropriator's clout could get the language included.
Other riders that the groups are closely eyeing are GOP provisions to exempt the recent repeal of the Clean Water Rule from the Administrative Procedure Act. The possible loosening of endangered species protections for the sage grouse, gray wolves and prairie chickens are a concern, too.
The Clean Budget Coalition, a collection of liberal and progressive groups that include several environmental organizations and labor unions, is also coming out against what it sees as a collection of "dirty" riders.
While Democrats and like-minded advocates have been beating the drum against the riders, Murkowski predicted those fights would be easier to sort out in the current political environment.
"I think it makes it easier for us to be working on the priorities of the majority as well as the administration when there's greater alignment like there is now," she said.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/02/28/stories/1060074967
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Republican Climate Caucus Members Get Low Environmental Marks
Feb 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter
Some House Republicans have bucked their party on climate change—not only acknowledging it's real, but vowing to fight the problem as well. But one environmental group says they still have poor voting records.
Republican members of the bipartisan “Climate Solutions Caucus” scored an average of just 16 percent on a scorecard released Feb. 27 by the League of Conservation Voters that tracks how lawmakers voted on major environmental issues last year.
The caucus—which now counts 35 Republicans in its ranks along with an equal number of Democrats—was formed to great fanfare in 2016 in hopes of breaking through congressional gridlock on climate legislation. But it has drawn criticism as being a vehicle to help politically endangered Republicans burnish their green credentials without having to take hard votes.
“Republicans are using the caucus to provide cover to hide their extreme anti-environmental record,” said Alex Taurel, the league's deputy legislative director. “What we need is action, not just talk.“
Alaska, Streams, Oil Votes
Republican members of the caucus have voted to open Alaska's pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, kill Obama-era rules protecting streams from the effects of coal mining, rescind a federal rule requiring oil companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments, and roll back regulations on the emissions of methane—a potent greenhouse gas, according to the league's analysis.
Others—such as New York Republican Claudia Tenney and Representative Scott Taylor of Virginia—have applauded Trump's decision to leave the Paris climate agreement, while staying silent on his moves to rescind the Clean Power Plan. One of the more recent members to join the caucus, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, introduced legislation last year that would “terminate” the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The members of the caucus on the Republican side are what I call climate peacocks,” said R.L. Miller, the chairwoman of the California Democratic Party's environmental caucus and co-founder of the Climate Hawks Vote super-political action committee. “They like to flash their tail feathers but not actually do anything.“
Out of Their League?
The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a grassroots group that played a role in starting the Climate Solutions Caucus, said the league's environmental scorecard doesn't accurately reflect the caucus's efforts.
“It's a little premature to be saying these Republicans are not doing anything at all,” said Steve Valk, a spokesman for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which has sought to put a fee on carbon emissions from fossil fuel.
Valk says the Republican members of the caucus have achieved small victories, such as voting to defeat an amendment on the House floor that would have killed language requiring the Department of Defense to study the effects of global warming on it's military bases.
“Much is happening behind the scenes, thanks to the caucus, and we think patience will eventually be rewarded with major legislation to address climate change,” said Mark Reynolds, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby's executive director.
Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican Representative who co-founded the Climate Solutions Caucus and has a score of 23 percent, criticized the scorecard through a spokeswoman.
“It's unfortunate that some environmental groups disingenuously and cynically put the interests of the Democratic Party above the cause of a clean planet,” said Curbelo spokeswoman Joanna Rodriguez. “To achieve their partisan objectives, they pollute the political environment with half-truths and misleading scorecards. They are most definitely a major part of the problem.”
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