Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 3/21/2018
-
(ACC Mentioned) New Documents Show Nearly $68,000 in Recent Premium Flights, Hotel Stays for EPA's Pruitt
Mar 20, 2018 | Washington Post
By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin
The Environmental Protection Agency turned over documents to Congress late Tuesday detailing nearly $68,000 in newly disclosed travel costs for Administrator Scott Pruitt during the past seven months. -
(ACC Mentioned) Trump’s Nomination Slowdown Keeps Anti-Environment, Pro-Industry Candidates in Holding Pattern
Mar 20, 2018 | Think Progress
By Mark Hand
Several key environmental and energy positions have yet to be filled 14 months into the presidency of Donald Trump. -
(ACC Mentioned) Chinese Surveillance/Tech Giant Alibaba Joins ALEC, Will Start Co-Authoring US Legislation
Mar 20, 2018 | Boing Boing
By Cory Doctorow
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a big-business think-tank that authors "model legislation" at the local, state and national level that benefits corporations at the expense of everyday people. -
(ACC Mentioned) Closed Loop Extending Its Efforts to Marine Pollution
Mar 20, 2018 | Plastics News
By Jim Johnson
Finding solutions for the collection and recycling of ocean bound plastics will not happen in a vacuum, according to one organization looking to make an impact. -
(ACC Mentioned) Plastics Recycling Markets Driven by Prime Prices and China
Mar 20, 2018 | Resource Recyling
By Colin Staub
Last year presented an upheaval in the global recovered plastics market, and the impacts continue to roll in. Three experts recently shared their thoughts on the specific causes of the volatility. -
Trump EPA Plans New Restrictions on Science Used in Rulemaking
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to restrict the scientific studies it uses to develop and justify regulations, making it harder to rely on research when its underlying data are shielded from view. -
Amidst Uncertainty, EPA Expects To Miss Deadline For Lead Hazard Rule
Mar 20, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan
Government lawyers have told a federal appellate court that EPA will miss a 90-day deadline -- expected to kick in as soon as March 27 -- for proposing updates to its lead hazard standard for residential structures though the lawyers are asking the court to clarify... -
EPA Plans State Meeting on PFAS
Mar 20, 2018 | Inside EPA
Responding to calls from state officials, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is inviting state and tribal officials to a leadership summit aimed at sharing information and identifying near-term actions for addressing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)... -
Judge Nixes Suit over Formaldehyde in Hair Products
Mar 20, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Amanda Reilly
A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by green groups that alleged the Food and Drug Administration failed to protect the public from formaldehyde in hair products. -
Amazon’s E-Commerce Model a 'Hurdle' for Chemicals Policy Compliance
Mar 21, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Leigh Stringer
Retail giant Amazon's promise of a chemicals management policy this year will have a big influence on the market, but its e-commerce business model will prove a challenge when it comes to getting third-party product sellers to adhere to it, say US NGOs and business groups. -
Maryland Considers NMP, Methylene Chloride Ban
Mar 21, 2018 | Chemical Watch
Introduced last month, the bill (HB 1138) calls for a prohibition on the sale or distribution of "any paint or coating removal product" containing either solvent. If passed into law, the ban would take effect from 1 January 2020. -
(ACC Mentioned) Exxon Says U.S. Gulf Coast Plastics Project Could Begin by 2021
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Kevin Crowley
Exxon Mobil Corp. said a project to expand plastics manufacturing along the U.S. Gulf Coast could start up by 2021 as the oil explorer boosts investment in a business that accounted for almost one-fourth of last year's profit. -
(ACC Mentioned) Appalachia Beats Texas in Chemical Money-Making Potential: Report (Corrected)
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jack Kaskey
Appalachia wants what Texas has...Shale gas is bringing $133 billion of chemical industry investments to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but civic boosters in Appalachia say the projects would make more money if they were built in their region. -
This Study Breaks down the Business Case for an Appalachian Cracker
Mar 21, 2018 | Pittsburgh Business Times
By Paul J. Gough
A new study by IHS Markit and a nonprofit organization marketing the Appalachian natural gas region is pressing the case that building more ethane crackers in the region is cheaper for the industry than a similar new facility on the Gulf Coast. -
EPA Planning Streamlined Audit Policy for New Oil & Gas Facilities
Mar 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Seeking to increase compliance with environmental rules, EPA is crafting a new audit policy for streamlining disclosure of non-compliance by new oil and natural gas facilities and is seeking states' input on the issue... -
Oil, Gas Firms Could Avoid EPA Penalties by Admitting Violations
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Oil and gas producers that choose to report past environmental violations at drilling sites, and related assets that they acquire, may dodge penalties under an audit program that the EPA plans to expand. -
Oklahoma Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Oil, Gas Tax Initiative
Mar 21, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
Oklahoma’s highest court has said "OK" to an oil and gas production tax. -
Natural Gas Generation Falls as Renewables Rise
Mar 20, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Ryan Maye Handy
ower generated by natural gas-fired plants saw the steepest declines on record last year, as coal-fired power continued to slump and power from renewable energy sources continued to rise. -
EPA Approves 'Technical Corrections' to Refinery Regs
Mar 21, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt signed off today on proposed changes to 2015 refinery emissions regulations that are projected to save the industry almost $90 million. -
Power Plants Can't Rely on Defunct Air Trading Program for Haze (1)
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer Lu
Electric utilities can't rely on a Bush-era emissions trading program to meet their obligation to improve visibility in parks and wilderness areas, judges said in a March 20 opinion. -
On the Menu for McDonald’s: Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Mar 20, 2018 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Joseph Pisani
The company behind the golden arches wants to get greener...McDonald’s said Tuesday it’s taking steps to cut the greenhouse gases it emits, including tweaking the way the beef in its Big Macs and Quarter Pounders is produced. -
Chevron, Oil Giants Request Dismissal of California Climate Case
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Kartikay Mehrotra
Federal statute prohibits California and its cities from blaming individual companies for the effects of global warming, several oil companies said in a filing asking a San Francisco judge to dismiss the case against them. -
Fourth Wave Environmentalism Fully Embraces Business
Mar 20, 2018 | Wall Street Journal
By Fred Krupp
American corporations began joining with environmental groups to increase sustainability nearly 30 years ago. This trend was still on the horizon in 1986 when I wrote an op-ed for this page describing an emerging style of environmentalism dedicated to problem-solving... -
FEMA Official Links Climate Change to Increased Threats
Mar 21, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Marc Heller
A regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday that he sees evidence of climate change in California's year-round wildfire season.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Transportation and Infrastructure News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
-
Mar 20, 2018 | Washington Post
By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin
The Environmental Protection Agency turned over documents to Congress late Tuesday detailing nearly $68,000 in newly disclosed travel costs for Administrator Scott Pruitt during the past seven months.
The records, which came at the request of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and were obtained by The Washington Post, show dozens of first-class domestic and overseas flights for Pruitt and other trip expenses between August and last month. That figure, which includes stays at high-priced hotels in New York City and Paris, does not include the travel expenditures of the personal security detail and aides who typically accompany him.
EPA officials attribute the elevated costs of Pruitt’s travels to the security precautions they have undertaken because of the number of threats he has received — especially compared to his immediate predecessors — since joining President Trump’s Cabinet in February 2017.
The administrator has received round-the-clock security protection since shortly after he took office, and after a protester made vulgar and threatening remarks to Pruitt last spring, the head of his security detail recommended that he fly in first or business class to provide a buffer between him and the public.
“We have responded to Chairman Gowdy,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in an email. “The letter explains EPA’s Protective Service Detail identified specific ongoing threats associated with Administrator Pruitt’s travel and shifted his class based on certain security protocols that require him to be near the front of the plane.”
Pruitt has been under fire for months because of his expenses, not just for travel in this country and abroad but for changes he has made at EPA headquarters, including the installation of a soundproof phone booth in his office for private communications.
Gowdy requested the latest information after The Post reported in February on Pruitt’s regular first-class travel. EPA officials initially indicated they had obtained blanket approval for him to buy premium-class tickets due to security concerns. A two-week stretch of travel in June by the administrator and his aides cost more than $120,000, according to records obtained by The Post and the Environmental Integrity Project under the Freedom of Information Act.
Pruitt’s aides later clarified that they clear each first-class ticket purchase with appropriate federal officials.
The latest documents reveal how that all adds up.
A journey to Morocco in December, where Pruitt and his aides promoted U.S. natural gas exports, ranked as the most costly trip detailed in the agency travel vouchers. They show that just Pruitt’s travel for the four-day trip — expenses for his roughly 10-person staff and security entourage were not disclosed — amounted to $17,631. The charges appear to include a $500 overnight stay in Paris on the way to Morocco. An EPA official said the trip was affected by weather delays, which prompted the group to stay in Paris on Dec. 10 before arriving in Rabat the next day.
Closer to home, Pruitt rang up hefty travel bills last summer and fall.
After Hurricane Harvey, Pruitt spent more than $3,900 on a one-day trip in late August to Corpus Christi, Tex., to visit with the city’s mayor and view damage at its port. Two weeks later, he returned to the state to visit a Superfund site in Houston that had been damaged by the storm and to participate in a roundtable at a technology company. After a weekend at home in Tulsa, he flew to New York to participate in the annual Concordia Summit. Those first-class flights cost $3,330, and records show he also spent $669 on a hotel room in Manhattan.
Pruitt never stayed off the road for long.
A five-day trip in October to Colorado Springs, Phoenix, Tulsa and Lexington, Ky., where he announced the rollback of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, cost taxpayers nearly $5,000 in airline tickets. A one-day trip that month to Jackson, Miss., to meet with the governor and tour farms cost nearly $3,200. Soon after, a one-day stop in Nashville to meet with the state’s governor and speak to a farm group entailed a $2,774.40 flight.
The records also underscore how often and to what lengths Pruitt traveled to speak to industry groups. He addressed the Texas Oil & Gas Association in October before heading to Nebraska for media stops. First-class flights: $3,610. He headed to New Orleans to speak to the Louisiana Chemical Association. First-class flight: $2,265. In November, he flew to Chicago to address the Society of Industrial Gasoline Marketers annual conference, at a cost of $1,172. The next day, he headed to Charleston, S.C., for the American Chemistry Council. That brief trip cost $3,155.
Travel in early December to Louisville, Des Moines and Tulsa cost $3,250. Days later, he headed to Florida to meet with Disney executives about food waste. His first-class seat cost $2,162.
Pruitt picked up 2018 where he left off. In January, he headed to Dallas for a day to meet with EPA regional administrators. His flight was $1,689.
Records show that at the end of January, he returned to New York for a day of interviews with Fox News, Fox Business, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News and the New York Times. Then it was back to Florida to visit a nursery near Tallahassee. That two-night trip cost $3,767.
A separate trip to Reno and Las Vegas in February to visit Superfund sites and do media interviews cost another $3,635. Later in the month, Pruitt took a brief trip to New England to visit another Superfund site and visit with New Hampshire’s governor, among other stops. His first-class flight to Boston: $1,428.
On one occasion, according to the new batch of travel vouchers, even a trip the administrator did not take ended up costing the government. The records show he had been scheduled to visit Australia for almost 10 days late last summer, meeting environmental officials and making site visits in Sydney and Melbourne. The journey ultimately was canceled, but records show that it cost the agency $1,927 to undo various flights and hotel reservations for Pruitt.
In Gowdy’s Feb. 20 letter, the lawmaker asked EPA to provide an array of documents by March 6 that would outline the circumstances under which Pruitt obtained permission from agency officials to eschew coach class.
“Clearly, federal regulations prohibit a blanket waiver to fly first class except to accommodate disabilities or special needs,” Gowdy wrote. “Instead, a waiver is required for each flight in order to fly first or business class when traveling on official government business.”
In an email Tuesday night, the communications director for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said members “are in the process of reviewing and evaluating the documents and information, which will determine the committee’s next steps.”
Pruitt appears poised to cut back on his first-class travel. Earlier this month, he told CBS News in a podcast interview that he would be flying coach more often. EPA officials have looked into the prospect of seating Pruitt in the bulkhead row, which has more legroom than a traditional coach seat and also would allow him to be among the first passengers to leave the plane.
“There’s a change coming,” Pruitt told CBS, referring to his travel practices.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/20/new-documents-show-nearly-68000-in-recent-premium-flights-hotel-stays-for-epas-pruitt/?utm_term=.a34ed6bd1600
-
Mar 20, 2018 | Think Progress
By Mark Hand
Several key environmental and energy positions have yet to be filled 14 months into the presidency of Donald Trump.
Of a total of 14 high-level political positions at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), eight remain empty, including the agency’s deputy administrator and its head of chemical safety. At the Department of Energy (DOE), Trump has yet to fill leadership positions in the department’s renewable energy and advanced technology offices.
But based on the track record of the nominees who have won Senate confirmation so far, Trump’s slow pace in filling these vacancies may not be a bad thing according to one environmental group — the fewer anti-environment, pro-pollution candidates who fill positions in his administration, it says, the better off the nation will be.
“Any day a coal lobbyist or chemical industry shill aren’t holding top jobs in Trump’s EPA should be considered a ‘good day’ by the American people,” Environmental Working Group (EWG) President Ken Cook said Tuesday in an emailed statement to ThinkProgress. EWG is a nonprofit group that focuses on protecting human health and the environment.
Among the confirmed nominees, EPA Scott Pruitt has emerged as the poster child for the Trump political environmental and energy appointee: a pro-industry, anti-environment ideologue. The administration has filled second- and third-tier positions at the EPA, Department of Energy, and related agencies with officials who have similar industry-friendly pedigrees.
Trump’s nominee to head the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, William Wehrum, came to the agency with numerous potential conflicts of interest. Confirmed by the Senate last November, Wehrum’s previous clients included the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the American Chemistry Council. Each of these trade associations filed litigation against the EPA under President Obama to weaken rules that could harm their member companies’ bottom line.
In late September 2017, a week before his confirmation hearing, Wehrum was still appearing in federal court on behalf of his industry clients. In the case, Wehrum argued against new standards meant to protect workers from airborne silica dust, which is so fine that particles can penetrate deep into the lungs and cause health problems, such as fatal lung disease and cancer.
Trump has announced a total 621 nominees to top government positions, compared with 730 during the same period under President Obama, 795 under President George W. Bush, and 703 under President Clinton, according to a nominee tracking project by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and the Washington Post. The project has been tracking hundreds of Trump administration nominations through the confirmation process.
According to ThinkProgress’ analysis of the data, the environment remains a low priority for the administration. Pro-industry individuals continue to take top roles and several nominees to environment- and climate-related positions at the EPA, DOE, and Department of Agriculture are still unnamed.
Along with Trump taking his time in officially selecting candidates, several nominees that were put forward have failed to win approval, despite Republicans holding a majority in the Senate.
After intense scrutiny of her history of fringe anti-science beliefs, the White House withdrew its nomination for Kathleen Hartnett White to lead its Council on Environmental Quality. Hartnett White is currently a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, the Koch network, and the Heartland Institute. She has long cast doubt on widely accepted climate science.
Trump has yet to nominate a head of chemical safety at the EPA after Michael Dourson withdrew his name from consideration. Dourson, nicknamed the “voice of the chemical industry,” faced bipartisan opposition to his nomination to head the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. He runs a consulting firm whose clients included Dow Chemical, Koch Industries, and Chevron.
Earlier this month, Trump nominated another chemicals industry veteran to fill a senior spot at the EPA. If confirmed by the Senate, Peter Wright, an attorney for Dow Chemical, would serve as assistant administrator for the the agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. At Dow Chemical, Wright works as managing counsel for environmental health and safety. Earlier in his career, Wright had jobs at several law firms as well as the agriculture giant Monsanto.
Also at the EPA, the nomination of Andrew Wheeler — a former coal lobbyist — to serve as the No. 2 person at the EPA remains on hold, even though the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved Wheeler’s nomination in February, albeit in a 11-10 party-line vote.
An outspoken advocate for the coal industry, Wheeler has long questioned the mainstream consensus on climate change. In 2006, while working for the Senate environment committee, Wheeler suggested that the Earth might actually be going through a “cooling phase.”
“Public health would be far better served if Mr. Wheeler remains unconfirmed and another chemical corporation hired gun isn’t tapped to run chemical safety at EPA,” Cook told ThinkProgress. “If President Trump nominated people for these positions who actually have the experience and commitment in safeguarding human health and the environment from smokestack pollution and toxic chemicals, I’d bet they’d both pass with strong bipartisan support.”
The administration is also still looking to fill the chief scientist position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture after the president’s original nominee, Sam Clovis, withdrew his nomination after getting embroiled in the scandal over the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials.
Agriculture businesses, including manufacturers of pesticides and fertilizers, strongly supported Clovis’ nomination as chief scientist for the department. At the time of his nomination, Christopher Jahn, president of trade association the Fertilizer Institute, said “American agriculture will find a knowledgeable and strong advocate in Dr. Clovis.”
The absence of high-ranking officials in several agencies hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from pursuing its goal of returning the government below the level of regulation in 1960. But these efforts to cut regulations are being handled by political appointees that do not need Senate approval.
Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) said he has “tremendous amount of concern about political people running the departments instead of Senate-confirmed people within the agencies that have been through a vetting process,” according to an E&E News report. “If you just have a political person in there who’s just handling the politics, the decisions are not good,” Udall said.
Despite the absence of a chemicals safety head, the EPA has overhauled how it determines whether new chemicals pose a serious risk to human health and the environment. The agency will no longer require that chemical manufacturers who want to produce new, potentially hazardous chemicals sign legal agreements that restrict their use under certain conditions. The changes come in the wake of intense lobbying by the chemical industry, which complained that the EPA was taking too long to clear their chemicals for commercial use.
Chances are the next nominee to fill the top chemical safety position will come from the industry, even though Dourson was forced to withdraw his nomination due to his industry ties. Nancy Beck, one of the deputy administrators in the chemical safety office, came to the EPA from the American Chemistry Council, the leading lobbying group for the chemical industry.
At the DOE, Secretary Rick Perry has filled many of his agency’s positions that require Senate confirmation with alumni of Koch-funded, pro-fossil fuel think tanks. But DOE still has several open positions, including ones that focus on clean energy.
Trump has not nominated an assistant secretary to lead DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). As a supporter of coal and other fossil fuels, the president has proposed massive cuts to this office in both fiscal budget plans it has released since January 2017.
EERE’s mission is to help support the development of clean, renewable, and efficiency energy technologies and support a global clean energy economy. Under the White House budget proposal, the office’s funding would be cut by more than 65 percent for FY’19.
Daniel Simmons currently serves as DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary of EERE, a position that does not require Senate confirmation. Prior to joining DOE last May, Simmons served as vice president for policy at the Koch-funded Institute of Energy Research, where he questioned the value of promoting renewable energy sources.
Another DOE position without a nominee is director of the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an agency modeled on the Department of Defense’s Department of Advanced Research Agency that funds research into long-term and high-risk energy technologies. As with EERE, ARPA-E is not a priority of the Trump administration. Trump would scrap ARPA-E and its $305 million budget in his FY’19 budget proposal.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-takes-time-with-nominations-348c82dea893/
-
Mar 20, 2018 | Boing Boing
By Cory Doctorow
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a big-business think-tank that authors "model legislation" at the local, state and national level that benefits corporations at the expense of everyday people; their greatest hits make for scary reading -- you can thank ALEC for ag-gag laws, stand-your-ground laws, private prisons, bans on municipal ISPs, killing Obamacare and jailing pipeline protesters.
ALEC's Republican legislator friends often introduce bills that are word-for-word identical to the "discussion drafts" they circulate, making ALEC the nation's most prolific and unapologetic legislative ghost writer.
Alibaba is ALEC's latest member. The Chinese tech giant is an integral part of China's surveillance apparatus and a de-facto arm of the Chinese government. It's the latest Chinese giant to join US corporate lobbying efforts, a list that includes Wanhua Chemical joining the American Chemistry Council to help fund its legendary pro-pollution super-PACs.
Bill Anaya, head of government affairs for Alibaba operations in the Americas, spoke at ALEC’s States & Nation Policy Summit in Nashville, Tenn., last December, according to notes taken at the meeting and obtained by The Intercept and Documented. The gathering brought together over one thousand state and local lawmakers and lobbyists.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment, but at the conference, Anaya heralded his company’s entry into the lobby. “We’re so excited to be a part of ALEC,” said Anaya. “We are probably the world’s largest e-commerce company you have never heard about. We have business-to-business marketplace solutions. We have VC marketplace solutions. And we have over 500 million active buyers on our marketplaces.”
https://boingboing.net/2018/03/20/true-conservatives.html
-
(ACC Mentioned) Closed Loop Extending Its Efforts to Marine Pollution
Mar 20, 2018 | Plastics News
By Jim Johnson
Finding solutions for the collection and recycling of ocean bound plastics will not happen in a vacuum, according to one organization looking to make an impact.
Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm established to find solutions for recycling and waste challenges and funded by some of the biggest companies in the world, has set a new focus on plastic ocean pollution.
"One of the things that we realized was ocean bound plastics and plastics in marine environments, it is one part of a variety of different materials in a waste stream. And when you go into any market, you have to think of things as an entire waste stream," said Bridget Croke, who leads investor partnerships and communications at Closed Loop.
"As we look at how do we solve this particular issue, we're taking a broader approach. We're thinking about what is the appropriate waste management that's needed in many markets where marine debris is a real challenge," she said.
Closed Loop has been working to improve recycling for years, but only recently decided to get involved in ocean plastics. That's because the group's members, many of them doing business around the globe, expressed a desire to get involved in the issue, Croke said.
Closed Loop is working with the Ocean Conservancy and the Trash Free Seas Alliance as well as private companies including Dow, PepsiCo Inc., 3M Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. The American Chemistry Council also is part of the effort called Closed Loop Ocean.
The effort currently is considering potential projects and talking with governments and private companies, about the possibilities. Funding could be deployed next year.
At the recent Plastics Recycling 2018 conference in Nashville, Croke said work must take place to build both demand for ocean bound plastics as well as supply.
"It's also going to be important to think of this as a whole system and not just plastics in a vacuum," she said.
Closed Loop is currently looking at Indonesia, India, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam as potential areas to start work. That's because much of the plastic that finds its way into water comes from those countries as well as China, the group said. The effort is looking for the right conditions to achieve early success that would allow replication elsewhere.
"What we know is that there is a multi-trillion [dollar] infrastructure needed across Asia," she said, to address the issue.
The goal is to build a fund to create capital that will attract even more capital to address the problem.
There needs to be a willingness at both local and national political levels to create change in countries where plastics leak into oceans. Local investors also are key. "We can't do it from afar," Croke said.
Closed Loop has found there actually is money available for waste management infrastructure projects in the region, but that there is a lack of understanding about the "investible opportunities."
"So our first job was to spend some time actually going into these markets and developing a pipeline to help investors understand that there are actually projects to invest in. Otherwise, it's very esoteric," she said.
Closed Loop Oceans hopes to provide some pilot investment in a few key markets next year with additional funding coming after.
http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20180320/NEWS/180329986/closed-loop-extending-its-efforts-to-marine-pollution
-
(ACC Mentioned) Plastics Recycling Markets Driven by Prime Prices and China
Mar 20, 2018 | Resource Recyling
By Colin Staub
Last year presented an upheaval in the global recovered plastics market, and the impacts continue to roll in. Three experts recently shared their thoughts on the specific causes of the volatility.
China permeated the discussion, which took place at last month’s Plastics Recycling 2018 event in Nashville, Tenn., but the analysts made it clear a number of factors in the prime resin market also shaped the global recycling landscape.
Kailin Fu, Tison Keel and Joel Morales, all staffers at research firm IHS Markit, took the stage to present details on a chaotic 2017. The session, titled “Pinning Down Shifting Markets,” was moderated by Craig Cookson, director of sustainability and recycling for the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council.
Chinese changes dominate
Unsurprisingly, market trends were shaped in large part by forces in China.
Fu, associate director of IHS’s chemicals and plastics group, said analysts had forecast in mid-2017 that China’s virgin PE demand would grow about 6 percent year over year. By the end of the year, the market ended up growing more than 10 percent.
“The reason behind this drastic shift was policy change,” Fu said. Those policies came on a range of fronts, not just import restrictions. For example, a major policy change will gradually phase out burning coal for residential heating in Northern China and replace it with natural gas. For the plastics industry, that led to a spike in HDPE pipe demand, and therefore higher overall virgin PE growth.
Morales, executive director of polyolefins Americas for IHS Markit, noted that “almost overnight we saw high-density polyethylene, which is probably the weakest, most competitive resin in the world, flip, to now it’s selling at a premium in Asia, versus low-density.”
But import restrictions had the most significant impacts on plastics demand. They reduced supply of recycled content and led to unexpected growth on the prime resin market, Fu explained.
“A year later, the National Sword has become a major event, and its impact on the global market turned out to be significant,” Fu said.
National Sword has come to be used as an encompassing term for the various import restrictions enacted in 2017. At its core, it’s a crackdown on importing and handling contaminated loads of waste and scrap materials.
The campaign has included three main aspects, Fu said. First, authorities began conducting extra inspections at China’s 26 main ports, which has caused three to six months of delays on imports. Second, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection began visiting domestic factories and has shut down many that were not meeting environmental standards. Third, factories cited for environmental violations within the past two years have had their import licenses suspended or canceled.
“This doesn’t mean no recycling; it means a cleaner, more efficient industry and higher domestic recycling rates,” Fu said. “Large-scale, up-to-environmental-standard recycling facilities will be needed, and they are encouraged to be built in the industrial parks. This can be the new trend for the future recycling market.”
This year, National Sword continues with a focus on targeting illegal foreign waste and recyclables imports, Fu said. On top of that, China enacted an imports ban on post-consumer PE, PP, PS, PVC and PET. Import permits issued during 2018 show a sharp reduction in plastic tonnages approved to enter the country.
Before 2017, imports of recycled PET supplied almost half of China’s total supply of the recovered resin. Most plastics facilities are concentrated in Southeast and Northeast China along coastal areas, where they have easy access to imported materials, Fu said.
“Import is a crucial element of the China recycled market,” Fu said. “This new policy is going to reshape the landscape of this market.”
Demand for recyclables collapses
In 2013, the Green Fence campaign led to a reduction in Chinese imports of scrap plastics. Two years later, pricing was the main driver of a 1.2-million-metric-ton decline in recycled plastic imports, as low crude oil and prime resin prices led to virgin substitution.
In 2017, PE imports fell another 23 percent, or 1.1 million metric tons, due to the range of Chinese policy changes, Fu explained.
This year, analysts expect a further decline of 2 million metric tons in demand, due to the full implementation of the import ban.
China’s recycled resin demand as a percentage of total demand grew from less than 10 percent before 2001 to as high as 22 percent in 2007 and 2012, Fu said. But after crude oil prices plummeted around 2015, recycled demand dropped to between 10 and 15 percent.
“With the new policy in 2017, we expect this percentage to continue to fall to between 6 to 7 percent and stabilize for the next couple years,” Fu said.
Fu said that after Green Fence, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Vietnam took extra volume, partially absorbing the Chinese reduction. That trend has shown itself again following the 2017 turmoil, as those and other countries substantially boosted their imports of scrap materials.
“Some of these materials will have to either find a home in another country, or to be processed domestically, or they will have to end up in a landfill,” Fu said.Prime market examination
Keel, senior director of PET, PTA, EO and derivatives at IHS Chemical, laid out how prime resins impacted recovered plastics markets in 2017.
“The world has too much prime PET capacity,” Keel said, noting there is 15 to 20 percent more capacity than demand can consume, and the market is not growing at the same rate it used to.
The U.S. PET industry has faced competition from China and India in the past, and the Department of Commerce has implemented antidumping measures. More recently, Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and others have begun selling large quantities of PET into the U.S. market as well, Keel said, prompting a new Commerce investigation. The department is expected to issue its decision in March, Keel added.
“Most people expect we’re going to get some significant preliminary duties put on to these polymers which will block out most of the rest of Asia,” Keel said. “Now, this is relatively positive news for the recycle industries, because anything that holds up or supports higher prices for virgin, prime PET counteracts the trend of the last few years which has been competition that drove people away from recycle for the lower price offered by prime PET.”
On the prime side, the main trend of 2017 was low profits and high construction costs, leading to a number of reductions in operating rate, Keel said. Operating rate refers to the total percentage of production capacity that’s in use. M&G, the virgin PET giant, declared bankruptcy during the fall and put on hold some of its new capacity.
“All of this has created a much tighter market condition for PET, and the producers that are left have taken advantage of that, and they’ve jacked their prices up,” he said, estimating that producers have raised prime PET resin prices by 8 to 12 cents this year.
Those higher prices have remained firm, Fu said, even during the Chinese New Year period, when they usually decline.
Morales said the situation on the recycled polyolefin side is positive. Prices for recycled PE and PP are higher than analysts had expected, he said, due to the higher prime prices.
“It’s almost like every break you could have to keep the price up, since August, has happened,” Morales said. “Typically, it doesn’t work that way, but everything has happened: Demand’s been stronger and production’s been terrible, and it’s all helped to support a higher price.”
China’s import ban spurred a lot more demand than the prime industry was expecting.
“Literally, reactors’ worth of resin sucked up in 2017, because China used a lot more than we thought,” Morales said.
Also, new capacity did not necessarily translate to increased production, Morales said. He pointed to a number of plants that opened in the U.S.during the fall but have not hit full output because of various delays, including those caused by hurricanes.
https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/03/20/plastics-recycling-markets-driven-by-prime-prices-and-china/
-
Trump EPA Plans New Restrictions on Science Used in Rulemaking
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to restrict the scientific studies it uses to develop and justify regulations, making it harder to rely on research when its underlying data are shielded from view.
The planned policy shift, urged by conservatives and advisers who guided Donald Trump's presidential transition, could affect EPA regulations governing climate change, air pollution and clean water for years to come. The move was described by a person familiar with the plan, who asked not to be named discussing the change before it is formally announced.
Although the EPA hasn't formally announced the policy change, expected in the coming weeks, Administrator Scott Pruitt outlined the broad strokes of the plan for conservatives in a recent meeting and told The Daily Caller he would insist on the details of studies underpinning environmental regulations.
The EPA should rely on science that is “very objective, very transparent and very open,” Pruitt said in a March 13 interview with Bloomberg News, casting his concern as focused on third-party research in which findings are published but the underlying data and methodology aren't open for scrutiny.
“That's not right,” Pruitt said. Whenever the EPA gets scientific evaluations from third parties, “the methodology and data need to be a part of the official record—the rulemaking—so that you and others can look at it and say, ‘was it wisely done?’“
Advocates of the change say that by revisiting the science that underpins a swath of environmental rules, including those governing ozone and mercury pollution, the EPA can begin to undo them.
“The EPA has gotten away from honestly comparing the costs and benefits of regulation, by using black box science that where they are essentially saying ‘trust us,’” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that advocates limited government. “It's a way to justify regulations, far beyond any environmental or health benefits.“
Critics said the move is a way to undermine environmental laws too popular to be undone by Congress.
“It's just another way to prevent the EPA from using independent science to enforce some of our bedrock environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act,” said Yogin Kothari, a Washington representative with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. “You know you're not going to be able to undo the Clean Air Act, so instead of attacking the law itself, you attack the process by which the law is implemented.“
Conservatives have pointed to a landmark 1993 air pollution study conducted by Harvard University's School of Public Health that paved the way for more stringent regulations on air pollution by linking fine particulate matter to mortality risk. The underlying data from that federally funded research, known as the Six Cities Study, was never publicly released because its participants were promised confidentiality, according to the university.
“This canard about ‘secret science’ began as an attempt by industry to undermine the landmark research—from more than two decades ago— that determined air pollution is bad for your health,” said John Walke, director of the clean air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “As a result of those findings, EPA forced polluters to clean up their act, saving or improving tens of thousands of lives.“
Depending on the details, the policy could affect both epidemiological studies that rely on confidential medical records, as well as industry-backed research by companies reluctant to share data recorded at oil wells and power plants.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133835&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133835&jd=130133835
-
Amidst Uncertainty, EPA Expects To Miss Deadline For Lead Hazard Rule
Mar 20, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan
Government lawyers have told a federal appellate court that EPA will miss a 90-day deadline -- expected to kick in as soon as March 27 -- for proposing updates to its lead hazard standard for residential structures though the lawyers are asking the court to clarify the deadline after the judges failed to issue an expected mandate that would have made the order final.
“EPA has been working diligently to comply with the Court’s directive to issue a proposed rule and continues in a detailed planning process to attempt to meet that directive,” Justice Department (DOJ) lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in a March 16 letter.
“However, these efforts have been based on the premise and advice that the 90-day period to generate a proposed rule would not be triggered until some action was taken to make the Court’s decision final, which until several days ago both DOJ and EPA understood would be the issuance of the mandate.
“Given this reliance, EPA candidly informs the Court that it is not in a position to publish a comprehensive proposed rule on the highly technical issues that are the subject of this case if it were deemed to be due ninety days from the date the opinion was issued, which would be March 27, 2018, just eleven days from now,” the letter adds.
At issue is the schedule for EPA's compliance with the court's Dec. 27 decision in A Community Voice, et al. v. EPA, which found that the petitioners were entitled to a writ of mandamus against EPA, requiring the agency to update its lead hazard standard for residential and child-care facilities and its definition of lead-based paint under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
The court also found the agency had unreasonably delayed making these revisions after accepting a 2009 rulemaking petition from the same environmental groups who later filed the mandamus suit.
Industry attorneys have voiced concerns that the split 2-1 decision may have lowered the bar for winning the “extraordinary remedy” of a writ of mandamus that compels government action -- a potential boon to opponents of the Trump EPA who may use litigation to force the agency to write some rules.
In the opinion, the court ordered EPA to propose new standards within 90 days and to take final action no later than a year after that -- a significant defeat for EPA which had sought to complete work on the rule by 2023.
But DOJ in the letter says the court has not issued a judgment or mandate -- something it says should have been issued within seven days after the window for a petition for rehearing ends -- which would have been Feb. 19, as the government did not petition for rehearing.
As a result, “neither EPA nor [DOJ] have to date understood the Court's decision to have become 'final,'” the letter says.
'Final Action'
DOJ attorney Perry M. Rosen says in the letter that he called the clerk's office March 13 to inquire about the mandate, and was told by the clerk's office that no mandate would be issued “because it was an action for mandamus.” When asked about determining when the court decision would be considered “final,” the office suggested DOJ write the court for clarification, the letter says.
Rosen explains that EPA's efforts to propose a rule have relied on the premise that the 90-day period would not begin until the court's decision was finalized, which the government understood to mean when the mandate issued.
EPA in a footnote says it is asking for a clarification, not an extension, at this time, but should it need an extension, the agency will make that request through a separate motion.
The expected delay marks the second lead paint rule where EPA anticipates it will miss court ordered deadlines. Agency lawyers last month renewed its calls to another federal appellate court to indefinitely delay a decision on whether it must regulate lead-based paint in public and commercial buildings.
In a Feb. 22 status update to the D.C. Circuit in New York Coalition to End Lead Poisoning v. EPA, agency lawyers reiterated their prior statements that officials are seeking to revise a survey questionnaire to nearly 20,000 contractors and others for their analysis of potential lead dust risks to occupants of public and commercial buildings -- an analysis that will help the agency determine whether a rule is needed -- but have no schedule for when its analysis will be completed.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/amidst-uncertainty-epa-expects-miss-deadline-lead-hazard-rule
-
EPA Plans State Meeting on PFAS
Mar 20, 2018 | Inside EPA
Responding to calls from state officials, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is inviting state and tribal officials to a leadership summit aimed at sharing information and identifying near-term actions for addressing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the class of chemicals that is contaminating drinking water in scores of states.
But it is not clear whether the meeting will ensure adoption of consistent risk values that state drinking water officials are seeking, given that EPA does not appear to be adopting federally enforceable standards that could preempt state requirements.
Pruitt March 19 announced that EPA will host a “National Leadership Summit” to address PFAS May 22-23 in Washington, DC, “to bring together stakeholders from across the country to build on the steps we are already taking and to identify immediate actions to protect public health.” He added, “Through this event, we are providing critical national leadership, while ensuring that our state, tribal, and local partners have the opportunity to help shape our path forward.”
EPA and other federal agencies have been under pressure from states to offer more clarity and uniformity on addressing PFAS.
The Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) asked federal agencies earlier this year to form a working committee with states to address a list of recommendations covering all aspects of drinking water programs, and called on the federal government to develop a unified message on PFAS. “Without this unified message and information, we’re concerned that several sets of differing risk numbers will be communicated from each agency, which will cause confusion, delay, or worse, no action at all,” ASDWA said in a Jan. 12 letter to federal officials.
While EPA in 2016 set health advisory levels for two PFAS compounds -- perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) -- at 70 parts per trillion, the agency stopped short of setting an enforceable drinking water standard and provided limited guidance to states and public water systems on how to use the advisory levels.
Instead, the agency has been leaving it up to states to shoulder the responsibility for what may become a patchwork of standards even as public pressure to address the issue has grown.
ASDWA in its Jan. 12 letter to EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, raised differing state interpretations of the agency's health advisories for PFOA and PFOS, noting the advisories are unclear on what actions public water systems should take to protect susceptible populations.
Nevertheless, Pruitt said in separate letters to the leaders of 56 states and territories that the agency plans to work with states, tribes and others to: “[s]hare information on ongoing efforts to characterize risks from PFAS and develop monitoring and treatment/cleanup techniques; [i]dentify specific near-term actions, beyond those already underway, that are needed to address challenges currently facing states and local communities; and [d]evelop risk communication strategies to help address public concerns with PFAS,” EPA says in its letter to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R).
The agency also plans to develop a management plan for PFAS in the fall, according to the agency's website. That may include a plan to develop human health toxicity values for perfluorobutane sulfonate and a newer generation of PFAS known as GenX.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/epa-plans-state-meeting-pfas
-
Judge Nixes Suit over Formaldehyde in Hair Products
Mar 20, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Amanda Reilly
A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by green groups that alleged the Food and Drug Administration failed to protect the public from formaldehyde in hair products.
Judge Trevor McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was confirmed to the bench last year, yesterday ruled that the environmentalists had failed to establish legal standing to sue.
The greens have "alleged nothing more than an abstract injury," McFadden wrote, citing past court precedent.
The Environmental Working Group and Women's Voice for the Earth brought the suit against FDA in 2016. They alleged that the agency failed to respond to a formal request to investigate particular hair straighteners containing formaldehyde.
According to the groups, the chemical evaporates as the products are heated. The greens say they're especially concerned about the hair-straightening treatment known by the brand name Brazilian Blowout.
FDA in 2011 sent warning letters to two hair product manufacturers about formaldehyde. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also previously investigated the use of formaldehyde-containing products at beauty salons.
But the environmentalists say that the efforts haven't been enough to shield the public from formaldehyde, a carcinogen and an allergen. They petitioned FDA in 2011 to require labeling and to consider a ban on formaldehyde-releasing chemicals in hair-straightening products (E&E News PM, Dec. 16, 2016).
McFadden, though, wrote that the Environmental Working Group and Women's Voice for the Earth had only presented allegations of past injury, rather than a "real and immediate threat." The groups, he wrote, failed to show that their members are likely to use or be exposed to formaldehyde-containing hair straighteners in the future.
In order to prove legal standing to sue, a party must show that it or its members have sustained direct, concrete harm that is redressable by a favorable court decision.
McFadden also chided the groups for attempting to "manufacture standing" by showing that they have expended resources combating FDA's alleged illegal inaction.
EWG claimed to have spent $1.365 million on fighting hazardous cosmetic ingredients over the past six years, while WVE said it had spent $371,000 of its $500,000 budget "on the hair keratin straightener issue."
"To be sure, the plaintiffs allege significant expenses," McFadden wrote. But, he noted, "much of this money appears to have been spent on lobbying."
"Injuries to an organization's government lobbying and issue advocacy programs cannot be used to manufacture standing, because that would allow lobbyists on either side of virtually any issue to take the government to court," the judge concluded.
McFadden was President Trump's second appointee on the D.C. district court. The Senate confirmed him in October by a vote of 84-10.
Click here to read the court's opinion.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/03/20/stories/1060076863
-
Amazon’s E-Commerce Model a 'Hurdle' for Chemicals Policy Compliance
Mar 21, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Leigh Stringer
Retail giant Amazon's promise of a chemicals management policy this year will have a big influence on the market, but its e-commerce business model will prove a challenge when it comes to getting third-party product sellers to adhere to it, say US NGOs and business groups.
The company announced in 2017 that it would launch its chemical policy – the first by a solely e-commerce business – this year, but it has not said exactly when it will do this.
Boma Brown-West, senior manager of the business programme at US NGO the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), told Chemical Watch: "One of Amazon’s biggest hurdles could be demonstrating that it can influence its large third-party seller population to adhere to its chemicals policy, when it doesn’t have the traditional buyer-seller relationship that brick and mortar retailers have."
If, she added, Amazon is able to address this and establish a chemicals policy that commits to clear time-bound goals, then "I could see the retailer having a real impact on the marketplace."
Similarly, Joel Tickner, director of the Green Chemistry and Commerce Council (GC3), a cross-sectoral, business-to-business network of companies and other organisations, said: "The Amazon model of e-commerce, particularly of third-party sellers – that is becoming the norm with other retailers selling online – will create significant challenges in terms of extending chemicals policies beyond own brands to a dispersed network of smaller and larger resellers."
And Mark Rossi, executive director of US NGO Clean Production Action, the team behind the Chemical Footprint Project, said retailers that are successful in reducing their chemical footprints are setting clear goals for suppliers, both brands and private labels, to meet and then holding those companies accountable to the goals.
"Online retailers, like their brick and mortar peers, need to hold suppliers accountable for reducing the use of chemicals of high concern in the products they sell on their virtual shelves," he said.
Size and reach
The company’s size and global reach in terms of product sales makes its development and implementation of a chemicals policy hugely significant. Amazon last year recorded net sales of almost $180bn.
However, it has been criticised for its lack of chemicals management and came bottom of a 2016 'report card', ranking US retailers on their actions to eliminate chemicals in consumer products. The report card has been produced for the past two years by Mind the Store, a campaign run by the coalition Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.
In last year's report card, the company ranked 14th out of 30 companies and scored 30.5 points out of a possible 135.
Mike Schade, Mind the Store director, said: "We are confident that Amazon will develop a chemicals policy that ensures the products they sell don’t contain harmful chemicals. Given the company’s innovation, resources and market power, the company can have a big impact on the health of its consumers."
David Levine, co-founder and CEO of the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), a policy group representing a network of more than 250,000 businesses, told Chemical Watch Amazon's plan to launch a policy is part of a trend of more businesses creating products that meet safer chemical criteria – and the growing demand of consumers.
Retailer policies
Amazon will follow several major retailers which have recently launched chemicals policies – such as Home Depot and Costco. Walgreens and Staples also plan to launch policies this year.
Professor Tickner said that those being developed by major retailers to date have played a significant role in signalling demand for safer chemistry. "This has in turn driven the growth of green chemistry initiatives within brands and chemical manufacturers."
"Amazon's chemicals policy – the first of a solely e-commerce retailer – will only augment these demand signals and hopefully investments in green chemistry," said Professor Tickner.
Ms Brown-West said an effective policy sets clear time-bound goals on ingredient transparency within the supply chain and to consumers, and on safer products via removal of chemicals of concern and prevention of regrettable substitutes. Equally important, she said, is a plan to measure and demonstrate progress to consumers and the business.
Amazon declined to respond to Chemical Watch's questions asking for details about its policy and how it plans to address the challenge of ensuring its third-party sellers adhere.
https://chemicalwatch.com/65225/amazons-e-commerce-model-a-hurdle-for-chemicals-policy-compliance
-
Maryland Considers NMP, Methylene Chloride Ban
Mar 21, 2018 | Chemical Watch
Maryland is considering legislation to ban the sale of paint strippers containing N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) or methylene chloride.
Introduced last month, the bill (HB 1138) calls for a prohibition on the sale or distribution of "any paint or coating removal product" containing either solvent. If passed into law, the ban would take effect from 1 January 2020.
A similar ban is being considered at the federal level. The US EPA proposed a rule under section 6 of TSCA in the final days of the Obama administration to ban paint strippers containing methylene chloride and prohibit or restrict such products containing NMP. However, the current administration appears to be delaying action on finalising it.
The NGO Center for Environmental Health has praised Maryland for taking up the issue "where the EPA has failed to act". It is calling on other states to follow suit.
In addition to the paint stripper legislation, Maryland lawmakers are also contemplating a cleaning product ingredient disclosure bill, similar to one passed last year in California.
The state is also one of more than half a dozen contemplating legislation to ban certain flame retardants from children’s products.
https://chemicalwatch.com/65238/maryland-considers-nmp-methylene-chloride-ban
-
(ACC Mentioned) Exxon Says U.S. Gulf Coast Plastics Project Could Begin by 2021
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Kevin Crowley
Exxon Mobil Corp. said a project to expand plastics manufacturing along the U.S. Gulf Coast could start up by 2021 as the oil explorer boosts investment in a business that accounted for almost one-fourth of last year's profit.
Engineering work has begun on a facility that would increase Exxon's ability to produce polypropylene, a resin used to make lightweight and durable plastics, by as much as 450,000 tons a year, the Irving, Texas-based company said in a statement March 20.
The project will cost “several hundred million dollars” with a final investment decision due later this year.
Hundreds of U.S. chemical projects valued at $188 billion have been announced since 2010, according to the American Chemistry Council, as the U.S. shale boom slashed the cost of oil, natural gas, and byproducts used as feedstocks.
“Most of our planned investment in the Gulf Coast region is focused on supplying emerging markets like Asia with high-demand products,” John Verity, who heads Exxon's chemical business, said in the statement.
Exxon's polypropylene project is one of the company's 13 new facilities planned to expand chemical output in North America and Asia.
—With assistance from Jack Kaskey.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133853&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133853&jd=130133853
-
(ACC Mentioned) Appalachia Beats Texas in Chemical Money-Making Potential: Report (Corrected)
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jack Kaskey
Appalachia wants what Texas has.
Shale gas is bringing $133 billion of chemical industry investments to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but civic boosters in Appalachia say the projects would make more money if they were built in their region.
Now they have a study from IHS Markit to back them.
The region has its own abundant supply of cheap natural gas from the parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia that sit atop the Marcellus and Utica shale deposits. Over two decades of operation, ethylene and plastic plants built in that “Shale Crescent” would generate $3.6 billion more in pretax cash flow than identical Gulf Coast plants, according to the consultant's calculations in a March 20 report.
Appalachia is wooing the chemical industry as its coal mining jobs disappear in a shift to natural gas. Cheap gas in the U.S. gives chemical makers a cost advantage over other parts of the world that rely on oil-based raw materials.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, last week said he'll soon unveil a plan to redevelop Appalachia into a chemical-refining hub like the Gulf Coast.
“For 75 years, the right place to put a cracker and polyethylene plant has been on the Gulf Coast, so we are kind of questioning that paradigm,” Wally Kandel, senior vice president of Solvay Specialty Polymers U.S.A., said on a conference call to discuss the report.
Raw Materials
The biggest benefit of building in Appalachia is the cost of ethane, a natural gas liquid used to make ethylene, a basic building block of the chemicals industry. Ethane prices are projected to be 32 percent less than on the Gulf Coast five years from now, IHS said. Close proximity to customers generating more than two-thirds of U.S. polyethylene demand is another advantage.
Companies from DowDuPont Inc. to Exxon Mobil Corp. have announced hundreds of domestic chemical projects valued at $188 billion since the shale boom began in 2010, according to the American Chemistry Council. More than 70 percent of the capital spending is on the Gulf Coast.
Not many large chemical companies are seeing an advantage in Appalachia at this point. The Dow unit of DowDuPont won't shift investments from its Gulf Coast sites to Appalachia, Jarrod Erpelding, a company spokesman, said by email. When evaluating where to add production, Dow examines the cost and availability of raw materials, access to markets, logistics capabilities, and integration with current assets, he said.
Not Yet Convinced
“Our initial assessment of Appalachia does not appear to have an outstanding, sustainable advantage for Dow,” Erpelding said. “As such, we remain firmly committed to our current global investment plans.”
Exxon is sticking with the Gulf Coast, too, announcing March 20 that the company is studying the possibility of a new polypropylene plastics plant there.
Existing infrastructure can swing investments to Texas, which has attracted about one-third of new U.S. chemical projects.
It's also got a pipeline network that allows plants to easily market their chemicals, superior marine, rail, and truck transportation, and a massive gas storage facility outside of Houston at Mont Belvieu, he said.
Infrastructure Deficit
Appalachia hasn't attracted many projects during the industry's historic expansion, largely because it lacks the infrastructure built on the Gulf over generations. One chemical maker bucking the trend is Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which is building an ethylene complex outside Pittsburgh.
Shell has cited some of the same reasons detailed in the IHS study for building in the region: proximity to Appalachian shale gas deposits, as well as to the customers who turn plastic pellets into products such as packaging, trash bags, and bottles.
But the most likely investors would be companies that don't already have an existing site on the Gulf Coast, Solvay's Kandel said.
The region's lawmakers are seeking federal loan guarantees to build a $10 billion gas-storage and pipeline project. The IHS study said cheaper ethane and the other benefits more than overcome higher construction costs and the lack of a pipeline and storage network for gas liquids.
Third-Biggest
“My hat's off to Appalachia if they are able to create some economies of scale that help our industry thrive,” Hector Rivero, president of the Texas Chemical Council said. “We are not too selfish. We are willing to share with our brethren across the country.”
Appalachia now produces 30 percent of U.S. natural gas, up from 3 percent at the start of the decade, said Jerry James, president of Ohio-based Artex Oil Co., on the call to discuss the report. If the region was its own country, it would be the world's third-biggest gas supplier, he said.
“The Texas Gulf right now is considered the premiere location to build a polyethylene plant, but the Shale Crescent USA location is even better,” James said.
IHS released its study the same week it hosts the largest industry gathering, the World Petrochemical Conference in Houston, long the center of the U.S. chemical industry.
—With assistance from Ari Natter.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133858&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133858&jd=130133858
-
This Study Breaks down the Business Case for an Appalachian Cracker
Mar 21, 2018 | Pittsburgh Business Times
By Paul J. Gough
A new study by IHS Markit and a nonprofit organization marketing the Appalachian natural gas region is pressing the case that building more ethane crackers in the region is cheaper for the industry than a similar new facility on the Gulf Coast.
The study from IHS and Shale Crescent USA goes beyond a previous study by IHS Markit, sponsored last year by the Team Pennsylvania Foundation and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, that said Appalachia has enough ethane to supply up to five crackers. Ethane, a byproduct of natural gas production, is a critical element in the manufacture of plastics.
Over the course of the 20-year life of an ethane cracker, IHS forecast the pre-tax cash flow of an Appalachian ethane cracker would be $11.5 billion, compared with $7.9 billion on the Gulf Coast for a so-called world-scale cracker that would have about 1 million metric tons of annual output. Why? Because the cost of ethane and transportation to and from the processing plant provides a significant advantage to crackers in Appalachia. About half of the high-demand markets and about two-thirds of the polyethylene market is within a day's drive of the region. The delivery costs are about 23 percent lower overall in Appalachia than they would be from Gulf suppliers, the IHS Markit study found.
"It's that unassailable location (of Appalachia) ... that gives us a huge advantage," said Jerry James of Shale Crescent USA.
It's already convinced Shell Chemicals USA, which is building a $6 billion petrochemical plant in Beaver County. Another foreign company, PTT Global Chemicals, is working with Daelim to decide on whether to go ahead with an ethane cracker on the site of a former power plant in Belmont County, Ohio. Ron Whitefield, vice president of applied economics at IHS Markit who was the lead for both the Shale Crescent and Team PA studies, believes ethane crackers could be built by international companies who don't have a foothold in the Gulf Coast.
March 27
"We think this would be a very good opportunity for potential investors," Whitefield said.
Whitefield, James and Wally Kandel, a senior vice president of Solvay Specialty Polymers USA, are also bullish on the chances of having follow-on petrochemical development beyond the crackers. There are about 900 plants in Ohio, 100 in Pennsylvania and 30 in West Virginia that already buy the plastic pellets produced by ethane crackers for use in making their own plastic products like milk jugs and bottles for other liquids. Whitefield said those additional investments, either in new plants or expansions, wouldn't take as long as the five-to-six-year ramp-up for an ethane cracker.
"They can build (a plastics plant or expansion) within a year to add capacity," Kandel said.
https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2018/03/20/this-study-breaks-down-the-business-case-for-an.html
-
EPA Planning Streamlined Audit Policy for New Oil & Gas Facilities
Mar 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Seeking to increase compliance with environmental rules, EPA is crafting a new audit policy for streamlining disclosure of non-compliance by new oil and natural gas facilities and is seeking states' input on the issue, though environmentalists and others are cautioning that strong enforcement will still be needed to deter non-compliance.
Speaking at the Environmental Council of the States' (ECOS) Spring Meeting here March 20, Patrick Traylor, assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA), billed the new policy as part of the Trump administration's effort to achieve “compliance through collaboration,” and argued that facilities' self-disclosure can save state and federal resources in a time of shrinking budgets.
“No one knows more about operations and compliance then regulated entities. If we can find ways for industry to find and report non-compliance then they can be a partner,” Traylor said. “We can only do so much,” and “states can only do so much.”
While Traylor noted that the policy would not replace the need for enforcement, especially against the worst violators, the idea is receiving some early push back.
Scott Anderson of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) cautioned that strong enforcement is critical to deterring non-compliance. “It's critical for compliance that companies know that chronic violations of standards is not going to be cheaper than living up to the standards,” EDF's Anderson said. He also acknowledged that industry disclosures can play a role in improving compliance, though it should not replace enforcement.
And an EPA official noted that an audit policy would naturally “self-select” responsible companies while potentially missing more egregious cases of non-compliance.
The new EPA policy is one of several ideas EPA is advancing in response to ideas floated during a Feb. 27-28 roundtable on oil and gas development convened by EPA, ECOS and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.
In a March 15 draft summary of the roundtable, EPA says OECA's Air Enforcement Division is crafting the oil and gas sector initiative to streamline auditing and self-disclosures for new owners.
As part of the effort, EPA “is developing a template for more routine and regular disclosure of violations with an initial focus on storage tank emissions control systems,” the draft document says.
The draft also says that EPA's Smart Sectors program in the agency's Office of Policy is meeting with oil and gas industry officials to offer “[meaningful] engagement above EPA's media stovepipes.”
The document also notes some potential hurdles, including that “the biggest obstacle for industry is not understanding the potential risks of” self disclosure.
It added that industry experience with EPA’s audit policy varies. “Experiences with EPA Headquarters are generally positive, but experiences with EPA Regional Offices are generally negative,” the document states.
Stand-Alone Program
Traylor told ECOS that the planned initiative stems from the agency's 2008 audit policy for new facility owners, which generally provides some enforcement relief in the event that facilities disclose and correct any violations. While that program has had success, Traylor said that it is targeted toward individual facilities rather than hundreds of operations in the oil and gas sector.
“We think it would be wise to take that policy and create a stand-alone program on the side for use only in the oil and gas sector -- at this point at least -- to streamline the new owner audit policy.”
But according to ECOS' draft summary, some at the recent roundtable also recommended that the policy “should go beyond 'new owners' and focus on existing operations.”
Traylor asked states for input to support OECA's crafting of the new policy.
During the meeting David Glatt, chief of the Environmental Health Section of the North Dakota Department of Health, generally backed Traylor's stated goal of allowing industry as partners in compliance. While noting that regulators must enforce against the worst violators, regulation also can stall innovation, noting that liability concerns may impede novel industry ideas for reuse of produced water at oil and gas sites.
And Todd Parfitt, director of Wyoming's Department of Environmental Quality and ECOS' president, generally backed the new approach but suggested that regulators should craft a policy in a way that allows measurement of environmental benefits that result from any disclosures and corrective actions taken under the policy to ensure effectiveness.
Noting that many states already have similar audit policies or law, Parfitt told Inside EPA on the sidelines of the meeting that states will likely seek assurance that if a regulated entity discloses under a state audit policy and takes corrective action, EPA would not then overfile against the facility under the agency's policy.
“As EPA moves forward, EPA needs to understand what states are doing,” he said.
And Martha Rudolph, director of environmental programs at Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment, said that without knowing specifics of EPA's proposal, it is hard to say how it might dovetail with state audit policies.
But she generally backs the goal of encouraging facilities to conduct audits and report compliance issues. “If there is a way of encouraging any industry, in this case the oil and gas industry, to really do an audit . . . to determine whether they are in compliance and then to come into compliance, that is a good thing,” she said.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-planning-streamlined-audit-policy-new-oil-gas-facilities
-
Oil, Gas Firms Could Avoid EPA Penalties by Admitting Violations
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Oil and gas producers that choose to report past environmental violations at drilling sites, and related assets that they acquire, may dodge penalties under an audit program that the EPA plans to expand.
The Environmental Protection Agency would build upon a self-audit program that has been in place since 2008 to foster compliance and reward companies that do make an effort to meet environmental laws, Patrick Traylor, deputy assistant EPA administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, told the Environmental Council of the States during a March 20 panel discussion on encouraging oil and gas compliance in St. Paul, Minn.
The EPA initiative is a positive step, questions linger the details, Roy Hartstein, vice president for strategic solutions at Southwestern Energy Co., the third largest producer of natural gas in the continental U.S., told Bloomberg Environment. He said he wanted to see “the mechanics of how this program will work.”
The nuts and bolts of how the program would work for the oil and gas sector is an issue that the EPA has just begun to work out, Traylor said, acknowledging that it takes time to write out audit agreements. He assured state officials that the credible threat of enforcement would remain in the background.
Self-auditing is a positive step in an era of shrinking budgets, Dave Glatt, co-chairman of the ECOS shale oil and gas caucus and environmental health chief for the North Dakota Department of Health, said.
“The challenge for the EPA is to apply the audit policy that currently applies to single manufacturing facilities to multiple oil and gas facilities,” Traylor said, adding that the EPA will be looking to states that have self-auditing programs in place.
The agency doesn't want to measure compliance by how many notices of violations are filed with the Justice Department, Traylor said.
“These are good tracking tools, but not a measure of compliance,” he said.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133836&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133836&jd=130133836
-
Oklahoma Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Oil, Gas Tax Initiative
Mar 21, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
Oklahoma’s highest court has said "OK" to an oil and gas production tax.
In a pair of rulings Monday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a ballot initiative to enact an additional 5% gross production tax on oil and natural gas wells during the first 36 months of production, with proceeds funding state education needs.
State Question No. 795, Initiative Petition (IP) No. 416, as filed with the Oklahoma Secretary of State, calls for amending the state constitution to create an Oklahoma Quality Instruction Fund. The 5% tax would be applied to oil and gas wells spudded after July 1, 2015.
In January, the Oklahoma Oil & Gas Association (OKOGA) and the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association (OIPA) filed lawsuits over the ballot initiative, arguing that it was unconstitutional because it violated the one general subject rule and creates a retroactive tax. The court disagreed.
"After fully considering opponents' arguments concerning the continued applicability of the germaneness test and their constitutional challenge, this court concludes that...the new article proposed by IP 416 does not violate the single-subject requirements of the Oklahoma Constitution," the court ruled in OKOGA v. Thompson (No. 116682). The justices issued a similar ruling in OIPA v. Potts (No. 116679). However, in the OIPA case, it said the ballot initiative "does not create a retroactive tax in violation of U.S. Constitution."
Chief Justice Douglas Combs, Vice Chief Justice Noma Gurich and Justices James Edmondson, Yvonne Kauger, John Reif, Jim Winchester and Patrick Wyrick ruled in favor of the defendants. Justice Tom Colbert was recused from both cases.
Currently, Oklahoma has a two-tiered gross production tax system that starts at 2% and increases to 7% after the first 36 months of production for new wells.
Last year, the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, which is composed of private and small operators, differed with OIPA and urged state lawmakers to raise the gross production tax to 7% to help resolve a budget crisis.
"It's easy to look at the oil and natural gas industry for a quick fix when the state is facing economic hardships, but raising taxes on a single industry is not a cure-all for every financial woe," OKOGA President Chad Warmington said. "It is dangerous to further tie teacher salaries and education funding more strongly to a revenue source that fluctuates radically.
"Should this measure make it to the ballot, we will educate the public on the consequences of passing such an initiative, including the job losses it will cause in the energy sector. We believe teachers deserve salary increases and schools deserve adequate funding, but raising the gross production tax yet again is not a long-term solution. We will continue to work with our state leaders and educators to find a sustainable answer to this problem."
Four years ago Gov. Mary Fallin signed industry-backed stateHouse Bill 2562 to modify the tax rate on gross production. The bill, which took effect in mid-2015, set a 2% tax rate for the first 36 months of production, with the same rate for horizontal and vertical wells. The rate increases to 7% after the first 36 months of production. Later in 2014, legislation was passed that provided for a permanent, lowered tax rate for new oil and natural gas wells.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/113758-oklahoma-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-oil-gas-tax-initiative
-
Natural Gas Generation Falls as Renewables Rise
Mar 20, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Ryan Maye Handy
ower generated by natural gas-fired plants saw the steepest declines on record last year, as coal-fired power continued to slump and power from renewable energy sources continued to rise.
Nationally, natural gas remains the top fuel for electricity, a spot it has held for three years as coal-fired power plants shut down. But power from natural gas fell by 7.7 percent in 2017, a bigger drop than coal-fired power, which fell 2.5 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The drop is partially due to decreased electricity demand in 2017.\
It has been a decade since natural gas and coal-fired generation both saw declines, and for the first time in a decade no new coal plants were added last year, according to the Energy Department. Coal plants accounted for half of the plant retirements nationally, and more natural gas plants were put online than were retired.
Meanwhile, wind and solar power hit record numbers for power generation -- wind accounted for 6.3 percent of the nation's energy mix, while solar accounted for 1.3 percent.
Hydroelectricity also had a strong year in 2017, thanks so record-breaking precipitation in California, and hydro power generated 7.5 percent of the nation's electricity. But wind is expected to become the dominant renewable energy source in 2019.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Natural-gas-generation-falls-as-renewables-rise-12767310.php
-
EPA Approves 'Technical Corrections' to Refinery Regs
Mar 21, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt signed off today on proposed changes to 2015 refinery emissions regulations that are projected to save the industry almost $90 million.
The draft changes, described in a news release as "technical corrections," relate to fence-line monitor placement, maintenance venting requirements and other provisions in the updated standards for hazardous air pollutants, according to an EPA summary.
The proposal, which will carry a 45-day public comment period when published in the Federal Register, will "simplify compliance with national standards, generate significant costs savings and ultimately enhance protection of human health and the environment," Pruitt said in a news release today.
If finalized, the changes would save the industry an estimated $77 million in capital investment and almost $12 million in yearly compliance costs, according to the agency.
EPA had already made a lengthy number of technical corrections and clarifications to the updated standards in 2016. The new proposal comes in response to industry requests for administrative reconsideration.
The changes were welcomed by the American Petroleum Institute, which is among the industry organizations that is also challenging the standards in litigation that has been on hold since early 2016.
"EPA's practical clarification to the language of the refinery rule's regulatory requirements is a positive step that can help reduce uncertainty, while meeting our shared goal to protect public health," Howard Feldman, senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the influential trade group, said in a statement.
Earlier today, Pruitt's office tweeted out a photo of him flanked by a half-dozen people in business attire after he had signed the proposed rule.
While EPA press aides didn't reply to an email asking to identify the six, an API spokeswoman confirmed that they include Feldman and three other senior institute employees. The other two could not be definitively identified by publication time.
The updated New Source Performance Standards and National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants affect almost 150 refineries nationwide. At the time of their publications, EPA predicted they would ultimately cut emissions of toxic air pollutants by 5,200 tons each year, accompanied by a reduction in about 50,000 tons of emissions of volatile organic compounds.
They stem from a 2014 consent decree reached after Air Alliance Houston and other environmental groups sued over EPA's failure to meet a statutory timetable for review and revision of the new source standards. Many of those same groups are also challenging the final version in court.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/03/20/stories/1060076875
-
Power Plants Can't Rely on Defunct Air Trading Program for Haze (1)
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer Lu
Electric utilities can't rely on a Bush-era emissions trading program to meet their obligation to improve visibility in parks and wilderness areas, judges said in a March 20 opinion.
A panel of three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to allow the power plants to comply with the regional haze requirements using an updated emissions trading program issued by the Obama administration. Companies can use that program, known as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, instead of installing modern pollution controls at their facilities, the court said.
The regional haze rule, which sets standards to improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas, requires sources of pollution to install the best available retrofit technology to control those emissions. Facilities have the option of using an emissions trading program in lieu of applying pollution control.
Some electric utilities wanted to use the older emissions trading program known as the Clean Air Interstate Rule, which the D.C. Circuit previously struck down. Environmental groups wanted the EPA to require facilities to use direct pollution control technologies.
Sources of stationary air pollution that use emissions credit trading must use the newer cross-state air pollution rule rather than the older emissions trading program, Judge Stephen Williams wrote.
Texas Litigation
The ruling could offer a preview as to how judges will rule in a regional haze case being heard in the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, after environmental groups sued the EPA last December for allowing Texas electric utilities to use a modified emissions trading program instead of pollution controls.
“We're looking at outcomes from the D.C. Circuit as an indicator for how the circuit is likely to rule for us,” Derek McDonald, an environmental lawyer at Baker Botts LLP's Austin, Texas, office, told Bloomberg Environment.
McDonald represents industry clients involved in the case.
A ruling in their favor would provide “additional flexibility” for how emissions are reduced and allow facilities to avoid source-specific emissions controls, he said. “So we're pleased with the D.C. Circuit's decision.”
The case is Util. Air Regulatory Grp. v. EPA, D.C. Cir., No. 12-1342, 3/20/18.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133840&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133840&jd=130133840
-
On the Menu for McDonald’s: Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Mar 20, 2018 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Joseph Pisani
The company behind the golden arches wants to get greener.
McDonald’s said Tuesday it’s taking steps to cut the greenhouse gases it emits, including tweaking the way the beef in its Big Macs and Quarter Pounders is produced.
The world’s largest burger chain said it expects the changes to prevent 150 million metric tons (165 million tons) of greenhouse gas emissions from being released into the atmosphere by 2030, equal to taking 32 million cars off the road for a year.
Several food and beverage companies have announced changes recently to appeal to customers concerned about the environment. Dunkin’ Donuts has said it will stop using foam coffee cups by 2020. And soda maker Coca-Cola announced plans to recycle a bottle or can for every beverage it sells by 2030.
“We’re taking action we care about and customers really appreciate,” said McDonald’s Corp. CEO Steve Easterbrook.
The company said three areas — beef production, energy use at its restaurants and packaging — account for more than 60 percent of its emissions, and it will make changes there first.
To reduce emissions at cattle farms, suppliers are testing a new way to feed cattle: moving animals from pen to pen, so the soil the cows stand on as they eat grass has a chance to recover. Healthier soil can better absorb carbon, the company said, meaning less of it will end up in the air.
At its 40,000 restaurants around the world, McDonald’s said it is working with franchisees to replace light bulbs and kitchen appliances with more energy-efficient ones. It is also in the process of using more environmentally friendly materials for its soda cups, Happy Meal boxes and burger wrappers, a shift it announced last month.
Because of the company’s size, changes made by McDonald’s could have a ripple effect across the industry, said Sheila Bonini, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund, which worked with McDonald’s to make its changes. McDonald’s beef suppliers, for example, likely sell beef to other restaurant chains.
Altogether, McDonald’s expects to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40 percent by 2030 from 2015 levels.
The Oak Brook, Illinois-based company declined to say how much it will spend to make the changes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-the-menu-for-mcdonalds-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions/2018/03/20/6c040f96-2c15-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html?utm_term=.a5aa75026569
-
Chevron, Oil Giants Request Dismissal of California Climate Case
Mar 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Kartikay Mehrotra
Federal statute prohibits California and its cities from blaming individual companies for the effects of global warming, several oil companies said in a filing asking a San Francisco judge to dismiss the case against them.
Chevron, BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Shell, defendants in a lawsuit by the state, argued that California and San Francisco can't blame five companies for the global epidemic of climate change.
Allowing the case to move forward would encroach on the U.S. government's ability to shape policy, the filing said.
The companies claim the state and city failed to allege any direct harm caused explicitly by the named defendants.
Both parties will present a tutorial March 21 on climate change to federal judge William Alsup, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The case is People of the State of California v. BP Plc, N.D. Cal., No. 17-cv-6011, motion to dismiss filed 3/20/18.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=130133851&vname=dennotallissues&fn=130133851&jd=130133851
-
Fourth Wave Environmentalism Fully Embraces Business
Mar 20, 2018 | Wall Street Journal
By Fred Krupp
American corporations began joining with environmental groups to increase sustainability nearly 30 years ago. This trend was still on the horizon in 1986 when I wrote an op-ed for this page describing an emerging style of environmentalism dedicated to problem-solving, market-based approaches, and partnerships.
Now widely known as Third Wave environmentalism, the idea first became a reality in 1990, when McDonald’s teamed up with my organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, to reduce more than 300 million pounds of solid waste by doing away with its foam-clamshell packaging. The Third Wave built on the progress of the first two: Teddy Roosevelt-era land conservation, followed by mid-20th-century antipollution laws like the Clean Air Act. In the 1990s, the advent of reliable pollution monitoring opened the door to flexible Third Wave solutions such as the U.S. cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, which causes forest-killing acid rain. Since 1990, this program has helped reduce coal-plant sulfur-dioxide emissions by more than 90% nationwide.
Market-based approaches and corporate partnerships are standard practice today. Yet too many environmentalists still regard business as the enemy, and vice versa. That may finally be changing, because an emerging wave of environmental innovation is making these partnerships more productive, and their results more precisely measurable. Call it the Fourth Wave of environmental progress: Innovation that gives people new ways to solve environmental problems.
Last year, for example, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, joined with EDF and other groups to reduce fertilizer waste on the vast network of farms from which it purchases roughly two million tons of corn each year. The move is part of Smithfield’s goal of cutting supply-chain greenhouse-gas emissions 25% by 2025. The company is the first in its industry to set such a target, and its progress is enabled by corn growers’ increasing investment in tools that help determine the most efficient ways to apply fertilizer.
The Fourth Wave not only makes invisible problems visible, it makes them solvable. EDF put sensors on Google Street View cars to measure and map leaks of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and other cities. We challenged entrepreneurs to create methane-detection units that are now being piloted in oil and gas facilities owned by Statoil , Shell and Pacific Gas & Electric . And we teamed with Google Earth Outreach to map air-pollution threats on each block in West Oakland, Calif., giving residents detailed data to help make the case for emissions reductions under California’s new air-quality law.
EDF is just one of many groups doing this kind of work. The World Resources Institute is using satellites to track deforestation in the Amazon, and uploading the data to a website that alerts local authorities and the public to fires. Retailers, consumer brands and tech companies are using blockchain to improve traceability and accountability across supply chains, from verifying the sustainability claims of the Indonesian tuna industry to managing energy trading across a solar-fed microgrid in Brooklyn. And the Nature Conservancy is working on facial-recognition technology for fish to help fishermen in Indonesia identify and track their catches. “The solutions are out there,” says the group’s chief executive, Mark Tercek. “And these innovative technologies are helping us find them, deploy them and scale them up.”
Where Third Wave partnerships tended to be one-on-one, the Fourth Wave boasts many multilateral partnerships. EDF’s work to measure methane emissions from the oil-and-gas supply chain involved scores of academic institutions and energy companies, and now we’re working with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research to derive emissions data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, sent into orbit last year. More than 400 companies have joined Walmart in its effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in its global supply chain by one billion tons—more than the total annual emissions of Germany.
The momentum is building, but we need more groups to take part. Local groups that may not have access to the latest technology deserve access to transparent data about what’s happening in their communities. I encourage environmentalists, tech innovators, business leaders and local citizens to explore the power that unlikely Fourth Wave coalitions can unleash.
In any era, those doing the hard work of solving environmental problems take advantage of the best available tools, and in this era those tools include innovations that can help drive transparency, responsibility and low-cost solutions. Technology can obviously be used for good or ill. But when sensors, machine learning and data analytics are used to shape smart policy, rein in free riders, and reward corporate responsibility, they will enable changes that help people and nature prosper.
Mr. Krupp is president of the Environmental Defense Fund.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fourth-wave-environmentalism-fully-embraces-business-1521585072?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2
-
FEMA Official Links Climate Change to Increased Threats
Mar 21, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Marc Heller
A regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday that he sees evidence of climate change in California's year-round wildfire season.
"We're seeing changes in the climate in California that have caused a significant fire season which continues, and a prolonged one," said Robert Fenton, administrator for FEMA's Region 9, covering California, Nevada, Hawaii, Arizona and the Pacific islands.
The comments prompted questions from Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) about the views held higher up in the Trump administration.
"I wonder if the administration believes climate change is real," Titus said at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing on the 2017 wildfire season, citing the removal of the term "climate change" from FEMA's latest multiyear planning document.
"And how do you think we can prepare for natural disasters if we don't acknowledge that's a significant factor in the cause of these disasters?"
Fenton said he couldn't characterize the position of the administration or FEMA Administrator Brock Long.
"I represent Region 9. I can't speak for what either Brock Long's beliefs are or this administration's beliefs," Fenton said.
Wildfire season is now year-round, Fenton said, echoing experts who've assessed growing threats to the state's forests and the wildland-urban interface.
In his testimony, Fenton said policymakers should emphasize reducing wildfire threats — and the potential for damage to homes and other buildings — through local zoning laws, establishing defensible space around buildings and thinning of vegetation, among other measures.
And while the administration has proposed a cut of $70 million to FEMA for fiscal 2019, Fenton said he has the resources he needs.
"There have to be priorities in building a budget," he said.
Yesterday's hearing focused on response and mitigation for fires on private lands that threaten buildings.
But the president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, Thomas Jenkins, said his group continues to press Congress to end the Forest Service's practice of borrowing money from non-fire-related accounts to cover climbing wildfire costs.
Jenkins said his group backs a new funding arrangement that would allow the Forest Service to tap the federal disaster cap, an idea that has faced opposition from some House Republican leaders.
Local fire departments depend in part on federal programs to help meet the cost of fighting wildfires. But reimbursements are sometimes delayed, he said.
The fire chiefs association supports legislation, H.R. 4460 from Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), to provide hazard mitigation funds to states, Jenkins said.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/03/21/stories/1060076903
Industry and Association News
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Transportation and Infrastructure News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
Add recipients
Suggested