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AM ACC 7/6/2018

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Industries Fear Worst Is Yet to Come From Trump Tariffs
Jul 5, 2018 | Bloomberg
By Mark Niquette

U.S. companies for months bemoaned the tariffs on Chinese imports that will take effect Friday. Now they fear the worst is yet to come in an escalating confrontation with Beijing over trade.
(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Energy, Agricultural and Plastics Firms Gird for Next Round of Tariffs to Drop
Jul 6, 2018 | Reuters
By Collin Eaton and Mark Weinraub

U.S. energy, agricultural and chemicals companies are girding for a summer standoff over trade as a midnight deadline approaches for Washington to impose the next round of tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods.
(ACC Mentioned) Pruitt Resigns but His Deputy Expected to Maintain Deregulatory Agenda at EPA
Jul 5, 2018 | Morning Consult
By Jacqueline Toth

Scott Pruitt’s resignation as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is unlikely to change the agency’s overall push in cutting back on environmental regulations, analysts said.
(ACC Mentioned) Chemical Production on the Upswing: 5 Growth Stocks to Buy
Jul 6, 2018 | Zacks (In Nasdaq)
By Anindya Barman

Global chemical production continued its uptrend in the second quarter with May seeing a rise in production on broad-based regional gains in output and increased capacity utilization, according to the recent monthly report from the American Chemistry Council (ACC).
(ACC Mentioned) A Brief History of How Plastic Straws Took Over the World
Jul 6, 2018 | National Geographic
By Sarah Gibbens

At the beginning of this month, Seattle became the largest U.S. city to ban plastic straws.
Scott Pruitt Steps down as EPA Head After Ethics, Management Scandals
Jul 5, 2018 | Washington Post
By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin

Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who relentlessly pursued President Trump’s promises of deregulation at the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned Thursday after controversies over his lavish spending, ethical lapses and management decisions...
How Andrew Wheeler, the New Acting E.P.A. Chief, Differs From Scott Pruitt
Jul 5, 2018 | New York Times
By Coral Davenport

The departure of Scott Pruitt, the scandal-plagued former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, means that the agency will be led in the coming months by Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s zeal to undo environmental regulations.
We’ll All Be Paying for Scott Pruitt for Ages
Jul 5, 2018 | New York Times
By Editorial Board

Just when America had all but given up hope, Scott Pruitt’s appalling reign as Environmental Protection Agency administrator is finally over.
Pruitt Drowns in the Swamp
Jul 5, 2018 | Wall Street Journal
By Editorial Board

Chalk one up for the swamp. The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.

LCSA News

Adhesive, Cleaning Product Makers Bear New Chemical Accountability
Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto

Future sales of adhesives, cleaners, motor oils, and other products may depend on providing the EPA with chemical use and exposure information.

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) EPA Rollbacks Already Touching Americans’ Lives
Jul 6, 2018 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Ellen Knickmeyer

For 37 mostly female farm-workers in California’s Central Valley, U.S. policy under Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt became personal not long after sunup one day in May 2017.
(ACC Mentioned) Sources: EPA Blocks Warnings on Cancer-Causing Chemical
Jul 6, 2018 | Politico
By Annie Snider

The Trump administration is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments, a current and a former agency official told POLITICO.
EPA to Revisit Risks of Carcinogenic Mothball Chemical
Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sylvia Carignan

The EPA wants to determine if a chemical used in mothballs is more toxic than it concluded in 1998.
Fluorochemicals in Water to Trigger Alerts Under California Plan
Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Emily C. Dooley

Water suppliers in California will have to report when they find concentrations of fluorochemicals in drinking water samples at levels much lower than what would trigger a U.S. EPA health advisory.
J&J Gets Two Talc Appeals Wins, but Broad Impact Questioned
Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Julie Steinberg

Johnson & Johnson is two-for-two in getting big Missouri talc jury verdicts overturned on appeal.
Transparency Battle Brews As Canada Ponders Chemical Law Changes
Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By James Munson

Canada is leaning toward disclosing more information about regulated substances, a direction that concerns the country’s chemical manufacturers.

Energy News

Utilities Urge EPA to Let States Choose Replacement Framework for CPP
Jul 6, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves

Utility industry groups are urging EPA to allow states to choose either a “top-down” or “bottom-up” framework for determining the level of greenhouse gas cuts that can be achieved at existing power plants under a narrow Clean Power Plan (CPP) replacement rule...

Chemical Security News

Sony Prenatal Toxic Exposure Case Revived
Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Steven M. Sellers

A California woman may proceed with claims her birth defects were caused by prenatal exposure to toxic chemicals while her mother worked at a Sony plant, the California Supreme Court ruled July 5.

Transportation and Infrastructure News - There are no clips to report at this time.

Environment News

(ACC Mentioned) Appeals Court Rejects Rehearing on Boiler Standards
Jul 5, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly

A federal appellate court has denied environmental groups' request to revisit part of a March ruling in litigation over air toxics standards for industrial boilers.
States Expected to Rely More on Monitoring in Upcoming Ozone Rule (1)
Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid

States should expect to rely more on monitoring of air pollutants rather than modeling their predicted levels to show they are meeting the current federal ozone standard.
D.C. Circuit Orders Suit over 2015 Ozone NAAQS to Resume Next Month
Jul 5, 2018 | Inside EPA
By David LaRoss

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is ordering delayed litigation over the Obama EPA's 2015 ozone standard to resume Aug. 1, the same date that the Trump administration has told the court on which it will decide whether...
EPA Slow to Enforce Conflict-of-Interest Rules in States: Court (1)
Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Chris Marr

The EPA should have imposed federal clean air plans on three states to strengthen their policies against regulatory conflicts of interest, a federal court said in a July 5 order.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Industries Fear Worst Is Yet to Come From Trump Tariffs

Jul 5, 2018 | Bloomberg

By Mark Niquette

U.S. companies for months bemoaned the tariffs on Chinese imports that will take effect Friday. Now they fear the worst is yet to come in an escalating confrontation with Beijing over trade.
Duties on $34 billion of Chinese goods will take effect just after midnight in Washington, President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to a rally in Montana on Thursday. China has promised to immediately impose retaliatory duties of a similar size on American goods.
The U.S. has also released a list of an additional $16 billion in products targeted for tariffs, and Trump suggested the final total could eventually reach $550 billion, a figure that exceeds all of China’s annual goods exports to the U.S.
Companies including General Electric Co. and trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say tariffs are the wrong way to address allegations of intellectual property theft by China, and that firms are making contingency plans should a trade war ensue.
Some businesses have tried to persuade the Trump administration to back down by saying they’d be left with no choice but to consider reducing production, firing workers and even shifting operations out of the U.S. to account for the added costs from import tariffs.
“With tariffs against China taking effect, American consumers are one step closer to feeling the full effects of a trade war,” Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said. “Reining in China’s abusive trade policies is a goal shared by many countries, but a strategy based on unilateral tariffs is the wrong approach and it has to stop.”
SEMI, which represents semiconductor companies and others in the manufacturing supply chain for the electronics industry, estimates that the initial round of tariffs will increase costs for its members by between $20 million and $35 million. The second list of $16 billion in goods -- which is more heavily focused on technology products -- could produce a hit of at least $500 million, said Jay Chittooran, a public policy manager for the group.
The American Chemistry Council estimates that the second wave of promised tariffs will affect $2.2 billion in imports of chemicals and plastics from China and $5.4 billion in U.S. exports to China from retaliatory duties, said Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade.
The Trump administration did remove some products from an initial tariffs list after companies and businesses groups objected. The goods included electric and cordless snow blowers made by New Jersey-based Snow Joe LLC, said Joseph Cohen, the company’s chief executive officer.
But the list of $16 billion in goods targeted for tariffs include Snow Joe tillers, garden cultivators and log splitters, and imposing duties only means higher prices for consumers and added cost and uncertainty for businesses, he said.‘Tough Thing’
“Tariffs are always a tough thing to look at because unfortunately the consumer does get hurt, business like mine get hurt unintentionally in the process,” Cohen said by phone.
Daniel Rogge, the chief executive officer of a closely held metal-machining equipment company in Waunakee, Wisconsin, said he may have to raise prices 5 percent to 10 percent to cope with tariffs that kick in Friday on Chinese-made tools for which there’s no U.S.-made equivalent. Tormach Inc., with about 45 employees, sells some computer-controlled milling machines, lathes and other tools subject to the tariffs.
“My fear is that all this uncertainty around the Trump administration and the trade war will result in less consumer confidence,” Rogge said.
American soybean farmers -- including from states that backed Trump in the 2016 election -- are being particularly hard hit by the retaliatory duties. China is the top export market for U.S. soybeans, accounting for almost $14 billion in sales and representing nearly a third of total U.S. soybean production in 2017, according to the American Soybean Association.Farming Pain
Farmers are already feeling the pain with canceled orders and falling commodity prices, without any promised relief, said Max Baucus, a former Democratic senator from Montana and ambassador to China. He’s co-chairman of Farmers for Free Trade, a non-profit group.
“For farmers across the country, the trade war is now getting real,” Baucus said in a statement.
General Electric, one the largest U.S. employers and exporters, tried unsuccessfully to have 34 product lines removed from the list of goods targeted for tariffs. The company has said imposing tariffs on products such as aviation and medical parts could hit American operations and jobs -- including its Wisconsin-based facilities that employ 6,000 people.
“We remain concerned that these tariffs could make it harder for U.S. manufacturers to compete in the global economy, and will shrink rather than expand U.S. exports,” the company said in a statement. “We will work with the administration to minimize potential impact to our businesses.”
Companies and trade groups can submit comments on the list of $16 billion in goods targeted for tariffs and appear at hearing set for July 24 in Washington.
Still, there aren’t high hopes the administration will change its approach, Brzytwa of the American Chemistry Council said.
“There’s a viewpoint that’s shared across the government, and certainly at the White House, that there’s going to be pain that U.S. industry is going to have to suffer in order to change China’s behavior,” Brzytwa said by phone. “We think that you can change China’s behavior without shooting yourself in the foot.”
— With assistance by Uliana Pavlova(Updates with Trump comments from second paragraph.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-05/u-s-industries-fear-worst-is-yet-to-come-from-trump-s-tariffs

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(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Energy, Agricultural and Plastics Firms Gird for Next Round of Tariffs to Drop

Jul 6, 2018 | Reuters

By Collin Eaton and Mark Weinraub

U.S. energy, agricultural and chemicals companies are girding for a summer standoff over trade as a midnight deadline approaches for Washington to impose the next round of tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods.
Industry lobbying efforts appear to have failed to convince the Trump administration to put off Friday’s 25 percent tariffs on $34 billion worth of mostly tech and manufacturing goods from China. Earlier this year, the United States levied tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and elsewhere.
Lobbying efforts are now focused on convincing President Donald Trump to not put tariffs on a second list of mainly energy, plastics and chemicals worth about $16 billion, said industry officials.
China has vowed to respond to any new tariffs, threatening to further escalate the trade conflict between the world’s two largest economies.
The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas producers, backed a bill that would have Congress vet future tariffs proposed on national security grounds. The bill has stalled in the Senate.
“We’ve had meetings with members of Congress to press the issue,” said Lee Fuller, a vice president at oil and gas trade group Independent Petroleum Association of America. It is requesting the administration “look at better alternatives than they have so far.”
The IPAA favors granting more tariff exclusions to products not typically made in the United States, including certain specialty steel used in oil drilling.
China’s list of goods facing retaliatory tariffs include U.S. crude oil, plastics and chemicals, all industries that have rapidly expanded using abundant U.S. shale oil and natural gas to drive exports to China.
“I put millions of dollars into equipment and infrastructure on the basis of exporting a heck of a lot more to China. I’m at risk,” said Marc Levine, chief executive of Plantgistix LLC, a Texas-based plastics resin blender, packager and shipper.
If China goes ahead with tariffs on U.S. plastics, it “could have a very clear negative effect on resin producers and others here to support the huge increase in production - railroads, truckers, pallet manufacturers and ocean carriers,” Levine said.
Chinese retaliatory tariffs on $5.4 billion worth of U.S. chemicals goods “are direct hits” on recent production expansions, said Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council.
“If those come into effect, we’ll have to close down plants and jobs will be at issue,” he said.
The ACC opposes the Trump administration’s plan to put tariffs on $2.2 billion worth of Chinese plastics, Brzytwa said, saying: “We didn’t ask for that.”
Agriculture lobbyists have resigned themselves to tariffs from China, the largest buyer of U.S. agriculture commodities, following the imposition of tariffs earlier this week by the European Union, Canada and Mexico.
“We’re primarily battening down the proverbial hatches ... and hoping the administration will throw that Hail Mary for us,” American Soybean Association spokeswoman Wendy Brannen said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-energy/u-s-energy-agricultural-and-plastics-firms-gird-for-next-round-of-tariffs-to-drop-idUSKBN1JV35M

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(ACC Mentioned) Pruitt Resigns but His Deputy Expected to Maintain Deregulatory Agenda at EPA

Jul 5, 2018 | Morning Consult

By Jacqueline Toth

Scott Pruitt’s resignation as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is unlikely to change the agency’s overall push in cutting back on environmental regulations, analysts said.
President Donald Trump announced Pruitt’s resignation on Twitter on Thursday and said his deputy, Andrew Wheeler, will take over as acting administrator as of Monday.
The resignation came after months of ethical and spending controversies took an increasing toll on Pruitt’s image and put the administration’s press team on the defensive.
“Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this,” Trump tweeted Thursday afternoon. “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda.”
Environmental groups are not likely to see a sudden shift in the EPA’s agenda even with Pruitt’s departure. Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, is expected to carry forward Pruitt’s deregulatory push for the moment, though it is still unclear whether Trump will nominate him as EPA administrator.
“I think we’ll see a change in style, but I don’t really think we’ll see a change in direction,” Jeff Holmstead, a partner with law firm Bracewell LLP who led the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation from 2001-05, said in a phone interview Thursday.
Looking at the larger regulatory reform initiatives at the EPA, he said: “I think Andy’s fully on board.”
Beyond Wheeler, the EPA will still retain many top agency officials the Senate confirmed or the agency hired — several of whom came from or represented the industries they now regulate. Nancy Beck, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA office that handles pesticide and chemical issues, for example, was a senior director at the chemical lobbying group American Chemistry Council prior to joining the administration. And air chief Bill Wehrum, now on his second turn at the agency, was most recently a partner with Hunton and Williams LLP, which in April became Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP after a merger, lobbying the administration on air issues on behalf of oil and gas interests.
In recent months, Pruitt came under an increasing number of internal and congressional investigations into potential ethical missteps, including allegations of misused taxpayer money on travel and security.
EPA press staff repeatedly maintained that Pruitt faced an “unprecedented” number of threats that merited increased spending on security measures, including taking first-class flights on official business trips.
But internal EPA memos obtained by Senate Democrats suggested the specific threats identified were less credible than the agency maintained. One memo described by Democrats indicated the EPA Office of Homeland Security determined no specific or credible threats were made against the administrator. The agency later parted ways with the employee who signed off on the memo, according to media reports.
Under Pruitt’s administration of the EPA, the agency spent over $43,000 to have a private phone booth installed in Pruitt’s personal office. And last June, he spent more than $120,000 of public money for himself, staff and security to travel on a work trip to Italy, in some cases taking premium-class flights, according to agency records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll of 1,991 registered voters from April 26 to May 1 found 53 percent believed Pruitt should be removed as head of the EPA based on his ethical lapses, while 12 percent disagreed. Among Republicans, 38 percent thought Pruitt should be removed, while 40 percent of Republicans, a plurality, weren’t sure or had no opinion.
Trump had long stood behind Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who perhaps more than any other agency head has implemented deregulatory actions to change or scrap Obama-era rulemakings, with the goal of increasing U.S. energy production and supporting businesses.
As directed by Trump, Pruitt started processes at the EPA to roll back big-ticket regulations like the Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan. The agency is now moving to more narrowly define WOTUS under the Clean Water Act, limiting the federal government’s jurisdiction over American waters for permitting purposes, and to replace the Clean Power Plan, which was to require existing fossil fuel-fired power plants to curb their carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent under 2005 levels by 2030.
Pruitt also moved to revise, rescind or delay compliance requirements with a slew of other rules, including a regulation that set first-ever methane emissions limits on new and modified onshore oil and gas production facilities, and another that updated 1980s-era limits on toxic waste dumping from steam electric power plants.
Environmental groups have brought legal challenges to the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions at every turn, usually asserting the rollbacks are arbitrary or capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. Optimistic voices in the environmental community maintain that many of the rollbacks at the EPA and Interior Department, for instance, have been too hastily established and will not hold up upon court review.
Mary Anne Hitt, director of the environmental group Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said in a phone interview Thursday that Sierra Club expects Wheeler would continue forward with Pruitt’s “wish list of the fossil fuel industry.”
“We’re not going to let the pressure off for a minute” in defense of clean air and water standards and on public records access, she said.
Also, Holmstead said he did not expect the leadership transition to Wheeler to impact the lawsuits, since the litigation is run by Department of Justice lawyers.
https://morningconsult.com/2018/07/05/pruitt-resigns-but-his-deputy-expected-to-maintain-deregulatory-agenda-at-epa/

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(ACC Mentioned) Chemical Production on the Upswing: 5 Growth Stocks to Buy

Jul 6, 2018 | Zacks (In Nasdaq)

By Anindya Barman

Global chemical production continued its uptrend in the second quarter with May seeing a rise in production on broad-based regional gains in output and increased capacity utilization, according to the recent monthly report from the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

Growth Accelerates in May

The chemical industry trade group said that the Global Chemical Production Regional Index (CPRI) rose 0.9% in May on a monthly comparison basis, an improvement from a 0.4% gain in April. The gains in chemical production in the second quarter also marks a turnaround from a decline in output through the first quarter.

The Global CPRI, which is measured using a three-month moving average, measures chemical production volumes for 33 major nations, sub-regions and regions. It is comparable to the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) production indices.

The ACC also noted that the Global CPRI went up 1.8% year over year on a three-month moving average basis. Capacity utilization for the global chemical industry moved up 0.4 percentage points to 84.9% in May.

The results were favorable on a product basis in May. Growth was witnessed in agricultural chemicals, basic chemicals, specialty chemicals and consumer products.

By regions, gains in production were seen across North America (up 0.6%), Europe (up 0.5%), Latin America (up 0.2%), Africa & the Middle East (up 0.3%) and the Asia-Pacific (up 1.1%) in the reported month.

Per the ACC, chemical production in the United States went up 0.7% in May. The trade group expects higher demand across light vehicles and housing markets, an upturn in U.S. manufacturing, improving export markets and favorable shale gas economics to contribute to the growth of the U.S. chemical industry this year.

The ACC sees U.S. chemical production (excluding pharmaceuticals) to rise 3.4% in 2018. It expects production to continue to expand across all regions of the United States this year, with the Gulf Coast region - the epicenter of the U.S. specialty chemicals and petrochemicals industry - seeing the strongest gains. While the automotive sector is expected to remain at high levels, steady recovery in housing is expected to continue in 2018.
Chemical Industry in Fine Shape

The chemical industry continues its positive run this year, sustaining the momentum witnessed in 2017. The industry's upswing is backed by a resurgent global economy and strength across major end-markets, such as construction and automotive.

Improving fundamentals in the energy space - another key market for chemicals - has been a significant tailwind for the chemical industry. A rebound in crude oil prices has led to a recovery in demand for chemicals in the energy market and a favorable pricing environment for chemical products as chemical prices essentially move in tandem with oil prices.

The favorable Zacks Industry Rank of 53 carried by the Zacks Chemicals Diversified industry is a testimony to the fact that the chemical industry is in fine fettle. The favorable rank places the industry in the top 21% of the 250+ groups enlisted. Our back testing shows that the top 50% of the Zacks ranked industries outperforms the bottom half by a factor of more than two to one.

Despite some headwinds including a spike in raw materials costs as a result of short supply, softness in agricultural commodity prices due to persistent grain glut and trade war risks, the industry's upturn is expected to continue through the remainder of 2018 as the fundamental driving factors remain firmly in place. Sustained demand strength across automotive and construction markets, a rebound in energy and investment on capacity expansion are expected to keep the industry on a positive growth trajectory.

5 Stocks to Ride the Industry's Upturn

The chemical industry has gotten its mojo back after being stuck in a rut for a spell, making it an attractive investment proposition. As the industry's momentum is expected to continue in the back half of the year it would be prudent to invest in stocks in the space with compelling growth prospects.

Growth investors look for stocks with aggressive earnings or revenue growth potential, which should lead to higher stock prices. Here we put a spotlight on chemical stocks that are poised for strong growth. With the help of our Style Score System , we have picked five stand-out stocks that have excellent prospects and might offer solid investment returns.

Our research shows that stocks with Growth Style Score of A or B when combined with Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy) offer the best investment opportunities in the growth investing space. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank stocks here .
The Chemours CompanyCC

Delaware-based Chemours sports a Zacks Rank #1 and a Growth Score of B. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings for 2018 is currently pegged at $5.69, reflecting an expected year-over-year growth of 48.9%. Chemours also has a long-term expected earnings per share (EPS) growth rate of 15.5%.

Annual estimates for Chemours have also moved north over the past 60 days, reflecting analysts' confidence on the stock. Over this period, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2018 and 2019 for the company have increased by around 4.6% and 5.2%, respectively.

Methanex CorporationMEOH

Methanex, based in Canada, is another attractive choice with a Zacks Rank #1 and a Growth Score of B. The company has expected earnings growth of 36.5% for 2018. It also has a long-term expected EPS growth rate of 15%.

The estimates for both 2018 and 2019 for the company have also increased by around 7% and 3.6%, respectively, over the last 60 days.

KMG Chemicals, Inc.KMG

Our next pick in the space is Texas-based KMG sporting a Zacks Rank #1 and a Growth Score of B. It has expected earnings growth of 76.1% for fiscal 2018. The company delivered positive earnings surprise in each of the trailing four quarters with an average beat of 33.2%. The stock also has a long-term expected EPS growth rate of 28.5%.

W. R. Grace & Co.GRA

Maryland-based W. R. Grace has a Zacks Rank #2 and a Growth Score of A. The company delivered positive earnings surprise in each of the trailing four quarters with an average beat of 8.4%. It has expected earnings growth of 14.4% for 2018. The company also has a long-term expected EPS growth rate of 12%.

LyondellBasell Industries N.V.LYB

Based in Netherlands, LyondellBasell has a Zacks Rank #2 and a Growth Score of B. The company has expected earnings growth of 10% for 2018. LyondellBasell also delivered positive earnings surprise in three of the trailing four quarters with an average beat of 5.7%.

The estimates for both 2018 and 2019 for the company have also increased by around 1.1% and 2%, respectively, over the last 60 days. The company also has a long-term expected EPS growth rate of 9%.

Will You Make a Fortune on the Shift to Electric Cars?
Here's another stock idea to consider. Much like petroleum 150 years ago, lithium power may soon shake the world, creating millionaires and reshaping geo-politics. Soon electric vehicles (EVs) may be cheaper than gas guzzlers. Some are already reaching 265 miles on a single charge.

With battery prices plummeting and charging stations set to multiply, one company stands out as the #1 stock to buy according to Zacks research.

It's not the one you think.
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/chemical-production-on-the-upswing-5-growth-stocks-to-buy-cm987753

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(ACC Mentioned) A Brief History of How Plastic Straws Took Over the World

Jul 6, 2018 | National Geographic

By Sarah Gibbens

At the beginning of this month, Seattle became the largest U.S. city to ban plastic straws.
They’re not alone.
McDonald’s recently announced it will ban plastic straws at its U.K. and Ireland restaurants. Bon Appétit Management, a food service company with 1,000 U.S. locations, announced last May it will phase out plastic straws. Alaska Airlines will be one of the first airlines to phase out plastic straws and stirrers, in part thanks to an environmentally conscious girl scout.
These groups are responding to public outcry demanding action against a product that, on one hand, seems very simple—but which is harming the world’s oceans, experts warn.
In just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches.
Eight million tons of plastic flow into the ocean every year, and straws comprise just 0.025 percent of that.

But that hasn't stopped the straw from becoming the major focus of recent environmental campaigns. This is in part because, for most able-bodied people, the straw is something you can easily do without. Eliminating plastic straw usage rarely requires a drastic change in behavior.

But if they're so easy to do without, how did they become so ubiquitous in the first place?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/07/news-plastic-drinking-straw-history-ban/

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Scott Pruitt Steps down as EPA Head After Ethics, Management Scandals

Jul 5, 2018 | Washington Post

By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin

Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who relentlessly pursued President Trump’s promises of deregulation at the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned Thursday after controversies over his lavish spending, ethical lapses and management decisions eroded the president’s confidence in one of his most ardent Cabinet members.
Pruitt’s reputation as a dogged deregulator and outspoken booster of the president allowed him to weather ethics scandals in recent months, including questions about taxpayer-funded first-class travel, a discounted condominium rental from the wife of a D.C. lobbyist and the installation of a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office.
But revelations about his behavior continued to mount, including reports that he repeatedly enlisted subordinates to help him search for housing, book personal travel and help search for a six-figure job for his wife. That quest included setting up a call with Chick-fil-A executives in which he discussed his wife’s becoming a franchisee, as well as outreach to a conservative judicial group that eventually hired Marlyn Pruitt.
In recent weeks, an exodus of trusted staffers left Pruitt increasingly isolated, and some Republican lawmakers wearied of defending him. Investigators on Capitol Hill had summoned current and former EPA aides for questioning as part of more than a dozen federal inquiries into Pruitt’s spending and management of the agency.
On Thursday, the White House informed Pruitt, who was not in the office, that he had to submit his resignation, according to two individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. President Trump did not speak to the administrator directly, according to a third individual, but instead called Pruitt’s top deputy, Andrew Wheeler, to inform him that he would be taking the helm of the agency.
Soon after, Trump announced in a two-part tweet that he had accepted Pruitt’s resignation. “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this,” Trump wrote.
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who traveled with Trump to a political rally in Montana on Thursday, had for months privately groused about Pruitt’s conduct and had pushed for his removal during West Wing meetings, according to White House officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. The accumulation of several new revelations about Pruitt’s conduct allowed Kelly to make a convincing case to Trump on Thursday’s flight out West that the stories about the administrator’s behavior would not stop, according to a senior administration official.
In a resignation letter released by the EPA, Pruitt wrote that it had been “a blessing” to serve under Trump and undertake “transformative work” at the EPA. But he added that “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.”
He signed the letter, “Your Faithful Friend, Scott Pruitt.”
Trump later told reporters aboard Air Force One that there was “no final straw” that led to Pruitt’s departure, and that the move, which he said was of Pruitt’s volition, had been in the works for “a couple of days.”
“He came to me and said, ‘I have such great confidence in the administration. I don’t want to be a distraction,’ ” Trump said. “And I think Scott felt that he was a distraction.”
Wheeler, a former Senate staffer and EPA employee who spent a decade representing coal, mining and other energy companies, will become acting administrator on Monday, Trump tweeted.
Democrats and environmentalists hailed Pruitt’s exit, even as they viewed Wheeler’s rise warily and warned that he would continue many of the same policies. Sen. Thomas R. Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said Thursday that Pruitt’s “brazen abuse of his position” had surprised even his political opponents.
“We had a good idea what he was going to be on the policy side. We had no idea how morally bereft he would be,” Carper told reporters. “He was all the things this administration said it was opposed to. . . . He’s done a lot of damage. It can be reversed, but it’s going to take some time.”
The chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican John Barrasso (Wyo.), said that Trump “made the right decision in accepting Pruitt’s resignation. “It has become increasingly challenging for the EPA to carry out its mission with the administrator under investigation.”
During his roughly 16 months in office, Pruitt took steps to reverse more than a dozen major Obama-era regulations and overhauled key elements of the agency’s approach to scientific research. For months, he had ranked as a personal confidant and influential policy adviserto the president, commiserating with Trump over negative news coverage while praising the commander in chief for his intelligence and political acumen.
As scrutiny of Pruitt grew in recent months, Trump initially stood by his EPA chief. The president tweeted in early April that Pruitt was “doing a great job,” despite revelations about costly travel funded by taxpayers. Trump publicly defended Pruitt and praised his job performance as recently as early June.
Pruitt also endured contentious hearings recently on Capitol Hill during which he admitted little culpability as lawmakers in both parties grilled him about his ethics and spending decisions.
But the EPA leader continued to be dogged by bad publicity, as alleged spending excesses were described by current and former aides to congressional lawmakers.
The Washington Post reported that a lobbyist had helped arrange Pruitt’s $100,000 trip last December to Morocco, only to later receive a $40,000-a-month contract to promote that country’s interests.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed the same pattern for a visit the administrator wanted to make to Australia. That travel was canceled at the last minute, as was a trip to Israel, which had been lined up in part by casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
The documents contained emails that showed Pruitt used his official position to line up a call with an executive at Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A, during which he raised the prospect of his wife’s getting one of the company’s coveted franchises.
Combative and unapologetic, Pruitt spoke with the rapid-fire delivery of a trial lawyer when outlining his policy positions or addressing audiences. While serving as Oklahoma’s attorney general, he made a name for himself in conservative circles by suing the EPA 14 times. And after taking over the EPA, he spent the bulk of his time meeting privately with industry leaders regulated by his agency, including top executives from the fossil fuel, agriculture and chemical sectors.
In the early months of the Trump administration, when other Cabinet members were struggling to recruit deputies and navigate their departments, Pruitt was already unraveling federal restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions and toxic-waste discharge from coal-fired power plants. He declined to ban a commonly used pesticide linked to potential neurological damage in fetuses, as the agency had previously proposed.
And he pushed Trump to announce a U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Paris climate accord. He questioned not only the science of climate change but also the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the primary contributor to global warming. He fundamentally altered the makeup of key scientific advisory boards, adding industry voices and barring scientists who had received EPA grants.
The moves, coupled with Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy, made him a lightning rod for controversy. He refused to publish his schedule in advance or to release transcripts of speeches he delivered in front of industry groups. He installed biometric locks on doors and constructed a soundproof phone booth for his use.
From his third-floor, wood-paneled suite, Pruitt largely insulated himself from career staffers, many of whom had worked to craft the policies he sought to dismantle. Meanwhile, through buyouts and a hiring freeze, he proudly shrank the EPA’s workforce to levels not seen since the 1980s.
Pruitt unrelentingly steered the agency in the direction long sought by those being regulated, a shift he defended as providing regulatory certainty, handing greater power to states and saving companies money in compliance costs.
Critics described his approach as an assault on the agency’s mission, its employees and on science. Supporters applauded his willingness to wrangle an agency many conservatives view as prone to overreach and, as Pruitt recently said, “a bastion of liberalism.”
The administrator’s fervor and stamina elevated his profile significantly. At one point, Pruitt was viewed as a contender for attorney general if the president decided to fire Jeff Sessions, and he spoke privately with others about climbing the ranks of Trump’s Cabinet.
Pruitt, who had considered running for Oklahoma governor before joining the administration, made a point of meeting with GOP activists and addressing large organizations. He delivered the keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual gathering in February, a slot often reserved for presidential contenders.
When asked at CPAC what stood out as his proudest moment as head of the EPA, he cited Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement — a decision that was a win for Pruitt over Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
“The president showed tremendous fortitude, tremendous courage to stand in the Rose Garden in June and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to put America first,’ ” Pruitt told the audience.
In recent months, however, Pruitt’s favor and credibility within the administration began to unravel. Even as he continued to announce far-reaching actions to scrap or scale back regulations, scrutiny of his ethics and profligate spending began to overshadow his actual policies.
In February, The Washington Post detailed Pruitt’s routine use of first-class air travel and his stays in high-end hotels on dozens of trips during his first year, which racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded expenses. While the EPA said such travel arrangements were necessary, given the elevated number of threats to Pruitt’s security, the revelations led to a wave of criticism about his spending and inquiries from lawmakers and government investigators.
Further allegations of ethical misconduct followed.
They included news that the EPA leader’s office had circumvented the White House and used an obscure provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act to give large pay increases this spring to two top aides, staffers who had come with him from Oklahoma. In an interview with Fox News in early April, Pruitt claimed to have “corrected” the decision and said he had not been aware of the raises beforehand. Three administration officials subsequently said that Pruitt had endorsed the raises, though other staff members had overseen the paperwork.
Other accusations emerged: that the EPA had considered a roughly $100,000-a-month contract to lease a private jet for Pruitt; that Pruitt’s director of scheduling was also house-hunting for him on the side; that after leaving his Capitol Hill rental last summer, Pruitt ran the EPA from Oklahoma for a month; that he wanted his security detail to use emergency lights and sirens to get him around Washington faster, including to dinner at a favorite French restaurant; that he had upgraded to a larger, customized — and more expensive — SUV than his predecessor had used; that he reassigned or dismissed a handful of senior employees who had questioned his spending on travel, furnishings and more.
Internally, Pruitt’s inner circle fractured between aides he had recruited from his Oklahoma days and conservatives who had worked in Washington for years and fought unsuccessfully to contain the administrator’s spending excesses.
As the headlines piled up — prompting Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) to tweet that Pruitt’s “corruption scandals are an embarrassment to the Administration” — top aides strategized about how to protect their boss’s job. Industry allies rallied to his side.
Several congressional Republicans, as well as some governors, conservative groups and pundits, defended the embattled EPA chief. Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) publicly backed Pruitt, as did governors Matt Bevin of Kentucky, Phil Bryant of Mississippi and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Bevin tweeted that the administrator should “ignore the nattering nabobs of negativism,” invoking a phrase Vice President Spiro T. Agnew used in 1969 while blasting the media.
But as weeks passed and more allegations mounted, at least half a dozen of Pruitt’s closest aides, including several who came with him from Oklahoma, left the agency. His support on Capitol Hill eroded, and few industry representatives rushed to his defense.
Just as he has with a few other Cabinet members he eventually dismissed, Trump at first stuck up for Pruitt. “He’s been very courageous,” the president told reporters April 5 on a flight back from West Virginia. “I can tell you, at EPA, he’s done a fantastic job.”
On June 6, he praised Pruitt during a meeting at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “EPA is doing really, really well. And, you know, somebody has to say that about you a little bit. You know that, Scott,” Trump said as Pruitt looked on. “People are really impressed with the job that’s being done at the EPA.”
On the night before offering his resignation, Pruitt attended a gathering for military families on the White House lawn. A band played. Families spread blankets on the grass, as fireworks exploded over the nation’s capital.
Less than 24 hours later, the president decided that his most controversial Cabinet member had to go.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-epa-head-steps-down-after-wave-of-ethics-management-scandals/2018/07/05/39f4251a-6813-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html?utm_term=.4209a01f46ed

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How Andrew Wheeler, the New Acting E.P.A. Chief, Differs From Scott Pruitt

Jul 5, 2018 | New York Times

By Coral Davenport

The departure of Scott Pruitt, the scandal-plagued former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, means that the agency will be led in the coming months by Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s zeal to undo environmental regulations.
But unlike Mr. Pruitt — who had come to Washington as an outsider and aspiring politician, only to get caught up in a swirl of controversy over his costly first-class travel and security spending — Mr. Wheeler is viewed as a consummate Washington insider who avoids the limelight and has spent years effectively navigating the rules.
For that reason, Mr. Wheeler’s friends and critics alike say, he could ultimately prove to be more adept than his controversial former boss in the job.
“Many worry Wheeler will be more effective at implementing Trump’s anti-environmental agenda than Pruitt was,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser, in the wake of the departure.
On Thursday afternoon, President Trump tweeted that he had accepted Mr. Pruitt’s resignation and that Mr. Wheeler would take over as acting director of the agency. Mr. Wheeler is expected to serve in an acting capacity as head of the E.P.A. until President Trump nominates a new agency chief, who must then be confirmed by the Senate. That process could take months and potentially stretch past the November midterm elections.
It is possible that Mr. Trump could nominate Mr. Wheeler to the top job. However, several other names have also been mentioned as possible successors to Mr. Pruitt, including Donald Van der Vaart, a former senior environmental official in North Carolina. Mr. Pruitt selected him to serve on an E.P.A. scientific advisory board.
In a June interview with the Washington Examiner, Mr. Wheeler said he had no interest in taking over his boss’s job. “I could have put my hat in the ring for the administrator. I wasn’t interested in that. I am still not interested in that,” he said.
Mr. Wheeler will now step in as the acting chief of an agency that has been central to President Trump’s signature campaign promise of stripping away regulations.
During Mr. Pruitt’s tenure, the former Oklahoma attorney general gained headlines for his aggressive push to roll back dozens of regulations governing clean air and water, and fighting against Obama-era rules focused on limiting carbon emissions. In recent months, however, Mr. Pruitt’s policy efforts were overshadowed by a running stream of alleged ethics violations.
Mr. Wheeler tends to eschew the limelight, his colleagues said. His career was built around quietly and incrementally advancing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, chiefly by weakening or delaying federal regulations.
Mr. Wheeler has worked in Washington for more than 20 years. He is a former chief of staff to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the conservative Republican who has become known as Washington’s most prominent denialist of the established science of human-caused climate change.
Mr. Wheeler also worked at the E.P.A. during the administration of the first President George Bush. More recently, he lobbied for the coal company Murray Energy, whose chief executive, Robert E. Murray, has been a supporter and adviser of Mr. Trump’s.
Environmentalists see in Mr. Wheeler a powerful ally of polluting industries and enemy of clean air and water. “Like Pruitt, this veteran coal lobby lobbyist has shown only disdain for the E.P.A.’s vital mission to protect Americans’ health and our environment,” said Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director for government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
Mr. Wheeler has appeared to embrace criticism from the left that he is an ally of fossil fuels, according to email exchanges obtained by the Sierra Club under a Freedom of Information Act request. Last October, soon after Mr. Wheeler was nominated to his position as deputy director, he sent an email to Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, a longtime friend, with a headline from The Onion, the satirical publication: “EPA Promotes Pulsating Black Sludge to Deputy Director.”
“Welcome, pulsating black sludge,” Mr. Jackson responded. “I guess I’m going to have to get the cleaning crews to come in more often.”
Washington insiders describe Mr. Wheeler as well positioned to pursue Mr. Trump’s agenda as effectively as Mr. Pruitt, or even more so, by moving more slowly but in ways likelier to withstand legal challenge.
“Andrew is one of the most well-known, well-respected policy professionals in Washington on energy and environment — he knows everybody,” said Matthew Dempsey, a former colleague of Mr. Wheeler’s in Mr. Inhofe’s office, who currently works for a consulting firm representing the oil and gas industry.
“He will be similar to Pruitt in terms of the agenda — he understands the Trump administration and will carry out the agenda,” said Mr. Dempsey. “But he’s been around Washington a long time. He knows how D.C. works and he does things by the book.”
The departure of Mr. Pruitt, a former protégé of Mr. Inhofe’s, and rise of Mr. Wheeler represents the powerful influence of Mr. Inhofe on the Trump administration’s environment policy. Mr. Inhofe had long championed Mr. Pruitt’s political career, and it was speculated that Mr. Pruitt would one day run for Mr. Inhofe’s Senate seat in Oklahoma.
Mr. Wheeler is one of a group of former Inhofe staff members, loosely known as the “Inhofe mafia,” who now work in energy and environment policy positions across the Trump administration and in top Washington lobbying firms.
Mr. Inhofe cheered Mr. Wheeler’s arrival at the E.P.A. earlier this year. “Andy Wheeler is the most competent and qualified person for the job he’s been asked to fulfill,” Mr. Inhofe said.
Mr. Wheeler’s rise also represents a victory of influence for another of his former bosses, the coal magnate and Trump adviser Robert Murray.
A few weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Murray, who contributed $300,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration fund, presented the president with a wish list of regulations that he wanted to see lifted from the coal industry. In particular, Mr. Murray has pushed Mr. Trump to undo President Barack Obama’s regulations designed to curb planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, a leading cause of global warming. Mr. Trump then assigned Mr. Pruitt to roll back those rules.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Inhofe and Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Wheeler has questioned the established science of human-caused climate change. In 2010, Mr. Wheeler criticized the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific authority on global warming, writing in a blog post that it has “has functioned more as a political body than a scientific body.”
However, some Democrats have offered at least modest praise of Mr. Wheeler — as he himself noted in another email exchange with Mr. Jackson.
After his November confirmation hearing, Mr. Wheeler emailed Mr. Jackson. “Everyone seemed to think I did a really good job, including Inhofe, Capito and Mr. Murray. Carper and Cardin both said really nice things about me,” he wrote.
He was apparently referring to Democratic Senators Thomas Carper of Delaware and Ben Cardin of Maryland, both of whom are advocates of strong environmental regulations, and Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican from West Virginia, who is one of Washington’s strongest advocates for the coal industry.
In a statement at Mr. Wheeler’s confirmation hearing, Mr. Carper said, “As a longtime staffer for the senior senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Wheeler was someone with whom we didn’t always agree on each and every policy, but he did prove to be one with whom we were able to work together on policies that we did agree on.” However, Mr. Carper did eventually vote against Mr. Wheeler’s confirmation to his position as deputy.
While it is likely that Mr. Wheeler, as the acting E.P.A. chief, will be effective in implementing Mr. Trump’s deregulatory agenda, one potential obstacle to his being nominated by the president to fill the job permanently is his record of opposing Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign. In a Facebook post on February 29, 2016, Mr. Wheeler penned a strong critique of Mr. Trump that has since been deleted.
“If you are considering voting for Donald Trump please think about the following: 1) no one really knows what his political beliefs are, he has donated to both parties over the years and to people with completely different views. 2) he has demonstrated through the debates and interviews that he doesn’t understand how government works,” he wrote. Mr. Wheeler’s post also suggested that, as a businessman, Mr. Trump “really hasn’t been that successful.”
Neither Mr. Wheeler nor two White House spokesmen responded to requests for comment about the Facebook post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/climate/wheeler-epa-pruitt.html

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We’ll All Be Paying for Scott Pruitt for Ages

Jul 5, 2018 | New York Times

By Editorial Board

Just when America had all but given up hope, Scott Pruitt’s appalling reign as Environmental Protection Agency administrator is finally over. Thursday afternoon, Mr. Pruitt delivered President Trump his resignation letter, replete with references to “God’s providence” and how “blessed” he was to have had the opportunity to serve not the nation, but this president. He sadly noted that “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.” And so Mr. Pruitt heads for the door, leaving behind a dark, oily stain on the office that he has spent the past year and a half vigorously defiling.
Mr. Pruitt’s departure did not come as a total shock. Word around Washington in recent weeks was that the stench of corruption wafting from E.P.A. headquarters was getting to be too much even for Mr. Trump. Someone in the White House no doubt noticed that, with the midterms approaching, Mr. Pruitt was not playing well with any voter who retains some common sense. In an administration characterized by extreme swampiness and ethical flexibility, the E.P.A. chief had nonetheless distinguished himself with pathological grifting to the point that even some Republican lawmakers and reliably conservative commentators had begun publicly slapping him.
Still, for months, Mr. Pruitt held on to his job as the embarrassing revelations piled up like so many used mattresses: his profligate spending on posh travel, over-the-top security, and ridiculous, self-aggrandizing office supplies; his directing agency staffers to run his personal errands, including finding him a place to live in Washington and combing hotels for his favorite skin cream; his attempts to score his wife a high-paying job, possibly involving chicken nuggets and waffle fries. Every week seemed to bring fresh examples of Mr. Pruitt’s shameless and yet surprisingly petty misuse of his office.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to tolerate Mr. Pruitt’s chicanery was not surprising. The two men share an environmental philosophy that may be roughly summarized as “industry over science,” and, for all his flaws, Mr. Pruitt was tireless in the crusade to dismantle environmental protections. His greatest hits include playing a key role in getting Mr. Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement; pushing the repeal of numerous Obama-era regulations, including those to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and automobiles; and instituting a policy that barred scientists who receive federal grants from serving on the E.P.A.’s advisory committees, while simultaneously welcoming corporate representatives onto these panels. Just last month, The Times reported that the E.P.A. had decided for the most part not to consider exposure to chemicals through the air, water or ground when it is evaluating whether they should be regulated or banned under a bipartisan law passed in 2016.
Impressively, Mr. Pruitt was both a sneak and a thug. Self-aware enough to realize that some of what he was up to — especially his snuggling up to certain industry interests — might be viewed negatively by some, he took pains to keep his activities under wraps. Aides have accused him of keeping secret schedules and calendars, employing multiple email accounts and conducting important agency business on phones other than his own to ensure that the calls wouldn’t show up on official logs.
At the same time, staff members who tried to curtail some of Mr. Pruitt’s more egregious behavior were demoted, reassigned or fired.
Upon accepting Mr. Pruitt’s resignation, Mr. Trump felt moved to tweet supportively: “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.” Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Trump said Mr. Pruitt was a “terrific guy.” The president said the decision to leave was Mr. Pruitt’s, but then noted, “We’ve been talking about it for a little while.”
The daily drumbeat of toxic publicity finally turned the president against his E.P.A. chief. “It’s one thing after another with this guy,” Mr. Trump told a friend recently.EDITORS’ PICKSAmericans Explain Why They Are Having Fewer BabiesUntrodden Broadway: The Hidden Gems of a World-Famous StreetThe Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar
Not that Mr. Trump is likely to lose much sleep over Mr. Pruitt’s departure. Mr. Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler, is expected to stay the antiregulatory course, albeit presumably without drawing as many headlines, by avoiding his predecessor’s penchant for scandal. Mr. Wheeler is a former coal industry lobbyist and a former aide to Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has denied the existence of climate change and has long opposed legislation to address that global problem.
One task facing Mr. Wheeler — who publicly opposed Mr. Trump during the Republican presidential primaries — is to rebuild morale at the E.P.A. Much of the agency’s career staff has felt under siege, not just because of Mr. Pruitt’s policies and bullying behavior, but also because of his contempt for science and professional expertise. When President Trump’s tweet appeared announcing the Pruitt resignation, there were reports of cheering in the hallways.
In the end, Mr. Pruitt was driven from office for having abused his position so outrageously. But if Mr. Trump continues down the same policy paths, as seems likely, Mr. Pruitt’s more lasting legacy, along with the president’s, will be an overheated planet and shortened life spans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/scott-pruitt-epa-resigns-corruption.html

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Pruitt Drowns in the Swamp

Jul 5, 2018 | Wall Street Journal

By Editorial Board

Chalk one up for the swamp. The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.
President Trump announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon that he had accepted Mr. Pruitt’s resignation. Mr. Pruitt cited the “unrelenting attacks on me personally” and his family that have “taken a sizable toll on us all.” He’s right about unrelenting. Dozens of reporters have examined every furl of Mr. Pruitt’s forehead since he started the job.
Press dispatches have suggested that he misused private air travel, sent staff on personal errands and bought $1,560 pens, among dozens of other allegations. Mr. Pruitt says most of this was false or exaggerated, and no doubt much of it was. He’s also right that billionaires Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg were out to get him. You can add the EPA bureaucracy that leans left, the green lobby entwined with it, and their collaborators in the press corps.
But this is not news, or it shouldn’t have been to Mr. Pruitt, who claimed to understand he was the biggest political target in the Administration after President Trump. EPA is the Holy Sepulchre of progressive politics, and Mr. Pruitt posed an existential threat to command and control regulation that is the hallmark of the left’s environmental agenda.
Mr. Pruitt had to avoid even the hint of an ethical question, and he should have been walking around Federal Triangle handcuffed to a general counsel. Of particular odor were the claims that Mr. Pruitt used his official position to help his wife find work or even open a Chick-fil-A franchise. The daily assault undermined his effectiveness and ultimately his support at the White House.
The shame is that Mr. Trump is losing his bravest deregulator. Mr. Pruitt started to roll back the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan that attempted to re-engineer the economy with little effect on climate change. He clamped down on the “sue and settle” racket that allows environmental groups to impose policy through consent degrees. He moved to redefine the Waters of the United States rule that let EPA regulate ponds and potholes. Mr. Pruitt also sought to require more honest cost-benefit analysis, and he updated advisory science boards that have been stacked with members who receive EPA grants.
Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler will take over, though acting directors are inherently transitional and thus less powerful. Then again, Mr. Wheeler may be there a while: Senate Democrats would block the Dalai Lama to run EPA if Mr. Trump nominated him.
Fresh off its Pruitt defenestration, the left will be looking for new targets, so some advice to the rest of the Trump cabinet: Fly coach.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pruitt-drowns-in-the-swamp-1530834262?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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LCSA News

Adhesive, Cleaning Product Makers Bear New Chemical Accountability

Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Pat Rizzuto

Future sales of adhesives, cleaners, motor oils, and other products may depend on providing the EPA with chemical use and exposure information.
But the manufacturers will be on the hook for some of the data instead of relying on suppliers to help them comply with toxics laws, attorneys said.
Products made by companies including 3M, ITW Polymers Sealants North America, Sherwin-Williams Co., and W.M. Barr & Co. Inc. already are under the Environmental Protection Agency’s spotlight, according to agency documents. Those firms could team up with other companies to provide exposure information to sustain sales, the attorneys added.
The EPA has suggested those companies make or have made products containing one or more of 10 chemicals the agency is evaluating, agency documents say.
Unreasonable Risk Means Regulation
If the agency concludes one or more of those chemicals—or specific uses of them—pose unreasonable health or environmental risks, the EPA is required by the 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act amendments to reduce those risks through regulation or other means that may affect their sale or future availability..
Adhesives, paints, paint strippers, lubricants, and varnishes are among the consumer products the EPA is examining for at least seven of the first of 10 chemicals the agency is studying, Martha E. Marrapese, a partner with Wiley Rein LLP, said during a recent webinar the law firm held on TSCA and consumer product manufactures.
Beyond those 10 chemicals, the EPA also is working toward proposing rules that would restrict uses of five chemicals of concern. The agency focused on the five chemicals because they persist in the environment, build up in the food chain, and are toxic, according to the EPA.
Flame retardants used in building materials, plastics, and textiles are among the uses the agency is focusing on, Marrapese said. But a boat paint also is listed as a use of at least one of the five problematic chemicals.
New Paradigm
For TSCA’s first 40 years, consumer product and other “downstream” companies that purchase chemicals relied with confidence on their chemical suppliers to address most of TSCA’s requirements, Marrapese told Bloomberg Environment.
“The tide has turned. That is no longer the paradigm,” she said.
“Downstream companies can’t rely on chemical manufacturers having all the information the EPA needs,” said Marrapese, with Wiley Rein’s Washington office.
For example, chemical manufacturers are not likely to have exposure and use data for consumer products, she said.
“Downstream companies don’t realize that yet,” Marrapese said.
Mark Collatz, director of regulatory affairs for the Adhesive and Sealant Council, told Bloomberg Environment he keeps the council’s members abreast of TSCA developments, including the agency’s focus on adhesive uses of chemicals.
“We’ve encouraged them, if they had concerns, to get back to us, but we haven’t gotten a lot of feedback,” he said.
Faye Graul, executive director of the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance Inc., said the alliance is gathering exposure and use information from its members.
The alliance also is reaching out to trade associations representing solvent customers, such as dry cleaners and institutional laundries, to find out whether they have exposure and use information, she said.
One Approach
The fragrance industry has developed a total or “aggregate” exposure model along with a wealth of other information about its products, ways they are used, and exposures that could occur.
That approach might be one that groups of consumer product manufacturers could adopt when providing the agency exposure and use information, according to Marrapese and Richard Reiss, a vice president with the Exponent consulting firm.
They referred to information developed by the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials—with members such as BASF Corp., Firmenich Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and S. C. Johnson & Son Inc., along with Creme Global, a data analysis firm.
The institute uses that database to assess the safety of fragrance chemicals and set limits on their uses, James C. Romine, president of the fragrance institute, told Bloomberg Environment.
The aggregate exposure model contains extensive information about consumers’ use of personal care products, the chemicals found in fragrances in those products, and the amounts of those fragrances that soap, shampoo, and other personal care product manufacturers use, he said. The institute is expanding the model to include fragrances in household products, he added.
Preview Potential Problems
Before any company or group launched such a data-collection effort, it should consider using a computer software model the EPA developed, Reiss said. The agency plans to use the model for it’s own chemical analyses, he said.
The EPA’s Consumer Exposure Model provides rapid insight into how high consumer exposures might be, Reiss said during Wiley Rein’s webinar. Such software models err on the side of protecting public health and the environment and assume the use of and exposure to a chemical is greater than it may be, he said.
“Anybody can use it, a consultant, a nongovernmental organization, a company,” Reiss told Bloomberg Environment.
For example, a company might use the EPA’s model to estimate exposure in a worst-case scenario for one of its products, he said. By worst case, Reiss referred to a product that has high concentrations of a chemical the EPA is looking at or is likely to examine, and a product that is used a lot for long periods of time.
If the model raises no concerns, “you’re in great shape,” Reiss said.
But if it flags concerns, the company can decide whether it wants to generate use, volatilization, skin penetration, or other data, he said.
Collaboration Urged
If the model raises concerns, Marrapese urged the company using it to contact its trade association,
“It doesn’t benefit any individual company to collect information on its own,” she said.
The information has more value if it’s generated by companies that use EPA or other guidance to make sure the data collection is done well, Marrapese said.
The European Chemical Industry Council has developed several exposure assessment guidance documents that could help, Reiss said.
Due to TSCA’s tight deadlines, the “EPA has very little incentive to do anything more than use its models,” Marrapese said. Industry has the incentive to provide data to improve the agency’s projections, she said.
Market Pressure
Giving the EPA exposure data will increase its and the public’s confidence in the safety, risk, and/or regulatory conclusions it reaches about the chemicals it reviews, Marrapese said.
The EPA also should be requiring companies to submit exposure and use data using the additional authority Congress gave the agency when it amended TSCA, Liz Hitchcock, legislative director for Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, told Bloomberg Environment.
Meanwhile, consumer, environmental, and other advocates will gather data as well and submit it to the agency, she said, referring to the consumer, environmental, health, and labor groups Safer Chemicals represents.
When such advocates find evidence that a particular chemical’s use—methylene chloride in paint strippers, for example—poses a health risk, they won’t wait for the EPA to take action, Hitchcock said.
Safer Chemicals’ "Mind the Store” campaign targets manufacturers and retailers urging them to take responsibility for the safety of the products they sell, she said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/adhesive-cleaning-product-makers-bear-new-chemical-accountability

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) EPA Rollbacks Already Touching Americans’ Lives

Jul 6, 2018 | AP (In The Washington Post)

By Ellen Knickmeyer

For 37 mostly female farm-workers in California’s Central Valley, U.S. policy under Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt became personal not long after sunup one day in May 2017.
Picking cabbage that morning, the workers noticed a tarry smell drifting from a nearby orchard. Mouths and lips tingled or went numb. Throats went dry. Soon some workers were vomiting and collapsing.
Officials in California’s farm-rich Kern County, where the workers fell ill, concluded that the harvesters were reacting to a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, misapplied at the neighboring orchard.
Five weeks before, in one of his first acts at EPA, Pruitt had reversed an Obama-era initiative to ban all food crop uses of the pesticide, which damages the brain and nervous system of fetuses and young children and has been prohibited as a household bug-killer since 2001.
While the new ban would not have gone into effect by the time of the Central Valley incident, Pruitt’s action postponed any further consideration of barring the popular bug-killer on food crops at least through 2022. Chlorpyrifos is crucial to agriculture, and the farms using it need “regulatory certainty,” Pruitt’s EPA said in announcing his March 2017 decision, using a phrase that would become a watchword for his business-friendly environmental rulings.
In all, the Trump administration has targeted at least 45 environmental rules, including 25 at EPA, according to a rollback tracker by Harvard Law School’s energy and environment program. The EPA rule changes would affect regulation of air, water and climate change, and transform how the EPA makes its regulatory decisions.
Pruitt, who resigned Thursday after months of ethics scandals, announced many of the policy changes quickly, and former EPA officials and environmental group predict that his proposed rollbacks will be vulnerable to court challenges.
“The world is focusing on Pruitt and his indiscretions, but they’re minuscule when you look at the impact of that change” on decision-making, said Chris Zarba, who quit this year as coordinator of two of the agency’s science advisory panels.
He was referring to allegations, now the subject of several federal investigations, about Pruitt’s lavish spending on travel and security, including a $43,000 soundproof telephone booth, and claims that he misused his office for personal gain, including seeking a fast-food franchise for his wife.
“This is not phone booths and Chick-fil-A issues,” Zarba said. “This is Americans’ lives.”
EPA spokesman Lincoln Ferguson defended the agency’s work under Pruitt, although some achievements Ferguson noted were largely completed in previous administrations.
“The science is clear, under President Trump greenhouse gas emissions are down, Superfund sites are being cleaned up at a higher rate than under President Obama, and the federal government is investing more money to improve water infrastructure than ever before,” the EPA spokesman said in a statement. The EPA declined to make an official available to speak directly on Pruitt’s policy initiatives.
Among Pruitt’s actions and proposals:
CLIMATE CHANGE
President Donald Trump, who famously called manmade climate-change an “expensive hoax” before his election, declared last summer that the United States would pull out of the Paris global accord on cutting climate-changing emissions from coal plants and other sources.
Pruitt, for his part, said he doesn’t believe humans are one of the main causes of climate changes.
Pruitt in October formally proposed the repeal of an Obama-era rule targeting climate-changing emissions from electricity plants powered by coal and other fossil fuels, part of his pro-coal and gas policies. “The war against coal is over,” Pruitt told Kentucky coal miners then.
The Obama rule would have cut power plant emissions by one-third. The Obama administration projected that it would prevent up to 6,600 premature deaths a year from air pollution.
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CLEAN AIR
Pruitt’s other proposals affecting clean air include allowing truck-builders to retrofit new tractor-trailer bodies with old diesel engines that were built before tougher pollution standards. He called the Obama administration’s ban on the dirtier truck engines an example of regulatory overreach that “threatened to put an entire industry of specialized truck manufacturers out of business.”
Though just a tiny niche in overall truck sales, the Obama administration said the retrofitted trucks would account for up to 1,600 early deaths each year from the soot alone.
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CLEAN WATER
Pruitt suspended an Obama-era version of a rule that ultimately governs what farmers, ranchers and businesspeople must do to protect water flowing through their property on its way to lakes, oceans and bays.
The so-called Waters of the United States rule impacts the water supply for people and wildlife. Pruitt, who had not yet publicly released his rewritten version of the rule when he resigned, told Nebraska farmers that his version would provide clarity and regulatory reform. “That’s how you save the economy $1 billion dollars,” he added.
Americans already are living with results of slowdowns and rollbacks in environmental regulation, said Elizabeth Southerland, who resigned last year as director of science and technology of the EPA’s Office of Water.
“Everybody in the country is now exposed to ongoing pollution, future environmental crises, because so many of these are being repealed,” Southerland said.
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SCIENCE
Pruitt boosted industrial and business representation on panels that advise the EPA. Other Pruitt changes called for more consideration of the costs of environmental rules. And a major Pruitt change would allow EPA decision-makers to consider only studies for which all the underlying data is available.
Supporters say those changes are broadening the EPA’s decision-making and making it more transparent.
Opponents said that change could throw out the kind of decades-long public-health studies, using confidential patient information, that drove landmark regulation of air pollutants and other threats.
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PESTICIDES
Pruitt also paused or slowed action on some other regulations that were started but not completed during the Obama administration, as with chlorpyrifos.
Chlorpyrifos used as directed offers “wide margins of protection for human health and safety,” said Gregg M. Schmidt, spokesman for DowDupont Inc., maker of the pesticide.
Industries said Pruitt’s EPA is giving business and economic impacts the consideration and input that past administrations long denied them.
“This is about how you find the appropriate balance here, where we can continue to make significant progress in environmental and health protection while continuing to benefit the economy,” said Mike Walls, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council trade group.
“The fact that industry no longer has an adversary in its government, and specifically at the EPA, is a huge step forward in common sense regulation,” said Ashley Burke of the National Mining Association. The mining group’s members include coal companies, which stand to benefit from proposed Pruitt rollbacks of Obama-era initiatives on fossil-fuel power plants and disposal of toxic coal ash.
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A RETREAT
Pruitt had put on hold the Obama administration’s attempt to ban consumer sales of paint strippers containing the compound methylene chloride. But he reversed course in May after meeting with families of men who died after using paint stripper.
Brian Wynne, brother of 31-year-old Drew, is grateful. But if Pruitt’s EPA had never stayed the rule in the first place, Brian Wynne believes, methylene chloride may already have been out of stores by fall 2017, when his brother went to a South Carolina home-goods store to buy paint stripper to use on the floor of his cold-brew coffee company. Drew Wynne was found dead at the business last October, killed by methylene chloride, according to coroners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/americans-already-living-epa-rollbacks-under-pruitt/2018/07/05/2a6b9a66-80c7-11e8-a63f-7b5d2aba7ac5_story.html?utm_term=.2d48d9f66517

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(ACC Mentioned) Sources: EPA Blocks Warnings on Cancer-Causing Chemical

Jul 6, 2018 | Politico

By Annie Snider

The Trump administration is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments, a current and a former agency official told POLITICO.
The warnings are contained in a draft health assessment EPA scientists completed just before Donald Trump became president, according to the officials. They saidtop advisers to departing Administrator Scott Pruitt are delaying its release as part of a campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.
Andrew Wheeler, the No. 2 official at EPA who will be the agency's new acting chief as of Monday, also has a history with the chemical. He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment.
Formaldehyde is one of the most commonly used chemicals in the country. Americans are exposed to it through wood composites in cabinets and furniture, as well as air pollution from major refineries. The new assessment would give greater weight to warnings about the chemical's risks and could lead to stricter regulations from the EPA or class-action lawsuits targeting its manufacturers, as frequently occurs after these types of studies are released.
“They’re stonewalling every step of the way,” the current official said, accusing political appointees of interfering with the formaldehyde assessment and other reports on toxic chemicals produced by EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System. Industry has long faulted the IRIS program, the agency’s only independent scientific division evaluating the health risks of toxic chemicals, whose assessments often form the basis for federal and state regulations.
The current official and former official requested anonymity out of fear for their jobs and the impact that speaking out could have on the IRIS program.
Interfering with the formaldehyde study is one of several steps Trump's EPA has taken to side with the businesses the agency is supposed to regulate and undermine the agency's approach to science, critics say. Public health advocates also expressed alarm after Pruitt replaced academic scientists with industry advocates on the agency’s influential science advisory boards and sought to limitthe types of human health research the EPA can rely on in rulemakings.
The officials said Trump appointees have required that career officials receive their permission before beginning the required internal review of the formaldehyde study and have canceled key briefings that would have advanced it. That interference came after EPA career scientists revised the study once already last year to insulate it from political controversy, they said.
In a statement, EPA denied that the assessment was being held back.
“EPA continues to discuss this assessment with our agency program partners and have no further updates to provide at this time," EPA spokeswoman Kelsi Daniell said. “Assessments of this type are often the result of needs for particular rulemakings and undergo an extensive intra-agency and interagency process.”
But as long ago as January, Pruitt told a Senate panel that he believed the draft assessment was complete.
Five months later, it has yet to see the light of day. Meanwhile, internal documents show, a trade group representing businesses that could face new regulations and lawsuits if the study were released had frequent access to top EPA officials andpressed them to either keep it under wraps or change its findings.
“As stated in our meeting, a premature release of a draft assessment … will cause irreparable harm to the companies represented by the Panel and to the many companies and jobs that depend on the broad use of the chemical,” Kimberly Wise White, who leads the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel, wrote in a Jan. 26 letter to top officials at the EPA. The panel represents companies including Exxon Mobil and the Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC that could face higher costs from stricter regulations or lawsuits.
Nearly a million jobs “depend on the use of formaldehyde,” White’s letter argued.
The holdup is attracting attention on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have already expressed alarm, arguing that the Trump administration has allowed politics to interfere in EPA’s scientific assessments of threats such as toxic pollution and climate change.
The agency must “move past politics and focus on its job of protecting human health” by releasing the formaldehyde study, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement to POLITICO.
"Because formaldehyde can be found in everything from wood products to women’s hair straighteners, the public health risks are substantial,” Markey said. “Delaying the EPA’s latest assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde only further endangers the health of Americans."
Public health advocates have similarly expressed fears that the Trump administration has allowed EPA to be captured by the industries it regulates. The revelations about the formaldehyde study come after Pruitt removed academic scientists from the agency’s influential science advisory boards and in many cases replaced them with industry advocates, and after he proposed a policy to limit the agency's use of human health data while offering a carve-out for confidential industry studies.
“At every corner, you see the agency trying to either minimize the role of science or manipulate the role of science or just ignore the work of scientists in doing the critical work to ensure that human health and the environment is protected,” said Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund’s health program.
POLITICO also reported in May that Trump administration officials, including EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson, sought to delay an HHS study finding that nonstick chemicals pose health dangers at a lower level than EPA has said is safe.
Insiders anticipate few major policy changes under Wheeler, who is widely expected to continue Pruitt's deregulatory agenda and is well-versed in chemicals issues. He began his career in EPA's chemical safety office, and after leaving Inhofe's staff lobbied for a refrigerants manufacturer that was recently acquired by one of the country's major chemical manufacturers, Chemours Co., a DuPont spinoff.
Decades’ of research has linked formaldehyde to nose and throat cancer and respiratory problems, and newer research has suggested the connection to leukemia — controversial conclusions that would gain significant credence if EPAformally adopts them. The new assessment affirms those links to leukemia, nose and throat cancer and other ailments, according to the current and former officials familiar with its findings.
The new assessment could lead the EPA to impose stricter regulations of chemicals refineries or wood products and could spur class-action lawsuits from cancer patients attempting to hold companies responsible for their illnesses.
The agency officials said the political aides blocking the assessment include Jackson and Richard Yamada, a former staffer for House Science Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who is now a top official in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. And they said Nancy Beck, who criticized the IRIS program in her previous job as a top chemical industry expert, is now helping to stymie the program’s assessments in her new post as head of EPA’s chemical safety office. Jackson, Yamada and Beck did not respond to requests for comment.
The EPA spokeswoman disputed the accusations and said Yamada and Jackson have, in fact, requested briefings on the assessment.
The current EPA official told POLITICO that political appointees have managed to avoid creating written evidence of their interference with the formaldehyde assessment by refusing to send emails or create other records that eventually could become public, instead using what the official described as “a children’s game of telephone."
By blocking the report at the first step of the IRIS review process, political appointees are keeping it from being reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, an independent panel of the country's top scientists that must weigh in on all such risk assessments. EPA has already paid the academies $500,000 for that review, the highest level of scrutiny a scientific study can receive, but the work cannot start until Pruitt's aides send the study.
“If the administration was really keen on protecting public health, why wouldn’t they send this to the National Academy and give it a really good review?” the former EPA official asked. “If it survives that review, then there’s a public health problem that needs to be dealt with, and if it doesn’t survive the review, then they can point the finger at IRIS and say, ‘You’re dead.’”
The former official said there would be only one reason not to ask the country’s top experts whether they agree with the analysis: “You don’t want the answer.”
Public health advocates say the administration’s attacks on science have had especially significant implications for the IRIS program. The small office of about 35 experts pores over the huge body of existing research on chemicals, including industry-backed studies aimed at proving the substances safe, to independently assess their risks. While purely scientific, the program’s reviews are looked to by regulators not just at EPA, but also in the states and around the world, often paving the way for new or more stringent regulations.
But industry has long targeted the program, arguing it uses an opaque process to decide which studies to rely on and which research to give credence to when findings conflict.
The American Chemistry Council, Beck’s former employer, spent more than $7 million last year lobbying EPA and Congress on issues including IRIS, formaldehyde and the policy to limit EPA’s use of human health research. Chemicals manufacturers, including Hexion, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of formaldehyde, have also spent tens of thousands of dollars on lobbying related to the program this year.
A National Academies panel agreed with some of industry’s criticisms of the IRIS program in a blistering review of an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment that recommended major changes to how IRIS decides how much weight to give conflicting studies, although it did not attack the substance of its findings about the health effects of formaldehyde. Critics of the IRIS program have pointed to that review frequently as they have sought to kill it, including in an appropriations battle this spring. The EPA spokeswoman also pointed to that assessment in her statement. "The National Academy of Science and Congress in legislative reports have for years been highly critical of EPA’s previous assessments involving formaldehyde," she said.
But te EPA has overhauled the program since then, hiring a new director for IRIS and a new head of the National Center for Environmental Assessment, in which it is housed. The changes have received high marks from the National Academies in two more recent reviews, one in 2014 and one this past April. The latest formaldehyde assessment is expected to demonstrate further progress implementing the academies’ recommendations, potentially undermining industry critiques of the overall IRIS program if it were to be released.
Although efforts to kill EPA’s independent scientific arbiter have so far failed, EPA officials and public health advocates say the program has been significantly hobbled under an administration with close ties to the chemicals industry.
White, the top staffer for the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel, wrote the EPA three times between September 2017 and January 2018, urging the agency to incorporate industry-funded research that found no link between formaldehyde and leukemia, and arguing that the studies shifted the scientific consensus away from the conclusion that it does. In November, Pruitt appointed her to the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board.
Less than a week after the council's Jan. 24 meeting with EPA, Pruitt himself confirmed that the report had been complete for months. During a Senate hearing at the end of January, Markey asked Pruitt for an update on the formaldehyde assessment, saying it was his understanding “that the EPA has finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers and that [the] completed new assessment is ready to be released for public review, but is being held up."
“You know, my understanding is similar to yours,” Pruitt replied, promising to follow up.
Markey reminded Pruitt of the exchange in a May 17 letter. In a response Thursday, the agency’s principal deputy assistant administrator for science, Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, said EPA “continues to discuss the formaldehyde assessment internally and has no further updates to provide at this time."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/06/epa-formaldehyde-warnings-blocked-696628

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EPA to Revisit Risks of Carcinogenic Mothball Chemical

Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Sylvia Carignan

The EPA wants to determine if a chemical used in mothballs is more toxic than it concluded in 1998.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment runs the chemical toxicity assessment program, called the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS. The program is reassessing naphthalene because its previous report relied on inadequate data regarding the chemical’s potential to cause cancer. There is new research data available about the chemical that warrants a new assessment, according to the EPA.
Naphthalene is used in mothballs and found in coal and petroleum. The EPA considers it to be a possible human carcinogen. It released its plan for reassessing the chemical July 5.
The program’s assessments can influence the EPA’s decisions, standards, and regulations in multiple areas, from air, water, and chemicals to contaminated sites and waste.
Call for Transparency
Naphthalene is part of the family of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which have been found on nearly half of the sites on the EPA’s National Priorities List, or Superfund sites, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The public can be exposed to the chemical through the skin, inhalation, and ingestion.
The EPA’s chemical toxicity assessment program has come under fire from House Republicans and the chemical industry for lack of transparency. The National Academy of Sciences reported in April, though, that the program is making strides toward greater transparency and accelerating the assessment process.
Changes the agency is making in the program include informing the public how it will assess chemicals and incorporating the most recent scientific research into its decisions. The program is “dramatically more systematic, transparent, and scientifically defensible” than it was in a 2010 National Academies review, the April 11 report said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-to-revisit-risks-of-carcinogenic-mothball-chemical

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Fluorochemicals in Water to Trigger Alerts Under California Plan

Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Emily C. Dooley

Water suppliers in California will have to report when they find concentrations of fluorochemicals in drinking water samples at levels much lower than what would trigger a U.S. EPA health advisory.
California officials said they will announce this week drinking water notification limits for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) that have been linked to low birth weigh, thyroid issues, certain cancers, and immune problems.
Water agencies would have to notify their governing bodies when concentrations of these chemicals exceed those limits in drinking water, but they won’t necessarily have to inform the public.
Darrin Polhemus, deputy director for drinking water programs for the California State Water Resources Control Board, told Bloomberg Environment July 3 the limits—14 parts per trillion for PFOA and 13 parts per trillion for PFOS—would mirror thresholds set in New Jersey and could eventually lead to setting a drinking water standard for the compounds, which aren’t regulated nationally.
“It’s kind of the first step in the chain,” Polhemus said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an unenforceable health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion for combined levels of PFOA and PFOS.
It is unclear how many of the state’s water suppliers will be affected by the notification levels.
Dozen Detections
A dozen or so have detected fluorochemicals and about six hit the EPA threshold of 70 parts per trillion, but in those cases supplies were taken offline or blended to reduce concentrations.
“We’re going through a review process now to see who would be impacted with these lower levels,” Polhemus said.
The move comes weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report that said ill health effects could occur from exposure to fluorochemicals at levels seven to ten times lower than what EPA estimates.
Fluorochemicals have been used in making, or found in, a variety of products, from firefighting foam to non-stick pans and stain-resistant products. They don’t easily break down in water and can accumulate in the body.
The notification levels take effect immediately after being issued. They require water suppliers who decide to test for the compounds to tell their governing body when samples are over the notification level. Polhemus said the agency would prefer that suppliers tell customers, but they aren’t required to.
Sophie James, director of water quality for California Water Service Co., told Bloomberg Environment July 3 that the utility has been proactive when concentrations of PFOS or PFOA were detected. Some wells have been taken offline or used minimally.
“As a utility, protecting our customer’s health and safety is our priority,” James said. “We do everything we can to meet standards.”
She added that the utility will monitor and tell customers if notification levels are met.
OEHHA experts reviewed research studies and recommended the notification levels to the Water Resources Control Board June 26, said Sam Delson, OEHHAs deputy director for External and Legislative Affairs.
Polhemus said he would now ask OEHHA to develop a public health goal, which could take a year. Setting a drinking water standard could take another two years after that.
“To do a final recommendation we would need to do more research,” Delson told Bloomberg Environment July 3.
Neither the Association of California Water Agencies nor the Orange County Water District could immediately be reached for comment.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/fluorochemicals-in-water-to-trigger-alerts-under-california-plan

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J&J Gets Two Talc Appeals Wins, but Broad Impact Questioned

Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Julie Steinberg

Johnson & Johnson is two-for-two in getting big Missouri talc jury verdicts overturned on appeal.
But it’s easy to overstate the rulings’ impact on other pending cases trying to link J&J’s Baby Powder and other products to cancer, legal professionals involved with or following the cases told Bloomberg Law.

That’s because the rulings were procedural, they said.
Awards totaling $55 million and $72 million were thrown out on jurisdictional grounds. Two others of $110 million and $70 million are being challenged. The verdicts came from juries in a St. Louis court perceived as plaintiff-friendly, and appealed to the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District.
“J&J can claim ‘victory,’ so I suppose the optics look good for them,” Jean Eggen of Widener University Delaware Law School in Wilmington told Bloomberg Law.
“But while it is procedural victory, it does not signal ultimate substantive victory in any one case,” said Eggen, who specializes in toxic torts, civil procedure and science and the law.
It’s still early in the litigation, as Eggen says. But J&J is looking for more success on procedural and other grounds, and it’s being helped by a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction ruling that also has been a boon to other companies facing product liability suits.
Talc Link to Cancer Claims
J&J faces claims from about 9,100 plaintiffs who link certain talc products to cancer, it said in a May securities filing.
The bulk of the litigation is now in a federal multidistrict proceeding in New Jersey, though a number of those cases, before the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, were in state courts in Missouri and elsewhere.
The state cases include about 700 cases in Missouri state court, 445 cases in state court in California, and 410 in state court in New Jersey, according to a filing in the federal docket.
In addition to the Missouri cases, both sides have won and lost. For example, a $117 million verdict was upheld by a New Jersey trial judge while a California court wiped out a $417 million award, finding a lack of evidence to support the plaintiff’s claims.
The California ruling is on appeal, as is another New Jersey court decision, this one in 2016, that said two test plaintiffs didn’t offer good scientific evidence connecting ovarian cancer to J&J’s products.
No federal cases have yet gone to trial.
Supreme Court Precedent
The parties in the 700 pending cases in St. Louis have been fighting about whether non-residents can bring suit. A similar fight is ongoing in California.
The Missouri jurisdictional fight, so far, shows the ongoing effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2017 decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court.
Bristol-Myers limited options for out-of-state plaintiffs whose claims may have been initially joined with those of in-state plaintiffs.
Companies have hailed the decision as a way to curb plaintiffs’ attempts to choose a favorable forum.
Many talc suits were transferred from the Missouri state court to the federal MDL under an order issued shortly after BMS that let plaintiffs refile their cases in the consolidated proceedings to avoid potential jurisdiction challenges.
But while breaking up a critical mass of plaintiffs in one jurisdiction “is a plus for defendants,” plaintiffs can still win in courts they didn’t choose, Eggen said.
S. Dakota, Alabama Plaintiffs’ Verdicts Tossed
In the most recent J&J appellate decision June 29, South Dakota resident Gloria Ristesund conceded that the Missouri trial court lacked specific, or case-linked, personal jurisdiction over her claims under Bristol-Myers.
She asked the appeals court to send her case back for a new trial, so she could present evidence of J&J’s contacts with Missouri and attempt to meet the BMSrequirements.
Ristesund had relied on the bundling of her suit with those of two Missouri residents to support jurisdiction in Missouri, the appeals court said.
But she isn’t entitled to a do-over, the appeals court said without addressing the merits.
BMS didn’t change the law, it “simply reiterated the long-standing legal principles of personal jurisdiction,” the Missouri appeals court said, appearing to minimize the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Ristesund also had ample opportunity to fully address jurisdiction while her case was before the trial court, it said.

In 2017, the appeals court similarly precluded the family of Jacqueline Fox, an Alabama resident, from retrying her suit following a dismissal based on jurisdiction.
“We are extremely pleased the court recognized this trial never should have occurred and vacated the judgment and verdict,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement following the Ristesund decision.
The company told Bloomberg Law it would not speculate on the effect of the Ristesund ruling on the overall litigation.
‘Speed Bump’
The lasting impact of the appeals court decision in Ristesund, which involved layers of procedure, is limited, plaintiffs’ lawyers say.
Plaintiffs believe they have evidence of J&J’s contacts with Missouri that can satisfy BMS, Ted Meadows, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Missouri talc litigation, told Bloomberg Law.
More substantively, “The facts and the science behind these verdicts are not going away,” said Meadows, of Beasley Allen in Montgomery, Ala.
“We don’t expect this ruling to have a lasting effect on the big-picture of the litigation,” Meadows said.
Chris Panatier, who represents plaintiffs suing J&J over asbestos in powder, likened the ruling to a “speed bump.”
“Jurisdictional disputes are a short-term issue that merely delay Johnson & Johnson’s eventual comeuppance,” Chris Panatier of Simon Greenstone Panatier Bartlett PC in Dallas, said.
Panatier represents plaintiffs in a separate wave of litigation who allege they developed mesothelioma from the asbestos, including a woman who won a $25.7 million award from a California jury in June.
Asbestos Suits in N.J., Elsewhere
J&J denies both that its products can cause cancer and that they ever contained asbestos.
Both Eggen and Panatier pointed to the emerging mesothelioma litigation as an example of a positive outcome for plaintiffs in a state court where there can be no BMS jurisdictional challenges.
The $117 million New Jersey state court verdict that recently survived post-trial challenges came in a courtroom near J&J’s headquarters, Panatier said.
But other asbestos suits also are pending in Missouri and other states where jurisdiction, like in the talc cases, could become an issue.
J&J, for example, is currently facing a high-stakes trial by 22 ovarian cancer plaintiffs in St. Louis who say its talcum powder products were tainted with asbestos. The company didn’t face this allegation from plaintiffs in the previous Missouri trials.
The plaintiffs hail from numerous states.
The trial court ordered the current trial to proceed without resolving J&J’s challenges to jurisdiction, the company says.
The plaintiffs have had mixed luck with their contention that Johnson & Johnson’s contacts with Pharma Tech, a Missouri company that produced and distributed J&J products, supports jurisdiction in Missouri over non-residents’ suits.
A federal court rejected those arguments and dismissed 79 suits by non-Missouri residents.
But a St. Louis trial judge upheld a $110 million award to Virginia plaintiff Lois Slemp, saying J&J’s use of the Missouri company provided enough connection with the state to support her suit there.
J&J has appealed Slemp’s award.
In other state litigation, a trial in South Carolina ended when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict on mesothelioma claims.
Armstrong Teasdale and others represented J&J in the Ristesund case.
Ristesund’s attorneys included Bartimus Frickleton Robertson Rader and Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles.
The Missouri case is Ristesund v. Johnson & Johnson, Mo. Ct. App. E.D., ED104887, 6/29/18.
The New Jersey case is Lanzo v. Amex Minerals, Inc., N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div., No. L-007385-16, 6/29/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/j-j-gets-two-talc-appeals-wins-but-broad-impact-questioned

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Transparency Battle Brews As Canada Ponders Chemical Law Changes

Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By James Munson

Canada is leaning toward disclosing more information about regulated substances, a direction that concerns the country’s chemical manufacturers.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna‘s interest in new transparency requirements could hurt competitiveness by putting confidential business information in the public domain, Bob Masterson, president and CEO of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, told Bloomberg Environment July 5.

“We want Canada to continue to be a place where people can be innovative, can introduce new products that provide benefits, and aren’t overly worried about trade secrets being released to their competitors,” Masterson, whose group has 50 members representing CA$53 billion ($40 billion) in annual revenues, said.
The chemical sector’s concerns come after McKenna published her response to a parliamentary committee’s report on how to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which hasn’t been amended since it came into force in 1999.

The act is the cornerstone of Canada’s regulation of commercial and industrial substances. The Chemical Management Plan, a policy that prioritizes the regulation of toxic substances based on risks to human health and the environment, also plays a big role.

McKenna’s response to the committee, which was published June 29, largely won plaudits from the chemical industry, save for the worries about new disclosure requirements, with Masterson calling it a path forward that his organization broadly agreed with.

Her proposal calls for amending the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to require the disclosure of a substance’s explicit chemical or biological name if it’s regulated, a rule limiting the use of names that mask a substance’s explicit name to five years, a new provision stipulating that information given to her office is presumed to be public, and a condition that anyone who asks for confidentiality must provide a justification for their request.
The federal government could make regulatory or policy changes to chemical regulation at any time now that McKenna’s response to the committee is public. But any new legislation amending the Canadian Environmental Protection Act isn’t expected until after the next federal election in late 2019.
Oil, Gas Exemptions
McKenna moved away from total transparency by refusing to remove an exemption for the oil and gas exploration and drilling sector from the National Pollutant Release Inventory, a public database of pollution figures, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, a legal aid clinic and environmental non-governmental organization, said.
She won’t remove the exemption because she thinks the sector’s emissions are too low.
“You can change the reporting threshold—I mean the reporting threshold is pretty high,” association lawyer Joe Castrilli told Bloomberg Environment. The thresholds range, depending on the type of pollutant, from large numbers for greenhouse gases to small amounts for highly-toxic substances like mercury, Castrilli said.
McKenna also decided not to support daily, weekly, and monthly reporting through the inventory, which currently only discloses information on an annual basis.
These decisions were welcomed by the oil and gas industry.
“We agree with the government’s decision to retain the reporting exemption for oil and gas exploration and drilling and to maintain reporting requirements consistent with the (inventory’s) goal of assessing annual trends,” Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers spokesperson Elisabeth Besson told Bloomberg Environment in a June 29 email.
Product Labeling
Product labeling is another component of the transparency discussion.
New labeling requirements for toxic substances should focus on risks to human health, not the mere presence of substances that in a high enough dose could cause illness, Masterson, the chemical sector representative, said.
Canada shouldn’t copy California’s Proposition 65, which requires cancer warnings on products, because it doesn’t accurately communicate a consumer’s health risk, Masterson said.
But while consumers could become immune to warnings if there are too many, the status quo currently fails to protect buyers, Environmental Defence Executive Director Tim Gray said.
“There’s clearly a need for better labeling of products that in fact do contain toxic chemicals,” Gray said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/transparency-battle-brews-as-canada-ponders-chemical-law-changes

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Energy News

Utilities Urge EPA to Let States Choose Replacement Framework for CPP

Jul 6, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Dawn Reeves

Utility industry groups are urging EPA to allow states to choose either a “top-down” or “bottom-up” framework for determining the level of greenhouse gas cuts that can be achieved at existing power plants under a narrow Clean Power Plan (CPP) replacement rule that the agency is soon expected to send for White House review.
The groups plan to ask EPA to allow states to decide which approach to use, rather than have the agency choose a specific approach. Under a “bottom-up” framework, regulators would determine the efficiency improvement achievable at each plant within a state's borders. Under a “top-down” approach, states would determine how to implement the best system of emission reduction (BSER) more generally at each facility, similar to how EPA itself has generally set new source performance standards (NSPS) for new facilities.
One source familiar with the push -- which will formally begin after EPA sends a draft proposed rule for pre-publication review by the White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) -- says the idea to give states the choice was first floated in Feb. 26 comments from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) on the agency's advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) to issue a narrow CPP replacement.
The source refers to the request as the “NRECA compromise,” which the source explains is “my characterization of their suggestion to let states choose between top-down or bottom-up ways to set” standards based on the replacement rule's BSER.
“The utilities favor top down. Coal and labor generally favor bottom up,” the source adds. North Carolina took the latter approach when it submitted a draft CPP compliance rule to the Obama administration that only included inside-the-fenceline improvements that could be made at each individual regulated unit.
“Don't force EPA to choose. Let each state decide,” the source explains, adding that the decision “will depend on state resources, if they can go to each plant.”
When North Carolina did that, it proposed specific controls for just six of its coal-fired units, while finding that 14 coal units needed to take no additional action. It also proposed that its 32 natural gas-fired combined cycle units met BSER by continuing to fire with natural gas.
Under the compromise being advocated, EPA would let states pick between the approaches but not use a combination of the two.
NRECA in its comments urged EPA to “clearly” define BSER under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act in a way that recognizes the agency's “limited” role.
Once EPA proposes a clear replacement BSER, “Commenters may suggest different paths in that regard,” NRECA said. “BSER might, for instance, include a review of possible designs, equipment, work practice or operational standards, or combinations thereof that are already or could be implemented at individual existing sources. Regulated sources would be required to review such measures for operational and economic feasibility, based on each source's unique circumstances.”
That would be the bottom-up approach that North Carolina followed.
Top-Down Options
A top-down approach NRECA floated would allow states to determine standards based on what a given unit has historically demonstrated, that would be determined by a review of operational and economic feasibility, while accounting for each source's unique circumstances.
NRECA in its comments says EPA “might also wish to give the states the option of choosing between alternative measures of BSER. Such an approach would be consistent with the Clean Air Act's cooperative federalism structure.”
Another possible top-down approach NRECA floats is “something akin to a 'synthetic minor' provision” that would allow a facility to agree to restrict its operational hours or GHG tonnage limit within a given year to satisfy its CPP obligations. That would reduce “emissions to at least the same level that would be achieved by implementing BSER at the unit. Units could implement such an approach in lieu of certain other compliance measures,” NRECA said.
But NRECA's comments appear to favor bottom-up, and also push EPA to allow the maximum amount of flexibility. For example, the comments stress that section 111(d) “contemplates that a state has the authority and the discretion to establish a separate standard of performance for each existing source within its borders. That source-specific inquiry may be based on the state's evaluation of that source and its assessment of the extent to which, and the timeframe on which, that source can adopt the EPA-determined BSER,” including “whether it is even physically possible to implement the BSER at that source; and whether other factors merit application of a less stringent standard or a longer ramp-up time. . . .
“In short, unlike [NSPS], which are developed from the top down based on a uniform implementation of BSER by every new source, existing source standards are built from the bottom up, based on each state's survey of how much of the BSER each existing source in the state can reasonably implement,” NRECA wrote.
But NRECA adds that EPA still has a role after it defines BSER. “This does not mean . . . that states have unfettered discretion in establishing standards of performance for existing sources within their borders. . . . Where a state fails to submit the required standards of performance or fails to implement or enforce those standards, EPA must step in. But EPA's role is a modest, backstop role, reserved for the extreme and unlikely circumstance.”
When EPA sends its draft proposed rule to OMB for interagency review -- which is thought to be imminent but had yet to be noted on OMB's website at press time -- it is expected to outline a range of options for replacing the CPP. All are expected to be narrow and limited to GHG cuts that can be achieved within a power plant's fenceline based on efficiency improvements.
EPA is also expected to include exemptions from its new source review program that could otherwise require facilities making major upgrades to comply with the CPP to install state-of-the-art pollution controls for non-GHG emissions such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
Some of the controls North Carolina had proposed in its draft rule include “controllable loss reduction,” which is a site-specific plan for best operations and maintenance practices; “forced draft fan variable frequency drive,” which is equipment to reduce fan power consumption by electronically controlling combustion air flow rate; “combustion optimization with neural network,” which is a system that conducts real-time monitoring and controls for air flow distribution, furnace exhaust gas temperatures and boiler steam temperatures to maximize heat recovery; “air heater leakage reduction;” and “intelligent soot blowing,” which uses software, sensors and automated controls to achieve more effective cleaning of the furnace wall.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/utilities-urge-epa-let-states-choose-replacement-framework-cpp

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Chemical Security News

Sony Prenatal Toxic Exposure Case Revived

Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Steven M. Sellers

A California woman may proceed with claims her birth defects were caused by prenatal exposure to toxic chemicals while her mother worked at a Sony plant, the California Supreme Court ruled July 5.
The closely watched case hinged on the court’s interpretation of two conflicting statutes of limitation for tort actions in California, one of which would have barred Dominique Lopez’s personal injury suit against Sony Electronics Inc.
It also settled a conflict among two state courts of appeal on which of the two conflicting laws applied.
Lopez was born in 1999 with numerous birth defects. Those abnormalities were caused by prenatal exposure to chemicals at a Sony plant in San Diego, where her mother worked from 1978 to 2000, she alleged.
She argued that the two-year limitations period for toxic exposure actions—but which excludes a plaintiff’s years as a minor—applied to the lawsuit, filed when she was 12 years old.
Sony countered that the six-year statute of limitation for suits alleging birth and pre-birth injuries—but which does count a plaintiff’s years as a minor—barred the complaint.
“Because the toxic exposure statute was more recently enacted, and its language plainly encompasses prenatal injuries, we conclude it applies here,” the court said.
The state legislature could have excluded prenatal injuries from the reach of the toxic exposure statute of limitation when it was enacted in 2004, but it did not, the court said.
Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote the opinion, joined by Chief Justice Tano Gorre Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Ming W. Chin, Goodwin Liu, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Leondra Kruger, and Brain M. Hoffstadt, who sat by designation.
Waters Kraus and Paul LLP represented Lopez. Musick Peeler and Garrett LLP represented Sony.
The case is Lopez v. Sony Elec., Inc., Cal., No. S235357, 7/5/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/sony-prenatal-toxic-exposure-case-revived

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Environment News

(ACC Mentioned) Appeals Court Rejects Rehearing on Boiler Standards

Jul 5, 2018 | E&E News PM

By Sean Reilly

A federal appellate court has denied environmental groups' request to revisit part of a March ruling in litigation over air toxics standards for industrial boilers.
Without explanation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday rejected a petition for panel rehearing on the part of the opinion that upheld EPA's reliance on work practices standards for boiler startups and shutdowns. The order, issued on the court's behalf, likely signals an end to the litigation launched in 2016 by the Sierra Club and several other environmental groups.
The Obama-era regulations, originally issued in 2011 and then amended in 2013 and 2015, target hazardous emissions from large industrial boilers, as well as process hearings and smaller boilers. In the unanimous opinion released in March, a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit agreed with the environmental groups that EPA had failed to justify weaker limits for carbon monoxide when using the gas as a surrogate for other pollutants and sent them back to the agency for more work.
But the panel also agreed with the American Chemistry Council and other industry trade groups that EPA's substitution of work practice standards for numeric emissions limits was adequate, given that those standards "reasonably approximate what the best-performing boilers can achieve" (E&E News PM, March 16).
In the rehearing petition filed in April, lawyers for the environmental groups unsuccessfully argued in part that the judges erred by evaluating EPA's decision to exempt the entire category of boilers from specific emissions limits during startups as "reasonable" when in fact that decision exceeded the agency's authority under the Clean Air Act.
The court also erred in finding that the environmental groups did not identify other work practice standards to cut startup emissions, when they had in reality pointed to evidence that "additional reductions could be achieved through the use of clean fuels," according to the petition.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/07/05/stories/1060087961

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States Expected to Rely More on Monitoring in Upcoming Ozone Rule (1)

Jul 5, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Amena H. Saiyid

States should expect to rely more on monitoring of air pollutants rather than modeling their predicted levels to show they are meeting the current federal ozone standard.
States are closely watching a final rule currently at the White House for review that will guide them as they attempt to meet stricter federal air quality requirements for ozone set in 2015. Those stricter standards could mean states could impose new pollution controls imposed on businesses and vehicles.
That final rule could stipulate that states do more monitoring of actual pollution levels rather than rely on computer modeling to show air quality is improving.
Monitoring vs. Modeling
“My sense is there is a preference by EPA to move from a greater reliance on modeling data to monitored data, such as what is being experienced versus what you expect to see,” Miles Keogh, executive director for the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, told Bloomberg Environment.
Monitoring air pollution is more legally defensible in courts, but not always possible said Keogh, emphasizing that he is speculating about what to expect in the upcoming final rule (RIN: 2060-AS82) to implement the 2015 ozone standard of 70 parts per billion.
Ric Pirolli, planning and standards director for Connecticut’s Bureau of Air Management, noted that basic compliance is always determined with monitoring. “Modeling,” he added, “is used when projecting into the future to determine if strategies will get you into compliance by the attainment date.”
Lee Hoffman, an attorney with Hartford, Conn.-based Pullman & Comley LLC, said he was looking forward to reading more specifics about the EPA’s emphasis on monitoring that he too has heard about.
That is because the Environmental Protection Agency has stayed largely silent about its upcoming guidance to states that are charged with implementing the standard.
The federal ozone standard was set in October 2015, but the rule guiding states on how to comply was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review July 3.
To date, the agency already designated 56 areas as not meeting the ozone pollution standard.
(Updates with Pirolli, Hoffman comments beginning in sixth paragraph)
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/states-expected-to-rely-more-on-monitoring-in-upcoming-ozone-rule-1

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D.C. Circuit Orders Suit over 2015 Ozone NAAQS to Resume Next Month

Jul 5, 2018 | Inside EPA

By David LaRoss

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is ordering delayed litigation over the Obama EPA's 2015 ozone standard to resume Aug. 1, the same date that the Trump administration has told the court on which it will decide whether to formally reconsider the agency's decision to tighten the standard from the prior 2008 limit.
An unsigned July 3 order from the D.C. Circuit panel of Judges Thomas B. Griffith, Nina Pillard and Robert L. Wilkins says the consolidated litigation over the 2015 standard, Murray Energy, et al., v. EPA, will have its abeyance formally lifted at the start of next month, with an Aug. 22 deadline for the various parties to file motions on the schedule going forward -- including long-delayed oral argument if EPA does decide to preserve the 2015 rule.
The Obama EPA in October 2015 tightened the ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) to 70 parts per billion (ppb), down from the 2008 limit of 75 ppb, drawing immediate legal challenges from industry and GOP-led states.
But before scheduled oral argument in the case in 2017, the Trump administration announced it was considering revising the standard, and asked the D.C. Circuit to put the case on hold during that process.
Despite that initial statement, the agency now seems to prefer letting the 2015 rule stand, thanks in part to the difficulty of showing that the Obama-era rulemaking was unjustified based on science before the agency at the time. A formal reconsideration to undo the stricter standard would be a lengthy, complicated process that would inevitably also face a legal challenge from environmentalist and Democratic supporters of the 70 ppb limit.
And the Trump administration, according to sources, appears likely to retain the 70 ppb level in its next NAAQS review being targeted for 2020 under a new expedited process, based on modeling showing most areas attaining the limit by 2023.
Most recently, in a June 8 filing, EPA told the D.C. Circuit that it is “hopeful” it will reach a decision by Aug. 1 on whether to pursue formal reconsideration of the 2015 NAAQS -- which together with states' motion to resume the case prompted the court's new order formally backing that timeline.
The state petitioners have warned that if the agency does decide against reconsideration they will immediately resume their claims that the 70 ppb standard is illegally strict and should be vacated.
Prior to EPA announcing its Aug. 1 timeline, a group of 10 states challenging the NAAQS in Murray Energy called for the D.C. Circuit to resume the suit with or without the government's consent. Given the signals that EPA will let the 2015 rule stand, keeping the court case stayed would mean the petitioners “will effectively lose their right to contest an unlawful NAAQS,” they argued.
The states' motion sought an end to the stay on Aug. 1 “such that oral argument in September 2018 is possible” -- signaling that they will likely ask for an argument date that month since the D.C. Circuit order follows their preferred timeline so far.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/dc-circuit-orders-suit-over-2015-ozone-naaqs-resume-next-month

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EPA Slow to Enforce Conflict-of-Interest Rules in States: Court (1)

Jul 6, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Chris Marr

The EPA should have imposed federal clean air plans on three states to strengthen their policies against regulatory conflicts of interest, a federal court said in a July 5 order.
The order could have limited practical effect, however, as EPA said it’s already working with the states to bring them into compliance with federal conflict-of-interest provisions.
The court’s decision gives the Environmental Protection Agency a trio of deadlines in 2019 to impose federal plans on Alabama, Illinois, and Mississippi, unless the states produce their own updated plans and get EPA approval before the deadlines.
Coincidentally, the EPA’s approval of Alabama’s updated plan is scheduled to publish July 6 in the Federal Register.
“I assume that makes the federal court ruling moot” as it relates to Alabama, Ron Gore, air quality chief for the state’s Department of Environmental Management, told Bloomberg Environment.
The EPA “is working with all three of the states to resolve the outstanding issues,” EPA spokesman Robert Daguillard told Bloomberg Environment July 5. “This has already occurred with respect to Alabama, is underway with respect to Mississippi, and is anticipated with respect to Illinois.”
Conflicts of Interest
In its July 5 ruling, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment in favor of the environmental advocacy groups that sued EPA last September.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Environmental Health, and Sierra Club filed the lawsuit, alleging that the EPA failed its duties under the Clean Air Act to impose federal implementation plans within two years whenever a state plan is found to be inadequate.
The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Environment is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.
The EPA rejected state plans from Alabama, Illinois, and Mississippi in 2015 for what it deemed insufficient safeguards against regulatory decision-makers having financial conflicts of interest—such as holding ownership in, or deriving significant income from, a company that the state regulates.
Potential for Citizen Lawsuits
Once the conflict-of-interest provisions are included in an EPA-approved plan, they can be enforced by citizen lawsuits under the Clean Air Act, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney told Bloomberg Environment last September.
The status of Mississippi’s and Illinois’ efforts to update their state implementation plans wasn’t immediately clear July 5.
The Illinois EPA is reviewing the court decision and “will work with its federal counterparts moving forward to address this issue,” a spokeswoman told Bloomberg Environment on July 5.
A spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality told Bloomberg Environment last September that the state Legislature passed legislation that brought the state in line with Clean Air Act standards.
An EPA spokesman said at that time that the federal agency was working closely with Mississippi to help them get into compliance and that the state was well on its way.
A representative of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality didn’t immediately respond to Bloomberg Environment for comment on July 5.
The case is Center for Biological Diversity v. Pruitt, D.D.C., No. 1:17-cv-02002, 7/5/18.
(Updates with comment from Illinois EPA in 13th paragraph)
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-slow-to-enforce-conflict-of-interest-rules-in-states-court-1

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