Preview Newsletter
AM ACC Clips Report - August 13, 2018
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(ACC Mentioned) Toxic Corruption: The Chemical Industry Keeps Pulling EPA's Strings
Aug 11, 2018 | Common Dreams
By Zack Kaldveer
Even though Scott Pruitt, the disgraced former director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is gone, the agency remains in the thralls of aggressive lobbying by the chemical industry. -
(ACC Mentioned) Coming Soon: Wheeler's First Big Moves on Science
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Scott Waldman
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is about to get a science test. -
(ACC Mentioned) U.S., Mexico Presidents Seem to Favor Cooperation
Aug 13, 2018 | Albuquerque Journal
By Jerry Pacheco
In my last column, I wrote about Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s letter to U.S. President Donald Trump in which he states that the issues most crucial to the U.S.-Mexico relationship are commerce, immigration, development and security. -
Grassley Sets Sept. 4 Start for Kavanaugh Hearing
Aug 10, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Amanda Reilly
The confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court will occur in early September, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced today. -
How the Boom Billionaires Made Their Mark on State Politics
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Lee
By the time the 2010 governor's election rolled around, the shale-drilling boom had started to overhaul Pennsylvania's economy and its politics. -
(ACC Mentioned) Toxics from Manufacturing Turn up in Public Water Systems
Aug 13, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Lauren Woeher wonders if her 16-month-old daughter has been harmed by tap water contaminated with toxic industrial compounds used in products like nonstick cookware, carpets and fast-food wrappers. -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Officials Warned Against Trump 'Mob Conspiracy' Asbestos Rule: Internal Emails
Aug 10, 2018 | Newsweek
By Nicole Goodkind
Environmental Protection Agency attorneys and scientists urged top officials against pushing through a rule change that allows for unregulated uses of asbestos in consumer goods, according to internal emails obtained by The New York Times. -
Industry Backs EPA Chemical Approval But Seeks Clarity On TSCA Process
Aug 10, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Industry attorneys are welcoming EPA's recent approval of a new chemical that took a narrow view of the substance's “reasonably foreseen uses” that the agency is required to consider, but are urging officials to clarify whether the approach is intended to apply more broadly to agency reviews of other new chemicals under the revised toxics law. -
Massachusetts Leads State Effort To Block EPA's Proposed Asbestos Rule
Aug 10, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Massachusetts officials are signaling strong pushback against a Trump administration proposed rule that could allow for new uses of asbestos, with state environment officials raising early concerns and seeking a six month delay in the rulemaking while the state's attorney general (AG) works with other Democratic AGs to oppose the plan. -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Wrestles with How to Regulate Toxic Chemicals Contaminating El Paso County Aquifer
Aug 11, 2018 | Colorado Springs Gazette
By Jakob Rodgers and Tom Roeder
The acronyms read like a helping of toxic alphabet soup: PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFHpA. -
(ACC Mentioned) Rachel Rose: Who's Paying the 'Experts' to Peddle This So-Called 'News'
Aug 12, 2018 | New Zealand Herald
By Rachel Rose
Reusable shopping bags: dangerous breeding grounds for bacteria and mould! So exclaimed an alarmed correspondent in the Chronicle letters section, right in the middle of Plastic-Free July. -
Could Chemical Recycling Help Solve Plastic Trash Problem?
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Only 9 percent of plastic material in the U.S. gets recovered and put into new products. But several companies are developing ways to chemically break down plastic to its basic building blocks, called monomers. -
Monsanto Hit with $289 Million Verdict in Roundup Cancer Case
Aug 11, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Joel Rosenblatt
Monsanto Co. was socked by a jury with $289 million in damages in the first trial over claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer. -
Court Orders EPA to Ban Chlorpyrifos
Aug 10, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Britt E. Erickson
In a win for environmentalists and farmworkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize a proposed ban on the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyrifos. -
PetroChina Is Said to Mull Suspending U.S. LNG Purchases
Aug 13, 2018 | Bloomberg
By Stephen Stapczynski
PetroChina Co. may temporarily halt purchases of spot U.S. liquefied natural gas spot cargoes through the winter to avoid potential tariffs amid a trade conflict between the U.S. and China, according to sources with knowledge of the strategy. -
Gulf of Mexico Oil Lease Auction to Test Response to Trump-Era Rules
Aug 13, 2018 | Reuters (In E&E Energywire)
By Jessica Resnick-Ault
A federal auction of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico next week will test energy companies' appetite for acreage after the Trump administration left royalty rates for deepwater parcels unchanged, bucking an industry call to lower them. -
Oil Producers Turn to Wall Street to Speed Permian Buildout
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Adams-Heard
Energy explorers are looking to public markets to expand pipeline networks in the biggest American oil field as shipping bottlenecks threaten to curtail production in the prolific shale region. -
Federal Oil Leasing May Resume in California in 2020
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Alan Kovski
The Bureau of Land Management may be able to restart oil and gas lease sales in California in 2020 after more than five years of holding off. -
FERC Frenzy: Atlantic Coast Halted as Others Move Forward
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer and Sam Mintz
Federal regulators stopped another natural gas project in its tracks Friday, halting work on the Atlantic Coast pipeline. -
Oversight Leaders to Trump: Pick CSB Chair to Avoid 'Chaos'
Aug 10, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
Mismanagement plagues the agency tasked with investigating industrial accidents, and the president needs to nominate a permanent head for it, leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said. -
Station Square Derailment, a Rare but Risky Accident, Could Renew Rail Safety Concerns
Aug 10, 2018 | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Daniel Moore
The derailment of a Norfolk Southern train near Station Square this week gave Pittsburghers a rare peek inside ubiquitous freight trains that rumble through the region: Seven crumpled rail cars dumped piles of Pampers diapers, cat food, Hanover Snyder snacks, detergent and mouthwash. -
Trump 'Buy America' Review Delays Cleaner Buses, Trucks
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By David Iaconangelo
A Trump administration review of "Buy America" requirements for iron and steel has frozen a pot of federal money meant for local governments trying to clean up their vehicle fleet emissions. -
Massachusetts Will Borrow Up to $2.4B for Climate-Impact Response
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
Massachusetts will borrow up to $2.4 billion during the next five years to help the state’s coastal communities defend themselves against climate change. -
Gop Attorneys General Say Climate Speech Under Attack
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Hulac
A dozen Republican attorneys general and governors rushed last week to defend Exxon Mobil Corp. in court, arguing its free-speech rights are under attack and that climate change science isn't clear. -
‘Rivers of Smoke’ Carry Air Pollution East as California Burns
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
The record-setting wildfires causing widespread destruction in California are fueling research on the danger of the air pollution they spew—and how far across the country the pollution could spread.
Congressional Hearings - There are no hearings to report at this time.
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(ACC Mentioned) Toxic Corruption: The Chemical Industry Keeps Pulling EPA's Strings
Aug 11, 2018 | Common Dreams
By Zack Kaldveer
Even though Scott Pruitt, the disgraced former director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is gone, the agency remains in the thralls of aggressive lobbying by the chemical industry. Under his acting replacement, Andrew Wheeler, a former chemical and coal industry lobbyist, the agency is now poised to fundamentally weaken how the federal government determines the health and safety of some of the most dangerous chemicals on the market.
As a result of a law passed by Congress in 2016, for the first time ever we saw a chance for the EPA to improve how it reviews the potential toxicity of hundreds of chemicals and determine how best to address their use in a wide variety of commonly used consumer products.
The agency is starting with 10 chemicals—used in everything from plastics to paint strippers to dry cleaning products—including four that mimic hormones when they make their way into the human body (“endocrine disrupting chemicals,” or EDCs). Studies have linked EDC exposures to infertility, breast and prostate cancer, diabetes and obesity, increased rates of dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and a variety of other diseases.
But now, the upcoming review will be overseen by Nancy Beck, the former chief lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council (ACC). Pruitt hired Beck in 2017 as deputy head of the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, using an arcane loophole allowing her to evade the ethics pledge meant to prevent White House officials from working on issues they had lobbied on in the previous two-year period.
Since that time, Beck has been instrumental in backtracking EPA positions on the adverse health impacts of more than a dozen hazardous chemicals while effectively chipping away at key environmental laws, exposing millions of Americans to more cancer-causing chemicals in our food, water, and products.
Unsurprisingly then, the EPA has proposed excluding from consideration the potential harm caused by chemical exposure through the air, ground, or water. Instead, only direct contact will be used to determine a chemical’s threat level—particularly endangering vulnerable populations such as pregnant women, children, seniors, workers, and those with chronic diseases. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, the EPA’s proposed new risk analysis won’t take into account an estimated 68 million pounds a year of chemical emissions.
The agency also plans to delay or scrap proposed bans on a host of toxic chemicals, including uses of the grease-removing solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), an EDC that has been linked to kidney cancer, hormone disruption, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and liver cancer. The destruction wrought by TCE has been so severe, Americans from across the country who have been harmed by this chemical recently congregated in D.C. to join Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) to demand the EPA keep its promise and ban it. TCE has contaminated the drinking water for 14 million Americans in 37 states.
EDCs contradict the classic, dose-makes-poison understanding of toxic chemicals. In 2012, Laura Vandenberg, the lead author of a major study on EDCs, stated that there are “no safe doses for these hormone-altering chemicals.” The author also expressed concern that government “safety” levels for such chemicals have been incorrect since the substances have never been tested for low-level effects.
Protecting public health was once an EPA priority—now it’s being treated as just another obstacle to maximizing corporate profit. This radical departure from the agency’s core mission means chemical industry executives stand to make millions while ordinary Americans will be exposed to more toxic chemicals.
The EPA is accepting public comments until Aug. 16. Already, a broad coalition of environmental, public health, and consumer rights organizations representing millions of Americans are demanding that the EPA does its job: protect people and the environment, not corporate interests. Rest assured, we will keep up the pressure. And so should you.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/11/toxic-corruption-chemical-industry-keeps-pulling-epas-strings
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(ACC Mentioned) Coming Soon: Wheeler's First Big Moves on Science
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Scott Waldman
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is about to get a science test.
During Scott Pruitt's tenure as EPA chief, the agency's science was sidelined. Web pages explaining climate science disappeared. Pruitt contradicted scientists by claiming that humans aren't the primary drivers of climate change. Researchers on EPA science advisory boards who received agency grants were deemed to have conflicts of interest, while industry researchers were framed as independent. A rule was proposed that would restrict which science could be used in regulations.
But since Pruitt resigned under a cloud of ethics scandals last month, attention has turned to Wheeler and whether he will continue some of Pruitt's more controversial moves on science.
A series of key decisions in the coming weeks will offer some clues.
One early test will be Wheeler's picks for EPA science advisory boards, which are expected in the next month or so.
When Pruitt reworked those boards last year, he forced off academic researchers who received EPA grants and replaced them with researchers funded by industries the agency is tasked with regulating. Although independent academic researchers still make up the bulk of the chartered Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, the newest round of appointments could tip the balance of those boards toward industry.
Wheeler will also have an opportunity to reshape Pruitt's proposed rule to require that science used in EPA regulations have open and reproducible data. Critics say that rule is tailored to discount major human health studies where participants were granted anonymity. The public comment period on that rule closes this week.
Observers say there is no indication that Wheeler, who has long criticized established climate science, will take a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
Wheeler is likely to support a variety of SAB candidates, said Matt Dempsey, who worked with Wheeler in the office of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and now works with a consulting firm representing the oil and gas industry. Dempsey said he doesn't see any major change in the way EPA will approach science under Wheeler.
"Both Pruitt and Wheeler work for the Trump administration, and Andrew has been clear from the beginning that the policy side was going to stay largely the same under Trump and what he's doing at the EPA," Dempsey said.
These upcoming decisions are Wheeler's opportunity to side either with science or with conservative ideologues, said John Walke, director of the federal clean air, climate and clean energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Walke said a federal appeals court's rebuke last week of Pruitt's decision to lift a ban on chlorpyrifos — a pesticide linked to health problems — shows that the agency will lose in court if it tries to ignore science. He also said that Wheeler's unwillingness to put the ban back in place shows he is likely to be similar to Pruitt on science.
"Wheeler is at a juncture where he can decide to follow the path of Scott Pruitt in appointing avowed science deniers concerning climate, PM2.5 [fine particulate matter] and ozone," Walke said. "Or he can follow the more traditional Republican path set forth in both Bush administrations of appointing industry scientists and academics who are more skeptical of science and principles like the precautionary principle, but are not outright deniers like those Scott Pruitt appointed to official science advisory bodies for the first time."
The nominations for the chartered Science Advisory Board, the agency's most influential sounding board of researchers, closed last week, and the new members will be selected by the end of October.
Last year, Pruitt picked researchers including some funded by the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council, whose work downplays the human health risks of pollution. Observers expect that the new list of names is likely to include a number of researchers who are funded by the oil and gas or chemicals industries. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee nominees include a number of candidates whose research is funded by industry or conservative think tanks.
Wheeler will likely continue in the same direction as Pruitt when it comes to deregulation, and that will inform his approach to industry science, said Jeff Holmstead, former EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation under President George W. Bush. However, Wheeler will likely take a more nuanced and measured approach than Pruitt when it comes to agency science, Holmstead said. That could mean a reworked version of the science transparency plan, which would allow for the use of some historic and groundbreaking studies, and advisory boards with industry as well as academic researchers.
"He generally shares Pruitt's concerns about the SAB and some of the science issues, but I would also say Andy probably has a more sophisticated understanding of the issues, and I think whatever comes out is likely to be a bit more nuanced than what was proposed," he said. "I do think there is an issue that EPA has not always appointed people to the SAB and especially to some of the subpanels who really cover the range of legitimate opinions. I think Andy will want to be sure he has a range of viewpoints and not necessarily all people who come from one point of view."
The world of academe is eyeing Wheeler's next moves on science nervously.
Last week, Harvard University's president and the leaders of its law school, medical school, school of public health and teaching hospitals sent a letter to Wheeler asking him to withdraw the proposed science transparency rule because it would have a devastating effect on regulations that protect the public from lead, air pollution and water pollution. Harvard researchers produced the groundbreaking Six Cities study, which linked air pollution to serious human health problems and which critics of Pruitt's proposal say is a target of the draft regulation.
"The proposed rule would — for no rational reason — prevent EPA from relying on much of the research that the signatories, their institutions, and other public health and environmental exposure researchers have conducted and continue to conduct," they wrote. "The rule will cripple EPA's ability to implement the aforementioned Statutes and will jeopardize the health and safety of infants, children, and adults in the United States and beyond."
There is more attention than ever before on EPA's science advisory boards because Pruitt politicized them, said Janet McCabe, a former EPA air chief who helped craft President Obama's Clean Power Plan climate change rule.
During her tenure at EPA, the members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee pushed the agency to be clearer and more thorough and to make sure all the right questions were asked, she said. That independent advice was taken seriously by the administrator. Now, she said, those on the board will be weighing in on regulations that could potentially affect the bottom line of their employers. She said Wheeler's choices will set a new direction for the agency and could turn it further away from its mission to protect public health.
"It will be troubling if a significant number of any of these panels are made up of industry representatives," she said. "I don't know how they cannot be representing the interests of their industry in their work they do there."
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093927
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(ACC Mentioned) U.S., Mexico Presidents Seem to Favor Cooperation
Aug 13, 2018 | Albuquerque Journal
By Jerry Pacheco
In my last column, I wrote about Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s letter to U.S. President Donald Trump in which he states that the issues most crucial to the U.S.-Mexico relationship are commerce, immigration, development and security.
In the letter, AMLO, as he’s known, also proposes that the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations should be accelerated and wrapped up as quickly as possible, so as to not create prolonged uncertainty over NAFTA that could put a halt to new investments in the medium to long term. On July 20, Trump sent AMLO a letter in response.
Trump’s letter to AMLO states that he agrees with the four issues outlined by the Mexican president-elect and that he has directed his team “to redouble those efforts with your incoming team.” Trump tells AMLO that “Both of our countries benefit from an economically prosperous North America. But we can do better.”
He then echoes AMLO’s position on NAFTA by stating, “I believe a successful renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement will lead to even more jobs and higher wages for hard-working American and Mexican workers – but only if it can go quickly, because otherwise I must go a much different route. It would not be my preference, but would be far more profitable for the United States and its taxpayers.” What this specific route might be or why it would be far more profitable for Americans is not clarified.
Trump then addresses AMLO’s points on immigration: “America welcomes legal immigrants from around the world, but we cannot accept illegal immigration. Like you, I believe that meeting the challenge of illegal immigration involves more than just strong border security.” And in reference to AMLO’s call for the U.S. to involve itself more in Central American countries where people have been fleeing to the U.S. via Mexico, Trump states, “We are prepared to further address the economic development and security issues that drive migration from Central America, but we must also increase cooperation to protect the rule of law and the sovereignty of both our countries, as well as vulnerable migrants who are victimized by violent criminal organizations.” Trump ends the letter with, “A strong relationship will lead to a much stronger and more prosperous Mexico, which frankly would make me very happy!”
Several things stand out about the communication between the two men. Both agree that their respective nations will benefit from a prosperous North America, and this will happen with a renegotiated NAFTA. Trump goes out on a limb, stating that this will create more jobs and higher wages for the workers of both countries, exactly the opposite of what he stated on the campaign trail when he accused Mexico of stealing U.S. jobs, and that NAFTA was the worst trade agreement ever. The NAFTA renegotiations, which Trump and his team thought would take only to the end of 2017 to complete, have become a political problem for Trump. His attacks on NAFTA have resulted in strong pushback from organizations such as the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Association of American Railroads, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council. He has backed himself into a corner with the renegotiations, which have become a distraction during this congressional election year. He needs to put this issue to bed as quickly as possible.
On the other hand, AMLO wants to settle the NAFTA issue out of the gate to show that he can successfully negotiate with the U.S. and that he is a moderate rather than a leftist politician who would oppose free trade with the U.S. Coming to an agreement with the U.S. on NAFTA would also bring him enhanced standing on the world stage as the new president of Latin America’s second-largest economy.
Trump’s statement that “America welcomes legal immigrants from around the world” does not jibe with the actions of his administration, which has been making it harder to legally emigrate to the U.S., particularly from developing countries. Perhaps the U.S. and Mexico will jointly work on immigration reform that will more easily provide American industrial sectors with badly needed labor in jobs that Americans tend to not want any more.
Finally, it is positive that both men agree that a key in solving illegal immigration to the U.S. from Central American refugees is for both countries to take a more active role in that region. This would supposedly come in the form of promoting security so that Central Americans do not feel terrorized by gangs or corrupt governments; and by working with Central American countries to create economic opportunities that would allow people from that region to earn a living to be able to raise their families in their native lands.
Most presidential administrations start with hope and promise. However, campaign platforms differ from implementation and governing. Time will tell if the cooperation being espoused by Trump and AMLO can result in positive results that benefit the citizens of both countries.
Jerry Pacheco is the executive director of the International Business Accelerator, a nonprofit trade counseling program of the New Mexico Small Business Development Centers Network.
https://www.abqjournal.com/1208047/us-mexico-presidents-seem-to-favor-cooperation.html
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Grassley Sets Sept. 4 Start for Kavanaugh Hearing
Aug 10, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Amanda Reilly
The confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court will occur in early September, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced today.
The multiday affair will begin Sept. 4 and is expected to last three to four days. Members will making opening statements on the 4th, and questioning of Kavanaugh will begin on the 5th, according to the committee.
"I look forward to what will be a thorough and open vetting process by the Committee between now and September," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the GOP Senate leadership team, said today.
President Trump last month nominated Kavanaugh, a conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the seat of retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Today's hearing announcement comes as Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) spar over documents stemming from Kavanaugh's time in the George W. Bush White House, where he served prior to his appointment as a D.C. Circuit judge. Democrats have accused Republicans of seeking to block their access to documents that would shed light on his role in the Bush administration.
Twenty-five environmental groups today urged Grassley and Feinstein to reject Kavanaugh's nomination.
The groups said Kavanaugh's record on the D.C. Circuit "exposes him as an activist judge" who has used his position to rewrite laws and create obstacles for agency regulation.
Kavanaugh, who has been on the D.C. Circuit for a dozen years, "reads burdensome obligations into the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act," the groups wrote. They cited decisions by the judge to require EPA to consider the costs of regulating power plants and permitting mining operations.
"Judge Kavanaugh's approach to the law threatens key elements of environmental and public health protections, and makes it harder for people to hold the government and big corporate polluters accountable," the groups wrote today in a letter.
National environmental groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Environmental Working Group, the League of Conservation Voters and Waterkeeper Alliance signed the letter, as well as several environmental justice groups and local organizations.
Environmentalists have also aligned with a large coalition of progressive and civil rights groups opposing the nomination (E&E Daily, Aug. 2).
Conservative groups have gone to bat for Kavanaugh. The Judicial Crisis Network has already spent millions of dollars on ad campaigns supporting the nominee.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/08/10/stories/1060093903
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How the Boom Billionaires Made Their Mark on State Politics
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Lee
By the time the 2010 governor's election rolled around, the shale-drilling boom had started to overhaul Pennsylvania's economy and its politics.
The first successful wells in the Marcellus Shale field were less than 5 years old, but the gas industry was already spreading to more than half of Pennsylvania's counties, giving it a bigger footprint than the coal industry.
State regulators were scrambling to come up with rules to protect landowners and water sources from the potential harm caused by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the combination that was opening up vast new fields of oil and gas. And even though the Marcellus Shale had already created a couple of fortunes, the gas industry wasn't paying an extraction tax.
Tom Corbett, the state's former attorney general, won the governor's seat after raising more money than any Republican candidate in a decade. The resurgent oil and gas industry gave more to Corbett's campaign — $1.2 million — than the mining or real estate industries, according to records compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. And of that $1.2 million, $330,000 came from a handful of donors who would become billionaires in the Marcellus Shale.
Eight years later, as the shale industry enters its second decade, its influence on politics remains one of its biggest legacies. The boom in fracking, pipeline construction and related industries has created at least a dozen billionaires, according to Forbes.
Eight of those billionaires have become top political donors, contributing at least $40 million to candidates and political committees since 2010, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. They've given millions more to outside spending groups that are harder to track, according to media reports and campaign watchdog groups.
They haven't always been successful at the national level — $15 million of the shale industry's contributions went to Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign. But they've had a string of successes in state legislatures around the country.
"A lot of times, these guys get the biggest bang for their buck in giving to state and local officials," said Dan Weiner, who studies the impact of money on politics at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.
The flow of money is legal. The three biggest shale-drilling states — Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania — allow unlimited donations from individuals to political candidates. But critics maintain that the surge of giving has warped the political process, doing harm to both the environment and the democratic process.
None of the eight top donors agreed to an interview. Proponents say, though, that the industry is looking after its interests, the same way real estate brokers, lawyers and others have done for decades. And, they maintain, politicians in conservative areas like Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Texas are less concerned about the donations and more concerned about their constituents, who often work in the industry.
The shale billionaires have also become major charitable donors, pouring money into an urban park in Dallas, diabetes research in Oklahoma and an ice hockey rink at Pennsylvania State University.
It's clear, though, that the shale-drilling industry has given a lot and gotten a lot of what it wanted at state capitols.Pennsylvania
Among Corbett's biggest donors were Terry and Kim Pegula. Terry Pegula's company, East Resources, was an early driller in the Marcellus field, and it sold most of its acreage to Royal Dutch Shell PLC for $4.7 billion a few months before the election. Terry Pegula donated $100,000 to Corbett's campaign in 2010, and Kim Pegula gave $180,000, according to campaign records.
An additional $50,000 for Corbett's campaign came from Trevor Rees-Jones, founder of Chief Oil & Gas LLC. Rees-Jones had already become a billionaire after developing and flipping shale fields in Texas, and he sold assets in the Marcellus Shale for $2.2 billion in 2010 and 2011.
Corbett and the Republican-controlled Legislature went on to negotiate Act 13, the law that established the regulatory and fiscal rules for drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The bill sidestepped the kind of tax on energy production that most other states levy in favor of a relatively low fee on each well drilled. It also prevented local governments from using their zoning authority to restrict drilling locations (Energywire, July 16, 2012).
John Hanger, who oversaw the shale industry as the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection until 2010, said Corbett's election was a win for Terry Pegula and others in the shale industry.
"He put a lot of money behind the candidate who was going to favor weak regulation versus strong, no taxation versus significant taxation," Hanger said in an interview.
At the same time, Hanger said Act 13 was a legislative compromise; the shale industry was forced to pay a fee to the state, although it's lower than what it pays in other states. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the prohibition on local control of drilling in 2013.
"There's no doubt money does influence decisionmaking and access," Hanger said. "It's not the whole story."
North Dakota
In North Dakota, the shale billionaires have had a big impact while donating far smaller sums.
The state's oil industry is overseen by the three-member Industrial Commission, made up of the governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner.
Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources Inc., has given to all three. Hamm's company is the biggest leaseholder in the Bakken Shale oil field, and he has an outsized impact on the state's politics. He and his company have given $120,700 to candidates in North Dakota, including $20,000 to former Gov. Jack Dalrymple's (R) campaign in 2012.
Hamm served as an energy adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and was in North Dakota when Trump gave a thundering speech to an oil and gas conference about opening more government land up for drilling. He is also the finance chairman for Rep. Kevin Cramer's (R-N.D.) bid to oust incumbent Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (E&E Daily, June 26).
As in Pennsylvania, Hamm and the shale-drilling industry have racked up legislative and regulatory wins.
"There is not an industry that has a greater influence on North Dakota politics than the oil industry," said Jim Fuglie, a blogger who formerly served as the state tourism director and who's been involved in Democratic politics.
The Industrial Commission has moved haltingly to cut back on flaring of natural gas in the Bakken Shale field, a practice that's generally banned in other states as a waste of resources. It's also adopted relatively lax rules for the network of gathering pipelines that crisscross the oil patch, despite complaints from landowners (Energywire, May 11, 2016).
Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said the state was already a conservative, pro-business environment before the drilling boom happened, so it's not surprising that the oil industry supports local officeholders.
"Business activity brings engaged political activity," he said.Texas
Most of the billionaire donors live in Texas, so it's not surprising that they've been heavily involved in their home state's politics.
Kelcy Warren, the founder of pipeline giant Energy Transfer Partners LP, has had a long relationship with former Gov. Rick Perry (R), who's now the Trump administration's Energy secretary.
Perry served on the board of one of Energy Transfer's subsidiaries after he left the governor's mansion, and Warren donated $6 million to three super political action committees that backed Perry's 2016 presidential bid, according to The Washington Post and other media outlets.
Richard Kinder, chairman of the rival pipeline company Kinder Morgan Inc., backed Jeb Bush in that race, giving $1 million to a Bush-aligned PAC.
Two of the top donors in the state are Farris and Dan Wilks, who live in rural Cisco, about 180 miles west of Dallas. The brothers became billionaires after building and selling a fracking equipment company, Frac Tech Services Inc., and are currently worth about $1.4 billion each.
Farris Wilks and his wife, Joann, have contributed a combined $13.3 million to candidates and PACs since 2010, including $10 million to Keep the Promise III, a PAC that supported Cruz's 2016 presidential bid. Dan Wilks and his wife, Staci, donated $5.8 million over the same time period, including $5 million to Keep the Promise III.
As in other states, the shale donors have had perhaps their biggest impact at the state level, funding both sides of a fratricidal political fight over the direction of the Texas Republican Party.
Tea party conservatives, motivated by their strong stances on abortion and other social issues, have been trying to oust the traditional, business-oriented wing of the GOP. They've won a string of races, including Cruz's Senate win in 2012 and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's victory over the incumbent David Dewhurst (R) in 2014 (Energywire, Feb. 27, 2014).
The Wilkses have given more than $1 million each to both the nonprofit group Empower Texans and a PAC affiliated with Texas Right to Life.
Empower Texans has spent years recruiting challengers to run against GOP officeholders, pushing even establishment Republicans to the right, said Andrew Wheat of the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.
Other shale billionaires have backed the state's business-oriented establishment candidates. Rees-Jones has given $153,000 over the years to state House Speaker Joe Straus, who is stepping down this year.
Likewise, Houston billionaire Jeff Hildebrand has given $47,000 to Strauss over the years and gave $100,000 in 2014 to Dewhurst's unsuccessful campaign to hang onto the lieutenant governor's office.
Hildebrand's company, Hilcorp Energy Co., at one point was the largest privately held oil company in the country, with operations from Alaska to Pennsylvania.
The overall trend has been to the right, even as the state's population has become more urbanized and as black and Hispanic people became a larger majority of the population.
In 2014, when voters in the college town of Denton were organizing a petition drive that would ban fracking in the city limits, the Wilks brothers gave $800,000 to candidates who opposed the ban, Reuters reported.
All 21 of the Wilks-backed candidates won their races and went on to vote for House Bill 40, a state law that prevents cities from regulating most aspects of the oil and gas industry (Energywire, March 31, 2015).
Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who was elected in 2014, went on to make opposition to local environmental ordinances a hallmark of his administration.
"Texas is being California-ized, and you may not even be noticing it. It's being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans," he said in his first speech after the election (Energywire, Jan. 9, 2015).
Abbott is running for re-election and has amassed a campaign fund of $54.8 million — including $7.4 million from the oil and gas industry.
The big-money donations are likely to enforce the status quo, at least for the time being, Wheat said.
"None of these guys are worried about a progressive taking them out — they're worried about a guy on their right," Wheat said. "You get this crazy position — the people we thought were right-wingers 10 or 20 years ago are now the sort of reasonable statesmen."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093919
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(ACC Mentioned) Toxics from Manufacturing Turn up in Public Water Systems
Aug 13, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Lauren Woeher wonders if her 16-month-old daughter has been harmed by tap water contaminated with toxic industrial compounds used in products like nonstick cookware, carpets and fast-food wrappers. Henry Betz, at 76, rattles around his house alone at night, thinking about the water his family unknowingly drank for years that was tainted by the same contaminants, and the pancreatic cancers that killed wife Betty Jean and two others in his household.
Tim Hagey, manager of a local water utility, recalls how he used to assure people that the local public water was safe. That was before testing showed it had some of the highest levels of the toxic compounds of any public water system in the U.S.
"You all made me out to be a liar," Hagey, general water and sewer manager in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Warminister, told Environmental Protection Agency officials last month.
At "community engagement sessions" like the one in Horsham, residents and state, local and military officials are demanding that the EPA act quickly — and decisively — to clean up local water systems testing positive for dangerous levels of the chemicals, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
The Trump administration called the contamination "a potential public relations nightmare" earlier this year after federal toxicology studies found that some of the compounds are more hazardous than previously acknowledged.
PFAS have been in production since the 1940s, and there are about 3,500 different types. Dumped into water, the air or soil, some forms of the compounds are expected to remain intact for thousands of years; one public-health expert dubbed them "forever chemicals."
EPA testing from 2013 to 2015 found significant amounts of PFAS in public water supplies in 33 U.S. states. The finding helped move PFAS up as a national priority.
So did scientific studies that firmed up the health risks. One, looking at a kind of PFAS once used in making Teflon, found a probable link with kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, hypertension in pregnant women and high cholesterol. Other recent studies point to immune problems in children, among other things.
In 2016, the EPA set advisory limits — without any direct enforcement — for two kinds of PFAS that had recently been phased out of production in the United States. But manufacturers are still producing, and releasing into the air and water, newer versions of the compounds.
Earlier this year, federal toxicologists decided that even the EPA's 2016 advisory levels for the two phased-out versions of the compound were several times too high for safety.
EPA says it will prepare a national management plan for the compounds by the end of the year. But Peter Grevatt, director of the agency's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, told The Associated Press that there's no deadline for a decision on possible regulatory actions.
Reviews of the data, and studies to gather more, are ongoing.
Even as the Trump administration says it advocates for clean air and water, it is ceding more regulation to the states and putting a hold on some regulations seen as burdensome to business.
In Horsham and surrounding towns in eastern Pennsylvania, and at other sites around the United States, the foams once used routinely in firefighting training at military bases contained PFAS.
"I know that you can't bring back three people that I lost," Betz, a retired airman, told the federal officials at the Horsham meeting. "But they're gone."
State lawmakers complained of "a lack of urgency and incompetency" on the part of EPA.
"It absolutely disgusts me that the federal government would put PR concerns ahead of public health concerns," Republican state Rep. Todd Stephens declared.
After the meeting, Woeher questioned why it took so long to tell the public about the dangers of the compounds.
"They knew they had seeped into the water, and they didn't tell anybody about it until it was revealed and they had to," she said.
Speaking at her home with her toddler nearby, she asked, "Is this something that, you know, I have to worry? It's in her."
While contamination of drinking water around military bases and factories gets most of the attention, the EPA says 80 percent of human exposure comes from consumer products in the home.
The chemical industry says it believes the versions of the nonstick, stain-resistant compounds in use now are safe, in part because they don't stay in the body as long as older versions.
"As an industry today ... we're very forthcoming meeting any kind of regulatory requirement to disclose any kind of adverse data," said Jessica Bowman, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council trade group.
Independent academics and government regulators say they don't fully share the industry's expressed confidence about the safety of PFAS versions now in use.
While EPA considers its next step, states are taking action to tackle PFAS contamination on their own.
In Delaware, National Guard troops handed out water after high levels of PFAS were found in a town's water supply. Michigan last month ordered residents of two towns to stop drinking or cooking with their water, after PFAS was found at 20 times the EPA's 2016 advisory level. In New Jersey, officials urged fishermen to eat some kinds of fish no more than once a year because of PFAS contamination.
Washington became the first state to ban any firefighting foam with the compound.
Given the findings on the compounds, alarm bells "should be ringing four out of five" at the EPA, Kerrigan Clough, a former deputy regional EPA administrator, said in an interview with the AP as he waited for a test for PFAS in the water at his Michigan lake home, which is near a military base that used firefighting foam.
"If the risk appears to be high, and you've got it every place, then you've got a different level" of danger and urgency, Clough said. "It's a serious problem."
Problems with PFAS surfaced partly as a result of a 1999 lawsuit by a farmer who filmed his cattle staggering, frothing and dying in a field near a DuPont disposal site in Parkersburg, West Virginia, for PFAS then used in Teflon.
In 2005, under President George W. Bush, the EPA and DuPont settled an EPA complaint that the chemical company knew at least by the mid-1980s that the early PFAS compound posed a substantial risk to human health.
The EPA in the past "didn't have much of a hammer to come down on a bad existing chemical," said Lynn Goldman, the agency's assistant administrator over toxic substances in the 1990s, now dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
But Congress has boosted the agency's authority to regulate problematic chemicals since then. That includes toughening up the federal Toxic Substances Control Act and regulatory mandates for the EPA itself in 2016.
For PFAS, that should include addressing the new versions of the compounds coming into production, not just tackling old forms that companies already agreed to take offline, Goldman said.
"Otherwise it's the game of whack-a-mole," she said. "That's not what you want to do when you're protecting the public health."
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/08/13/us/ap-us-epa-forever-chemical.html
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Officials Warned Against Trump 'Mob Conspiracy' Asbestos Rule: Internal Emails
Aug 10, 2018 | Newsweek
By Nicole Goodkind
Environmental Protection Agency attorneys and scientists urged top officials against pushing through a rule change that allows for unregulated uses of asbestos in consumer goods, according to internal emails obtained by The New York Times.
The emails show that the Trump administration's mandate to roll back environmental and health regulations were contested within the agency and went against internal consensus and recommendations, The Times reported.
In June the EPA quietly announced that while it would evaluate and require approval for most new uses of asbestos in the United States, it would not investigate the risks associated with asbestos already in the environment.
“If you don’t evaluate the dangerous legacy of asbestos you don’t know how much contamination still exists in the United States,” Linda Reinstein, president of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, told Newsweek at the time. “We know it’s in our homes, schools, workplace and environment, but the average American can’t identify and evaluate the risk. We have taken risk evaluation off the table.”
Reinstein said that she had multiple meetings with Nancy Beck, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, to present over 100 studies that confirmed exposure to even low-doses of asbestos could cause terminal illness. But she said that Beck—previously senior director at the American Chemistry Council, a lobbyist group that represents Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto and ExxonMobil Chemical—declined to consider them.
The changes to the rule were spurred by a 2016 congressional amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which required the EPA to reconsider its process for evaluating asbestos in the U.S.
The amendment's sponsors, however, originally supported the change as a way to allow the U.S. to join most other developed countries in fully banning asbestos. “In a bipartisan compromise, Congress moved to patch up the holes in our chemical review system when it updated the Toxic Substances Control Act. But Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration are presiding over an attack on not just the spirit, but also the actual content of the reform law,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a statement.
“The new approach raises significant concerns about the potential health impacts,” wrote Sharon Cooperstein, an EPA policy analyst, in an email.
Robert T. Courtnage, an associate chief with the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, wrote that the change to the rule was ordered at the last minute. “Upper management asked us to take a different approach,” he wrote in another email.
Nearly 15,000 Americans die from asbestos-related illnesses each year, but President Donald Trump has called the naturally occurring mineral "100 percent safe, once applied." The president implied in his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, that the movement against asbestos is a conspiracy created by the mafia. “I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal,” he wrote.
A spokesman for the EPA, James Hewitt, told The New York Times that the emails indicated staff and other members of the working group on asbestos “did not fully understand the proposal being developed.”
https://www.newsweek.com/asbestos-epa-regulation-donald-trump-1068805
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Industry Backs EPA Chemical Approval But Seeks Clarity On TSCA Process
Aug 10, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Industry attorneys are welcoming EPA's recent approval of a new chemical that took a narrow view of the substance's “reasonably foreseen uses” that the agency is required to consider, but are urging officials to clarify whether the approach is intended to apply more broadly to agency reviews of other new chemicals under the revised toxics law.
“We urge EPA to articulate its thinking on what is and is not 'reasonably foreseeable' and what [chemical] submitters can do to help EPA understand not only what is intended, but what might be reasonably foreseen to occur,” attorneys with the law firm Bergeson & Campbell, P.C. said in an Aug. 6 blog post.
But one environmentalist says EPA is unlikely to document its current approach after stiff opposition to a prior draft approach that the agency shelved after drawing a lawsuit from environmentalists, suggesting continuing policy uncertainty for how the agency plans to review new chemicals under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
The call for clarity responds to EPA's July 30 approval of a chemical polymer, known as Oxirane, 2-methyl-, polymer with oxirane, bis[2-[(1-oxo-2-propen-1-yl)amino]propyl] ether, for use as a deodorizer in products, including cat litter and fabric sprays, though the product poses human health and environmental hazards.
EPA has been struggling to craft a process for reviewing new chemicals and its process for doing so has been shrouded in uncertainty and controversy. The law requires the agency to consider substances' “intended uses,” as well as “reasonably foreseen” uses, and to take steps to address any harms.
Late last year, EPA issued for public comment a draft “New Chemicals Decision-Making Framework,” though the agency said it would implement the draft even as it took comments.
The framework proposed streamlining reviews by dropping use of enforceable orders as an interim step in regulating new chemicals, and allowing the agency to proceed directly from premanufacture notices (PMNs) to issuing broader significant new use rules (SNURs). EPA officials also have said they have struggled to apply the law's mandate to consider “reasonably foreseen” uses in risk assessment.
While EPA said the draft framework was intended to speed approvals of new chemicals, environmentalists sued over the approach, charging it unlawfully dropped use of enforcement orders as an interim step to ensure that PMNs do not pose unreasonable risks or inadvertently allow other uses that may pose risks.
While the suit was expected to face procedural hurdles because it challenged a policy that was not yet final, the agency nevertheless declined to apply the framework.
But the agency's recent approval of the polymer suggested a new approach, in which officials may use a narrow definition of 'reasonably foreseen uses.'
The approach is winning praise from the attorneys at Bergeson & Campbell, which represents a coalition of companies interested in EPA's review of new chemicals under the revised TSCA.
In the blog post, the attorneys tout EPA's recent approval of a new polymer as showing the agency taking “a more measured approach” to considering “reasonably foreseen uses.”
“EPA more carefully applied new TSCA as written when it identified a low/moderate health concern and a moderate eco concern, and nevertheless took a reasonable approach grounded on the law to go beyond mere consideration of potential hazard and to interpret the 'reasonably foreseen' conditions of use and assess unreasonable risk as new TSCA requires,” the firm says. It calls the recent approval a “welcomed departure” from EPA's past decision-making.
'Let's Be Very Careful'
Environmentalist and industry officials agree that the polymer's approval signals EPA has resolved the lingering question of how it will consider reasonably foreseen uses. But while industry has backed the recent review as a necessary step toward a more efficient process, advocates worry EPA is failing to comply with the law's requirements.
An environmentalist attorney says that while the polymer's approval raises significant questions about how EPA is considering “reasonably foreseen” uses as TSCA requires, the agency is unlikely to offer clarity, given the pushback against a proposed draft framework for reviewing new chemicals the agency issued last year but has not implemented.
“There's no information that a policy is coming, and, you know, I tend to think there won't be one,” the environmentalist says, noting opposition to the draft framework. “Looking at that experience, EPA is likely saying to themselves, 'Let's be very careful what we put in writing here.'”
Concern about a narrow new approach has already prompted concerns from environmentalists and some Senate Democrats, who late last month raised fears that the Trump administration planned to further narrow new chemical reviews. Several Democratic senators, who backed the TSCA reform law, have requested meetings with EPA before the agency implemented additional changes to new chemicals reviews.
And in a series of recent blog posts, the Environmental Defense Fund's Richard Denison has argued the recent polymer approval shows the agency has shifted to a process that avoids issuing orders and SNURs limiting risks from a substance's intended and reasonably foreseen uses.
But an industry attorney says that the recently approved polymer is in a class of chemicals that likely would not have other reasonably foreseen uses that were not described in the PMN, and that fears of EPA's weakening of new chemical reviews are overblown.
“Not every chemical has multiple uses,” Herb Estreicher, of Keller and Heckman, LLP, told the firm's Aug. 8 webinar on TSCA implementation. For substances that do have a variety of uses, Estreicher added, chemical manufacturers should notify EPA of those other “reasonably foreseen” uses to speed the agency's analysis.
He also argued that companies seeking EPA approvals of new chemicals still face unnecessary delays and other hurdles. Problems with the agency's review process include inconsistent decision-making on similar chemicals and failure to group such chemicals for more efficient review.
Estreicher also said that EPA continues to rely on “surrogate or analog” data in cases when studies on the specific new chemical under review are available. “Far from a weakening, we would say that the chemical program is in a state of dysfunction,” he said.
Weaker Standard
But the environmentalist attorney says that language in EPA's decision document approving the new polymer approval includes language suggesting a weakening standard for assessing reasonably foreseen uses, and that the review's finding of no such uses deviates from most prior reviews.
In a footnote, EPA defines reasonably foreseen conditions of use as “future circumstances, distinct from known or intended conditions of use,” under which EPA “expects” the chemical will be used. EPA also says it will identify “reasonably foreseen” uses on a case-by-case basis, and that the analysis will be “highly fact-specific.”
The word “expected,” the source says, suggests that EPA “now believes reasonably foreseen uses requires a fairly high degree of certainty that a particular use will in fact be commercialized.”
“So it may be that by raising the bar very high they are able to conclude for this and presumably other new chemicals that there are not reasonably foreseeable uses,” the source adds.
And while Estreicher, who represents chemical sector clients, suggested the polymer may not have other similar uses, the environmentalist says that EPA's approval was based in part on the company's plan to import the substance in a solution and at a low concentration.
“How do we know someone won't come along and increase that concentration, and if that is the case, wouldn't that be a reasonably foreseen condition of use?” the source says.
“You hope that they actually did a search for reasonably foreseen uses, and they gave it some consideration and had a basis for saying there were none, but you can't really say that based on what's in the decision document.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/industry-backs-epa-chemical-approval-seeks-clarity-tsca-process
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Massachusetts Leads State Effort To Block EPA's Proposed Asbestos Rule
Aug 10, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Massachusetts officials are signaling strong pushback against a Trump administration proposed rule that could allow for new uses of asbestos, with state environment officials raising early concerns and seeking a six month delay in the rulemaking while the state's attorney general (AG) works with other Democratic AGs to oppose the plan.
In Aug. 8 comments on EPA's proposed significant new use rule (SNUR) for asbestos, which would allow the agency to regulate industry efforts to resume any of 15 prior uses of the substance, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MDEP) charges that the proposed rule may fail to capture the full scope of future uses of the substance, and that EPA should further clarify the methodology it will use in reviewing risks from future uses.
“The SNUR should provide at a minimum the benchmark process that will be followed in evaluating the potential health and environmental effects and identify the standards and criteria that will be used to determine which products can be safely used and those that should be excluded from use,” MDEP says.
MDEP's concerns that the proposed SNUR may not adequately address all possible uses echoes concerns from EPA staff, who raised concerns earlier this year during internal deliberations that the agency narrowed an earlier draft proposal that would have applied to all renewed uses to instead apply to only the 15 enumerated uses, according to internal emails obtained by the New York Times.
As a result of its concerns, MDEP says it needs more time to ensure that EPA's list of uses that would require federal review under the new rule is complete, and backs environmentalists' long-standing concerns that the Trump administration is failing to address exposures from chemicals' legacy uses in implementing the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
“The SNUR is silent on the use of legacy materials that may be manufactured into new products,” MDEP says, adding that the proposed rule should address “how these materials and products would be evaluated under the proposed SNUR to ensure protection of human health and the environment.”
The state cites asbestos brake linings, taken from scrapped vehicles, and then turned into materials for car parts other new products as one example.
MDEP asks EPA to postpone its Aug. 10 deadline for public input by 180 days to allow the state to consider other uses of asbestos that could recur and so should be subject to the rule. Alternatively, MDEP says EPA could withdraw its current proposed rule and issue an updated proposal for public comment that addresses the state's concerns.
As the state pushes back on the proposed SNUR, AG Maura Healey (D) is leading other Democratic state AGs to fight the rule. “In recent years, tens of thousands have died from mesothelioma and other diseases caused by exposure to asbestos and other dangerous chemicals,” she told the Times. “If the Trump administration’s erosion of federal chemical safety rules continues, it will endanger our communities and the health of all Americans.”
In an early indication that other attorneys general will almost certainly join Massachusetts' effort, Healey led nine other Democratic attorneys general -- from California, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia -- in filing Aug. 3 comments criticizing EPA's related plan for reviewing the risks of asbestos and several other chemicals.
“Asbestos is one of the most harmful chemicals, taking 15,000 lives a year. There is no safe level of exposure,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in an Aug. 6 Tweet announcing the comments. “The #Trump administration can’t cherry-pick their data on dangerous chemicals and threaten lives when @EPA evaluates their safety,” he added.
Any challenge from states will also be joined by environmentalists, who have long argued that the agency should simply ban all uses. “[T]he best way to prevent new uses is to have a complete ban of asbestos in the U.S.,” the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) said in a June 1 statement on the proposed SNUR.
EPA Staff
EPA sought comment through Aug. 10 on the proposed SNUR, issued in the Federal Register June 11, that would require any entity planning to resume 15 enumerated uses of asbestos to notify the agency 90 days in advance to allow EPA to review and potentially regulate it.
The rule would apply to 15 uses of asbestos that the agency has deemed are no longer occurring, including in adhesives, sealants, extruded sealant tape and other tape, high-grade electrical paper, reinforced plastics, vinyl-asbestos floor tile; and any other building material (other than cement).
In the proposed rule, EPA notes it sought to ban asbestos in 1989 but that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit overturned the ban on most uses.
New uses first initiated after August 25, 1989, were also banned, EPA says, adding that the proposed SNUR would address uses that were initiated prior to August 25, 1989, but for which manufacturing and processing are no longer ongoing.
But according to internal emails, EPA staff say that “upper management” changed a prior version of the proposed SNUR that would have required all future users of asbestos to notify EPA.
And staff faults the proposed version of the rule as potentially allowing new uses to go unregulated.
“At the staff level our recommendation was to structure the SNUR as previously shared with the workgroup as that would prevent any uses that are no longer ongoing from not being captured by the SNUR,” the emails say, noting that other uses beyond the 15 articulated could occur. “However, this is the direction we received from our upper management.”
And top EPA officials are defending this stance. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is arguing publicly that the proposed SNUR seeks to limit, not allow new uses of asbestos.
“There have been some inaccurate media reports regarding @EPA's actions on asbestos,” Wheeler says in an Aug. 8 Tweet. “The fact is @EPA is proposing a new rule that would allow for the restriction of asbestos manufacturing and processing of new uses of asbestos.”
And Nancy Beck, the most senior Trump administration appointee in EPA's toxics office, said that the proposed SNUR would restrict and potentially ban some uses of asbestos where no existing mechanism of doing so exists. “Obviously someone out there thinks we are increasing exposure to asbestos when we are doing the opposite,” she told the Times.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/massachusetts-leads-state-effort-block-epas-proposed-asbestos-rule
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Aug 11, 2018 | Colorado Springs Gazette
By Jakob Rodgers and Tom Roeder
The acronyms read like a helping of toxic alphabet soup: PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFHpA.
They number in the thousands — each representing a different compound with the same chemical foundation as those contaminating the aquifer beneath Security, Widefield and Fountain.
But as the number of those chemicals known to researchers grows, a central question about the federal government’s plans for protecting residents from those chemicals remains unresolved.
Will the EPA widen its approach and focus on the thousands of perfluorinated compounds as a group? Or will federal regulators continue addressing only one or two at a time — part of a lengthy process that experts and clean water advocates say could last for decades, if not longer?
At meetings last week in Colorado Springs, advocates gave the EPA an earful about the agency playing “whack-a-mole” with the chemical — chasing down each variation for its own set of regulations.
“The solution is to regulate perfluorinated compounds as a family to protect our families,” the Sierra Club’s Fran Silva-Blayney told EPA bosses at their Wednesday gathering in town.
Perfluorinated compounds entered the local lexicon in 2016, when testing revealed that drinking water for thousands of households in southern El Paso County exceeded an EPA health advisory for the chemicals due to contamination in the Widefield aquifer. Millions of other Americans were affected, too.
Testing later identified a likely source for the local contamination: firefighting foam used for decades at Peterson Air Force Base that spread into the aquifer after it was sprayed on the ground in training exercises.
Since then, two other communities in Colorado have discovered the compounds in their drinking water. One site, in western Boulder County, appears to have been fouled by the same toxic firefighting foam, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Requests to approach all the perfluorinated chemicals as a group — and to regulate them with enforceable drinking water standards — were among the most prevalent voiced to the EPA regulators who visited Colorado Springs on Tuesday and Wednesday during the third stop of a nationwide listening tour.
They echoed similar requests made during the agency’s previous two stops in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, said William Cibulas Jr., acting director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s division of toxicology and human health services.
“You see what the people want — the people want (a drinking water standard) that covers the whole family. They don’t want just individual chemical by chemical,” Cibulas said. “And that makes sense, and it’s a recommendation the EPA’s going to have to take seriously.”
For years, the EPA has chosen a narrower route — issuing a health advisory for the two best-known types of chemicals on that list, but withholding judgment on thousands of others. Both chemicals — perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA — were found in the Widefield aquifer.
In recent months, the EPA has doubled down on that course — voicing a desire to possibly stiffen regulations on those same two chemicals, while possibly developing baseline toxicity values for two others.
At a meeting Wednesday, residents and clean water advocates said that the agency can’t afford to continue addressing the chemicals one by one.
“We demand you fix this,” Liz Rosenbaum of the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition said during the standing room only meeting Wednesday in Colorado Springs.
The EPA, though, is not close to “fixing” the perfluorinated contamination, and its initial approach likely won’t be evident for months.
Jennifer McLain, the EPA’s deputy director of groundwater and drinking water, said the agency was trying to take a broad-based approach to oversight of the chemicals. Still, details aren’t expected until the agency’s release of a management plan for the toxic chemicals, which is due by the end of the year.
“It’s not possible to do everything chemical by chemical, but it is also important to study some of these important chemicals one by one,” McLain said. “It’s something that we see as being necessary for the future of our understating — is to have an understanding of how these chemicals behave in classes, as well as getting a deep understanding of some of the specific chemicals we’re finding in the environment.”
The number of such chemicals — also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — is unknown, said Christopher Higgins, a Colorado School of Mines chemist who has studied the chemicals. Some scientists have estimated as many as 3,000 or 5,000 exist.
They’re all man-made. But the vast number of products that they have been used in — and the complex chemistry used in making them — have complicated researchers’ efforts to make a final count.
And some of the chemicals change in the environment — often into versions federal officials say appear most threatening to human health.
“I’m realistic, in that I don’t think we’re ever going to have an exact number of how many of these chemicals one might find — either in various types of products or out in the environment — because of that complexity,” Higgins said.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, opposes a group-based approach to regulation. The chemicals’ properties vary widely, along with their uses and benefits, said Jon Corley, a spokesman for the organization. He argued that not all such chemicals require “risk-based regulation,” and that lumping them together would ignore their vast differences.
“We don’t think that would be based on good science,” Corley said.
Still, some experts say anything less than addressing the chemicals as a group will only prolong the risks Americans face. At a time when thousands of other such chemicals are known to exist, the rationale for keeping a narrow focus is questionable at best, they say.
“They’re all chemically so much alike that you’d expect one to act like the other in a biological setting,” said Dr. Paul Brooks, a West Virginia physician who led the nation’s only large-scale study of a community whose water was contaminated by the chemicals.
Even studying the chemicals one by one requires huge cost and effort, though, Brooks said. He referenced his study more than a decade ago as an example of the Herculean work needed to understand the chemicals’ effects on humans.
The study, which evaluated 69,000 people in the mid-Ohio Valley, examined only one type of perfluorinated compound, PFOA. But its findings proved revelatory.
The results — that the single chemical has a probable link with liver and kidney cancer, as well as other health ailments — helped form the basis of the EPA’s health advisory almost a decade later. And several juries awarded plaintiffs millions of dollars from DuPont, which paid millions more for the research as part of a court settlement.
Coordinating similar studies for each of the perfluorinated compounds known to researchers is wildly impractical, Brooks said.
“We don’t have time to study every one of those individually,” he said. “Because it would take probably 50, 60 years to do enough epidemiological studies on an individual basis on those chemicals to prove that individually they cause trouble. So you have to make some assumptions on this.
“If it’s in your blood, you’ve got a problem.”
Higgins acknowledged the EPA’s difficult position — overseeing a family of chemicals that have yet to be fully identified, and with varying levels of toxicity. Further, any move by the agency would likely have to withstand a court challenge.
Still, he said the shape-shifting nature of these chemicals must be considered. Only regulating one type of perfluorinated compound is “foolhardy,” given how some types can transform into more troubling varieties once in the environment.
“That’s a bit of a fool’s errand,” Higgins said.
While some have complained about the EPA’s slow approach to addressing the contamination in the Widefield aquifer, one lawmaker said he was happy that the agency at least came to town to listen to the frustrations of locals.
“I am pleased to hear the EPA is proactively reaching out to the local communities who may be affected by (perfluorinated compound) exposure,” Colorado Springs U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn said in an email.
“I will continue to do everything in my power to facilitate coordination between local and federal authorities. Ensuring that my constituents have safe drinking water has been a priority of mine for a long time.”
And EPA leaders say they learned a lot during two days in Colorado Springs.
Doug Benevento, the agency’s regional administrator, worked to assure the Colorado Springs crowd Wednesday that their comments will have an impact in Washington, D.C., as the agency figures out how to deal with perfluorinated compounds.
“You are speaking to people who are listening,” he said.
https://gazette.com/news/epa-wrestles-with-how-to-regulate-toxic-chemicals-contaminating-el/article_2036a514-9cbe-11e8-afe8-977e4d81854e.html
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(ACC Mentioned) Rachel Rose: Who's Paying the 'Experts' to Peddle This So-Called 'News'
Aug 12, 2018 | New Zealand Herald
By Rachel Rose
Reusable shopping bags: dangerous breeding grounds for bacteria and mould! So exclaimed an alarmed correspondent in the Chronicle letters section, right in the middle of Plastic-Free July.
The first thing I thought was not, "Hmm, how long since I washed my shopping bags?" Rather, who paid for that research?
Because news is very often not what it seems. With the world in such a mess and so much at stake, it's never been more important to read critically and dig deeper.
Everything about the sped-up pace of social media, online news and infotainment undermines careful reading and thoughtful analysis.
Far easier and more gratifying to respond with instinctive outrage (or glee or self-righteousness) and retweet or share information without thinking twice.
The letter to the editor reported: "Sydney health experts are warning that reusable shopping bags are perfect breeding grounds for E, coli, yeast and mould."
It didn't take long to find a clutch of news stories by Australian media outlets on this topic, look up the academic research they cited and (crucially) discover who funded that research.
No surprises as to who I found paying the bills: industry lobby groups representing the manufacturers of single-use plastic and right-wing think tanks that deny climate change.
Blame my scepticism on insider knowledge.
Once upon a time, I was a public relations consultant and manager. My weighty textbooks on communications theory are packed away now, but a small paperback with an unlikely title made a big impression and it still sits on a shelf to hand.
Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry was written in 1995. That's before the internet as we know it, so it's massively out of date but its core ideas remain pertinent and it's still in print.
There's a chapter on "Poisoning the Grassroots" that shocked me then; it's business as usual now.
Front organisations, often charities, are furtively established and funded by industry interests and made to look like authentic, citizen-led grassroots movements.
Add to that mounting pressure on scientists and researchers to bring in funding for their work and increasing corporate influence on academic institutions.
Take the crop of 2016 stories about germs in reusable shopping bags. It was a gleeful media echo-chamber, with all the stories rehashing the same American study: "Assessment of the Potential for Cross Contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags".
The study is no longer online, but a media release by the university can still be found.
The study sampled a whopping 84 bags - yes, I'm being sarcastic - and it was underwritten by The American Chemistry Council.
That body exists to promote the interests of companies "engaged in the business of chemistry", including plastics industries. It lobbies against banning the use of single-use shopping bags.
Our current era sees President Trump appoint climate-change deniers and fossil-fuel lobbyists to steer the Environmental Protection Agency. A more breathtaking example of putting poachers in charge of the game estate could not be dreamed up.
His attack dogs circle and chant "fake news, fake news" in response to any coverage that criticises Trump, no matter its accuracy. It's Orwellian how fake news in the Trump camp includes any inconvenient truth that makes them look bad.
And meanwhile the scale of false and misleading statements spewing from Trump himself is racheting up - he managed 79 such statements in just one day ( July 5) according to the Washington Post Fact Checker Database.
Never have we been so awash in lies and deception.
Hygiene tips for packing food in bags
Cynicism about this research aside, of course you should take some basic care with how you cart food around.
It's a good idea to pack meat and vegetables in separate bags; use different colours or bag types to remind you which is for what.
Use bags that carry food only for that purpose — don't also use them for dog leads, gym gear, childrens' toys etc.
Don't leave them in the car, especially in hot weather. That's the perfect condition for bacterial growth.
Do wash your bags on occasion; 100% cotton will hold up to a hot wash better than the common nonwoven polypropylene bags (the green Countdown bags are an example of this sort). You're stuck with hand-washing those.
I don't want to hand wash anything, so pack my scant supermarket haul into a cardboard box, which then serves as a fire-starter, a cat toy or food for my worm farm.
Otherwise I use nylon bags, which take up no space in my handbag so they are always to hand when I need them. They are easy to wash and dry almost instantly.
It's nice to hear that my neighbourhood butcher in Whanganui East is seeing both new and existing customers turn up with their own containers to buy their fresh cuts of meat, in an effort to reduce their use of single-use plastic.
But please don't be tempted to show up with a reused plastic bag. That's not a good idea when it comes to carrying and storing meat.
Washing plastic makes it leach chemicals and it's hard to get plastic bags completely clean. Use a BPA-free, food-safe plastic container or, better still, a glass container — and make sure it's sparkling.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=12105250
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Could Chemical Recycling Help Solve Plastic Trash Problem?
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Only 9 percent of plastic material in the U.S. gets recovered and put into new products. But several companies are developing ways to chemically break down plastic to its basic building blocks, called monomers.
If they get it right, the environmental implications could be seismic, making it possible for all plastics to be used and reused in an infinitely recyclable loop.
“The advantage with chemical recycling is you end up with a pure liquid monomer, which can be put directly back into the production process,” Andreas Anker, a spokesman for LyondellBasell Industries NV, tells Bloomberg Environment.
LyondellBasell, one of the largest producers of plastic in the world, recently announced a joint venture aimed at developing chemical recycling at an industrial scale.
While chemical recycling of plastics is still at least several years out, Anker says the technology behind the process already exists and is increasingly viewed as the best way to close the loop on plastic supply chains.
“Here in Europe, the issue of plastic recycling has become very important, very quickly,” said Anker, who lives in Germany. “You can see the demand coming from governments, as well as large brand owners and from society in general.”
Circular EconomySince plastic doesn’t biodegrade, developing new ways to break it down has been a goal of companies and recycling advocates for decades. Such a technology would dramatically cut the need for new plastic made largely from petroleum and vastly improve the life cycle of plastics.
Typically, most single-use plastic—known as polyethylene terephthalate or PET—is not recycled. But plastic that is recycled undergoes a mechanical process that involves shredding it down into small pieces, washing it, and then remolding it into new products.
“This works well, but to recycle PET to make new food and drink packaging—so-called food-grade PET—you can only use existing food-grade plastic,” said Maria Luisa Polli, technical director of Coca-Cola Central and Eastern Europe.
In a company publication, Polli said that only 20 percent of all PET is currently recycled, creating a limited supply of good quality, food-grade PET on the market. But by using a chemical decomposition method, any waste plastic could be used to make food-grade PET.
“Not just used plastic bottles, but also waste recovered from oceans and plastic from other sources, like polyester textiles. Ultimately, if all plastic can be recycled, then waste plastic could potentially become a thing of the past,” said Polli.
Scaling UpThe process of breaking plastic down, called “depolymerization,” involves using a chemical catalyst to heat the material to around 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit). At that point the molecules break, or “crack,” into monomers, such as the hydrocarbons ethylene or propylene.
High energy costs and the need to transport large amounts of plastic waste material to a central facility have traditionally meant that chemical recycling would be expensive compared to the cost of making new plastic. But that calculus is changing quickly.
“Increasingly, these decisions are less about the cost of raw materials, and more about the costs associated with dealing with plastic waste on the back end,” said Franco Cavadini, the chief technical officer with Synesis, an Italian engineering company involved with DEMETO.
DEMETO is a European Union-funded research consortium that has developed a microwave-based process to accelerate the chemical decomposition of plastic, potentially making it much easier to operate on an industrial scale.
“By using microwaves to accelerate a chemical reaction, the depolymerization time goes from three hours to less than 10 minutes,” Cavadini told Bloomberg Environment.
In addition to the recent Chinese ban on imports of recycled products from the West, Cavadini also points to a number of European laws and initiatives that will increase the costs of producing new plastic.
“Our current estimates show our method costing less than monomers produced by petroleum,” Cavadini said. “All the answers we get from technology side confirm the business model.”
Upside for TextilesThe issue of plastic waste isn’t just a problem for food and drinks manufacturers. Plastic is also used in some clothing, and the Council for Textile Recycling estimates that the average U.S. citizen throws away over 80 pounds of clothing each year.
“We need to use resources more efficiently in order to decrease our environmental impact,” said Mattias Bodin, a sustainability business expert for the H&M Group, a Swedish clothing retailer.
Of PET produced each year, the majority goes to make synthetic fibers, such as polyester, according to the PET Resin Association.
In a statement provided to Bloomberg Environment, Bodin said the company has recycled the equivalent of 89 million T-shirts through an in-store drop off program, but chemical recycling would be the biggest game changer for the fashion industry.
“We consider chemical recycling to be of utmost importance for us to be able to achieve our 2030 goal of using only recycled or other sustainably-sourced materials,” he said. “We also know that it makes very good business sense. It’s the only way forward.”
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/could-chemical-recycling-help-solve-plastic-trash-problem
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Monsanto Hit with $289 Million Verdict in Roundup Cancer Case
Aug 11, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Joel Rosenblatt
Monsanto Co. was socked by a jury with $289 million in damages in the first trial over claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.
Lee Johnson, a former school groundskeeper whose doctors didn’t think he’d live long enough learn the verdict, prevailed Aug. 10 in San Francisco state court after jurors deliberated for three days. The trial was an important test of each side’s evidence and will serve as a template for how plaintiffs can convince juries in future cases in state and federal courts in California and elsewhere.
Johnson was seeking $412 million in damages. Monsanto said it will appeal the verdict.
“Today’s decision does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews—and conclusions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and regulatory authorities around the world—support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer,” Monsanto Vice President Scott Partridge said in a statement.
Germany’s Bayer AG closed a deal to buy Monsanto for $66 billion in June. If the litigation generates large verdicts against Monsanto, it could have a material impact on Bayer’s bottom line, said Chris Perrella, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.
Since Roundup is ubiquitous in modern farming, there’s a “huge potential liability,” though it’s very uncertain it will materialize, he said. Bayer investors might not have such risks on their radars, since many analysts covering the company focus on pharmaceuticals, Perrella said.
Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, was first approved for use in Monsanto’s weed killer in 1974. As it grew to become the world’s most popular and widely used herbicide, the question of whether it causes cancer has been hotly debated by environmentalists, regulators, researchers and lawyers -- even as Monsanto has insisted for decades that it’s perfectly safe.
As groundskeeper for a school district in Benicia, Calif., about 40 miles east of San Francisco, Johnson mixed and sprayed hundreds of gallons of Roundup. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and in July 2017, after chemotherapy and other treatments, his oncologist gave him six months to live.
Johnson’s lawyers, relying on his testimony and expert witnesses, argued that his exposure, including accidents causing him to get soaked from head to toe in Roundup, caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/monsanto-hit-with-289-million-verdict-in-roundup-cancer-case
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Court Orders EPA to Ban Chlorpyrifos
Aug 10, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Britt E. Erickson
In a win for environmentalists and farmworkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize a proposed ban on the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyrifos. The Aug. 9 ruling gives EPA 60 days to revoke all allowable limits in food and cancel all approved uses for the pesticide, which is linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
EPA determined in a 2015 human health risk assessment that combined exposure to chlorpyrifos from food and drinking water in the U.S. likely exceeds safe levels, particularly for children. The agency twice proposed to ban chlorpyrifos under the Obama administration, but the agency did not finalize either rule. In March 2017, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt delayed EPA’s proposed ban and put off any decision about chlorpyrifos until 2022.
“Over nearly two decades, EPA has documented the likely adverse effects of foods containing the residue of the pesticide chlorpyrifos on the physical and mental development of American infants and children, often lasting into adulthood,” District Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in an opinion accompanying the ruling. “Yet, over the past decade and more, the EPA has stalled on banning chlorpyrifos.”
The case dates back to a 2007 petition from environmental groups, urging EPA to ban chlorpyrifos on food crops. EPA failed to respond to the petition until November 2015, when it was directed to do so by a court order. At that time, EPA proposed to revoke all food tolerances for chlorpyrifos.
Chlorpyrifos has been used as a pesticide in the U.S. since 1965. Manufacturers voluntarily canceled residential uses of the insecticide in 2000 because of health risks identified by EPA. Chlorpyrifos acts by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme essential for neurotransmitter function. The chemical is used on dozens of food crops, including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
After pushing EPA for decades to ban chlorpyrifos, environmentalists are elated. “The court has made it clear that children’s health must come before powerful polluters,” Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a statement. NRDC is one of the environmental groups that filed the 2007 petition. “This is a victory for parents everywhere who want to feed their kids fruits and veggies without fear it’s harming their brains or poisoning communities.”
Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), who has been leading an effort in Congress to ban chlorpyrifos, is urging EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler “to take immediate action to show that the Trump EPA will stop prioritizing the profits of industry and start putting public health first.” Udall introduced legislation in 2017 to ban chlorpyrifos. “It is long past time for this dangerous chemical to come off our food, off the shelves, and off the market,” Udall said in a statement in response to the court ruling.
DowDuPont’s agriculture division, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, claims that the insecticide is a “critical pest management tool used by growers around the world to manage a large number of pests.” The appeals court ruling “was a split decision of the panel and we agree with the dissenting judge’s opinion. We expect that all appellate options to challenge the majority’s decision will be considered. We will continue to support the growers who need this important product,” the company said in a statement.
https://cen.acs.org/policy/chemical-regulation/Court-orders-EPA-ban-chlorpyrifos/96/web/2018/08
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PetroChina Is Said to Mull Suspending U.S. LNG Purchases
Aug 13, 2018 | Bloomberg
By Stephen Stapczynski
PetroChina Co. may temporarily halt purchases of spot U.S. liquefied natural gas spot cargoes through the winter to avoid potential tariffs amid a trade conflict between the U.S. and China, according to sources with knowledge of the strategy.
Under the plan, PetroChina would boost buying of spot cargoes from other countries or swap U.S. shipments with other nations in East Asia to avoid paying additional tariffs, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. PetroChina, a unit of the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., couldn’t immediately comment when contacted by Bloomberg.
China said this month that it was considering a 25 percent tariff on U.S. LNG, which had been missing from previously targeted goods, in a direct hit to American gas exporters. The move comes ahead of the winter heating season when demand and prices typically peak and shows that Chinese President Xi Jinping may be willing to suffer some pain to avoid backing down from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade dispute.
“If the tariff is implemented before winter, it would potentially increase the competition for non U.S. supply to the Asian market and hence drive up spot prices in Asia this winter,” Maggie Kuang, an analyst with Bloomberg NEF in Singapore said in an email. “Australia, Qatar, and Southeast Asia will most likely benefit.”
Singapore Exchange Ltd.’s North Asia Sling spot price was assessed at $10.165 per million British thermal units as of Friday, the highest in a month. Prices are about 66 percent higher than the same time a year ago. PetroChina dropped as much as 2.2 percent to HK$5.80 a share before trading at HK$5.82 at 10:57 a.m. in Hong Kong. The city’s benchmark Hang Seng Index slid 1.8 percent.
PetroChina in February signed a 25-year deal to buy U.S. LNG from Cheniere Energy Inc., with a portion of that supply expected to start this year. While China is currently the third-largest buyer of U.S. LNG, American cargoes only made up about 5.7 percent of its imports over the last year, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
China’s proposed tariff may temporarily benefit other suppliers, U.S. Department of Energy Deputy Secretary Dan Brouillette said in an interview in Tokyo on Wednesday, noting that he doesn’t expect any detrimental impact to the U.S. energy industry.
President Xi has urged China’s state-owned energy giants CNPC and China National Offshore Oil Corp. to boost domestic exploration and production of oil and gas to safeguard the country’s energy-security as the trade dispute with the U.S. threatens to limit American shipments.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-12/petrochina-is-said-to-mull-temporary-halt-of-u-s-lng-purchases
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Gulf of Mexico Oil Lease Auction to Test Response to Trump-Era Rules
Aug 13, 2018 | Reuters (In E&E Energywire)
By Jessica Resnick-Ault
A federal auction of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico next week will test energy companies' appetite for acreage after the Trump administration left royalty rates for deepwater parcels unchanged, bucking an industry call to lower them.
The U.S. Gulf of Mexico has faced waning interest in recent years as competition stepped up from other basins globally, as well as from onshore shale basins and Mexico's waters in the Gulf.
Oil companies had lobbied for lower royalty payments for deepwater acreage because of the projects' high cost and long lead time before production can begin. In February, the Interior Department's Royalty Policy Committee recommended lowering the rates.
Some companies may have bid on fewer parcels in March's auction, waiting to see if the Interior Department would cut royalties, said William Turner, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. In that auction, only 1 percent of the 77 million acres (31.2 million hectares) on offer received bids.
Next week's sale is the first since Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in April that he would leave deepwater royalty rates unchanged at 18.75 percent, rather than drop them to the 12.5 percent rate for shallow-water parcels.
"The uncertainty is gone, it is off the table," said Imran Khan, senior manager at consultancy Wood Mackenzie. The clearer royalty rules may draw companies that held off in March, said Khan and Turner.
The auction is likely to draw the largest and smallest Gulf of Mexico participants: companies such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Chevron Corp. on one end, and LLOG Exploration Co. LLC, Kosmos Energy Ltd. and Fieldwood Energy LLC on the other, they said.
"If you're a company like Chevron or Exxon who plays in multiple basins, you have to make sure it is competitive with other basins globally," said Bob Fryklund, chief upstream strategist at IHS Markit.
In the March lease sale, companies largely stuck close to acreage they already held, and did not acquire new territory to explore.
"We're seeing a little bit of a resurgence in the Gulf," said Fryklund, adding that the rig count has climbed to about 20 rigs from 12 in March. The focus is still on evaluating current acreage rather than looking for new prospects.
By 2028, though, IHS expects that pattern to shift slightly with over 100 new-field, wildcat wells expected in the U.S. side of the Gulf.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093889
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Oil Producers Turn to Wall Street to Speed Permian Buildout
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Adams-Heard
Energy explorers are looking to public markets to expand pipeline networks in the biggest American oil field as shipping bottlenecks threaten to curtail production in the prolific shale region.
Apache Corp. said Aug. 8 it will spin off its Permian Basin pipes into a new publicly traded company worth $3.5 billion, which the Houston-based producer will create in partnership with a “blank check” company formed by private-equity firm Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors LP. Just a day earlier, Diamondback Energy Inc.’s Rattler Midstream Partners filed for an IPO.
Meanwhile, PDC Energy Inc. is considering a sale, joint venture or spin off of its midstream business in the Permian, according to a presentation published on the Denver-based company’s website.
“It’s definitely been a theme here this past week,” said Gabriele Sorbara, an analyst at Williams Capital Group. While it’s not new for producers to monetize midstream units, a scarcity of adequate pipelines to haul record crude supplies out of the Permian region in West Texas and New Mexico has created a new sense of urgency.
“It’s easier to raise capital when you’re a public company,” Sorbara said. “You can grow these assets faster.”
Pipelines and the processing plants and other gear that go along with them are referred to as midstream assets because they bridge the gap between oil and gas wells, which are upstream, and refineries and chemical plants that reside downstream.
The move to tap Wall Street for help funding pipeline projects comes as many in the sector struggle to raise money via capital markets. Unit prices for master limited partnerships, the structure used by most pipeline companies, plummeted in March following a change in U.S. tax policy.
Regulators last month softened the blow from the initial decision, which stripped partnerships of the ability to charge customers for taxes they don’t pay. Still, the change has spurred companies from Williams Cos. to Enbridge Inc. to move to ditch the MLP structure.
Diamondback’s Rattler Midstream will be structured as an MLP but taxed as a corporation. Altus Midstream Co., the joint venture between Apache and the special purpose acquisition company backed by Kayne Anderson, will be both structured and taxed as a corporation.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/oil-producers-turn-to-wall-street-to-speed-permian-buildout
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Federal Oil Leasing May Resume in California in 2020
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Alan Kovski
The Bureau of Land Management may be able to restart oil and gas lease sales in California in 2020 after more than five years of holding off.
An analysis of the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing first will be completed as part of a court settlement. That work kicked off this week with a request for public comments by Sept. 7 on the scope of the analysis—which also triggered some alarms among environmental activists.
Oil and gas drilling has continued in California to the present. Some of that has included hydraulic fracturing, but only on leases that existed prior to the start of the long stall on new lease sales—a pause the BLM began voluntarily about 2013 amid threats of litigation.
About 100 to 400 wells are drilled in the state each year, Gabe Garcia, field manager for the BLM Bakersfield Field Office, told Bloomberg Environment.
The next lease sales will depend on companies’ requests, and those in turn will be influenced by market conditions, making it impractical to predict exactly when sales will resume, Garcia said.
The sales could be in various parts of 400,000 acres of public land and 1.2 million acres of federal mineral estate underlying nonfederal land, the agency said.
The analysis that the BLM must first complete will be followed by any adjustments that might be needed to a resource management plan and a record of decision, which should be done by about the fall of 2019, Garcia told Bloomberg Environment.
‘More Fracking Would Be Terrible’Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, typically involves the underground injection of water, sand, and chemical additives with enough pressure to create fractures through which oil or gas can flow to a well.
“There’s really no question that more fracking would be terrible for California,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney at Earthjustice, the environmental law firm that represented activists in the lawsuit against the BLM that led to the agreement on more analysis of hydraulic fracturing.
The BLM had already gathered information on the subject, and the 2017 court settlement means it will gather some more. Various sources of information are available, notably a 2016 report by the California Council on Science and Technology that the BLM commissioned.
California’s Tricky GeologyRoughly 20 percent of the oil and gas wells on BLM-managed lands in California use fracking, notably in areas northwest of Bakersfield, Garcia said.
The percentage is far lower than in many other parts of the U.S. because the complex California geology, with many folds and subdivisions, often is unsuited to fracking, he said.
Long horizontal wells combined with fracking are used in such places as the Eagle Ford Shale of Texas or the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, where the geology is relatively more uniform and predictable than what is found in California, Garcia said.
“It is important to note that hydraulic fracturing is not a commonly used well completion technique in California due to our geology,” said Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association, in a statement emailed from his industry group.
“Hydraulic fracturing in California occurs almost exclusively on mature oil fields that have been producing for nearly a hundred years in the San Joaquin Valley,” Zierman said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/federal-oil-leasing-may-resume-in-california-in-2020
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FERC Frenzy: Atlantic Coast Halted as Others Move Forward
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer and Sam Mintz
Federal regulators stopped another natural gas project in its tracks Friday, halting work on the Atlantic Coast pipeline.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's decision, a major setback for developers, followed a recent court ruling that scrapped two critical permits for the pipeline.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a week ago that the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service did not adequately support their approvals of a right of way and an assessment of animals that could be harmed by the project (Energywire, Aug. 7).
Without those federal permits, pipeline construction cannot move forward, FERC said Friday.
"Atlantic may need to revise substantial portions of the ACP route across nonfederal or federal lands, possibly requiring further authorizations and environmental review," Terry Turpin, director of FERC's Office of Energy Projects, told developers.
The decision came in a flurry of filings late Friday, the last day of work for Republican Commissioner Robert Powelson, who is heading to a water utility group.
The order is FERC's second major construction shutdown in a week. The agency halted work on the Mountain Valley pipeline on Aug. 3 after a separate 4th Circuit ruling tossed Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service approvals of that project.
"FERC made the right decision to stop construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and protect public lands, rivers and streams, and private property from unnecessary harm," Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Greg Buppert said in a statement. SELC represents an environmental coalition fighting Atlantic Coast in court.
A pipeline spokesman said the company is already working with NPS and FWS to resolve the permitting problems identified by the 4th Circuit. Atlantic Coast also plans to seek permission from FERC to continue work on segments of the project that serve natural gas demand in discrete areas.
"The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is critical to the economic and environmental future of our region, and we are working as quickly as we can to get construction back underway and avoid unnecessary delays," spokesman Aaron Ruby said in a statement.
Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley are designed to transport shale gas along similar routes in Appalachia. Atlantic Coast would stretch 600 miles from West Virginia through Virginia to North Carolina. Mountain Valley would run 300 miles from West Virginia to Virginia.
Both projects have been subject to nonstop litigation from environmental groups and landowners since they were proposed years ago. FERC's stop-work orders on both pipelines represent environmentalists' biggest victory to date and could signal a turning point in their broader fight against natural gas infrastructure (Energywire, Aug. 10).Rehearing order
However, FERC's stop-work orders stem from 4th Circuit decisions scrapping permits from other agencies. The commission continues to defend its own pipeline approvals.
FERC did just that in a separate Friday filing rejecting challenges to its 2017 Atlantic Coast certificate. In a 150-page rehearing denial, the commission tossed various concerns about climate change, environmental justice, local impacts and project need.
The breakdown of commissioners' votes was unusual. Republican Commissioners Neil Chatterjee and Powelson voted in favor of the rehearing denial, as expected. Democrat Cheryl LaFleur dissented — also expected, as she dissented from the original approval last year.
Unexpected was that Chairman Kevin McIntyre, a Republican, did not participate in the matter. That prompted Democrat Richard Glick to sit out, too, noting that he was concerned the challengers' rehearing request would otherwise be left in the lurch from a 2-2 split vote. Pipeline opponents generally can't get judicial review until FERC resolves such requests.
"I chose not to participate in today's order denying rehearing of the [Atlantic Coast certificate] solely to enable those parties challenging the Certificate to have their day in court," Glick wrote.
Environmental groups, landowners and other Atlantic Coast critics can now head back to appellate court to take on FERC's certificate directly.Sabal Trail
FERC was also busy Friday issuing a stack of orders related to other pipelines.
With Powelson's departure, the commission is at risk of 2-2 splits in votes on pipeline projects, which have increasingly — though not always — broken down on party lines. Friday's orders resolved many of the biggest pipeline issues pending before the commission.
Among those: the climate review for the Sabal Trail pipeline.
Powelson and his Republican colleagues — McIntyre and Chatterjee — on Friday rejected environmentalists' requests that FERC revisit a court-ordered supplemental review of the climate impacts of Sabal Trail and a network of related pipelines that deliver gas to Florida.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the review last year after finding that FERC hadn't adequately considered the project's downstream climate impacts — that is, the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning gas from the pipeline.
FERC completed the additional review earlier this year by tallying potential downstream emissions. The review did not determine whether those levels are "significant" under the National Environmental Policy Act, and it declined to use the "social cost of carbon" tool to assess impacts.
The Sierra Club and other groups say the new analysis falls far short of what the court ordered (Energywire, April 16).
The commission's majority dismissed those concerns Friday, maintaining that it provided sufficient context to explain the emissions estimates. The order also reiterated FERC's long-standing resistance to using the social cost of carbon, a metric the majority considers too speculative to be useful for pipeline decisions.
Democrats LaFleur and Glick issued lengthy dissents. LaFleur wrote that FERC should have gone a step further to assess the significance of the downstream emissions.
"The majority states that quantifying the downstream GHG emissions, comparing the project's emissions to the state and nationwide emissions inventory, and reciting generic information acknowledging that GHGs contribute to climate change, satisfies our obligations to consider their significance under NEPA," she wrote. "I disagree."
Glick said the commission's failure to do that amounted to noncompliance with the D.C. Circuit's order.
"The Commission's refusal to consider the harms caused by climate change in its public interest determination is directly contrary to the Court's holding in Sabal Trail and reveals the Commission's stubborn adherence to the views that the Court rejected," he wrote.
Friday's order may trigger another round of litigation if the Sierra Club opts to challenge it. A new lawsuit at the D.C. Circuit could clarify FERC's climate analysis obligations, which have been the subject of heated debate lately (Energywire, June 5).PennEast
In yet another Friday decision, the split FERC also denied rehearing to opponents of the PennEast pipeline, a 120-mile Pennsylvania-to-New Jersey project the agency approved in January.
Environmental and consumer groups, as well as multiple New Jersey state agencies, made a wide variety of complaints about the project, including that there is not sufficient evidence of its need and that FERC's environmental review was inadequate.
The Republican majority at FERC shut down those concerns, defending both its practice of relying on precedent agreements to determine project need and the sufficiency of its environmental reviews.
Both Democrats again dissented.
"I disagree with the Commission's conclusion that the Project is needed, which is based only on the existence of precedent agreements, including contracts with the project developers' affiliates accounting for 74 percent of the Project's subscribed capacity," Glick wrote in his dissent.
He also challenged FERC's environmental assessment of the pipeline and said again that he thinks the commission needs to consider how the project will contribute to climate change.
LaFleur dissented solely on the majority's approach to considering climate change impacts.
"While I support the quantification and disclosure of the upper-bound estimate of GHG emissions, I strongly disagree with the majority's continued refusal to ascribe significance to this identified environmental impact," she wrote.
PennEast opponents' existing lawsuits pending in the D.C. Circuit can now move forward.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093925
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Oversight Leaders to Trump: Pick CSB Chair to Avoid 'Chaos'
Aug 10, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
Mismanagement plagues the agency tasked with investigating industrial accidents, and the president needs to nominate a permanent head for it, leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said.
The panel, led by Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), documented several examples of problems at the Chemical Safety Board in a letter to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly this week.
"We recommend the President nominate a new Chairman who possesses the qualifications, experience, and integrity necessary to address the longstanding dysfunction at the CSB," they wrote.
Kristen Kulinowski took the CSB helm in June on a temporary basis after Chairwoman Vanessa Allen Sutherland resigned halfway through a five-year term (Greenwire, June 21).
Kulinowski, whose title is interim executive authority, was one of three board members who stayed after Sutherland's departure.
The lawmakers said that the remaining board members, including Kulinowski, have "either contributed to or presided over ongoing mismanagement at the CSB."
The letter describes allegations of a toxic workplace, failures in investigations and a culture of whistleblower retaliation dating back to 2014.
They also cite a recent EPA inspector general report from June that found budget and leadership issues were hindering CSB's work (Greenwire, June 5). The review found CSB career staff "are frustrated and feel disrespected."
"Given the agency's history, the current transition could plunge the agency into further chaos, and a leadership void could embolden the remaining Board Members to engage in more inappropriate behavior. However, it also provides a crucial opportunity to reverse the CSB's troubled course and confront the pattern of management abuses," the letter said.
Whether the Trump administration will answer the plea is unclear. The administration has twice proposed eliminating the agency's funding.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/08/10/stories/1060093895
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Station Square Derailment, a Rare but Risky Accident, Could Renew Rail Safety Concerns
Aug 10, 2018 | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Daniel Moore
The derailment of a Norfolk Southern train near Station Square this week gave Pittsburghers a rare peek inside ubiquitous freight trains that rumble through the region: Seven crumpled rail cars dumped piles of Pampers diapers, cat food, Hanover Snyder snacks, detergent and mouthwash.
The derailment — which was cleared Wednesday but has shut down Carson Street and badly damaged the T commuter rail line — was also a highly visible reminder of safety concerns that had largely fallen off the radar after politicians and advocacy groups sounded the alarm a few years ago.
Those concerns could emerge once again as U.S. freight rail companies rely more on shipping consumer goods using double-stacked trains and put more tankers of crude oil, petroleum products and hazardous materials on the rails.
Such conversations have proven difficult to sustain, given the nature of the risk and the enormity of the railroad business.
For one, a derailment is a remarkably rare event, especially given the volume of rail traffic. Federal statistics show a continued decline in both the number of derailments and the derailment rate — a fact the rail industry frequently points out. Derailments dropped to 1.74 for every million train-miles in 2017, down from a rate of 8.98 per million train-miles in 1980.
Regulators also tend to give the major rail companies — in Pittsburgh, Virginia-based Norfolk Southern and Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX Transportation operate the two interstate main lines — flexibility with their operations.
Companies carry out their own track inspections and decide when to dispatch trains, for example, and federal and state rail regulators can’t possibly check all the logs. Pennsylvania alone has about 5,000 miles of track. Any regulation that would result in higher costs for rail companies could raise wholesale prices on a wide range of products, the industry has argued.
Still, when derailments do occur, they can cause extensive damage and put lives at risk.
4,000 derailed freight trains
Derailments are most often caused by track defects and human error, according to statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration. And some track inspectors have reported that the more traffic on the rails, the harder it is to get time to find flaws and repair tracks.
Since 2015, more than 4,000 freight trains have derailed across the country, causing $761 million in damage. In Allegheny County alone, 18 trains have jumped the tracks since 2015, causing a total of nearly $1 million in damage.
Though oil remains a small fraction of what railroads ship, the industry is seeing the biggest annual increases this year in that category, as drillers tap into shale formations once more with oil prices rising 35 percent over the year.
U.S. railroads shipped 10,837 carloads of petroleum and petroleum products during the week ending Aug. 4, up 16 percent higher during the same week one year ago, according to rail traffic numbers updated Wednesday by the American Association of Railroads.
So far in 2018, rail lines have shipped 326,481 carloads for the oil industry, up 10 percent from last year, according to the Washington, D.C.-based trade group composed of the North American freight railroads, as well as Amtrak.
Yet it’s been three years since oil shipments grabbed the attention of local and state officials.
In 2015, a push for safety measures seemed to reach a fever pitch after a string of fiery derailments across the continent, including an explosion in 2013 that killed 47 people in downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.
In 2015, after an oil train derailment near Charleston, W.Va., forced the evacuation of 100 people, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf hired a rail consultant to conduct a study that offered 27 recommendations for both state agencies and rail operators.
That same year: Sen. Bob Casey pushed for increased training of first responders. A day-long oil train safety conference at the University of Pittsburgh convened by the Heinz Endowments featured two dozen speakers from across the country. A report from PennEnvironment and FracTracker found 183,000 people in Pittsburgh lived within an evacuation zone of a crude oil route.
Then the issue virtually disappeared as oil prices fell precipitously and the oil trains pulled back.
Using tech to improve safety
That could be because derailments are becoming more infrequent as rail companies use technologies like ultrasound and software platforms that can comb through terrabytes of data to search for irregularities in rail, said Allan Zarembski, the researcher who Gov. Wolf hired in 2015.
“Railroads continue to employ very sophisticated inspection technologies, and they keep improving,” said Mr. Zarembski, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware.
The rail industry has also taken other measures to improve safety, said Jessica Kahanek, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Railroads.
“Railroads are committed to moving crude oil safely and securely, and the vast majority of all crude oil shipments (more than 99.99 percent) reach their destination without incident,” Ms. Kahanek said.
Railroads have expanded rail traffic routing technology that determines the safest route for the longest crude oil trains based on 27 risk factors — including the hazards of the commodity, trip length, population density along the route and track quality.
The rail industry also developed a new curriculum and training on how to respond to a crude oil emergency at the industry’s Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colo. More than 60,000 first responders have received hazmat training at the industry’s facility, according to Ms. Kahanek.
Railroads are also meeting deadlines set by a 2015 rule issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation that, in part, requires railroads to use newer models of tank cars to haul crude oil, ethanol and other substances the agency considers high-hazard and flammable.
A spokeswoman reported on Thursday that there had been “no issues meeting the phase-out of DOT-111s,” referring to the oldest legacy model of tanker car. Most recently, railroads met the March 1, 2018 deadline to phase out DOT-111 cars carrying crude oil and the most hazardous category of materials, according to the agency.
Rail operators are now working to meet the next deadline of April 1, 2020 to phase out a newer model, called a CPC-1232, that does not have an insulating layer — cars that are still hauling crude oil and the most hazardous materials.
Slowing down trains?
As for Mr. Zarembski’s report recommending 27 changes for both state agencies and rail operators, J.J. Abbott, a spokesman for Gov. Wolf’s office, said the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and Public Utility Commission had taken them seriously.
The state continues to work with the companies and local emergency planning committees to identify gaps in contingency plans, Mr. Abbott said.
Norfolk Southern and CSX did not heed a central recommendation: a voluntary speed limit reduction to 35 miles per hour from 40 miles per hour through cities with populations greater than 100,000.
“The state doesn’t have any authority to force the rail companies to adopt that rule because they are national companies regulated at the federal level,” Mr. Abbott said. “We continue to believe this reduction should occur.”
The Station Square derailment may once again put the issue front of mind.
Visiting the site earlier this week, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said the city “dodged a bullet on this one” and that it “could’ve been a catastrophe.”
The Port Authority of Allegheny County said that if the train had derailed just two minutes earlier, the cars would have tumbled onto a light-rail passenger train below.
The cause of the accident, in which no one was seriously hurt, is not publicly known. The Federal Railroad Administration is investigating.
http://www.post-gazette.com/business/pittsburgh-company-news/2018/08/10/Train-derailment-Station-Square-pittsburgh-crude-oil-hazardous-materials-railroad-norfolk-southern/stories/201808080176
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Trump 'Buy America' Review Delays Cleaner Buses, Trucks
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By David Iaconangelo
A Trump administration review of "Buy America" requirements for iron and steel has frozen a pot of federal money meant for local governments trying to clean up their vehicle fleet emissions.
The holdup originates with an April 2017 White House executive order directing agencies to reassess their Buy America enforcement and maximize use of U.S.-produced iron and steel.
The Federal Highway Administration's Buy America policies require all iron and steel incorporated in local projects to be produced in the United States.
In a notice one year after Trump's order, the FHWA acknowledged that it had not found any auto and truck makers that used only U.S.-made iron and steel and issued waivers for 151 local and state projects. That accounted for 955 garbage trucks, school buses, street sweepers and other heavy-duty vehicles.
Funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program, or CMAQ, can pay for up to 80 percent of those new vehicles.
But U.S. transportation officials have given no word of how they might subsequently interpret Trump's Buy America order. And that's upset plans by city and state officials to replace older, diesel-burning engines with plug-in electrics and vehicles with other fuel sources, including natural gas.
Alleyn Harned, who directs the Virginia branch of the Energy Department's Clean Cities coalition, said cities there had put aside CMAQ requests for about $1.4 million in funds, or 300 fleet vehicles.
"They're pausing projects," he said. "They're pausing the transition to cleaner domestic fuels."
The FHWA did not respond to requests for comment.
Under the Obama administration, the FHWA also halted projects early on, said Ken Brown, a consultant for Transportation Energy Partners, a nonprofit that works with 90 Clean Cities coalition members.
The agency eventually relented, requiring only that final assembly of the vehicles occur in the U.S.
The final-assembly requirement was also cited by the FHWA when it cleared the backlog of funding requests in April, pleasing transportation officials and alternative-fuel trade groups that took it as a sign that the administration might begin approving more recent Buy America waivers — or at least clarify what the new policy would be.
Some of those groups have resumed petitioning the FHWA, asking it to continue using the Obama-era criteria until it finalizes new rules.
"These are U.S. companies doing final assembly in the U.S., with U.S. workers," said Rick Sapienza, who works with North Carolina cities on air quality projects through North Carolina State University's Clean Energy Technology Center. "Beyond that, you're helping diversify your energy demand, and the fuels you're using — electricity, propane and natural gas — are domestic fuels. It's keeping with the intent of Buy America."
Brown estimated that the federal review had caused officials in states across the country to shelve or delay orders for about a thousand cleaner vehicles.
"What we've been arguing is, it's fine to review this, although we don't think you'll find a practical approach to vehicles that requires 100 percent of iron or steel," he said. "But in the meantime, keep with the old process so you can keep these projects going forward. That has fallen on deaf ears."
Some air quality and transportation planners are trying to scrounge together enough money from state-level sources to keep fleet transitions going.
Chris Klaus, senior air quality manager at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said many of the 44 Dallas-Fort Worth-area planners that make up the body were hoping to use funds from the Texas Emissions Reduction Plan (TERP), combined with money from EPA's Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) program.
"It's hard for me right now," he said, adding that officials from states that lacked programs like TERP were likely having an even tougher time.
"We've got a Buy America waiver request for probably $2 million in vehicles, and because we're waiting for it, half of these things have fallen through," he said. "Then add in calls for projects we didn't do, or projects we passed on, or future opportunities we're trying to weigh.
"We're reviewing fiscal year '20 and beyond, and I'm asking staff, 'Are we going to set aside CMAQ money to clean up fleets?'" added Klaus.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093815
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Massachusetts Will Borrow Up to $2.4B for Climate-Impact Response
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
Massachusetts will borrow up to $2.4 billion during the next five years to help the state’s coastal communities defend themselves against climate change.
Gov. Charlie Baker (R) signed an environmental bond bill Aug. 9 to provide for the borrowing authority and help the state and its communities prepare for flooding, wind, and extreme weather.
“All of the Commonwealth’s cities and towns must prepare for the impacts of climate change,” Baker said Aug. 9 in a signing statement.
Under the approved bond, the state will borrow $225 million for coastal resource protection, open space preservation, and land and soil conservation. It also will borrow $100 million for sea walls, jetties, planting sea grass, and other measures to protect Massachusetts’ coasts from storm surges.
The state will spend $30 million to buy coastal properties that have repeatedly been hit by storms,
Plans and DamsTowns that still need to draft climate adaptation plans can tap into $110 million set aside for this purpose. The state and towns also will have available $85 million for dam repairs and maintenance.
The bond bill also includes $400 million to improve parks and more than $1 billion in “earmarks” for pet projects of lawmakers throughout the state.
The law will provide funding for Baker’s 2016 Executive Order 569, which outlined a plan for addressing climate change through emissions caps, energy planning, and making communities more resilient.
The bond money “will impact planners in a very positive way,” Angela Cleveland, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Planning Association, told Bloomberg Environment in an interview.
Planners will help create community climate adaptation plans and are likely to also manage any funds that come from the state for that purpose, Cleveland said. There are about 4,500 planners in Massachusetts, she said.
Environmentalists supported the measure but had expressed disappointment that a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags was not included in the final bill.
Construction and labor groups also backed the bill.
The bill “will allow planners, engineers and construction firms to work statewide to mitigate climate change impacts,” David Borrus, business manager of the Piledrivers Local Union 56 of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, told Bloomberg Environment July 30, in an email.
Construction Industries of Massachusetts, which represents the heavy construction industry didn’t respond to requests for comment Aug. 10.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/massachusetts-will-borrow-up-to-24b-for-climate-impact-response-1
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Gop Attorneys General Say Climate Speech Under Attack
Aug 13, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Hulac
A dozen Republican attorneys general and governors rushed last week to defend Exxon Mobil Corp. in court, arguing its free-speech rights are under attack and that climate change science isn't clear.
In a brief submitted Friday to a federal appeals court, the group said Exxon, the world's largest publicly listed oil company, was the target of an "abuse of investigative power" by Massachusetts and New York.
At one point, the group said in the brief, "The tactics of the New York and Massachusetts Attorneys General are part of an 'aggressive approach' to silence dissenting viewpoints by policing the 'truth' about climate change in the marketplace of ideas."
Much of the document is dedicated to the notion that experts disagree about climate change.
"Climate change is the subject of legitimate international debate," one section begins. A few phrases later, the authors cite Craig Idso, a well-known skeptic of mainstream climate change research, saying, "Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is the lead filer on the brief, and 11 other states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — signed on as well.
Similar groups of Republican politicians, also led by Paxton, intervened on the oil giant's behalf twice before, despite the fact Exxon concurs with established climate science research.
Both times, the groups have used similar phrases.
In 2016, a group accused Maura Healey (D), the Massachusetts attorney general, of a "witch hunt," adding that climate science is debatable (Climatewire, Sept. 9, 2016).
Paxton was behind a similar brief, filed with other GOP officials, a year later. Healey and then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D), who resigned that post this year over sexual abuse allegations, were called the "axis of ideology" laboring to "enforce a singular climate change viewpoint" (Climatewire, June 27, 2017).
In court records, five oil majors — Chevron Corp., BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, ConocoPhillips and Exxon — acknowledge the damage their products have on the Earth's climate.
And they agreed during a climate "tutorial" on the basics of climate change — that it is real, man-made and serious, and is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and by other human activities (Climatewire, April 5).
All these legal spats originated from Massachusetts' and New York's separate but similar probes into Exxon. Both are investigating whether Exxon deceived investors and the public about its understanding of climate change and of its corporate exposure to climate risks.
Exxon sued Massachusetts and New York in 2016 to block their inquiries, first in Texas, then in New York.
After Judge Valerie Caproni of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York threw out the case in March, citing "thin allegations" favoring Exxon, the company appealed.
The case is now at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, after Exxon appealed Caproni's ruling.
"Multiple courts have now rejected Exxon's efforts to block our investigation and we expect that to continue," Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, said in an emailed statement.
The Massachusetts attorney general's office did not respond to emailed questions.
New York in May accused Exxon of failing to turn over documents relevant to its investigation.
Separately, the state said some computer files Exxon produced were wiped clean of much of their critical data.
Curiously, one record, an Excel spreadsheet, was marked as if it had been created in 1901 (Climatewire, July 30).
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/13/stories/1060093929
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‘Rivers of Smoke’ Carry Air Pollution East as California Burns
Aug 10, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
The record-setting wildfires causing widespread destruction in California are fueling research on the danger of the air pollution they spew—and how far across the country the pollution could spread.
Satellites operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are capturing images of smoke plumes spreading across the West Coast, much of the Midwest, and in some instances, heading toward the East Coast.
Understanding the insidious effects this smoke has on air quality and public health is an opportunity for researchers, but also a challenge. They told Bloomberg Environment it is difficult to pinpoint the effects as the fires break out in different communities, spreading whichever way the wind takes them.
“Every year you hear the fires are the worst ever,” said Amber Soja, a senior research scientist with the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. “These are not idle remarks. It’s not like they are trying to sell cars. The fires are increasing in burned area and severity each year as predicted by climate models.”
The first week of August alone saw the number of large fires jump from 98 to 106 across the West, burning 1.66 million acres in 15 states, according to the Aug. 9 update provided by National Interagency Fire Center.
Smoke from burning vegetation and trees contain precursors of ozone, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, as well as fine particulates—or particles 30 times smaller than the width of a single hair—of airborne pollution that are linked to a variety of respiratory and cardiac illnesses. These plumes also contain chemicals released when homes, factories, and vehicles are set ablaze.
Emily Fischer, an assistant professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, has been sampling what she calls “rivers of smoke” over Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, and Utah since late July. Nevada and Utah appear to be to be swimming in smoke, at least that is what it seemed like to Fischer during a particularly bumpy ride aboard a C-130 plane, as it navigated the smoke enveloping Utah.
Each day she and her team have been taking off from Boise in the four-engine cargo plane that is equipped with at least 25 different sensors and detection instruments, most of which work in real time.
“I am not just looking at pollutants the Environmental Protection Agency monitors, but hundreds of other pollutants,” Fischer told Bloomberg Environment.
Scientists are interested in how far the smoke travels, and what effect, if any, it has on the communities over which it travels. They also want to know the chemical makeup of the smoke at the burn site and how its composition changes as it travels further afield.
“It’s difficult to anticipate how far the smoke will travel because we don’t know how high the smoke will be released into the atmosphere,” Fischer said.
Winds generally move faster higher up in the atmosphere, but winds at different altitudes can also go in different directions, Fischer added.
Mapping Rivers of SmokeFischer leads a multiagency, multidisciplinary team of scientists with backing from the National Science Foundation to study the composition of Western wildfires.
Fischer and other scientists do know based on past studies that the Pacific Coast is an exporter of smoke to the Great Plains and the Midwest, and that smoke does have an adverse influence on air quality. But whether that influence translates into public health impacts is a question researchers are studying now.
Steven Brey, a Colorado State University doctoral student in atmospheric science, tried to pin down the spread of smoke plumes by studying smoke data from NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System for June through September in the years 2007 through 2014. He and his team also looked at the average concentrations of fine particulates across the country.
Brey’s study, published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journal in February, showed that North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota had more smoke plumes overhead than any other states in the lower 48, averaging between eight and 12 days per month between June and September. Specifically, the region with the most smoke plumes overhead was centered over Fargo, N.D., where ground-level monitors suggested that air quality was affected for only a fraction of those days when plumes were seen above.
The plumes from fires, some that originated in the Northwest and Canada, reached as far as the Northeastern states, influencing air quality for about a day for each of the summer months.
‘Incredibly Difficult to Control’
Further inland in Colorado, Jeff Pierce, another atmospheric science professor at Colorado State University, is making sense of the air pollution data and trying to piece together public health impacts with Sheryl Magzamen, an associate professor in epidemiology.
Pierce and Magzamen told Bloomberg Environment they don’t know what the long-term effects will be of inhaling smoke and other chemicals released by the wildfire. But previous wildfires led to increased hospitalizations in the past few years.
A study funded by the NASA Applied Science program enabled Magzamen, Pierce, Fischer, and others to uncover a correlation between exposure to fine particulates and an increase in the risk for hospital admission for respiratory problems, such as asthma and pneumonia.
“What we have been seeing are consistent, meaningful relationships between wildfire smoke and adverse respiratory outcomes in summer—a season where these health risks should be low, and in rural communities where there aren’t other major sources of summer fine particulates, such as traffic,” Magzamen said.
“On a daily basis,” Magzamen explained, “we don’t see these levels of fine particulates from other sources except from wildfire smoke in the United States. But keep in mind wildfires also affect large cities like Los Angeles that already have high levels of fine particulates from traffic. In those communities we are concerned about the burden of fine particulates from sources that are incredibly difficult to control.”
Magzamen said researchers need to figure out what happens in the long term, as people are exposed more frequently to wildfire smoke. “We need to change from viewing health effects of wildfires as an infrequent disaster, to thinking of wildfire smoke as a potentially chronic exposure, especially in more rural locations.”
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/rivers-of-smoke-carry-air-pollution-east-as-california-burns
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