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AM ACC 8/15/2018

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Businesses Brace for Non-Tariff Retaliation from China
Aug 13, 2018 | Inside US Trade
By Anshu Siripurapu

American companies are growing increasingly concerned about backlash from China beyond retaliatory duties already in place or threatened -- and some businesses are already facing non-tariff barriers as retaliation for U.S. tariffs, according to an industry association source.
(ACC Mentioned) Plastics Industry Flourishes in Response to Market Demand
Aug 15, 2018 | Area Development
By Dan Emerson

It’s a good time to be in the plastics manufacturing business. Plastics manufacturers in the U.S. are continuing to enjoy increased demand for their products in a number of end-user categories, along with decreasing production costs.
Science and Health Leaders Lay Out Evidence Against EPA’s 'Secret Science' Rule
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside Climate News
By Marianne Lavelle

Arguing that public health and safety are at risk, researchers, health experts and administrators from leading scientific institutions across the nation have joined in opposition to a controversial Trump administration proposal that would restrict the use of science in federal policy making.

LCSA News

(ACC Mentioned) Critics Pan EPA Plan for Evaluating Studies of Toxic Chemicals
Aug 15, 2018 | Science Magazine
By Vanessa Zainzinger

Academic scientists and advocacy groups are urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw and rewrite proposed guidelines for determining which scientific findings to use when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals.

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Worse Than Lead?
Aug 15, 2018 | The Nation
By Jamie Lincoln Kitman

Today, thanks in part to the efforts of a single Virginia family, as many as 97 percent of Americans have toxic flame retardants in their blood.
American Water Demonstrates Strong Leadership on Lead Service Line Replacement
Aug 14, 2018 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner

In a landmark decision on July 25, 2018, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) approved American Water’s plan to fully replace the lead service lines (LSLs) in the communities served by its Indiana subsidiary over the next 10 to 24 years.
Hopkins Affiliate Can’t Shake Sibling’s Paint Study Claim
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Peter Hayes

Johns Hopkins affiliate Kennedy Krieger Institute can’t shake claims that it exposed a child to lead paint while she was living in a home that was the subject of a lead paint study, Maryland’s high court ruled.
Monsanto Verdict Could Trigger Landslide of Litigation Over Roundup
Aug 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Emily C. Dooley

Last week’s huge jury award against Monsanto Co. over its popular weed killers Roundup and Ranger Pro could boost litigation from others claiming their use of the products harmed them.
Monsanto Roundup Appeal Has Uphill Climb on 'Junk Science' Grounds: Legal Experts
Aug 14, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Tina Bellon

Bayer AG unit Monsanto faces long odds on an appeal blaming an "inflamed" jury and "junk science" for a verdict of $289 million in damages to a man who said the company's Roundup weed killer caused his cancer, according to some legal experts.

Energy News

Saudi Aramco Approves SATORP, Motiva Chemicals Expansion Plans
Aug 15, 2018 | Platts
By Adal Mirza

State energy giant Saudi Aramco has approved two major plans to expand its chemicals production inside the kingdom and in the US, the company said Wednesday.
Rising U.S. Gas Exports Squeeze a Main Competitor
Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Nathanial Gronewold

Australia is set to become the world's largest source of liquefied natural gas capacity, but its export growth spurt is slowing, and perhaps peaking, as the United States takes over as the world's largest source of new LNG supply growth.
Cheniere Makes Feedgas Request for Corpus Christi LNG Export Facility
Aug 15, 2018 | Platts
By Harry Weber and Ross Wyeno

Cheniere Energy wants to introduce feedgas to the first liquefaction unit at its LNG export facility in Texas as it prepares to begin production before the end of the year.
Blocked Gas Project Asks FERC to Reconsider
Aug 14, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Ellen M. Gilmer

Developers are pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reconsider a sweeping stop-work order that halts construction of the Mountain Valley pipeline.
Proposal Draws Growing Opposition in Calif.
Aug 14, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Rob Hotakainen

Californians are sending a loud message to President Trump: Keep the oil rigs away from us.
Oil Companies Ask Florida Lawmakers to Unlock Offshore Drilling
Aug 15, 2018 | PoliticoPro
By Ben Lefebvre

Oil and gas companies are aggressively lobbying Florida lawmakers to agree to allow offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico — seeking to break decades of bipartisan opposition in a state that has long viewed oil spills as an existential threat to its tourist economy.
Dominion Cleared to Resume Limited Work on Atlantic Coast Pipe
Aug 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Adams-Heard

Dominion Energy Transmission can resume limited work on parts of the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline that is currently halted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, according to a commission filing.

Chemical Security News

Democratic Lawmakers Fault Trump's RMP Rollback
Aug 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

Democratic lawmakers are urging the Trump administration to withdraw a proposed rule seeking to scrap most requirements of an Obama-era final rule strengthening EPA's facility accident prevention program, arguing the rollback would increase facility risks that disproportionately harm minority and low-income communities.

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

Ranking Transportation Lawmakers Seeking Statewide Master Plan
Aug 15, 2018 | NJBIZ
By Daniel J. Munoz

The state Legislature’s ranking transportation lawmakers are backing a move to create a statewide transportation master plan just days before a Thursday hearing in Trenton on New Jersey Transit’s so-called “Summer of Hell 2.”
Why Transporting Oil by Rail is Popular, Despite the Cost
Aug 14, 2018 | Chicago Booth Review
By Brian Wallheimer

The fracking-driven surge in crude-oil production this century has forced two developments in the US transportation infrastructure: a boom in pipeline construction as well as a boom in rail shipments of crude while pipelines are being developed.

Environment News

Former EPA Staff Urge CEQ to Avoid NEPA Implementing Rule Changes
Aug 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Lee Logan

Former EPA staffers are urging the White House to avoid changing its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing rules, arguing that any changes would spark protracted litigation and that the existing rules can accommodate the Trump administration's goal...
Exclusive: Draft Details Trump’s Plan for Reversing Obama Climate Rule
Aug 15, 2018 | PoliticoPro
By Emily Holden

The Trump administration is preparing to unveil its plan for undoing Barack Obama’s most ambitious climate regulation — offering a replacement that would do far less to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, according to POLITICO’s review of a portion of the unpublished draft.
4 Ways Spending Fights will Affect Energy, Environment Issues
Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Daily
By George Cahlink

Congress, fearing a government shutdown, is pressing to pass as many spending bills as possible before the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.
Here’s How to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions Without Taxing Them
Aug 14, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion
By Justin Gillis and Jameson McBride

Once again, a bill to tax emissions of greenhouse gases has been introduced in Congress, this time with Republican sponsorship.
What If Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?
Aug 15, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion
By Thomas L. Friedman

What if this time is different?
U.S. Cities Brace for More Heat-Related Problems
Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Oliver Milman

Heat is now the cause of death for more Americans than floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Businesses Brace for Non-Tariff Retaliation from China

Aug 13, 2018 | Inside US Trade

By Anshu Siripurapu

American companies are growing increasingly concerned about backlash from China beyond retaliatory duties already in place or threatened -- and some businesses are already facing non-tariff barriers as retaliation for U.S. tariffs, according to an industry association source.
Products are being held at ports for additional inspection and permits and licenses are being slow-walked or not moving forward, the source said, adding that “we’re continuing to hear from our companies on a number of those.”
Both the U.S. and China last week finalized tariffs on $16 billion worth of goods to begin Aug. 23, rounding out the first wave of tariffs on $50 billion worth of products. The Trump administration, which has threatened tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese goods based on a Section 301 investigation into Beijing’s intellectual property and technology transfer practices, has argued that the U.S. has the upper hand in the trade dispute because China cannot put tariffs on the same volume of experts. Analysts and businesses have pushed back against that argument, however, contending that Beijing's options for retaliation go beyond tariffs.
The agriculture industry in particular has warned of the potential for non-tariff retaliation against its products, which are perishable and can be lost if kept at ports or rejected. Earlier this year, China increased inspections on incoming fruit shipments that later abated, according to Mark Powers, president of the Northwest Horticultural Council, which represents growers in the Pacific Northwest.
“Initially it was a huge issue, but it smoothed out and later in the season it really became more of the economic impact of the [tariffs],” he said. “But we saw what happened initially. It's clearly kind of a command situation there where if tariffs aren’t doing everything that they want it to do they can figure out other ways to close a market.”
Companies that haven’t yet faced increased retaliatory moves are fearful that such measures could soon be imposed. “We really have not seen an uptick,” Bill Zarit, the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said in an interview. “But it seems to me that this has a great potential, so I think the Chinese are just keeping their powder dry right now and holding on and being in a position to use it if they need to.”
“Our members are definitely worried,” Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, said of the potential for non-tariff retaliation. “They know that China is very capable of making it harder to do business on the ground.”
Zarit suggested Beijing could be holding back on the wider use of non-tariff retaliation because it fears it would scare off future foreign investment in the Chinese market. Foreign investment is an important aspect of China’s economy, Zarit said, and Beijing is hesitant to put that investment at risk. “I think the Chinese are being quite circumspect in terms of retaliation,” he said.
Businesses fear that more retaliation is on the horizon because a negotiated settlement between the U.S. and China doesn’t appear likely in the near term, Brzytwa and Zarit said.
Administration officials said last week that talks were “ongoing.” Zarit said the U.S. and China had been communicating on a working level, “but that doesn’t mean there’s any negotiation going on.” He added that the administration seemed intent on following through with threatened tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Trump has so far resisted calls from the business community and lawmakers from both parties to avoid tariffs and pursue negotiations with China. If the economy weakens, or if the U.S. policy toward China plays a noticeable effect in the midterm elections, Trump could decide to pursue a negotiated settlement with China, according to analysts and the industry association source.
“There are so many dynamics in all of this, and some of those are U.S. dynamics,” the industry association source said of the prospects of the two sides reaching a deal. “How much pain are companies feeling? How is that showing up in the economy? How is that showing up in a political basis -- in the elections and candidates and all of that?”
Scott Kennedy, a China analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an email that the Trump and Xi administrations must “feel the same amount of political pain around the same moment” if the two sides are to negotiate a deal. “It’s unclear that will ever occur, and so this could go for a while,” he added.
Derek Scissors, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said China is willing to make concessions to the U.S., but is unconvinced the U.S. is negotiating in good faith. Trump would have to take part in the negotiations for Beijing to believe the U.S. wants a deal, which would only happen if Trump sees a political benefit to the talks, Scissors said.
“This is about U.S. politics first and Chinese behavior second,” he said.
An economic downturn in the U.S. or a political setback in the midterms could push the Trump administration back to the negotiating table with China, Scissors said. A downturn also would add credence to arguments made by the business community in its opposition to escalating tariffs, he said.
Scissors said the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement could be an obstacle because it would not be politically beneficial for Trump to strike a deal with both Mexico and China before the midterm elections. Trump would not want to be seen as striking deals with the two countries he rails against the most, Scissors posited, meaning the president likely would forgo a deal with China if NAFTA talks wrap up.
China could start to face internal pressure to strike a deal with the U.S. if its economy begins to suffer, according to a trade lawyer who has advised the Chinese government. The Communist Party derives its legitimacy from sustained economic growth, which could be disrupted by the U.S. tariffs, the lawyer said. But China would have to appear that it is seeking a “win-win” scenario because it would be politically impossible for Beijing to appear to be giving in to U.S. pressure, the lawyer said.
“You’ve got a millennium of history here [that] says 'We’re finally strong enough not to be bullied,'” he said. “These are not the Opium Wars.”
“The Chinese on the one hand are not prepared to be humiliated,” the lawyer added. “On the other hand, the Chinese rather like the idea of appearing to pursue the win-win. They like the idea of being the diplomatic, accommodating force.”
Zarit said the U.S. tariffs had gotten China’s attention and could compel China to negotiate a deal. “So as much as we don’t like the tariffs, it has gotten China’s attention and it is leverage. I don’t think the Chinese like what’s going on and I don’t think it’s good for their economy. It’s certainly not good for their currency or their stock market.”
But the U.S. is trying to force cultural and ideological change in China with tariffs, the lawyer said -- particularly problematic for intellectual property, which is viewed fundamentally differently in China than in the U.S.
“The IP is a really complex issue for China if you accept the historical framework of the Communist Party that says all property is communal,” the lawyer said. “The distinction between tangible property and intangible property is a little harder to define, so why isn’t an intellectual property idea not in the public domain in some way?”
Analysts and Zarit said any deal would have to be structured with enforceable benchmarks for China, along with a time line to ensure that Beijing does not drag out the talks and lives up to the commitments it makes.
“The Chinese will just negotiate us to death, and they’ve been very successful at it in the past,” Zarit said.
Scissors said he could envision a deal in which the U.S. agreed to suspend tariffs while Beijing implemented changes to its IP practices.
Kennedy said there were “enough things that China could do that would indicate genuine commitment to liberalization that could be accompanied by measurable benchmarks,” including agreeing to substantially constrain -- but not eliminate -- industrial subsidies and addressing inward investment and intellectual property protections.
“In return China likely would want substantial concessions, including an ability to purchase more U.S. high-tech items that are currently export-controlled, a genuine commitment to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty, and recognition of China as a market economy,” he said. “So you could envision a big package deal, but China would have to have confidence that the U.S. would honor it. They currently don’t have that level of confidence.”
The Obama administration attempted to negotiate a BIT with China but could not conclude a deal before Trump took office. China has challenged the U.S. and EU’s classification of China as a non-market economy in antidumping cases at the World Trade Organization. A panel has been composed in the EU-China case; the China-U.S. case is still in the consultation stage.
Zarit faulted the Chinese for only offering the U.S. purchase commitments, but also laid some blame on the White House for not being clear in its demands. “This administration is not communicating terribly well with the Chinese,” he said. “I don’t see that the Chinese have an off-ramp here and I don’t think that our administration is giving them an opportunity to have an off-ramp.”
He said there had been some signs of market openings, in financial services, autos, insurance and, most recently, railway shipping and power, but added, “it’s almost too little too late in many ways.” A major announcement is expected later this year to mark the 40th anniversary of China’s market opening under former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, but Zarit said it was unlikely to include dramatic changes and likely would involve moves to be phased in over several years. He added that the Chinese were being careful to avoid being seen as giving in to the U.S.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is seen as internally divided on how to deal with China. “You can’t even say there’s two or three factions; I think it’s really very quirky depending on the individual,” said Matt Goodman, a China analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Trump is focused on reducing the bilateral trade deficit with China, Goodman said, while U.S Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is more interested in addressing structural change in China, including forced technology transfer, subsidies and Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” industrial plan. Trade adviser Peter Navarro wants to “break China Inc.,” and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow want to negotiate and cut a deal, Goodman said.
Lighthizer could be interested in securing “managed trade outcomes,” Goodman said, such as voluntary export restraints or an agreement to give U.S. companies a minimum level of market access in China. Goodman said Lighthizer showed a preference for those outcomes during negotiations between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s.
A trade attorney said the broader U.S. strategy was to compel companies to shift production out of China to force Beijing to abandon its industrial policy, calling the approach “the world’s most ludicrous bank shot.”
“Somebody, Thailand, will get a windfall. You’ll pay $50 more for an office chair and the Chinese will lose a lot of jobs and that’s okay with USTR,” he said. “They’re OK inflicting pain without any U.S. gain.”
Sources and analysts were united in the belief that there was no clear timetable for resolving the U.S.-China dispute. “It’s been going on for such a long time and the issues are complex,” Zarit said. “We’ve got two different economic structures and systems and both of us, both China and the U.S., feel that our structure is just fine for us, thank you very much.”
“Neither one is going to change significantly, so how do you reconcile these two systems? And therein lies the rub,” he added. “It’s going to take some time.”
https://insidetrade.com/daily-news/us-businesses-brace-non-tariff-retaliation-china

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(ACC Mentioned) Plastics Industry Flourishes in Response to Market Demand

Aug 15, 2018 | Area Development

By Dan Emerson

It’s a good time to be in the plastics manufacturing business. Plastics manufacturers in the U.S. are continuing to enjoy increased demand for their products in a number of end-user categories, along with decreasing production costs. They’re also developing new uses for their products, as technology continues to advance the use of strong, lightweight plastics in sectors such as healthcare, automotive, packaging, and 3-D printing.
The U.S. has become the cheapest place in the world to make plastics, as one of the benefits of the fracking technology that has created a surplus of natural gas, the primary ingredient for making most plastics. To build on this competitive advantage, chemical producers have invested a record $185 billion to build new capacity in the U.S., according to the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group.
Expansion/New Investment
“Many plastics companies are betting on the continued, future growth in the industry, which has generated a great deal of expansion and new investment,” Perc Pineda, chief economist of the Plastics Industry Association told Area Development.

Much of the expansion is taking place along the Texas Gulf Coast, which continues to be a mecca for plastics manufacturers and those who supply the industry. Dow, Exxon Mobil Corp., and Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. are building multibillion-dollar factories along the Texas coast. The plants are part of $185 billion in proposed and recently completed investments, according to the ACC.

One of the biggest Gulf Coast projects is a joint venture between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC), a company owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. The partners are investing $10 billion in what will be the world’s largest steam cracker plant at a massive petrochemical complex just north of Corpus Christi. Access to natural gas from the Eagle Ford Shale was the key factor in locating the plant, which will become operational in 2021, making ethylene and other chemicals used to make polyester, anti-freeze, plastic bottles, and food packaging products.

The plant will be capable of producing 1.8 million metric tons per year of ethylene that would feed a monoethylene glycol plant and two polyethylene plants. Manipulation of these molecules currently is used in a number of practical applications, including the manufacture of hybrid plastics and ceramics that are scratch-resistant, lighter, and much stronger than steel.

In Baton Rouge, La., Lotte Chemical USA is investing in a $1.9 billion joint venture with Westlake Chemical to build an monoethylene plant on a 250-acre site that will also serve as a future headquarters. More than $3 billion in new capital investment is expected to translate into 265 new direct jobs, and more than 2,300 new indirect jobs in Lake Charles and surrounding areas.

Almost 20 factories are being built or expanded to convert gas to liquids such as ethane and propane into ethylene, the most used petrochemical and the main ingredient in polyethylene plastic. However, South Africa’s Sasol Ltd. has abandoned plans for a gas-to-liquids plant in the Lake Charles, La., area that would have cost as much as $15 billion and employed 750, saying the low price of oil and a volatile marketplace make the project “uneconomic,” according to the Lake Charles Advocate. Meanwhile, Sasol is going ahead with an $11 billion ethane cracker complex being built near Lake Charles, La., which is scheduled to begin producing polyethylene next year.

Formosa Plastics Corp. USA is making a massive investment in the coastal town of Port Comfort, Texas, building two polyethylene plants and a polypropylene plant. ICIS, a market information service, has reported that the polyethylene plants, each with a 400,000 ton per year capacity, should start up in the second half of this year. Formosa is also building a 1.2m ton/year ethylene cracker at Point Comfort, as well as a 600,000 ton/year propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit. The PDH unit could start production in 2020 or 2021, ICIS says.
Another major cluster of plastics manufacturers has developed in southwestern Pennsylvania, which has more than 100 plastics-related companies employing more than 5,000 people. As in Texas and Louisiana, the main attraction for plastics-makers has been access to local, reliable, and inexpensive natural gas byproducts made available by Marcellus and Utica Shale production.

Pennsylvania is the second-largest U.S. producer of natural gas, expected to produce 40 percent of U.S. natural gas by 2030. And, Central Pennsylvania is home to one of the largest coal-to-natural gas power plant conversion projects in the U.S. — a $1 billion, 1,124-megawatt plant along the Susquehanna River in Snyder County, on the site of a shuttered, coal-burning power plant. Beginning this year, it is expected to power one million homes in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, the U.K. oil and chemicals conglomerate, has started building an ethylene complex outside Pittsburgh that will begin production in the early 2020s. It will produce plastic pellets, which end-users will turn into products such as packaging, trash bags, and bottles.

In Monaca, 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Shell Chemical Appalachia is building a petrochemical plant that will produce ethylene and polyethylene, employing 600 workers. It should be noted that more than 70 percent of North American polyethylene customers are within a 700-mile radius of Pittsburgh.

The Midwest has also attracted plastics manufacturers, albeit on a smaller scale than the Gulf Coast. Like the Pennsylvania-Ohio area, the Midwest also has a strong manufacturing legacy. “In a way, the Midwest cluster is expanding eastward to Pennsylvania,” says Pineda.

One Midwestern concentration is in McPherson County, Kansas, which has nine plastics manufacturers and eight plastic industry support facilities. Central Plastics has expanded to 210,000 square feet at its original location there and employs more than 200 people, with another expansion planned.
n St. Clair, Mich., a $3.3 million expansion project is in the works for Wright Plastic Products Co. LLC, a major supplier to the automotive, recreational, and marine vehicle markets. And in Iosco County, Mich., Plastic Trim International is investing $16.1 million in a 42,000-square-foot expansion and technology upgrade at its Baldwin Township manufacturing plant and its logistics center in Tawas City, on the shore of Lake Huron.

Plastics manufacturers are also expanding in Indiana. 20/20 Custom Molded Plastics, a custom structural form-molding manufacturer, plans to locate a new facility in Bluffton, Ind. The company will move into the former home of Buckhorn Inc. and plans to hire many of its workers, ultimately creating up to 155 jobs by 2020. The Holiday City, Ohio-based company will invest more than $27 million to purchase and equip Buckhorn’s former 170,000-square-foot facility.

Evansville, Ind.-based Berry Plastics Group, Inc. has added 150,000 square feet and an on-site quality lab to its Phillipsburg, N.J., facility. The expansion will help serve its growing healthcare and personal care packaging market.

Another major consideration for plastics manufacturers seeking a new plant location is proximity to a vibrant market, Pineda says, since proximity to customers means lower shipping costs.

With that in mind, proximity to automakers has been profitable for Oji Intertech, Inc., a Japanese-owned automotive and industrial packaging company, which plans to expand its operations in North Manchester, Ind. The company, a subsidiary of Tokyo-headquartered Oji Interpack Co. Ltd., will invest $4.5 million to double its 80,000-square-foot facility.
Growing Plastics Markets
Along with new and expanded facilities, plastics manufacturers are also making sizable investments in processing equipment. For example, Canada-based IPL Plastics recently announced that it is spending $18.9 million in Forsyth, Ga., to add eight injection presses that will lower production costs with modernized technology. IPL, which makes sustainable packaging, is a 79-year old company that went public in June.

Packaging, in particular, is showing especially strong growth, according to Pineda, due to the growth of e-commerce. With the rapid growth of the middle class in Asia and elsewhere, the packaging sector should remain strong, he says. U.S. exports of polyethylene plastic to Asia will increase by more than five times by 2020, with China as the primary destination, according to research company IHS Markit Ltd.

The U.S. housing market is expected to stay in recovery mode, meaning the outlook for plastics materials in building and construction will remain stable. Nonresidential construction has also returned to pre-recession levels, meaning continuing plastics demand in that end market.

Automakers are another customer group that will continue to show strong growth for plastic-makers, says Jeff Forsythe, a Greenville, S.C.-based site selection consultant. “With automakers continuing to reduce the weight of the vehicles they make, lightweight plastics are going to continue to be maximized.” Across all sectors, “I don’t see any drawbacks to the continued growth of plastics, especially with natural gas costs being so low in the U.S. For the plastics industry, the only potentially negative trend on the horizon may be the developing, global trade war,” Forsythe adds.

“Tariffs will undoubtedly have an impact on the industry, which has global reach both upstream and downstream,” Pineda says. “Imposing higher import duties on U.S. plastics companies changes the industry’s supply chain dynamics in a way that impacts both businesses in plastics and businesses that depend on or serve plastics. Higher tariffs on plastic materials and products ultimately reduce the industry’s competitive advantage internationally, and so it is in the best interest of the plastics industry, and the U.S. economy as a whole, that plastics trade is allowed to flourish.”
http://www.areadevelopment.com/Plastics/Q3-2018/plastics-industry-flourishes-in-response-to-market-demand.shtml

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Science and Health Leaders Lay Out Evidence Against EPA’s 'Secret Science' Rule

Aug 15, 2018 | Inside Climate News

By Marianne Lavelle

Arguing that public health and safety are at risk, researchers, health experts and administrators from leading scientific institutions across the nation have joined in opposition to a controversial Trump administration proposal that would restrict the use of science in federal policy making.
As the comment period draws to a close Thursday on a plan to limit the science that the Environmental Protection Agency can use in decision-making, the scientific and academic communities are flooding the agency with letters arguing the proposal would hobble EPA and wreak havoc on research.
"The proposed rule would—for no rational reason—prevent EPA from relying on much of the research that ... public health and environmental exposure researchers have conducted and continue to conduct," said one letter, organized by Harvard University, its health and medical schools and its affiliated hospitals. It was signed by Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and nearly 100 other administrators and researchers—the first time such an array of Harvard's most prestigious faculty have joined in opposition to any EPA proposal, according to former agency officials and observers.
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The EPA proposal has long been sought by fossil fuel interests. It could be used to weaken health-based standards for limiting some of the pollution caused by burning coal, oil and natural gas, and ties in with the Trump administration's broad attempt to roll back climate and pollution rules.
But the Harvard letter, drafted by the school's legal experts, lays out a roadmap that opponents surely will rely on to challenge the approach as illegal.
They note that Congress has mandated that EPA use the "best available science" in at least a half dozen separate laws. "The rule will cripple EPA's ability to implement [these environmental laws] and will jeopardize the health and safety of infants, children, and adults in the United States and beyond," they wrote.
The so-called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" proposal, also known as the "secret science" rule, would prohibit the EPA from relying on studies where raw data has not been released publicly, perhaps even including information that could reveal the identities and medical records of research subjects.
That could exclude studies where participants were promised confidentiality, including some of the seminal research on environmental health threats—such as the first studies linking small particle soot pollution with increased mortality. One of these was published in 1993 by Harvard scientists.Broad Opposition, Particularly in Health Care
If acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler forges ahead to finalize the proposal, it will be against the advice not only of Harvard and many other health and medical research institutions, but also the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the leaders of physicians' groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, and health organizations like the American Lung Association.
The editors of four major scientific journals published a rare joint statement. EPA's own Science Advisory Board has recommended the proposal be delayed until the board can undertake a review. Even the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent nonprofit funded by electric power generators, warned that its recent studies on pollutants and health could be sidelined by EPA under the plan.
"I've never seen such a broad spectrum of opposition," said Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator early in President George W. Bush's administration.
"It's not just environmentalists," she said. "It's health care people, and frankly all people who recognize the constrictions this would put on good science and the ability to get comprehensive data, which is what you need in order to make the decisions the agency has to make."
Wendy Wagner, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an authority on science in the regulatory process, noted the "high caliber of some of the commenters, who are usually not engaged in these issues at all. I don't know in my life whether I've seen a rule attract interest from this kind of spectacular group of all-stars."
"To me, that alone signals to some sector of the public that there is a problem," Wagner said.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University Law School, said the broad condemnation reflects the deep impact the rule could have on how the EPA carries out its mission.
"This proposal goes to fundamental scientific methodology, and is an effort to turn a blind eye to some of the most useful scientific evidence for environmental rulemaking," Gerrard said. "Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of any regulation in particular, this seems like an attack on the overall scientific enterprise."Where Did 'Secret Science' Plan Come From?
The proposal was one of the final gambits of former Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt before his resignation in July amid a swirl of ethics investigations. It mirrored legislation sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, that has been passed by the House of Representatives three times but has never been taken up by the Senate.
Smith had picked up the idea from fossil fuel industry allies who have waged a years-long campaign to discredit the science on the dangers of fine soot pollution. Attacking that research has been a cause célèbre for some fossil fuel industry advocates, because it has been an underpinning of EPA's calculation of health benefits and co-benefits for rules to cut air pollution from power plants—including efforts to rein in greenhouse gas pollution, like the Clean Power Plan.
But the EPA proposal would have an impact far beyond how the agency weighs the risks of soot pollution.
The agency also would be forced to ignore the studies that established the dangers of arsenic, lead, methylmercury, radionuclides and numerous other environmental hazards, Harvard officials argued in their 50-page submission.
For example, the EPA currently is considering setting maximum contaminant levels for two widespread industrial chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), which are polluting drinking water sources around the country. But the Harvard letter argues the agency would be prevented from taking action under the "transparency" proposal, since the raw data in the most important science on those chemicals is under court-ordered seal. (A study involving 70,000 participants funded as part of a lawsuit settlement agreement over drinking water contaminated near a DuPont facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia.)Supporters with Close Ties to Fossil Fuels
The EPA proposal has its supporters. The Heartland Institute, a conservative policy group with close ties to fossil fuel interests, said the plan would remedy what it characterizes as a "scientific crisis" at EPA.
In its comments, it called the mainstream modeling of climate and pollution science "a waste of time and money, as well as self-delusional."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce applauded the Trump administration's effort to address what it characterized as a "longstanding problem."
"Citizens have a right to the data and information that are used in the development of public policy," Dan Byers, head of the chamber's Global Energy Institute, said in a prepared statement for a hearing the agency held on the proposal in July.
But others argue that the Trump administration's proposal, developed without consultation with the science community, mischaracterizes the issues.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the world's largest nonprofit funder of research for Parkinson's disease, said it "strives for open data in its own research where possible, and encourages funded researchers to make data available based on the nature of the study and the feasibility of adequate de-identification."
But the foundation said "there are many studies where the exposure of data is infeasible, counterproductive or dangerous. The types of studies most vulnerable to exclusion, human-based clinical trials or epidemiology (observational) studies, form the bedrock of knowledge vital for determinations about the environment's impact on human health."Regulation Would Depend on 'Opinion', 'Whim'
To support its proposal, the EPA invoked the work of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, known for his 2005 research paper "Why Most Published Findings Are False."
But Ioannidis published an editorial early this spring arguing that the EPA proposal was misguided, since most of the raw data from past studies are not publicly available.
"If the proposed rule is approved, science will be practically eliminated from all decision-making processes," he wrote. "Regulation would then depend uniquely on opinion and whim."
The EPA also cites studies that were conducted by the Administrative Conference of the U.S., an agency dedicated to improving the regulatory process, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, a public policy think tank.
But Wagner, who authored both of those studies, said there is no overlap between the EPA proposal and the recommendations of those groups. To the extent they dealt with transparency, it was on issues such as the need for better disclosure of the financing of industry-funded studies.
Wagner points out that because the EPA proposal would give the administrator discretion to grant exemptions on a case-by-case basis, it would mark a profound change.
"It's anyone's guess how that discretion can be used," she said. "It's by design a political decision. We don't really have criteria as we typically like to see in accountable democratic systems to measure or even assess the administrator's decisions. It significantly departs from process honed over the past 40 years. Not that it's been perfect, and not that there aren't a lot of things to fix. But it's hard to think of any case, ever, where we simply created a process rule that said it's up to a political administrator to decide what science counts and what doesn't."
It remains to be seen how influential the response from the scientific community will be with the EPA under Wheeler's leadership. "In a normal world, where facts and science matter, this kind of outpouring would be quite influential," said Gerrard. "Under Trump, who knows?"
But he said the arguments made by the commenters will be important in the inevitable legal challenges that Wheeler will face if he does move forward with the proposal.
"I think the courts may be the more important audience," Gerrard said. "If Andrew Wheeler does decide to bolt ahead with the rule, he will be sued in a matter of minutes."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15082018/epa-secret-science-rule-opposition-health-environmental-data-public-comments

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LCSA News

(ACC Mentioned) Critics Pan EPA Plan for Evaluating Studies of Toxic Chemicals

Aug 15, 2018 | Science Magazine

By Vanessa Zainzinger

Academic scientists and advocacy groups are urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw and rewrite proposed guidelines for determining which scientific findings to use when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals. Critics say that if adopted, the guidance will allow regulators to exclude high-quality health and risk studies for “ridiculous” reasons, favor industry-backed research, and prevent EPA from considering academic studies that rest on innovative methods.
EPA’s guidance “is less about evaluating the quality of evidence, and more about eliminating it altogether,” the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) of Washington, D.C., wrote this week to EPA in comments blasting the “flawed” proposal, which it says “describes a head-in-sand approach to any evidence that a toxic chemical is toxic.” EPA, however, says the guidelines are likely to evolve and that it is aiming for an “efficient systematic review process that generates high-quality, fit-for-purpose risk evaluations that rely on the best available science.”
The controversy, which mirrors a debate over a proposal EPA released earlier this year that critics say would allow the agency to ignore certain human health studies, has its roots in a 2016 overhaul of the nation’s premier chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The revised law aims to make it easier for EPA to complete safety reviews of new chemicals before they reach the market and to more quickly restrict the use of existing chemicals if new evidence of risks emerges. It also orders EPA to develop new guidelines for the “systematic review” of the quality of the scientific evidence used in risk assessments.
In response, EPA released a 248-page draft in May describing the review process it is using for its first major round of chemical assessments under the new TSCA. The agency is focusing on 10 compounds already in use, including asbestos (which is still used in the production of chlorine), carbon tetrachloride (often used to make refrigerants), and Violet 29, a common pigment. EPA notes the document offers only “general expectations” and that regulators can depart from the guidance. But it does appear to allow a publication to be excluded if it does not include detailed methods, for instance, or if specific information about study subjects or data sources is withheld because of privacy, business, or other concerns.
A key industry group, the American Chemistry Council in Washington, D.C., said in a statement that the guidelines have “many positive attributes,” but would “benefit from additional explicit guidance,” for example on how to make EPA’s process for integrating evidence into the rulemaking process more transparent.
Critics worry that President Donald Trump’s appointees at EPA will use the guidance—which they note has not been independently reviewed—to put a pro-industry spin on evidence reviews, and perhaps make it easier for companies to keep dangerous chemicals on the market. And they say it could make it easier for EPA to ignore data from certain kinds of health studies. “The things that they are excluding [studies] on are ridiculous,” says Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), one of 25 academics and advocacy group officials who signed a letter to EPA criticizing the guidance. In particular, they say it places too much emphasis on how a study is described—or reported—in the scientific literature.
Detailed information on methods and subjects is often left out of journal publications, the critics note, and has “nothing to do with the quality of the study,” Woodruff says. The approach, NRDC adds, mirrors the so-called transparency rule proposed this past April by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt; researchers argue it would bar the agency from using major epidemiological studies based on confidential health records.
In contrast, the critics note, the TSCA guidance fails to mention financial conflicts of interest as a reason for excluding a study. And they argue it inappropriately implies that studies done in industry-funded laboratories that adhere to specific standards, known as Good Laboratory Practices (GLP), are more trustworthy than studies done in academic laboratories that don’t follow GLP—often because they are pioneering innovative methods.
Critics want EPA to scrap the draft guidance and replace it with an established method for systematic review, such as one developed by the National Toxicology Program, which has already been peer reviewed. “I have not seen an explanation of why EPA’s approach is so far outside of the scientific mainstream on systematic reviews,” says Veena Singla, an associate director of UCSF’s health and environment program.
EPA is now deciding how to proceed. The deadline for public comment on the draft was 16 August. The guidelines would need to be revised soon, as the agency has said it wants to complete its 10 initial chemical assessments by late next year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/critics-pan-epa-plan-evaluating-studies-toxic-chemicals

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Worse Than Lead?

Aug 15, 2018 | The Nation

By Jamie Lincoln Kitman

Today, thanks in part to the efforts of a single Virginia family, as many as 97 percent of Americans have toxic flame retardants in their blood. Deeply poisonous, and linked to cancer, genetic damage, and behavioral and learning difficulties, the prevalence of flame retardants, here and around the world, owes to the fact that these chemicals have been placed in many of the objects of daily life—in our homes, automobiles, and workplaces, even in our beds.
This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation. Emily Biuso and Darren Ankrom provided research assistance.
While the flame-retardant business has grown explosively and with tragic consequences, the world has yet to reckon with this morally challenged industry, which started taking off more than 40 years ago. Nor has the US government held manufacturers accountable for the original evil that spawned the proliferation of flame retardants: the monumentally unsafe business of adding lead to gasoline. Now, new research undertaken by The Nation reveals the startling connection between these two scourges to public health and the environment.
Meet the Gottwalds of Virginia, one of the 100 richest families in America and the most powerful shareholders in the Albemarle chemical company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. In September 2016, Floyd Gottwald Jr. gave $50,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fund-raising committee for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, continuing a family tradition of Republican funding that goes back decades. Yet you’ve probably never heard of them. The Gottwalds keep a low profile—perhaps understandably, given that they’ve built their wealth by blanketing the planet in lead and flame retardants.
A deadly neurotoxin that never biodegrades, lead assaulted the public health throughout the 20th century, largely through its role as an additive to gasoline. When the United States began phasing out leaded gas in the 1970s, the Gottwalds pivoted to flame retardants. Often manufactured with the chemical element bromine, flame retardants are also extremely toxic products. But they have never been effectively regulated, much less banned, as lead eventually was—even though the banning of lead was scandalously delayed, as its manufacturers fought off regulation for decades with a mixture of outright lying, deceptive advertising, and the financial lubrication of elected officials (as I documented in an investigation for The Nation back in 2000).
Flame retardants have been identified not only as carcinogens, but as mutagens (i.e., agents that mutate genetic material). Many are now understood as first-class endocrine disrupters, implicated in a growing variety of learning difficulties, IQ deficits, and behavioral disorders, especially among the young, including hyperactivity and behaviors consistent with autism and, among the older set, diminished fertility, miscarriages, premature births, obesity, advanced puberty, thyroid hormonal problems in postmenopausal women, and an increased risk of ALS.
Traces of flame retardants are now found virtually everywhere on earth, including in the water and dust inside our homes. According to the Chicago Tribune, the level of certain flame retardants doubled in the blood of adults every two to five years between 1970 and 2004. In a 2014 study of California day-care centers, researchers found flame retardants in 100 percent of the dust samples. A recent Chinese study revealed their presence in e-cigarettes. Remote locations aren’t safe either; the chemicals have been consistently found in the blubber of Arctic sea mammals.
It’s no wonder. The global consumption of flame-retardant chemicals is projected to top 7 billion pounds by 2022—a staggering amount, especially when you consider the most incredible fact of all: In the quantities in which they’re typically employed, flame retardants don’t retard flame very much.CURRENT ISSUEView our current issue
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These compounds became ubiquitous starting in the 1970s, as governments around the world were persuaded by corporate campaigns that flame retardants were essential fire-safety tools. Much of this campaigning was hysterical and dishonest; almost all of it was underwritten by the products’ manufacturers, including the Gottwalds’ Albemarle Corporation and the chemical industry of which it was a part. Working in concert with the tobacco industry, these manufacturers mounted aggressive scare campaigns to create a perceived need for their products: They crafted regulations and lobbied legislatures to adopt them; attacked scientific findings they didn’t like; ridiculed public-health advocates; spun journalists; and bought political access with millions of dollars in campaign contributions. This anti-public-health offensive explains why flame retardants are now embedded in an astonishing array of consumer products, including furniture, bedding, electrical equipment, and—most despicable of all—children’s clothing and car seats.
Although they were launched more than 50 years apart, flame retardants and leaded gasoline share a common corporate pedigree. The story begins with the addition of lead to the gasoline supply, an act of breathtaking greed and deceit on the part of four blue-chip companies: General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey (these days known as ExxonMobil), and, later, Dow Chemical. The story continues for nearly a century, as the mass production of leaded gas gave way to the mass production of flame retardants.
While certain flame retardants have been phased out over time, others have been phased in; the Gottwalds and other manufacturers are not going quietly into the night. Notwithstanding the proven health and environmental harms that their products inflict, the suppliers of flame retardants intend to sell increasing amounts of this toxic product for years to come. The Gottwalds have made that clear enough, as their Albemarle Corporation has expanded its bromine-production capacity and its partnerships around the world, recently with a 2014 linkup with Israel Chemicals, Ltd.
Like other makers of dangerous chemicals, Albemarle has stayed one step ahead of the law and public outrage by perfecting a cynical version of the classic bait-and-switch scam. When regulators ban one flame retardant because of its undeniable health impacts, the manufacturers simply tweak a molecule here and there to produce a similar but legally distinct product. Then they give that product a new name and hustle it back onto the market.SUPPORT PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISM
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Albemarle declined interview requests for this article and did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its activities.
The roots of today’s scandal extend back to 1923, when three of the world’s biggest companies combined to introduce leaded gasoline in the United States, the fastest-growing market for automobiles. General Motors came up with the idea; Standard Oil of New Jersey had the technical smarts to move it into mass production, along with the market share and distribution muscle to reach huge numbers of customers around the world; and the chemical giant DuPont contributed factories, additional capital, and scientific expertise.
The business opportunity for these three companies arose from the fact that the automotive fuel of the day was lousy and getting lousier. But GM researchers had discovered that adding lead increased the fuel’s octane level and reduced engine “knock,” an unpleasant metallic sound heard when the engine accelerated. With Standard Oil of New Jersey, GM created a joint venture, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to the Ethyl Corporation), to organize the mass manufacture, distribution, sales, and marketing of this new gasoline additive.
Over the next 50 years, leaded gasoline would erode public health so grievously—in the form of hundreds of millions of cases of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, renal failure, learning disabilities, behavioral difficulties, and more—that the removal of lead from most modern gasoline, which started in the 1980s, has been hailed as one of the greatest public-health triumphs of the last century.
The health impacts of leaded gas could have been avoided if corporate greed hadn’t trumped human decency. Many of lead’s hazards were already known, and some had been suspected for thousands of years. (The ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides warned that “Lead makes the mind give way.”) Safer methods of increasing octane, such as adding ethanol, were also known in the 1920s, and they were cost-competitive. But ethanol, known at the time as “farm alcohol,” could not be patented—a fatal flaw in the eyes of the Ethyl Corporation’s owners, who preferred their proprietary, if deadly, product.
GM, DuPont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey soon confronted a new problem: It turned out that lead wrecked car engines. Senior GM executives Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were informed by associates inside and outside the company that lead deposits dramatically shortened the lives of engines, spark plugs, and other vital components. “[I]n the course of a few thousand miles [of driving with leaded gasoline] it becomes necessary to replace spark plugs,” Thomas Midgley Jr., GM’s top scientist, told Kettering, the company’s director of research, in a November 1922 memo. Midgley’s report, now housed in the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University (the former General Motors Institute) in Flint, Michigan, added: “The exhaust valve stems and seats suffer in a slightly different way when they become hot enough to melt the litharge [lead].” Other internal documents suggest that engineers in GM’s Buick division were seeing engines fail within 1,500 miles of driving.
Far from retreating, however, Sloan and Kettering turned this unanticipated lemon of a business problem into the lemonade of bigger profits by making leaded gas part of GM’s new push for “planned obsolescence.” For some years, GM and the rest of the US auto industry had confronted a structural problem: Their productive capacity was outstripping consumer demand for their products. Americans didn’t need, or didn’t think they needed, as many cars as the industry could build. Sloan, GM’s future president and CEO, who championed the concept of planned obsolescence, set out to change their minds.
To entice people to buy more cars, GM began changing its cars’ designs, colors, and capabilities year in and year out. Provocative advertising was introduced, and customers were allowed to pay in installments. Cars became status symbols as much as transportation machines.
Though unintended, the propensity of leaded gasoline to wear out engines and their components amounted to a supercharged form of planned obsolescence. The business logic was as simple as it was cold and calculating: GM profited directly from every vehicle it sold. Then it earned an additional royalty, through its joint stake in the Ethyl Corporation, on every gallon of leaded gas sold—whose damage to engines and components in turn generated additional earnings when GM supplied the replacement parts or, better yet, a whole new car. For GM’s leadership, it was what you might call a win-win-win.SUBSCRIBE TO THE NATION FOR $2 A MONTH.
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But what was good for GM wasn’t so good for its customers, some of whom were powerful enough to make their displeasure felt. Before long, representatives of the US Army and Navy and the British and Canadian air forces were informing GM and Ethyl executives that leaded gasoline was wreaking havoc on their airplane engines. “I am bringing this matter to your attention as some action must be taken on the part of the Ethyl Gas Corporation or they will lose the foot-hold which they are just now getting with the [US] Navy,” a high-level executive of the airplane-engine maker Pratt & Whitney wrote to Kettering on November 11, 1927.
The commercial risks posed by leaded gas were so worrying that they triggered dissension within GM’s ranks, the company’s internal files reveal. The heads of Buick and Cadillac, GM’s luxury-car divisions, were initially reluctant to recommend leaded gas to their customers because of its destructive properties. Letters of concern from the two division heads led CEO Sloan to fire a terse missive back to Buick’s general manager, H.H. Bassett, on May 2, 1924: “[I]f it continues as it looks now, [leaded gasoline will] be a very big earning power [for the corporation] competing with our Car Divisions, all without the employment of hardly any capital at all.” Translation: You don’t understand. We’re going to make more money selling this stuff than we do selling cars. Before long, the Buick and Cadillac divisions fell in line.
Still, a new engine failing after just 1,500 miles proved to be a bit much, even for cutthroat businessmen like Sloan and Kettering. They needed to find a way to expel more of the lead from engines. A quick fix was found with the discovery of ethylene dibromide. Often known by the acronym EDB, it’s produced by the reaction of the hydrocarbon ethylene with bromine. Manufactured by Dow Chemical engineers, EDB worked as a chemical “scavenger”: It turned lead into lead bromide, making it less prone to build up in engines and more likely to be expelled with the exhaust into the air.
Problem solved—except for the people breathing that air, because elemental bromine is no day at the beach. With a name derived from the ancient Greek word bromos, for “stench,” bromine is the only nonmetal element that is a liquid. It’s most readily found in mineral halide salts or dissolved in salt lakes and brine pools. And, as will be detailed below, it is definitely not good for you.
If leaded gasoline was to come into widespread use, huge additional quantities of bromine had to be found. After a few false starts, the Ethyl Corporation’s scientists hit upon the answer: the ocean. Seawater contains about 67 parts of bromine per 1 million parts of seawater. In 1934, a huge plant opened at Kure Beach, North Carolina. The plant sucked in millions of gallons of seawater each day, removed the bromine from the water, and then expelled the wastewater back into the sea.
After additional extraction plants were built, the worldwide production of bromine reached 40,000 tons in 1941, 90 percent of which found its way into leaded gasoline. By 1970, global production had increased by a factor of eight to reach 320,000 tons. A reckoning, however, was fast approaching.
In the 1960s, airborne lead was increasingly seen as an urgent public-health issue, as scientific certainty overturned decades of specious corporate-funded research. In 1974, the US government required that unleaded gasoline be put on the market to permit the use of catalytic converters. These were essential to meeting the terms of the Clean Air Act of 1970; placed in a car’s exhaust system, the catalytic converter dramatically reduced air pollution, slashing nitrogen-oxide emissions by 98 percent, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. But there was a catch: Catalytic converters were incompatible with the use of leaded gasoline, because the lead contaminated the component’s catalyst. As a result, leaded gas had to go.
Lead was gradually phased out of the gasoline sold in the United States and finally banned outright in 1986. The European Union did the same, albeit more slowly; its ban became official in 2000, the same year that bans also took effect in India and China. Other nations followed suit, but even more slowly; as of March 2017, the UN Environment Programme reports that only three countries (Algeria, Yemen, and Iraq) still permit the sale of leaded gasoline.
The phaseout created an obvious problem for the makers of leaded gas: How could they keep the profits rolling in? GM, however, had seen that problem coming years earlier and had taken steps to protect its interests. Along with its partners, GM arranged to dump the Ethyl joint venture. Which is how the Gottwalds enter this tale.
In one of the strangest transactions in US corporate history, the Ethyl Corporation was unloaded in 1962 by its creators—GM and Standard Oil of New Jersey—onto the Albemarle Corporation. At the time, the Ethyl Corporation was 13 times larger than Albemarle; its purchase price of $200 million was 100 times greater than Albemarle’s annual profits. “It was like a Mom and Pop grocery buying the A&P [supermarket chain]!” Monroe Jackson Rathbone, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, exclaimed at the time. The deal was so unlikely that it made the front page of The New York Times, and was covered by The Wall Street Journal in an article headlined Jonah Swallows the Whale.
The inside story of this deal wasn’t revealed until Ethyl’s official history was published decades later—and even that history left out a key detail that the Gottwalds might not have known. At the time, Ethyl’s purchase ranked as the largest leveraged buyout that Wall Street had ever seen. And it took place only because of extraordinary backroom muscling on the part of Ethyl’s corporate founders. The company’s official history recounted that GM and Standard Oil of New Jersey applied intense pressure on Chase Bank and a handful of leading insurance companies to lend the Gottwalds the $200 million they needed to buy Ethyl. Rathbone acknowledged that his company and GM “really guaranteed the banks that they would not lose anything if loans were made to Albemarle for the purchase of Ethyl,” according to the official history.
Why did GM and its partners want to unload Ethyl so urgently, selling the joint venture for a fire-sale price? The answer may lie in something that the public didn’t know: GM was quietly working on a solution to curb automotive air pollution. But that discovery wasn’t announced until 1970—eight years after the sale of Ethyl—when GM president Ed Cole stunned the automotive world by announcing that the industry could meet the standards of the Clean Air Act by introducing catalytic converters. In short, GM had vociferously opposed tighter pollution standards throughout the 1960s—from the original Clean Air Act of 1963 through its 1970 amendment—even though it and others were actively working toward a new technology that would meet those standards. The question that GM has never been forced to answer is: Why did you fight emissions regulations—and during those years of secrecy, how many people were sickened or killed as a result of the delayed pollution standards? Contacted by The Nation, representatives of GM, DuPont, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and the Albemarle Corporation all declined to comment.
In any case, the subsequent phaseout of leaded gas became the Gottwalds’ problem—a risk they then blamed GM and the other sellers of Ethyl for failing to disclose. Yet the new owners of the Ethyl Corporation were a resourceful bunch with no apparent moral compass, and so they managed to turn this situation to their advantage. First, Ethyl tried to sell EDB as a fumigant, a quick-acting pesticide to spray on soil and post-harvest crops. EDB killed fungi, rodents, insects, and other vermin with aplomb, but shortly after its arrival on the market, its residues started turning up in breakfast cereals and cake mixes. By 1981, the EPA had concluded that EDB was a “potent mutagen, which should be removed from the food chain.” The EPA also linked EDB to damage to the liver, stomach, adrenal glands, and reproductive systems, especially the testes. And when burned, EDB creates methyl bromide, a major contributor to the hole in the earth’s ozone layer, which increases skin cancers and respiratory problems.
It took time and a few dead ends, but the Gottwalds eventually found a profitable solution: brominated fire retardants. Although these fire retardants had been in use since the 1950s, they didn’t become huge sellers until the 1970s. What changed?
As the 1970s unfolded, a purported epidemic of house fires began attracting attention in the United States. Fingers were pointed at the tobacco industry, which had been adding chemicals to cigarettes that caused them to stay lit for 10 minutes or more. People smoking in bed would nod off, and before they knew it the bedroom was in flames. Government regulators and legislators began calling on manufacturers to develop cigarettes less likely to start fires.
The tobacco industry wasted no time in deflecting suggestions that it come up with a safer cigarette. Instead, as the Chicago Tribune revealed in an award-winning investigation in 2012, Big Tobacco worked to shift the public focus from its product to the risk of household objects that might burn, including foam-filled, upholstered furniture.
Remarkably, the State of California seemed to agree. In 1975, a state agency enacted a regulation that proved to be a godsend for the manufacturers of flame retardants. Known as the California Furniture Flammability Standard Technical Bulletin 117, the rule mandated that all furniture offered for sale in the state pass an open-flame test: The foam inside upholstered products was required to withstand 12 seconds of exposure to an open candle flame.
The Ethyl Corporation rushed to satisfy the demand for flame retardants created by California’s regulation. The potential market was enormous, because other states and even foreign countries would go on to adopt California’s approach, much as they had a decade earlier with automobile seat belts and air-pollution standards. Flame retardants soon found their way into a dizzying array of household items: not just furniture but carpeting and flooring materials, bedding, baby products, computers, televisions, and other electronic equipment, as well as cars, boats, and aircraft. Like lead in gasoline, flame retardants became pervasive, spreading on a sea of clever marketing, strategic half-truths, and lies.
However well-intentioned, the far-reaching California regulation proved to be scientifically unfounded. When scientists with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission applied flame to two upholstered chairs—one with flame retardant in its foam, the other untreated—both chairs were consumed by fire in less than four minutes. “We did not find flame retardants in foam to provide any significant protection,” said Dale Ray, a commission official who oversaw the tests, in 2009.
But such studies only emerged decades after the California regulation took effect. Meanwhile, Albemarle and its fellow manufacturers joined with the tobacco industry to convince the public, the press, and government officials that flame retardants were the necessary cure for all things fire-related. This propaganda campaign was assisted by Burson-Marsteller, a public-relations giant that boasted a Hall of Shame client list: not only the tobacco barons, but also Union Carbide (after the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed 15,000 people); the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear-power-plant disaster; and the military junta that prosecuted Argentina’s “dirty war” in the late 1970s. As Burson-Marsteller founder Harold Burson said in 2008, “We are in the business of helping companies through difficult situations.”
Retained by the flame-retardant makers in 1997, Burson-Marsteller urged the creation of the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, a group less interested in science and the environment than in weakening the US ban on methyl bromide. Along with industry associations like the Methyl Bromide Working Group and the Methyl Bromide Global Coalition, the forum lobbied state and federal legislatures and fought the Montreal Protocol, the international community’s effort to repair the ozone layer.
“Burson-Marsteller has helped the bromine industry advocate on how flame retardants enable manufacturers to increase the ignition resistance of materials used in a wide range of applications including in the automotive sector,” a Burson-Marsteller representative told The Nation.
Peter Sparber, a former tobacco-industry executive, recruited the National Association of State Fire Marshals, the organization representing the top fire officials in all 50 states, to propose federal rules mandating flame retardants in furniture. Sparber attended meetings with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission on behalf of the marshals for years, sometimes offering the scientifically bogus claim that the foam inside furniture was “solid gasoline” that needed to be treated. Marshals claimed not to have known that Sparber was billing the industry-funded Tobacco Institute $200 an hour for his work with them.
Burson-Marsteller helped run the Alliance for Consumer Fire Safety in Europe, which is similarly bankrolled by flame-retardant manufacturers. The alliance’s front man was a British firefighter named Robert Graham, a high-strung individual whose tactics included setting furniture alight outside the European Parliament to make his point. An Alliance for Consumer Fire Safety website, now removed, solicited memberships with horror stories of combustible consumer products, including allowing viewers to watch sofas from a selection of countries being burned.
As with leaded gasoline, the manufacturers of flame retardants knew early on that their product wasn’t safe. In 1977, Arlene Blum and Bruce Ames, two chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, published a report in Science magazine whose damning subtitle plainly stated: “The main flame retardant in children’s pajamas is a mutagen and should not be used.” The authors explained that tris(2,3-dibromopropyl) phosphate, or Tris-BP, a frontline flame retardant of the day, was a likely carcinogen that caused sterility in animal tests. With a chemical composition alarmingly similar to EDB, the lead scavenger, Tris-BP was certain to pose disturbing health impacts.
Blum and Ames further observed that Tris-BP inevitably entered the ecosystem through wastewater from laundry. Six bedsheets treated with Tris-BP and washed in 30 gallons of water resulted in six parts per million of the poison in the wash water, when only 1 ppm was needed to kill goldfish. Like all flame retardants before and after, Tris-BP was seen to leach readily into the bodies of people wearing treated fabrics. “We found a child who’d never worn Tris-treated pajamas,” Blum recalled in an interview. “We had the child wear Tris-treated pajamas for one night, and we found Tris breakdown products in her urine” soon after. It was easily picked up, Blum added, and “screamingly mutagenic.”
Three months after the Blum and Ames paper was published, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned brominated Tris in children’s clothing. But in a response that set the stage for the next 40 years, flame-retardant manufacturers simply rolled out a related product: chlorinated Tris. No matter that chlorinated Tris was also a known carcinogen.
In another round of chemical whack-a-mole, when EDB was banned in 1984, the world’s bromine makers rallied around a substitute known as tetrabromobisphenol-A. TBBPA’s most widespread application has been as a fire retardant in electronic equipment, a market that expanded dramatically thanks to the growth of the Asian economies and the rapid obsolescence of electronic goods.
Today, TBBPA is the world’s most-produced brominated flame retardant, with millions of pounds sold each year. Like all flame retardants, TBBPA will escape in time from wherever it’s placed and enter the homes, offices, and bodies of people, as well as pets, livestock, wildlife, plants, streams, and rivers. Once in the human body, it can cause cancers, mutations, learning disabilities, behavioral issues, fertility issues, and reduced IQs. A 2014 study by the National Toxicology Program found that TBBPA caused cancers of the uterus in female rats and cancers of the liver in male mice.
None of this unsavory health news seemed to bother the Gottwalds; a resolute willingness to pollute has been central to Albemarle’s strategy from the beginning. So has the company’s management by family members—indeed, family control appears to be key to the Gottwalds’ financial success, shielding them from the opprobrium of outsiders who might recoil from the nasty end of the chemical business in which Albemarle has dwelled.
Forbes recently estimated the Gottwald family’s net worth at $3.1 billion, but their rise to fortune began humbly enough. In 1918, young Floyd D. Gottwald found work as a clerk at the Albemarle Paper Manufacturing Company, a small paper concern located in Richmond, Virginia. Floyd rose through the ranks, becoming president in 1941, before purchasing the business after the Second World War.
Gottwald served as the Ethyl Corporation’s CEO until 1968 and remained an active board member until his death in 1982. His son, Floyd Jr., ran Ethyl after 1968, frequently swapping titles—CEO, chairman, president—with relatives as Ethyl’s holdings grew and were reorganized. Floyd Jr.’s brother, Bruce, has also served as CEO. Today, Bruce’s personal wealth is estimated at $580 million. Floyd Jr. isn’t far off.
The Gottwalds are regular donors to the state and national Republican Party. The Gottwalds have collectively gifted more than $1 million to GOP causes over the last 10 years, including to a fund-raising committee for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. All of this may help explain why, in March 2017, Trump’s EPA declined to conduct further testing on TBBPA.
Questions for the Gottwalds went unanswered by the Albemarle Corporation’s press office.
Over time, as one scientific study after another found that flame-retardant chemicals were carcinogenic and mutagenic, California came to see the error of its ways, and state officials sought to limit their use. Between 2007 and 2012, four bills were introduced in the California Legislature to update TB 117, the regulation that had given rise to the proliferation of flame retardants.
All four bills failed, thanks in part to the muscle of the chemical industry, which spent at least $23 million on lobbying and campaign donations aimed at resisting tighter regulation. Joining the industry were deceptive front groups like Citizens for Fire Safety, which was exposed in the 2012 investigation by the Chicago Tribune. Founded by Albermarle and other flame-retardant manufacturers, the group described itself as “a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, fire departments and industry leaders, united to ensure that our country is protected by the highest standards of fire safety.” But the group’s only funding came from three different chemical companies.
To defeat the California bills, Citizens for Fire Safety spent tens of millions of dollars on a variety of underhanded tactics. For example, the group paid a retired burn surgeon who falsely testified about burn victims and misled lawmakers about the effectiveness of flame retardants. (He later surrendered his license to practice medicine.) The group also falsely claimed to work with a federal agency, an international firefighters’ association, and the American Burn Association, all of which denied any connection with Citizens for Fire Safety when contacted. And seeking that last refuge of contemporary scoundrels, the group rolled out a phony social-justice argument, maintaining that poor children would experience the most harm if flame retardants were removed from household items. The group summoned witnesses to repeat this bogus assertion at hearings, including a 10-year-old boy who told California legislators, “I just want you to imagine a child crying for help in a burning building, dying, when there was a person who only had to vote to save their life.”
The Chicago Tribune’s exposé of the industry’s skullduggery had an impact, however. Shortly after its publication, Albermarle and other flame-retardant manufacturers announced that they would defund Citizens for Fire Safety. The lobbying on the industry’s behalf would be now undertaken by the American Chemistry Council’s newly formed North American Flame Retardant Alliance. Just as it had retooled banned products with new names and slightly different chemical profiles, the flame-retardant industry slapped a fresh coat of paint on its lobbying efforts and got back to work resisting regulation.
Nevertheless, California lawmakers voted in 2013 to amend TB 117 in a subtle but important way: Now the materials covering the furniture, rather than the underlying foam, needed to deter fire. To the industry’s chagrin, this new standard could be met with smolder-resistant materials—leather, wool, or synthetic weaves—rather than with flame retardants. And in 2015, a new labeling law took effect in California, requiring that furniture that contained flame retardants be identified as such.
Alas, none of these changes spelled an end to their use. As other states began taking note of the hazards posed by flame retardants, the American Chemistry Council stepped in again, taking the fight to state legislatures. In its 2010 tax returns, the council told the IRS that it had “helped defeat, amend or postpone the passage of more than 300 flawed bills dealing with chemicals and plastics in 44 states,” many of which concerned flame retardants.
Despite the industry’s best efforts, 16 states were actively considering legislation to ban certain flame retardants as of March of this year, according to the Pew Charitable Trust. Often, the states have been motivated by a lack of regulation at the federal level. A shocking fact: The EPA maintains a database of some 85,000 chemicals that have been manufactured or processed in the United States, but it has subjected less than 300 of these to rigorous testing under the Toxic Substances Control Act and has banned only five (including PCBs.) Crucially, some of the pending state legislation would prohibit manufacturers from substituting other hazardous chemicals in place of the flame retardants that the legislation restricts. Provisions like this, which strike at the heart of the industry’s modus operandi—“You don’t like that flame retardant? Try this one!”—are particularly reviled by these companies.
Indeed, it may have been the fear of aggressive state regulation that led the chemical industry to endorse a major overhaul in the federal regulation of chemicals that was passed by Congress in 2016. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety in the 21st Century Act is generally considered a compromise between the industry and the environmental and public-health communities. The latter liked the fact that, for the first time, the law gave the EPA the right to regulate chemicals based on their health effects alone, without reference to economic costs and benefits. (A previous EPA ban on asbestos had been thrown out by a court and watered down on the grounds that it failed to weigh the ban’s cost to industry.) Health and environmental advocates also liked that the act mandated a safety review of many previously untested chemicals and expanded the EPA’s ability to require testing of new and existing ones.
Despite this, the American Chemistry Council lobbied strenuously on behalf of the bill, presumably because it limits the ability of states to pass their own laws regulating chemicals. If the EPA rules that a chemical is safe, that decision preempts a state’s ability to say otherwise. Even if a state compiled clear evidence that a given chemical was poisoning its residents or waterways, it would have to wait for the EPA or Congress to take action. History teaches that the odds of such a federal interruption of the chemical industry’s business practices are slim. The moral: In a post–Citizens Unitedenvironment, where corporations and the wealthy can flood electoral campaigns with unlimited amounts of untraceable money, it is easier to buy Congress than to buy 50 statehouses.
Flame retardants are more prevalent in 2018 than they’ve ever been, as the industry continues to promote the venerable falsehood that all of its products are safe and effective. On its website, the American Chemistry Council boasts that the EPA has identified more than four dozen safe flame retardants, but it fails to note that many of those now in widespread use are not featured on that EPA list. Old fear tactics continue to proliferate as well. “Every 23 seconds, a fire department responds to a fire in the U.S.,” the council has warned ominously. This fact cynically elides the actual effectiveness of flame retardants. Indeed, most of the fires that a department responds to are, by definition, ones in which a flame retardant has failed to prevent the fire.RELATED ARTICLETHE SECRET HISTORY OF LEAD
Jamie Lincoln Kitman
In “The Facts Behind Misconceptions of Brominated Flame Retardants,” the industry revs up its fog machine one more time. This slippery document, featured on the website of the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, decorously concedes that not all flame retardants have been good for people, but then assures readers that “one flame retardant does not represent the entire family…. It is very difficult to attribute properties or findings from one small group or sub-group of substances to an entire family of chemical substances.”
As the industry supposedly continues its search for new and safer materials, it has refined its bait-and-switch scam, even pretending to embrace environmental consciousness by recasting out-of-favor products with green-sounding names. Thus, in 2016, Albemarle retired its HBCD flame retardant in favor of an allegedly more sustainable product with the moniker GreenCrest, while Afton Chemical, another Gottwald-headed/controlled company, calls one of its gasoline additives “Greenburn.”
Albemarle is also stepping up its export efforts. As the company enthused in a quarterly report last year, “[W]e continue to believe that improving global standards of living, widespread digitization, increasing demand for data management capacity and the potential for increasingly stringent fire safety regulations in developing markets are likely to drive continued demand for fire safety products.” The global demand for flame retardants has skyrocketed—from 526 million pounds in 1983 to 3.4 billion pounds in 2009—with the demand projected to top 7 billion pounds by 2022. Market analysts have predicted that global sales, around $6 billion in 2015, could reach $10 billion per year by 2020.
With products like the appealingly named GreenCrest and Saytex coming to market, the manufacturers of flame retardants continue to march ahead, spreading disease and death with every step. Consider it a gift from the Gottwald family to you. All of you.
https://www.thenation.com/article/worse-than-lead/

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American Water Demonstrates Strong Leadership on Lead Service Line Replacement

Aug 14, 2018 | Environmental Defense Fund

By Tom Neltner

In a landmark decision on July 25, 2018, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) approved American Water’s plan to fully replace the lead service lines (LSLs) in the communities served by its Indiana subsidiary over the next 10 to 24 years. This represents the replacement of more than 50,000 LSLs across 27 community water systems (CWSs). As we highlighted in our blog on the company’s January 2018 proposal, the plan provides a framework that enables the cost of fully replacing LSLs, whether owned by the utility or by customers, to be shared by its 300,000 customers. As far as we know, this is the first comprehensive, voluntary LSL replacement program developed by an investor-owned utility in the country.
In its plan, American Water cited both long-term health and economic benefits that would be realized from avoiding partial replacements when rehabilitating water mains and laterals. The plan showed that having a single contractor handle the entire line reduces the overall cost by 30 to 50%. It also avoids the likely increased risk of consumer’s exposure to lead when only part of the lead pipe is replaced.
IURC’s approval found the plan “to be reasonable and in the public interest.” Even though the customer will continue to own the service line, American Water will be allowed to add the cost to remove and replace the customer-owned portion to the value of the utility’s property. The increase would be considered an infrastructure improvement cost once the new service line is placed into service.
The state’s consumer advocate, the Office of Utility Consumer Counselor (OUCC), supported the plan’s objective but sought changes. American Water accepted some of the ideas but had concerns with others. The key issues were:
·        Setting priorities: American Water proposed setting priorities primarily based on avoiding partial LSL replacements when it rehabilitated mains and laterals. The OUCC wanted the utility to set priorities that explicitly consider lead test results and areas with many LSLs. While the utility was willing to adjust its model, the IURC ruled the failure of mains were a greater threat and should remain a priority.
·        Inactive services: American Water proposed only replacing LSLs where the service had been active in the past 24 months. The OUCC was concerned that the limit was unnecessary and could exacerbate urban blight. The utility did not object, and the IURC decided to require replacement of inactive services.
·        Efficacy testing: The OUCC wanted American Water to take before and after samples for some of the participating residences. The utility already planned to take an immediate post-replacement sample and offer customers an opportunity to collect a second sample with 72 hours after the first one. It objected to additional initial testing, preferring to participate in a study by the Water Research Foundation. The IURC decided that the study was sufficient as long as the utility shared results when it was final.
·        Annual reporting and 5-year reauthorization: The OUCC wanted American Water to submit an annual status report and obtain IURC reauthorization every 5 years. The utility wanted to use existing mechanisms to provide updates and consider adjustments. The IURC agreed with the utility.
The next step is for the utility to propose a specific rate increase (known as a tariff) to raise funds to implement the plan. That proposal will address the total cost, estimated range of annual costs, and overall timeframe for the project.
American Water’s plan for Indiana builds on similar but less comprehensive proposals in other states. These proposals are focused on avoiding partial LSL replacement when the utility is rehabilitating water mains. One has been approved, and the other is set for a final decision:
·        The Missouri’s Public Service Commission approved a proposal affecting some of the utility’s 30,000 LSLs on May 2, 2018.
·        The Pennsylvania Utility Commission is considering a proposal affecting some of the utility’s 18,000 LSLs. The state’s Office of Consumer Advocate (OCA) supported the proposal with conditions. A hearing officer recommended approval with changes to address OCA’s concerns. The next step is a final decision by the Commission.

With between 206,000 and 599,000 LSLs total in the state of Indiana, American Water’s actions will benefit its Hoosier customers and provide an approach that other states should consider. As the largest, investor-owned drinking water utility in the country, with 17 million customers, we applaud the company’s leadership.

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Hopkins Affiliate Can’t Shake Sibling’s Paint Study Claim

Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Peter Hayes

Johns Hopkins affiliate Kennedy Krieger Institute can’t shake claims that it exposed a child to lead paint while she was living in a home that was the subject of a lead paint study, Maryland’s high court ruled.
Such medical research institutes may owe a duty of care to a child who is not a study participant but resides in a property that was subject to the research, the Court of Appeals of Maryland said.
The ruling means that Maryland research facilities will face a potentially wider pool of plaintiffs when conducting such studies.
Johns Hopkins has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Bloomberg.
The plaintiff, Ashley Partlow, is the sister of a study participant and Kennedy Krieger knew she lived in the residence at the time of the study, the court said.
The case stems from a study conducted from 1993-99 to investigate the effectiveness of lead paint abatement measures.
Partlow alleged that lead poisoning caused her severe and permanent brain damage, and that her IQ has been significantly diminished.
Kennedy Krieger owes Partlow a duty of care because it knew Partlow lived in the home; her mother signed a consent agreement; the institute knew lead was present, and determined the level of lead-based paint abatement for the property; and Partlow was injured, the court said.
The court also found a special relationship exists between Partlow and Kennedy Krieger, creating another ground on which a jury could find a duty.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Joseph M. Getty said the ruling has the potential to create a duty to “indeterminate classes of people.”
Judge Shirley M. Watts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judges Clayton Greene, Sally D. Adkins and Michele D. Hotten.
Judges Mary Ellen Barbera and Robert N. McDonald joined in the dissent.
Brown & Barron, LLC represented Partlow. Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP represented Kennedy Krieger.
The case is Kennedy Krieger Inst., Inc. v. Partlow, Md., No. 82, 2017, 8/13/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/hopkins-affiliate-cant-shake-siblings-paint-study-claim

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Monsanto Verdict Could Trigger Landslide of Litigation Over Roundup

Aug 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Emily C. Dooley

Last week’s huge jury award against Monsanto Co. over its popular weed killers Roundup and Ranger Pro could boost litigation from others claiming their use of the products harmed them.
On the first business day after a California jury awarded $289 million in damages to a man who claimed his use of a Monsanto weed killer led to his blood cancer, the firm that helped argue the case received more than 200 calls from people interested in joining future suits.
Those potential cases are in addition to roughly 5,000 already filed across the nation, from Delaware to California and in between at Monsanto’s headquarters city of St. Louis, said R. Brent Wisner, one of the co-litigators arguing on behalf of Dewayne Lee Johnson, a former school groundskeeper whose non-Hodgkin lymphoma is terminal.
Pressing On
“I think this case is really important,” Wisner, a partner at Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, PC in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg Environment Aug. 13. “It sends a clear message to Monsanto, to Bayer and to all the other plaintiffs who are waiting for their day in court. We can press these cases in court and can win.”
Monsanto maintains its product doesn’t cause cancer and says it plans to appeal the jury’s verdict.
“Glyphosate does not cause cancer,” Scott Partridge, a vice president at Monsanto, said in a statement posted on the company’s website. “The jury got it wrong. We will appeal the jury’s opinion and continue to vigorously defend glyphosate, which is an essential tool for farmers and others.”
The award included $250 million for punitive damages against Monsanto, which was bought by German company Bayer AG in June for $66 billion and saw its stock value drop around 10 percent Aug, 13, the first day of trading after the verdict.
That nine-figure punishment could be considered a “message to Monsanto that in the jury’s judgment they have acted perhaps intentionally or recklessly toward this plaintiff or the people who were exposed to it,” said Carl Cranor, a professor at University of California, Riverside and author of several books on toxic tort laws, cases, and outcomes.
Escalating Attention
The verdict will likely escalate the attention.
“I’m sure now people that have non-Hodgkin lymphoma will look back and say ‘My god, I used Roundup,” said Kathryn M. Forgie, a partner with Andrus Wagstaff in Oakland, Calif., whose firm has state and federal cases against Monsanto.
Johnson’s attorneys argued that his use of Ranger Pro caused his cancer and the active ingredient, glyphosate, was a key factor. They said Monsanto knew of the risk and should have provided adequate warnings.
Key to the win was the experts that were allowed to testify on causation. State and federal rulings in California allowed the testimony as to what caused Johnson’s cancer and there is no reason to think that won’t continue, said W. Clay Massey, a partner at Alston & Bird in Atlanta who primarily represents defendants in toxic tort cases but has not been involved with Monsanto trials.
“All of those cases now have a path forward,” Massey told Bloomberg Environment Aug. 14. “They need to get that issue to an appellate court.”
150 Cases
At least 150 cases are in San Francisco Superior Court where the Johnson trial was held.
“I think Monsanto is just going to have to continue to fight this and litigate and try to get some good verdicts,” Massey said. “They really have to change the momentum.”
Future cases will entail the same arguments and experts, with some adjustments for specific plaintiffs, said Wisner and Timothy Litzenburg, a Virginia-based attorney with the Miller Firm who also represented Johnson.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Litzenburg told Bloomberg Environment Aug. 13.
40 Years of Safe Use
Much of the testimony focused on a 2015 report from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that said glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide, was a probable carcinogen. Monsanto’s attorneys disputed that study and said the product has been regulated for 40 years and is not listed as a carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The jury’s opinion does not change the science,” Monsanto’s Partridge said. “Glyphosate has a more than 40-year history of safe use.”
Current cases involve people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, though scientific literature has indicated other diseases could be linked, Forgie told Bloomberg Environment.
“When you’re going to take on a giant like Monsanto you want to start with something you know you can prove,” she said. “You want to make a clear, precise, surgical cut.”
Another 500 federal cases are combined in what is known as a multi-district litigation in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In those instances, one judge handles pretrial matters and discovery for similar cases. If the individual cases aren’t settled or dismissed they go back to the jurisdiction where they originated.
Forgie, Wisner and Lizenburg’s firms are all involved with overseeing the multi-district litigation cases.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/monsanto-verdict-could-trigger-landslide-of-litigation-over-roundup

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Monsanto Roundup Appeal Has Uphill Climb on 'Junk Science' Grounds: Legal Experts

Aug 14, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)

By Tina Bellon

Bayer AG unit Monsanto faces long odds on an appeal blaming an "inflamed" jury and "junk science" for a verdict of $289 million in damages to a man who said the company's Roundup weed killer caused his cancer, according to some legal experts.
Last week's verdict ended the first trial over whether glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer. Monsanto, which says decades of scientific studies have shown Roundup and glyphosate are safe, is facing about 5,000 similar lawsuits nationwide.
Bayer stock fell sharply on Monday following Friday's verdict in San Francisco Superior Court.
Monsanto said on Monday it planned to challenge the verdict on the grounds that the judge should have barred scientific evidence presented by California school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson's lawyers as insufficient.
"Plaintiffs are putting forward junk science that is not based upon the 40 years of safe glyphosate use and studies," Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy, told Reuters. "They attempted to color science with very emotional arguments designed to inflame jurors."
The company also said statements by Johnson's lawyers, designed to paint the company in a malevolent light, inappropriately influenced the jurors.
Monsanto could have difficulty getting the verdict thrown out on those grounds, according to some legal experts who said the judge carefully considered whether to allow Johnson's scientific evidence under California law and reached a defensible conclusion that the jury should hear it.
"This is one of those difficult questions at the margins of science and the judge found the evidence simply wasn't inadmissible," said Lars Noah, a law professor at the University of Florida.
Johnson, 46, said in his lawsuit filed in 2016 that frequent use of Roundup caused him to develop lymphatic cancer.
Expert testimony is highly influential in product liability cases, and evidentiary standards exist to prevent juries from making decisions based on theories unsupported by science.EDITORS’ PICKSFrom a Space Station in Argentina, China Expands Its Reach in Latin AmericaGeorge Soros Bet Big on Liberal Democracy. Now He Fears He Is Losing.OpinionMake Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found the chemical not likely carcinogenic to humans. However, the cancer unit of the World Health Organization in 2015 classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
Monsanto said the plaintiff's experts should have been excluded because although they mainly cited respected, peer-reviewed studies, they inappropriately cherry-picked results and used unreliable methods to support the position that glysophate causes cancer in humans.
But Alexandra Lahav, a law professor at the University of Connecticut, said it was common for experts to rely on the same studies and reach different conclusions to present to a jury during trial.
Legal experts said a federal judge overseeing other Roundup cases has allowed the same experts to go forward with testimony, even though the standard in federal courts is generally thought to be higher than in state courts.
The evidence rulings might draw the attention of higher courts, both in California and the U.S. Supreme Court, to use the Roundup cases as a way to clarify expert admissibility standards, other legal experts said.
A major question for appellate courts could be whether it is enough for an expert to simply analyze widely accepted peer-reviewed studies to support his own opinion, or whether the expert's analysis must also be reviewed or otherwise subject to stronger scrutiny, said two California-based defense lawyers, who requested anonymity citing potential conflicts of interest.
Monsanto also took issue with statements by Johnson's lawyer, Brent Wisner, and some expert witnesses comparing Roundup to tobacco. Wisner told jurors the company would "pop champagne corks" if the verdict was too low.
He also said in court that a Monsanto unit made so-called Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide mixture used by the U.S. military 50 years ago in the Vietnam War. The harmful impact included cancers and birth defects.
Wisner on Monday rejected Monsanto's claims that the jury made its decision on emotional grounds.
"This was a considerate, thoughtful and well-educated jury that looked at the science to conclude glyphosate causes cancer," Wisner said.
Monsanto's arguments that remarks by witnesses and lawyers inflamed and prejudiced the jury would likely fall flat, some legal experts said.
David Rosenberg, a professor at Harvard Law School, said editorializing by lawyers in a courtroom needed to be truly egregious for a judge to even consider throwing out a verdict.
"Such remarks are part of the game during trials and I can't see a single reason why Monsanto would think an appeal would be helpful on those grounds," Rosenberg said.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/08/14/business/14reuters-monsanto-cancer-lawsuit-analysis.html

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Energy News

Saudi Aramco Approves SATORP, Motiva Chemicals Expansion Plans

Aug 15, 2018 | Platts

By Adal Mirza

State energy giant Saudi Aramco has approved two major plans to expand its chemicals production inside the kingdom and in the US, the company said Wednesday.
Its board of directors signed off on the expansion project at its joint venture refinery and petrochemicals complex with Total, as well as funding for its front-end engineering and design on Sunday, Aramco said in its weekly in-house magazine, the Arabian Sun.
After years of talks between the partners, Aramco and Total announced plans in April to build a new petrochemicals facility next to the 400,000 b/d SATORP complex at Jubail, on the kingdom's Persian Gulf coast.
The new $5 billion complex, which will be integrated into the SATORP refinery, started operations in 2015. It will include a mixed-feed cracker, processing 50% ethane and refinery off-gas, to produce as much as 1.5 million mt/year of ethylene. No details have been given on the planned start-up date yet.
The board also approved a funding request for chemicals capacity expansion at Aramco's US subsidiary Motiva Enterprises, the company said.
Motiva signed two agreements in April with Honeywell UOP and TechnipFMC, to evaluate proprietary technology for a mixed-feed cracker, as well as benzene and paraxylene production. These will be part of a potential new complex at the 603,000 b/d Port Arthur refinery in Texas.
Aramco plans to raise its global refining capacity to between 8 million b/d and 10 million b/d, from 5.4 million b/d currently.
Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih, who also sits on Aramco's board, said last May the company planned to invest $20 billion over the next five years in its US refining brand, to take advantage of the US' feedstock crude and gas for petrochemical production.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/petrochemicals/081518-saudi-aramco-approves-satorp-motiva-chemicals-expansion-plans

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Rising U.S. Gas Exports Squeeze a Main Competitor

Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Energywire

By Nathanial Gronewold

Australia is set to become the world's largest source of liquefied natural gas capacity, but its export growth spurt is slowing, and perhaps peaking, as the United States takes over as the world's largest source of new LNG supply growth.
There's one more LNG export platform set to launch probably this year in Australia from its northern shores, and there's speculation of more to come from the west as companies push investments there.
But Australia's main population areas in the south and east have soured badly on the LNG export industry after domestic gas prices rose sharply as a result, leading some utilities to warn of potential blackouts when gas exports cut deeply into domestic needs last year. A compromise sees Australia's oil and gas industry restraining its LNG exporting ambitions until domestic supplies can be secured.
By the end of 2019, Australia will have the capacity to produce some 85 million metric tons per annum (mtpa) of LNG, exceeding Qatar's LNG production and export capacity, say analysts at the National Australia Bank. "However, we do not expect actual exports will reach this level as some of the Queensland LNG terminals will be forced to run well below capacity," NAB said in a research note.
The gas supply and power crisis has been adverted for this year, but analysts say prices will remain high for the indefinite future now that Australia's gas market is inextricably linked to the rest of the world. A new pipeline from the Northern Territory and LNG imports into the southeast demand centers may help ease supply concerns, but not prices, say analysts at Macquarie Research.
Some new LNG shipping capacity could be built, but much of that LNG could end up destined for Australia itself as market watchers say the odds are increasing that one or several import terminals will be built in the country's east. And LNG imports would cut into Australia's net export status. Meanwhile, few observers see another major wave of LNG export platforms coming for Australia, even as five more projects should enter into service in the United States within the next five to seven years.
The Australian government is imposing LNG export restrictions in a bid to keep domestic power producers adequately supplied with gas. The scheme is called the Australia Domestic Gas Security Mechanism (ADGSM).
The LNG export restrictions under the ADGSM "only apply to East Coast LNG exporters," Macquarie analyst Andrew Hodge clarified. "And currently they have made an agreement with the government that should mean no LNG export restrictions in 2018 or 2019." 2020 and beyond is another story.
So for now, the ADGSM means no new export capacity is anticipated for eastern Australia. Macquarie believes it's more likely for an import facility to be built there, or even "multiple import terminals on Australia's east coast," it said in a recent note to investors. But this won't help Australia's gas costs to come down, it added.
Analysts at NAB say that if any gas price relief is to come for Australia, it will arrive thanks to rising U.S. LNG exports.
"One saving grace for prices may well be the speed with which the U.S. is gearing up for LNG export amid a domestic gas glut," researchers there said. "If East Asian prices move away from oil and towards Henry Hub, there may be downward pressure on Australian export prices."
The next big LNG effort from Australia is Ichthys, a mixed project spearheaded by Japan's INPEX Corp. that will produce natural gas and other petroleum products from fields in western Australia, shipping the gas as LNG from a port near Darwin in the Northern Territory.
Carlo Niederberger, public relations coordinator at INPEX, said LNG is expected to begin shipping from the Ichthys project by the end of this year. Beyond that, the company is staying mum on just how much LNG may be shipped at start-up, or whether future expansion may be in order.
"We are not providing further details on the exact timing of the initial shipment of each," said Niederberger. "We're also not providing the exact quantity of shipments for this initial phase."
General planning sees Ichthys' LNG capacity ramping up to 8.9 million mtpa over a two- or three-year period after initial launch, he said. Niederberger says the company doesn't think Australia's concerns over domestic gas supplies will involve INPEX's project. "Our understanding is that the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism is a temporary measure designed to offset gas supply shortages in the eastern part of Australia," he said. "All things considered, we believe the Ichthys Project will not be impacted in any way."
Prelude, a floating LNG (FLNG) project, is under construction for western Australia and is expected to be online by the end of 2019. But once those two projects are shipping LNG to East Asia customers, that may be it for a while as far as new Australia LNG export investments are concerned.
"At the moment we don't see any new Australian projects that are likely to go ahead, but lately there has also been some discussions between the different producers in the West Coast to build a joint plant which would make a new project more feasible," Carlos Torres-Diaz at Rystad Energy AS said in an email.
Hodge, however, holds out more hope for further LNG export growth in Australia post-2019, pointing to two proposals that have yet to reach final investment decisions (FID), which could see companies breaking ground on new construction.
"ConocoPhillips is preparing to FID the Caldita-Barossa project in 2019," he pointed out. "Woodside/BHP are proposing to FID the Scarborough project in early 2020, which would add new capacity."
Woodside Petroleum Ltd. recently commenced production at a second LNG train at the Wheatstone project north of Perth. It is also mulling an expansion of the Pluto LNG project, executives told investors in the company's most recent quarterly update. Scarborough is still up for consideration, they confirmed, though it may not become reality until 2024 should a positive FID be issued.
While the Australian LNG push slows, at least five new U.S. LNG export platforms will be commencing shipments before then. Those include the projects Corpus Christi, Freeport, Cameron, Elba Island and now Driftwood, according to an announcement made last week. Sabine Pass and Cove Point are already exporting LNG and are expanding their liquefaction and export capacity.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/15/stories/1060094123

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Cheniere Makes Feedgas Request for Corpus Christi LNG Export Facility

Aug 15, 2018 | Platts

By Harry Weber and Ross Wyeno

Cheniere Energy wants to introduce feedgas to the first liquefaction unit at its LNG export facility in Texas as it prepares to begin production before the end of the year.
The Houston-based company has been moving quickly to ramp up its operations amid strong demand and netbacks in Asia and as other US competitors are expected to start their terminals in the months ahead.
Cheniere's late-Monday filing with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requests permission to be granted by Thursday to introduce feedgas to Train 1. It said Cheniere is ready to begin commissioning of the dry flare. Once in operation, Corpus Christi will be the company's second LNG export terminal. Its first, at Sabine Pass in Louisiana, began shipping cargoes in February 2016.
With Cheniere and Dominion Energy already producing, US LNG exports are forecast by S&P Global Platts Analytics to surpass 4 Bcf/d this year. With Corpus Christi nearing startup and facilities under construction by several other developers, that total is projected to reach 8 Bcf/d by the end of 2019, Platts Analytics data shows.
Delays at Freeport LNG and Cameron LNG mean the bulk of the new capacity is expected to come online in the second half of next year. Kinder Morgan expects initial in-service at its export terminal at Elba Island near Savannah, Georgia, in the fourth quarter, with final units slated to come online by the third quarter of 2019. One wildcard for the market is what happens with the next crop of US LNG export hopefuls that are part of the so-called second wave of developers. More than a dozen projects are being proposed as part of that group, with startups expected in the early- to mid-2020s. Many have struggled to reach long-term contracts with buyers of their capacity to finance construction.
The escalation of international trade disputes is another wildcard. China said August 3 it may impose 25% tariffs on American cargoes of LNG if President Donald Trump follows through on his threat to expand tariffs on US imports of Chinese goods beyond duties he has already imposed.
LNG tariffs could have considerable short-term and long-term implications for both countries, and for the broader market. China is forecast in the years ahead to overtake Japan as the world's biggest LNG importer.GROWTH GOALS
Amid both tailwinds and headwinds, Cheniere is chugging along, with an eye toward growth.
Construction is ahead of schedule at Corpus Christi, where a second train is being built and a third train is planned. Cheniere also plans to add midscale liquefaction units at Corpus Christi and is working to commercialize a sixth liquefaction train at Sabine Pass. Four trains are currently operating at Sabine Pass and a fifth one, like Train 1 at Corpus Christi, is expected to begin producing LNG before the end of the year.
Cheniere's Midcontinent Supply Header Interstate Pipeline project, which would boost takeaway capacity from Oklahoma's Anadarko Basin to support growing Gulf Coast demand for LNG exports, received its FERC permit certificate earlier this week. The pipeline has shipper agreements with Devon Energy, Marathon Oil, Gulfport Energy and Cheniere's Corpus Christi export facility.
Cheniere, which procured steel for the pipeline from a Canadian supplier, is awaiting word on whether it will be granted exemptions from the Trump administration's move to impose a 25% tariff on imports of steel.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/081418-cheniere-makes-feedgas-request-for-corpus-christi-lng-export-facility

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Blocked Gas Project Asks FERC to Reconsider

Aug 14, 2018 | E&E News PM

By Ellen M. Gilmer

Developers are pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reconsider a sweeping stop-work order that halts construction of the Mountain Valley pipeline.
In a letter today, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC lawyers urged FERC to narrow its recent order and allow work to continue on parts of the natural gas project, which stretches 303 miles from West Virginia to Virginia.
FERC halted construction earlier this month after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated two federal approvals from the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service allowing the project to cross the Jefferson National Forest in southern Virginia (Energywire, Aug. 6).
The commission halted work not only within the national forest but along the length of the pipeline, reasoning that BLM and the Forest Service could end up denying permission for the forest crossing, requiring the rest of the route to change.
"The work stoppage has already had substantial detrimental effects on the environment, landowners, project workers and the public," pipeline backers told FERC this afternoon. "Continuing the work stoppage would further exacerbate these detrimental effects."
The letter argued that although the company has implemented measures to secure the pipeline construction sites, its measures aren't intended for long-term use, and the work stoppage could eventually cause "serious unintended consequences," including erosion and sedimentation problems.
The pipeline is backed by EQT Midstream Partners LP, NextEra Energy Inc. and a number of smaller partners.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/08/14/stories/1060094107

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Proposal Draws Growing Opposition in Calif.

Aug 14, 2018 | E&E News PM

By Rob Hotakainen

Californians are sending a loud message to President Trump: Keep the oil rigs away from us.
So far, 65 cities and counties have acted to oppose the administration's proposal to allow more lease sales in nearly all federally controlled waters, Oceana announced today.
Fifty-four of the cities and counties have passed resolutions against more drilling, while 11 others have sent formal letters of opposition to federal officials, said Oceana, an environmental group and one of the leading opponents.
Altogether, the 65 jurisdictions represent 21.3 million Californians, or more than half the state's population.
"This united front sends a clear message to Washington, D.C., that our coast is not for sale," said Ashley Blacow, the Pacific policy and communications manager for Oceana.
The opposition has also gained traction in Sacramento, where state lawmakers have introduced bills in both the House and Senate that would prevent oil from new leases being transferred through the state.
Blacow said the fate of the Senate bill could be decided tomorrow.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/08/14/stories/1060094103

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Oil Companies Ask Florida Lawmakers to Unlock Offshore Drilling

Aug 15, 2018 | PoliticoPro

By Ben Lefebvre

Oil and gas companies are aggressively lobbying Florida lawmakers to agree to allow offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico — seeking to break decades of bipartisan opposition in a state that has long viewed oil spills as an existential threat to its tourist economy.
The effort, which would potentially bring oil rigs as close as 75 miles to Florida beaches, comes just seven months after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke promised that the state was “off the table” for offshore drilling. And it could complicate Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, whose opposition to drilling off the coast has been a main theme of his decades in Congress.
But the expansion would aid President Donald Trump's effort to increase U.S. oil and gas production, in what he calls a bid for American “energy dominance."
Gaining access to the millions of barrels of oil and natural gas off Florida’s west coast is a top priority for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and other companies.
Energy lobbyists and trade associations believe Zinke left some wiggle room in his comments, and they are trying to persuade Florida lawmakers to sign on to possible compromises, including allowing drill rigs to operate up to 75 miles off the state's Gulf coast, lawmakers and industry sources said. That would be down from more than 200 miles under an existing drilling moratorium.
Zinke’s tweet exempting Florida — which critics charge was simply a political giftfor Scott’s Senate campaign — and his subsequent statement that he was “removing Florida from consideration for any new oil and gas platforms” shouldn’t be read as official Interior policy, said Randall Luthi, president of the trade group National Offshore Industry Association, which is pressing for access to the waters.
“Secretarial tweets and statements to Congress are outside the administrative process, but certainly are indicators of where the Secretary and evidently the White House might end up,” Luthi said in a statement to POLITICO. “The Eastern Gulf of Mexico is ripe for some kind of a reasonable compromise.”
The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006 put a moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the eastern Gulf until June 2022. Department of Defense offshore training zones put another large part of those waters out of contention for drilling.
Interior’s first draft plan included opening up every acre of federal water to oil and gas companies, however. Zinke has implied in later conversations with coastal state governors, senators and trade associations that the final plan wouldn’t necessarily include drilling off the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maine, but his plan to announce a final decision this fall could delay unpopular decisions — including possibly opening up the waters off southern California and the Mid-Atlantic region — until after the midterm elections, sources said.
The most aggressive plan industry lobbyists have brought to lawmakers calls for allowing drilling platforms within 75 miles of Florida's Gulf coast, an idea that Interior itself floated in its draft plan. Buffer zones going out as far as 125 miles have also been discussed, sources said. Either could technically adhere to Zinke’s promise not to open Florida's waters, since the state's jurisdiction only extends nine nautical miles from the shoreline. Interior proposed the use of so-called exclusion zones for the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast in its draft plan.
One lobbyist working the issue told POLITICO that Zinke and Scott were careful to "not say the entire Eastern Gulf," was off the table during their press conference at the Tallahassee airport in January.
"There are some Republicans who are prepared to make a deal. Seventy-five miles is the expected buffer, but folks might be willing to throw it a little further," said the lobbyist, speaking anonymously to frankly discuss ongoing negotiations.
That reduced buffer zone would please the oil industry because most of the oil and gas reserves in the eastern Gulf are believed to be in the waters south of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, said a person at one oil and gas company who was not authorized to discuss the draft plan.
“I think we could live with 75 miles,” the person said. “I think that wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
The idea so far has failed to gain much traction with at least two Florida Republicans who said they have been inundated with industry requests to open the area to drilling.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said he opposes the idea on national security grounds, given that the Defense Department uses a large part of the eastern Gulf for training exercises.
“It seems every week the oil and gas industry is working to obtain permission to crack the Destin Dome,” Gaetz said in an interview with POLITICO, referring to one offshore site believed to hold large amounts of natural gas. “That would be devastating to our national security. I don’t have a nuanced view on this. I am opposed.”
Gaetz said he has raised his concerns on several occasions with Zinke, who he said has not pushed for a specific policy but has espoused an expansion of oil and gas drilling in general.
“I’ve had meetings with the secretary on this,” Gaetz said. “I’ve had spirited conversations with him. I would not say he was wedded to any particular plan. He was trying to advance the cause of energy exploration.”
An Interior spokeswoman did not answer questions about Zinke’s meetings with Florida lawmakers or the possibility of establishing a 75-mile buffer zone.
“Secretary Zinke regularly meets with and communicates with many members on both sides of the aisle, coastal and non-coastal,” the spokeswoman said in a written statement. “Members often discuss relevant issues pertaining to their districts and states as appropriate."
Republican Rep. Francis Rooney, who opposed drilling off the Florida coast during his 2016 campaign, said the industry has also been reaching out to him. Industry representatives have suggested several compromises, including a 100-mile buffer zone, he said, though he has rejected that plan, saying currents could carry any spilled oil from that part of the Gulf onto state beaches.
Instead, Rooney, who had served on the board of the oil and gas company Laredo Petroleum, offered to allow drilling 200 miles off the coast, west of the area where the military conducts training.
"The oil people have brought up several different things and I have been pretty much recalcitrant in negotiating with them,” Rooney told POLITICO. “I think we need a clear delineation of where they will drill and not drill, and we don’t need them drilling east of that military mission line."
Environmentalists also oppose any drilling, saying a buffer zone wouldn’t protect Florida’s beaches and tourism economy.
“The Deepwater Horizon disaster that spoiled Florida’s coastline was 200 miles from its shore,” said Diane Hoskins, director of environmental group Oceana, referring to the 2010 deepwater gusher that took months to plug. “A 75-mile buffer would be a cold comfort for Floridians."
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/article/2018/08/oil-companies-ask-florida-lawmakers-to-unlock-offshore-drilling-736996

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Dominion Cleared to Resume Limited Work on Atlantic Coast Pipe

Aug 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Rachel Adams-Heard

Dominion Energy Transmission can resume limited work on parts of the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline that is currently halted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, according to a commission filing.
The company can continue road bore construction activity at Mount Carmel and Route 50 crossings in Virginia “to prevent potential environmental and safety impacts.”
Dominion can also continue work at Mockingbird Hill compressor station in Wetzel County, W.Va., “to avoid service impacts” to customers on existing gas system.
The 600-mile project is being developed by Dominion, Duke Energy, and Southern Co.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/dominion-cleared-to-resume-limited-work-on-atlantic-coast-pipe

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Chemical Security News

Democratic Lawmakers Fault Trump's RMP Rollback

Aug 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

Democratic lawmakers are urging the Trump administration to withdraw a proposed rule seeking to scrap most requirements of an Obama-era final rule strengthening EPA's facility accident prevention program, arguing the rollback would increase facility risks that disproportionately harm minority and low-income communities.
In separate letters posted Aug. 8 to an online docket tracking EPA's May 17 proposed rule rescinding much of the Obama-era update to the agency's Risk Management Plan (RMP) facility accident prevention program, roughly a dozen Senate Democrats and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) urge the Trump administration to leave the update rule in place.
“This latest proposal to undo the critical safety, transparency, and emergency response requirements proposed by the original rule places thousands of first responders, facility workers, and fenceline communities at risk,” the senators say in a July 19 letter.
The letter is signed by 11 Senate Democrats, including Tom Carper (DE), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, as well as panel members Cory Booker (NJ), Ed Markey (MA), Ben Cardin, (MD), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), among others.
DeGette in a July 30 letter, notes that an August 2017 fire at an Arkema, Inc. plant in Crosby, TX, occurred during the Trump administration's delay of the Obama-era update rule, and that recent releases from a Suncor Refinery in Commerce City, CO, near her district, show the need for the improved communication that the rule would require.
“Many of the shortcomings of the Suncor Refinery's incident response are covered by the improvements contained in the updated [RMP] that the current proposed rule would roll back,” DeGette says.
“It is vital that EPA require Suncor and similar facilities to have rigorous emergency planning in place, that such plans include accurate and effective communication of the hazards of any accidents that occur, and that first responders know how to respond expeditiously,” the letter adds.
EPA issued the final rule updating RMP with new requirements shortly before the Obama administration left office in 2017, imposing new requirements for certain facilities and included provisions aimed at streamlining disclosure of facility data, and improved coordination between facilities and first responders.
EPA is seeking public comment through Aug. 23 on the revision rule that responds to petitions from the chemical industry and GOP-led states that argued the Obama EPA failed to fulfill a Clean Air Act requirement to coordinate with other agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The revision would scrap most of the Obama-era update, including provisions that certain facilities consider safer alternatives and conduct third-party audits after incidents, and requirements increasing facility coordination with local governments and increasing information sharing.
Both congressional letters argue that scrapping the safety requirements of the Obama-era update would increase risks of accidental releases from facilities, which disproportionately fall on low-income and minority communities.
“[W]e are extremely disturbed that the EPA chose to move forward with issuing this proposed rule despite the agency's finding that "there is evidence that risks from RMP facilities fall on minority and low-income populations, to a significantly greater degree than those risks affect other populations," the senators say.
“The EPA's assertion that the potential annual cost savings of $88 million -- to an industry valued at more than $767 billion -- justifies this action in spite of its obvious negative impacts on these vulnerable communities is in blatant disregard of the EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment."
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/democratic-lawmakers-fault-trumps-rmp-rollback

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

Ranking Transportation Lawmakers Seeking Statewide Master Plan

Aug 15, 2018 | NJBIZ

By Daniel J. Munoz

The state Legislature’s ranking transportation lawmakers are backing a move to create a statewide transportation master plan just days before a Thursday hearing in Trenton on New Jersey Transit’s so-called “Summer of Hell 2.”
Speaking Tuesday at the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey’s Transportation Summit in Woodbridge, Senate Transportation Chair Pat Diegnan, D-18th District, said he plans to sponsor such a bill, with the hopes of getting it signed into law by the end of the year.
Diegnan said he wants to form a panel of about a dozen transportation experts to lay out the master plan.
“Let’s admit it, nobody wants to address our transportation challenges more than the group that’s in this room today,” he said.
At the summit were Department of Transportation Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti and representatives from United Airlines, United Parcel Service and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, all of whom addressed the audience.
Assembly Transportation Vice-Chair Patricia Egan Jones, D-5th District, said the state hasn’t put forth such a plan in nearly 30 years, calling it long overdue.
“It’s a really good idea to bring people who know day in, day out, what’s going on on the roads, what they need,” Jones told NJBIZ.
And that decades-old plan was downgraded from a master plan to an advisory one, Jones said, which has less sway over state policy.
“I don’t think anybody looks at it,” she added.
On Thursday, the Senate and Assembly transportation committees will be conducting a joint hearing on problems at NJ Transit, which have included staffing shortages, dozens of cancelled and delayed trains, equipment breakdowns and a last-minute dash to install federally mandated positive train control braking technology on all New Jersey’s trains.
Lawmakers also want to hear more on NJ Transit’s decision to halt all service on the Atlantic City line until early 2019 while they install the PTC system, as well as their recent move to end one-seat service on the Raritan Valley Line to New York Penn Station.
Gov. Phil Murphy, at an NJ Transit press conference last week at its Newark headquarters, said he underestimated the scope of the issues plaguing the transit system, but will continue to push forward on fixing the agency.
That same week, frustrated commuters grilled the NJ Transit Board of Commissioners on the recurring problems of the past few weeks.
But for commuters, that fix won’t happen right away.
http://www.njbiz.com/article/20180814/NJBIZ01/180819926/ranking-transportation-lawmakers-seeking-statewide-master-plan

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Why Transporting Oil by Rail is Popular, Despite the Cost

Aug 14, 2018 | Chicago Booth Review

By Brian Wallheimer

The fracking-driven surge in crude-oil production this century has forced two developments in the US transportation infrastructure: a boom in pipeline construction as well as a boom in rail shipments of crude while pipelines are being developed. Rail transportation peaked at almost 1 million barrels a day between 2010 and 2014, representing a record 10 percent of American crude production.
But as pipeline developers sought long-term contracts from oil shippers, a curious thing happened. The availability of rail as a transport option reduced demand for pipeline capacity, find Chicago Booth’s Thomas Covert and University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Ryan Kellogg, even though shipping by rail costs more and causes more environmental damage. They argue that “crude-by-rail may be an attractive transportation option in spite of its higher costs.”
The researchers focused on the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota, where fracking began to unlock vast amounts of oil in the mid-2000s. Producers turned to rail tanker cars to get the crude to refiners as production levels exceeded existing pipeline capacity. Meanwhile, a consortium of companies began signing up customers for the proposed $3.78 billion, 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. They obtained enough long-term commitments from crude-oil shippers to build the pipeline in June 2014, though protests and legal challenges delayed completion until 2017.
Building a model using data on market conditions as of June 2014, the researchers find that the capacity of rail transit makes it more than a stopgap and can erode incentives to invest in pipelines.
Why shipping oil by rail can be more expensive, less reliable—and still attractive
“Because rail infrastructure already exists between the upper Midwest and nearly every major refining center in the country, crude-by-rail allows shippers the flexibility to decide when and where to ship crude” on the basis of changes in prices, write Covert and Kellogg.
Their research suggests that rail’s flexibility reduced demand for pipeline capacity. Promoters obtained enough commitments to support building a pipeline to carry only 520,000 barrels a day, or roughly a third of the projected production capacity of the Bakken fields. The researchers calculate that for every $1-a-barrel increase in the cost of rail transportation, demand for pipeline capacity would have risen by between 32,000 and 75,000 barrels a day, or 6–14 percent. That is based on data from December 2016, the latest month for which they have data, when a $1 increase would have amounted to a 9 percent rail cost spike.
The findings highlight the limitations of pipeline projects. When refineries are paying high prices for oil, pipeline shippers do well. But when prices and production decline, shippers still have to pay for the pipeline capacity they reserved, whether they’re using it or not. With rail, shippers can set up shorter contracts and pay only when they’re actually moving oil, and they can send the oil to many more refining locations.
Environmental protesters fought hard against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, but the researchers note that pipelines have been found to be less harmful to the environment than trains. Emissions of greenhouse gases by locomotives hauling Bakken oil to the east coast may cause environmental damage averaging $2.02 a barrel, the researchers say, citing research by Carnegie Mellon’s Karen Clay, Akshaya Jha, and Nicholas Muller and University of Pittsburgh’s Randall Walsh, adding that this is nearly twice the pollution damage caused by pipeline transportation. Trains are also subject to the risk of spills and explosions. For example, a 2013 freight-train derailment destroyed much of the downtown area in Lac-Mégantic, in Quebec, Canada, and left 47 people dead.
The researchers argue that their findings should inform policy makers on how emissions regulations could address environmental damage by raising the cost of rail shipping and altering the incentives for investing in pipelines. Beyond crude oil, their model could also guide decisions about technological projects that must weigh large, up-front investments against variable-cost options, they write. City planners, for example, often choose whether to make significant investments in light-rail systems that offer cheap per-person costs or more-flexible bus systems that would save up front but pass higher costs on to riders.
http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2018/article/why-transporting-oil-rail-popular-despite-cost

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Environment News

Former EPA Staff Urge CEQ to Avoid NEPA Implementing Rule Changes

Aug 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Lee Logan

Former EPA staffers are urging the White House to avoid changing its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing rules, arguing that any changes would spark protracted litigation and that the existing rules can accommodate the Trump administration's goal to offer more efficiency in NEPA reviews of infrastructure projects.
“We strongly urge the Administration to begin this undertaking with a bias toward avoiding changes to the NEPA implementing regulations since they are unnecessary to achieve the goal of efficiency. Any changes are likely to be litigated thus creating more delay,” says Aug. 10 comments to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) submitted jointly by the groups Environmental Protection Network (EPN) and Save EPA, both of which represent former EPA staff who are critical of the Trump EPA's environmental rollbacks.
Their warning about litigation would likely apply to the possibility that CEQ might change the definition of the “reasonably foreseeable” risks that agencies must assess, a change that industry officials have said could allow the administration to limit consideration of climate change impacts.
The groups are commenting on CEQ's June 20 advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) that could usher in a sweeping update of its NEPA implementing regulations.
EPN and Save EPA's comments were filed well before the Aug. 20 deadline to submit comments on the ANPR, meaning that a host of other groups are likely to weigh in on the topic in the coming days.
But their comments offer an early look at some of the pushback CEQ will likely receive from environmentalists and others that strongly back NEPA's requirement that agencies take a “hard look” at any environmental harms from its actions and consider how to avoid or mitigate any impacts.
NEPA implementation over the past 40 years has delivered “countless benefits to our nation,” the former EPA staff write. “We cannot afford to lose the important benefits this has provided.”
The groups add that the “small subset of projects experiencing delays due to NEPA implementation alone, and not to other factors such as financing delays, are usually those which are not cost-effective to begin with or for which further information and consideration of alternatives result in new ways to achieve 'productive harmony' between the natural and built environments.”
The ANPR's questions “are designed to solicit positive comments in favor of revising the regulations,” EPN and Save EPA write, while adding that the current rules can allow for increased efficiency and coordination between agencies.
The groups in a summary of their comments also charge that NEPA has been “wrongly accused of being the primary cause of unwarranted project and infrastructure delays, even though numerous independent studies have attributed most significant infrastructure delays to uncertain financing and changing priorities.”
The Trump CEQ, industry and many Republican lawmakers blame environmental reviews conducted under NEPA for slowing down critical infrastructure projects, and have floated a range of ideas to speed up the process, including by creating some type of deadline by which agencies must complete their reviews.
Among several other legislative proposals regarding permitting, one bipartisan bill in the Senate would codify a two-year “goal” for completing permits, while also broadening the number of projects that qualify for help under a special permitting council.
'Unrealistic' Timeline
But EPN and Save EPA blast the notion of the administration or Congress imposing time limits, arguing existing rules allow agencies to set a time limit and that rushing a NEPA review could be counterproductive for project supporters.
“Any effort by the Administration to force fit a timetable for both NEPA reviews and authorization decisions is deeply flawed,” the comments say. “Such a fixed time limit is unrealistic for certain types of permit authorizations and [is] largely inadequate to resolve complex issues in the small subset of proposed projects that pose significant and complex issues to be addressed and might fuel rather than prevent conflict.”
The groups add, however, that a Trump administration executive order outlining an “average performance target” of two years is “far more realistic” because it allows agencies to explain why they must exceed that goal.
The former staff say that when agencies conduct a thorough review with enough public input, “the process usually moves smoothly and in a timely manner. If time limits force inadequate reviews and analysis of the type contemplated by the statute, the process will likely be slowed not expedited due to public demands for complete information and ultimately litigation.”
Such concerns appear likely to extend to suggestions from some industry attorneys that the ANPR could give CEQ a subtle path to downplaying climate change and greenhouse gas analysis in NEPA reviews, in particular by revising the definition of a “reasonably foreseeable” risk that must be assessed.
A new definition of that and other terms “could at least limit an agency's obligation to consider greenhouse gases. I think it is unlikely that CEQ would specifically target climate impacts as something that need not be evaluated,” said Venable attorney Tyler Welti during a June webinar.
Environmentalists have recently had some success in forcing agencies to consider the downstream GHG effects of natural gas and other energy projects, arguing those emissions are “reasonably foreseeable” and an “indirect” effect of the project.
While EPN and Save EPA do not address the climate and GHG issues in detail, they argue against revising several key NEPA terms that the ANPR floated, saying that current rules, “best practices” and court decisions have robustly defined those terms already.
The groups add that it is difficult to “redefine words that have accepted definitions,” and that doing so “creates a significant risk of litigation.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/former-epa-staff-urge-ceq-avoid-nepa-implementing-rule-changes

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Exclusive: Draft Details Trump’s Plan for Reversing Obama Climate Rule

Aug 15, 2018 | PoliticoPro

By Emily Holden

The Trump administration is preparing to unveil its plan for undoing Barack Obama’s most ambitious climate regulation — offering a replacement that would do far less to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, according to POLITICO’s review of a portion of the unpublished draft.
The new climate proposal for coal-burning power plants, expected to be released in the coming days, would give states wide latitude to write their own modest regulations for coal plants or even seek permission to opt out, according to the document and a source who has read other sections of the draft.
That’s a sharp contrast from the aims of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a 2015 regulation that would have sped a shift away from coal use and toward less-polluting sources such as natural gas, wind and solar. That plan was the centerpiece of Obama’s pledge for the U.S. to cut carbon dioxide emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement, which President Donald Trump has said he plans to exit.
The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that both carbon emissions and pollutants such as soot and smog would be higher under its new proposal than under the Clean Power Plan. And Trump’s critics call it a recipe for abandoning the effort to take on one of the world’s most urgent problems.
The proposal would be “another, more official, sign that the government of the United States is not committed to climate policy,” said Janet McCabe, EPA’s air chief under Obama.
McCabe said based on a description of the proposal, it would offer "a significant amount of discretion to states to decide that nothing at all needs to be done."
Many red states and several companies sued over the Clean Power Plan, and a federal appeals court was nearing a decision when Trump’s EPA asked for time to rewrite the rule. McCabe said the proposal could be meant to eat up time and stall a future president from quickly regulating greenhouse gases.
EPA was widely expected to write a far less stringent replacement rule. Trump promised to nix the Clean Power Plan and exit the Paris deal during his campaign. But the draft offers the first look at the specifics since the agency released a broader notice that it would reconsider the rule in April.
The White House Office of Management and Budget has finished reviewing the draft and sent it back to EPA this week.
The rule would allow states to write rules to make coal plants more efficient, enabling them to burn less coal to produce the same amount of electricity. But that could be bad for the planet, people familiar with state air programs say, by making it cost-effective for power companies to run those plants more often.
EPA looked at the outcomes of various scenarios that could be possible from state-proposed plans in 2025, 2030 and 2035, implying that the plans could be in place before 2025.
Obama's plan was meant to see greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power sector fall to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The nation has already achieved much of that reduction because of trends such as the closures of dozens of older coal plants.
EPA intends to argue that the Obama administration rule illegally sought to regulate the broader power sector, beyond coal plants, and that the compliance costs would have been big and the climate benefits negligible, according to the draft POLITICO reviewed.
Environmental advocates and blue states plan to wage war on the proposal once it is final. But while the legal fights play out, the regulation will be a placeholder that could stall a future president from regulating power plants.
States will be able to present reasons for why they don’t want to regulate coal plants, including considering how many more years they have left before they would probably shut down, according to a source who reviewed a different section of the document.
In another contentious portion of the proposal, EPA is looking at letting states decide whether they want to adopt changes to pollution reviews that kick in when a plant makes upgrades. Existing rules are meant to keep plants from making changes that cause more pollution.
Conservatives and industry groups have long argued that the review process, called New Source Review, makes it too expensive for operators to make improvements to plants.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/article/2018/08/exclusive-draft-details-trumps-plan-for-reversing-obama-climate-rule-740066

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4 Ways Spending Fights will Affect Energy, Environment Issues

Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Daily

By George Cahlink

Congress, fearing a government shutdown, is pressing to pass as many spending bills as possible before the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.
Negotiations in the coming weeks will cover policy riders, programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and whether to approve emergency dollars for wildfires.
The Senate returns today for a rare mid-August session, where its main goal will be advancing the two largest of the 12 annual appropriations measures in a single package.
Together, the Defense and Labor-Health and Human Services bills would account for nearly 3 out of every 4 discretionary dollars to be spent in fiscal 2019.
Senate GOP leaders are due to call up the defense spending bill, S. 3159, later today. The idea is to later amend it to attach the Labor-HHS bill, S. 3158.
If a truce on avoiding controversial riders holds, the legislation could pass by next week and the Senate would then likely join the House in a summer break that will extend until just after Labor Day.
Negotiations, meanwhile, continue behind closed doors over several bills that have already passed both chambers, including those funding EPA and the Energy and Interior departments. Lawmakers want staff to hash out final versions this month so Congress can quickly send them to the president in September.Avoiding cuts
EPA, Interior and Energy won't see major changes over current spending, with all three agencies on track for either flat funding or relatively modest increases as negotiations play out.
EPA is likely to get very close to its current $8.1 billion for fiscal 2019, a figure that would match its current dollars, signaling some congressional support for an agency the White House proposed slashing by $2 billion.
However, there could be some grumbling at the agency and from environmentalists about regulatory programs getting trimmed in favor of more dollars directed to politically popular clean and safe drinking water grants.
Interior, too, is likely to receive flat funding for the coming fiscal year at $13.1 billion. The National Park Service could see a modest increase in its $3.25 billion budget to address its maintenance backlog.
Other programs and agencies covered by the Interior-Environment bill — such as LWCF, the payment in lieu of taxes program, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management — are due to match their current spending (Greenwire, Aug. 1).
The Energy Department could see some modest increases, especially for science-related programs. Those efforts are set to get a few hundred million dollars above their current level of $6.6 billion, with much of the funding going toward upgrading nuclear laboratories (E&E Daily, June 29).
Lawmakers are expected to at least maintain current dollars for two programs — the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — that the president has targeted for cuts or elimination. Lawmakers could also press for boosting fossil fuel research.
And for workers, Congress is likely to end up backing the Senate's call for a 1.9 percent federal pay increase in fiscal 2019 rather than the House's proposed pay freeze (E&E News PM, June 19).Shutdown fears
While almost nobody on Capitol Hill seems to want a federal shutdown, no one knows whether President Trump is on their side in wanting to avert one.
Trump has frustrated GOP leaders in recent weeks by repeatedly suggesting he might allow federal funding for agencies to expire on Sept. 30 unless he gets billions of dollars in border wall funding.
Many Republicans are hoping the president will hold off on the threat until after the elections. They note he has made similar pronouncements in the past before begrudgingly signing spending bills.
A continuing resolution would cover whatever agencies don't get money though minibus packages. Those temporary dollars would extend until December, meaning Congress would finalize any loose ends in a lame-duck session.
Both parties believe the more bills they pass, the harder it would be for Trump to reject them. It's not clear how many bills could be finalized in coming weeks, although even three or four would be notable progress over recent years.
Energy and water spending is seen as more likely to be completed than Interior-EPA, given bipartisan support for Army Corps of Engineers water projects.
Lawmakers have already decided three spending bills will wait until after the elections: the Commerce-Justice-Science, State and Foreign Operations, and Homeland Security measures.
All three fund programs that are highly partisan, including immigration, foreign aid and gun measures. The CJS bill also funds NOAA, which does significant research on climate change patterns (E&E Daily, June 13).Riders out
Controversial policy riders are likely to disappear from any final spending bills in a bid to avoid a Senate blockade.
The House's Interior-EPA measure, now within H.R. 6147, has several contentious add-on provisions, among them language to scrap the Clean Water Rule and rollbacks of the Endangered Species Act.
GOP lawmakers privately concede the House riders are attempts at election-year messaging and that many of the proposals, including on water, are unnecessary because of an administration that shares their policy goals.
On the Energy and Water spending bill, the biggest policy issue remains whether to provide funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
House lawmakers insist they'll press for funding the waste site in negotiations, but Senate Republican leaders are likely to resist. One of the GOP's most vulnerable senators, Dean Heller of Nevada, has pushed to halt the project, and Republicans are unlikely to buck him with the elections less than three months away.Wildfire, LWCF wild cards
Wildfires now scorching the West and an expiring land conservation program could be factors in the spending talks.
Congress has yet to receive a request for emergency spending related to the wildfires, but aides expect one will come given the scale of the damage. Moreover, costs could mount as the worst fires generally occur in September and October as the Santa Ana winds pick up in California.
Both House and Senate aides believe there would be bipartisan support for wildfire aid, a total that could stretch into the billions. They say the funding could ride on whatever spending package passes before Oct. 1.
Congress also needs to address LWCF, which will see its authority expire on Oct. 1.
While the program has broad backing in both chambers, the most likely outcome is an extension of a few months to buy lawmakers' time to hammer out what's been an elusive permanent reauthorization.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/08/15/stories/1060094145

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Here’s How to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions Without Taxing Them

Aug 14, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

By Justin Gillis and Jameson McBride

Once again, a bill to tax emissions of greenhouse gases has been introduced in Congress, this time with Republican sponsorship. Just about every economist thinks putting a price on these emissions would reduce them and hasten the shift toward clean energy, slowing climate change. This latest push is, in principle, a good idea.
It is also a political fantasy.
Attempts to tax or otherwise price emissions have been made in Congress for a quarter-century now. The first ambitious bill, in 1993, got whittled down to a modest increase in the gasoline tax, and the rest of these efforts have failed miserably, even when Democrats had strong congressional majorities. By the time this latest proposal was even introduced, the House of Representatives had already passed a resolution declaring any emissions tax dead on arrival.
Every indication is that these emissions-pricing plans will keep failing, even if Democrats manage to seize the House in November. But a different approach might stand a better chance in Congress — one that would focus on building more clean energy, rather than taxing emissions. This could be accomplished by setting a national clean-energy standard.
This policy would require the share of American electricity from low-emitting sources to increase steadily over time. States would be given flexibility in how they meet the national goal — that is, which energy sources to embrace — but they would have to meet it, most likely by fining utilities that failed to comply.
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Such a policy would encourage the continued growth of renewable energy, but it would also do more. It would most likely slow the shutdown of nuclear power plants, which are the nation’s single largest low-emission power source but are at risk of closing. They face stiff competition from cheap natural gas, with some needing costly maintenance.
A quarter of the American nuclear fleet is at risk of closing under current market conditions. If the plants shut down, they are likely to be replaced by gas, a setback for the climate. By putting a value on the low-emission nature of nuclear power, a clean-energy standard would prevent these closings.
An ambitious standard would encourage a wave of investment in other ways to clean up the power grid, including new devices to store electricity and new types of low-emitting power stations. Quite likely, utilities would figure out ways to shift power demand to periods when the output from renewable sources is highest.
The idea of a clean-energy standard is not new — it has come up in Congress before, sometimes with Republican support. It never got through, not just because fossil-fuel interests hated it but also because elements of the left, not wanting to help nuclear plants, also opposed it.
But the political situation has changed. Fossil-fuel companies have gone from lying about climate science to saying they believe it. More important, they need something: They are asking Congress for relief from a rising tide of lawsuits over emissions and may be willing to trade a climate policy to get that protection.EDITORS’ PICKSAnnoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His OwnTransforming Tulsa, Starting with a ParkParents Behaving Badly: A Youth Sports Crisis Caught on Video
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Among mainstream environmental groups, opposition to nuclear power has also softened over the past decade because of the climate benefits. We hope that some green groups would support a clean-energy standard and that others could at least be persuaded not to fight it. Polling suggests strong public support for clean energy, including among Republican voters.ImageThe Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Ga.CreditPallava Bagla/Corbis, via Getty Images
A national clean-energy standard is worth another shot in Congress, as the one ambitious climate proposal that might pull substantial votes from both sides of the aisle. The best time to try may be early next year, when Democrats are likely to be stronger in Washington, even if they have not seized control.
And if a push in Congress does not work?
Then clean-energy advocates should turn to the states. They have more control over the electricity grid than the federal government anyway, and a majority of them have already adopted narrower clean-energy targets called renewable portfolio standards.
These older targets were generally written to favor specific technologies, like wind turbines and solar panels. They have been a huge success, helping to scale up the market and drive the cost of these facilities down, though wind and solar subsidies from Congress also helped expand the market.
Most state renewable portfolio standards expire in the next few years, and the federal subsidies are scheduled to be phased out, too. Instead of just renewing these mandates with higher targets, we think the states, barring any new action by Congress, ought to broaden them to cover every low-emission source of electricity. Some states are already discussing the idea, and New York has adopted a variant, but none of these plans is as broad as the measure we envision.
We realize that a state-by-state approach is a long way from the sweeping national policy that many climate hawks — including us — would prefer to see. But it could still have a significant effect. A recent study by the research groups Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute found that by adopting clean-energy standards, at least nine states could be getting more than half their power from low-emitting sources by the mid-2020s.
If Congress once again fails the nation, the states can break the partisan gridlock on clean energy. This sweltering summer of wildfires and life-threatening heat waves demonstrates that they must.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/opinion/how-to-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions-without-taxing-them.html

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What If Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?

Aug 15, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

By Thomas L. Friedman

What if this time is different?
There is an assumption that the 2020 presidential election will be business as usual: Donald Trump will run on the economy, social issues and immigration, and the Democratic candidate will run on income inequality, Democratic socialism and Trump’s character — the 2020 version of right-left U.S. politics.
But I believe there’s a sleeper issue out there that could force its way into the election. What if Mother Nature is on the ballot?
What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?”
We’re talking about the natural world, so one has to be cautious. But if you look at all the destructive extreme weather buffeting the world this summer alone, it’s as if Mother Nature were saying to us: “Oh, you didn’t notice me tapping on your shoulder these past few years? O.K. Well, how about a little fire, Scarecrow? How about this:
“How about I bake Europe, set the biggest wildfire California has ever seen and more active wildfires — 460 in one day — than British Columbia has ever seen, and also start the worst forest fires in decades in Sweden, even extending north of the Arctic Circle where temperatures this month reached 86 degrees. Meanwhile, I’ll subject Japan to the heaviest rainfall it’s ever recorded, and then a couple weeks later the highest temperature it’s ever recorded — 106 degrees in Kumagaya, northwest of Tokyo. And for a punctuation mark, I’ll break the heat record in Death Valley, reaching 127 degrees, and burn the worst drought in living memory into Eastern Australia, where the BBC last week quoted a dairy farmer as saying, “It’s gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to shoot your cows than it is to feed them.”
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While climate scientists have long argued that you can’t attribute any single weather event to climate change, a study last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded: “The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified blanket statement. In many cases, it is now often possible to make and defend quantitative statements about the extent to which human-induced climate change … has influenced either the magnitude or the probability of occurrence of specific types of events or event classes.”
Climate change makes the hots hotter, the wets wetter and the dries drier.
Heidi Cullen, chief scientist for Climate Central, an environmental organization, was quoted as telling the Weather Channel in July that the national academies’ report connecting global warming to the increased risk and severity of certain classes of extreme weather — like some of the heat waves, floods and droughts we’re experiencing — carries the same scientific import as the U.S. surgeon general’s 1964 report connecting smoking to lung cancer.
In other words: Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics.
Democrats have been casting about for a big idea to propel them in 2020. My free advice: If Democratic socialism or Democratic Trotskyism or abolishing ICE — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — is what will get you elected as a Democrat in your district in 2018, go for it. The Democrats must take the House back. But Trump would feast on those issues in a national election.
However, if in 2020 we’re in the midst of even more damaging droughts and storms than we are today, Democrats may be able to run against Trump’s make-America-polluted-again environmental strategy and his refusal to either acknowledge the threat of climate change or seize the incredible opportunity it offers America to become richer, healthier, more secure and more respected by leading the world in clean energy technologies.EDITORS’ PICKSThis Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership EndsOpinionMake Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later.Inside Nicaragua’s Protest Movement
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Trump has no answer for that. He doesn’t believe the climate science that NASA is telling him is true. He is trying to bring back coal precisely when wind, solar and efficiency are becoming cheaper, cleaner, healthier alternatives — precisely when four of the five biggest wind states are red states and precisely when China has committed itself to owning the clean power and electric car markets of the future! He’s trying to force the U.S. auto industry to bring back gas guzzlers when the last time we did that — from the 1980s to the 2000s — Japan and Korea bankrupted Detroit and we enriched petro-dictators from Venezuela to Russia to the Arab world to Iran.
Trump is the president who’s throwing away our umbrella right before the storm.
Sure, Trump will sneer that “green” is girlyman, uneconomic, unpatriotic and vaguely French. But Democrats can easily counter that green is globally strategic, locally profitable and working class — green is the new red, white and blue. That message can play today in Rust Belt battleground states like Michigan and Ohio. One recent clean energy industry study found that 714,257 people in 12 Midwestern states work in renewable energy generation, clean transmission, energy efficiency, clean fuels and advanced transportation. Some 108,000 in Ohio alone do, compared with 38,000 in the coal, oil and gas fields.
The Democratic message could start with some simple math: There are currently 7.6 billion people on the planet, and in 2030 there will be 8.6 billion — another one billion in just over a decade! If even half of them get cars, have air-conditioners and eat high-protein diets like Americans now do, we will devour and burn up the planet beyond recognition. So what does that mean? It means clean energy and efficiency have to be the next great global industry or we’re going to be a bad biological experiment, whether there is climate change or not. Does anyone — other than Trump — believe that America can continue to dominate the world economy and not lead the next great global industry, but leave that to China?
The Democratic strategy should be built around putting together the performance standards, research and carbon pricing to achieve what Energy Innovation C.E.O. Hal Harvey calls “the four zeros.” These are, Harvey explains: 1. “A zero-carbon grid. Right now, Republican states like Texas and Wyoming dominate the U.S. wind industry and are reaping most of the jobs and environmental benefits. That should go national. 2. Zero-emission vehicles. When you combine a zero-carbon grid with electric vehicles, bingo, you have zero-carbon transportation. 3. Zero-net energy buildings. What if you could build a well-insulated home, put today’s inexpensive solar panels on the roof and, over the course of a year, produce as much energy as you consume? Fantastical? No. It’s now the law in Santa Monica, and getting most of the way there is already feasible — and cost-effective — throughout the country. 4. Zero-waste manufacturing. New techniques in manufacturing, such as 3-D printing or advanced chemistry, can slash waste — and waste is a tax on both the budget and the earth.”
Now that’s a platform worth running on, and it’s one that can do what Democrats need most: make them the party of strengthening the working class and American security.
Clean power, clean cars, clean manufacturing and efficient buildings make everything we want to achieve in our society easier. They can lower our health care costs, cut heating bills for the poor, drive 21st-century innovation, foster decent jobs, mitigate climate change, create more competitive export industries, weaken petro-dictators — and enhance U.S. national security and moral leadership.
Let Trump fight that idea. If Mother Nature keeps on this destructive track into 2020, well, Trump’s favorite mantra about strong women, “Lock her up,” will look awfully silly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/opinion/2020-election-climate-change-trump.html

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U.S. Cities Brace for More Heat-Related Problems

Aug 15, 2018 | E&E Climatewire

By Oliver Milman

Heat is now the cause of death for more Americans than floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters.
It's quickly becoming a nationwide problem. Recent research suggests warming conditions are leading to suicides. Rising nighttime temperatures have led to lack of sleep and relief from hot days.
A study published in GeoSpace last week found that a warming climate will cause thousands more people to check into emergency rooms for heat-related illness.
"There's a point where the human body can't cool itself, which means you are either in an air-conditioned space or you're having serious health problems," said Gregory Wellenius, an epidemiologist at Brown University. "Some places in the U.S. will get to that point. The way we live, work and play will be altered by rising temperatures."
The hottest days experienced in the United States could be an additional 15 degrees warmer this century if nothing is done to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Cities throughout the country will have to tackle the problem.
East Coast locations that are relatively cooler, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, have the most excess heat-related deaths of the whole country.
Western residents "may be a little more attuned to the issues — like don't jog your 5 miles at noon, do it at 5 a.m.," said Dr. Caroline Johnson, a senior official at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. "Some of that may come as a surprise to people around here."
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/15/stories/1060094127

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