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AM ACC Clips Report - August 16, 2018
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(ACC Mentioned) So, An Impact Investor, A Social Entrepreneur And A Sea Turtle Walk Into A Bar...
Aug 15, 2018 | Forbes
By Devin Thorpe
Okay, an impact investor, a social entrepreneur and a sea turtle didn’t literally walk into a bar, but the way their lives intersected is no joke. -
(ACC Mentioned) Film Recovery Effort Shifts Focus to Markets
Aug 15, 2018 | Plastics Recycling Update
By Colin Staub
A film recycling improvement campaign in Connecticut has wrapped up its first phase and is getting ready for its second after reporting successful collection and contamination reduction results. -
(ACC Mentioned) This High-Yield Stock Plans to Cash In on the Next Big Thing in American Energy
Aug 16, 2018 | The Motley Fool
By Maxx Chatsko
The United States has certainly enjoyed the spoils of technological know-how and robust national energy infrastructure in the last decade or so. -
EPA Vows to Improve Communication With Vulnerable Communities
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
The EPA needs to do a better job telling neighborhoods about the dangers they face from nearby pollution, the agency’s head said. But that is a promise community advocates said they have heard before. -
Coalition Decries Science Plan as Comment Period Nears End
Aug 15, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
A broad-based coalition of almost 80 advocacy organizations is asking acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to withdraw a proposed rule that could significantly restrict the types of scientific studies the agency uses in crafting new regulations. -
McCaskill Criticizes Trump Administration Efforts To Cut EPA IG's Budget
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Rebecca Rainey
A top Senate Democrat is criticizing Trump administration proposals to cut funding for EPA's Office of Inspector General (IG), a move that may help preserve separate congressional spending plans that propose to increase the office's funds in fiscal year 2019 just as officials battle to address increased work loads due in part to inquiries into former Administrator Scott Pruitt. -
(ACC Mentioned) Industry Backs TSCA New Chemical Review Plan Despite EPA Abandonment
Aug 16, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Chemical and other manufacturers are aggressively defending EPA's draft framework for reviewing new chemicals under the revised toxics law, charging it is consistent with the law and sufficiently protective, even though the agency has signaled it will not implement the plan in the face of a lawsuit from environmentalists. -
It's Time for the EPA to Ban Asbestos Once and for All
Aug 15, 2018 | CNN
By Linda Reinstein
Nearly 40,000 Americans die from preventable asbestos-caused diseases every year, yet the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still hasn't banned this toxic substance. -
US EPA Received 31 PMNs in May
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA received 31 pre-manufacture notices (PMNs) in May. Nineteen of these had the manufacturer’s identity withheld as confidential. -
Monsanto’s Glyphosate Appeal Denied by California Supreme Court
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Joyce E. Cutler
Monsanto Co.'s challenge to California’s decision to list the popular herbicide glyphosate as a known carcinogen won’t head to the state’s highest court. -
EPA Nears Release of GenX Toxicity Values
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
A top EPA water official is reiterating that the agency hopes by September to release a toxicity value for GenX, a newer chemical in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) class that is being found in the Cape Fear River and drinking water in North Carolina, a measure that other states can use to set regulatory and other standards. -
US EPA Received 31 PMNs in May
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA received 31 pre-manufacture notices (PMNs) in May. Nineteen of these had the manufacturer’s identity withheld as confidential. -
The Netherlands, Echa Propose Restriction on PAHs in Rubber Crumb
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
Echa has published a joint proposal with the Netherlands to restrict concentration limits of polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in rubber crumb used for play and sporting applications. -
Oil Industry Targets Florida in New Offshore Drilling Advocacy Push
Aug 15, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The oil industry is undertaking a new public relations campaign to push for offshore drilling along Florida’s coast. -
Oil Companies Ask Florida Lawmakers to Unlock Offshore Drilling
Aug 16, 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. -
Fewer Than 1 Percent of Offshore Drilling Tracts Auctioned by Trump Receive Bids
Aug 15, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green
Oil and gas companies bid on fewer than one percent of the offshore tracts made available by the Trump administration during an auction Wednesday. -
Lease Sale Shows 'Steady Interest' in Gulf
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke once promised that the federal government's March auction of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico would be a "bellwether" of oil and gas operators' desire to drill in new sections of the U.S. outer continental shelf. -
Oil and Gas Lines Not Being Inspected Annually, Group Alleges
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
The federal government hasn’t inspected pipelines running through public lands as required by law, an environmental group said in a lawsuit. -
Trump's CO2 Rule Is Coming, and Industries Wonder Who's Next
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Zack Colman and Robin Bravender
Industries across the U.S. economy are closely watching for the Trump administration's plan to regulate power plant emissions — and wondering whether they're next. -
Court Orders Trump Admin to Study New Route's Impacts
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
The Keystone XL pipeline hit another legal snag last night after a federal court ordered the Trump administration to take a closer look at environmental impacts. -
Trump Blasts Cuomo Over Frack Ban in New York State
Aug 15, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
President Trump, at a campaign stop in Upstate New York to support a Republican congresswoman seeking reelection, used his appearance as an opportunity to pillory Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his opposition to hydraulic fracturing (fracking). -
(ACC Mentioned) Trump Keeps Trying to Kill Agency That Investigates Chemical Plant Disasters
Aug 16, 2018 | Reveal
By William G. Schulz
On a warm morning in April, workers at a Wisconsin oil refinery were conducting a routine shutdown for maintenance. Suddenly, a gasoline cracking unit exploded, and the workers watched in horror as a huge fireball ripped through the plant. They ran for their lives, barely escaping the blast. -
Texas, Refineries Urged to Plan Storm Shutdowns to Cut Pollution
Aug 16, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Timothy Gardner
Texas environment regulators should coordinate shutdowns of oil refineries and other petrochemical plants during major storms to avoid big releases of air pollution like during last year's Hurricane Harvey, a report said on Thursday. -
The Key to Trump’s Climate Reversal? New Math
Aug 16, 2018 | Politico
By Alex Guillen and Emily Holden
The Trump administration’s attempt to reverse Barack Obama’s most sweeping climate regulation rests on a legally risky strategy — redoing the calculations of how much the rule would cost and who would benefit. -
Phillips 66 Agrees to Cut Ozone-Forming Emissions at Illinois Plant
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Phillips 66 Co. says it will spend at least $10 million at its Roxana, Ill.-based Wood River Refinery to resolve allegations it released excessive ozone-forming pollution and other toxic emissions in violation of the Clean Air Act. -
New York City Landlords Vow to Cut Energy Use 20 Percent by 2030
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By David M. Levitt
Some of the biggest names in New York real estate, including SL Green Realty Corp., Vornado Realty Trust and Related Cos., have signed on to an ambitious plan to reduce energy use in the city’s larger buildings by 20 percent by 2030—with some “wiggle room.” -
Inspector General Launches Review of Key EPA NSR Program
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) is launching a review into the agency's implementation of its Clean Air Act new source review (NSR) permitting program as it applies to industrial sources located on tribal land, in order to assess factors affecting the permitting process including the number and approval time of NSR permits. -
Will Washington State Voters Make History on Climate Change?
Aug 15, 2018 | The Atlantic
By Robinson Meyer
This November, voters in Washington State may do what no group of people—in or outside the United States—has done before. -
Will Dems Act on GHGs After a Midterm Win? It's Complicated
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Democrats have long billed themselves as the party of climate science, and if they take back the House in November, they want to put global warming back on the congressional calendar.
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(ACC Mentioned) So, An Impact Investor, A Social Entrepreneur And A Sea Turtle Walk Into A Bar...
Aug 15, 2018 | Forbes
By Devin Thorpe
Okay, an impact investor, a social entrepreneur and a sea turtle didn’t literally walk into a bar, but the way their lives intersected is no joke.
Three years ago this week, a Texas A&M marine biologist, Christine Figgener, uploaded a video of her team removing a four-inch plastic straw from the nostril of a sea turtle. The evocative video immediately went viral and now has 32.6 million views on YouTube.
The video not only inspired the current activism around plastic straws that has me carrying around paper straws and a law banning plastic straws in Seattle, but it has people thinking about all single-use plastic more critically. That movement has provided a catalyst for impact investors and social entrepreneurs who have solutions to ocean plastic.
Priyanka Bakaya, the CEO and founder of Renewlogy, a company that uses a chemical process to convert even the worst plastics into fuel and Rob Kaplan, the CEO and founder of Circulate Capital, which launched in July with the specific mission to invest in companies that will reduce the flow of plastic into the world’s oceans, joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about ocean plastic. You can watch the 27-minute interview in the video player at the top of this article.
The Ocean Plastic Problem
The problem of plastic in the ocean isn’t limited to an occasional straw up a turtle’s nose. On its website, Clean Water Action reports:
In the ocean, plastic debris injures and kills fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Marine plastic pollution has impacted at least 267 species worldwide, including 86% of all sea turtle species, 44% of all seabird species and 43% of all marine mammal species. The impacts include fatalities as a result of ingestion, starvation, suffocation, infection, drowning, and entanglement.7
In 2010, a California grey whale washed up dead on the shores of the Puget Sound. Autopsies indicated that its stomach contained a pair of pants and a golf ball, more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, duct tape and surgical gloves.
Seabirds that feed on the ocean surface are especially prone to ingesting plastic debris that floats. Adults feed these items to their chicks resulting in detrimental effects on chick growth and survival.8 One study found that approximately 98% of chicks sampled contained plastic and the quantity of plastic being ingested was increasing over time.9
The problem is getting worse. Fast. The plastic debris in the Central Pacific Gyre increased five-fold in the ten years ending 2007.
Kaplan notes that this is largely a result of the rapidly growing economies in south and southeast Asia “exponentially” increasing their consumption of plastics without correspondingly increasing their waste and recycling infrastructure.
McKinnley Workman, chief operating officer and co-founder of Lakay Vet, S.A. in Haiti, works to improve waste handling in the Western Hemisphere’s most challenged economy. She says there is a lot of work to do. She explains anecdotally:
Yesterday, I was driving through the city as rain started to fall. It quickly began gushing through the streets and I watched as people made their way into the streets under the rain to dump their buckets or bags of waste. As a poor person, where daily life is a struggle, they gladly watch it wash away with a smile on their face as it’s one less thing they have to worry about. In their minds, they found a free solution to dealing with their waste. Ultimately, all of that water goes straight to the Port-au-Prince bay and eventually makes its way into the worlds global ocean plastic repository.
Workman is cooperating with Bakaya at Renewlogy to deploy the technology there, where all transportation fuel is imported and expensive and single-use plastic that can’t otherwise be recycled for quality reasons is ubiquitous.
Bakaya points to a study that suggests that at current rates by 2050, there will be “more plastic than fish in our oceans.”
“Ocean plastic presents one of the most urgent and fast-growing ecological and health challenges of our time. Our objective is nothing less than to become the leading force behind solving the capital gaps of companies and infrastructure that prevent ocean plastic,” confirms Kaplan.
The China Ban
Last year, China implemented new restrictions on imported waste plastic for recycling. Previously, 40% of plastic from the United States—and much of the plastic elsewhere—was shipped to China for recycling. The new restrictions constitute an effective ban, Kaplan and Bakaya confirmed. The rules require the plastic to be cleaned at a cost that exceeds the value of the plastic.
“It's really opening up a lot of local opportunities to find domestic solutions to handle this material,” Bakaya says. One of those solutions is the Renewlogy solution that converts plastic to fuel or the feedstock for virgin plastic.
“There's no question that China's ban has is revolutionizing the recycling market globally in many parts of the Western world,” Kaplan says. He notes that any time a company or industry loses 40% of its market, a gaping hole is created.
Demand Side
One of the recycling problems that has developed is a lack of consumer demand for recycled products.
“If there were more consumers interested in using recycled content and choosing those products as part of their shopping experience that would build the market and that would increase the demand,” Kaplan says. “There's a huge opportunity for consumers to incentivize brands and companies and parts of the supply chain to use more recycled material.”
He adds, “I work with many of the world's largest brands consumer brands and when we ask them to use more recycled content their initial feedback is, ‘No, our customers aren't interested in it.’”
“Even if you put all of your plastic in a recycling bin or in a recycling system if there isn't an end market for it then it will not be reused it will end up either in the environment or in a landfill somewhere,” he says, reiterating his point.
Traditionally, recycled plastics are effectively downcycled. Much of the use of plastic is for food containers. Governments regulate what plastics can come in contact with our food and many recycled products aren’t considered safe. That means that recycled products are typically used in less valuable functions than the source plastics.
Although more expensive and energy intensive than other forms of recycling, by converting plastic into the naphtha to make virgin plastic using the Renewlogy process, consumers don’t have to choose recycled products. Better still, the resulting products aren’t technically recycled and can be used for food and medical purposes, allowing even the worst plastics to be upcycled into the highest value ones.
Kaplan points out that contamination of high-quality plastics is also a problem. After good plastics spend time exposed to the environment on land or in the ocean, they can no longer be recycled into top quality products.
The Renewlogy process, and other similar ones, can convert even contaminated plastics into fuel or plastic feedstock, creating an economic value for low-quality and/or contaminated plastic.
Workman says, “In Haiti, most of the plastic that we see every day in rivers, canals, and streets is this dirty plastic that is difficult to recycle and therefore sticks around to eventually be washed into the oceans.”
“Renewlogy has a great solution that makes sense particularly for Haiti because of the type of plastics found and also because fuel is an extremely expensive and unstable imported resource,” Workman says. She adds that implementation of the Renewlogy technology just in Port-au-Prince could prevent 60,000 metric tons of plastic from flowing into the ocean annually.
One of the reasons the Renewlogy technology holds such appeal for Workman is that it allows for the value-adding process to occur in Haiti, which should reduce imports of fuel and keep more profits in the country.
Technology Is Not the Problem
Both Kaplan and Bakaya point out the technology is not the problem.
Kaplan says:
You know one of the biggest challenges we see is less on the technology side but more on like who's going to operate this on the ground in Indonesia. Here in the U.S., you've got companies that have been operating recycling businesses and waste businesses for decades. We don't have that in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand and India. There isn't the local expertise and talent that are ready to put that to work in a way that you know is going to be successful. So that's a big part of our focus is how can we match our financing and capital with technology like Priyanka's but also with operators on the ground who can execute it.
Workman is trying to address that problem in Haiti. “we have been working with Renewlogy in conjunction with the Plastic Ocean Project to get a pilot system setup at Lakay Vèt.” By partnering with a local recycling company to source plastic that can’t otherwise be recycled, the technology fills an important gap in keeping plastic out of the ocean. The key is to find a responsible recycling partner.
“I will be the first to say that it's foolish to rely on just a handful of solutions for such a gigantic and multi-faceted problem like this,” she says. She recognizes the need to implement many different solutions to both clean up the mess “we’ve already made” and to prevent further damage to the environment.
Bakaya, for her part, says, “The technology is actually the easy part, and the real challenge is the logistics of both collecting the plastic and getting the end product to the right place.” She adds that with a ready waste plastic supply, Renewlogy’s technology can produce fuels for $30 per barrel.
Getting investors—like Circulate Capital and The Closed Loop Fund—to invest is another constraint she faces.
Partnerships
Circulate Capital could be described as a spinout of Kaplan’s last company, Closed Loop Partners, which does impact investing in recycling domestically. The Ocean Conservancy is also a partner in the new company, along with backing from 3M, American Chemistry Council, The Coca-Cola Company, Kimberly-Clark, Dow, PepsiCo, Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia, Procter & Gamble and the World Plastics Council.
Deigo Donoso, president of Dow Packaging & Specialty Plastics, says, “Circulate Capital is the type of active engagement we need to accelerate the implementation of waste management systems with effective recycling processes that keep plastics waste out of the ocean.”
Ron Gonen, Kaplan’s former partner at the Closed Loop Fund, which the latter previously ran, says, “Circulate Capital is the realization of many months of research and planning on the part of Closed Loop Partners and Ocean Conservancy to design a structure that can dedicate the time and resources necessary to tackle the complexity of the ocean plastic problem at scale.”
Steve Sikra, associate director of corporate R&D and global product stewardship at Procter & Gamble, says, “P&G is proud to be part of the Circulate Capital. Just like the Closed Loop Fund, this will address the root cause and help develop the right infrastructure to drive positive change. Working together, we believe we can halt the flow of plastics into the world’s oceans.”
Ben Jordan, the senior director of global environmental policy at The Coca-Cola Company, says, “We are excited to support Circulate Capital and their aim to prevent the flow of ocean plastic. We aim to be a driver of the circular economy as we continue toward our vision of a world without waste.”
Kaplan says, “Our goal is to remove capital as a barrier.” Bakaya sees capital as a constraint for her business. Perhaps there’s a sea turtle out there that could buy them a drink and help them see how they could solve both their problems.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/devinthorpe/2018/08/15/so-an-impact-investor-a-social-entrepreneur-and-a-sea-turtle-walk-into-a-bar/#4d8e88407e54
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(ACC Mentioned) Film Recovery Effort Shifts Focus to Markets
Aug 15, 2018 | Plastics Recycling Update
By Colin Staub
A film recycling improvement campaign in Connecticut has wrapped up its first phase and is getting ready for its second after reporting successful collection and contamination reduction results.
In a recently released report, the Connecticut Wrap Recycling Action Program (CT WRAP) unveiled the results it achieved in 2017. The program sought to increase education about film packaging recycling efforts in Connecticut, with a particular focus on Hartford and its surrounding area.
WRAP is a program of the American Chemistry Council’s Flexible Film Recycling Group. The Connecticut effort included representatives from state government, the food and plastics industries, grocery stores and other recycling stakeholders.
Plastics Recycling Update previously reported on the campaign’s outreach efforts in East Hartford. The new document, released Aug. 10, quantifies the results of that and similar outreach projects. East Hartford saw a doubling of film packaging collected at ShopRite, a local store partnering on collection.
In the greater Hartford area, at the conclusion of the outreach campaign, material audits found an 11 percent increase in the weight of plastic bags collected; a 7 percent increase in all other film, including wrap, bread bags, newspaper bags and more; and a 23 percent decrease in contaminants.
In the latest report, WRAP states that the Connecticut results are “readily replicable” in WRAP campaigns targeting other areas.
Now, after tackling collection, the campaign will shift into the market development phase, encouraging residents, companies and governments to help increase demand for products made from recovered film.
“If we aren’t buying recycled, then we’re not really recycling,” said Sherrill Baldwin, environmental analyst with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Services (DEEP), in a press release.
This phase will include creating incentives for governments and companies to use recycled PE and other resins. The campaign will also expand the state’s recycled products directory, a project to share information with consumers and businesses so they know where to find products made with recycled plastic.
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2018/08/15/film-recovery-effort-shifts-focus-to-markets/
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(ACC Mentioned) This High-Yield Stock Plans to Cash In on the Next Big Thing in American Energy
Aug 16, 2018 | The Motley Fool
By Maxx Chatsko
The United States has certainly enjoyed the spoils of technological know-how and robust national energy infrastructure in the last decade or so. In a virtually overnight transformation, the country went from being the world's largest energy importer in 2005 to on the brink of becoming a net energy exporter. The expectation is for the incredible rise to continue for the foreseeable future, with booming crude oil production from the Permian Basin in West Texas suffocating pipelines, and natural gas production in the Appalachian region of the Northeast doubling in the next five years.
Yet, while crude oil and natural gas get all the headlines and glory, they're not the only products spawned from the shale energy revolution that will alter global trade flows. Less-appreciated natural gas liquids (NGLs) are quietly becoming the go-to inputs for world-class chemical manufacturing facilities right here in the United States. That creates significant growth opportunities up and down the industry's value chain -- and Enterprise Products Partners LP(NYSE:EPD) is uniquely positioned to capitalize both upstream and downstream.
American chemical production is about to soar
Natural gas is a mixture of various chemicals. The sought-after component of natural gas is methane (with one carbon atom), although several others -- ethane (two carbon atoms), propane (three carbon atoms), butane (four carbon atoms), and so on -- are present in lesser quantities. These are natural gas liquids.
While NGLs can be upgraded in petrochemical facilities to various building-block chemicals that power modern society (many everyday plastics and polymers are made from ethylene and propylene), they've historically been produced in such small quantities with such erratic prices that it never made much economic sense. Thus, petrochemical manufacturing is typically based on a petroleum byproduct called naphtha.
But booming American natural gas production has changed the calculus. The United States now pulls so much natural gas out of the ground that there's a steady and low-cost supply of NGLs, especially ethane. Because there's so little infrastructure to handle the byproduct, what can be exported is, and the rest -- up to 40% in 2016 -- simply gets sent through pipelines as dry natural gas for heating and power generation (called "ethane rejection" in industry jargon).
That's all about to change, as the global petrochemical manufacturing industry is finally catching up to the opportunity. According to the American Chemistry Council, since 2010 capital investments totaling around $181 billion have been announced for new petrochemical manufacturing capacity in the United States -- all of which plan to use low-cost ethane, propane, and butane as inputs. Over 62% of the financing is from a foreign company or includes a foreign partner, and many foreign companies worry that American NGLs will steal market share from more expensive naphtha, the global standard.
They might be right to be worried. Consider the expected growth in U.S. ethylene manufacturing facilities alone over the next five years or so:
Enterprise Products Partners will be all over the opportunity. 53% of the company's $5.2 billion in capital investments this year and next is slated for NGL projects. That includes processing facilities that will separate NGLs from natural gas, dedicated NGL pipelines with long-term contracts, and storage and export terminals for both NGLs and upgraded chemicals such as ethylene.
The opportunity will begin with the existing Aegis pipeline in Texas. While it boasts an ethane capacity of 425,000 barrels per day (BPD), the slow start of the American chemical manufacturing industry means it will only see 297,000 BPD of contracted volumes by the end of 2018. But that'll grow to 362,000 BPD in 2019.
In the second quarter of 2019 Aegis will be joined by the Shin Oak NGL pipeline, which will boast an initial capacity of 550,000 BPD. Enterprise Products Partners already has a deal in place to take 100% of NGL production from Apache's Alpine High acreage in West Texas, with minimum volumes of 205,000 BPD. The expansion of the Orla gas processing center, also expected to be completed by June 2019, will boost Enterprise Product Partners' Delaware Basin NGL production from just 50,000 BPD today to 200,000 BPD.
The combination of Aegis, Shin Oak, and Orla will allow Enterprise Products Partners to produce and supply NGLs, but those assets will be part of a larger network that gives the company an unprecedented advantage in America's budding petrochemical industry.
In 2019 a combination of storage assets, pipelines, and a massive export terminal will be connected for the first time. The system will aid the manufacture of over 12 billion pounds of ethylene per year and export up to 2.2 billion pounds of ethylene each year -- a healthy chunk of the domestic industry's excess production.
NGLs will grow this company's earnings and distribution
Put it all together, and Enterprise Products Partners is quietly poised to exploit one of the most under-discussed growth opportunities in American energy: the overnight rise of a state-of-the-art, low-cost petrochemical manufacturing base. That bodes well for unitholders relying on the stock's 5.9% payout, and for the business's ability to grow the distribution above and beyond its 3% year-over-year increase ($0.01 per unit) in 2018.
Management is expecting the increased earnings from growth projects to deliver enough free cash flow to self-fund 50% of growth capital expenditures in 2019, and potentially more in the future. Given that, this $63 billion company might be on the cusp of record financial flexibility. The ability to produce, supply, transport, and export NGLs and chemical products further down the value chain will play a major role.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/08/16/this-high-yield-stock-plans-to-cash-in-on-the-next.aspx
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EPA Vows to Improve Communication With Vulnerable Communities
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adrianne Appel
The EPA needs to do a better job telling neighborhoods about the dangers they face from nearby pollution, the agency’s head said. But that is a promise community advocates said they have heard before.
Communicating with neighborhoods about the risks of contamination will be a priority of the Environmental Protection Agency going forward, Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Aug. 15, speaking via video to a panel that advises the agency on environmental justice issues. He spotlighted the lead contamination crisis in Flint as one area in which the EPA failed to protect affected communities.
“How well or how poorly” the EPA discloses risks to residents has a big impact on entire communities, Wheeler told the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which met in Boston.
It is a familiar refrain from the EPA, council members said.
“Risk communication is often code for trying to minimize the danger” neighborhoods face, said Nicky Sheats, director of the Center for the Urban Environment at Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, N.J., and a member of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
“I’m sure that’s not what the acting administrator wants to communicate, but that’s what’s been communicated before,” Sheats said.
The EPA fell down on the job in communicating with residents in Flint, Mich., Wheeler said. A federal emergency was declared in Flint in 2016 due to dangerously high levels of lead in drinking water. Environmental justice neighborhoods are those that historically have been exposed to higher amounts of pollution, such as low-income communities and neighborhoods with a higher number of people of color.
Wheeler didn’t say how the EPA would improve its communication with communities.
It is important and a right of tribes that the EPA speak face-to-face with tribal members about important issues, Kelly Wright, waste management manager of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in the Northwest, said. The EPA “needs to go door-to-door” when trying to update neighborhoods about contamination nearby, Wright said.
Limited ResourcesThe EPA has limited resources and has tried to use technology, such as telephone conferences, to replace human-to-human communication, Alexandra Dunn, the EPA administrator in New England, said. “There’s not an easy answer,” said Dunn, who promised to meet with those on the panel who voiced concerns about the agency’s risk-communication policy.
The EPA could prioritize those those neighborhoods most in need of direct door-to-door communication about pollution, by considering factors such as which communities have the largest number of people at high risk and which communities have residents who speak a language other than English, Sacoby Wilson, director of the Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health Initiative at the University of Maryland, said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-vows-to-improve-communication-with-vulnerable-communities
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Coalition Decries Science Plan as Comment Period Nears End
Aug 15, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
A broad-based coalition of almost 80 advocacy organizations is asking acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to withdraw a proposed rule that could significantly restrict the types of scientific studies the agency uses in crafting new regulations.
"The damage inflicted by this rule would have far-reaching consequences beyond undermining EPA's scientific research processes," the coalition said in a letter this afternoon.
Among the consequences: weakened public health and environmental safeguards and less protection for communities "that already bear the brunt of environmental contamination and associated health impacts," the letter continued.
After noting that Wheeler told EPA staff last month that he would "seek the facts" before drawing conclusions, the letter ends by urging that he follow through on that pledge "by withdrawing this flawed proposal that would politicize science and prevent the agency from fulfilling its mission."
Signers include the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, which represents EPA workers in its Chicago-based Region 5; Moms Clean Air Force; and the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance. Leading the effort to put the letter together were the Union of Concerned Scientists and Earthjustice, a UCS representative said in an email.
It was dispatched to Wheeler one day before the deadline for written comments on the draft rule, officially titled "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science." Unveiled by then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt in late April, the proposal would generally limit EPA to using only studies for which the underlying research data "are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation," according to the text.
Pruitt had previously described the plan as geared toward bolstering public confidence in EPA's decisionmaking; critics say the real purpose is to curtail the use of research that might justify the case for stricter pollution standards.
Wheeler, who took over as acting EPA chief early last month following Pruitt's forced resignation, recently told E&E News that he would take "a hard look" at the proposal but added that he believed "the more information we put out to the public as far as what we're basing our regulations on, the better our regulations will be" (E&E News PM, July 13).
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/08/15/stories/1060094227
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McCaskill Criticizes Trump Administration Efforts To Cut EPA IG's Budget
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Rebecca Rainey
A top Senate Democrat is criticizing Trump administration proposals to cut funding for EPA's Office of Inspector General (IG), a move that may help preserve separate congressional spending plans that propose to increase the office's funds in fiscal year 2019 just as officials battle to address increased work loads due in part to inquiries into former Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (MI), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, issued an Aug. 15 report that makes the case that EPA and other agencies' IGs should be funded at least at their authorized funding levels, which is higher than levels proposed by the Trump administration in FY19.
She argues that President Trump's fiscal year 2019 budget, if enacted, would not provide sufficient funding for oversight of agencies including EPA, which is facing a proposed 8 percent cut from the administration request to its IG office.
“Cutting the budgets of independent watchdogs is deeply troubling and hinders the effort to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately,” said McCaskill, in a statement accompanying the Aug. 15 report. “Inspectors General contribute to the important job of curbing waste, fraud, and abuse at federal agencies, so it’s unconscionable that we would cut their budgets and decrease accountability, especially as we’re potentially increasing the budgets of some of the very same agencies they’re supposed to oversee.”
McCaskill's report notes that despite being authorized to spend $50 million in budget authority, the president's request only seeks to fund EPA's IG office at $46 million in FY19.
Appropriators have already pushed aside prior proposals from the Trump administration to cut funding to the office in FY18. Then, the administration sought to fund the office at $41.3 million, but appropriators ended up allocating $50.26 million for the IG office in the FY18 spending bill approved in March.
Earlier this month the Senate approved a “minibus” FY19 spending bill that maintained EPA's existing funding level for its IG office at $50.2 million.
And the House-version of EPA's spending bill, while cutting overall funding for the agency's budget, also maintained funding for the IG at close to FY18 enacted levels.
The differences between the two bills ensure that House and Senate lawmakers will have to confer for talks on how to resolve differences on the two funding measures and McCaskill's report may provide some fodder for Democrats and other IG supporters to preserve those funds -- or even negotiate increased funding -- especially in the wake of Pruitt's ethics scandals.
IG Workload
In an exclusive interview with Inside EPA in March, IG Arthur Elkins, Jr. and several top officials within his office noted the restriction that tight funding has already placed on the office's ability to pursue discretionary audits and evaluations of agency programs to uncover potential fraud, waste and abuse, because dwindling staffing and budgets means the IG must first focus on performing audit work mandated by statute.
Such requests to the IG had increased as the Trump administration declined to respond to dozens of oversight requests from Democrats, prompting an increase in the number of requests the lawmakers made to the IG.
In order to cope with budget cuts, the IG cut its staff from 289 full-time employees to 253. "In terms of the senior leadership team we started out with nine people and as of today we only have five," Elkins said.
Patrick Sullivan, the assistant IG for investigations, said in March that his team was facing a budget crunch that was restricting the office's ability to investigate non-criminal misconduct at the agency that could potentially uncover wrongdoing by EPA employees."I'm down approximately 15 agents from where I should be. I no longer have the luxury of looking at serious allegations of misconduct that are not criminal," he said.
Sullivan added that "a lot" of those investigations "don't have people to work them." As a result, he said, "we have to return those to the agency as a management inquiry," even though they really should be investigated by the IG because there is serious administrative misconduct alleged.
Although Pruitt resigned in July, the OIG is close to finishing at least four audits of Pruitt's ethics and spending practices during his tenure as administrator, which could potentially be released later this month.
McCaskill's report also analyzed the budget requests submitted by agency IGs to their individual agency heads when crafting that agency's budget request to the President. The IG Reform Act of 2008 allows IGs to submit comments regarding the final proposed budget level requested by their agency.
“Seven IGs at five major agencies are facing significant reductions to their budgets--totaling $63.4 million in cuts.
Additionally, under the president’s proposal, six other IGs would see budget increases that do not keep pace with increases to their agency’s budget -- resulting in a relative reduction in resources for these IGs,” the report says. “Many IGs expressed concerns about the adequacy of the funding levels proposed in the President’s FY19 budget."
The act also requires that the President’s budget document includes the IG’s initial budget request and any comments submitted on the request “if the Inspector General concludes that the budget submitted by the President would substantially inhibit the Inspector General from performing the duties of the office.”
McCaskill's report says that the President's budget request failed to meet these transparency requirements under the act because it did not include a “separate statement” of the initial requests from agency IGs. The analysis also found that of 11 IGs whose initial request was identified in their agency’s budget justification, nine had their initial request lowered during the budget process.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/mccaskill-criticizes-trump-administration-efforts-cut-epa-igs-budget
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(ACC Mentioned) Industry Backs TSCA New Chemical Review Plan Despite EPA Abandonment
Aug 16, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Dave Reynolds
Chemical and other manufacturers are aggressively defending EPA's draft framework for reviewing new chemicals under the revised toxics law, charging it is consistent with the law and sufficiently protective, even though the agency has signaled it will not implement the plan in the face of a lawsuit from environmentalists.
Given the draft policy's abandonment, the industries' defense, as well as their separate request for oral argument, appears to underscore business support for EPA's discretion to determine chemicals' risks and any resulting regulatory requirement, an argument that the agency and industry groups have long made.
At issue is EPA's draft “New Chemicals Decision-Making Framework” that proposed streamlining reviews, allowing the agency to proceed directly from premanufacture notices (PMNs) to issuing significant new use rules (SNURs) without using enforceable orders as an interim step in regulating new chemicals.
But the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued Jan. 5, arguing that the framework inappropriately narrows the scope of new chemical reviews to only the intended uses of a new chemical, while punting other reasonably anticipated uses to a SNUR.
They have signaled they believe the agency is required to regulate uses -- beyond those detailed in the PMN -- in enforcement orders that act as an interim step in regulating new chemical uses.
But in their Aug. 14 filing, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), intervenors in the case, NRDC v. EPA, fault advocates' claims that the framework glosses over a Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) requirement to consider “reasonably foreseen uses,” and backs SNURs as a mechanism for preventing chemical uses that pose unreasonable risk.
“EPA may reasonably make a 'not likely to present' determination based, in part, on the existence of a SNUR or its consideration of adopting a SNUR in the future, knowing that a SNUR would be effective in ensuring that appropriate restrictions would be implemented,”ACC and NAM say in their intervenor brief supporting EPA.
“Amended section 5 gives EPA the authority to make risk determinations, and Petitioner and Intervenor [Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families (SCHF)] are not entitled to substitute their judgment for EPA’s or to alter the statutory process,” the groups add.
In a separate Aug. 14 filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, ACC requests oral argument in the case.
And in a declaration, Michael Walls, ACC's vice president of regulatory and technical affairs, argues that EPA generally has time to craft a SNUR to prevent future chemical uses before they occur.
“Based on my knowledge of the industry, SNURs are effective in regulating the activities of prospective and actual manufacturers and processors of SNUR substances,” Walls says. “[B]oth the PMN submitter (in cases where no section 5(e) order is issued) and other manufacturers and processors of the SNUR substance are barred from engaging in the significant new uses for the substance unless and until they submit a [significant new use notice (SNUN)] and EPA completes its review.”
'Grossly Misread'
The suit is part of a wide-ranging effort to push back on the framework, with environmental groups and Democratic senators, arguing the agency's approach appears to skirt the law's requirements to consider a substance's “reasonably foreseen” uses.
NRDC, backed by intervenors Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, also has alleged procedural violations, noting statements from EPA officials that they had already started implementing the framework late last year.
But in a July 31 response, EPA defended its framework as consistent with the 2016 revised TSCA, and argued that petitioners lacked standing, in part, because the agency has not implemented the draft framework and may never.
Environmentalists have also faulted EPA's recent approval of the new polymer, known as Oxirane, 2-methyl-, polymer with oxirane, bis[2-[(1-oxo-2-propen-1-yl)amino]propyl] ether, for use as a deodorizer in a variety of products as indicating the agency has further weakened its process, approving new chemicals without an order or SNUR.
Industry attorneys have said that because the framework was only ever issued in draft form -- and may never be implemented -- the suit will likely face significant procedural hurdles.
Nonetheless, ACC and NAM are defending EPA's possibly defunct framework, arguing that petitioners lack standing to challenge the plan, which is consistent with TSCA and protective of human health and the environment.
ACC and NAM argue that environmentalists are seeking to distort TSCA, which gives EPA discretion to impose 5(e) consent orders before approving a chemical, and allows the agency to deem a chemical unlikely to present unreasonable risks based on a host of considerations, including that it may issue a future SNUR.
“Petitioner and Intervenor SCHF assert that whenever EPA has 'concerns' attributable to reasonably foreseeable conditions of use of potential future manufacturers and processors, it must make a 'may present an unreasonable risk' determination and issue a section 5(e) order to the PMN submitter,” industry says. “This grossly misreads section 5.”
The groups also say that companies face significant liability for violating the terms agreed to after EPA's PMN approval. They also back SNURs as strong protections that bind not only a PMN submitter but other future users as well.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/industry-backs-tsca-new-chemical-review-plan-despite-epa-abandonment
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It's Time for the EPA to Ban Asbestos Once and for All
Aug 15, 2018 | CNN
By Linda Reinstein
Nearly 40,000 Americans die from preventable asbestos-caused diseases every year, yet the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still hasn't banned this toxic substance.
Asbestos was once marketed as a "miracle mineral" for its flame-resistance, strength and flexibility to use in construction, but has since been revealed for what it truly is: a killer. Microscopic asbestos fibers can become trapped in our bodies, leading to deadly diseases years after original exposure. In short, there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos, but the toxic substance is still legal and lethal, at least in part, in the US.
The EPA attempted to ban asbestos in 1989 but was sued by Corrosion Proof Fittings -- a company that used asbestos in their products. And, in 1991, an appeals court overturned the ban. Ultimately, the EPA was only able to ban five obsolete asbestos-containing products and any new commercial uses.
Not only has this allowed old construction containing poisonous asbestos to stand, but it left gaping holes through which 31 million metric tons of asbestos are imported into the US ever year. Companies can legally import products that contain asbestos, including some crayons and makeup.
Over the course of the last 25 years, thousands of Americans, including my husband, became sick and died of asbestos-induced illnesses. It's high time to close the loopholes and impose a complete ban on asbestos -- and that opportunity is now before us.
In 2016, Congress came together in a rare act of bipartisanship and rewrote the chemical regulations law. The updated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) finally gave the EPA the regulatory authority to protect us from dangerous toxic substances like asbestos. When it was signed into law, President Barack Obama remarked the much-needed legislation was a necessary step forward, saying, "The [old] system was so complex, it was so burdensome that our country hasn't even been able to uphold a ban on asbestos."
The EPA attempted to ban asbestos in 1989 but was sued by Corrosion Proof Fittings -- a company that used asbestos in their products. And, in 1991, an appeals court overturned the ban. Ultimately, the EPA was only able to ban five obsolete asbestos-containing products and any new commercial uses.
Not only has this allowed old construction containing poisonous asbestos to stand, but it left gaping holes through which 31 million metric tons of asbestos are imported into the US ever year. Companies can legally import products that contain asbestos, including some crayons and makeup.
Over the course of the last 25 years, thousands of Americans, including my husband, became sick and died of asbestos-induced illnesses. It's high time to close the loopholes and impose a complete ban on asbestos -- and that opportunity is now before us.
In 2016, Congress came together in a rare act of bipartisanship and rewrote the chemical regulations law. The updated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) finally gave the EPA the regulatory authority to protect us from dangerous toxic substances like asbestos. When it was signed into law, President Barack Obama remarked the much-needed legislation was a necessary step forward, saying, "The [old] system was so complex, it was so burdensome that our country hasn't even been able to uphold a ban on asbestos."
As a mesothelioma widow and advocate, I was encouraged. Surely this meant an asbestos ban, like those more than 60 countries have put in place, was imminent. Then Donald Trump was elected.
Trump has a long-standing and well-documented love for asbestos. On Twitter, in congressional hearings and as an author, he has professed his love for killer asbestos.
Why would the President praise a lethal mineral that kills thousands of Americans every year? It's unclear. But we do know the biggest producer and exporter of asbestos: Russia. The Russian asbestos producer Uralasbest, which of course has ties to President Putin, even brags about Trump's support. They recently posted a photo of tons of raw asbestos wrapped and ready to export with a seal of approval that read: "Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States."
Given this reality, I am hardly surprised that Trump's EPA is on the brink of giving up this historic opportunity to ban asbestos.
In June, the EPA released its new formulation for how it would regulate asbestos, announcing it would ignore legacy uses of the mineral. This means the EPA will not evaluate the risk from asbestos in our homes, schools, workplaces and already built infrastructure. Our firefighters are left at risk as they become exposed to older infrastructure. The 25.6 million pounds of asbestos that are disposed of each year -- left in landfills near where people live -- will also be ignored in risk evaluation.
Further, the EPA has dangerously decided to limit the scope of their systematic review to only lung cancer and mesothelioma -- which ignores exposures and deaths from ovarian and laryngeal cancers and asbestosis.
Taken together, these limitations dangerously undercalculate the risks posed by asbestos. Recently released emails from career EPA officials confirm this change was shocking -- and is dangerous. One staffer, writing to his colleagues, noted, "The new approach raises significant concerns about the potential health impacts."
Even worse, without a ban, the EPA will continue to allow imports of both raw asbestos and contaminated products -- including crayons and makeup for kids -- letting the millions of tons of asbestos already threatening our health only continue to build up.
Since its peak in the 1970s, asbestos has progressively become so unpopular that only one industry -- a division of the chemical industry that makes chlorine -- continues to use it in the US.
Industry after industry has turned away from asbestos, and not because it is illegal, expensive or difficult to obtain -- it is none of those things. They have stopped using it because the health risks are so great that the liability of continued use is unmanageable. Asbestos has poisoned and kills too many workers, and any manufacturer with half a conscience switched to safer substitutes long ago.
As an EPA attorney recently noted in an email discussing the Trump administration's change of plans, "Asbestos is an extremely dangerous substance with no safe exposure amount."
That's why when it comes to ending the deadly asbestos trade in America, nothing short of an exemption-free ban on imports will suffice. The EPA needs to utilize its power under the TSCA to protect the health of the American people, not the profits of chemical companies and Russian asbestos producers. The time is now for Congress to hold the EPA accountable and demand they do their job.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/15/opinions/trump-epa-needs-full-asbestos-ban-reinstein/index.html
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US EPA Received 31 PMNs in May
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA received 31 pre-manufacture notices (PMNs) in May. Nineteen of these had the manufacturer’s identity withheld as confidential.
The submissions comprised 15 new PMNs, and 16 that were amended versions of a previously submitted one.
During this period, the agency also received 52 notices of commencement (NOCs). And it received test data in support of the PMNs of 11 substances.
The EPA reported its May updates to the new substance programme in a 14 August Federal Registernotice.
Under section 5 of TSCA, any person who intends to manufacture or import a new chemical substance for a non-exempt commercial purpose must provide the EPA with a PMN before initiating the activity. The agency will review the notice, make a risk determination and take appropriate action.
https://chemicalwatch.com/69769/us-epa-received-31-pmns-in-may
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Monsanto’s Glyphosate Appeal Denied by California Supreme Court
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Joyce E. Cutler
Monsanto Co.'s challenge to California’s decision to list the popular herbicide glyphosate as a known carcinogen won’t head to the state’s highest court.
Monsanto, bought by Bayer AG for $63 billion, argued that California shouldn’t have relied on a 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer report when the state concluded that glyphosate is a “probable” carcinogen that should be added to the state hazards list. Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, is the world’s most widely used pesticide.
The California Court of Appeal, Fifth District, rejected that argument in April. Monsanto in May appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
Justices during their weekly meeting Aug. 15 denied review, with Justice Ming Chin voting for review, according to the docket.
The California Supreme Court’s decision comes less than a week after a San Francisco state jury awarded a former groundskeeper $289 million on his claim that exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkillers caused his terminal cancer. There are thousands of additional cases pending against Monsanto over glyphosate.
Monsanto, in an Aug. 15 statement, said it is considering options for further legal action.
“There is no scientific basis to list glyphosate under Prop 65,” the company said. “The listing contradicts 40 years of science and the conclusions of regulatory bodies around the world.”
The case is Monsanto Co. v. Office of Envtl. Health Hazard Assessment, Cal., No. S249056, 8/15/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/monsantos-glyphosate-appeal-denied-by-california-supreme-court-1
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EPA Nears Release of GenX Toxicity Values
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
A top EPA water official is reiterating that the agency hopes by September to release a toxicity value for GenX, a newer chemical in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) class that is being found in the Cape Fear River and drinking water in North Carolina, a measure that other states can use to set regulatory and other standards.
According to The Fayetteville Observer, Peter Grevatt, the director of EPA's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water and the top official on PFAS policy, told the agency's fourth regional meeting with communities on the chemicals that EPA plans to base the GenX toxicity value on data from industry, states and academia and subject it to an independent peer review prior to a public release.
“States can use that to shape their decision making,” Grevatt told attendees at EPA's PFAS engagement meeting in Fayetteville, NC, Aug. 14, according to the article.
He added that the agency supports the 140 parts per trillion (ppt) provisional health goal the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has set for the chemical, the article says, though it does not say if he gave any indication of any level that EPA may adopt.
EPA has previously said it planned to develop human health toxicity values for GenX and perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS) by this summer.
The agency also plans to release the PFBS draft toxicity assessment, along with the one for GenX, for public comment by next month, an EPA spokesperson says. After the public comment period, the agency plans to evaluate comments and revise and finalize the assessment, the spokesperson says. Both EPA programs and state agencies will then have access to the values as tools “to address GenX and PFBS contamination concerns in a variety of exposure scenarios,” the spokesperson says.
GenX is a replacement for an older PFAS chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), that manufacturers agreed to phase out by 2015.
But it has become a potent issue in North Carolina where it has been found in the Cape Fear River, a source of drinking water for four counties in the state. PFAS -- known for their non-stick qualities -- have been used in a variety of consumer and industrial applications, but the chemicals have been linked to various adverse health effects, including certain cancers, ulcerative colitis and thyroid disease.
GenX's producer, Chemours, manufactures the substance at a facility near Fayetteville, where concerns about levels of runoff and air emissions from the facility have led to monitoring and other actions from the state's environmental regulator.
In slides presented at the Aug. 14 forum, Linda Culpepper, a water official in the state's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), showed graphs indicating wastewater outfall from the Chemours' plant reached more than 1,400 ppt in one 2018 sampling event, and in 2017 and 2018 samplings, the level of GenX was between 25 and 55 ppt in one drinking water system.
Culpepper also reported that in data collected between September 2017 and June 2018, the state found 164 exceedances of the GenX health goal in private drinking water wells.
Her slides describe a “path forward” for PFAS that includes chemical analysis to “develop and harmonize existing test methods” for wastewater, sediment, soil, food, air emissions, blood serum and urine. And the path forward includes research on both human health and ecological toxicity, including conducting rapid bioassays, determining additive and synergistic effects from chemical mixtures, weighing “the need for new wastewater Whole Effluent Toxicity methods for aquatic toxicology,” considering bioaccumulation occurring in the food chain and developing toxicity bench marks such as reference doses.
Air emissions stemming from PFAS were also raised at the Aug. 14 meeting. According to another article in the Observer, Mike Abraczinskas, who heads DEQ's air quality division, asked the agency to create methods for measuring PFAS in the air, noting that the state had to develop a customized method to evaluate the levels of GenX from the plant's smokestacks.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/epa-nears-release-genx-toxicity-values
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US EPA Received 31 PMNs in May
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA received 31 pre-manufacture notices (PMNs) in May. Nineteen of these had the manufacturer’s identity withheld as confidential.
The submissions comprised 15 new PMNs, and 16 that were amended versions of a previously submitted one.
During this period, the agency also received 52 notices of commencement (NOCs). And it received test data in support of the PMNs of 11 substances.
The EPA reported its May updates to the new substance programme in a 14 August Federal Register notice.
Under section 5 of TSCA, any person who intends to manufacture or import a new chemical substance for a non-exempt commercial purpose must provide the EPA with a PMN before initiating the activity. The agency will review the notice, make a risk determination and take appropriate action.
https://chemicalwatch.com/69769/us-epa-received-31-pmns-in-may
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The Netherlands, Echa Propose Restriction on PAHs in Rubber Crumb
Aug 16, 2018 | Chemical Watch
Echa has published a joint proposal with the Netherlands to restrict concentration limits of polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in rubber crumb used for play and sporting applications.
The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), in cooperation with Echa, says the general concentration limits set under REACH for eight carcinogenic PAHs in mixtures are "insufficient" for protecting those who come into contact with the granules and mulches while playing at sports facilities and on playgrounds.
The proposal suggests a combined concentration limit for the eight PAHs of 17mg/kg (0.0017% by weight). The current concentration limits applicable for supply to the general public are set at 100mg/kg for two of the PAHs and 1,000mg/kg for the other six.
The eight PAHs are:
· benzo[a]pyrene (BaP);
· benzo[e]pyrene (BeP);
· benzo[a]anthracene (BaA);
· chrysen (CHR);
· benzo[b]fluoranthene (BbFA);
· benzo[j]fluoranthene (BjFA);
· benzo[k]fluoranthene (BkFA); and
· dibenzo[a,h]anthracene (DBAhA).
Protection
Under its assessment, RIVM looked at the health risk for professional football players, children playing on the pitches and playgrounds, as well as workers installing and maintaining them.
According to the proposal, the suggested reduction in the concentration limit would ensure the cancer risk from PAH exposure remains "very low" for those coming into contact with the granules and mulches. It would also decrease societal concerns about the negative health impacts caused by the substances.
The reduction would not lead to major additional administrative burdens on public authorities in terms of costs for implementing the lower concentration limit, the proposal added. And it would generate "relatively limited and affordable" societal costs.
Last year Echa concluded that there was a "very low" level of concern from PAHs present in these materials. However, the agency also gave a number of recommendations to be considered for the future – including a restriction under REACH.
Next steps
Echa’s risk assessment and socio-economic analysis committees (Rac and Seac) will now check whether the restriction dossier conforms to REACH requirements. If they find it does, a six-month consultation will begin in September. The scientific committees will assess the proposal, formulate opinions and submit them to the European Commission.
The Commission has also requested that the agency assess the health risks of other substances that may be contained in granules and mulches used as infill in synthetic sports pitches. Echa says it is "possible" it will assess the environmental risks as well.
More regulatory authorities have turned their eyes to rubber crumb recently. Last month, the Swedish Chemicals Agency said that newly installed artificial turf should not be made from rubber crumb containing hazardous substances.
Meanwhile in June last year, the US EPA and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) requested authorisation to complete information collection activities in order to support its investigation of crumb rubber infill.
https://chemicalwatch.com/69778/the-netherlands-echa-propose-restriction-on-pahs-in-rubber-crumb
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Oil Industry Targets Florida in New Offshore Drilling Advocacy Push
Aug 15, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The oil industry is undertaking a new public relations campaign to push for offshore drilling along Florida’s coast.
The American Petroleum Institute’s Explore Offshore program, launched in June to promote offshore drilling, held its first Florida event Wednesday.
The Trump administration’s January proposal to allow offshore oil and natural gas drilling all along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts met strong opposition in many places, but it was especially widespread in Florida.
That quickly prompted Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to promise that no drilling would be allowed in the water near either side of Florida.
But the oil industry has nonetheless pushed for some compromise, including allowing some new drilling with a large margin around the state.
“Our American way of life and the freedoms we enjoy are undoubtedly linked to access to affordable, reliable energy. At the same time, 94 percent of America’s offshore energy resources are completely off-limits to natural gas and oil development, disallowing hundreds of thousands of American jobs and abundant domestic energy supply, and keeping us reliant on foreign sources,” Jim Nicholson, co-chairman of Explore Offshore, said in a statement.
“Affordable energy is critical to the quality of life in the Sunshine State,” said Jeff Kottkamp, the Florida co-chairman for the campaign and a former Republican lieutenant governor of the state.
“We are speaking with our local leaders throughout Florida to discuss ways to maintain our state’s natural beauty and meet the energy needs of our growing population of over 20 million residents and 110 million annual visitors.”
At the event, Nicholson said that with the drilling the industry wants, there would be no rigs visible from the shore.
“Most of these offshore reserves are the same distance from land as that of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. There’s little or no chance of this exploration being visible from coastal lands,” he said at the Tallahassee event, according to radio station WJCT.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/401995-oil-industry-targets-florida-in-new-offshore-drilling-advocacy-push
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Oil Companies Ask Florida Lawmakers to Unlock Offshore Drilling
Aug 16, 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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Fewer Than 1 Percent of Offshore Drilling Tracts Auctioned by Trump Receive Bids
Aug 15, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green
Oil and gas companies bid on fewer than one percent of the offshore tracts made available by the Trump administration during an auction Wednesday.
Of the 14,622 tracts made available by the Interior department for bidding on 801,288 acres in federal waters off the Gulf of Mexico, only 144 received bids.
The percentage of tracts bid on was slightly less than the previous lease sale in March that leased just over 1 percent of tracts made available.
The last sale in March was the biggest offshore lease sale in United States history--with 77.3 million acres made available. The sale saw 33 companies bidding on plots off the cost of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida for $124.8 million. Of the 14,474 tracts available for bidding only 148 tracts received any bids.
The Obama administration held much smaller sales that focused only on areas where oil companies had expressed interest.
The administration Wednesday nevertheless hailed the latest sale as a success, promoting the nearly $180,000,000 in sales generated in a press release.
"Today’s lease sale is yet another step our nation has taken to achieve economic security and energy dominance,” Interior Deputy Secretary Bernhardt said in a statement. “The results from the lease sale will help secure well-paying offshore jobs for rig and platform workers, support staff onshore, and related industry jobs, while generating much-needed revenue to fund everything from conservation to infrastructure.”
Despite the revenue, the limited interest is a considerable blow to an administration that has been preaching the need to expand oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters in order to increase U.S. energy dependence and revenue. Fewer than 30 companies submitted bids.
In January Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced a desire to expand offshore drilling to new areas off the coast. The call met resistance from a number of state leaders opposed to opening up drilling off their coastlines. Zinke has yet to formally announce where new drilling might be but has acknowledged that oil and gas companies have more interest in plots located on land rather than offshore.
Critics say the bids shows a lack of interest by fossil fuel groups to invest in offshore drilling which is expensive, risky and not always profitable.
Environmental groups have also jumped on the lackluster results as proof that drilling is overall not desirable.
"When will Ryan Zinke finally get the message that it’s time to scrap his reckless offshore drilling plans? Millions of Americans and elected officials from both sides of the aisle have made it clear that the public does not want dangerous drilling off our coasts, and even corporate polluters aren’t buying what Zinke’s selling," Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s land protection program, said in a statement.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/401984-fewer-than1-percent-of-offshore-drilling-tracts-auctioned-by
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Lease Sale Shows 'Steady Interest' in Gulf
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke once promised that the federal government's March auction of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico would be a "bellwether" of oil and gas operators' desire to drill in new sections of the U.S. outer continental shelf.
Industry watchers classified yesterday's Lease Sale 251, likely one of the last before the Trump administration introduces its expanded five-year offshore leasing program, as a "barometer" of slow and steady recovery. Companies bid on less than 1 percent of the blocks the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management offered, but they shelled out more money — a total of $178 million, up from $125 million earlier this year — for the tracts (Greenwire, Aug. 15).
"The Gulf of Mexico is a long established oil and gas province and many of the blocks offered at today's sale have been offered many times before," Interior's principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Kate MacGregor, said in a statement yesterday. "Today's results demonstrate a steady interest as serious innovation and engineering continues to unlock new energy resources deep below the seabed."
While offshore firms largely bid on acreage near existing infrastructure during the March sale, companies yesterday demonstrated that they were willing to venture into new areas, said Mike Celata, BOEM's Gulf regional director.
"I think you see some companies willing to look at other opportunities," he told reporters on a conference call following yesterday's sale.
Equinor ASA and Exxon Mobil Corp. were among the companies that showed an interest in entering untested waters, William Turner, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, wrote in an analysis.
"This reflects the steady increase in oil price and competitive [return on investment] now due to much more efficient practices in the Gulf of Mexico," he wrote.
The day's high bid also reflected an increased appetite for risk, Turner said.
"The biggest surprise came from Hess with the highest bid of the round," he wrote. "It bid $25.9 million on a block in the heart of the Mississippi Canyon near BP's Na Kika offshore platform.
"Surprising as it is also near the Silvergate prospect, a dry hole."
The industry's renewed optimism is likely due to climbing oil prices, said Tommy Beaudreau, a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP and a former BOEM director under Obama.
"Industry is willing to spend on certain acreage, in good neighborhoods like Mississippi Canyon, that offer value," Beaudreau said of the companies bidding in Lease Sale 251. "But, the industry is staying disciplined, which I think is going to be really important for the Gulf of Mexico."
Despite the brightening outlook, industry groups like the National Ocean Industries Association and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA) recalled efforts to lower royalty rates on deepwater leases from 18.75 percent to 12.5 percent. Zinke declined to make that cut earlier this year, but he previously slashed the shallow-water rate.
"The cost of drilling, exploring and producing is much higher in the deep water, and we have a tremendous opportunity to provide a level playing field when it comes to royalty rates and the competitiveness of the Gulf," said LMOGA President Chris John. "Ultimately, reduced royalty rates will lead to an even greater increase in activity in the Gulf of Mexico, an increase in production, and an increase in much-needed oil and gas industry jobs and will fully support the administration's American energy dominance."
Courtroom action
Yesterday's lease sale renewed assertions from environmental groups that President Trump's BOEM is engaging in an aggressive sell-off of offshore blocks.
Green groups last month filed a lawsuit against Interior in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge the legality of lease sales 250 and 251 (Greenwire, July 17).
"This massive, climate-killing Gulf oil lease sale is reckless and unlawful," said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director with the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Trump administration is blowing off its duty to carefully study the impacts of the largest lease sale in history on ocean wildlife and a healthy, functioning planet. That's why we filed a lawsuit challenging the lease sale."
Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's lands protection program, called on Zinke to heed bipartisan opposition to Interior's draft proposed offshore leasing expansion (Energywire, Jan. 18).
"When will Ryan Zinke finally get the message that it's time to scrap his reckless offshore drilling plans?" Manuel asked. "Millions of Americans and elected officials from both sides of the aisle have made it clear that the public does not want dangerous drilling off our coasts, and even corporate polluters aren't buying what Zinke's selling.
"Zinke must finally take the hint and stop these ill-advised efforts to sell off our public lands and waters."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/16/stories/1060094249
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Oil and Gas Lines Not Being Inspected Annually, Group Alleges
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
The federal government hasn’t inspected pipelines running through public lands as required by law, an environmental group said in a lawsuit.
At least once a year, oil and gas pipelines and associated facilities on federal lands are supposed to be examined for leaks and other safety problems, but the Transportation Department and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration aren’t doing so, Rebecca Fischer, climate guardian for WildEarth Guardians in Denver, told Bloomberg Environment.
Some 120,000 miles of pipelines, primarily in the Western U.S. haven’t been inspected annually as required by the Mineral Leasing Act, the group said in a suit filed Aug. 14 in federal court in Montana.
Pipeline Moratorium SoughtThe suit asks the court to require PHMSA and the Transportation Department to “immediately identify all oil and gas pipelines and their associated facilities on federal lands, catalogue when they have last been examined, and ensure each segment and associated facility is examined at least annually in the future.”
A moratorium on new pipelines should be put in place until inspections are completed, Fischer said. “Our safety regulators are unfortunately asleep on the job,” she said.
A PHMSA spokesman told Bloomberg Environment the agency does not comment on pending litigation
Fischer said WildEarth Guardians learned from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests the Transportation Department has no documentation that any pipeline on public lands is being inspected annually.
The suit comes as the Trump administration is accelerating drilling and fracking on public lands, the group said.
The case is WildEarth Guardians v. Chao, D. Mont., No. 4:18-cv-00110-BMM, 8/14/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/oil-and-gas-lines-not-being-inspected-annually-group-alleges
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Trump's CO2 Rule Is Coming, and Industries Wonder Who's Next
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Zack Colman and Robin Bravender
Industries across the U.S. economy are closely watching for the Trump administration's plan to regulate power plant emissions — and wondering whether they're next.
EPA is expected to release its version of the Clean Power Plan in the coming days. It's expected to relax requirements to address climate change envisioned by former President Obama, who never saw his plan activated.
Now, under President Trump, the plan's public release could offer early hints about how the federal government might extend rules on emissions to oil refineries, metal producers, chemical makers and cement factories, all of which belch planet-warming gases into the atmosphere. Some industry representatives bet that it would be better to be regulated under Trump than a future president, especially a Democratic one.
"This is a precedent-setting exercise for future sectors," said Ross Eisenberg, vice president of energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. "I'm looking forward to seeing it because it will go a long way toward easing anxiety."
Industrial emitters have long expected to be regulated after the power sector. That's been the fear ever since the Supreme Court's decision in Massachusetts v. EPA gave EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act.
In 2010, the Obama administration agreed to issue greenhouse gas limits for power plants and refineries after EPA was threatened with lawsuits by environmental groups (Greenwire, Dec. 23, 2010).
But by 2014, then-EPA chief Gina McCarthy announced that the refinery rule might no longer be needed, given a separate EPA plan to limit toxic emissions and capture methane leaks at those facilities. EPA has not issued a rule to limit refineries' greenhouse gas emissions (Greenwire, Oct. 3, 2014).
But with Massachusetts v. EPA still on the books, a future administration — or even the Trump team — could eventually write rules to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources beyond power plants. So EPA's forthcoming plans for utilities are significant to others, too.
"We're carefully watching what is going to be done," said Howard Feldman, senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Petroleum Institute. "We are concerned about the precedent this sets for controls of greenhouse gases from stationary sources."
What's been more opaque is how EPA would craft those regulations and which sectors would get hit. The agency's rationale for focusing on the electricity sector first was straightforward — at the time, it was the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Transportation now wears that crown, though it's not a stationary source, and EPA doesn't regulate auto emissions under the same program as power plants.
The oil and gas industry — refineries, in particular — is expected to be next in line for regulations. Power plants are still the largest stationary source of U.S. carbon emissions, by far, according to 2016 EPA data. Refineries and chemical plants are runners-up.
"I would think that the oil gas and refinery industries are watching [the Clean Power Plan replacement] closely," said Joe Goffman, a top Obama EPA air official and an architect of the Clean Power Plan. He said industry groups made it clear under Obama "that they were opposed to using the kind of template that the agency used for utilities and applying it to their sector."Direct greenhouse gas emissions reported
by sector in 2016[+] EPA
He recalled opponents of the rule arguing that the precedent set by the Clean Power Plan could signal that EPA would drastically overhaul transportation fuels when it moved to regulate the oil and gas sector.
"That, I think, was akin to a child drawing pictures of monsters in order to scare herself, because in actual fact, the agency felt a great deal of constraint" when drafting that rule, Goffman said. The agency, he added, was careful to explain "why the approach that made sense to the utility industry was applicable to the utility industry and not applicable to other industries."
Goffman said there's irony in how industry asked EPA for compliance flexibility and then fought the agency's systemwide approach in the Clean Power Plan.
"If, in fact, the current EPA succeeds in its fence-line approach, it may really limit the agency's ability to offer either the utility industry or other industries flexibility on the compliance side," Goffman said. "This may absolutely be a 'be careful what you wish for' problem."
Many in industry would prefer a legislative approach to curbing emissions.
They say the Clean Air Act wasn't designed to handle carbon dioxide. Congress, though, has stalled on climate legislation for years. Some companies muse that they would rather take their chances with Trump regulating their sectors — assuming lawmakers remain hidebound — than leave it to a potential Democratic administration.
"In general, though, would we rather take our chances with a Republican administration than say one under a President [Elizabeth] Warren or [Kamala] Harris? Probably yes," a refining industry source said in an email, referring to the Democratic senators from Massachusetts and California, respectively.
Others are willing to take their chances with no regulations at all.
The major reason, as noted by one source in the oil and gas industry, is that the Clean Power Plan never took effect. The Supreme Court stayed the plan early in Trump's presidency. The better play is to lean on Congress, the source said. Even if that doesn't work, emissions could decline in the oil and gas sector in the interim, cooling the need for regulations, the source said.
"I don't think people think that that's a thing," the source said of asking the Trump administration to impose regulations. "I think on the larger question, people are looking at Congress."
Eisenberg, at the National Association of Manufacturers, also thinks Congress could produce some results. Developing sector-specific rules takes time and litigation adds to it, he noted. The lack of regulatory clarity has been problematic for his group's membership, as EPA never defined what it meant when an industry's emissions posed "significant endangerment."
Now, Eisenberg hopes the Trump proposal clearly delineates that metric to let sectors know "whether you're in or out" of the regulatory clutches.
"Given the urgency that many of us see to dealing with climate change, do we have that kind of time?" Eisenberg said. "So wouldn't this be better dealt with in some kind of legislative fashion?"
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/16/stories/1060094261
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Court Orders Trump Admin to Study New Route's Impacts
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Ellen M. Gilmer
The Keystone XL pipeline hit another legal snag last night after a federal court ordered the Trump administration to take a closer look at environmental impacts.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Montana ruled that the State Department must conduct a fresh analysis of the contentious oil pipeline's new route through Nebraska.
The agency approved a critical cross-border permit for Keystone XL shortly after President Trump took office, but Nebraska state regulators later in 2017 approved a revised route for the Canada-to-U.S. project.
The State Department had argued that the route change did not require the agency to revisit the 2014 National Environmental Policy Act analysis underpinning the cross-border permit because it had already been issued. The Montana court disagreed.
"Federal Defendants cannot escape their responsibility under NEPA to evaluate the Mainline Alternative route," wrote Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee.
"Federal Defendants first argued that it was too early to evaluate the Mainline Alternative route before the approval of the Presidential Permit," he continued. "They now argue that it remains too late to evaluate the Mainline Alternative route. NEPA requires a hard look."
Environmental groups opposed to the pipeline cheered the decision, saying it clouds the pipeline's future.
"This proposed project has been stalled for nearly a decade because it would be all risk and no reward, and despite the Trump administration's efforts, they cannot force this dirty tar sands pipeline on the American people," Sierra Club attorney Doug Hayes said in a statement. "It's time for TransCanada to give up on their Keystone XL pipe dream."
TransCanada has previously said it is still securing shippers for the pipeline but has gotten strong interest and is eager to move forward.
Existing analysis
The State Department has actually already completed one additional study of the alternative route, but it did so to support pending permitting decisions by the Bureau of Land Management and the Army Corps of Engineers, which have authority over public land rights of way and waterway crossings, respectively.
That analysis is currently open for public comment (Energywire, July 31).
It's unclear to what extent the agency can use that supplemental review to satisfy the new district court order. The decision requires the government to propose a schedule for updating its environmental analysis "that allows appropriate review before TransCanada's planned construction activities."
State Department officials were unable to comment on the ruling last night. Pipeline developer TransCanada Corp. said it was reviewing the decision.
The court's decision came in a partial summary judgment order favoring environmental groups opposed to Keystone XL. Additional legal issues, including allegations of other NEPA flaws and Endangered Species Act violations, are still pending.
Morris, the judge, declined to scrap the State Department's cross-border permit at this time. He noted that he would revisit the issue if TransCanada's construction plans progress faster than the State Department's analysis.
The company last week told the court that it planned to start pipeline construction in the second quarter of 2019. It hoped to begin tunneling over two major rivers as early as January (Energywire, Aug. 9).
"The Court will consider further remedies if circumstances change that do not allow review of the supplemental EIS before TransCanada's planned construction activities," Morris wrote yesterday.
TransCanada first applied for a cross-border permit for Keystone XL in 2008. After multiple rounds of environmental review, the Obama administration rejected the project in 2015. Trump moved to reverse that decision immediately after taking office.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/16/stories/1060094257
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Trump Blasts Cuomo Over Frack Ban in New York State
Aug 15, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Charlie Passut
President Trump, at a campaign stop in Upstate New York to support a Republican congresswoman seeking reelection, used his appearance as an opportunity to pillory Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his opposition to hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
Access to full text unavailable – subscription required.
Story can be found here: http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/115442-trump-blasts-cuomo-over-frack-ban-in-new-york-state?v=preview
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(ACC Mentioned) Trump Keeps Trying to Kill Agency That Investigates Chemical Plant Disasters
Aug 16, 2018 | Reveal
By William G. Schulz
On a warm morning in April, workers at a Wisconsin oil refinery were conducting a routine shutdown for maintenance. Suddenly, a gasoline cracking unit exploded, and the workers watched in horror as a huge fireball ripped through the plant. They ran for their lives, barely escaping the blast.
Debris from the explosion ruptured a tank, which spilled more than half a million gallons of hot asphalt that burst into flames and burned for nine hours. Black smoke spread over the port town of Superior. Eleven workers were injured, and about 40,000 people were evacuated from nearby homes and schools.
Within 24 hours of the explosion at the Husky Energy Inc. refinery, a small team of federal investigators arrived. Their mission, Superior Mayor Jim Paine reassured residents, was to “find out what happened and how we prevent it in the future.”
Earlier this month, after a three-month probe, the investigators from theU.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board concluded that a faulty valve at the plant caused the explosion. The board plans to issue recommendations that aim to prevent such an accident from happening again at a refinery.
But despite the warm welcome in Superior – and wide recognition of its expertise in chemical plant disasters – this small, independent federal agency is teetering on the brink of elimination.
The Trump administration has twice in its budgets attempted to shut down the Chemical Safety Board; so far, Congress has rejected the attempts. For the 2019 fiscal year, both the House and Senate have proposed restoring full funding.
But the assaults appear to be taking a toll. Hostility from the Trump administration and disarray from its efforts to eliminate the agency follow years of leadership turmoil and high turnover that started during the Obama administration. In 2015, its chairman, who was embroiled in a congressional investigation into poor management, resigned under pressure – yet leadership problems remain.
Combined, these problems threaten to cripple the agency’s investigations of chemical plant disasters, according to interviews and reports obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. A report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general says the turmoil “if not addressed, may seriously impede the agency’s ability to achieve its mission efficiently and effectively.”
The Trump administration argues that the Chemical Safety Board duplicates the work of other federal agencies. Administration budget documents also cite unspecified complaints from industry and other federal agencies about the board’s recommendations for new regulations of the chemical industry.
Health and safety advocates and labor unions say the board is essential because aging oil and chemical facilities have had some of the deadliest and costliest industrial accidents in the past two decades.
More than 12,000 plants store or handle toxic or flammable chemicals in the United States. Under worst-case scenarios for more than 2,500 of these facilities, between 10,000 and 1 million people could be harmed, according to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report. An estimated 4.6 million children at nearly 10,000 schools are within 1 mile of a plant that handles hazardous chemicals, according to the Center for Effective Government.
Local officials, including emergency responders, often have little information about the chemicals and safety conditions at the plants in their communities. The chemical industry keeps much of this information under wraps, invoking national security and a need to protect confidential business information.
“Millions of people live and work in the shadow of high-risk chemical plants that store and use highly hazardous chemicals,” said Jordan Barab, a former board investigator who now blogs about worker safety.
Little-known federal agency
Over its 20-year history, the Chemical Safety Board has investigated more than 150 explosions, fires and spills at chemical plants and oil refineries.
Included are the 2012 Chevron refinery fire in Richmond, California, which drove about 15,000 people to seek medical care, and the 2013 West Fertilizer Co. explosion in Texas, where 15 people, including 12 emergency responders, died and 350 homes were damaged or destroyed.
Similar to the National Transportation Safety Board, which probes airplane, ship and railroad accidents, the Chemical Safety Board has no regulatory authority and does not issue fines or prosecute companies. But its findings often point to problems that other agencies may act upon: It has issued 815 recommendations designed to prevent tragedies at oil and chemical plants.
Established by Congress in the wake of two chemical plant explosions in Texas that killed or injured more than 350 workers, the board has a staff of 35 and a budget of $11 million a year – miniscule compared with other federal agencies. For the next fiscal year, the House has proposed $12 million in funding, while the Senate has proposed $11 million.
Mike Wright, director of health, safety and environment for the United Steelworkers, has called the board “one of the best bargains in Washington. If it has prevented even one accident, it has saved far more money than its budget over its entire history.”
The Trump administration has justified its proposal to eliminate the agency by saying other agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the EPA, already do similar investigative work.
“Congress intended CSB to be an investigative arm that is wholly independent of the rulemaking, inspection, and enforcement authorities of its partner agencies,” according to Trump administration budgetdocuments. “While CSB has done some useful work on its investigations, its overlap with other agency investigative authorities has often generated friction. The previous management sought to focus CSB’s recommendations on the need for greater regulation of industry, which frustrated both regulators and industry.”
There apparently was friction between two federal agencies during the investigation of the West Fertilizer disaster in Texas. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that the cause was arson, while the Chemical Safety Board reported that unsafe storage practices for combustible materials contributed to the explosion and a lack of sprinklers spread the flames. The bureau kept Chemical Safety Board investigators away from the site for four weeks, which hampered their ability to investigate the explosion, according to a board report.
The White House did not disclose any evidence that industry groups or companies have complained about the board’s investigations or recommendations.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical companies, told Reveal in a statement that its members “find considerable value in the CSB’s work – especially the reports and materials generated by the Board as part of its investigations.” The investigations “raise industry awareness to potential problems” and “have benefitted ACC, its members and the public.” The industry group, however, declined to answer questions.
But former board Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso, who resigned under pressure in 2015, blames his ouster on retaliation by some Republican members of Congress for his agency’s aggressive investigations of oil company accidents, including the 2010Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico; the 2010 Tesoro refinery accident in Anacortes, Washington; and the 2012 Chevron refinery fire in California.
In those three investigations, the board made recommendations “that were opposed by industry groups … and their friendly congressmen in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Moure-Eraso said. The overarching recommendation was that federal regulations should require refineries and offshore oil platforms to continually meet higher safety standards and reduce risk.
Moure-Eraso said industry groups welcome investigations because they improve safety for their workers and neighbors. But, he added, the groups oppose some of the board’s recommendations.
“When changes on improving protections require regulation, the support abruptly ends,” he said.
For example, after the Texas fertilizer plant explosion, the Obama administration enacted safety measures requiring more detailed public reporting of chemical hazards and improved safety training. But under President Donald Trump, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt moved to rescind most of the new rules, saying they would cost the industry too much – an estimated $88 million a year – and could make public information about chemical plants that would be useful to terrorists.
Moure-Eraso said the board’s highly technical investigations are not duplicated by federal regulatory agencies, which “obviously have failed to prevent some major chemical accidents.”
The EPA inspector general’s office under the Trump administration appears to agree. In a June report, the office said the board’s work complements other agencies’ work because “the root causes of an incident go beyond whether there was a violation of a regulation.”
Adam Carlesco, staff counsel for the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents government employees, said the chemical industry has stalled efforts to improve reporting of chemical plant accidents.
His group has sued to enforce a part of the board’s statutory authority that says it must compel companies to report plant accidents directly to the board. When the board tried to do this in 2009, industry groups called it burdensome. The pushback eventually led the board to drop the effort.
‘Agency in disarray’
During the Obama administration, two House committees investigatedcharges that the board under Moure-Eraso had an abusive and hostile work environment and conspired to punish agency whistleblowers. No details about the whistleblowers were released publicly.
Also, the EPA’s inspector general criticized the number and pace of investigations. A 2014 report by the two House committees called it an “agency in disarray.”
The turmoil continues. Since January, the board has lost seven of its 18 investigators. In June, its chairwoman since 2015, Vanessa Sutherland,resigned and took a vice presidency job with a railroad company. And the EPA inspector general’s June report identified more mismanagement problems, including evidence that an unidentified board member improperly shared information with a labor union representative.
The inspector general’s office reported “negative impact from the President’s continued proposal to eliminate the agency.”
“This budget uncertainty impedes the CSB’s ability to attract, hire and retain staff,” according to the report, which added that the board “should continue to work with Congress toward achieving funding needs wherever possible.”
Earlier this month, U.S. Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., chairman of the Interior, Energy and Environment Subcommittee,wrote the White House asking that Trump nominate a new chairman because the vacancy “could plunge the agency into further chaos.”
The board members and chairman are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
“Recent reports indicate mismanagement and improper conduct continue to undermine the CSB’s mission,” the congressmen wrote.
Living in fear in Superior
Debates about budgets and board leadership are not much of a balm for people who live with oil and chemical plants in their communities.
Residents of the Twin Ports area – the cities of Superior, population 27,000, and Duluth, Minnesota – still live in fear of the Husky Energy plant after the April accident.
Those who live near the refinery said the explosion was so powerful that they could feel the detonation. They now understand a harsh reality shared by millions of Americans: An accident at a chemical plant or refinery in their community could level their homes or injure them with toxic gases or smoke.
“I watched this … scary thing happen off my back porch,” Superior resident Renee Goodrich said at a City Council meeting a few days after the accident.
“Looking back, the normal pace of that day was terrifying,” said resident Gabriela Vo. “Were the citizens of Pompeii just going about their daily lives when the fateful volcano erupted? The smoke alone was enough to raise health concerns, let alone the possibility of the town blowing up.”
The black smoke posed some health risks due to high concentrations of fine particles, but after it cleared, monitoring by company and county officials showed no air pollutants violated health standards.
Husky pledged cooperation and transparency with officials, and the Chemical Safety Board investigators said the company granted them full access to its plant and records. The company declined to answer questions from Reveal, citing the ongoing investigation.
The investigators concluded that a worn-out valve in a fluid catalytic cracking unit – equipment used to refine gasoline – allowed air to contact flammable chemicals, triggering the explosion. The board now is developing its recommendations on how to avoid such accidents.
It could have been a catastrophe: The board’s investigators reported that debris flew 200 feet into an asphalt tank. A storage tank filled with highly toxic hydrogen fluoride sits in the same area, just 150 feet away from the cracking unit that exploded. It was undamaged. If it had ruptured, the fumes could have caused severe injuries or deaths.
The company said the plant has a system of safeguards that would have prevented release of the gas, which is used to make high-octane gasoline, even if the tank had been punctured.
“The (hydrogen fluoride) storage tank is designed with multiple protection levels including a dedicated deluge system that douses the tank with a water curtain to keep it cooled and mitigate potential releases,” the company said in a statement.
But many locals – including Pat Farrell, a University of Minnesota Duluth soil scientist who is pushing for safety changes – think the town got lucky.
“One piece of shrapnel would have been all that was necessary for a major disaster, the scale of which the Twin Ports here have never seen,” Farrell said.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/trump-keeps-trying-to-kill-chemical-safety-board/
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Texas, Refineries Urged to Plan Storm Shutdowns to Cut Pollution
Aug 16, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Timothy Gardner
Texas environment regulators should coordinate shutdowns of oil refineries and other petrochemical plants during major storms to avoid big releases of air pollution like during last year's Hurricane Harvey, a report said on Thursday.
A year ago Harvey dumped more than 60 inches (1.5 meters) of rain on southeastern Texas, halting refineries that produce a quarter of U.S. fuel and damaging infrastructure.
Texas industry, including refineries and petrochemical plants, released an extra 8.3 million pounds (3.8 million kg) of air pollutants including cancer-causing benzene, during Harvey, said the report by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project.
(The report, called "Preparing for the Next Storm" can be seen at: https://bit.ly/2Mkw1Ur)
Most of that pollution was released in the Houston area, where refineries did not shut until the rains arrived, three days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a warning for coastal counties. Much of that pollution resulted from equipment malfunctions and electrical outages, emissions that could have been avoided if the state coordinated early shutdowns, the report said. In Corpus Christi, refineries that shut before rains came released less pollution on average, the report said.
Houston suffered three high ozone days, which can be dangerous for people with lung and heart conditions, following Harvey, including the worst day for smog in Texas in 2017.
"The state should take a more hands-on approach for future storms because with climate change we are going to have more storms like this," said Tom Pelton, a spokesman at the EIP, headed by former Environmental Protection Agency director of civil enforcement, Eric Schaeffer.
The report recommended that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality "plan, coordinate and stagger the often- complicated shutdowns of major industrial facilities during hurricanes and other disasters, as well as the subsequent restarting of plants," to reduce pollution.
It also recommended that the state not suspend pollution reporting requirements during future natural disasters as it did for months after Harvey.
TCEQ spokesman Brian McGovern said every storm is unique and every plant is unique, so developing a one-size-fits-all approach "would be a virtually impossible task."EDITORS’ PICKSFrom a Space Station in Argentina, China Expands Its Reach in Latin AmericaTransforming Tulsa, Starting with a ParkThe Water Wars of Arizona
Refining companies should invest in robust backup power generation systems and the best available pollution controls to reduce emissions during storms, EIP said.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry group, had no immediate comment on the report's recommendations and wanted to review the entire report before responding, spokesman Michael Frohlich said.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/08/16/business/16reuters-usa-weather-refinery-operations.html
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The Key to Trump’s Climate Reversal? New Math
Aug 16, 2018 | Politico
By Alex Guillen and Emily Holden
The Trump administration’s attempt to reverse Barack Obama’s most sweeping climate regulation rests on a legally risky strategy — redoing the calculations of how much the rule would cost and who would benefit.
The EPA’s proposed replacement is expected to downplay the money that people and businesses would save from using less electricity, a key feature of the Obama-era greenhouse rule for power plants. People tracking the issue also expect that the agency will count only a fraction of the improvements in public health from reduced smog and soot pollution, and won’t consider any benefits from slowing climate change outside the U.S.
The upshot: President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will argue that the Obama administration’s rule had more costs and fewer benefits than previously stated, a change to help improve the comparison when it unveils its own, much less ambitious power plant proposal as soon as next week.
The Obama administration had estimated that the benefits from its 2015 rule would outstrip the costs by $26 billion to $45 billion by 2030.
Supporters of the Obama version say those net benefits could be even higher now, because states are on track to meet the climate goals and the costs of clean energy have continued to plummet. And they warn that repealing the regulation could keep older, more expensive coal-fired power plants in operation, adding to consumers’ costs.
The math could be crucial to the success or failure of a number of Trump rules. That could make the rollbacks legally vulnerable when environmental advocates and states sue to overturn Trump’s action, critics of the new proposals say.
“They are cooking the books on technical analysis to try to justify preconceived conclusions that these regulations are bad,” said David Doniger, the senior strategic director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate program who was influential in the Obama EPA’s crafting of the original rule.
EPA did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Trump administration lawyers reviewing the replacement are already struggling with how to defend a rule that could cost electricity users money but would not do much to address climate change or air pollution, according to a person aware of conversations between the White House and the Justice Department. DOJ would be charged with defending the rule in court.
POLITICO has examined a portion of the agency’s unpublished draft of the new rule, which would allow states to write their own modest regulations for coal plants or even let plant operators seek to opt out entirely, according to a source with knowledge of the broader proposal.
The proposed rewrite of the power plant rule is part of a pattern: Critics say similarly fuzzy math underlies other Trump administration proposals to reverse or stymie action on climate change, such as a recent plan by EPA and the Department of Transportation to halt a planned tightening of fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks.
Sean Donahue, an environmental lawyer who has represented groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, said he would expect a court to be “very skeptical" of any effort that looks as though EPA is trying to evade its obligation to regulate greenhouse gases. But he conceded that will depend on the details of EPA’s power plant proposal.
“If it were one or two technical judgments where there’s a difference between this administration and the last one, or this administration and prior consistent practice, that would be one thing,” Donahue said. “But it’s many, many things, all pointing the same way, all pointing toward rolling back greenhouse gas mitigation efforts.”
Trump has repeatedly expressed doubts about man-made climate change, and much of his Cabinet shares a similar view. In contrast, the federal government’s own scientific assessment finds that human-caused climate change will not only raise temperatures but also make extreme weather more dangerous and lift sea levels by 1 to 4 feet by the end of the century.
Kate Larsen, director of economic research firm Rhodium Group, said the Trump administration’s justifications for unraveling climate change policies are symptomatic of its broader governing principles.
“A decision we make today is narrowly focused on the impacts to myself and my immediate neighbor in the next week, but you’re not taking into account impacts next year and the following year to yourself, your neighbor, the entire community,” she said.
Environmental experts are also scrutinizing the auto rule proposal, released earlier this month, which would freeze the Obama administration’s aggressive fuel economy standards after 2020 and dial back EPA greenhouse gas rules to match.
EPA and DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration argued that the freeze would save billions of dollars in costs. Critics say the administration overestimated compliance costs of the Obama-era auto targets by as much as fourfold, which could significantly tip the cost-benefit analysis in their favor. Another claim that the Trump rollback would save more than 1,000 lives per year — yielding benefits of $77 billion — has also drawn skepticism.
On Tuesday, EPA released a June memo that showed agency staff criticizing a number of “unrealistic” aspects of NHTSA’s modeling. They disagreed with the proposal’s fatality figures, with EPA staff estimating deaths would increase slightly under the freeze. And they thought the rule overestimated compliance costs and the time needed to recoup those costs in fuel savings, all factors that boosted benefits and lowered costs for the proposed freeze. Both EPA and NHTSA dismissed the memo as only one part of a complex review process.
The administration and industry groups have blasted the Obama administration’s use of “co-benefits” — the benefits in improved health or reduced pollution that arise even when they're not the primary aim of a regulation. (One example: Cutting coal plants’ carbon dioxide pollution under the power plant regulation would’'t do much directly to improve people’s health, but it would reduce smog.) But Donahue argued that Trump’s regulators sometimes lean on co-benefits to help build the case for their rollbacks.
For example, NHTSA’s modeling credits changes in consumer behavior as the overwhelming factor behind all the lives that the Trump administration contends its auto rollback would save. The agencies argue that under the previous Obama rule, drivers would be more likely to remain in older, more dangerous cars than purchase more expensive, safer ones.
That “would seem to be a co-benefits argument, since the EPA doesn’t have, and NHTSA doesn’t have, the authority to regulate used cars,” said Donahue, who called the paradox “sort of entertaining.”
Counting co-benefits is a long-standing practice for federal regulators, but energy industry groups and Republican state officials grew incensed by the Obama administration’s use of it to justify major regulations.
“The co-benefits thing has ballooned into the biggest scandal in environmental regulation,” said the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s post-election transition team at EPA. “You get very small direct benefits, but you make up, essentially, a lot of co-benefits.”
Still, he contended that EPA’s withdrawal of Obama’s power plant rule would eliminate a huge amount of costs in the coming years, saying Obama’s regulation represented “just the first emissions cuts.”
“There were going to be more beyond that if the Obama administration had been succeeded by the Clinton administration,” Ebell said. He added: “By cutting it off in the way that they’re doing, we’re avoiding immense future costs.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/16/trump-climate-change-obama-cost-benefits-740455
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Phillips 66 Agrees to Cut Ozone-Forming Emissions at Illinois Plant
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Phillips 66 Co. says it will spend at least $10 million at its Roxana, Ill.-based Wood River Refinery to resolve allegations it released excessive ozone-forming pollution and other toxic emissions in violation of the Clean Air Act.
In a draft agreement with the Justice Department and Illinois, Phillips, the refinery operator, and WRB Refining LP, which the company jointly owns with Canada-based Cenovus Energy, would be required to reduce volatile organic compound emissions from flaring devices; replace and repair leaky pumps and valves; limit toxic benzene emissions from its wastewater treatment facility, and improve emissions monitoring. The court has to approve the agreement to make it final.
If the settlement is accepted by a federal court, the company, which makes gasoline, asphalt, petroleum coke, and other products from crude oil, would pay a $475,000 fine, most of which—$415,000—would go to the Environmental Protection Agency while Illinois would receive the rest. The company also would spend $500,000 on a supplemental environmental project to reduce lead in contaminated homes and buildings.
The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of volatile organic releases, according to the EPA. These compounds, which easily evaporate when released, contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone that can cause respiratory problems in children, people with asthma, and older adults.
The company estimates it will have spent about $10.8 million on changes to its refinery operations to resolve the Clean Air Act complaints brought in 2014, according to the proposed settlement, which was filed Aug. 10. The agreement also would resolve federal and state complaints under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.
This is not the first settlement the company has reached over refinery operations. In 2016, it settled with Illinois over releasing wastewater containing ammonia, mercury, and fecal coliform into a nearby river.
Phillips 66 told Bloomberg Environment in an Aug. 15 statement it does notcomment on legal matters.
The proposed settlement, which is subject to a 30-day comment period, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.
The case is U.S. v. WRB Refining LP, N.D. Ill., No. 18-01484, 8/10/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/phillips-66-agrees-to-cut-ozone-forming-emissions-at-illinois-plant
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New York City Landlords Vow to Cut Energy Use 20 Percent by 2030
Aug 15, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By David M. Levitt
Some of the biggest names in New York real estate, including SL Green Realty Corp., Vornado Realty Trust and Related Cos., have signed on to an ambitious plan to reduce energy use in the city’s larger buildings by 20 percent by 2030—with some “wiggle room.”
If it is implemented, the plan would take the city’s 50,000-plus buildings of at least 25,000 square feet (2,300 square meters) more than a third of the way to a city-backed goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, according to the Urban Green Council, the New York affiliate of the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council. The Urban Green Council’s 80x50 Buildings Partnership is releasing the plan Aug. 15.
Brookfield Property Partners LP, the Durst Organization, and Rudin Management Co. are also among the signatories. Other parties include the Environmental Defense Fund, the New York League of Conservation Voters and unions such as the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ.
“We brought the most important building and energy stakeholders together around a framework to substantially reduce building energy use in New York City,” Russell Unger, the Urban Green Council’s executive director, said.
But the plan comes with a significant caveat: that the signatories “accept the core ideas expressed here, even though some may not agree with the specifics of certain recommendations.” In an interview, Unger called it “wiggle room by design.”
In 2005, New York City was responsible for 61 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, about two-thirds of it from buildings. The city had reduced that number to 52 million metric tons by 2016. A million metric tons is equal to more than 13,000 tanker trucks of gasoline, according to an Environmental Protection Agency calculator.
Greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, are widely regarded by scientists as a major cause of climate change, leading to rising seas and spurring extreme weather like storms and heat waves. While President Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax and his EPA has backed off from carbon-reducing initiatives such as the Paris agreement, some local and state governments, including New York’s, have pressed ahead with measures designed to cut back on carbon emissions.
One of the partnership’s recommendations is to support a local version of carbon-credit trading, allowing owners who exceed energy-savings targets to sell credits to those who save less. Another is to encourage pilot conversions to high-efficiency electrical heating and other technologies to move away from fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.
Calling climate change “a societal problem,” John Banks, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said in an emailed statement that “every sector, including real estate, needs to help address it.”
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/new-york-city-landlords-vow-to-cut-energy-use-20-percent-by-2030
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Inspector General Launches Review of Key EPA NSR Program
Aug 15, 2018 | Inside EPA
EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) is launching a review into the agency's implementation of its Clean Air Act new source review (NSR) permitting program as it applies to industrial sources located on tribal land, in order to assess factors affecting the permitting process including the number and approval time of NSR permits.
James Hatfield, director of the Air Directorate within the OIG's Office of Audit and Evaluation, announced the review in an Aug. 13 letter to agency air chief William Wehrum. “The OIG's objective is to determine the EPA's progress in implementing a Clean Air Act preconstruction permitting program (New Source Review) for new sources and modifications in Indian country.”
NSR requires industrial facilities in areas out of attainment with EPA's national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) to assess whether their emissions require permits with strict air pollution control mandates, while the related prevention of significant deterioration program applies to areas attaining the NAAQS.
Critics of the NSR program claim it can discourage investment in industrial facility expansion for fear of triggering expensive pollution control mandates in permits, and that the permit process is too complicated and lengthy.
But environmentalists say such permits help reduce air pollution and are fighting the Trump administration's efforts to relax key provisions of the NSR program. They are also pursuing at least one EPA Environmental Appeals Board challenge to “minor” source NSR permits issued for natural gas production on tribal land in Utah.
The OIG's review will address several questions: How many permit applications have been received and processed? How many applications are pending approval and reasons for any delays? And what procedures or systems are in place for identifying sources that are potentially subject to permit requirements but have not submitted a permit application?
To conduct the review, the OIG will do research in the Office of Air and Radiation that Wehrum leads at EPA headquarters, and in the agency's regional offices.
According to Hatfield's letter, “The anticipated benefits of this project are to improve any identified weaknesses in the New Source Review permitting program so that the EPA can most effectively assure the protection of public health and the environment as new facilities are built and existing facilities expand in Indian country.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/inspector-general-launches-review-key-epa-nsr-program
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Will Washington State Voters Make History on Climate Change?
Aug 15, 2018 | The Atlantic
By Robinson Meyer
Updated on August 15 at 4:30 p.m. ET
This November, voters in Washington State may do what no group of people—in or outside the United States—has done before.
They will vote on whether to adopt a carbon fee, an aggressive policy to combat climate change that charges polluters for the right to emit carbon dioxide and other potent greenhouse gases.
Their decision will reverberate far beyond the Olympic Peninsula. If the measure passes, Washington will make history, becoming not only the first state in the union to adopt a type of policy called a carbon tax—but also the first government anywhere to do so by ballot referendum.
If it fails, it will bring into question whether progressives can implement substantive, state-level climate policy in the face of President Donald Trump’s environmental rollbacks, even in deep-blue redoubts like Washington.
“I’m going to do everything I can for it,” said Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat and a longtime champion of climate policy, in an interview. “I’m hoping others will join me, because it really is a very well-balanced, thoughtful policy.”
The proposal, known as Ballot Initiative 1631, is one of the most ambitious climate policies advanced since Trump took office. Its passage would slot Washington into the forefront of the national fight against global warming: Only California could claim to have tougher climate laws.
But its victory is not assured. Washington voters knocked down a carbon tax the last time one appeared on the ballot, in November 2016, though that effort was not supported by the state’s environmental community. And a wide array of oil and gas companies—including Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, and Shell—have collectively donated or pledged millions to oppose the measure, according to public documents.
Initiative 1631 attempts to take the colossal costs of climate change—its hotter days, higher seas, and angrier weather—and calculate them into the price of fossil fuels. It requires major polluters like fossil-fuel companies to pay $15 for every ton of carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere. The state estimates that this levy would generate roughly $2.2 billion in its first five years.
Initiative 1631 would then invest this windfall into a new fund to support projects that would accelerate the state’s transition away from fossil fuels, like public-transit development, energy-efficiency upgrades, and new wind- and solar-power plants.
The fund would support other kinds of projects, as well. One-quarter of its revenue must be spent to protect forests and streams in the state. One-twentieth must directly flow to communities that stand to be hurt by either climate change or the transition away from fossil fuels—communities such as the Quinault Indian Nation, whose territory runs along the Pacific Coast, or Centralia, Washington, a majority-white, working-class town near the state’s only operating coal plant.
Initiative 1631 would take effect in 2020. For the next decade and a half, its starting fee of $15 would increase by $2 every year, plus inflation. In 2035, when the fee is projected to hit $55 a ton, state lawmakers could either freeze it in perpetuity or vote to continue its steady increase.
Initiative 1631 is a “carbon tax”—at least as defined by the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, and, well, the Carbon Tax Center. Since it tries to internalize the costs of climate change into the economy, it is unmistakably what economists would call a Pigovian tax.
But Initiative 1631 enacts a carbon “fee,” not a tax, citing Washington State law. As a fee, its revenue cannot be spent on any government expenses, like public education or welfare. Every cent raised by Initiative 1631 must go toward solving climate-related problems or protecting the state’s environment.
The fee will be charged directly to some of the state’s largest polluters. But Dana Bieber, a spokeswoman for the opposition campaign, argues that there’s “no doubt” these companies would pass along its costs to consumers. “Regardless of what you say about a carbon fee or a carbon tax, it’s intended to be paid by consumers,” she told me.
Carbon prices are usually designed to raise the cost of fossil fuels in order to goad consumers into using them less. Under Initiative 1631, the price of gas would likely rise by 13 cents a gallon in 2020, and the price of home-heating oil would rise by 15 cents a gallon, according to the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future.
The initiative’s supporters say that—in a worst-case scenario—the policy will cost most Washingtonians about $10 a month. And they contend that companies will not succeed in transferring every cent of costs to consumers.
Carbon prices have been successfully implemented both in and outside of the United States. For almost a decade, California has charged polluters for the right to emit carbon pollution. But it uses a “cap and trade” scheme to set its carbon price, which means it uses a market to determine the price of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide. Under the law, the state’s annual carbon emissions have fallen 13 percent from their historical peak.
But carbon markets can fail, and Washington forgoes that approach. Initiative 1361 levies a single, economy-wide fee that will not gyrate with the swings of a market. No other state has imposed a carbon price in the same way. But elsewhere in the developed world, examples abound.
“Right next door to Washington, in British Columbia, there’s been a carbon tax for 10 years,” says Kristin Eberhard, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank that focuses on the Pacific Northwest.
British Columbia’s tax is roughly twice as expensive as Washington’s proposed starting fee, and it rises faster than Initiative 1631 would increase. But the province’s carbon emissions have fallen by only 2 percent since 2007, when the fee was adopted—though this gap is mostly due to an enormous oil-and-gas exporting boom.
Canada on the whole will phase in a national carbon price of roughly $38 (in U.S. dollars) by 2022, though that plan could be canceled if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not reelected.
Roughly 20 percent of the world’s carbon emissions are covered by some kind of carbon-pricing scheme, according to the World Bank. But every single one of those policies was adopted or decreed by lawmakers. “This has never been done at the ballot,” Eberhard told me. “If this passes, it would be a huge win for climate action. It would show that people are actually willing to vote for a tax—that’s how much they care about climate change.”
It would also show that voters will do what state lawmakers—at least in the United States—cannot. Since Trump’s election, progressives have claimed that states and cities will take up the banner of climate action. But other than a series of vigorous lawsuits against Trump’s environmental rollbacks, blue-state Democrats have struggled to channel this resolve into new policy.
In Washington, Inslee has proposed several carbon-tax schemes since 2016. But state lawmakers have not taken interest: In March, state-Senate Democrats shot down the latest attempt at a statewide carbon tax, effectively killing the measure for a year. One week later, Oregon Democrats also failed to muster the votes for a carbon price.
“There’s a long tradition in Washington of voters seizing the initiative, literally, and passing things that were way ahead of where the politicians were,” Inslee told me. “This was true on gay marriage, on legalizing marijuana, and on recognizing a woman’s right to choose.”
State-level carbon prices may not put much of a dent in global emissions, but they retain outsize importance in America’s federal system. If Democrats hope to pass a national climate law when they next take control of both Congress and the White House, they will benefit from having plenty of state policies to learn from. Just as Romneycare in Massachusetts helped set the framework for Obamacare, Washington’s carbon tax could serve as a model for the entire country’s—especially if Inslee runs for president, as he is rumored to be considering.
It is the right time to be talking about serious climate-change policy, Inslee said, as climate change has recently become serious for many of the state’s residents. Though Washington’s blazes have not reached the size of destructiveness of California’s, the state is suffering through a wretched wildfire season of its own. Washington could see more fires in 2018 than it has seen in any year in its history, according to a spokesman for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
“I’m looking across Puget Sound. I can’t see Seattle through the smoke right now,” Inslee said, speaking by phone. “Climate change is no longer a chart and a graph. It’s smoke that people are choking on.”
In 2016, an environmental nonprofit got a carbon tax onto the state general-election ballot, but the state Democratic Party—as well as a coalition of civil-rights, labor, and environmental groups—opposed the measure, and it failed. Unlike Initiative 1631, that proposal took a revenue-neutral approach, returning all money collected by the carbon fee directly to state residents. It did not include the carveouts for labor, environmental justice, or communities of color included in this policy.
“The 2016 ballot initiative was attempting to be a bipartisan effort—attracting some more moderate Republicans, but repelling the more left wing of the Democratic voting bloc,” Eberhard told me. “This one is trying to go straight for the left wing.”
Initiative 1631 can claim the support of a huge coalition of Democratic-affiliated groups, including labor unions, racial-justice groups, and environmental nonprofits. They drafted the proposal together and are now hoping their unified organizing power can push it over the finish line.
Part of these deliberations included making sure that the poorest communities would not be affected by the new carbon price. The initiative includes a “dollar recycling” mechanism meant to shield low-income ratepayers, for instance, from higher electricity bills.
“We did the work that I think Congress and state legislatures—the elected officials in our democracy—are meant to do,” says Becky Kelley, the president of the Washington Environmental Council who was involved in the initiative’s creation.
“We brought together a big range of folks who are affected by a hard challenge, and we tried to find solutions that work for a lot of folks. We did the work of lawmaking,” she told me. “And the good news is, in Washington State, we the people can act as the lawmakers when the lawmakers fail to act.”
“This is just a very tremendous alliance,” Inslee agreed. “I’ve never seen an alliance around a clean-air or clean-water initiative before that is so broad.”
Initiative 1631 does not cover every major carbon polluter in the state. It exempts manufacturing industries that sell much of their products abroad—which is to say, the state’s enormous aerospace industry, and especially the state’s largest employer, Boeing. Alcoa, a major aluminum manufacturer, is exempt, too.
The proposal also exempts the Centralia coal plant, Washington’s only operating coal-fired power plant. That plant is scheduled to shut down in 2025 through a prior agreement with the state government. Any additional regulation of Centralia’s emissions would push that date further into the future, increasing the overall amount of air pollution, said Nick Abraham, a spokesman for the initiative’s supporters.
All in all, Initiative 1631 covers about 80 percent of Washington’s climate-warming pollution. It will cover more than 85 percent of the state’s pollution after Centralia shuts down.
Abraham framed these carveouts as crucial for the state’s workers. “We need to build a lot of infrastructure to move away from fossil fuels, so we need the folks who know how to build things to stay in our state,” he told me. “If we’re keeping those industries here, over time we can transition them over. But we need the folks who are already here to stay here.”
That wasn’t good enough for Bieber, the spokeswoman for “No on 1631,” a political-action committee formed by the Western States Petroleum Association to oppose the measure. She argues that consumers and small businesses will bear the brunt of the new fee. “The proponents will tell you that it’s about going after the state’s largest carbon emitters, but the largest carbon emitters in the state will be exempt from 1631,” she told me. “Pulp-and-paper mills and airplane manufacturers are exempt. But a small business—like any other business—has to pay their energy costs. They don’t have an exemption like a coal-fired power plant.”
Not all coal plants are exempt from Initiative 1631. Any coal-generated electricity imported into the state through the power grid will be subject to the fee. About one-sixth of Washington’s electricity comes from coal plants.
Bieber did not answer directly when asked whether the initiative’s opponents would support the measure if it included fewer exemptions. “Our broad coalition have differing views on how to handle a carbon fee,” she said.
Bieber claimed that the “No on 1631” coalition includes Teamsters and machinists, as well as “farmers, small businesses, and consumers.” If so, those farmers are not putting their money where their mouth is: “No on 1631” has received 99.999 percent of its $5.4 million budget from oil and gas companies, according to its public campaign-finance filings. That last 0.001 percent comes from a construction-focused pac.
“We’re happy with the support we have. Hopefully people contribute to our campaign so we can get the facts out to voters,” Bieber said when asked about the oil-industry money underwriting the effort.
Both the “Yes” and the “No” campaigns say that their rival effort is certain to outspend them. Clean Air Clean Energy WA, the pac that supports the initiative, currently reports a $3.4 million budget.
But if “Yes” wins, it won’t necessarily have anything to do with the size of its budget. Victory may not even hinge on its turnout operation or the scale of its coalition. It may come down to the work and rhetoric of one man who has turned climate change into a progressive rallying cry.
“Donald Trump is a very inspirational, unifying figure. He’s unified the Democratic Party like never before,” Inslee told me. “When you know you’re on your own, when you know you’re not going to have salvation from the White House, it focuses your attention that we need to take action.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/washington-state-carbon-tax/567523/
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Will Dems Act on GHGs After a Midterm Win? It's Complicated
Aug 16, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Democrats have long billed themselves as the party of climate science, and if they take back the House in November, they want to put global warming back on the congressional calendar.
"It's the 800-pound gorilla," said Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), co-chairman of the Safe Climate Caucus. "It's going to be huge in terms of having the ability to shape the agenda on that."
In a general sense, the first steps would be obvious: oversight hearings, votes on messaging bills and movement on some sort of carbon tax legislation.
But Democrats would have to deal with a Senate likely to stay in Republican hands and with President Trump, who says climate change is a hoax.
And despite all the climate caucuses, press releases and posturing, they would also have to figure out how to push major climate legislation through a caucus whose members often don't list it among their top priorities.
Climate change takes a back seat on the campaign trail to issues like health care and the broader economy, meaning it wouldn't be the first thing Democrats jump on next Congress, said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).
"I don't think it will be the No. 1 priority, because I think if we take back the House, it will be because we responded effectively to the one, two, three concerns of voters," Beyer said.
Still, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), who served on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming when Democrats last controlled the House, said his party would bring in conservative stalwarts from the policy world — such as James Baker and George Shultz — to testify on their carbon pricing ideas.
"If Democrats are in control, there will be an honest debate about carbon pricing. Not phony," he said. "And there will be an opportunity for people to look at real legislation and talk about the pros and cons."
That debate, Blumenauer said, likely wouldn't go through a revived version of the select panel. Instead, Democrats would look to hold hearings in the Science, Space and Technology; Ways and Means; Natural Resources; and Energy and Commerce committees.
In the energy lobbying world, though, there's doubt about whether Democrats could keep their caucus on board for carbon pricing, much less draw Republican votes in what could be a narrowly divided House.
On one side are members like Rep. Conor Lamb, who took his conservative western Pennsylvania district in part by touting the shale boom and supporting hydraulic fracturing. Lamb voted alongside most Republicans — and six other Democrats — in favor of an anti-carbon-tax resolution from Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) last month.
On the other end are Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who dethroned 10-term incumbent and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Joe Crowley in the primary for New York's 14th District.
Ocasio-Cortez has voiced support for carbon pricing and called for a switch to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, an ambitious goal that falls in line with the rhetoric coming out of 350.org, Justice Democrats and other groups on the party's progressive wing.
Those groups see climate solutions — and holding fossil fuel companies accountable for pollution — as part of a broader movement for environmental and social justice.
"We want legislation that decarbonizes the economy but also does things like closing the racial wealth gap and supporting indigenous communities maintaining their sovereignty and self-determination," said Julian NoiseCat, a policy analyst at 350.org.
But carbon pricing would need support from Midwestern and shale-state Democrats, who might struggle to sell the issue in their districts, said Frank Maisano, a partner in Bracewell LLP's Policy Resolution Group, which represents a mix of energy clients.
That may also make Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the current minority leader, and the rest of leadership hesitant to put it on the calendar in the first place.
"Depending on how big their margin is, I doubt it would even pass the House," Maisano said. "I do think that for a really important carbon tax piece that could be used against you in a campaign in a presidential year, I would think that there would be a lot of people who would be worried about that."
'Convenient political cudgel?'
The response over the past month to the first GOP carbon pricing bill in nearly 10 years illustrates the problem Democrats could face, said Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center.
Democrats and environmental groups generally praised the effort by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), the lead sponsor, but offered only tentative support or outright rebuttals of the bill's substance (E&E Daily, July 25).
"The response was kind of muted," Majkut said. "And so you really start wondering, how much is this really a policy issue, or is it just what has become a really convenient political cudgel?"
Still, there are Democratic models on the books.
Several Democrats — led in the Senate by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz — have their own carbon pricing bill floating around the congressional record. Another carbon tax measure from Beyer, H.R. 4889, has 36 co-sponsors in the House, as well as a Senate companion led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
And Citizens' Climate Lobby, the group behind the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, has been pushing its own fee-and-dividend model, which may get introduced either during the current Congress or early in the next session.
The policy is out there, but historically, the issue has been the sales pitch, Beyer said.
"I think we're going to try to do it thoughtfully, carefully," Beyer said. "We don't want to repeat the cap-and-trade problem of the 2009-2010 House, where we passed the bill with a very narrow margin, it was dead on arrival in the Senate, and it may have cost a bunch of people their seats in the 2010 election."
For that reason, Democrats should try to reframe carbon pricing and climate issues as economic policy, said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser and a strategic adviser with New Democracy, a centrist Democratic group.
That means talking more about ballooning costs of natural disasters, touting the potential emissions reduction benefits of the shale boom and using a carbon tax to lower taxes.
"Trump's climate nihilism has provided an unprecedented opportunity for Democrats to occupy the center and center left on energy and climate, and I think they're doing so," Bledsoe said.
Progressive groups, too, support carbon pricing, but NoiseCat rejected the more moderate approach, arguing that the party should focus instead on telling the stories of those affected by climate change and eliminating fossil fuels altogether as part of a "Green New Deal."
"In terms of working with the centrist part of the Democratic Party, we really feel that the momentum is with the progressive wing," NoiseCat said.
"So while there might be some negotiation that you can imagine in the 2021 to 2023 legislative window with the more moderate wing of the party, we think that the people who are really pushing the solutions that have the momentum, that are where the base of the party is at, are people like [Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez."
The Democratic National Committee took a step in Bledsoe's direction last week when it voted to reverse its ban on campaign dollars from fossil fuel companies and pledged support for an "all of the above" energy policy (Greenwire, Aug. 13).
The move was panned by environmental and progressive groups, some of whom protested yesterday, though it drew praise from some labor interests.
But despite that messaging divide at the national level, congressional Democrats find their own ways to talk about the issue. The story that has consistently cropped up since the 2016 election — that Democrats don't have a cohesive message on climate or any other subject — is often overblown, Beyer said.
"It's really hard to do messaging by committee," he said. "Typically, messages are delivered by presidential candidates, or by individuals who feel strongly about an issue."
On the legislative side, Lowenthal said he sees a clear direction in the caucus, adding that his party has had plenty of time to contemplate it.
"I think being in the minority has forced us to think through what we want," he said. "There's a consensus that we're going to put a price on carbon."
Smaller steps
Still, Democrats acknowledged the obvious reality: Trump and the Senate would likely reject any carbon pricing legislation.
They ticked off lists of other priorities, which often included smaller, bipartisan adaptation measures that would have a real shot of passing the Senate and getting to Trump's desk.
Democratic Environmental Message Team Co-Chairman Don McEachin (D-Va.) said Democrats might look to put together a green infrastructure bill to fund adaptation projects, as well as legislation to boost carbon capture and storage technology.
A big part of the environmental agenda would involve pushing back on the Trump administration's climate change policies at the federal agencies, particularly its proposal to freeze fuel economy targets at 2020 levels.
"Clearly, regardless of where it goes in the Senate, we're going to want to do legislation that reverses Trump's freeze on [corporate average fuel economy] standards," Beyer said. "And hopefully, that will go forward in the Senate."
Beyer, ranking member of the Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Oversight, added that his panel would likely hold more hearings to examine ethical lapses at EPA and the Interior Department.
House Natural Resources ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said his panel and the Energy and Commerce Committee would take on a bigger oversight role, as well.
But the blue wave is not a sure thing yet.
Curbelo predicted that slim margins will put moderates in the legislative driver's seat in the next Congress, no matter which party takes control.
Even if his party keeps the House, there might still be room for modest action on warming if moderates and groups like the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus can band together, Curbelo said.
"No matter who's in charge, there's going to be a faction of that party that is going to be demanding the most extremist policies," he said. "And it's going to be members from the minority party that are going to come to the rescue."
McEachin, meanwhile, cautioned against predicting too far into the future with an administration that often appears to be in chaos.
"It's a fool's errand to try to predict what you can do, exactly, with President Trump in the White House," he said. "But I think our party and our supporters will demand that we move forward on climate change and the environment."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/08/16/stories/1060094241
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