Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 8/24/2018
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(ACC Mentioned) First Move: China Tariffs Kick In • Border Wall Lawsuit Appeal • Canada Pipeline Challenge
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Chuck McCutcheon
Tariff time has arrived. -
(ACC Mentioned) Warnings Grow About Impact of Tariffs on Chemicals from China
Aug 23, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jean-François Tremblay
Slapping a 25% tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports would raise the prices of countless products and damage U.S. companies, representatives from the chemical industry told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at public hearings last week. -
(ACC Mentioned) China's Squeeze on Imported Recyclables Hampers Local Programs, GHGs
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
Chinese tariffs on U.S. municipal waste exports that are slated to take effect Aug. 23 are expected to further impede local recycling programs that are already scrambling to overcome material purity standards China adopted earlier this year... -
U.S.-China Trade Talks End With No Breakthrough as Tariffs Kick In
Aug 24, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By David Lawder, Steve Holland, Tim Aeppel, Tony Munroe, Michael Martina, Philip Wen and Ben Blanchard
U.S. and Chinese officials ended two days of talks on Thursday with no major breakthrough as their trade war escalated with activation of another round of dueling tariffs on $16 billion worth of each country's goods. -
24 Environmental Rules Trump is Rolling Back
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Marissa Horn
President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda has pushed at least 24 environmental regulations and policies issued during the Obama administration out of the queue. -
Green Groups, Sanders Supporters Demand DNC End Fossil Fuel Donations
Aug 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green
A group of environmentalists, Bernie Sanders supporters and progressives is urging the Democratic National Committee to reverse its decision to allow donations from the fossil fuel industry. -
Critics Eye Suits on TSCA Evaluations but 'Murky' Law Complicates Strategy
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
Environmentalists are raising a litany of legal concerns with the Trump EPA's efforts to evaluate the first 10 existing chemicals reviewed as part of the new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) program, but a “murky” situation in the recently-revised statute is complicating... -
Blue-Collar Workers ‘Invisible’ as EPA Critiques Chemicals
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Electricians, firefighters, roofers, plumbers, homeowners, and school maintenance workers are among those whose contact with asbestos—and other hazardous chemicals—the EPA plans to ignore, according to physicians and public health officials. -
Senate Set to Look at PFAS Concerns
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Corbin Hiar
Senators are planning to hold the first congressional hearing next month specifically focused on a class of toxic chemicals that have polluted the drinking water of millions of Americans. -
EPA Asks 9th Circuit to Clarify Deadline for Banning Chlorpyrifos
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
EPA is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to clarify a deadline for the agency to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos and suggesting the deadline should not take effect till the agency exhausts any appeal, in response to a court order finding that EPA... -
Roundup Cancer Verdict May Ignite ‘Glyphosate-Free’ Food Demand
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Lydia Mulvany and Megan Durisin
Consumers already pay a premium for foods labeled GMO-free. The next thing that shoppers could be shelling out for are foods free from pesticides—in particular, free from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, Monsanto Co.’s bestselling weedkiller. -
Bayer Has a $289 Million Roundup Headache
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Naomi Kresge, Aaron Kirchfeld and Klaus Wille
Last fall, as Bayer AG was completing its $66 billion merger with Monsanto Co., Werner Baumann, its chief executive, visited the concrete-slab Berlin complex where company scientists develop disease-fighting drugs. -
Nature Valley Drops ‘100% Natural’ Claim After Pesticide Suit
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Deena Shanker
General Mills Inc.’s Nature Valley bars will no longer bear the “Made with 100% Natural Whole Grain Oats” label, after the company settled a lawsuit by consumer groups alleging the snack contained glyphosate—a pesticide better known as Roundup. -
Echa BoA ‘Sidesteps’ Animal Testing Issue in Symrise Case
Aug 23, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Andrew Turley
Echa’s Board of Appeal has sent the long-running Symrise AG case back to the competent authorities, amid complaints from animal rights groups that the BoA is sidestepping the issue of animal testing of cosmetics ingredients under REACH. -
ACE Rule's 'Fenceline' GHG Policy Could Limit Future President's Options
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Lee Logan and Dawn Reeves
Legal experts say the Trump EPA's “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) proposal targeting greenhouse gases from existing power plants appears designed to block a future administration from pursuing broader GHG controls, because it all but says the Clean Air Act restricts such standards... -
Trump’s Latest Energy Plan Leaves American Energy and Innovation in the Dark
Aug 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rep. Jerry Mcnerney (D-Calif.)
Since coming to office, President Trump has led the U.S. down a path of regression, ceding the nation’s leadership on important issues, chief among them our commitment to policies that promote energy innovation and job creation, and combat the impending dangers of climate change. -
Scientists Blast EPA Effort That Would Discredit Health Research in the Name of 'Transparency'
Aug 24, 2018 | Los Angeles Times
By Melissa Healy
When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to give states more latitude in regulating pollution from power plants within their borders, it came with a sobering forecast of its likely impact on Americans’ health. -
Midwest Utility Turning to Cows, Landfills for a Gas Alternative
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Naureen S. Malik
CenterPoint Energy Inc. wants to introduce a pilot program in Minnesota offering customers access to a renewable form of natural gas recovered from dairy farms and landfills. -
4th Circuit Denies Stay of Atlantic Coast Pipeline Permit
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has denied environmentalists' motion to stay a Clean Water Act (CWA) dredge-and-fill permit for construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) in West Virginia, noting the Army Corps of Engineers has already voluntarily stayed... -
ExxonMobil Looking to Add More Texas Production
Aug 23, 2018 | Plastics Today
By Frank Esposito
Still more growth could be headed for ExxonMobil Chemical's massive complex in Baytown, Texas. -
Interior EIS Opens Door for Arctic Production
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Margaret Kriz Hobson
The Interior Department signed off on a final environmental impact statement for Hilcorp Alaska LLC's Liberty project yesterday, opening the door to first-ever oil production in federal Arctic waters. -
U.S. Provides $200m in Grants to Improve Rail Safety
Aug 24, 2018 | UPI
By Daniel J. Graeber
More than $200 million in grants will support safety improvements for rail transport of hazardous materials, the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration announced. -
FRA Sees Train-Control Systems Progress, But Some Railroads May Miss Deadline
Aug 23, 2018 | Engineering News-Record
By Tom Ichniowski
U.S. railroads are making gains toward meeting the yearend deadline for having automatic train control systems in place, but nine commuter-rail lines remain “at risk” of failing to hit that target, the Federal Railroad Administration says. -
Railcar Cleaning Company Charged for Deaths, Conspiracy in Explosion
Aug 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Brown
A Nebraska railcar cleaning company was indicted for alleged worker safety and environmental violations following a 2015 incident in which two workers were killed and another injured when a tanker care caught fire while being cleaned. -
Trump Put a Low Cost on Carbon Emissions. Here’s Why It Matters.
Aug 23, 2018 | New York Times
By Brad Plumer
How much economic damage will global warming cause? That’s one of the key questions embedded in the Trump administration’s recent proposals to weaken Obama-era regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from both vehicles and power plants. -
Trump Reshaped U.S. Climate Policy in One Month: August 2018
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Maxine Joselow and Benjamin Storrow
August was supposed to be a quiet month for climate politics, a time when Congress went on recess; President Trump played golf in Bedminster, N.J.; and Americans took a break from politics before this November's midterm elections. -
Shell Oil Quietly Urges Lawmakers to Support Carbon Tax
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Hulac and Kelsey Brugger
Lobbyists for Shell Oil Co. told members of Congress this year that Shell supports a nationwide carbon tax and encouraged lawmakers to price greenhouse gas emissions, E&E News has learned. -
Climate Change Has Already Hit Home Prices, Led by Jersey Shore
Aug 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Flavelle
Sea-level rise is already hitting home prices along the Atlantic Coast, new data shows—and nowhere harder than the tiny New Jersey town of Ocean City.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Transportation and Infrastructure News
Environment News
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Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Chuck McCutcheon
Tariff time has arrived.
The U.S. starts collecting duties today on some $2.2 billion in chemicals and plastics products coming from China. At the same time, China’s own retaliatory tariffs go into effect—which, at last count, includes $2 billion in chemicals and plastics products, according to the American Chemistry Council.
The council has said the companies that produce manufactured goods will be hit particularly hard, as will multinational companies.
In addition to the tariffs on chemicals, the next shoe to drop would be a proposed 25 percent duty on exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas. A Chinese trade delegation is visiting Washington this week, where the LNG exports are certain to be a topic of discussion. Bloomberg News is monitoring.
BORDER WALL SUIT: The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups are expected to file a U.S. Supreme Court appeal over a judge’s ruling that no environmental compliance is needed for the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall.
A federal judge in San Diego dismissed the lawsuit that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and environmental groups had filed over the wall. The filing challenged the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly using immigration laws to waive environmental compliance.
A Border Patrol car parks near the U.S.-Mexico border in June in San Ysidro, Calif.
Photographer: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images
Homeland Security has sought to waive 37 environmental and other laws—including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act—to start construction on a tiny portion of the border wall project that President Trump has pledged to build.
CANADA PIPELINE: Canada’s top court could settle a fight between Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. and a British Columbia city seeking to have its bylaws enforced over the company’s Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline.
The Supreme Court of Canada will announce whether it will hear a challenge of the Trans Mountain project’s ability to run through the city of Burnaby without obeying tree-cutting and land-use bylaws.
The National Energy Board, the federally run national energy regulator, decided in December 2017 that Burnaby’s bylaws could be pushed aside because they had become unreasonable. James Munson is watching.
Other Stories We’re Covering
· EPA has been busy this summer, so Bloomberg Environment has updated our listof the environmental rules that Trump has sought to roll back.
· The Senate commerce panel discusses the nomination of Kelvin Droegemeier to head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Droegemeier is the secretary of science and technology in Oklahoma GOP Gov. Mary Fallin’s administration. His research focuses on severe weather and not climate change specifically, but colleagues call him a proponent of science. Bloomberg Law’s Alexis Kramer is covering.
· The Senate energy committee votes on two Energy Department nominees: William Cooper to be general counsel and Lane Genatowski to be director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Rebecca Kern is tracking.
· A working group of federal pipeline safety regulators meets to discuss a framework for sharing accident and pipeline information to prevent future incidents. Sylvia Carignan is monitoring.
· California’s special legislative committee on wildfires is scheduled to meet todayand may offer the first look at legislation on whether utilities will be able to pass the cost of future fire damages on to customers. Bloomberg News is monitoring.
Quote of the Day
“We believe this action would violate the requirement that FERC remain a neutral and unbiased decisionmaker.”
—Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), in a letter to FERC’s chairman criticizing the regulatory agency’s chief of staff for saying FERC was helping the White House develop a list of coal and nuclear plants at risk of closure to keep online.Around the Web
· Stormwater and pollution from Pennsylvania and New York flowed into the Chesapeake Bay through the Conowingo Dam, raising concerns about potential harm to oyster reproduction and the bay’s overall ecology.
· Shipping giant Maersk plans to send its first container ship through the Arctic to see if the once-impossible route could become feasible thanks to warmer temperatures.
· Vermont, Delaware, and Tennessee are the top states in North America’s first and largest consumer battery recycling program.
· Seven Denver-area school districts have barred field trips to a wildlife refuge on what was formerly a nuclear weapons plant, citing fears about plutonium still in the ground.
Today’s Events
· 11 a.m. • Forest-Water Interactions • Winrock International holds seminar on interrelationships between forest loss and increasingly severe floods and drought.
· 12 p.m. • Advanced Nuclear • Global America Business Institute holds discussionon innovative technological approaches for advanced nuclear with Ron Faibish, General Atomics’ senior director of business development for nuclear technologies and materials.
· 12:30 p.m. • Fuel Economy/Vehicle Standards • American Bar Association holds webinar on Trump administration proposal to roll back current greenhouse gas emission standards and set new fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles.
· 1 p.m. • Chemicals • EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System office hosts webinar to take comments on plans for an IRIS toxicity assessment of naphthalene, the main ingredient in mothballs.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/china-tariffs-kick-in-border-wall-lawsuit-appeal-canada-pipeline-challenge-25?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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(ACC Mentioned) Warnings Grow About Impact of Tariffs on Chemicals from China
Aug 23, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jean-François Tremblay
Slapping a 25% tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports would raise the prices of countless products and damage U.S. companies, representatives from the chemical industry told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at public hearings last week. After imposing a 25% tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods earlier this summer, USTR is now considering taxing other Chinese products worth four times as much at the same rate.
Chemicals and plastics represent more than $16 billion worth of the goods on the $200 billion list, according to the American Chemistry Council, an industry association. Moving ahead with the new tariffs “would have a potentially irreparable impact on our industry’s economic structure and supply chain,” ACC’s director of international trade, Ed Brzytwa, warned at the hearing. The group also cautioned that retaliatory tariffs would close off the Chinese market to U.S. chemical producers.
“The best way to preserve the interests of the U.S. chemicals industry and indeed the entire manufacturing sector is by removing chemicals from the front lines of this trade war,” Brzytwa testified.
Bulk Pharmaceuticals Task Force, an affiliate of the Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates, another trade group, predicted that the tariffs would lead to higher drug prices. Numerous U.S.-produced pharmaceuticals depend on chemicals that are made only in China, it noted.
President Donald J. Trump directed USTR to propose tariffs in April to coerce China to modify trade and business practices that the U.S. deems unfair. Trump and USTR subsequently escalated the threats, and China has mirrored U.S. moves in retaliation.
The latest proposed tariffs have generated intense public reaction. USTR had to double to six the number of days devoted to hearings. More than 2,000 groups and individuals submitted comments.
Numerous chemical companies submitted letters explaining the harm the tariffs would do to them and their customers.
For example, the chemical maker SNF Holding has been importing quaternized dimethylaminoethyl acrylate from a sister company in China because of an industry-wide shortage of capacity in the U.S. The chemical is widely used to treat municipal drinking water. The company warned that the proposed tariff on this product could raise the cost of water treatment by 20%.
“This particular tariff will not increase costs for the latest electronic gadget or luxury item,” SNF President John Pittman wrote. “Instead, this tariff will increase costs for drinking water and waste treatment, a basic human necessity.”
The tax would also reduce SNF’s cash flow and slow an ongoing investment in U.S. capacity in Riceboro, Ga., he added.
Kraton, which produces styrene-isoprene-styrene (SIS) polymers in Belpre, Ohio, argued against a tariff on isoprene. CEO Kevin M. Fogarty wrote that Kraton imports isoprene from China and other countries because U.S. output of the monomer, a by-product of ethylene production, is limited.
SIS, Fogarty noted, is not on the list of products being targeted for tariffs. Putting a tariff on isoprene would allow foreign SIS producers, including those in China, to undercut Kraton and harm its business.
G. Brandt Jordan, a consultant advising industrial dye users, wrote that imposing a 25% tariff on Chinese-made dyes might have made sense in the 1990s when the U.S. still had a dye industry. But today, with the domestic industry long gone and its craftspeople retired, “the net effect of what you are proposing will be an additional tax on the importers, which will ultimately be passed on to the consumers.”
https://cen.acs.org/policy/trade/Warnings-grow-impact-tariffs-chemicals/96/i34
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(ACC Mentioned) China's Squeeze on Imported Recyclables Hampers Local Programs, GHGs
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
Chinese tariffs on U.S. municipal waste exports that are slated to take effect Aug. 23 are expected to further impede local recycling programs that are already scrambling to overcome material purity standards China adopted earlier this year, and could also increase greenhouse gas estimates which assume a level of recycling in their baseline.
The Chinese tariffs, which come in retaliation for planned Trump administration tariffs on Chinese imports, are already prompting some cities to pare back their recycling programs in the wake of higher costs, resulting in the stockpiling of more material at waste facilities and calls for a boost in U.S. recycling infrastructure.
The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) on a weekly basis has been updating a growing list of local government recycling program changes due to China's restrictions, with cities in some cases scaling back what is accepted for recycling or hiking prices due to the increased cost of recycling.
Some cities are dropping materials they accept in their recycling programs and a few are halting their programs entirely, although “these are still relatively few and far between,” one source with the waste management industry says.
Those materials more often being dropped are plastics numbered 3-7, mixed waste paper and glass, the source says. But the source says the markets for metals and other plastics -- such as bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high density polyethylene and polypropylene -- from residential recycling programs have remained stable.
The impacts from China's actions could also prompt an increase in the United States' greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly if paper is landfilled rather than recycled.
The industry source says a good amount of mixed waste paper in the Pacific Northwest is being landfilled, making the paper unavailable for reuse and, in theory, leading to greater use of virgin pulp, which would increase GHG emissions, the source says.
In addition, Eric Potashner, with a recycling company in California and a member of the California Refuse and Recycling Coalition, notes in an interview that if paper, an organic, is landfilled, it creates the GHG methane.
And increased landfilling of paper could add to current challenges as the state of California eyes ambitious recycling goals for organics, according to Potashner, who is with the recycling company Recology.
GHG impacts could grow if more cities drop recycling programs, the industry source says. On the other hand, if both the United States and China expand the number of processing facilities for recyclables, “we could see a global reduction in emissions,” the source adds.
The United States had been sending significant amounts of recyclable material to China, exporting 16.2 million tons out of a total of 37 million tons generated, to China in 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau/International Trade Commission statistics.
The California Department of Resources, Recycling & Recovery (CalRecycle) estimates that California was exporting one-third of its recyclables to foreign markets, with 62 percent of that going to China.
National Sword
But new policies instituted by China this year are hurting the U.S. recycling industry and impacting programs. Under a policy called National Sword, China in March implemented restrictions on imported recycled materials, ratcheting down the level of impurities it would accept in such materials to 0.5 percent, according to sources.
In addition, China this month announced plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on certain goods, including old corrugated cardboard, other recovered fiber, and scrap plastic in retaliation for recent U.S. tariff plans, the California Refuse and Recycling Coalition says in a press release issued earlier this month.
They will apply to materials arriving from the United States, putting U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage with other nations, the industry source says. This source says that in the days before the tariffs go into effect, some recyclers have been “scrambling to divert the material."
A proposed 20 percent tariff on fiber pulp from paper or cardboard “will likely halt any potential movement of pulp from the U.S. to China,” this source says. “It is clear that China is intent on limiting all imports of recycled material into China,” this source says, adding that the tariffs underscore the need “to diversify our markets and to develop more domestic recycling markets."
According to CalRecycle, China this year also began implementing an enforcement plan that prevents the import of certain materials under the country's recycling ban. Under this, materials banned by the end of this year include post-industrial PET, polyethylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other scrap plastics, the department says. It also includes a ban on slag and residue from smelted steel and iron, certain metal and electrical appliance scrap as well as compressed scrap from cars, CalRecycle says on its website.
CalRecycle says China's policy changes have already begun to cause adverse impacts on California, and are “resulting in more material being stockpiled at solid waste facilities and recycling centers or disposed of in landfills.” The policy changes also “may have significant impacts on California's economy, as recyclable materials exported from California had a total vessel value of $5.2 billion in 2017, and on California's broader environmental goals,” it says.
During a plenary session at the 2018 Materials Recovery Facility Summit in Nashville, TN, Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. (ISRI), highlighted the effects of the tariffs and other steps taken by China.
“China is the trigger that exposed a lot of the weaknesses in the recycling system, especially in residential [recycling],” she said.
She noted a steep decline in exports, saying in the first six months of this year, U.S. exports of plastics dropped by 90 percent, and copper and paper exports decreased by 40 percent.
While ferrous metals were affected the least, she noted they are now getting hit hard due to tariffs on imports from Turkey that President Donald Trump announced this month. Trump's decision to raise the tariff on steel imported from Turkey to 50 percent will impact demand for U.S. scrap as Turkey is the largest market for U.S. ferrous scrap, an ISRI source says.
Wiener and others in the recycling and waste industry at the summit called for collaboration to address challenges facing the market for recyclables. “The bottom line is we all need to work together. . . . There isn't one fix that's going to return us to where we were,” she said. “China's not coming back. We need to strengthen markets here and overseas."
Recycling Infrastructure
With the squeeze on U.S. recycling, industry groups representing chemical and plastics manufacturers, recyclers and others are expected to renew their call to Congress to provide incentives and funds to boost recycling infrastructure.
This is a “moment in time to get people's attention to this” and provide a boost to domestic recycling capacity, says Scott DeFife, with a coalition of groups that has sought support from House and Senate leaders to include investments and support for recycling in the United States as part of infrastructure legislation.
Industry groups plan to reiterate their push for this in talks on the Hill this fall, he says.
A coalition of groups, including the Plastics Industry Association, American Chemistry Council, NWRA, Solid Waste Association of North America and others, in April wrote to congressional leaders calling for funding in any infrastructure bill for recycling.
They touted the economic, environmental and other benefits from recycling, noting the disruptions from China and advocating for new infrastructure measures in the recycling arena. Among other things, they called for investments for upgrades to material recovery facilities (MRFs) -- used for sorting recyclables -- and faster permitting of MRFs, plastics recycling facilities and conversion technology plants, the letter says.
Many MRFs are not up to date, and are unable to provide the level of quality material China now wants, the coalition's DeFife says.
The groups also are seeking incentive grants for state and local governments to increase curbside recycling programs, and funds to bolster education and training regarding recycling. Recycling needs to be seen as a public utility and given investment at the federal level, DeFife says, rather than deferring to cities, which are often cash-strapped.
David Biderman, executive director of SWANA, told Inside EPA that the impacts from China's policies will likely lead to a boost in the U.S. industry ramping up its recycling capabilities, noting that interest in expanding recycling has already risen. He says that a leading Chinese recycling company has already purchased two recycling papermills in the United States.
But, in the short term, Biderman predicts there will be “some pain” for some in the recycling supply chain. “We should expect to pay more for recycling,” he said. And the boost in capacity in the United States will take time, he said.
For its part, CalRecycle says on its website that in response to China's policies, the department is working with local enforcement agencies to offer guidance for storing processed recyclable material. It plans to continue to build recycling markets and infrastructure within the state, to lower the state's reliance on foreign exports, it says.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/chinas-squeeze-imported-recyclables-hampers-local-programs-ghgs
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U.S.-China Trade Talks End With No Breakthrough as Tariffs Kick In
Aug 24, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By David Lawder, Steve Holland, Tim Aeppel, Tony Munroe, Michael Martina, Philip Wen and Ben Blanchard
U.S. and Chinese officials ended two days of talks on Thursday with no major breakthrough as their trade war escalated with activation of another round of dueling tariffs on $16 billion worth of each country's goods.
"We concluded two days of discussions with counterparts from China and exchanged views on how to achieve fairness, balance, and reciprocity in the economic relationship," White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said in a brief emailed statement.
The discussions included "addressing structural issues in China," including its intellectual property and technology transfer policies, Walters said.
The mid-level Trump administration officials participating in the talks would brief the heads of their agencies on the discussions, she added.
Implementation of the latest 25 percent tariffs on Thursday did not derail the talks, led by U.S. Treasury Under Secretary David Malpass and Chinese Commerce Vice Minister Wang Shouwen. They were the first face-to-face U.S.-China meetings since early June to try to find a way out of a deepening trade conflict and escalating tariffs.
Earlier, a senior Trump administration official downplayed chances for success, saying China had yet to address U.S. complaints about alleged misappropriation of U.S. intellectual property and industrial subsidies.
"In order for us to get a positive result out of these engagements, it's really critical that they (China) address the fundamental concerns that we have raised," the official said on a press call on the new U.S. security review law for foreign acquisitions. "We haven't seen that yet, but we are going to continue to encourage them to address problems that we have raised."
In a brief statement on Friday, the Chinese commerce ministry said both sides had a "constructive" and "candid" exchange over trade issues, and will stay in touch on the next steps.
Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China did not like providing a running commentary while talks were under way, and preferred to quietly do the work.EDITORS’ PICKSThis Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership EndsDemocrats Want Pennsylvania (and Trump Voters) BackThe Iraqi Spy Who Infiltrated ISIS
"This round of trade negotiations is the same. If you want to seriously talk for a good outcome then you should do so earnestly, there's no need to speak out loudly," he told a daily news briefing.
China's Commerce Ministry said in Beijing that it has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization over the latest round of U.S. tariffs. The two countries have now targeted $50 billion of each other's goods and threatened duties on most of the rest of their bilateral trade, raising concerns that the conflict could dent global economic growth.
Trump administration officials have been divided over how hard to press Beijing, but the White House appears to believe it is winning the trade war as China's economy slows and its stock markets tumble.
Economists reckon that every $100 billion of imports hit by tariffs would reduce global trade by around 0.5 percent.
They have assumed a direct impact on China's economic growth in 2018 of 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point, and somewhat less for the United States, but the impact will be bigger next year, along with collateral damage for other countries and companies tied into China's global supply chains.
HARD LINE RATTLES BEIJING
Business groups expressed hope that the meeting would mark the start of serious negotiations over Chinese trade and economic policy changes demanded by Trump.
However, Trump on Monday told Reuters in an interview he did not "anticipate much" from this week's talks.
His hard line has rattled Beijing and spurred rare criticism within the highest levels of China's ruling Communist Party over its handling of the trade dispute, sources have said.
Beijing has denied U.S. allegations it systematically forces the unfair transfer of U.S. technology and has said it adheres to World Trade Organization rules.
Washington's latest tariffs apply to 279 product categories, including semiconductors, plastics, chemicals and railway equipment, that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has said benefit from Beijing's "Made in China 2025" industrial plan to make China competitive in high-tech industries.
China's list of 333 U.S. product categories hit with duties includes coal, copper scrap, fuel, steel products, buses and medical equipment.
Though it is too early for trade damage to show up in much economic data, tariffs are beginning to increase costs for consumers and businesses on both sides of the Pacific, forcing companies to adjust supply chains and pricing, with some U.S. companies looking to decrease reliance on China.
John Neuffer, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said the tariffs would hurt U.S. companies more than Chinese firms, since most semiconductor products imported from China started out as chips fabricated in the United States.
"Putting tariffs on semiconductors specifically doesn't give the administration additional leverage. The Chinese don't sell their own semiconductors to America so Chinese enterprises won't be hurt by this," Neuffer said.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/08/24/business/24reuters-usa-trade-china.html
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24 Environmental Rules Trump is Rolling Back
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Marissa Horn
President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda has pushed at least 24 environmental regulations and policies issued during the Obama administration out of the queue.
Some have been revoked completely, while others are being replaced by less- stringent rules.
This list of Environmental Protection Agency regulations compiled by Bloomberg Environment staff will be republished periodically as Trump introduces, rescinds, or overturns regulations and policies.
AIR+EMISSIONS
Overturned
· Requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions leaks | Story
· Policy that limits toxic emissions from industrial facilities | Story
· Rule that restricts the use of hydrofluorocarbons as replacements for ozone-depleting compounds | Story
In Process
· Proposed repeal of Clean Power Plan, which would have imposed the first carbon dioxide limits on power plants. A replacement plan has been proposed | Story
· Reviewing standards for limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified, and reconstructed power plants | Story
· Reviewing missions rules for power plant startups, shutdowns, and malfunctions | Story
· Revised rules to allow methane leaks to go unrepaired during unscheduled or emergency shutdowns at oil and gas facilities and control guidelines on volatile organic compound emissions from oil and gas operations | Story
· Paused rules aimed at cutting landfill methane emissions | Story
· Reviewing permitting programs for air-polluting plants | Story
· Updating rule that would reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas | Story
· Proposed changes to rules about how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities | Story
· Changes to fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks made between 2020 and 2026 have been introduced | Story
· Proposed repeal of portions of greenhouse gas limits for trucks| Story
WATER
In Process
· Repealed and working to replace Waters of the U.S., also known as WOTUS, which clarifies what waters are covered by the Clean Water Act | Story
· Delayed rule regulating toxic discharges from power plants into public waterways by two years | Story
· Proposed rule rolling back groundwater protections for certain uranium mines
CHEMICALS
Overturned
· Narrowed scope of a federal law requiring safety assessments for potentially toxic chemicals | Story
· Removed copper filter cake from the “hazardous waste” list
In Process
· Proposed removing programs that limit children’s exposure to lead paint | Story
· Proposed changes to rule aimed at improving safety at facilities that use hazardous chemicals | Story
OTHER
Overturned
· Proposed rule directing mines to prove they can pay to clean up future pollution | Story
· Federal rules regulating coal ash waste from power plants. States were granted oversight of the waste Story
In Process
· Proposed limiting the studies used by the EPA for rulemaking to only those that make data publicly available | Story
· Changing the way cost-benefit analyses are conducted under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, among other environmental regulations | Story
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/24-environmental-rules-trump-is-rolling-back-1?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Green Groups, Sanders Supporters Demand DNC End Fossil Fuel Donations
Aug 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green
A group of environmentalists, Bernie Sanders supporters and progressives is urging the Democratic National Committee to reverse its decision to allow donations from the fossil fuel industry.
In a letter Thursday, 20 groups and 1,000 petition signers told DNC Chairman Tom Perez that they were "alarmed and dismayed" at the committee's decision to reverse its prior stance that it would not accept donations from fossil fuel corporate PACs.
Groups who signed the letter include Greenpeace, 350 Action and People for Bernie.
"As you can surely understand, we were alarmed and dismayed to see the DNC reverse course after only two months," the letter read. "Taking a stand against the campaign contributions of fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, front-groups, and political action committees corrupting our democracy is a basic test of progressive leadership."
The DNC in early August overwhelming passed a resolution reversing its prior ban on donations from oil, gas and coal industries.
The resolution, sponsored by Perez, allows the committee to accept contributions from “workers, including those in energy and related industries, who organize and donate to Democratic candidates individually or through their unions’ or employers’ political action committees.”
Perez cast the measure as a commitment to organized labor.
Critics called the move a reversal of a prior DNC June decision to reject all fossil fuel donations.
The resolution, introduced by Christine Pelosi, a member of the committee and the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was suggested as a way to connect with grass-roots voters and emphasize the party's stance on environmentalism.
"Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels represents an existential threat to civilization, and Democrats committed in our 2016 Platform to curbing the effects of climate change, protecting America’s natural resources, and ensuring the quality of our air, water and land for current and future generations," read the text of the resolution.
The letter was timed with the DNC summer meeting in Chicago. A number of youth protestors interrupted the meeting Thursday to object to the reversal and warn the party was turning away young voters.
"If Democrats actually want to take back the House this fall, they will do everything they can to get young people excited about the party’s vision,” said Shelby Krohn, 21, in a statement provided by political group Sunrise Movement. “Turning their back on young people who are scared about climate change and opening their coffers to fossil fuel CEOs, lobbyists, and front groups is the wrong direction for the Democratic party."
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/403350-environmental-groups-and-bernie-sanders-supporters-demand-dnc
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Critics Eye Suits on TSCA Evaluations but 'Murky' Law Complicates Strategy
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
Environmentalists are raising a litany of legal concerns with the Trump EPA's efforts to evaluate the first 10 existing chemicals reviewed as part of the new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) program, but a “murky” situation in the recently-revised statute is complicating their strategy of when and how to challenge the evaluations.
“The statute is a little murky,” regarding when a final agency action has been made that could be challenged in court, one environmentalist tells Inside EPA, due to the administration's approach of assessing risks of individual chemical uses rather than the chemicals themselves.
At issue is EPA's process for assessing and regulating existing chemicals -- those that were in commerce before the law was originally enacted in 1976 -- under the revised 2016 TSCA. The law requires the agency to craft a scoping document for any existing chemical risk evaluation within six months of announcing the evaluation. EPA generally has three years to complete each evaluation to determine whether the chemical poses unreasonable risk to human health or the environment based on its conditions of use.
In cases where the agency finds a chemical does not pose an unreasonable risk, the law notes that a formal agency determination detailing the finding is a final action subject to judicial review. But in cases where the agency finds a chemical poses unreasonable risk, any regulation the agency issues to address it is considered a final action subject to judicial scrutiny.
TSCA section 6(i) defines final agency action on evaluations of existing chemicals as either “a determination by the Administrator under section [6](b)(4)(A) that a chemical substance does not present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment shall be issued by order” or as “a final rule promulgated under subsection [6](a), including the associated determination by the Administrator under subsection[6](b)(4)(A) that a chemical substance presents an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.”
But the environmentalist says the Trump EPA's decision -- codified in its final risk evaluation rule -- allowing the agency to reach different risk conclusions for individual uses of a chemical, complicates the issue. The evaluations are conducted regarding chemical substances' current and reasonably anticipated conditions of use.
“What do you do in a case where EPA says, 'Here are a couple of uses that present unreasonable risk, and here are a couple of others that don't.' The statute is just not clear,” the source says.
One of legal challenge environmentalists may raise is EPA's decision to craft problem formulation documents to guide the risk evaluations for the first 10 chemicals the agency is assessing -- documents EPA released in June, after issuing the scoping documents last year. The problem formulation documents are not part of the process required by TSCA or the rule, and environmentalists argue in their comments that they “cannot be used to revisit issues of scope.”
The environmentalist says: “It might've been possible to challenge [EPA's] problem formulations, but I don't think that's going to happen. The next point is when we have the final risk evaluations, which they say is going to be in late 2019. Maybe there could be a challenge at that point,” the source says.
But Herb Estreicher, a partner with the law firm Keller and Heckman, tells Inside EPA that a legal challenge “would need to await final agency action per TSCA 6(i).” Estreicher adds that he agrees with EPA's risk evaluation rule that it “may reach different conclusions for different uses of a single chemical,” suggesting that plaintiffs would need to challenge final actions as they come, even on individual uses.
“A challenge would need to be brought against a 6(i)(1) order in the case of a does not present an unreasonable risk determination, or against a 6(i)(2) rule in the case of a does present an unreasonable risk determination and the associated risk management,” Estreicher explains. “The 6(i)(1) order would need to be challenged in Federal Circuit Court within 60 days of its issuance.”
'All Of Its Hazards'
The idea that EPA can separate its risk conclusions by individual uses of a chemical, rather than reaching a single conclusion regarding the chemical's totality of uses, is just one of the legal concerns that environmentalists raise with EPA's problem formulations.
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) argues in its Aug. 16 comments that “The plain text, overall structure, purpose, and legislative history of TSCA indicate that EPA has to determine whether a chemical substance presents an unreasonable risk comprehensively, considering all of its hazards, exposures, and conditions of use.”
EDF also protests EPA's plans in the latest documents to exclude from the risk evaluations of nine of the 10 chemicals those uses of chemicals that result in exposure through pathways that are regulated by other agency program offices -- meaning most environmental exposures to the general population.
“In all but one of the problem formulations, EPA states that 'EPA does not expect to include in the risk evaluation pathways under programs of other environmental statutes, administered by EPA, which adequately assess and effectively manage exposures and for which long-standing regulatory and analytical processes already exist,'” EDF notes. “This approach is illegal and arbitrary and capricious for numerous reasons, including because TSCA requires EPA to analyze all exposures.”
EDF argues that EPA's approach is not only contrary to statute, it is also “inaccurate. For numerous sources of exposure, EPA treats the overall exposure from a particular pathway as . . . non-existent despite the fact that the available evidence thoroughly establishes that exposure is occurring at levels well above zero regardless of any actions taken under the other statutes EPA invokes. Thus, in reality, human beings and the environment are experiencing levels of exposure that EPA is willfully ignoring.”
The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition (SCHF) agrees in its Aug. 16 comments, similarly arguing that EPA's approach “would remove all environmental exposure pathways . . . from the TSCA risk evaluation process. This dramatic narrowing of TSCA’s scope is contrary to the plain language of the law and will defeat the central purpose of TSCA reform -- to conduct comprehensive risk evaluations on ubiquitous chemicals that examine the impacts on health and the environment of all of the diverse pathways and modes of release that may result in harm.”
SCHF adds that extending this approach, EPA indicates in “several” of the planning documents that it “will not evaluate the risks of general population exposure to the first 10 chemicals identified for review. However, if the presence of a chemical in environmental media -- and therefore exposure to the chemical by the general population -- is attributable to its 'conditions of use,' there is no basis for excluding this background level of exposure from EPA’s risk evaluation.”
Legacy Uses
Both groups continue to protest the Trump EPA's decision to exclude “legacy” uses of chemicals -- uses that were once common but have since exited the market -- from the evaluations. SCHF also suggests that by excluding recent legacy exposures from some evaluations, EPA's toxics office is opening the door for industries to avoid evaluation by ceasing operations -- with the potential to restart some uses after EPA's assessment is completed.
“This scenario is of particular concern where the product phase-out is in response to agency scrutiny and intended to avoid the consequences of an adverse risk finding and subsequent regulatory action. Although EPA claims that discontinued uses are not 'conditions of use' as defined in TSCA, the future resumption of these uses can be 'reasonably foreseen' and thus would satisfy the statutory definition.”
SCHF points to the example of the flame retardant chemical HBCD among EPA's first 10 evaluations, complaining that “Based on representations by industry, EPA asserts that HBCD use” in a number of uses “has ceased” and will therefore be excluded from the risk evaluation. Similarly, EPA “indicates that because HBCD is no longer being manufactured in the US, domestic production will likewise not be addressed.”
But SCHF argues that “EPA has not disclosed the industry communications it is relying on but it appears they are informal and non-binding and have not been verified by the Agency. Nor has EPA indicated that it has contacted all HBCD producers and users to confirm that the uses in question have been fully eliminated. Thus, there is no assurance that these HBCD uses no longer exist and, if so, will not be revived in the future.”
Interestingly, the docket for another of the 10 chemicals, 1,4 dioxane, contains a July 2 memo from manufacturer BASF explaining that it is closing its only U.S.-based plant. “BASF will cease the manufacturing [of] 1,4-Dioxane . . . from our . . . location in Zachary, LA USA by the end of 2018. We are currently in the process of qualifying our current customers to a source of imported material from BASF SE based in Ludwigshafen Germany. This decision . . . is not the result of the EPA risk assessment activity -- rather one based on economics and the declining sales and use of 1,4-Dioxane in North America.”
BASF adds that it is sharing the information with EPA “to assist you in prioritizing your assessment activities. Since BASF Corporation, as the sole producer of 1,4-Dioxane in the US, will no longer be manufacturing, you can remove any US manufacturing employee exposure risk assessment activities from your plan . . . we may replace this with import of bulk material . . . which may change your assessment activities.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/critics-eye-suits-tsca-evaluations-murky-law-complicates-strategy
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Blue-Collar Workers ‘Invisible’ as EPA Critiques Chemicals
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Electricians, firefighters, roofers, plumbers, homeowners, and school maintenance workers are among those whose contact with asbestos—and other hazardous chemicals—the EPA plans to ignore, according to physicians and public health officials.
When maintenance workers strip and wax an asbestos-tile floor, when electricians move a ceiling tile in a building with spray-applied asbestos fireproofing, and when technicians fix boilers in rooms with asbestos-containing insulation, they can be exposed to the deadly mineral, Celeste Monforton, a public health professional who lectures at Texas State University, told Bloomberg Environment.
Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has blindfolded itself to the health risks these and many other workers, along with residents, face from exposures to asbestos and nine other chemicals the agency is examining, Monforton said in comments recently submitted to the EPA on behalf of the American Public Health Association.
These people “will be invisible” because the EPA’s risk analysis strategy will not take their exposures into account as it decides whether the chemicals pose enough risk to warrant some type of regulation to reduce exposures, said Monforton.
Monforton helped write a series of comments the association recently submitted to the EPA about the agency’s most recent plans to evaluate the 10 chemicals.
When EPA actions are open to public comment—as is the case here—the agency typically will only say that it will consider all perspectives and information submitted. The agency has, however, defended limiting the exposures it examines as it decides whether commercial uses of chemicals should be restricted.
The EPA must make final decisions within about two years.
In its plans to make those decisions, the agency says it won’t examine every way people could be exposed to any of the 10 chemicals.
For example, if a Clean Water Act regulation already applies to a compound, waterborne exposures may not be examined.
The EPA also has said it will focus solely on ongoing commercial uses of certain chemicals—meaning it won’t consider that people might continue to be exposed from old uses, such as asbestos being in buildings.
Most developed and developing countries have banned new uses of asbestos. The few exceptions include China, Russia, and the U.S.
But most countries that have banned asbestos still have the problem of legacy asbestos in homes and buildings. Some of those countries have developed systems to warn occupants about possible exposure.
Ongoing uses of asbestos in the U.S. that the EPA will examine include its presence in equipment used to make chlorine, caustic soda, and titanium dioxide.2019 Decisions
The EPA must make an initial decision by next year whether asbestos, pigment violet 29, a group of three fire retardants being considered as a single chemical, and seven solvents—1-bromopropane, 1,4-dioxane, carbon tetrachloride, methylene chloride, n-methylpyrrolidone, perchloroethylene, and trichloroethylene—pose an unreasonable risk of injuring people or the environment.
The 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act amendments require a final decision from the EPA on whether these substance pose an unreasonable risk no later than mid-2020.
If the EPA were to find that any of the 10 substances poses an unreasonable risk, it is required to regulate them to reduce that risk.
“If EPA does not adequately protect Americans’ health and environment, local and state governments throughout the country will bear the extraordinary costs necessary to treat people exposed to these dangerous chemicals and clean up preventable pollution,” Kathleen C. Schmid, senior counsel for the environmental law division of New York City, told Bloomberg Environment.
Few Industry Voices
As of Aug. 23, few companies or trade associations had offered their views on the risk assessment plans, called “problem formulations,” that the EPA released in June. Comments were due Aug. 16.
Those few manufacturers that did, such as Honeywell, ICL-IP America Inc., andKemira, provided the agency details on how they use a specific chemical or scientific data the agency might not have, but which suggests a chemical they make would pose less of a risk than previously thought.
The BASF Corp. told the agency it will no longer make one of the 10 chemicals the EPA is evaluating, a solvent called 1,4-dioxane, by the end of this year.
Uncommon Comments
New York City, attorneys general from 11 states, physicians, public health officials, and the National Cancer Registrars Association, which tracks deaths from cancer, criticized all 10 of EPA’s risk analysis plans. These groups, which don’t typically weigh in on EPA’s chemical policies, claim they believe the agency would ignore many exposures to these chemicals.
They also said the agency shouldn’t presume that existing regulations adequately protect people and the environment from exposure to these chemicals. The agency used that rationale to justify decisions not to look at a variety of ways people could be exposed to the 10 chemicals.
Firefighters, remodelers, and other workers are among the many people that would remain inadequately protected under the EPA’s plans, Pat O’Connor, director of government affairs for the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, told Bloomberg Environment and the EPA. The college represents more than 4,000 physicians and other health-care professionals.
Some of those workers would still be expected to get cancer and other diseases even if exposed to these chemicals at concentrations allowed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s regulations, O’Connor said.
Public employees, small business contractors, and many other workers also are not covered by OSHA regulations, said Randy Rabinowitz, executive director of the Occupational Safety & Health Law Project, which serves unions and workers injured by chemical exposures.
The EPA’s plans to ignore many exposures means it may incorrectly conclude the chemicals don’t pose an unreasonable risk of injury and don’t need to be controlled, Rabinowitz told Bloomberg Environment.
Future Litigation
For eight of the 10 chemicals that lack detailed risk analyses, the EPA could calculate “risk values” that underestimate the extent to which the chemicals would cause injuries, she said. Risk values provide information such as chemical concentrations that would not be expected to cause illnesses other than cancer and estimates of how potent a carcinogenic chemical may be.
The agency’s risk values become evidence in toxic tort and other lawsuits, meaning the underestimated risks may favor corporate and other defendants in future litigation involving the chemicals, Rabinowitz said.
The EPA’s approach violates the TSCA amendments and scientific principles, Betsy Southerland, a former EPA official, told Bloomberg Environment.
The Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA staff Southerland represents, plans to keep raising such points as the agency’s risk evaluations proceed.
Decisions the agency would make based on its current risk strategy will be challenged in court when they become final actions that can be litigated, Southerland said.
Yet even if critics win eventually, it will take years and the agency’s risk analyses will have to be done again at taxpayers’ expense, she said.
The consequence is “all those years lost with people’s health at risk,” Southerland said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/blue-collar-workers-invisible-as-epa-critiques-chemicals?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Senate Set to Look at PFAS Concerns
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Daily
By Corbin Hiar
Senators are planning to hold the first congressional hearing next month specifically focused on a class of toxic chemicals that have polluted the drinking water of millions of Americans.
A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel is set to examine the federal role in responding to the public health threat posed by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. It will be on Sept. 26.
PFAS chemicals have been prized by industry and the military since the 1940s for their stain and fire-resistant qualities. But in recent decades, they've also been linked to cancer and developmental problems.
Dangerously high levels of PFAS have been discovered in many states, including Michigan, which is represented by the top Democrat on the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management Subcommittee (Greenwire, July 30).
"Michiganders across the state have been unknowingly and involuntarily exposed to harmful PFAS chemicals, and they deserve a clear picture of both the full extent and long-term effects of the contamination," Sen. Gary Peters, the panel's ranking member, said in a statement announcing the event.
"I am pleased that this hearing will help shed light on the PFAS problem, determine the necessary steps to clean up the contamination and get some answers for the Michigan families, service members and veterans, who were exposed to toxic PFAS chemicals," he said.
Earlier this month, Congress passed a defense spending bill that ordered the Pentagon to commit resources to studying PFAS contamination (E&E News PM, Aug. 1).
Meanwhile, EPA officials are in the midst of a community engagement campaign around PFAS that has included events in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado and, most recently, North Carolina.
Earlier this year, EPA announced that it would develop groundwater cleanup recommendations for PFOS and PFOA, two types of PFAS; consider establishing a binding maximum contaminant levels for them; and consider declaring the compounds hazardous substances. It will also develop toxicity values for GenX and PFBS, two other varieties of PFAS (Greenwire, May 22).
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2018/08/24/stories/1060095139
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EPA Asks 9th Circuit to Clarify Deadline for Banning Chlorpyrifos
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
EPA is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to clarify a deadline for the agency to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos and suggesting the deadline should not take effect till the agency exhausts any appeal, in response to a court order finding that EPA has failed for years to protect against the substance's neuro-developmental risks.
In an Aug. 21 filing, EPA asks the appellate court to clarify judges' Aug. 9 order that the agency revoke all tolerances and registrations for chlorpyrifos within 60 days. EPA argues that such timeframes are usually triggered by a mandate issued after the agency has had an opportunity to appeal.
“Although the Court did not expressly state from when this 60-day deadline would run, EPA believes that it would run from the issuance of the mandate because a decision of the Court of Appeals generally does not become final until after the time for filing a Petition for Reconsideration lapses and the Court thereafter issues the mandate,” EPA says.
“Despite its reading of the Federal Rules and relevant case law, out of an abundance of caution, EPA seeks clarification of this issue,” the filing adds.
EPA has already suggested a possible appeal of the court's order for a chlorpyrifos ban, saying in a statement that it has concerns with a Columbia University epidemiology study that formed the basis for the Obama administration's proposed ban of use of the substance on food because the underlying medical data is not public.
In the Aug. 9 decision, a three-judge panel of the court ruled 2-1 in League of United Latin American Citizens et al. v. Wheeler that EPA had failed to justify former Administrator Scott Pruitt's controversial decision reversing the proposed Obama-era ban given the risks that the agency has found chlorpyrifos poses to children.
"There was no justification for the [Trump] EPA’s decision in its 2017 order to maintain a tolerance for chlorpyrifos in the face of scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children," the ruling said.
In the recent motion to clarify, EPA says it believes that the 60-day time frame should begin with the issuance of the court's mandate, which would occur either seven days after a deadline for a petition for rehearing expires, or seven days after an order denying a petition for rehearing, rehearing en banc, or motion to stay the mandate, whichever is later.
EPA's current request appears to echo a legal question that the agency raised after the 9th Circuit's landmark ruling late last year ordering EPA to propose a rule updating its lead dust hazard standard for residential structures and its regulatory definition of lead-based paint within 90 days “of the date this decision becomes final."
Following the decision last December in A Community Voice, et al. v. EPA, the agency sought similar clarification and the court granted the agency an additional 90 days to propose the rule updating the lead hazard standards.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/epa-asks-9th-circuit-clarify-deadline-banning-chlorpyrifos
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Roundup Cancer Verdict May Ignite ‘Glyphosate-Free’ Food Demand
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Lydia Mulvany and Megan Durisin
Consumers already pay a premium for foods labeled GMO-free. The next thing that shoppers could be shelling out for are foods free from pesticides—in particular, free from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, Monsanto Co.’s bestselling weedkiller.
Earlier this month a California jury sided with a school groundskeeper in saying that Roundup gave him cancer, awarding him $289 million. Since then, Henry Rowlands, director of the Detox Project, says food brands have been flooding him with inquiries about the glyphosate-residue-free certification he offers.
The Detox Project started offering glyphosate testing in 2017. So far, 15 brands have been fully certified, with dozens more pending, Rowlands said. More than 50 additional brands, ranging from baby food to honey to supplements, have been in touch since the California verdict, he added.
Testing has been available in the milling and baking industry for several years, but interest is growing, said Rich Kendrick, director of business development at Great Plains Analytical Lab in Kansas City. He cited California’s listing of glyphosate as a carcinogen as part of its Proposition 65 law.
Glyphosate is a staple of modern farming. Growers spray it over crops that are genetically modified to be resistant so that only weeds die. Because it’s so widely used, trace amounts of glyphosate have been detected in all sorts of foods, including cookies, beer, breakfast cereals, honey and oatmeal, and it’s been found in human urine and breast milk.
Germany’s Bayer AG bought Monsanto for $66 billion in June, and has vowed to vigorously defend against the wave of Roundup lawsuits. Monsanto has said for decades that glyphosate is safe. Regulators including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have agreed that it’s unlikely to cause cancer.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/roundup-cancer-verdict-may-ignite-glyphosate-free-food-demand?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Bayer Has a $289 Million Roundup Headache
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Naomi Kresge, Aaron Kirchfeld and Klaus Wille
Last fall, as Bayer AG was completing its $66 billion merger with Monsanto Co., Werner Baumann, its chief executive, visited the concrete-slab Berlin complex where company scientists develop disease-fighting drugs. At an employee town hall meeting, Baumann asked whether staffers believed environmentalists’ claims that the Monsanto weed killer Roundup causes cancer.
Despite the CEO’s obvious interest in the acquisition, some raised their hands. On Aug. 10 a California court agreed, awarding a school groundskeeper dying of lymphoma $289 million on a claim that exposure to glyphosate, Roundup’s key ingredient, had contributed to his cancer. The verdict—the first in what may be thousands of cases—sent shock waves through Bayer and erased $16 billion from the company’s market value in a week.
“The odds are that Bayer will suffer more losses” in litigation over Roundup, says Elizabeth Burch, a University of Georgia liability law professor. “Investors better get prepared.”
Roundup is at the core of the Monsanto portfolio: In addition to the weed killer, the company sells soybean, cotton, and corn seeds genetically engineered to survive being doused with it. After the California verdict, Bayer issued a memo to managers citing studies that found glyphosate to be safe, underscoring Baumann’s contention that science should rule over emotion in the debate over Roundup.“Everyone has a right to their own opinion,” Baumann told shareholders at Bayer’s annual meeting in April. “Nobody, ladies and gentlemen, has a right to their own facts.” Bayer declined to make Baumann or other executives available for interviews.
Animus Against Monsanto
Bayer, which enjoys a positive reputation in its home country, may not have fully grasped the animus that Monsanto faces. The plaintiff in the California case “probably got $2 million to $3 million for the horrible suffering, another $3 million because he was a sympathetic guy, and $280 million because people hate Monsanto,” says Jonas Oxgaard, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Investors were so concerned with the risk that the Monsanto purchase might not pass regulatory muster, Oxgaard says, that they overlooked various product-liability risks Bayer faced if the deal did go through. He predicts that while the California penalty will almost certainly be reduced on appeal, Bayer could end up paying damages and sanctions as high as $5 billion in cases linked to glyphosate.
Although it’s best known as the inventor of aspirin 121 years ago, Bayer has never been just a drugmaker. It was founded in 1863 as a producer of synthetic coal-tar dyes for the textile industry, and it invented polyurethanes in the 1930s. In 2001, Bayer became one of the world’s biggest agrochemicals makers with its purchase of Aventis CropScience.
Among the overseers of the transaction was soon-to-be-CEO Werner Wenning, who was seeking to reinvigorate the company amid the recall of a cholesterol-lowering medicine called Lipobay. Although Bayer never acknowledged any liability, by 2005 it had paid more than $1.1 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits over the drug, which was ultimately linked to a muscle-wasting disease and more than 50 deaths.
Some 15 years later, Wenning had been promoted to chairman and his protégé Baumann was contemplating the Monsanto deal as an antidote to another pharma problem. In 2023, patents would expire for Xarelto, the heart medication responsible for one-fifth of Bayer’s prescription drug sales.
Push for Agrochem Purchase
Medical research is slow, and Baumann could see that little in Bayer’s pipeline had the potential to be as big as Xarelto. Wenning was pushing for another big agrochem purchase, according to a person familiar with the process. After Monsanto lost a bidding war for Swiss pesticide producer Syngenta AG, the German company saw an opportunity to approach the U.S. rival. Competitors were doing big deals to combine seeds and weed killers, and Bayer needed an acquisition to remain a leader in agriculture, says Markus Manns, a fund manager at Union Investment, which owns some $750 million in Bayer shares.
“Bayer didn’t have any choice but to buy a seeds company,” Manns says, “and Monsanto was the only one left.”
Bayer executives knew it would be a difficult deal, especially from a brand cleanup perspective, a person familiar with the process says. In a project code-named Moonshot, it extensively examined Monsanto and the potential legal risks associated with Roundup, which has long been a target of environmentalists.
While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said glyphosate is “unlikely” to cause cancer in humans, the World Health Organization in 2015 labeled it a probable carcinogen. The designation opened the door to lawsuits by agriculture workers with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer common among farmhands. According to several people inside the company, the size of the California ruling came as a surprise, but since the verdict, Bayer has insisted that “decades of real-world experience” have shown glyphosate to be safe and that regulators have agreed.
Bayer has said it will vigorously defend any challenges to Roundup, and its U.S. legal team has experience with liability lawsuits. In a case involving Xarelto, a Pennsylvania jury awarded more than $27 million to a woman hospitalized with gastrointestinal bleeding after taking the heart drug.
Bayer and its partner Johnson & Johnson got the award thrown out by pointing at procedural problems with a doctor’s testimony. But more than 20,000 Xarelto suits are still pending—as well as about 5,000 cases involving Roundup.
“Managing class actions, that’s something Bayer can do,” says Marc Tungler, CEO of DSW, a shareholder rights group in Germany. “As sad as that might be, it’s important.”
—With Lydia Mulvany and Jef Feeley
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/bayer-has-a-289-million-roundup-headache?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Nature Valley Drops ‘100% Natural’ Claim After Pesticide Suit
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Deena Shanker
General Mills Inc.’s Nature Valley bars will no longer bear the “Made with 100% Natural Whole Grain Oats” label, after the company settled a lawsuit by consumer groups alleging the snack contained glyphosate—a pesticide better known as Roundup.
General Mills, which confirmed the change, sold $985.1 million worth of the brand’s snack bars last year, making it the top U.S. seller in that category, according to data from Euromonitor.
The alleged presence of the chemical made the label deceptive, the consumer groups argued in their complaint. Roundup is big agriculture’s most popular pesticide. The consumer groups alleged that laboratory testing had found traces of the chemical in Nature Valley bars. General Mills hasn’t commented on that claim.
“In a perfect world, we’d like to see food companies stop using these chemicals,” said Katherine Paul of the Organic Consumers Association, or OCA, one of the plaintiffs. “In the short term, one way we believe to help put the pressure on corporations in general is to hold them accountable for the way they label and advertise their products.”
Paul’s group has previously sued over the alleged presence of Roundup in products that include Post Holdings Inc.’s Shredded Wheat, a case that was also settled confidentially while resulting in a label change, and Ben & Jerry’s ice creams, a pending case.
Earlier this month, a San Francisco jury handed up a $289 million verdict against Monsanto Co., the maker of Roundup, in favor of a man who argued that exposure to the chemical had caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Bayer AG, which acquired Monsanto, said it will appeal.
“Nature Valley is confident in the accuracy of its label,” General Mills said in a statement about the settlement, in which it didn’t admit or deny any wrongdoing. Mike Siemienas, a spokesman, said the “100% natural” claim will be changed. Last summer, a federal judge in Minnesota dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought against General Mills over the same “100% natural” claim. The court concluded that it wasn’t plausible to interpret the statement to mean there were no traces of the pesticide in the bars.
The more recent litigation, filed two years ago in Washington, D.C., Superior Court, was brought by consumer advocacy groups Beyond Pesticides, Moms Across America, and OCA.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/naturevalley-drops-100-naturalclaim-after-pesticide-suit?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Echa BoA ‘Sidesteps’ Animal Testing Issue in Symrise Case
Aug 23, 2018 | Chemical Watch
By Andrew Turley
Echa’s Board of Appeal has sent the long-running Symrise AG case back to the competent authorities, amid complaints from animal rights groups that the BoA is sidestepping the issue of animal testing of cosmetics ingredients under REACH.
The dispute arose during REACH evaluation when Echa asked Symrise, the registrant of antifungal substance climbazole, to submit further data from toxicity studies, including an extended, one-generation reproductive toxicity study (Eogrts). The German flavours and fragrances company appealed, and two NGOs intervened in the case: the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE) and the Peta International Science Consortium.
The company and NGOs argued that Echa was wrong to ask for animal testing under REACH because of climbazole’s exclusive use as a cosmetics ingredient, and because of the ban on animal testing under the cosmetics Regulation.
Rather than rule on these arguments, the BoA ruled on a procedural issue involving whether Echa had breached Symrise’s right to be heard. Ultimately, the result was that the BoA annulled the contested Decision in relation to the Eogrts, and dismissed the appeal in relation to other aspects.
Echa told Chemical Watch that the sidestepping claim was incorrect because, as found by a 2017 ombudsman Decision, the agency "has no role in the implementation of the cosmetics Regulation".
The ECEAE, however, said it was the second time the BoA had missed an opportunity to provide clarity for EU cosmetics companies and potentially avoid the use of thousands of animals in toxicity studies. Echa’s Board of Appeal previously considered the issue in an appeal brought by BASF Personal Care and Nutrition. In that case, the BoA Decision also focused on other arguments.
The dispute over animal testing of cosmetic ingredients under REACH has a long history, spanning several individual cases, and producing:
· a 2014 joint statement from Echa and the European Commission;
· an ombudsman Decision; and
· a European Court of Justice ruling.
"The way Echa interprets the animal test bans in Article 18 of the cosmetics Regulation – as in this case – means that they could hardly ever apply, and the European public are being cynically misled into thinking that animal testing for cosmetics is banned when it is not. Clarification of the legal position from the Board of Appeal was therefore essential," the ECEAE said.
The BoA should have taken the opportunity to provide guidance on the issue through its Decision, the ECEAE said.
Julia Baines, science policy adviser at Peta UK, said that Echa was "continuing to place manufacturers in a position of legal uncertainty".
"The Commission can and must align its policy on the interplay between the two regulations to fit with the intent of the legislators – cosmetics must not be tested on animals for any purpose," Dr Baines added.
https://chemicalwatch.com/69919/echa-boa-sidesteps-animal-testing-issue-in-symrise-case
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ACE Rule's 'Fenceline' GHG Policy Could Limit Future President's Options
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Lee Logan and Dawn Reeves
Legal experts say the Trump EPA's “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) proposal targeting greenhouse gases from existing power plants appears designed to block a future administration from pursuing broader GHG controls, because it all but says the Clean Air Act restricts such standards to those “within the fenceline” of the plant.
EPA would be expected to rely on the inside-the-fenceline argument to defend a near-certain lawsuit from environmentalists and states if the agency finalizes ACE as proposed. But some sources say the policy position might not be an explicit prohibition on a future president imposing stricter “beyond the fence” standards, instead hoping the rule would set a precedent preventing such tougher approaches.
The debate over whether EPA's Clean Air Act section 111(d) climate rule for existing utilities must consider only GHG limits inside a facility or can weigh controls outside a facility's boundaries will likely play out in pending written comments on the ACE proposal, released Aug. 21 ahead of its publication in the Federal Register.
The comments are also expected to include a fight over whether section 111(d) even allows GHG regulation of existing power plants, though the agency in the ACE plan says it has such authority.
Throughout the proposed power sector GHG rule, EPA frequently argues that its legal findings about the scope of its section 111(d) authority are “reasonable,” alluding to the landmark Supreme Court Chevron doctrine in which courts grant deference to agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws.
Implicit in that argument, however, is a concession that the air law might not unambiguously preclude “beyond the fence” standards. This is an apparent shift from EPA's separate plan to repeal the 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Obama-era policy that was much broader in scope than ACE and which the Trump EPA's new proposal would replace.
“To the extent that the Agency, due to the fact that Congress did not expressly forbid such an approach, does possess that discretion, today it proposes not to exercise it,” EPA writes in the preamble to its ACE proposal.
University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, in an Aug. 22 blog post on Legal Planet, highlights this dynamic.
“Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see anything in the proposal saying that the statute is unambiguous or that EPA’s interpretation is the only one possible. Instead, over and over again, it uses the language of reasonableness,” he writes.
Farber questions whether EPA's reading of the air law is “reasonable” given that it “undeniably” would cut far fewer GHGs than the CPP and would “admittedly” cause many more premature deaths from air pollution.
Successor Limits
But even if courts agree with the agency that its approach is “reasonable,” he says “a future EPA could revert to the Obama Administration’s broader interpretation of EPA’s powers by finding that interpretation to be more reasonable than the Trump Administration’s.”
Others are not so certain on that point. If upheld, the ACE rule “could to make it difficult for a differently oriented successor to establish [GHG] limits on any stationary sector via executive discretion,” the analysis firm ClearView Energy Partners writes in an Aug. 21 research note.
The firm argues that the rule would set a “precedent” for inside-the-fence standards and may “set firm boundaries for other emitting sectors that still could have GHG exposure,” including refineries and chemical plants.
However, ClearView says this outcome “is contingent on the Trump Administration successfully navigating judicial review.”
Additionally, Jessica Wentz, an attorney at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, notes in an Aug. 21 blog post that one “critical question” is whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will “agree with EPA's new interpretation, as this bears on the fate of both” the ACE rule and the CPP.
Echoing other supporters of the Obama standards, she calls for the D.C. Circuit to issue a ruling on the “fenceline” issue, in the context of the CPP, “sooner rather than later.”
The court held oral argument on that rule in September 2016 but never issued a ruling, instead pausing the case while the Trump EPA revisited the regulation.
CPP backers say the scope of EPA's legal authority -- specifically, whether it is allowed to issue “beyond the fence” standards -- is a key question in both rules, and that the D.C. Circuit is poised to clarify the issue now.
Other legal observers, however, expect the D.C. Circuit to continue to hold off on a ruling and instead wait to address the “fenceline” issues in near-certain litigation over the Trump administration's ACE rule.
Subtle Shift
EPA says its rule is returning to the “historical practice” of section 111 by limiting standards “to emission reduction measures that can be applied to or at an individual stationary source.”
This argument is similar to the key justification for EPA's separate October 2017 proposed rule to rescind the CPP, a measure sources expect the agency to not take any further action on given its plans to scrap the CPP by imposing the ACE rule as a replacement.
While the new proposal cites to the earlier repeal plan, it appears to depart from the prior measure in a one key way. There, EPA said it “proposes to determine that the CPP is not within Congress’s grant of authority to the Agency under the governing statute.”
At the time, environmentalists highlighted that argument as a key legal vulnerability in the repeal plan. Sean Donahue, who is representing the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in litigation over the CPP, noted that the repeal proposal did not say, “We think it's better to interpret the act differently” than the Obama EPA did in issuing the rule. Rather, it argued that the CPP was based on an “unlawful interpretation” of the air law, with EPA proposing to find it can never issue standards based on actions taken “beyond the fence” of regulated power plants.
The first argument, he told reporters in October, might get a better reception from courts because it would likely be viewed through courts' traditional Chevron framework, but the latter argument presents a hurdle that is “higher than it might otherwise have been. You have to show you can't do the kind of thing the CPP does. It's not just, 'We're exercising discretion in a different way,' but that 'The existing rule is beyond our range of discretion.' That's a difficult” problem.
Nearly a year later, EPA's ACE proposal might offer a subtle shift on this point, arguing for instance that certain measures that “redefine” a source “should be excluded from consideration for purposes of” section 111(d).
EPA also finds its approach is the “best way to ensure GHG emission reductions” at power plants, a phrase that Berkeley's Farber notes is not the same as “the only way allowed by the statute.”
He adds: “EPA does use some other language hinting that the statute may require its interpretation, but it never says so explicitly.”
If the courts do uphold the Trump rule, one coal industry source agrees with the ClearView assessment, saying the ACE's rule's inside-the-fence approach may constrain a future administration but would not be a direct bar on imposing section 111(d) standards that are based on actions taken beyond a facility's fenceline -- such a fuel switching to natural gas or renewables.
Rather, the source says, it would set a precedent that supporters of the Trump approach can cite in future rulemakings and legal challenges.
Other Approaches
However, this source believes it is unlikely that a future White House interested in broad climate change limits using existing authority would seek to regulate using section 111(d), but would instead look to Clean Air Act section 115, a little-used provision which allows EPA to limit domestic emissions that harm other countries.
A future Democratic administration also might attempt to set GHG limits through the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) program under section 110.
The notion of a section 115 GHG rule, potentially covering power plants and several other sectors, was gaining momentum during the end of the Obama administration, with many expecting Hillary Clinton's EPA to seriously consider the strategy if she had won the presidency in 2016.
However, the coal industry source says that such a strategy could be complicated if President Donald Trump follows through with his pledge to remove the United States from the Paris climate agreement. Many agreed that participation in the Paris deal would enable such a rule by helping EPA make a requisite “reciprocity” finding that other countries are making similar efforts to cut GHGs.
Many experts have also cited challenges with imposing a NAAQS for GHGs, given that such an approach would likely put the entire country out of attainment with such a standard and put communities at risk of losing federal highway funding. The coal source believes a future administration would only impose a rule as a way to get Congress' attention and spur lawmakers to enact a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax.
https://insideepa.com/weekly-focus/ace-rules-fenceline-ghg-policy-could-limit-future-presidents-options
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Trump’s Latest Energy Plan Leaves American Energy and Innovation in the Dark
Aug 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rep. Jerry Mcnerney (D-Calif.)
Since coming to office, President Trump has led the U.S. down a path of regression, ceding the nation’s leadership on important issues, chief among them our commitment to policies that promote energy innovation and job creation, and combat the impending dangers of climate change. His latest attempt to turn back the clock on America’s energy progress was rolled out this week by the acting director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a former coal lobbyist himself. The proposal, deceptively named the Affordable Clean Energy rule, is being marketed as a less “prescriptive” replacement for the Clean Power Plan, but it is really just a giveaway to the coal industry.
While the Clean Power Plan carved out a national agenda to reduce carbon emissions and encourage the use of clean energy sources, this new proposal passes the buck off to the individual states. It would give them broad authority to increase emissions in exchange for minor efficiency improvements, and it contains loopholes big enough to drive a diesel-powered tractor trailer straight through.
The president and his cronies are falsely claiming this plan will create jobs, but the Department of Energy’s annual U.S. Energy Employment report for 2017 tells a different story. The solar and wind industries combined make up nearly three times the amount of jobs as compared to the coal industry. Coal jobs declined by 39 percent between March 2009 and March 2016, with a 24 percent decline in the last year alone, and net generation from coal sources has dropped by 53 percent since 2006. Most notably, this decline is due to increasing economic competition from renewable energy and natural gas.
Meanwhile, solar has seen a net generation increase of over 5,000 percent and accounts for the largest share of workers in the electric power generation workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists solar photovoltaic installers as the fastest growing occupation, with a median pay of $39,490 per year – over $8,000 more than the $31,099 median personal income of a single American. Coming in a close second on that list of growing occupations is wind turbine service technicians, whose median pay was $53,880 in 2017.
As the administration peddles its Affordable Clean Energy plan, which would mostly financially benefit their industry friends, they fail to highlight the devastating health and environmental costs laid out in their own analysis of this proposal. The administration’s own report outlines the climate and human health losses that would be incurred under this plan – including premature deaths caused by increased emissions that have been linked to heart and lung diseases as well as the increasing toll of chronic respiratory problems, such as asthma. The analysis states that implementing this proposal will increase carbon dioxide emissions, countering significant emissions reduction progress. This comes at a time when natural disasters and drastic changes in weather patterns associated with these emissions are at a historic high. With forest fires raging, choking the West with smoke, now more than ever we should commit to reducing these lethal emissions.
But from the beginning, the president has made clear that he has no desire to move the country forward on issues related to our environment or the future of our economy. As 200 countries around the world committed to rein in emissions under the Paris Climate Accord, President Trump withdrew the United States, provoking diplomatic discord and relinquishing our role as a global leader. Just weeks ago, he rolled back fuel economy standards– a move that will stifle technological advancements and put American automakers at a competitive disadvantage. And this latest proposal is his last-ditch effort to provide life support for coal plants that could not otherwise compete against other sources of power generation. The president is rolling back decades of progress and leading our country – once a shining example for energy innovation and leadership – down a dark path.
Congressman McNerney is a former wind energy engineer and holds a PhD in mathematics. He sits on the House Committees on Energy and Commerce and Science, Space and Technology.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/403270-trumps-latest-energy-plan-leaves-american-energy-and
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Scientists Blast EPA Effort That Would Discredit Health Research in the Name of 'Transparency'
Aug 24, 2018 | Los Angeles Times
By Melissa Healy
When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to give states more latitude in regulating pollution from power plants within their borders, it came with a sobering forecast of its likely impact on Americans’ health.
By 2030, adoption of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule could lead to 470 to 1,400 additional premature deaths each year because of an increase in tiny airborne particles. Children with asthma could wind up missing 21,000 extra days of school annually, and up to 48,000 more people could experience “exacerbated asthma” as air quality deteriorates.
Those estimates were made possible by decades-old studies that linked the rise and fall of microscopic airborne particulates — smog and other emissions from automobile tailpipes, factories and other industrial sources — to predictable patterns of premature death. It’s the kind of analysis that federal regulators will be barred from considering if the EPA adopts a controversial plan ostensibly designed to enhance the quality of research.
The Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science initiative would allow rulemakers to base their decisions only on studies whose raw data is available to the public. That way, anyone who doubts the findings can make their own attempt to validate, or discredit, them.
“The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end,” former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said when he unveiled the initiative in April. “Americans deserve to assess the legitimacy of the science underpinning EPA decisions that may impact their lives.”
Who could possibly be against that?
Nearly 70 medical societies and public health groups, including the American Medical Assn., the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Assn. and the American Assn. for Cancer Research. In their view, it’s a backhanded attack on the key air pollution studies that forced companies to spend billions of dollars on cleaner factories and better equipment.
“I can’t come up with any explanation other than that they want to make this data available to vested interests by making it available to everyone,” said George Thurston, an environmental medicine researcher at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine who opposes the EPA initiative. “The problem is that people with an agenda can statistically manipulate the data and come up with really inappropriate conclusions. And if they have a profit motive, that’s likely to happen.”
Even the EPA’s own Science Advisory Board is skeptical. The board, which was not consulted on the transparency proposal, voted in May to review the initiative itself.
Before a four-month public comment period closed last week, more than 6,000 people and organizations weighed in on the proposal. It is now in the final stages of deliberation and could be adopted as early as this fall.
To Thurston, the tactic has a familiar ring.
Twenty years ago, he said, the EPA was examining research on the health effects of secondhand smoke and whether they warranted new restrictions on smokers. In a bid to gain access to the research and cast doubt on the findings, tobacco-industry allies pressed the agency to adopt “transparency” measures. The measure found its way into a House appropriations bill in 1998, but never made it into law.
“If you challenge the fundamentals, you challenge the finding,” said Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of policy for the American Lung Assn. “That’s why you’re seeing this proposal.”
The initiative comes at a vulnerable moment: In recent years, scientists have been grappling with the fact that in certain fields, too many landmark findings can’t be replicated by independent researchers. Editors of peer-reviewed science journals have responded with calls for broader sharing of data to ensure the integrity of new research.
The EPA says those voices “informed” its transparency initiative.
Scientists acknowledge that such openness is the ideal in research. But it’s not always practical.
Researchers are often bound by requirements to protect the privacy of their subjects. New methods in data management have made it possible to maintain privacy while sharing personal data, they said. But those often don’t help researchers whose subjects were enrolled decades ago.
Consider the 1993 “Six-City Study” and the 1995 American Cancer Society study, which both laid the groundwork for federal and state regulations aimed at reducing automobile and industrial emissions. They were based on the detailed tracking of air pollution exposures and health outcomes of 8,111 and 552,138 subjects, respectively.
The data on which the two studies rested were never wholly released to the public. The authors argued they could not do so without breaking a commitment to protect subjects’ privacy. That made it difficult for operators of coal-fired power plants, car manufacturers and other opponents of air pollution rules to challenge the studies’ findings.
While some kinds of technology may make it easier to shield the identities of research subjects, others may make it more difficult. Increasingly powerful computers can sift through genomes to find suspects, such as in the Golden State Killer case. It wouldn’t be hard to strip away study participants’ anonymity in cases where several publicly available databases are used to characterize their exposure to possible toxins, Thurston wrote in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
The EPA’s critics also say the proposal purports to fix a problem that scientists and regulators have generally addressed with other, less disruptive measures. For instance, if privacy concerns bar the public release of a research study’s data, independent third parties can be paid to review and reanalyze the study’s inputs and confirm or challenge its findings.
That’s what has happened to the two air pollution studies. In 2000, the EPA tapped an independent research group to conduct a reanalysis of the studies and their subsequent updates. The audit confirmed the original results.
Nolen said the transparency initiative appears to be part of a broader Trump administration assault on science.
“They’d like to be able to censor the science, to cast doubt on it by saying, ‘It’s not valid because it’s not transparent,’” she said.
Beyond discrediting past studies, the initiative would also undermine the quality of future environmental research, Thurston said.
If scientists can’t promise to protect subjects’ privacy, fewer of them would agree to participate. Smaller study populations mean less convincing findings. Less convincing findings don’t justify complex or costly environmental regulation to protect Americans’ health.
The scaring-off of research participants is already happening, Thurston said. The trend is most clear among immigrants and those in poverty — the kinds of people who were underrepresented in earlier research, yet tend to face more consistent exposure to environmental toxins.
“It’s very difficult to get those populations,” he said. “It’s getting harder and harder.”
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-epa-research-transparency-20180824-story.html
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Midwest Utility Turning to Cows, Landfills for a Gas Alternative
Aug 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Naureen S. Malik
CenterPoint Energy Inc. wants to introduce a pilot program in Minnesota offering customers access to a renewable form of natural gas recovered from dairy farms and landfills.
It’s the first such program in the Midwest, mirroring the push by utilities to offer electricity powered by wind or solar. Methane produced by everything from manure to rotting garbage is the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, and environmentalists have long been looking for ways to reduce its emissions.
Under a plan filed Aug. 23 with the state, CenterPoint will let customers enroll in a voluntary, budget-based program to buy the fuel—processed to be chemically identical to natural gas—starting in Spring 2019. The hook: It’ll cost about 7 times more than the traditional version. Still, the company’s confident of a positive response.
“We’ve heard from our customers that they want to have options for how they get their energy, and that many of them are interested in using more renewable energy,” Nick Mark, manager of conservation and renewable energy policy for the Houston-based utility, said in an emailed statement. “We think it can help Minnesota achieve its energy policy goals as well as achieving environmental benefits.”
To access the program, households would need to make a commitment of at least $1 a month for a year. If the program’s approved, Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission will set the final cost.
Minnesota accounts for about a quarter of the 3.5 million gas customers that CenterPoint serves in six states.
RNG, which can be produced from cow, pig, or even human waste and from gas emitted off the decomposing contents of landfills, is an emerging, environmentally friendly renewable fuel that doesn’t have blending limits. Utilities including Duke Energy Corp. and National Grid Plc and trucking fleets are already investing in it.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/midwest-utility-turning-to-cows-landfills-for-a-gas-alternative?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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4th Circuit Denies Stay of Atlantic Coast Pipeline Permit
Aug 23, 2018 | Inside EPA
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has denied environmentalists' motion to stay a Clean Water Act (CWA) dredge-and-fill permit for construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) in West Virginia, noting the Army Corps of Engineers has already voluntarily stayed the permit pending review and saying the record does not support environmentalists' arguments.
“We deny Petitioners’ motion without prejudice. The record lacks clear evidence that ACP is unable to comply with” the requirements in nationwide permit (NWP) 12 that construction across streams in West Virginia must be completed within 72 hours, the court says in an Aug. 20 per curiam order in Sierra Club , et al. v. Army Corps of Engineers.
In addition, the Huntington District of the Corps has voluntarily suspended all NWP 12 verifications for ACP in West Virginia pending ACP’s provision of additional information to ensure its compliance with all NWP 12 conditions, the court says.
ACP has also committed to provide written notice to the environmental groups prior to resuming any work authorized under NWP 12 so the groups may review the Corps' decision and pursue further relief from the Corps or the 4th Circuit, the order says.
Environmentalists in July asked the court to stay the Corps' verification of the permit, raising similar arguments that were successful in getting the 4th Circuit to stay use of NWP 12 for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in June.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/4th-circuit-denies-stay-atlantic-coast-pipeline-permit
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ExxonMobil Looking to Add More Texas Production
Aug 23, 2018 | Plastics Today
By Frank Esposito
Still more growth could be headed for ExxonMobil Chemical's massive complex in Baytown, Texas.
The Houston-based firm is planning a $1.9 billion expansion in Baytown that would include two plastics units, according to an Aug. 22 report from the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle credited the Houston Business Journalwith first reporting the story.
The expansion would create 65 permanent jobs, with construction beginning in mid-2021 and concluding in 2023.
Officials with ExxonMobil could not be reached for comment. The Chronicleitem said that the expansion plans were detailed in an application for Chapter 313 tax exemptions with the Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District.
Since 2017, ExxonMobil has added more than 3 billion pounds of annual polyethylene resin production capacity, mostly at a new facility in Mont Belvieu, Texas. ExxonMobil and other firms are adding capacity as a result of newfound supplies of natural gas feedstock throughout North America.
In July, ExxonMobil opened a massive new ethane cracker in Baytown with annual capacity of more than 3 billion pounds of ethylene feedstock. Officials said at the time that the new capacity will be used to make PE in Mont Belvieu.
"Our new ethane cracker will help us meet the growing global demand for high performance plastic products that deliver key sustainability benefits such as lighter packaging weight, lower energy consumption and reduced emissions," ExxonMobil Chemical President John Verity said in a July 26 news release.
He added that the abundance of domestically produced oil and natural gas "has reduced energy costs and created new sources of feedstock for U.S. Gulf refining and chemical manufacturing while creating jobs and expanding economic activity in the area."
ExxonMobil is spending more than $20 billion on petrochemical projects in the region as part of a program titled Growing the Gulf.
http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20180823/NEWS/180829942/exxonmobil-looking-to-add-more-texas-production
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Interior EIS Opens Door for Arctic Production
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Margaret Kriz Hobson
The Interior Department signed off on a final environmental impact statement for Hilcorp Alaska LLC's Liberty project yesterday, opening the door to first-ever oil production in federal Arctic waters.
Hilcorp, a Texas independent, is proposing to build the Liberty oil development project on a 9-acre artificial gravel island about 5 miles off Alaska's northern coast and 20 miles east of the North Slope's Prudhoe Bay oil distribution hub.
The gravel island would be built in 19 feet of water and include 16 wells designed to produce up to 65,000 barrels of crude oil and 120 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Oil produced from the island would be piped to shore through a subsea pipeline.
The site, estimated to contain about 120 million barrels of oil, is expected to have an operational life of 15 to 20 years. According to state records, construction of the gravel island would begin in late 2019 with first oil expected in 2022.
Hilcorp submitted its preliminary plans for the Liberty project in September 2015, with an amended version presented two years later.
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management acting Director Walter Cruickshank said the agency's final environmental analysis "thoroughly analyzes the potential impacts of Hilcorp's proposal."
Regulators estimated that the chances of a very large oil spill at the Liberty site were "well outside the normal range of probability."
The final Liberty EIS drew immediate scrutiny from environmental activists who warned that in recent years Hilcorp has suffered two pipeline leaks in southern Alaska's Cook Inlet, as well as an oil spill in Louisiana.
"The Trump administration is glossing over the dangers of Arctic drilling," said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
"Hilcorp has a terrible safety record in Alaska and shouldn't be given the chance to drill and spill in these treacherous seas," Monsell said. "The Liberty project will pose a massive pollution threat to polar bears and other vulnerable Arctic wildlife."
The Liberty oil field has a long history in Alaska. Drilling began at the offshore site in the 1980s under Royal Dutch Shell PLC's ownership. In 1996, BP PLC acquired the tracts.
Over the next 18 years, BP considered a variety of approaches to develop the Liberty unit, including a proposal to use ultra-extended-reach horizontal drilling technology. In late 2014, BP sold controlling interest in the Liberty site to Hilcorp.
Today, Hilcorp owns a 50 percent interest in the project, BP Alaska maintains a 40 percent interest and the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. has a 10 percent interest.
In a statement, Hilcorp officials said they are reviewing the final EIS and are "encouraged that another step forward has been taken in the permitting process."
"The Liberty Project will incorporate proven technologies already utilized in the shallow waters of Alaska's Beaufort Sea, and would help generate new jobs, revenue and domestic energy," Hilcorp said.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/08/24/stories/1060095151
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U.S. Provides $200m in Grants to Improve Rail Safety
Aug 24, 2018 | UPI
By Daniel J. Graeber
More than $200 million in grants will support safety improvements for rail transport of hazardous materials, the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration announced.
"These $200 million in grants will help the railroads continue to implement positive train control, a technology that could help reduce accidents and save lives," U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said in an emailed statement.
Positive train control, or PTC, is technology that can take over when an operator fails to respond to adverse conditions like a pending overspeed derailment or possible collision. With some minor exceptions, the requirements cover rail lines carrying any poisonous or hazardous materials or an any line that regularly transports commuters.
The U.S. Congress in 2008 mandated PTC systems, but has responded to railroad requests for an extended schedule on implementation.
The increase in crude oil production in North America had been more than the existing network of pipelines can handle, which left many in the industry to turn to rail as an alternate transit method in the peak era of shale.
Four years ago, about a dozen empty crude oil tankers derailed in Casselton, N.D., from a BNSF-operated train. About 950 barrels of oil spilled when two trains operated by BNSF collided and derailed near Casselton in late 2013.
U.S. safety regulators said older DOT-111 cars, some of which derailed in the 2013 accident, may be more vulnerable to leaks or explosions than other types of rail cars.
North Dakota officials at the time said specific action would target route safety, speed limits and other guidelines.
In July 2015, the federal Transport Canada filed charges against Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway for a 2013 derailment of a train carrying crude oil through Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The incident left more than 40 people dead.
U.S. federal data show about 197,000 barrels of oil per day moves on the U.S. rail system, a fraction of the total U.S. production. Data from Canada, the largest exporter of oil to the United States, show crude oil transport by rail has nearly doubled, however, from last year.
https://www.upi.com/Energy-News/2018/08/24/US-provides-200M-in-grants-to-improve-rail-safety/2561535105612/?rc_fifo=1
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FRA Sees Train-Control Systems Progress, But Some Railroads May Miss Deadline
Aug 23, 2018 | Engineering News-Record
By Tom Ichniowski
U.S. railroads are making gains toward meeting the yearend deadline for having automatic train control systems in place, but nine commuter-rail lines remain “at risk” of failing to hit that target, the Federal Railroad Administration says.
To help railroads with their Positive Train Control (PTC) push, FRA also has awarded $203.7 million in grants for such items as wayside signals and in-locomotive and fiber-optic communications systems.
FRA’s latest quarterly update on Positive Train Control installation, released on Aug. 23, indicates that, as of June 30, 15 railroads have installed 100% of the equipment needed for operating the system. Another 12 carriers have 85% to 99% of the hardware in place.
In all, 41 railroads are covered by the PTC mandate.
In general, freight railroads continue to achieved more progress, reporting PTC in operation on 66% of their total route-miles, up from 37% as of June 30, 2017.
Commuter lines have lagged, with systems in place on 24% of their mileage, up just one percentage point over the year-earlier level.
In fact, nine commuter railroads are still at risk of missing the yearend target, FRA reported. That’s an improvement over the approximately one dozen in that category as of March 31.
But the nine still are responsible for11% of the total route-mileage subject to the PTC mandate.
The nine include the busy New Jersey Transit network, which had operating PTC on none of its 317 route-miles as of June 30. NJ Transit also had only 26% of its locomotives equipped with PTC devices.
Nancy J. Snyder, an NJ Transit spokesperson, said via email that “PTC installation remains our highest priority.” She said the agency has “made substantial progress in the last six months,” completing 60% of the FRA milestones, up from 12%.
Snyder says NJ Transit is continuing to work to meet the FRA requirements by the end of December but adds that “we have our work cut out for us over the next four months.”
FRA Administrator Ronald L. Batory said in a statement, “While we are seeing progress among a majority of railroads, we want to see everyone meet their requirements.”
If railroads cannot comply with FRA requirements by Dec. 31, they may be able to qualify for an extension, or “alternative schedule,” if they meet six conditions. One condition is having all PTC hardware installed.
In any case, an extension cannot carry beyond Dec. 31, 2020.
PTC is a combination of wayside and in-locomotive equipment that aims to prevent derailments and excessive train speed. The National Transportation Safety Board has for years recommended that railroads install the systems to avoid accidents.
FRA’s $203.7 million in PTC grants, also announced on Aug. 23, are divided among 28 projects in 15 states.
The largest grant is an up-to $29.4-million award to the Rio Metro Regional Transit District in New Mexico—one of the at-risk railroads—to help fully implement PTC on 96 miles between Belen and Santa Fe.
Other big grants include up to $23 million to the Metra system in Illinois for fiber optic systems on the Rock Island and South West Service lines; and up to $20 million to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to help complete implementation of a speed-enforcement system, as well as system testing.
FRA also said it will publish a notice “in the coming days” seeking applications for another $46 million in PTC grants.
https://www.enr.com/articles/45068-fra-sees-progress-on-train-control-systems-but-some-railroads-may-miss-deadline
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Railcar Cleaning Company Charged for Deaths, Conspiracy in Explosion
Aug 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Brown
A Nebraska railcar cleaning company was indicted for alleged worker safety and environmental violations following a 2015 incident in which two workers were killed and another injured when a tanker care caught fire while being cleaned.
Nebraska Railcar Cleaning Services LLC and two of its owners, Stephen M. Braithwaite and Adam T. Braithwaite, allegedly failed to implement worker safety standards and then tried to cover up possible violations during an inspection by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
The fatal incident took place just one month after the inspection.
The company also mishandled hazardous waste removed from rail tanker cars during the cleaning process, the Justice Department said.
The company and the two owners were charged with conspiracy, violating worker safety standards resulting in worker deaths, violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and submitting false documents to a federal agency.
“The defendants in this case failed to live up to [their] responsibility, even falsifying documents to evade worker safety requirements,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey H. Wood said in the statement. “Tragically, employees at the defendants’ facility lost their lives while working in these unsafe conditions.”
A company spokesman didn’t respond to a telephone request from Bloomberg Environment for comment.
Inspection Followed Worker ComplaintsAccording to the indictment, OSHA inspected NRCS in July 2013 after receiving complaints from workers about health and safety conditions. OSHA cited the company for failing to monitor atmospheric conditions inside tanker cars where workers were exposed to benzene and other hazardous materials, among other violations.
In February 2015, the company falsely assured OSHA that it had begun testing atmospheric conditions in tanker cars when workers were inside them, the agency said. But one month later, the company denied entry to OSHA officials attempting to conduct a follow-up inspection.
OSHA came back with a warrant and demanded documentation related to safety requirements for workers entering the tanker cars. But the documents that the company eventually produced were fraudulent, the indictment said.
Explosive GasesThe incident in which the workers were killed involved a tanker car that contained “natural gasoline” residue, the indictment said. Testing during the morning showed that the level of explosive gases was too high for worker entry, but the company sent the workers into the car anyway, it said.
The company also failed to properly monitor the atmosphere in the car after the workers entered, it said. Around one hour later, the contents of the car exploded, killing the two workers and injuring a third.
The company also violated environmental laws, including RCRA, in failing to test the waste removed from railcars to determine whether it was hazardous, the indictment said.
The case is U.S. v. Braithwaite, D. Neb., No. 8:18-CR-216, indictment 8/22/18.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/railcar-cleaning-company-charged-for-deaths-conspiracy-in-explosion?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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Trump Put a Low Cost on Carbon Emissions. Here’s Why It Matters.
Aug 23, 2018 | New York Times
By Brad Plumer
How much economic damage will global warming cause? That’s one of the key questions embedded in the Trump administration’s recent proposals to weaken Obama-era regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from both vehicles and power plants.
When federal agencies calculate the costs and benefits of climate regulations, they use a figure called the “social cost of carbon,” an estimate of the harm caused by releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing global warming.
In its rollback proposals, the Trump administration argued that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted by a car or a coal plant in 2020 would only cause around $1 to $7 in economic damages. That’s far lower than the Obama administration’s central estimate, which, after adjusting for inflation, argued that same ton of carbon dioxide would cause roughly $50 in total damages.
That change will make a big difference for the cost-benefit analyses that agencies are required to conduct for new rules. If the Trump administration can successfully claim that carbon dioxide causes relatively little harm to the economy, then it can more easily justify moves like replacing the Clean Power Plan, an ambitious Obama-era program to cut pollution from coal plants, with a less-stringent rule.
So how did the Trump administration conclude that global warming will be much less costly than the Obama administration assumed?
First, the Environmental Protection Agency focused solely on damages from climate change that would occur within the borders of the United States rather than across the entire globe. Second, they used calculations that put less weight on the harm climate change could inflict on future generations.
Trump officials contend that their carbon approach better reflects the way the government has traditionally done cost-benefit analyses. Critics argue that this approach is inappropriate for global, multigenerational problems like climate change, and that newer research suggests the social cost of carbon may be even higher than the Obama administration estimated, not much lower.
Ultimately, the courts could decide which view prevails. “This will be part of the legal challenges to these regulatory rollbacks,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. “The reasons for why the Trump administration picked these numbers for the social cost of carbon are going to be scrutinized.”
Tallying the costs of climate change
Predicting the costs of climate change is a maddeningly complex task, one that has bedeviled economists for years. They have to grapple with uncertainty around population growth, future levels of emissions, the effect of those emissions on the Earth’s climate and the economic turmoil that higher temperatures could create.EDITORS’ PICKSWhat Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates SayThis Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership Ends
In 2009, the Obama administration brought 12 federal agencies together to hash out a best estimate of the social cost of carbon. They based their answer on three widely used academic models that tried to quantify the harm to things like human health and coastal property as heat waves increased and sea-levels rose.
These models produce a wide range of estimates. But in 2016, the Obama administration recommended that federal agencies use a central estimate that, in current dollars, pegged the damage from a ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2020 at around $50 per ton, rising over time.
At the time, some researchers and environmentalists criticized the Obama number for being incomplete. It did not, for example, fully account for many plausible climate impacts like damage from increased wildfires or the loss of diverse ecosystems. In one survey of climate economists from 2015, 51 percent of respondents said the number was probably too low. Only 9 percent said it was probably too high.
The Trump administration’s new numbers
When President Trump came to office, he disbanded the interagency team working on this issue. Instead, the E.P.A. under Scott Pruitt came up with its own “interim” estimate of the social cost of carbon.
First, the E.P.A. took the Obama-era models and focused solely on damages that occurred within the borders of the United States, rather than looking at harm to other countries as well. That change alone reduced the social cost of carbon estimate to around $7 per ton.
The reasoning was simple: If Americans are paying the cost of these rules to mitigate climate change, then only benefits that accrue to Americans themselves should be counted.
Critics counter that this approach overlooks two key points. First, many of those climate impacts in other countries could indirectly hurt the United States, say, by roiling the global economy or by increasing the number of refugees. Second, climate change can only be solved by all countries working together. If the United States refused to consider the impacts of its emissions on other countries, other countries could respond in kind.
“The United States is only 14 percent of global emissions, which means that 86 percent of the damages we face will be caused by emissions from other countries,” said Richard G. Newell, president of Resources for the Future, an environmental economics think tank. “If we took this domestic-only approach to its logical conclusion, that means other countries should not worry about their impacts on us.”
Next, the E.P.A. lowered its estimate of the social cost of carbon further by rethinking how it used an economic concept known as the discount rate.
The discount rate is how economists value costs and benefits across time. People tend to value a dollar today more than a dollar in the future (a dollar today could be invested in the stock market and gain value, for example). The question is how much that future dollar should be discounted. A higher discount rate implies we shouldn’t pay as much today to avoid harms far in the future, which, in turn, produces a lower social cost of carbon.
The federal government has long recommended discount rates of 3 percent and 7 percent for valuing costs and benefits across a single generation. But some economists have argued that higher rates are inappropriate for thinking about long-range problems like global warming, where today’s emissions can have impacts, like melting ice sheets, that reverberate for centuries.
“If you use a rate above 5 percent, you’re essentially saying that we shouldn’t worry today about anything that happens 100 years from now,” said Maureen Cropper, an economist at the University of Maryland.
The Obama administration opted for lower rates of 2.5 percent, 3 percent, and 5 percent when thinking about climate change. But the Trump administration has returned to the practice of using 3 percent and 7 percent. That higher rate further reduces the social cost of carbon down to $1 per ton.
Arguing in court
The Trump administration may not be finished adjusting the social cost of carbon. In earlier proposals, the E.P.A. said “improved domestic estimates” could be developed in the future.
Most experts agree that the social cost of carbon can be improved by taking into account newer scientific and economic research. “There’s been an explosion of research on the impacts of climate change in recent years, and it hasn’t been fully reflected in the estimates,” said Michael Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago who helped craft the Obama administration’s original numbers.
Dr. Greenstone was an author of a recent paper that looked more carefully at projected heat deaths from global warming as well as the costs of adapting to higher temperatures, such as buying more air-conditioners. That study concluded that these new estimates could add significantly to the social cost of carbon.
Yet some influential conservative groups, like the Heritage Foundation, have made the opposite case: that the Obama numbers were too high, emphasizing studies that suggest a slower rate of future warming and arguing that it is misguided to focus on damages that will occur centuries from now, when the American economy may look radically different.
Whatever number the Trump administration ultimately comes up with, they will have to defend it in court. Once the proposed rollbacks of vehicle and power plant rules are finalized, environmental groups and states like California plan to sue, including on the process that the administration used to tally costs and benefits.
“Typically, an agency gets some latitude to set standards a bit more or less stringently,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School. “But if you can show the agency to be glaringly wrong in its analysis — they ignore obvious counterarguments, they cherry-pick the data to support their outcome, they make numbers up — you can get a court to strike the standards down.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/climate/social-cost-carbon.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience
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Trump Reshaped U.S. Climate Policy in One Month: August 2018
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Maxine Joselow and Benjamin Storrow
August was supposed to be a quiet month for climate politics, a time when Congress went on recess; President Trump played golf in Bedminster, N.J.; and Americans took a break from politics before this November's midterm elections.
Instead, it may go down as a historic turning point in U.S. climate efforts.
EPA launched a whirlwind of actions that stand to exacerbate people's influence on global temperatures. First came the rollback of clean car rules, an aggressive effort to unravel former President Obama's program to reduce tailpipe pollution. Then came the Clean Power Plan replacement, another muscular move that dismantles Obama's signature initiative for curbing emissions from the power sector.
The twin blows could have an outsized impact on carbon-cutting efforts globally, analysts said, potentially slowing the pace of emission reductions internationally and halting momentum to decarbonize the economy. EPA's own analysis suggests that replacing the two Obama-era standards with Trump's proposals would increase carbon emissions by as much as 141 million metric tons in 2030 — the equivalent of running around 35 coal-fired power plants for a year.
"I've started to describe this as a one-two punch for the climate," said Janet McCabe, who served as acting EPA air chief under Obama. "If people weren't convinced already that this administration is not focused on taking real action on climate change, this ought to convince them."
The United States, the world's second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has been a leading carbon cutter in recent years. In 2017, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan were among the only large economies to post carbon declines, according to the International Energy Agency. Trump may have labeled climate change a "hoax" and initiated the process for pulling America out of the Paris climate accord, but U.S. carbon emissions fell by 25 million tons, or 0.5 percent, last year (Climatewire, March 23).
EPA's moves threaten to stymie that momentum. Transportation is the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, followed by the power sector. Emissions from cars and trucks have slowly climbed in recent years, while power-sector emissions have dropped. In fact, power plants accounted for 80 percent of U.S. carbon reductions between 2005 and 2016, according to federal figures.
While many analysts project that American utilities will continue to move away from coal and toward lower-carbon alternatives like natural gas, wind and solar, EPA's moves could slow the rate of emission reductions. That, in turn, could send ripples across the globe.
"I doubt other countries would pick up the slack to cover less ambition in the U.S. — each country will follow a path that suits it," said Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate and Environment Research. Trump's proposals, he added, have the potential to snowball, opening the door for other major economies to reduce or eliminate their emission goals. Australia is engaged in debate over whether it should roll back its climate goals.
"If U.S. emissions are likely to go down less fast as previously, or even increase, then the global picture is not so promising," Peters said.
Dallas Burtraw, a research fellow at Resources for the Future, projects that power-sector emissions will continue to decline. In his view, the real damage from Trump's proposals could come in the transportation and building sectors. All scenarios for deep decarbonization of the economy largely rely on electrifying transportation, home heating and cooling.
"That is an embryonic trend right now," Burtraw said, adding that the administration's moves have a major impact "because it delays this trend toward electrification."
EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this month outlined a series of options for the clean car rules. The agency's preference was freezing fuel economy targets at 2020 levels through 2026, rather than maintaining Obama's year-over-year fuel efficiency increases (Greenwire, Aug. 2). EPA estimates show that the freeze would increase emissions by about 100 million metric tons of CO2 in 2030.
In their own analysis, the agencies acknowledge that the weakened car rule would lead to a 9 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions through 2100. And the Rhodium Group, an economic consulting firm, estimates that the rollback would release up to an additional 931 million metric tons of CO2 between now and 2030.
That's equivalent to adding 199 million new passenger vehicles to the road for a year, according to a tool on EPA's website that lets consumers calculate the impact of their emissions. It's also equivalent to running 231 coal-fired power plants for a year.
"It's incredible how much this would erode the gains that we've had thus far," said Dave Cooke, senior vehicles analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "There are so many reasons why flatlining the 2020 standard is bad policy. It's hard to know where to begin. But it's pretty clear just how significant the climate impacts would be."
It's possible that motorists would emit less than 931 million metric tons of CO2. That's an upper-bound estimate, said John Larsen, an analyst with the Rhodium Group. The lower-bound estimate is 321 million metric tons of CO2, he said. The reason for the discrepancy is that the group accounted for future fluctuations in oil prices, Larsen said. Economists have found that people drive less when oil prices go up.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration earlier this week released a Clean Power Plan replacement that would give states wide latitude for determining how to cut greenhouse gases from the power sector. The Affordable Clean Energy plan is far narrower than Obama's proposal, which sought to cut emissions across the power sector rather than only at individual plants (Climatewire, Aug. 21).
Under Obama's plan, the country's greenhouse gas emissions from power plants were projected to drop 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Trump's plan envisions continuing those reductions, but at a slower pace. EPA's revised projections estimate that carbon emissions would have fallen to 1,737 million tons under the Clean Power Plan by 2030, or 36 percent of 2005 levels.
Under Trump's Affordable Clean Energy plan, they would fall to at least 1,798 million tons. That is 33 percent below 2005 levels, but nearly 3 percentage points higher than what emissions would have been under the Clean Power Plan.
"We need to be building on the fact these market forces are building in the right direction," said Dan Lashof of the World Resources Institute. "This, obviously, goes in the opposite direction."
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/24/stories/1060095133
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Shell Oil Quietly Urges Lawmakers to Support Carbon Tax
Aug 24, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Hulac and Kelsey Brugger
Lobbyists for Shell Oil Co. told members of Congress this year that Shell supports a nationwide carbon tax and encouraged lawmakers to price greenhouse gas emissions, E&E News has learned.
The company's in-house lobbyists met with lawmakers in the Senate and the House, including Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who introduced a carbon tax bill last month.
In a lobbying disclosure form dated last month, Shell said its representatives had taken part in "discussions in support of a robust, transparent federal carbon price" in the second quarter of the year.
"We see carbon pricing as an essential policy tool to tackle climate change and pave the way for a smooth energy transition," a Shell spokesman said in a statement.
"Shell has long supported a strong and stable government-led carbon pricing framework," the spokesman said. "It's our view Government-led carbon pricing mechanisms are the lowest cost way to develop low carbon technologies for a low carbon economy."
A small but growing number of conservative advocacy groups and energy companies have talked openly about their support for a U.S. carbon tax, in particular in exchange for rolling back environmental regulations. The chance of passing carbon tax legislation is remote in the Republican-led Congress, but Shell is quietly laying the groundwork for similar bills in the future.
Shell is not the only oil and gas major actively lobbying members of Congress for a carbon tax, industry sources said. Experts say the industry is not homogeneous in its approach to a carbon tax, with some majors taking more ambitious positions.
The Climate Leadership Council, a group led by former secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz, began promoting a $40-per-ton carbon tax plan in June 2017.
General Motors Co. and four oil and gas majors — Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC, Shell and Total SA — support that plan, which includes a provision that would shield the industry from certain lawsuits (Climatewire, June 22, 2017).
"Shell is very straightforward that they feel a responsibility to support addressing climate change," said Alex Flint, director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, which backs a carbon tax.
Like many of its peers, Shell views a national carbon tax as a more efficient way to address climate change than piecemeal government rules.
A separate lobbying disclosure form filed by Shell in 2017 said the company was considering "Carbon pricing related issues and Shell's role in the Climate Leadership Council."
Since then, Shell has organized meetings in Washington, D.C., with industry and environmental groups to discuss carbon taxes, according to people familiar with the gatherings.
"For Republicans, it's essential that industry be a part of the discussions," Flint said. "Shell is committed on this issue."
Last month, Shell was one of 34 businesses that wrote a letter supporting concepts in Curbelo's bill, the "Market Choice Act." BP America, Equinor US and Gap Inc., along with recreation and utility companies, also signed on. A market-based approach offers companies more certainty to help make long-term investment decisions, they wrote.
They stopped short of endorsing the bill but lauded the effort for advancing "non-partisan" and "robust" discussion on climate policies.
Joanna Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Curbelo, said in an email that the congressman is "especially encouraged to see energy companies' engagement in favor of these policies."
Others expressed doubt about the companies' intentions. Frank Maisano, senior principal at Bracewell LLP, which represents energy companies, suggested that some oil companies support taxing carbon because "politically, it's not going anywhere."
Last month, just six House Republicans opposed a resolution stating that carbon taxes would be "detrimental" to the U.S. economy.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/08/24/stories/1060095169
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Climate Change Has Already Hit Home Prices, Led by Jersey Shore
Aug 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christopher Flavelle
Sea-level rise is already hitting home prices along the Atlantic Coast, new data shows—and nowhere harder than the tiny New Jersey town of Ocean City.
Between 2005 and 2017, increased tidal flooding erased $14.1 billion in home values across eight states, according to research by First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that seeks to quantify the effects of climate change on coastal communities. The group found that 820,000 homes are now worth less than they would have been otherwise, including 75,000 homes in New York State and 15,000 in Connecticut.
When First Street broke those impacts down by zip code, the most concentrated losses turned up in small New Jersey towns. Ocean City, N.J., with just 11,000 residents, has lost $530 million in property value.
The state where climate change has hurt home prices the most is Florida, where rising seas and flooding wiped out $5.4 billion in relative value since 2005.
First Street reached those conclusions by comparing historical transactions of homes exposed to tidal flooding with like properties in similarly valued areas elsewhere, controlling for lot size and other variables to isolate the difference in price appreciation related to tidal flood risk. The model underlying their findings was published in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Population Research and Policy Review.
The magnitude of property-value loss along the Jersey Shore suggests that Superstorm Sandy in 2012 caused potential home buyers to pay more attention to flood risks, according to Steven McAlpine, head of data science for First Street. The storm “accelerated the way sea-level rise impacts home value,” McAlpine said in an interview.
A spokesman for Ocean City, Doug Bergen, questioned the findings, saying the assessed value of the city’s real estate has risen substantially since 2005.
“The notion that any researcher could isolate and quantify the effect of one factor (flooding) on hypothetical past real estate windfalls is implausible,” Bergen said by email. Still, he said the city is working to reduce the threat from flooding, including updating its drainage systems and pumping stations, raising its streets and requiring that new and renovated homes be elevated.
New Jersey is only the most pronounced example of a nationwide trend, warns Matthew Eby, First Street’s executive director. He said the data shows that increased flooding is hurting property values around the country, and not just in places like Miami Beach and Charleston, S.C., that often appear in the news.
“When you look at this analysis, you see the exposure of the coastal U.S. is immense,” Eby said. “You can see what’s happening, and what’s around the corner. This is surely the beginning.“
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/climate-change-has-already-hit-home-prices-led-by-jersey-shore?context=landing&limit=30&tab=news
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