Preview Newsletter

ACC AM 17/12/18

Congressional Hearings - There are no hearings to report at this time.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Predictions for the US Chemistry Job Market in 2019
Dec 16, 2018 | Chemjobber (In Chemical & Engineering News)

With 2019 just around the corner, you might be wondering what the chemistry job market in the US will look like next year.
(ACC Mentioned) US Chemical Output Set to Rise in 2019
Dec 17, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Marc S. Reisch

The US will benefit from strong job growth, moderate inflation, and a good investment climate in 2019, according to the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the US chemical industry’s major trade association.
(ACC Mentioned) Chemicals Start Q4 on Soft Note with Sluggish October Growth
Dec 14, 2018 | Zacks (In Nasdaq)
By Anindya Barman

Global chemicals production started the fourth quarter on a sluggish note with October witnessing a slight uptick in production on lower capacity utilization, according to the recent monthly report from the American Chemistry Council ("ACC").
(ACC Mentioned) R.I.'s Plastics Task Force Focused on Statewide Bag Ban
Dec 17, 2018 | ecoRI News
By Tim Faulkner

A bill proposing a statewide ban on plastic bags is the likely outcome of Gov. Gina Raimondo’s plastic waste commission, but it isn’t necessarily the result preferred by environmentalists and even some businesses.
(ACC Mentioned) The Journey of Trash After You Throw It Away at CSUF
Dec 17, 2018 | Daily Titan
By Sommer Clark

Discarded seat cushions, chemical and detergent bottles, and bags of garbage tower over a bulldozer as it sweeps piles of debris up into its blade.
(ACC Mentioned) UN Meeting Considers Plastic Treaty, Taxes
Dec 14, 2018 | Plastics News
By Steve Toloken

Marine plastics pollution is a global problem, so will it require a stronger global solution like some sort of tax on plastics to pay to clean up waste in developing countries?
EPA to Pursue Final 'Science Transparency' Rule in 2019
Dec 14, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to pursue next year a final version of its much-criticized rule that would restrict the scientific studies it can use to justify regulations.
Zinke’s Likely Successor Is a Former Oil Lobbyist Who Has Influenced Trump’s Energy Policy
Dec 15, 2018 | The New York Times
By Coral Davenport

With Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke departing at the end of the year, the agency will likely be run, at least for a time, by its deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who has played a central role in enacting President Trump’s agenda of rolling back conservation measures and opening up public lands to drilling and mining.

LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Toy, Tire Makers Want Heads-Up on Chemicals EPA Will Screen
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto

LEGO, Mattel, Goodyear, Michelin, and other companies that use chemicals to make consumer products want the EPA to let them know which chemicals it will sort through in 2019 and beyond.
Proposal to Speed Pesticide Reviews Faces Steep Odds (Corrected)
Dec 12, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tiffany Stecker

Lawmakers likely won’t reauthorize a crucial bill to help speed pesticide safety assessments by the end of the year, punting legislation to the next two years in a much more uncertain political environment.
Environmentalists Press States For SDWA Technology Standard For PFAS
Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan

New England environmentalists are quietly pressing states in the region to set enforceable “treatment technique” standards for drinking water utilities to address thousands of chemicals in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) class, an interim step they hope will limit exposures as they await chemical-by-chemical health-based drinking water standards.
Facing EPA Hesitancy, States Press Officials To Address PFAS Class In CCL5
Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Lara Beaven

State drinking water administrators are urging EPA to use its upcoming Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) contaminant list to address per- and polyfluroalkyl substances (PFAS) as a broad class of chemicals, pushing back in the face of reluctance from the agency to consider crafting health-based maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for the substances.
EPA’s Childhood Lead Exposure Strategy Coming Dec. 19
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to release a long-awaited, multi-agency plan to reduce childhood exposure to lead on Dec. 19, an agency spokeswoman confirmed.
High Chemical Levels in Blood of People Near Colorado Air Base
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz

Blood testing of some 220 residents in southern El Paso County, Colo., found high levels of fluorinated chemicals that likely stemmed from a spill of firefighting foam at a nearby Air Force facility.
Hazardous Chemicals Protection Needs More Funding
Dec 17, 2018 | The Ecologist
By Kate Young

Councils lack resources to enforce regulations designed to keep the public and the environment safe from hazardous chemicals, including those that damage hormone systems, organs and aquatic life.
How to Buy a Water Filter That Actually Filters Out Your Local Contaminants
Dec 14, 2018 | Quartz
By Zoë Schlanger

It’s very possible there are more unpleasant things in your tap water than you realize.

Energy News

(ACC Mentioned) Now is the Time to Build the Appalachian Storage Hub
Dec 17, 2018 | The State Journal
By David B. McKinley

When Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area in August 2017, the devastation was unimaginable.
Louisiana Gives $2B Tax Break to Liquefied Natural Gas Facility
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Karn Dhingra

Louisiana property tax breaks could exceed $2 billion over ten years for a liquefied natural gas facility developed by a subsidiary of Houston-based Tellurian Inc.
Report Sees Massive Increase in LNG Demand
Dec 14, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck

The world's biggest buyers of liquefied natural gas will quadruple their uncontracted demand for LNG, and more buyers will be on the hunt for additional LNG soon, too, a report from Wood Mackenzie suggests.
FERC Releases Environmental Impact Statement for Annova LNG
Dec 14, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has released a 452-page draft environmental impact statement regarding Exelon's proposed Annova LNG project at the Port of Brownsville.
Oil Loses Ground as U.S. Shale Growth Undermines OPEC+ Cuts
Dec 14, 2018 | Bloomberg (In Houston Chronicle)
By Grant Smith and Sharon Cho

Oil settled below $52 a barrel in New York, more than a $1 lower than where it ended a week ago after OPEC and its allies announced output cuts, as traders weighed incremental U.S. shale growth against softer demand for 2019.
Cleanest Fossil Fuel Tries to Eke Out a Future in Greener World
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Vanessa Dezem

The natural gas industry is trying to up its green credentials as it bids to join electric cars and renewable power plants in a lower emissions future.
How America Broke OPEC
Dec 14, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal - Opinion

Remember when America’s political class fretted about “peak oil” and dependence on foreign energy?
MATS Rule Likely Floats Range Of Options From 'Tinkering' To Rescinding
Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Stuart Parker

EPA's imminent proposal on reconsidering the Obama-era power plant mercury and air toxics standards (MATS) will float a host of options from rescinding the rule outright by undoing its cost-benefit analysis to “tinkering” with parts of the rule, sources say, and the agency will then use public input on the options to decide on a final outcome.
Shareholders Call on ExxonMobil to Set Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets
Dec 16, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)

A number of institutional investors in ExxonMobil Corp have said they will file a shareholder resolution which calls on the world's largest oil company to set targets for lowering its greenhouse gas emissions.
New Governor Seeks 'Way to Monetize Our Gas'
Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Energywire
By Margaret Kriz Hobson

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) plans to announce a decision soon on how he will proceed with the state's proposed multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline and export project that was developed under his predecessor, Bill Walker (I).
Judge Rules PennEast Can Start Taking Land
Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Energywire

A federal judge in New Jersey ruled a natural gas pipeline company can go ahead with taking property and compensating landowners as part of the roughly $1.1 billion project.

Chemical Security News

New TSA Cybersecurity Roadmap States Specific Requirements for Pipeline Industry
Dec 14, 2018 | Lexology
By Norma M. Krayem

The pipeline sector is a crucial aspect of the nation's economic and national security.

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

Environment News

Talks Adopt 'Rulebook' to Put Paris Climate Deal Into Action
Dec 16, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)

Almost 200 nations, including the world's top greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, have adopted a set of rules meant to breathe life into the 2015 Paris climate accord by setting out how countries should report their emissions and efforts to reduce them.
Climate Deal Emerging Shows More Friction Between U.S. and China
Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Bobby Magill and Jeremy Hodges

Envoys at a United Nations conference are preparing to endorse a set of steps on fighting climate change that falls short of the detailed action plan many countries and businesses were hoping for.
D.C. Circuit Poised To Hear Suit Over EPA's Tightening Of Ozone NAAQS
Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Stuart Parker

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is set to hear long-delayed oral argument Dec. 18 in consolidated litigation challenging the Obama EPA's decision to tighten the ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS), a revision that the agency's air chief has criticized but ultimately decided to uphold and defend in court.
Scientific Study Reaffirms EPA's GHG Endangerment Finding
Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science finds strong evidence to support EPA's 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, concluding that there is no reason for the agency to overturn its threshold legal determination that makes GHGs subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
Carbon Cutters Look Beyond the Power Sector in 2019
Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Climatewire
By Benjamin Storrow

Cities and states have trumpeted their climate ambitions ever since President Trump took office.
Alaska Groups Sue EPA to Enforce Clean Air Laws in Fairbanks
Dec 14, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)

Three Alaska groups sued Friday to demand the Environmental Protection Agency enforce the cleanup of some of the nation's most polluted winter air around the state's second-largest city.

Congressional Hearings - There are no hearings to report at this time.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Predictions for the US Chemistry Job Market in 2019

Dec 16, 2018 | Chemjobber (In Chemical & Engineering News)

With 2019 just around the corner, you might be wondering what the chemistry job market in the US will look like next year. If I knew, I wouldn’t be working in the chemical enterprise; I’d be making fortunes on Wall Street. What I do know is that how the job market performs will likely depend on what the economy does in 2019.
By the numbers, the US economy is doing pretty well. The second and third quarters in 2018 had healthy gross domestic product increases of 4.2% and 3.5%, respectively, and we’ve had record low unemployment at 3.7%. But if the recent stock market is a guide to the economy of 2019, there may be signs of a slowdown, as major indices have lost most of their gains for 2018.
Another indication that the economy as a whole may be slowing down comes straight from the chemical enterprise. The American Chemistry Council’s Chemical Activity Barometer measures and collates basic data, like prices and inventories of commodity chemicals; these numbers tend to lead the business cycle by 2–14 months. In November, for the first time since mid-2016, the index fell slightly. If this decline becomes a downward trend, we could be headed for a slowdown. This bears watching, but most of the economic data are still pointing in a positive direction.
How might the academic job market fare next year? For the past three years, I have helped chart the tenure-track faculty job market in the US and Canada. Started by longtime blogger Paul Bracher in the fall of 2015, the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (bit.ly/facultychemjobs2019) is curated by me and Andrew Spaeth, a chemist in the Minneapolis area. We attempt to identify every open tenure-track faculty position in the US and Canada and post it to a single public Google spreadsheet.
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This list has gained broad use in academic hiring. It’s also a great source of data on the faculty job market in the US and Canada. From 2016 to 2017, we found 590 tenure-track positions. From 2017 to 2018, we found 552 positions. Our efforts in scouring job postings have increased over the years, so failing to identify jobs is likely not the reason for the fall between years. As of late November, there are 480 positions on the 2018–19 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List—slightly ahead of where we were at the same time in the 2017–18 season and slightly behind where we were at the same time in the 2016–17 season.
These three seasons’ worth of data give us room enough to make some broad guesses as to what a typical academic hiring season looks like. In an average academic year, I expect that there will be around 500–600 tenure-track positions posted in the US and Canada. Of these, 250–300 of them will be at PhD-granting universities. Of the 500–600 positions, well over 60% of them are intended to hire assistant professors. What will the 2019–20 academic year bring? It’s hard to say, but if the economy performs poorly and state tax revenues fall, leading to university funding cuts, it’s possible that these changes might negatively affect faculty hiring in public universities.Advertisement
What does the job market look like for those working in industry or aspiring to do so? I’ve also been tracking the medicinal and process chemistry job markets in the US. We don’t have enough year-to-year data to make strong predictions, but I believe that right now is better than it has been since the end of the Great Recession for finding a position in pharma of any kind, entry level to midcareer. Regrettably, it seems that most of the positions are going to be in a limited number of locations in the US, either in the Bay Area or in the Boston area. At any one time, there are 50–150 open positions across the country in medicinal and process chemistry. I don’t expect those numbers to dwindle significantly in 2019.
How do these numbers affect you, the aspiring job seeker or job changer? Despite signs of an economic slowdown, I predict that 2018 and 2019 will be at or near the peak of the job market for chemists in all sectors. Across the entire economy, both wages and job turnover are increasing as workers are moving for better pay or better working conditions. If you’ve been thinking about dipping your toe in the job market and seeing if you can find a different, better position, now looks like a pretty good time to do so. Best wishes for a prosperous 2019!
Chemjobberis an industrial chemist who blogs about the chemistry job market at chemjobber.blogspot.com. Find all his columns for C&EN and suggest future topics at cenm.ag/benchandcubicle.
Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or ACS.
https://cen.acs.org/careers/employment/Predictions-US-chemistry-job-market/96/i49

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(ACC Mentioned) US Chemical Output Set to Rise in 2019

Dec 17, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News

By Marc S. Reisch

The US will benefit from strong job growth, moderate inflation, and a good investment climate in 2019, according to the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the US chemical industry’s major trade association. Even though it is concerned about rising interest rates and the impact of tariffs, the ACC predicts that US chemical output will rise 3.6% in 2019 following a 3.1% increase this year.
“Expansion across a broad band of industrial sectors is supporting American economic growth this year,” says Kevin Swift, the ACC’s chief economist. He predicts that next year, US industrial activity will continue to expand but that an economic slowdown that is now underway in overseas markets, coupled with rising trade tensions, presents “a risk of economic disruption.” Forecast: US chemical production will rise again in 2019. 
Source: American Chemistry Council.  
On the plus side for US chemical producers are surging domestic energy supplies and increased availability of ethane, a key raw material obtained from natural gas. Because of the shale-gas revolution, chemical makers have committed $202 billion since 2010 for 333 new chemical plants, 40% of which are still in the planning stage, notes Martha Moore, the trade group’s economic and policy director.
As that production capacity comes on line, US exports will surge, Moore predicts. Assuming no major trade disruptions, the US will post a chemical-trade surplus of $39 billion in 2018 and $69 billion by 2023, she says.
Outside the US, predictions are less optimistic. The European Chemical Industry Council anticipates 0.5% production growth in 2019 following a 0.5% decline this year. The group cautions that trade tensions among the US, China, and Europe, plus uncertainty about the UK’s approaching Brexit from the European Union, could dampen the expected uptick.
In Germany, Europe’s largest chemical maker, production is likely to rise 1.5% in 2019, according to the German Chemical Industry Association. Production this year is on track to increase 2.5%.
The German association’s forecast includes pharmaceuticals, which are set to rise 11.5% this year. Excluding pharma, Germany’s chemical production will slip 1.5% this year.
https://cen.acs.org/business/economy/US-chemical-output-set-rise/96/i49

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(ACC Mentioned) Chemicals Start Q4 on Soft Note with Sluggish October Growth

Dec 14, 2018 | Zacks (In Nasdaq)

By Anindya Barman

Global chemicals production started the fourth quarter on a sluggish note with October witnessing a slight uptick in production on lower capacity utilization, according to the recent monthly report from the American Chemistry Council ("ACC").

October Sees Modest Growth

The chemical industry trade group said that the Global Chemical Production Regional Index (CPRI) rose a paltry 0.1% in October on a monthly comparison basis, following flat growth in September.

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

Per the ACC, the Global CPRI ticked up 0.6% year over year on a three-month moving average basis. Capacity utilization for the global chemical industry eased 0.2 percentage points to 83.6% in October. Utilization fell from 85.9% a year ago.

On a segment basis, growth was witnessed in agricultural chemicals, basic chemicals and specialty chemicals in October. By regions, October witnessed higher production across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. However, output fell in North America and Latin America.

Per the ACC, chemical production in the United States went down 0.2% on a monthly comparison basis in October. This follows a 0.1% sequential growth a month ago.

The trade group recently said that it expects U.S. chemical production (excluding pharmaceuticals) to rise 3.6% in 2019, following a 3.1% growth in 2018. The expansion is expected to be partly driven by growth in manufacturing and export and gains in business investment.

Chemical Industry Faces Multiple Headwinds

The prospects of the chemical industry have taken a beating due to the trade war between the United States and China. The Trump administration levied tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods earlier this year that led to China retaliating with tariffs on American products of equal value that includes a wide range of chemicals. The U.S. administration, in September, also imposed a 10% tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. In response, China hit back with tariffs on an additional $60 billion in American products.

China is one of the biggest export markets for U.S. chemicals. Beijing's retaliatory trade actions have created an uncertain demand environment for U.S. chemical products in this major market. Chemical industry trade groups are worried that the tariffs would hurt U.S. chemical exports and the competitiveness of the American chemical industry. China's retaliatory tariffs have hit more than 1,000 U.S. chemicals and plastics exports worth an estimated $10.8 billion, per the ACC.

Trade tensions have clouded the overall demand outlook for chemicals. Softer demand from the automotive space of late is a concern for chemical makers. Notably, the U.S.-China trade friction has led to a slowdown in demand in China in this major chemical end-use market.

Companies in the chemical space also face headwinds from a spike in costs of raw materials as a result of short supply partly due to production outages and plant shutdowns. China's environmental crackdown has led to the tightening in the supply of certain key raw materials as a result of plant closures. The disruption in the supply chain has pushed up the prices of these inputs.

Nevertheless, strategic actions including expansion of scale through acquisitions, operational efficiency improvement, capacity expansion, price hike initiatives and continued focus on cost and productivity should help chemical companies offset these challenges.

Chemical Stocks to Watch For

A few stocks currently worth considering in the chemical space are Celanese Corporation CE , Albemarle Corporation ALB , Innospec Inc. IOSP and Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. SHECY , each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here .

Celanese has an expected earnings growth of 47.9% for 2018. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 3.4% upward over the last 60 days.

Albemarle has an expected earnings growth of 18.3% for 2018. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 0.7% upward over the last 60 days.

Innospec delivered an average positive earnings surprise of 10.5% in the trailing four quarters. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 4.6% upward over the last 60 days.

Shin-Etsu Chemical has an expected earnings growth of 13.5% for the current fiscal year. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 7.4% upward over the last 60 days.

More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone!

It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market.

Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/chemicals-start-q4-on-soft-note-with-sluggish-october-growth-cm1069368

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(ACC Mentioned) R.I.'s Plastics Task Force Focused on Statewide Bag Ban

Dec 17, 2018 | ecoRI News

By Tim Faulkner

A bill proposing a statewide ban on plastic bags is the likely outcome of Gov. Gina Raimondo’s plastic waste commission, but it isn’t necessarily the result preferred by environmentalists and even some businesses.
Aside from opponents of the ban — a bag distributor and an American Chemistry Council representative spoke against it — there were calls for substantive reform to waste and pollution in the state at the Dec. 14 meeting of Task Force to Tackle Plastics.
Jonathan Stone, executive director of Save The Bay, called it “a gross omission" if the commission’s final report doesn’t address stormwater.
He said any solution to reduce plastic waste should include incentives coupled with increased enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act to address stormwater runoff, preferably through regional entities to manage and finance stormwater projects, known as a stormwater utility.
“Stormwater delivers everything — waste of any kind, including toxins — into the bay and rivers and streams,” Stone said.
Curt Spalding, former director of the New England office for the Environmental Protection Agency, doesn’t want the report to just be a single “transaction” and instead prefers a long-term strategy that includes working with neighboring states.
“I don’t get any sense from this that people are interested in a strategy,” Spalding said, referring to the governor’s appointees who are facilitating the task force.
Spalding noted that the United States is way behind other countries that address the life cycle of plastic packaging through incentives and regulations.
Other members of the task force remarked that there is no data or study of the economic costs and other impacts of plastic pollution in Rhode Island.
“We can ban plastic bags, and it’s not going to solve the plastics problem in the ocean,” Spalding said.
“No, but it’s what’s doable today,” said Sen. Josh Miller, D-Cranston, a task force member and sponsor of many of the failed statewide bag ban bills.
Miller noted that legislation is a starting point that should lead to other initiatives.
There was other pushback against criticism of a statewide bag ban. Janet Coit, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environment Management, and Raimondo’s deputy chief of staff, Rosemary Powers, reminded the 22-member commission that they only have until Feb. 18 to offer legislation that reflects the consensus of the group.
“There are all sorts of ideas, but focusing on a statewide plastic bag ban is something we might be able to bring in with support from people who have technically testified against it,” Coit said. “Because we have a bill that takes business interests into account. If we could get that done, it would really be something to be proud of.”
Powers said she is expecting two or more bills from the task force, while noting that other initiatives will also be moving forward. She didn’t say if those initiatives would be done through the task force or independently.
Raimondo has plenty of political cover for a statewide bag ban. Although legislation has been defeated in the General Assembly every year for nearly a decade, municipal bag bans are sweeping the state. Since Barrington enacted a ban in 2013, 10 Rhode Island communities have passed similar bans on retail plastic bags. Boston started a high-profile ban on Dec. 14.
The launch of Boston’s bag ban prompted the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) to advocate for a ban on plastic bags across New England.
At the recent task force meeting, Kirstie Pecci, director of the zero waste program at CLF, said Raimondo called for innovate solutions when she announced the task force in July and therefor the legislation should include a ban on polystyrene, as well as a provision that restaurants only provide plastic straws upon request.
Pecci advocated for a bottle-deposit law and other consumer incentives that encourage manufactures to use sustainable packaging and take back products that no longer work, a concept known as producer responsibility.
“We need to make sure we take care of (pollution) at the source or we are never going to solve this problem,” she said.
CLF has three goals relating to plastic waste: ban items that aren’t recyclable; increase recycling to 100 percent; and shift the costs and clean up from cities, towns, and states to manufacturers.
Amy Moses, director of CLF in Rhode Island, said taking care of the environment is paramount.
“I think it’s important that we take a step back and realize that plastic comes from fossil fuels. And while they may be cheap — you can buy a case of water bottles for a few bucks — we’re not paying for the true cost of that plastic,” Moses said. “We’re not paying for that pollution when we buy the little bit of plastic in the water bottle. And this plastic is everywhere degrading all of our environment. And the fossils fuels these products are derived from are literally destroying our planet. So I don't think we can focus on the narrow little dollars and cents because there are so many externalities and problems with plastics that are not captured in the prices that you’re paying.”
Business representatives at the meeting, such as Chris Nothnagle, senior director of marketing for Toray Plastics, were inclined to support improving current recycling programs and expanding public education. Toray makes plastic bags and containers at its plant in North Kingstown.
Nothnagle said businesses need incentives to use sustainable packaging, otherwise they will buy the least expensive product, which is usually made of plastic.
“There’s an enormous opportunity to knock this problem way, way, way down with existing infrastructure,” he said.
Recycling is the law
Sen. Miller, a restaurant owner, wasn’t sure if businesses are aware of the state’s recycling laws. Every business in Rhode Island, including food establishments, are required to recycle, but there is no enforcement. As of 2014, Rhode Island had only one employee dedicated to commercial recycling.
Unlike Massachusetts, Rhode Island doesn’t inspect waste at landfills to find and fine businesses and municipalities that are throwing away recyclables.
Subcommittee reports
The commission’s final report will reflect the top ideas from four subcommittees. It will also include any dissenting views and recommendations for near- and long-term goals. Each group will meet two or three times before the Feb. 14 deadline.
At the full task force meeting on Dec. 14 each group presented its findings to date.
The Lead By Example subcommittee is considering energizing and expanding DEM’s idle Rhode Island Hospitality Green Certification for the Hospitality & Tourism Industry. The group will also send out a survey to the public to gather best practices.
Save The Bay’s Stone urged boosting local stewardship groups, such as neighborhood associations, to work with businesses to monitor waste and implement new clean-up programs.
The Legislative Solutions subcommittee is focused on passing a bag ban bill and whether a fee on alternative bags would be assessed. The group meets Jan. 7.
The Education subcommittee, led by Dave McLaughlin of Clean Ocean Access, is considering a campaign to reduce plastics at restaurants, an educational program for grades K-12, and re-starting the famed Woodsy Owl campaign from the 1970s and ’80s, with its slogan “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!”
Dale Venturi, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, didn’t like the idea of focusing on the restaurant industry.
“I don’t want it to just be one industry, because that makes me a little uncomfortable, sitting here as the chair (of the Hospitality Association),” Venturi said. “We’re not coming out of this just being focused on our industry.”
The Innovation Committee suggested reconsidering a statewide bottle-deposit law, as Rhode Island is the only state in New England without one. Dennis Nixon suggested mimicking other bag bans, such as the Boston ban. He suggested organizing a local design competition for sustainable packaging. The group also wants support for a fiberglass boat recycling program.
The Task Force to Tackle Plastic is scheduled to meet next on Jan. 9 at DEM headquarters, 235 Promenade St., Room 300, from 11 a.m - 12:30 p.m.
https://www.ecori.org/government/2018/12/16/plastics-task-force-focused-on-statewide-bag-ban-as-deadline-nears

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(ACC Mentioned) The Journey of Trash After You Throw It Away at CSUF

Dec 17, 2018 | Daily Titan

By Sommer Clark

Discarded seat cushions, chemical and detergent bottles, and bags of garbage tower over a bulldozer as it sweeps piles of debris up into its blade. A cloud of dust hangs in the air as trash is dropped into a machine engineered to sort recyclable material in the Republic Services transport station in Anaheim.
This is where Cal State Fullerton’s waste and recyclables are sorted.
CSUF produced about 3,000 tons of waste and recyclables in 2017, said Danny Miranda Jr., a sustainable waste management specialist.
“It fluctuates give or take a few 100 tons, but it depends a lot on projects. Sometimes there is construction projects where suddenly they’ll generate extra tons we didn’t have the previous year,” Miranda Jr. said.
The waste that goes in the recycling or trash bins on campus is picked up by two designated types of trucks, a recycling front loader and two landfill trucks, that service CSUF in the morning. From there, they go to Anaheim’s transport station to be sorted.
CSUF’s diversion rate, the amount of of waste diverted away from landfills, ranks in the “middle” compared to other campuses, said Michael Lotito, associate director of planning operations, and the campus is attempting to bring those numbers up.
California state law specifies a 75 percent waste diversion goal, however the CSUs goal is to reach an 80 percent waste diversion by 2020.
“Our diversion rate was 55 percent last year. Our target is to get up to 75 percent,” Lotito said.
Once the materials have been sorted at Republic Services, the recycling waste is either sold to other companies that turn it into another product, or moved from the transport station to the Olinda Landfill or Frank R. Bowerman Landfill.
Materials that are recyclable include aluminum (cans), glass, paper, cardboard (unless it is food covered) and plastics, according to Republic Services website.
Depending on the type of plastic, the material can be recycled to become another container, playground equipment, picnic tables, lawn furniture, plastic lumber or even clothes, according to the American Chemistry Council, an enterprise that advocates for public policies that support the creation of products that improve lives and protect the environment.
Miranda Jr. said he expects there will be an increase in diversion rates with upcoming campus programs in place. He said there are plans to start a composting program at the Fullerton Arboretum, and to recycle preprocessed food waste in the Gastronome.
“Post-consumer is after students buy it, eat it and throw it in the trash. This is all the cuttings from the kitchens, all the stuff that hasn’t been consumed yet, all the runoff and all that,” Miranda Jr. said.
In 2017, about 244 tons of paper were shredded and recycled, and about 600 tons of green yard waste were collected on campus.
“We’ve complied with the yard waste aspect but not the food aspect yet. So this is long overdue, and we’re getting that started,” Miranda Jr. said.
https://dailytitan.com/2018/12/trash-recyclables-journey/

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(ACC Mentioned) UN Meeting Considers Plastic Treaty, Taxes

Dec 14, 2018 | Plastics News

By Steve Toloken

Marine plastics pollution is a global problem, so will it require a stronger global solution like some sort of tax on plastics to pay to clean up waste in developing countries?
That provocative idea was on the table at a high-level United Nations meeting on plastic marine litter and microplastic pollution Dec. 3-7 in Geneva.
The main purpose of the gathering was to examine whether the world needs a new global treaty for managing plastic waste, a sort of Paris Climate Agreement or Montreal Protocol for polymers that could put binding requirements on countries.
The group’s recommendations will feed directly into the next meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly, slated for March in Kenya.
Most of the push for global funding seemed to come from environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund. But governments from Norway to Indonesia, while deferring on thorny questions of how to finance, were pushing for stronger action from governments.
The plastics division of the American Chemistry Council had a representative to the five days of discussions and its senior executive said that even though different viewpoints were aired, there was broad agreement new approaches were needed, even if it was hard to agree on what that would be.
“We have reached an inflection point where there is rapidly growing awareness and commitment to action on the need to prioritize waste management around the world, in particular in emerging economies,” said Steve Russell, vice president of the plastics division for the American Chemistry Council.
“I think there’s also growing recognition that ‘business-as-usual’ is unlikely to be our way forward, whether it’s disruptive technology or financing mechanisms or advances in different systems to create value from waste,” Russell said. “There is now collective resolve.”
In a report prepared for the meeting, the World Wildlife Fund called for fees on plastic products and new, legally binding treaties.
“The plastic production industry makes annual revenues of $700 billion, and one option could be to introduce levies on plastic products,” the WWF report said. “This would create a win-win situation as such a levy could be designed to reduce unnecessary consumption, stimulate use of recycled content and recollection, in addition to generate the necessary funds to feed a trust fund and to invest into waste management systems.”
At the last U.N. Environment Assembly in late 2017, Norway said it wanted to explore binding legal treaties, and it said current global rules have too many gaps for regulating plastic, allowing too much debris to slip into the oceans.
Not all governments were in favor of new treaties. In an official statement, Indonesia — generally considered the second-largest source of plastics waste in the ocean after China — said it’s “uneasy” with a legally binding treaty.
It said it could take a long time to overcome technical and political hurdles to such a treaty. But still, the government in Jakarta urged much stronger action.
It favored much more international cooperation and said within its borders, it’s getting ready to tax plastic bags and introduce extended producer responsibility around packaging. It wants society to focus on “avoiding unnecessary use of plastic products.”
It said developing countries need financial help building waste management systems.
The meeting was well attended by the plastics industry. Besides ACC, representatives from the PlasticsEurope trade group and from the industry in Malaysia and South Africa attended.
An official statement from the industry, endorsed by ACC, cautioned participants against rushing to replace plastics with packaging materials that can have several times the environmental footprint of plastics, doing unintended harm. It said that companies are working on new technology like breaking polymers into monomers for recycling.
Still, the industry statement said plastics companies recognize changes are needed in how plastic waste is handled: “We agree that the status quo is not an option.”
There are other funding ideas floating around. One academic at Trent Nottingham University in England, for example, has said the fee oil companies pay to clean up spills would be a good model for setting fees on plastics to fund waste cleanups.
Some environmental groups told the gathering that the world should look at producing less plastic, arguing that even much better waste management will not be able to capture enough of the huge increase in plastic production expected.
https://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20181214/NEWS/181219930/un-meeting-considers-plastic-treaty-taxes

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EPA to Pursue Final 'Science Transparency' Rule in 2019

Dec 14, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Timothy Cama

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to pursue next year a final version of its much-criticized rule that would restrict the scientific studies it can use to justify regulations.
In a Friday interview with The Hill, acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler dismissed the idea that the science transparency regulation was on the “back burner” since the administration recently listed it as a “long-term” regulatory action.
“It is not a back-burner issue. I feel strongly about that,” Wheeler said. “And we will move forward to finalize that next year.”
The transparency rule was a key priority of Wheeler’s predecessor, Scott Pruitt, before he resigned from the agency in July under a slew of ethics and spending scandals.
But Wheeler made it clear that he isn’t letting it fall by the wayside.
“I’ve worked on those issues for over 20 years. So I feel very strongly about science transparency,” said Wheeler, who has previously served as a career EPA employee, a GOP Senate aide and an energy industry lobbyist.
Under the proposal, the EPA would only be able to use scientific data and studies if they are reproducible and the underlying data can be made public, among other factors, with some exceptions, including for personal health data.
Republicans and regulated industries have been pushing similar proposals for years, arguing that the EPA previously relied too much on “secret” science that could not be fully scrutinized.
“I fundamentally believe that the more information that we put out as an agency, the better our decisions will be and the more confidence the public will have in what we’re doing,” Wheeler said.
“And I think if we’re going forward with a regulation, particularly a major regulation, we need to tell the American public, what are we using for basis? How did we decide what we’re deciding? We need to put that information out there.”
Wheeler rejected the main criticism from opponents of the rule, that it is meant to restrict the agency’s ability to regulate by putting out of reach large bodies of valuable science, such as many epidemiological studies that by their nature cannot be reproduced.
“I don’t think it’s designed to restrict what we use. It’s designed to get the information out to the public. The critics look at it as ‘oh, you’re trying to get rid of a lot of the studies, you’re trying to restrict what the agency can use.’ No,” he said.
“And part of it is to send a signal to the research community that you need to make your data available to the public. Particularly if the United States government is paying for it. But we need to make the data available to the public.”
Wheeler’s opponents had read as a positive sign an October report by the White House Office of Management and Budget that the proposal was either dead or not a priority for the EPA, since it was listed in “long-term” actions that wouldn’t be finalized before 2020 at the earliest.
For those critics, Wheeler’s dedication to the rule is concerning.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has sued the Trump administration’s EPA numerous times — frequently with success — said if the science rule moves forward, he’ll fight it.
“If that’s the case, California wouldn’t stand for this and we’d urge EPA to get back to its main mission: protecting our environment and the health of our families from California to Maine,” he said in a statement.
“Not only would this rule limit the kinds of facts and science EPA can consider in rulemaking, it would cripple EPA’s ability to fully assess the public health impact of its decisions.”
Gretchen Goldman, an environmental engineer and research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’s Center for Science and Democracy, said the April proposal is a long way from being anything that could reasonably be implemented.
“He has a lot of to do, given all of the problems with the current rule and the degree to which it wouldn’t work,” Goldman said.
“It’s completely unworkable. It’s a solution without a problem,” she said of the proposal. “It would create huge burdens both on the EPA and on the scientific community that would have to implement this.”
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/421479-epa-to-pursue-final-science-transparency-rule-in-2019

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Zinke’s Likely Successor Is a Former Oil Lobbyist Who Has Influenced Trump’s Energy Policy

Dec 15, 2018 | The New York Times

By Coral Davenport

With Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke departing at the end of the year, the agency will likely be run, at least for a time, by its deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who has played a central role in enacting President Trump’s agenda of rolling back conservation measures and opening up public lands to drilling and mining.
Mr. Bernhardt’s supporters and detractors say that while Mr. Zinke has been the public face of some of the most significant reversals of public land protections in the nation’s history, behind the scenes it has been Mr. Bernhardt pulling the policy levers to enact Mr. Trump’s aggressive energy agenda.
“Bernhardt has been running the policy show ever since he’s been there as deputy secretary,” said Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based association of independent oil and gas companies.
It was Mr. Bernhardt, for example, who oversaw a controversial revision of a program to protect tens of millions of acres of habitat of the imperiled sage grouse, a puffy-chested, chicken-like bird that roams over 10 oil-rich Western states. Mr. Bernhardt’s proposal to change that plan, released just this month, would strip away protections from about nine million acres of the sage grouse habitat, a move that in a stroke opened up more land to oil and gas drilling than any other single policy action by the Trump administration.
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Mr. Bernhardt’s critics contend that much of the experience that gave Mr. Bernhardt his deep policy knowledge — namely, his years representing oil companies — creates a potential conflict of interest given that he oversees policies that could benefit companies he once represented. At the same time, they note that Mr. Bernhardt’s long experience in Washington and with the law means he is unlikely to make ethical missteps.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department, Heather Swift, did not respond to emails requesting comment from Mr. Bernhardt. An email sent to the Interior Department’s communications office was also not returned.
Mr. Zinke, once a favorite of Mr. Trump’s, drew the president’s ire after allegations of possible conflicts of interest and violations of agency policy triggered numerous investigations. At least one of those investigations has been referred to the Justice Department, a sign that the federal government may open up a criminal investigation into the former secretary.
Mr. Zinke has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. “I followed every procedure, every policy, every rule, and most importantly I followed the law,” he said in an interview in April.
Mr. Bernhardt is expected to serve as acting Interior secretary in the wake of Mr. Zinke’s departure. It remains unclear who might lead the agency in the long term. Mr. Trump could nominate Mr. Bernhardt to be the next secretary, a position that would require Senate confirmation, but it is also possible he might choose someone else. The job has typically gone to Western state lawmakers or governors.Editors’ Picks76 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under TrumpChina’s Women-Only Subway Cars, Where Men Rush InWhat War Can’t Destroy
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Mr. Bernhardt’s presumed rise to acting secretary echoes the events at the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year. In July, Scott Pruitt, then head of the E.P.A., was forced to step down amid a series of ethics scandals. He was succeeded in an acting capacity by his deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist with a low professional profile but a deep knowledge of the agency he ran and the regulations on industry he sought to undo.Mr. Zinke at a rodeo in Salt Lake City in July. Mr. Trump has praised his "out-of-central-casting" style.CreditRick Bowmer/Associated Press
ImageMr. Zinke at a rodeo in Salt Lake City in July. Mr. Trump has praised his "out-of-central-casting" style.CreditRick Bowmer/Associated Press
“I see a parallel to E.P.A.,” said Ms. Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance. “The environmentalists wanted scalps. They got Pruitt’s scalp, but the policy didn’t change. I would expect the same thing to happen with Interior.”
Mr. Bernhardt, a lawyer and former Interior Department official in the George W. Bush administration, lacks the rugged outdoorsy image embraced by Mr. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL who drew praise from Mr. Trump for his out-of-central-casting style.
“Zinke is something of a cowboy, who often shoots from the hip and maybe speaks without knowing all the facts, and he needed a real professional who knows how the department works,” said Whit Fosburgh, the president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, an advocacy group for hunters, fishers and others. “It’s been David’s job to actually put what Zinke says into policy.”
Environmental and government watchdog groups say that as Mr. Bernhard has enacted those policies, he has overseen proposals that could create profits for his former clients. Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who is expected to become chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee once Democrats return to the House as the majority party in January, has said he intends to look at Mr. Bernhardt’s activities within the agency.
“Mr. Bernhardt’s serious conflicts of interest are well known to us, and we’ll be scrutinizing his role in Interior Department decision-making whatever position he holds,” said Mr. Grijalva in an emailed statement.
The energy industry has benefited from policies Mr. Bernhardt has shepherded. The agency has opened up the East Coast to offshore oil and gas drilling for the first time, loosened the standards of the Endangered Species Act, weakened safety regulations for offshore drilling equipment and reduced the boundaries of national monuments to open the land to mining and drilling.What on Earth Is Going On?
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As a partner in the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Mr. Bernhardt lobbied for the oil companies Cobalt International Energy and Samson Resources. His legal clients have included the Independent Petroleum Association of America and Halliburton Energy Services, the oil-and-gas extraction firm once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney.
In August 2017, Mr. Bernhardt signed an ethics letter saying he would recuse himself from policy decisions that might stand to benefit former clients specifically.
Ethics watchdogs say that despite the fact that Mr. Bernhardt’s former clients are likely to benefit from his policy actions, Mr. Bernhardt has complied with the letter of the ethics pledge, because he has steered clear of enacting policies that have specifically benefited a single former client. Nevertheless, they argue that there remains an ethics issue because he has pushed policies that have broadly benefited the oil and gas industry, including his former clients.The sage grouse’s habitat is under federal protection, but Mr. Bernhardt’s former client, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has sought to limit those protections, believing the lands are rich in fossil fuel deposits.CreditAlan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated Press
ImageThe sage grouse’s habitat is under federal protection, but Mr. Bernhardt’s former client, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has sought to limit those protections, believing the lands are rich in fossil fuel deposits.CreditAlan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated Press
“Bernhardt goes right up to the edge,” said Chris Saeger, the executive director of the Western Values Project, an advocacy organization. “The spirit of these laws is that you shouldn’t use the federal government to enrich people who are close to you, people you used to work for,” he said.
As an example, Mr. Saeger’s group cited a November 2017 move by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to grant a permit to Eni, an Italian oil company and a former client of Mr. Bernhardt’s, to drill in federal Arctic waters. The permit — the first granted to a company since 2015 — came just months after Mr. Bernhardt was confirmed to his job. The agency has given out many similar drilling permits since then, “But at the end of the day, his former client is still getting what they want,” Mr. Saeger said.
Mr. Bernhardt’s plan to weaken the protection of the sage grouse also translates into a victory for his former oil industry clients, who have long sought such a change. In particular, his former client, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has pressed for years to reduce federal protection measures on the habitat of the sage grouse, much of which is believed to contain rich deposits of fossil fuels.
In March, a group of oil companies, including the Independent Petroleum Association of America, wrote to Mr. Bernhardt to thank him for his work on actions “that rescinded and revised mitigation policies that far exceeded statutory authority.” The companies also listed policies they hoped Mr. Bernhardt would change, including the sage grouse plan.
Mr. Bernhardt’s defenders point out, though, that the sage grouse policy is so broad that it would benefit dozens of companies and industries, including farmers, ranchers and real estate developers, not just former clients of Mr. Bernhardt. “Sage grouse is a broad policy issue,” said Ms. Sgamma, “not company-specific.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/climate/zinke-interior-successor-bernhardt.html

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Toy, Tire Makers Want Heads-Up on Chemicals EPA Will Screen

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Pat Rizzuto

LEGO, Mattel, Goodyear, Michelin, and other companies that use chemicals to make consumer products want the EPA to let them know which chemicals it will sort through in 2019 and beyond.
“It’s important for EPA to provide a schedule of what chemicals will be reviewed and when,” Sarah Amick, vice president for environment, health, safety, and sustainability at the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, told Bloomberg Environment.
Tire and toy companies want that information to schedule time and budget resources to gather information that the agency may need for its ongoing analysis under a federal chemicals law that could lead to additional regulation.
Companies also want to prepare for customers’ questions, said Amick and Alan P. Kaufman, a senior vice president of the Toy Association.
Brand-name companies are the “face” of chemicals to customers, Kaufman told Bloomberg Environment.
“It is these companies, not the chemical manufacturers, that may be required to reformulate their products if risk is determined or may be contacted by the consumer with questions and concerns,” Amick, Kaufman, and officials representing paper, plastics, and motor equipment manufacturers told the Environmental Protection Agency in comments last month.
The agency hasn’t released the names of the 40 chemicals it will start sorting in 2019, but it released plans in October that described a pool of 73 chemicals under consideration.
Amick, Kaufman, and other industry representatives Bloomberg Environment spoke with were pleased those plans also included a longer-term scheduling strategy.a.    Sorting 40 Chemicals in 2019
The EPA is expected to start releasing any day—by no later than March 31 under the law—the names of at least 40 chemicals for 2019.
The agency will consider two general types of information. It will look analyze the 40 chemicals’ potential to cause cancer, birth defects, and other health problems, and it will review worker, consumer, community, and wildlife exposures to chemicals.
Based on such information, the EPA must decide which chemicals warrant a closer analysis.
The 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act amendments require the EPA to decide by Dec. 22, 2019, which 20 chemicals may present an unreasonable risk of injuring people or the environment.
The agency must immediately begin to examine those 20 “high priority” chemicals to see if they actually pose an unreasonable risk. The agency is then required to control unreasonable risks—through warning requirements, use or disposal restrictions, or a ban.
By Dec. 22, 2019, the agency also must classify 20 chemicals as low priorities, meaning there’s nothing about them that prompts an immediate need to review them. b.    Use Available Data
Trade associations are worried that the law’s 2019 deadlines won’t give them much time to submit information.
They urged the agency to use the growing amount of information that its Office of Research and Development has compiled. Canada and the European Union, which have been examining chemicals in commerce for several years, have also made some of that information available.
“There’s a lot of reasonably available information,” Sarah Brozena, senior director of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, told Bloomberg Environment.
There’s also no requirement that the EPA have complete information to prioritize chemicals, said Mike Walls, the council’s vice president for regulatory and technical affairs.c.     Long-Term Strategy
The chemistry council is among many industry associations that support the EPA’s longer-term strategy to sort through the chemicals.
The EPA proposes to use computer software to search for information for about 38,000 chemicals in commerce. The agency would then place those chemicals into various “bins,” taking into account cancer-causing potential, likelihood of exposure, and persistence in the environment.
The agency is set to detail this approach in an upcoming paper but scheduled a release date or a related public meeting.
The binning process could provide companies and the trade groups with details and predictable scheduling they need to gather information for the agency, said Kaufman, from the Toy Association. d.    No Binning!
But environmental, health, and labor groups oppose the EPA’s binning strategy, as do a group of 18 scientists.
The EPA’s prioritizing plans seem aimed at using “very, very limited information” to put chemicals aside by calling them “low priorities,” Bob Sussman, an attorney representing Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, told Bloomberg Environment.
That’s an “end run” around the process the law required the agency to use, said Sussman, whose organization represents hundreds of environmental, health, and labor groups.
The binning strategy will take resources that the agency can’t afford to waste on a task neither required by TSCA nor needed to implement it, he said.
“EPA’s job under the new law is to select high priority chemicals and devote resources to those,” Sussman said.

Bloomberg Environment contacted the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., LEGO Systems Inc., Mattel Inc., and Michelin North America Inc. They either referred Bloomberg Environment to their trade associations or didn’t reply.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/toy-tire-makers-want-heads-up-on-chemicals-epa-will-screen

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Proposal to Speed Pesticide Reviews Faces Steep Odds (Corrected)

Dec 12, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Tiffany Stecker

Lawmakers likely won’t reauthorize a crucial bill to help speed pesticide safety assessments by the end of the year, punting legislation to the next two years in a much more uncertain political environment.
Reauthorization of the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act was supposed to be a relatively smooth, bipartisan process. The law sets up a fee structure for the Environmental Protection Agency to collect money from the makers of insecticides, weed killers, disinfectants and other pesticides.
It’s an important funding source for the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, supporting between 20 percent and 40 percent of the office’s pesticide registration costs. And companies depend on that office to get their products on the market in a timely way.
The legislation, which has passed both the House and Senate but hasn’t yet gone to conference, has stumbled since Senate Democrats added amendments to prevent the Trump administration from rolling back Obama administration regulations to protect farmworkers from pesticide exposure.
The legislation (H.R. 1029), the fourth version of the bill since it was first enacted in 2003, will expire Dec. 31. A new Congress in January will have to start over again with a new bill.a.    Udall to Oppose One-Year Extension
Lawmakers are no closer to resolving the impasse than they were six months ago, when the Senate passed the bill through unanimous consent.
House and Senate negotiators declined to include the legislation in the 2018 farm bill, which is set to pass in both chambers by the end of the week.
Starting from scratch in the 116th Congress, with a new, emboldened Democratic majority in the House, may be no easy task.
Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who pushed for the amendments to protect farmworkers, told Bloomberg Environment he will oppose a one-year extension of the bill.
But Udall said he hopes the House this month will pass the bill with his amendments on suspension of the rules—a process to pass legislation with fewer hurdles—or as part of another legislative vehicle.
“If the House does not act this year, we will pursue a new PRIA agreement with new leadership in the next Congress,” Udall said through a spokesman Dec. 11.b.    Farm Groups’ Criticism
The EPA is set to propose changes to the Obama farmworker protection rules, the Worker Protection Standard (RIN:2070-AK43) and Certification of Pesticide Applicators Rule (RIN:2070-AK37), in January. Farm groups have criticized certain provisions in the rules, such as setting a minimum age of 18 to apply pesticides and allowing workers to pick a “designated representative” to obtain pesticide use information on their behalf.
The law has allowed the EPA to dramatically decrease the time needed to review new products for safety, Owen Caine, executive vice president of government relations and public policy for the Household and Commercial Products Association, told Bloomberg Environment.
“To get PRIA done next year is going to get a lot tougher,” Caine told Bloomberg Environment last week. HCPA represents about 240 household product manufacturers that make cleaners and disinfectants. Agricultural groups rejected the Senate amendments, which they viewed as a distraction from the goals of PRIA.
“I have to believe they’re going to like it less next year, working with a Democratic House,” Caine said. c.     ‘Lifeblood” to Get to Market
The reauthorization bill would allow the EPA to raise fees from $27.8 million to $31 million from manufacturers to maintain existing registrations, and implement two 5-percent increases over seven years to license new products.
It would also set aside $500,000 to fight bedbugs and other insects; provide up to $1 million for farmworker safety training; and require the EPA to keep track of revisions to product labels if such changes are required after a pesticide is reviewed for safety.
House Republicans view the amendments, championed by Sen. Udall, as an obstacle in a typically smooth process. The PRIA Coalition that promoted passage of the legislation includes pesticide industry representatives CropLife America and environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, two groups that are more often at odds than in cooperation.
“For me, the whole PRIA process was disrupted when it could have been one of the bipartisan success stories of this Congress,” Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the author of the House bill, recently told Bloomberg Environment. “It was, in my opinion, hijacked over non-germane issues.”
The current version of PRIA has been extended since September 2017 through short-term continuing resolutions, the latest of which expires Dec. 21. Caine expects it will stay afloat in a funding bill for fiscal year 2019.
“For our pesticide manufacturers, the PRIA program is their lifeblood in terms of getting new products to market,” Caine said.

(Corrects expiration date of PRIA in penultimate paragraph.)
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/proposal-to-speed-pesticide-reviews-faces-steep-odds-corrected

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Environmentalists Press States For SDWA Technology Standard For PFAS

Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Suzanne Yohannan

New England environmentalists are quietly pressing states in the region to set enforceable “treatment technique” standards for drinking water utilities to address thousands of chemicals in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) class, an interim step they hope will limit exposures as they await chemical-by-chemical health-based drinking water standards.
If successful, the approach could provide a new technology-based approach for addressing widespread contamination from the chemicals even as EPA struggles to respond under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to growing calls by states, environmentalists, lawmakers and others to set health-based maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for the substances.
In addition, the approach could allow regulators to set a standard to address the entire class of chemicals, rather than awaiting the more burdensome and time-consuming approach of a chemical-by-chemical rule.
The effort, being spearheaded by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) along with the Toxics Action Center, has already led to petitions this fall to regulators in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.
CLF plans to send similar letters in the next couple of weeks to New Hampshire and Maine, and eventually to Rhode Island as well, an attorney with CLF says.
The effort has had mixed reactions so far. For example, Connecticut Public Health Commissioner Raul Pinon denied the petition in a Nov. 21 response saying the department is continuing “to evaluate the rapidly evolving science surrounding PFAS toxicity and is not presently in a position to initiate the adoption of a regulation.”
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is reviewing the petition and plans to consider it at a Jan. 16 meeting, inviting the petitioners to present their views at that time, according to Nov. 5 and Dec. 13 letters from DEP Commissioner Martin Suuberg.
And Vermont has not yet responded to the petition, although CLF has agreed to give the state an extension for a response until the end of January and plans to meet with agency staff earlier in January, the CLF attorney says.
But the attorney says environmentalists are also preparing to press state legislatures in the region to act on the issue if regulators reject their petitions and are unwilling to consider solutions, noting an appeal of a denial can be time-consuming.
For now, the group is pressing New England states to develop treatment techniques and has no plans to push EPA on it, letting other environmental groups press the agency, the source says.
PFAS are a class of chemicals that are toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative and that have been prompting growing concern around the country, particularly in the Northeast, due to their presence in drinking water systems and links to adverse health impacts at low levels.
The chemicals have been used widely in non-stick applications such as clothing, cookware and firefighting foam.
Their presence in drinking water has prompted broad concerns in states from Michigan to New Jersey and across the Northeast, with many federal lawmakers, environmentalists and others urging EPA to set one or more MCLs to address the chemicals.
While EPA is only slated to release a long-awaited action plan next year, the agency has signaled it is hesitant to commit to crafting an MCL for one or more PFAS given scientific and other uncertainties, as well as the lengthy process involved in crafting an MCL.
'Whack-a-Mole Approach'
While CLF and other environmentalists continue to call for an MCL, they are now also calling on states to craft technology-based treatment standards for drinking water utilities, which they say could be used “in lieu of setting [an MCL] for specific PFAS,” CLF's Oct. 25 petition to Connecticut's Department of Public Health says.
The groups' petition to Connecticut adds that the chemical-by-chemical regulatory framework for addressing toxic chemicals is inefficient, placing public health at risk.
“The 'whack-a-mole' approach is especially troublesome when it comes to setting drinking water standards for emerging contaminants like PFAS, because it is time consuming and expensive to assess them, it is 'technically and financially challenging to identify and reverse environmental and human exposure to PFASs[,]' and both of these issues are exacerbated by the continual introduction of new PFAS compounds,” the letter says, in part referencing a 2017 article in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The petition notes that at least 3,000 PFAS are in use, but regulators lack information on where they are being used or released, and companies regard newly developed PFAS as trade secrets, giving regulators little information on their structure or use. Therefore, setting MCLs for each compound is unsustainable, it says.
“There is no way” states or EPA have the resources to deal with these contaminants one by one, the CLF attorney tells Inside EPA.
As a result, the groups call for states to adopt technology-based treatment standards for public drinking water utilities in lieu of an MCL.
“A treatment technique is an enforceable procedure or level of technological performance which public water systems must follow to ensure control of a contaminant,” the letter to Connecticut says, citing EPA data. And it notes that in cases where such standards are adopted in lieu of an MCL, the SDWA requires the technique to “prevent known or anticipated adverse effects on the health of persons to the extent feasible.”
According to EPA's website, the agency sets a treatment technique instead of an MCL “[w]hen there is no reliable method that is economically and technically feasible to measure a contaminant at concentrations to indicate there is not a public health concern.” It is “an enforceable procedure or level of technological performance which public water systems must follow to ensure control of a contaminant.”
'Level Of Contaminant'
The groups' letter to Connecticut adds that EPA has adopted several treatment standards in lieu of an MCL in cases that have met the economically or technically infeasible criteria.
For example, the agency's lead and copper rule requires public water systems to test drinking water in the homes of consumers and undertake additional treatment measures to control lead if 10 percent of the samples exceed 15 parts per billion.
In addition, the Surface Water Treatment Rule requires most public water systems that obtain water from surface water or groundwater fed by surface water to use filters and disinfectants to reduce pathogens.
“In both cases, EPA had to establish a unique procedure to address the risks posed by a specific contaminant because an MCL would not have been practical or protective of public health due to the unique characteristics of the contaminants,” the letter says.
In a similar vein, the groups argue that “the unique characteristics of the PFAS class pose a public health threat that cannot be adequately addressed with the establishment of an MCL for one or a few PFAS chemicals.”
As a result, the groups suggest the state could adopt a rule that “requires public water systems to install appropriate treatment technologies where (1) the sum of all measurable PFAS exceeds a conservative threshold level that is protective of public health and takes into account the cumulative impacts of all PFAS chemicals or (2) the presence of PFAS compounds is detected using 'non-targeted' laboratory analysis.”
Alternatively, a rule could require “a robust source water assessment for PFAS and . . . treatment where PFAS may be present in the source water.”
The petition also notes that there are established and novel methods for removing PFAS, and says that a “treatment train” of several technologies that combine adsorption, separation and destruction in sequence would effectively treat drinking water and protect public health.
It adds that such a standard for the PFAS class, rather than developing MCLs for many PFAS, will expend fewer resources and provide protections from exposure to unsafe levels more quickly.
Nevertheless, the petition adds that if states do not adopt a treatment technique, as an alternative and at a “bare minimum,” states should adopt an MCL for the PFAS class or for each PFAS posing risk to public water systems. Also, in the interim, the states should adopt Vermont's health advisory for five PFAS at 20 parts per trillion in drinking water as an MCL for the PFAS class, the letter says.
In the petitions, CLF and other groups argue these three states “can -- and must -- take the lead in the absence of federal safeguards.” Further, the groups note the weaknesses of current drinking water action levels that have been adopted by these states, noting that these levels do not require water systems to test for the chemicals or to treat unsafe concentrations because a federal or state drinking water standard has not been set.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/environmentalists-press-states-sdwa-technology-standard-pfas

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Facing EPA Hesitancy, States Press Officials To Address PFAS Class In CCL5

Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Lara Beaven

State drinking water administrators are urging EPA to use its upcoming Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) contaminant list to address per- and polyfluroalkyl substances (PFAS) as a broad class of chemicals, pushing back in the face of reluctance from the agency to consider crafting health-based maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for the substances.
But drinking water utilities say only a subset of PFAS should be listed, namely those where regulation would represent true risk reduction -- a statutory threshold -- rather than an alternative to risk management under other statutes.
In addition, both state and utility groups are also urging EPA to scale back the number of contaminants listed on the five-year list, which the agency uses to identify drinking water contaminants that may need regulation and to prioritize research and data collection efforts to determine whether regulation is necessary.
They say the length of past lists has made it difficult to focus resources on potential risks in a timely fashion and contributed to the agency's failure to craft an MCL since Congress reauthorized SDWA in 1996.
The calls come in comments to EPA on nominations for the fifth contaminant candidate list (CCL5)
The agency accepted nominations for the CCL5 through Dec. 4.
PFAS includes thousands of chemicals widely used in commerce for their nonstick characteristics, but which are persistent and bioaccumulative and pose significant cancer and other risks.
EPA included two PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and prfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), on the CCL3 and CCL4, and included PFOA, PFOS and four other PFAS in its third unregulated contaminant monitoring rule (UCMR3), which mandated sampling for the listed chemicals at all large utilities and a representative sample of small utilities.
But separate from the CCL and UCMR processes, since the tenure of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt the agency has been developing a multi-media PFAS management plan, which acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler has suggested will be released in January.
While states and others have been urging the agency to craft MCLs, some agency officials have been hesitant to do so. For example, Peter Grevatt, the recently retired director of EPA's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, warned frequently that crafting an MCL would take years to complete and may not be warranted given monitoring data obtained via UCMR3 showing relatively limited scope of contamination.
In the face of such hesitation, some are turning to alternative approaches. For example, New England environmentalists are pressing state officials in the region to set technology-based treatment standards that could address many substances in the class -- though they are also continuing to urge state and federal regulators to craft health-based MCLs.
'Holistic Solution'
But in Dec. 4 comments to EPA, the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) renews states' calls for EPA to begin a process that could eventually lead to an MCL for the entire class.
The group says that while some individual PFAS could be easy additions to the CCL5, for various reasons, EPA should include PFAS as a group on the list “to provide a potential path for a holistic solution to this vexing environmental problem.”
For example, perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), which was included on the UCMR3, appears to have significant occurrence; GenX, a newer PFAS, has generated much media attention; and perfluorobutyrate (PFBA) will not necessarily be removed by treatment installed for PFOA and PFOS, ASDWA says.
“However, there are literally thousands of potential drinking water contaminants in this group and adding them one by one is not going to be constructive for the long-term,” ASDWA says. “Including the group on the final CCL5 (in addition to individual PFAS that can be analyzed for currently) will help EPA maintain focus on these emerging contaminants together, at least initially, and begin to consider what regulatory actions may be appropriate. Finally, with health-based values in the parts per trillion range, emphasis should also be placed on achieving the lowest reliable quantitation limits possible.”
ASDWA notes there is precedent for listing groups on the CCL, pointing to the inclusion of cyanotoxins as a group on the CCL4 in 2016. And the state officials say EPA's recently updated Method 537.1 means laboratories can now test for a total of 18 PFAS in drinking water, “which is an important step in assessing the public’s exposure to a broader range of PFAS and providing holistic solutions to the PFAS problems.”
Some drinking water utilities agree with states that EPA should list PFAS on the CCL5, but they suggest some limitations.
“There is sufficient public concern regarding PFAS that the CCL5 process must explicitly describe the subset of PFAS that warrant evaluation in addition to those identified for regulation in EPA’s soon to be released PFAS Management Plan based on information collected to date through the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule and other means,” the American Water Works Association (AWWA), which represents a variety of drinking water utilities, says in Dec. 4 comments.
“The CCL5 subset should be those likely to represent an opportunity for risk reduction through setting drinking water standards rather than as a substitute for risk management via the Toxic Substance Control Act, Resource Conservation Recovery Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other statutes,” AWWA says.
Better Focus
The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA), which represents large municipal water utilities, does not include any specific nominations for the CCL5 in its Dec. 3 comments, but the group echoes AWWA and ASDWA in encouraging EPA to narrow the size of the CCL.
“First and foremost, AMWA urges EPA to establish ways in which the agency can better focus the CCL so that it may best identify contaminants of greatest public health concern and utilize the current available staff and funding resources,” the comments say.
While EPA has previously pointed to the fact that SDWA places no limits on the size of the CCL, AMWA says “it remains unclear how the agency can best accomplish the prioritization of these contaminants when the list continues to grow exponentially.” The CCL2 had 51 contaminants, but by CCL4 the list had grown to 109 contaminants, AMWA says.
AWWA says, “EPA faces a loss of public confidence because it does not focus resources to support research and information collection to evaluate and act on potential risks in a timely fashion. EPA should search extensively for potential risks to public health through drinking water exposure and then through the CCL focus EPA’s resources toward effective risk reduction on a manageable subset of contaminants of concern. Given EPA’s resources, the final CCL5 should be much smaller than the current CCL4.”
ASDWA, noting that there has been no new drinking water standard since 1996, also calls for a smaller CCL, saying that having a smaller list might help move high-priority contaminants forward more efficiently for actual regulation, noting the public's expectation of timely regulation.
States are being forced by state-level laws and/or public pressure to develop their own state-level regulations in the absence of national standards, prompting states to divert resources from their core drinking water programs into the regulatory development process. “This resource drain is being replicated in multiple states, and that’s not an effective use of limited resources,” ASDWA says.
“Undertaking a process to reduce the length of the CCL will take some effort but it will have long term benefits and eventual savings. ASDWA and states are willing to help with this process, and other industry stakeholders will likely have a similar interest,” the comments say.
Reforming and improving the CCL will allow EPA to strengthen the regulatory development process and signal to stakeholders and the public that the CCL process is effective, science-based, and working to increase public health protection, ASDWA says.
The drinking water groups also make other general suggestions for the CCL5, with AWWA highlighting contaminants for which available data are sufficient to warrant additional investigation, such as pathogens from waterborne disease. “In preparing the CCL contaminants associated with recognized waterborne disease should take precedence over theoretical risks,” AWWA says. Disinfection byproducts should also be seriously considered, the group says.
Additionally, AWWA includes a list of dozens of contaminants for which data are sufficient to make negative regulatory determinations and says these contaminants need not re-appear on the CCL5.
AMWA, encourages EPA to show documentation for the ongoing state of prioritization of contaminants that have been carried over from previous CCLs; continue to facilitate combining efforts between the Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water and the Office of Research and Development; improve the correlation of the CCL and UCMR by using the UCMR to gather occurrence data for contaminants on the CCL that have a high potential to be a public health threat but have large gaps in the occurrence data; and to clarify the process for removing a contaminant from the CCL.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/facing-epa-hesitancy-states-press-officials-address-pfas-class-ccl5

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EPA’s Childhood Lead Exposure Strategy Coming Dec. 19

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Amena H. Saiyid

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to release a long-awaited, multi-agency plan to reduce childhood exposure to lead on Dec. 19, an agency spokeswoman confirmed.
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler will join Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson in revealing the plan to address exposure to lead, a toxic metal that can cause irreversible neurological and cognitive damage to children.
The national plan builds upon work that began with a February 2017 task force meeting that included former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and 15 other federal agency heads to identify opportunities to reduce risk to lead exposure.
At the time, the task force set five goals for the plan, including an improvement in monitoring of childhood lead exposure and creating a plan for federally funded research into lead,
The task force was set up in 1997 by President Bill Clinton to address environmental health risks and safety risks that lead poses to children. The task force’s first report was issued in 2000 and recommended eliminating children’s exposure to hazardous lead paints by 2010.

The EPA has been working for years to update its standards on lead in drinking water, known as the lead and copper rule. The effort gained some momentum after the water-contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., made national headlines.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/epas-childhood-lead-exposure-strategy-coming-dec-19

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High Chemical Levels in Blood of People Near Colorado Air Base

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Tripp Baltz

Blood testing of some 220 residents in southern El Paso County, Colo., found high levels of fluorinated chemicals that likely stemmed from a spill of firefighting foam at a nearby Air Force facility.
Researchers also found per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water wells in Security, Widefield, and Fountain that were most likely contaminated with firefighting foam used at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, according to a preliminary report. Residents have complained of ailments ranging from rashes to cancer.
The research was designed to examine a possible link between the chemicals found in the Widefield Aquifer, the source of drinking water for more than 65,000 people, and the Air Force base’s use of the foam, Christopher Higgins, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, told Bloomberg Environment Dec. 13. That school and the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health conducted the study.a.    Chemical Exposure
The research, part of a study that has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific manuscript, sought to analyze samples from untreated wells to understand what residents might have been exposed to before the Environmental Protection Agency issued health advisories for two PFAS chemicals—perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS).
The EPA recommended a nonenforceable combined health advisory limit for the two chemicals of 70 parts per trillion. In August, the EPA held a hearing in Colorado Springs as part of a series of community engagement sessions around the country on PFAS contamination. Hearings also were held in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
Liz Rosenbaum, one of the residents who was tested, told Bloomberg Environment Dec. 14 she received a letter from the researchers two weeks ago saying the levels of perfluorohexane sulfonate (PFHxS) in her blood was 19.9 nanograms per milliliter. That level was roughly 5 nanograms above the 50th percentile for the residents who were studied.
The residents’ overall level was 10 times that of the 50th percentile for the general U.S. population. b.    ‘Insane Numbers’
“Our numbers are insane,” said Rosenbaum, who founded the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition. “They’re off the chart.”
Not as much is known about the health effects of PFHxS and there is no EPA health advisory for it, although it is a type of PFAS, Higgins said.
The study population had a median blood level PFOS level of 9.7 nanograms per microliter, about 1.8 times as high as the U.S. median, he said.
After the study is published, possible avenues of further research may include evaluating any associations between the level of chemicals in the residents’ blood and potential health effects. Also, he said, research could examine the relationship between chemicals found in the bloodstream and those found in the water the residents were drinking. c.     October 2016 Spill
In October 2016 Air Force officials at Peterson reported the discharge of about 150,000 gallons of wastewater laced with the compounds.
PFAS contamination—the result of making products such as nonstick pans, firefighting foam, and stain-resistant sprays—has been linked to a number of health problems, from liver and thyroid dysfunction to high blood pressure.

Neither Peterson Air Force Base nor an EPA Region 8 spokesman in Denver immediately responded to Bloomberg Environment’s requests for comment.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/high-chemical-levels-in-blood-of-people-near-colorado-air-base

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Hazardous Chemicals Protection Needs More Funding

Dec 17, 2018 | The Ecologist

By Kate Young

Councils lack resources to enforce regulations designed to keep the public and the environment safe from hazardous chemicals, including those that damage hormone systems, organs and aquatic life.
This was the conclusion of analysis of responses to Freedom of Information requestsby UK-based environmental charity CHEM Trust, which asked 164 council trading standards departments across the UK how much they spent on monitoring consumer products for hazardous chemicals in the past five years, how many products were tested, and how many of those were found to breach legal limits.
The results revealed an under-resourced, fragmented approach to consumer health and environmental protection. Out of 88 UK councils that tested products for chemicals, 52 percent found hazardous chemicals over legal limits, and nearly a quarter (23 percent) of samples were found to contain hazardous chemicals.
Certain chemicals
These included cadmium – known to cause damage to organs and genetic defects to unborn children – in jewellery samples; phthalates – associated with disruption of the hormone system and metabolic diseases – found in toys; and lead – which can impact brain development – found in lipsticks.
It is clear that risks exist in everyday products. Despite this, 35 percent (58 councils) did not test any products at all for hazardous chemicals. From London boroughs to Welsh valley councils, not a penny was spent on sampling products for chemicals. Others carried out very little, with 31% testing less than ten products over five years.
The extent of action on hazardous chemicals by trading standards officers varied widely between councils. The highest spend in the whole of the UK was in the London Borough of Enfield, which spent £33,917 on testing 18 products over five years, followed by the London Borough of Southwark, which spent £20,290 testing 285 products.
This was followed by Birmingham City Council, which spent £15,733 on products tests. In Wales, the highest spending council was Rhondda Cynon Taf Council, which spent £4,854 testing 42 products. The most spent in Scotland was £2,000 by Midlothian Council, while in Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council spent £3,000.
Environmental campaign groups fought for years for the introduction of chemicals through the EU Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation. Other regulations are linked to REACH, including the Toy Safety Regulation and Cosmetics Product Regulation, which restrict use of certain chemicals in these products.
Improve collaboration
REACH is the most advanced system in the world for controlling chemicals. But consumers in the UK are not benefitting from this protection because it is simply not being enforced at a local level.
Council budget cuts have taken their toll on trading standards departments, and hit their ability to proactively protect the public. Overall council budgets have decreased by 23.5 percent between 2010-11 and 2015-16, according to government spending watchdog the National Audit Office. This has led budgets for trading standards services to call from £213 million in 2009 to £105 million in 2018, and the number of enforcement officers has dropped by 56 percent over this time.
Regulation of products containing potentially deadly chemicals is one of many areas competing for an ever-decreasing pot of money in local authorities.
Trading standards officers have responsibility for enforcing over 260 pieces of legislation, including those on rogue traders, preventing scams and keeping dangerous products that injure consumers off the market. With fewer staff and less money available for investigations and prosecutions, which can be extremely complex for chemicals, councils are having to make hard choices on enforcement priorities.
We were shocked by the results of our investigation. We are asking the government to increase funding for trading standards services across the UK, improve collaboration between the government and local councils on hazardous chemicals, and develop and publish a comprehensive review of the UK’s enforcement of chemical regulations, with an effective strategy to protect the public.
This Author
Kate Young is Brexit and chemicals campaigner at the CHEM Trust.
https://theecologist.org/2018/dec/17/hazardous-chemicals-protection-needs-more-funding

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How to Buy a Water Filter That Actually Filters Out Your Local Contaminants

Dec 14, 2018 | Quartz

By Zoë Schlanger

It’s very possible there are more unpleasant things in your tap water than you realize. Government watchdogs are slow to find them, and even when they do, it’s often too late. Even the fastest municipal responses to a water crisis take time, and by nature only happen once contaminants have been detected in the water, which is to say, likely only after residents have been exposed. For those interested in taking precautions, a water filter is the most direct solution. But not all water filters are created equal—in fact, there’s about a zillion different kinds.
Here’s how to pick one out.Step One: Find out what the hell is in your water.Get a quality report
The US Environmental Protection Agency requires your water supplier to mail you a water-quality report, also known as a “Consumer Confidence Report,” once a year. You can find these in an EPA database (or at least get a phone number to call to request one). But the Environmental Working Group, a health advocacy non-profit, has compiled roughly 28 million water records from nearly 50,000 American water utilities reports into an easier to use database here. The EWG database compares detected contaminant levels to state and national averages, as well as to health guidelines. It makes it pretty clear that in the US, most people are drinking water that is legally “safe” but isn’t actually risk-free. Every zip code turns up some form of contamination.
And of course, pay attention to public water supply notices. If your water supplier sends a letter, open it.Check your pipes
In many cases, there may be nothing wrong with the water supply itself. The problem, if there is one, could be coming from your pipes. In the case of Flint’s ongoing lead crises, for example, the problem wasn’t that the water supply was leaded; it was that Flint’s service lines were made of lead, and the government failed to add enough anti-corrosion agent to the water. Follow these tips for checking if you have lead pipes in your home.
Older buildings may have sediment build-up in the pipes. This might not be technically dangerous, but it is kinda gross. A New York City plumber once showed me a quick way to check for sediment: Stop up your kitchen sink, fill it with water, and then darken the room (easiest to do this at night). Shine a flashlight at an angle into the water, and you should see any sediment. You can also momentarily drape a clean, unfolded sheet of paper towel over the surface of the water so it floats and lift it off carefully. Check the paper towel under a bright light for specks of material. Do either method shortly after filling the sink so the sediment doesn’t settle.Step Two: Find out what elsemight be in your water
At the end of the day, a water-quality report will only take you so far. “The reality is, most contaminants are not tested for,” says Judith Enck, who served as a regional EPA administrator under President Obama.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is responsible for determining when a chemical needs to be regulated in the US water supply, but it hasn’t added a new toxin to its list since 1996. (Even the Government Office of Accountability thinks that’s a sign of a broken system.)
Enck advises people to not expect the government to find something wrong with their water in a timely fashion. “Do not wait. Cobble the money together. Do the testing yourself,” she says. “You have to be a little bit of a detective. What might you be downwind from? Where is your public water near?”
One way to do this is to find out where your water supply comes from, and then look in its general vicinity on the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory map to see what, if any, facilities are nearby, and what toxic materials they are permitted to release.
Citizen efforts have uncovered major emergencies in recent years. In Hoosick Falls, New York, for example, Michael Hickey knew his water wells were not far from a factory that manufactured Teflon. He bought several $400 testing kits, and sparked an investigation that uncovered major contamination from a chemical called PFOA that’s used in manufacturing Teflon. His town had likely been drinking PFOA in its water supply for decades. PFOA is not presently regulated by the EPA despite evidence linking it to heightened cancer risks, infertility, developmental delays, and other health problems. Ultimately, Hickey’s discovery led the area being declared a federal Superfund site.A note about private wells
If your water comes from a private well, the government is not required to do any testing at all; that is entirely up to the homeowner. Homeowners will typically use these tests to look for naturally-occurring contaminants like arsenic and radon, depending on where you live, as well as bacteria (this is especially relevant if you have a septic system onsite, to be sure it isn’t leaching into your water supply). Check what any nearby manufacturing plant makes, and if it involves hazardous materials. If you live near a farm, testing for pesticides may also be advisable.
There are many ways to find water testing labs, and the Water Systems Council keeps a directory. If lead is your primary concern, some states offer free lead testing.Step Three: Decide how big you want to go.
Do you live alone? You might opt for a pitcher filter. Are there five people in your household? An in-line system under your kitchen sink might make sense—or you could buy a refrigerator with a water filter built in. Are you willing (or permitted) to cut into your plumbing? Then a whole-house filter might be for you.
If you have done your due diligence in finding out what might be in your water and found no major red flags, the filter that comes with your refrigerator might be enough.Step Four: Check which filter is certified for the contaminant most likely to be in your water
Contrary to popular belief, just buying whatever Brita pitcher is on the shelf in your local supermarket doesn’t always cut it. There is no one-size-fits all water filter; what you should buy depends on what’s in your water. (You can see what Brita does and doesn’t filter out here—only two of their products filter lead, for example).
In the US, look for certification from NSF International, a product-testing organization. Another tip, says Rick Andrew, director of water-systems development at NSF, is to check whether or not a product can be shipped to California. California has a rule that requires water filters that make health claims to register with the state as passing certification tests—so “if you see a product that isn’t shipping to California you might want to be wary,” Andrew says. (Wisconsin and Iowa have similar programs, but California is known to enforce theirs most.)
Also look for the NSF certification on the filter website or packaging to know that they’ve been through a testing protocol. The NSF has a slightly clunky database for checking which filters have passed their testing programs for each contaminant. Here are a few entries for common ones:PFOA and PFOS:Countertop filters connected to sink faucetCountertop filters, manual fillRefrigerator filtersUnder the sink filtersReverse osmosis systemsLead:FiltrationReverse OsmosisRadonBacteria:Microbiological PurifiersUltraviolet Disinfection
You can also search filters by manufacturer name here to see what they’re certified to remove.
The NSF operates a consumer info hotline, where they’ll talk you through questions about filters or contaminants in water:info@nsf.org+1800 673 8010
Another option is to use the Environmental Working Group’s water-filter database.Step Five: Don’t get scammed.
Water-filter scamming is a big business—particularly refrigerator-filter replacement cartridges. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) says up to one-third of the filters in people’s homes are probably frauds. They’re often sold online with the exact same labeling as a legitimate filter—and may even bear the NSF seal, claiming to be certified.
One way to tell if a filter is counterfeit is the price: “If you try to order one and it’s like $5, and the one on the manufacturer’s site is like $50, that’s probably a fake,” says NSF’s Andrew. “If the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Some fake filters might be stuffed with newspaper or other useless material instead of the typical cake of activated charcoal. Even if the activated charcoal block is where it should be, they often don’t work as well, or for as long, in the knockoffs.
AHAM tested dozens of these, and found some worked for a short time at removing contaminants like lead or arsenic, but then failed far sooner than they should have. In some cases, they actually introduced contaminants into the water. Most of them clogged quickly, which can cause problems like flooding.
“Not only are these things not removing lead, some of these filters are leaching chemicals into the water. Actual manufacturers are using food-grade plastics. But the counterfeit plastics are just random white plastic,” says Jill Notini, the vice president of communications at AHAM.Step Six: Change your filters!!!!
Seriously. Do it. If you don’t change your filter cartridge according to instructions, you might as well not bother getting a filter. They don’t work as intended after whatever time period they’re certified for. This is for very reasonable physics reasons; contaminants will built up in the cartridge until the cartridge can’t hold any more.Skeptical? Here’s why you should care
In 2018, large parts of the US woke up to the fact that water contamination is a widespread problem. The country had been building to this for a while: The Flint, Michigan lead-contamination crisis is in its fourth year. The lead crisis in Chicago’s East Side broke in 2016. This year, Newark, New Jersey added itself to the list of major urban lead emergencies. Lead is known to impact children at lower doses than adults—and there is no safe level of lead in drinking water.
But lead is far from the only villain, as far as water contaminants go. Slowly but surely, PFAS is becoming a household name and emerging as the DDT of this generation. Compounds that fall under the PFAS umbrella—like PFOA (the Teflon ingredient) and PFOS (used in firefighting foam)—have cropped up in water supplies in West Virginia, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy island community off of Massachusetts, is the latest US municipality to be added to the lengthening PFAS contamination list.
And then there are the trihalomethanes: These are byproducts of the chlorination process that include chloroform and have been linked to a number of health problems.Towns in US states like New York, Florida, Michigan, and Canadian provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador all found high levels of trihalomethanes in their municipal water this year.
As contamination sites proliferate, water users are growing wary—but few are changing anything about the water they drink. According to a survey by NSF, the group that certifies water filters, 71% of people in the US drink tap water, and 55% are concerned about what might be in it—but 42% don’t take any steps to do anything about it. But hey, it’s about to be a new year, when everyone musters the will to achieve tedious but beneficial things. And like they say: Nothing changes if nothing changes. So maybe go get yourself a filter.
https://qz.com/1494953/how-to-buy-a-water-filter-that-actually-filters-our-your-local-contaminants/

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Energy News

(ACC Mentioned) Now is the Time to Build the Appalachian Storage Hub

Dec 17, 2018 | The State Journal

By David B. McKinley

When Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area in August 2017, the devastation was unimaginable. The storm not only impacted an untold number of homes and businesses, it also exposed a weakness in America’s petrochemical industry.
When the storm hit, 17 ethylene crackers, representing 60 percent of the production capacity in America, went offline. These facilities provide the feedstock for the plastics and chemical industries, and shortages and spikes in prices impacted manufacturers coast to coast. Gradually, the crackers returned to production after several weeks, but not before this major disruption to America’s economy.
Why does this matter? Ethylene is a vital ingredient that goes into hundreds of products from food packaging to carpet to tires. Simply put, it is essential to our economy and way of life.
A recent report issued by the Department of Energy states that 95 percent of America’s production of ethylene is produced on the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana — a region exposed to major storms like Hurricane Harvey. Should we be worried about the vulnerability of our country’s petrochemical industry? Wouldn’t it make sense to build some redundancy so an industry vital to America’s economic and national security is not clustered in one location? The Department of Energy and other experts have already answered with a resounding “yes.”
The question is where this secondary “Hub” should be located. The Appalachian region would be a natural location. The development of the Marcellus and Utica Shales over the past decade has made West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio the largest shale gas-producing area in the country. The increase in production has led to an abundance of natural gas liquids, which are currently shipped to the Gulf Coast or up to Canada where they are processed.
Why can’t we utilize this valuable commodity closer to home and attract downstream industries that require access to ethylene? The supply is here. The capacity to store it is here. A large market for the products that use ethylene is nearby. The only hurdle is building out the infrastructure to store and process natural gas liquids.
Developing such a “Hub” in Appalachia would bring significant investment and jobs to the region. A 2017 report by the American Chemistry Council estimates it would create more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs and $36 billion in investment by 2025. From construction jobs building plants and infrastructure to manufacturers further down the supply chain that would locate nearby, an Appalachian Hub has the potential to transform the economy in our region.
For nearly four years, I have worked to promote this project, introducing legislation to authorize a DOE study, ensuring project developers can utilize federal loan guarantees, and discussing the project with President Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry. While, ultimately, it will take private investment to complete this infrastructure, having federal support will help smooth the path forward.
Momentum is starting to build. Shell is building a cracker facility in Monoca, Pennsylvania, which is on target to begin operating in 2020. A consortium of Thai and South Korean companies are planning to develop a facility across the river from Moundsville. Additional projects are in various stages of consideration.
As more facilities consider locating in Pennsylvania, Ohio or West Virginia there will be need for more pipeline and storage infrastructure. There is ample underground storage in the region using salt domes and hard rock caverns. The storage could hold more than 10 million barrels, ensuring a supply of ethane these plants will need to run.
Developing a hub for petrochemicals in the Appalachian region will reduce America’s dependence on a single Hurricane-prone area for ingredients that are required for products we use every day, create a supply for manufacturers located in the Northeast and the Midwest, and transform our region’s economy, creating opportunity for an area that deserves economic diversification.
Any undertaking of this size requires the cooperation of many stakeholders. In the past few years, we have worked with federal and state agencies, the private sector, labor unions and others to bring this vision to fruition. As the momentum behind the Appalachian Hub continues to grow, we stand ready to help advance this project. It is good for West Virginia, good for Appalachia, and good for America.
https://www.wvnews.com/statejournal/opinion/now-is-the-time-to-build-the-appalachian-storage-hub/article_848dd174-fb08-5815-883a-98ea0e481303.html

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Louisiana Gives $2B Tax Break to Liquefied Natural Gas Facility

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Karn Dhingra

Louisiana property tax breaks could exceed $2 billion over ten years for a liquefied natural gas facility developed by a subsidiary of Houston-based Tellurian Inc.
Louisiana’s Board of Commerce and Industry voted Dec. 14 to give Driftwood LNG LLC, which is developing the LNG production export facility near Lake Charles, La., a $283.7 million first-year exemption.
The facility’s tax abatement comes under the Pelican State’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program, which gives manufacturers an 80 percent property tax abatement for an initial term of five years and an option to renew for an additional five years. Companies like Shell Chemical LP and ExxonMobil Corp. have received similar credits under the program.
In exchange for the tax break, Driftwood is bringing 350 permanent jobs and will pay out $33 million in salaries for those jobs. The project will have 6,400 construction jobs and pay $531 million for those jobs. Construction on the project is slated to begin in the first half of 2019, and the facility will begin operations in 2023.
Natural gas will be delivered to the facility via a 96-mile pipeline from the Haynesville shale play.
“This abatement is crucial to the development of our $15 billion Driftwood project and to the development of our other assets across Louisiana, including upstream natural gas production in the Haynesville, and proposed pipelines, representing a total of nearly $30 billion investment,” Tellurian spokeswoman Joi Lecznar told Bloomberg Tax in an email.
Lecznar said the Driftwood project is still in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s environmental review process, which is expected to be complete in January.

Once complete, the facility is expected to export up to 27.6 million tonnes of LNG per year to customers around the world.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/louisiana-gives-2b-tax-break-to-liquefied-natural-gas-facility

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Report Sees Massive Increase in LNG Demand

Dec 14, 2018 | Houston Chronicle

By Marissa Luck

The world's biggest buyers of liquefied natural gas will quadruple their uncontracted demand for LNG, and more buyers will be on the hunt for additional LNG soon, too, a report from Wood Mackenzie suggests.
That's good news for Texas, which is transforming into an LNG export hub as companies tap into cheap natural gas supplies.Recommended Video
By 2030, the seven major LNG buyers are expected to gobble up 80 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas over and above their existing contracts, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Total demand from those buyers, including purchasing LNG on contract and off contract, will grow to 180 million metric tons, up from 150 million metric tons today, the research firm said.
"As China pushes on toward a lower-emission economy, its demand for gas and LNG has grown significantly and we expect the trend to continue in the longer term," said Wood Mackenzie research director, Nicholas Browne in a statement.
MILESTONE: Texas now an exporter of LNG
The major seven LNG buyers are clustered in Asia, including China National Offshore Oil Corp., PetroChina, Sinopec, Tokyo Gas, Jera Co. and CPC Corp. Together they account for more than 50 percent of the global LNG market.
"Other traditional major buyers, on the other hand, are facing legacy contract expires and will be on the hunt for a mix of contracts to lower average costs and security in supply sources," Browne added.
LNG DEAL: Tellurian plan for $15 billion LNG terminal advances
Next year could be a record year for new liquefied natural gas projects too – collectively suppliers could give the green light on LNG investments totaling 220 million metric tons per a year of capacity.
To put that in perspective, nearly 300 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas was traded globally last year — a jump from 100 million metric tons at the start of the century, according to an outlook from Shell.
Several projects are expected to get the green light next year, including the $27 billion Arctic LNG-2 in Russia, at least one project in Mozambique and at least three the U.S. Expansion projects in Australia and Papua New Guinea will also be in the running.
A new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration earlier this week said the U.S. could more than double its export capacity in the next year to become the third largest LNG exporter behind Australia and Qatar.
In Texas, Cheniere Energy sent out the first LNG export tankerfrom the state earlier this week. Cheniere's initial customers for the Corpus Christi facility hold long-term supply contracts from Europe, Asia and Australia.
Cheniere started exporting LNG from the U.S. in 2016, when it sent LNG from its Sabine Pass complex in Louisiana. Dominion Energy of Richmond, Va., also is exporting LNG from the United States, and others are expected to follow in the coming months, including two Houston firms, Kinder Morgan, which is completing an export terminal in Georgia, and Freeport LNG, which will operate a Gulf Coast terminal at Quintana Island.
Companies behind another four export projects on the Gulf Coast —Magnolia LNG, Delfin LNG, Lake Charles and Golden Pass— have federal approvals and are expected to make final investment decisions in the coming months, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Several other companies, including Sempra Energy of San Diego, NextDecade of Houston and Tellurian of Houston, are working on projects expected to start up in the coming years. This week NextDecade scored state permits for its Rio Grande LNG project in Brownsville. And the federal government just released an environmental study on another Brownsville project, Annova LNG, an important milestone in the permitting process.
LNG ADVANCES: NextDecade lands state permit for Rio Grande LNG project
Browne said 2019 will be "the biggest year ever" in terms of LNG projects advancing and receiving final investment decisions.
"Asia's major buyers will be at the forefront in ensuring this next generation of LNG supply is brought to market," he added.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Report-Biggest-LNG-buyers-to-to-quadruple-demand-13466294.php

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FERC Releases Environmental Impact Statement for Annova LNG

Dec 14, 2018 | Houston Chronicle

By Sergio Chapa

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has released a 452-page draft environmental impact statement regarding Exelon's proposed Annova LNG project at the Port of Brownsville.
As part of FERC's review of the project's permit application, the draft report release kicks off a public comment period that ends on Feb. 4. It also triggers a public comment session that will take place at the Port Isabel Convention Center on Jan. 10.Recommended Video
FERC officials will take those comments to draft a final environmental impact statement that will be released in April 2019 used to decide the proposed project will receive a permit in July 2019.
If approved, Exelon plans to invest $3 billion to build and operate the liquefied natural gas export facility. Exelon is one of three companies seeking FERC permission to build LNG export terminals at the Port of Brownsville.
The proposed LNG export terminals face stiff opposition from a coalition of environmentalists, shrimpers, fishermen and communities working under the banner Save RGV From LNG.
FERC's draft report gives Exelon a list of 124 items to mitigate environmental impacts.
One area of concern is the proposed LNG site's proximity to the SpaceX rocket launch site at nearby Boca Chica Beach.
Located on the south shore of the Brownsville Ship Channel, the Annova LNG facility would be within a zone that would be closed to the public during rocket launches.
FERC officials recommend that construction crews be positioned outside higher-risk areas during launches and for plant personnel to monitor them and shut down operating equipment in the event of a failure.
Construction and plant operations are expected to impact movements of endangered species such as the ocelot and jaguarundi.
If all the three LNG projects are approved, FERC estimates that 467 LNG tankers would travel through the Brownsville Ship Channel per year.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/FERC-releases-environmental-impact-statement-for-13466722.php

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Oil Loses Ground as U.S. Shale Growth Undermines OPEC+ Cuts

Dec 14, 2018 | Bloomberg (In Houston Chronicle)

By Grant Smith and Sharon Cho

Oil settled below $52 a barrel in New York, more than a $1 lower than where it ended a week ago after OPEC and its allies announced output cuts, as traders weighed incremental U.S. shale growth against softer demand for 2019.
Saudi Arabia's plan to slash exports to the U.S. next month is shoring up expectations that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners will deliver on last week's promise to curb production by 1.2 million barrels a day. Yet the oil market appears to have largely ignored cuts agreed to just a week ago, concerned by the relentless growth from U.S. shale, which veteran crude trader Andy Hall says is making it hard to predict the market's direction.Recommended Video
"The market may have to wait for OPEC to get the job done this time, given the perception that OPEC+ was unable to cut enough to reduce the surplus expected," said Michael Cohen, head of energy markets research at Barclays Plc in New York.
PREVIOUSLY: Oil jumps as Saudis target American refiners for supply cuts
Crude has traded in the narrowest range since early 2017 so far this month as investors assess the production cuts pledged by the so-called OPEC+ coalition. The International Energy Agency said unplanned outages in OPEC's member states may double its intended curbs. Still, the market is concerned that breakneck production from the Permian of West Texas and New Mexico and North Dakota's Bakken shale fields may quash any price rallies.
"We really had a blowout day yesterday with the strong rally," said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA. "I don't think the headlines supported it so today's move is more so a pullback to compensate."
West Texas Intermediate for January delivery fell $1.38 to settle at $51.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract closed Thursday's session up $1.43 at $52.58 a barrel.
SOUTHEAST TEXAS: Layoffs hit Beaumont-area petrochemical plant
Brent for February settlement fell $1.17 to $60.28 a barrel on London's ICE Futures Europe exchange, after gaining 2.2 percent on Thursday. The global benchmark crude settled at an $8.81-a-barrel premium to WTI for the same month.
Concerns about stronger production persist even as U.S. shale explorers continue to dial back drilling, with working oil rigs falling by 4 this week to 873, according to Baker Hughes data. That's the third decline in four weeks.
Market Uncertainty
While it's become more difficult for traders to assess the market, those seeking to pick a trend should probably bet that oil will rebound from its recent 30 percent plunge, said Hall, once nicknamed "God" for his lucrative calls on crude.
Saudi crude shipments to the U.S. next month could test the 30-year low set in late 2017 of 582,000 barrels a day, down about 40 percent from the most recent three-month average, according to people briefed on the plans of the kingdom's state oil company. The final figure could still change, they added.
--With assistance from James Thornhill, Sharon Cho and Grant Smith.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Oil-Stutters-Near-52-as-OPEC-Curbs-Weighed-13466050.php

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Cleanest Fossil Fuel Tries to Eke Out a Future in Greener World

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Vanessa Dezem

The natural gas industry is trying to up its green credentials as it bids to join electric cars and renewable power plants in a lower emissions future.
European energy companies spent years touting the role gas can play as a transition fuel to replace dirtier sources of round-the-clock power. Now they are increasingly promoting gas as a cleaner alternative to oil products in transportation and investing in technology to produce less polluting fuel.
“Natural gas will play a bigger role in a greener world,” Guy Smith, head of gas trading at Swedish utility Vattenfall AB, said Dec. 11. “It will be the fuel of choice for an intermediary situation towards a greener economy, and after that, new technologies will come and drive the markets.”

With governments and investors increasingly concerned about climate change, and meeting in Poland for United Nations climate talks, the natural gas industry has questioned its own survival. The fuel’s share in primary energy supply is expected to rise to a quarter by 2040, though annual consumption growth is expected to slow to 1.6 percent from 2.3 percent over the 25 years to 2016, according to the International Energy Agency.
The fact that natural gas is less polluting than other fossil fuels, with emissions as much as 55 percent below those of coal, have made it an energy company darling. Companies from Scania AB to Royal Dutch Shell Plc are investing to increase the role of natural gas in the transportation sector.
“The view that gas is just a transition fuel is changing,” said Eva Hennig, chairwoman of the distribution system operators committee at Brussels-based industry lobby group Eurogas.a. Fourfold Growth
Austria’s OMV AG is assessing a liquefied natural gas corridor for trucks from Germany to Bulgaria, one of the main traffic routes for international heavy traffic in Europe, it said in an emailed statement. The company, which operates more than 2,000 filling stations in 10 countries, declined to provide more details on the investment.
Shell has opened its first retail LNG station in Germany, its ninth in Europe, and wants to expand more.
“If you want to stay in the game, you have to play it and decarbonize,” said Kaloyan Tsilev, EU affairs manager at Brussels-based lobby group Natural & Bio Gas Vehicle Association Europe. “Change the portfolio to accommodate the demand.”
Shell expects the global market for LNG as a transport fuel to quadruple by 2030 as implementation of government policies that tax carbon emissions prompts demand for cleaner sources.
“Transport is an area where gas hasn’t played a role historically, but it can,” Steve Hill, executive vice president at Shell Energy, said at a conference in Lisbon last month. “Cars will be electrified eventually, but heavy-duty transport, where you have to move heavy loads long distances is not very suitable for batteries and electricity, which can be a segment for LNG.”
The challenge for natural gas to expand into transportation is the lack of political will and a better regulation framework, according to Manfred Leitner, an executive board member at OMV. Current European legislation focuses on vehicles emissions, which put electric cars in a better position than other technologies.
“There are incentives only for electric cars. They are defined as low emitters, but when you look at the whole chain you ask yourself where the electricity comes from?,” Leitner said in a telephone interview. “The gas for mobility market would fly if there was political will. We see a better future with a mix of technologies.”
Natural gas companies also are investing in technology to clean the fuel. Green gas should help Engie SA, Snam SpA, Gas Natural SDG SA, and other electricity generators, as well as operators of gas pipelines and storage facilities, to ensure long-term demand for existing infrastructure, Elchin Mammadov, a Bloomberg Intelligence industry analyst, said in a recent report.
“The decarbonization of gas is possible and is a very important part of the narrative of the climate talks” taking place this week in Poland, Ludwig Mohring, head of German oil, gas, and geothermal energy lobby BVEG, said at a conference in Berlin last month. “Natural gas will be the second element next to renewables.”

—With assistance from Anna Shiryaevskaya.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/cleanest-fossil-fuel-tries-to-eke-out-a-future-in-greener-world

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How America Broke OPEC

Dec 14, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal - Opinion

Remember when America’s political class fretted about “peak oil” and dependence on foreign energy? So much for that. The U.S. the other week for the first time in 75 years became a net petroleum exporter as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries wrangled over how to respond to America’s growing energy bounty.
U.S. crude production has surged 20% in a year and nearly tripled in a decade thanks to advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. American output is rising at the fastest rate in a century. Earlier this year the U.S. eclipsed Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest oil producer.Potomac Watch PodcastIntegrity of Comey's FBI; Planned Parenthood Court Case
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For nearly six decades OPEC has dominated oil markets by setting production quotas among its 15 members. In late 2014, OPEC flooded the market with oil in an effort to break U.S. drillers who were burning cash on mounds of debt. As oil prices fell below $40 a barrel in 2015-2016, many wildcatters folded or were absorbed by larger producers.
But the survivors became more efficient. Technology—including drones with thermal imaging to detect leaks along with improvements in horizontal drilling—boosted productivity. Over the last five years production per rig has more than tripled in the Permian Basin and quadrupled in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. While the Bakken rig count has fallen by 70%, output has increased by a third.
Most American oil refineries have processed heavier crudes, which depressed prices for lighter, sweeter grades produced in the new wells. But in late 2015 the GOP Congress expanded shale-oil’s market by lifting the export ban on crude in return for Barack Obama’s demand to extend renewable energy tax credits. U.S. crude exports have since soared to 3.2 million barrels a day.
Many U.S. producers say they can turn a profit at $50 a barrel and even as low as $30 in the Permian’s most productive regions. Yet most OPEC members need prices ranging between $70 and $90 per barrel to balance their budgets. The cartel scaled back output in 2016, but shale producers roared back as prices recovered. America’s shale gusher has presented a quandary for OPEC and especially its largest member, Saudi Arabia, which faces large budget deficits as it works to contain Iranian influence in the Middle East.
Earlier this year, the Saudis obliged President Trump by increasing output to prevent prices from soaring with the reimposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Even so oil prices hit a four-year high in early October. But they have since declined 30% amid weakening world economic forecasts, sanctions exemptions and surging U.S. production.
OPEC and Russia last week agreed to scale back production collectively by 1.2 million barrels a day, but the meeting exposed the cartel’s cracks. Qatar quit amid hostilities with the Saudis. Small producers carped they were too insignificant to affect global supply. Algeria produces one million barrels per day, which is as much as U.S. output has increased in five months.
Saudi Arabia, Russia and allied producers agreed to shoulder the bulk of the cuts while Libya, Iran and Venezuela received exemptions. Some in the media claim the Saudis defied Mr. Trump’s pleas to keep oil prices low, yet U.S. shale producers are likely to benefit from OPEC’s cuts by capturing more market share.
One of the biggest constraints on U.S. production has been a distribution bottleneck. Hence West Texas Intermediate now sells at a $8 to $9 discount to Brent crude on the world market. But next year three pipelines capable of delivering two million barrels of Permian crude to the Gulf Coast are expected to come online. In 2020 two more pipelines that can carry two million barrels a day are expected to be completed.
Oil companies are also racing to build more export terminals to handle the supply gusher, which isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. The U.S. Geological Survey reported recently that the Permian’s Delaware Basin holds more than twice as much oil and 18 times as much natural gas as the heavier-drilled Midland region.***
Barack Obama, hilariously, is now claiming credit for the shale boom. “You know that whole suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer . . . that was me, people,” he said last month at Rice University. But drilling leases on federal land declined 28% during his two terms amid new restrictions on land use. Drilling skyrocketed on private land, despite attempts by his regulators to block pipelines, slow down approvals, and impose higher costs on production.
The Trump Administration is expediting pipeline and terminal permitting and opening new federal land to drilling. Last year’s tax reform unlocked Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Interior Department recently scaled back needless Obama protections for the sage grouse, which will allow drilling on nine million acres in oil-rich states. Leases are being snapped up at auction, even in areas where recoveries are now low and expensive. As technology advances, many investors expect the break-even price of production to fall.
Politicians in the past have sought to secure American energy independence with price controls, ethanol mandates and the oil export ban. But they and OPEC should note that America owes its new energy prosperity to industry innovation, private property, and the free market.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-america-broke-opec-11544831785?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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MATS Rule Likely Floats Range Of Options From 'Tinkering' To Rescinding

Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Stuart Parker

EPA's imminent proposal on reconsidering the Obama-era power plant mercury and air toxics standards (MATS) will float a host of options from rescinding the rule outright by undoing its cost-benefit analysis to “tinkering” with parts of the rule, sources say, and the agency will then use public input on the options to decide on a final outcome.
At press time the MATS reconsideration rule was still listed as undergoing mandatory White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) pre-publication review, but the agency is expected to release it in the coming days. The rule will combine a Clean Air Act-mandated risk and technology review (RTR) of the regulation to assess whether revisions are necessary with a reassessment of the cost finding that underpins the regulation.
Utility industry officials and other critics of the MATS rule said at the time of its issuance that it was based on a flawed “appropriate and necessary” cost-benefit analysis. EPA initially did not craft such a finding for the rule, but after lengthy litigation and an adverse Supreme Court ruling issued a finding that backed the rule.
In meetings with EPA and OMB officials to try swaying the outcome of the proposed reconsideration rule, environmentalists and some power groups have urged the administration to retain the regulation, given that most utilities have already invested millions of dollars to comply. Groups including the American Lung Association, Clean Air Task Force, Sierra Club, investor-owned utility group Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and power company Exelon in their meetings have outlined their varied arguments for keeping the rule in place, and to oppose any attempt to “de-list” power plants from air toxics regulation under Clean Air Act section 112.
But a coal industry coalition has made the argument for rescinding MATS entirely, saying such a move is legally necessary before it can lawfully finalize its proposed section 111(d) Affordable Clean Energy utility greenhouse gas rule, arguing the air law prohibits regulation of utilities under both sections.
And critics of the rule are urging the agency to undo the appropriate and necessary finding, which would remove the justification for MATS and would conceivably require EPA to scrap the rule outright. They argue that the agency erred by including “co-benefit” reductions of non-toxic emissions as part of its cost-benefit finding.
The primary co-pollutant cited by EPA is fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which is responsible for billions of dollars' worth of estimated adverse health impacts. But PM2.5 is not a hazardous air pollutant (HAP) regulated under the Clean Air Act's section 112 on air toxics, leading industry and GOP critics of the rule to claim that it is illegitimate to count benefits of reducing it. Also, scrapping the “appropriate and necessary” finding on these grounds would set a precedent against EPA relying on such co-benefits to justify future rules.
Some informed sources believe EPA will move to scrap the finding, but others say the imminent rule will opt to merely “tinker” with the finding, altering the cost-benefit analysis but not eliminating the finding entirely, suggesting that the rule could float a range of options rather than just one.
MATS Reconsideration
Generally speaking, much of the power generation sector does not want to see MATS itself scrapped, because this would risk the loss of major investments in compliance by industry. MATS is now fully implemented, and has driven the conversion of much generating capacity from coal to gas fuel, along with low gas prices. Some coal plants have added pollution controls such as selective catalytic reduction to curb air emissions. Advocates of MATS argue that the implementation costs have in fact been lower than initially projected by EPA.
Another informed source believes EPA could scrap the appropriate and necessary finding yet retain MATS because EPA has no plans to attempt de-listing power plants as a source category under air law section 112.
Such de-listing is required in order to eliminate air toxics regulations, but is subject to stringent criteria that the agency would have to defend in court. A previous attempt by the George W. Bush EPA to de-list power plants, and to instead regulate power plant air toxics under section 111(d), failed because an appellate court rejected EPA's de-listing effort as flawed. This sets a high bar for future attempts to de-list power plants, the source argues.
With respect to the MATS rule, EPA is thought likely to use its air law-mandated RTR process to make changes to ease implementation of the pollution limits, such as changes to monitoring, reporting and recordkeeping provisions. It is unclear whether EPA may try to weaken actual numeric emissions limits under the RTR.
RTRs require the agency to reassess its HAP rules for individual sectors eight years after their implementation to weigh whether health risks remain from emissions or whether new technology exists to further reduce emissions. If risks linger or if new technology exists, the agency can then revise the rules to make them stricter.
But environmentalists argue it is unlawful to use an RTR to weaken air toxics standards, and would be sure to litigate any agency attempt to use the MATS RTR to soften its requirements.
But the Trump EPA has used the reviews to ease some implementation requirements for other sectors' HAP rules, such as monitoring or reporting regimes. Industry groups such as EEI have pressed EPA to conduct an RTR for the MATS rule, keeping the rule in place but easing some compliance requirements.
The proposal is further expected to ease compliance with the MATS rule for utilities using coal waste as fuel, a specialized sector that has pressed EPA to ease emissions limits on its facilities.
One informed source says the sector expects to see some easing of the rule, possibly with the introduction of an “alternative” acid gas standard that would be easier for waste coal plants burning bituminous coal to meet. “We have gotten positive feedback” on the issue from EPA and OMB, says the source.
Carper's Push-Back
Meanwhile, a top Senate Democrat is warning EPA not to gut the MATS rule, saying it continues to generate significant health benefits and improve air quality.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), ranking member on the Environment & Public Works Committee, sent a Dec. 13 letter to OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Neomi Rao urging the Trump administration to keep the rule in place, along with the underlying appropriate and necessary finding.
“If EPA looks at all the actual benefits and updated costs of this [MATS] rule instead of persisting in its tortured effort to re-define its own legal authority and responsibility, there is no reasonable conclusion other than that it is appropriate and necessary to regulate these dangerous power plant emissions under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. I echo the call of health and environmental groups, states and the business community: Keep the entirety of the MATS rules in place,” Carper writes.
Carper reminds OIRA that under OMB's Circular A-4 rule, EPA rules require a regulatory analysis that includes “a discussion of non-quantified as well as quantified benefits and costs,” and that agencies should “look beyond the direct benefits and direct costs of your rulemaking and consider any important ancillary benefits and countervailing risks.”
Ancillary benefits include co-benefits of reducing PM2.5, and “non-quantified” benefits include benefits EPA was unable to quantify in support of MATS, but which are nonetheless real, advocates of MATS say.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/mats-rule-likely-floats-range-options-tinkering-rescinding

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Shareholders Call on ExxonMobil to Set Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets

Dec 16, 2018 | Reuters (In The New York Times)

A number of institutional investors in ExxonMobil Corp have said they will file a shareholder resolution which calls on the world's largest oil company to set targets for lowering its greenhouse gas emissions.
The call, led by the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYSCRF) and the Church Commissioners of England (CCE), comes in the wake of shareholder moves at other major energy firms seeking to make them more responsive to climate change and its impact on the business.
The statement released on Sunday by the CCE asked Exxon to disclose, for the first time, short, medium and long-term targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from both its operations and the use of its products.
"We want to see ExxonMobil develop a clear strategy for long-term sustainability, in line with international commitments for a safer climate," Edward Mason, head of responsible investment for the CCE, said in the statement.
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Thomas DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller and Trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, added: "The world is transitioning to a lower carbon future and Exxon needs to demonstrate its ability to adapt or risk its bottom line along with investors' confidence."
Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The pair have previously teamed up to pressure Exxon on environmental issues, including on a shareholder resolution in 2017 which asked the company to disclose the impact of measures to combat climate change on its business.
The NYSCRF and CCE are joined in the latest initiative, which will be filed for a potential vote at Exxon's shareholder meeting in the spring of 2019, by other funds including the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), and HSBC Global Asset Management, the statement added.
Earlier this month, Royal Dutch Shell set out plans to introduce three-year or five-year carbon emissions targets that were linked to executive pay in 2020, following pressure from its investors.
BP and Total have also set short-term targets on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but these are limited to their own operations.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/12/16/business/16reuters-exxon-mobil-shareholders-climatechange.html

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New Governor Seeks 'Way to Monetize Our Gas'

Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Energywire

By Margaret Kriz Hobson

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) plans to announce a decision soon on how he will proceed with the state's proposed multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline and export project that was developed under his predecessor, Bill Walker (I).
In an interview with E&E News after his meeting last week with President Trump and 12 other newly elected governors, Dunleavy said his staff "is still evaluating the gas line. We are hopeful that there's going to be a way to monetize our gas."
"We're hoping to be able to have a direction here shortly," he continued, "hopefully within the next week or two, and then we'll make an announcement."
Alaska has an estimated 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas stranded at its North Slope oil fields.
For the past four years, Walker advanced a plan to have the state build a $44 billion gas commercialization project, including an 800-mile pipeline and export facility.
But throughout his campaign for governor, Dunleavy questioned the economics of the state-controlled approach, insisting that private oil companies would be better equipped to handle the megaproject.
Once elected, Dunleavy appointed former Gov. Sean Parnell (R) to oversee the gas project.
Parnell, who preceded Walker as governor, had been instrumental in working with BP Alaska, ConocoPhillips Alaska and Exxon Mobil Corp. in a partnership to build the Alaska pipeline and liquefied natural gas export project. But the oil companies dropped out of the operation a year after Walker became governor, citing market conditions.
Since the November election, Parnell and other members of Dunleavy's staff have been meeting with officials of Alaska Gasline Development Corp. (AGDC), which is handling the Alaska LNG project for the state.
According to Dunleavy, "Former Gov. Parnell is assisting with some of our staff to look at some of the documents and have conversations with all of those entities associated with this project — the [state's major oil companies], AGDC, etc."
Dunleavy declined to comment on the status of a joint development agreement that Walker signed a year ago with three large Chinese companies. Under that pact, the companies expressed interest in partnering with AGDC to build, finance and buy gas from the Alaska LNG project. A final contract with those companies had been targeted for the end of 2018.
While Dunleavy's staff assesses the Alaska LNG project, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is continuing its work on an environmental impact statement for the venture, with a draft version of that report due in February.Earthquake relief
Dunleavy said that during his meeting with Trump, the top issue on his mind was earthquake relief. He noted that Alaska is still picking up the pieces after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the Greater Anchorage region on Nov. 30.
"The earthquake caused damage, but the aftershocks have added to that," he said. "We're looking at the infrastructure, the roads and bridges, and the port and assessing what needs to be fixed."
The state needs "more funding and, if needed, relaxation of any regulations," the governor continued.
On his first trip to the capital since his election, Dunleavy also used the opportunity to thank Trump for advancing resource development in Alaska, particularly for signing the 2017 tax bill that opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development.
The Alaska governor also sat down for a one-on-one meeting with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Over the weekend, however, Trump announced on social media that Zinke will leave the administration at the end of the year.
After that announcement, Dunleavy issued a statement praising Zinke's handling of Alaska issues.
"Consider for a moment what he accomplished in less than two years," the governor said. "A road to King Cove that can prevent the needless loss of lives, our country's reemergence as the world's leading producer of energy, opening ANWR to safe exploration and forging a new relationship between western states and the interior department based on mutual trust and respect."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/12/17/stories/1060109803

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Judge Rules PennEast Can Start Taking Land

Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Energywire

A federal judge in New Jersey ruled a natural gas pipeline company can go ahead with taking property and compensating landowners as part of the roughly $1.1 billion project.
U.S. District Judge Brian Martinotti said Friday that PennEast can begin taking immediate possession of properties in New Jersey along the roughly 120-mile proposed pipeline from northeastern Pennsylvania to Mercer County, N.J.
The 50-page ruling says PennEast offered $3,000 for access to parts of land where the pipeline would travel.
The ruling is a blow to towns, landowners, the state and environmental groups, which sought to stop PennEast's use of eminent domain.
Landowners would be paid under the ruling.
Permits for the project are pending in both states. The company has said it plans to move forward.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2018/12/17/stories/1060109743

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Chemical Security News

New TSA Cybersecurity Roadmap States Specific Requirements for Pipeline Industry

Dec 14, 2018 | Lexology

By Norma M. Krayem

HIGHLIGHTS:The pipeline sector is a crucial aspect of the nation's economic and national security. While the sector has a host of regulators on various aspects of the industry from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) or U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), no one agency was officially in charge of cybersecurity.DHS has focused on cybersecurity risk to Critical Infrastructure for many years and has recently focused on defining "national critical functions" for the purposes of managing systemic cybersecurity risk.The new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Cybersecurity Roadmap (Roadmap) builds on concerns over cyber risk to the industry from as far back as 2004, making clear that TSA is the lead agency and will use all tools necessary, including regulations, to implement the effort.
This is the second in a series of Holland & Knight alerts about the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Cybersecurity Roadmap announced on Dec. 4, 2018. The Roadmap covers other transportation sectors as well.
The first alert of the series focused on the aviation sector. (See Holland & Knight alert, "New TSA Cybersecurity Roadmap Articulates Clear Aviation Sector Requirements," Dec. 10, 2018.)
Safety vs. Security and the Pipeline Industry
The pipeline industry, and that of the larger energy sector, has a complicated regulatory system across the spectrum for safety, security and permitting issues. Oversight by the U.S. Departments of Transportation (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA), Energy (DOE) and Homeland Security (DHS), along with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), is siloed for specific issues. While TSA has worked with the industry on cybersecurity voluntary measures, it has historically only focused its regulatory authority over physical security issues despite the fact that the Public Law (P.L.) 107-296 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD-7) gives it authority over all related security issues for the transportation subsector, which includes pipelines.
Debate over cyber risks to the industry are not new, however, the discussion over which agency should be the lead agency for cybersecurity has been widely debated. In the meantime, while other Critical Infrastructure sectors have seen regulations mandating varying aspects of cybersecurity, the pipeline industry has focused on voluntary measures and public-private partnerships, but has not seen regulations. In 2004, TSA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with PHMSA to help delineate the distinction between TSA's security oversight versus PHMSA's safety oversight. In 2016, TSA and PHMSA issued a joint notice raising concerns over cybersecurity risk and the need to secure supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for "... abnormal operations and/or indications of unauthorized access or interference with safe pipeline operations." The notice cited to an incident in October 2016 that created the "... potential for serious infrastructure damage and significant economic and environmental harm, as well as endangering public safety." This example highlighted abnormal operations that included physical issues. However, the notice focused on cybersecurity risks as well.
In June 2018, FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee and FERC Commissioner Richard Glick wrote an article, "Cybersecurity Threats to U.S. Gas Pipelines Call for Stricter Oversight" calling for greater focus on cyber risks to pipelines and stating that "The U.S. has no comparable standards for its network of pipelines. As abundant and affordable natural gas has become a major part of the fuel mix, the cybersecurity threats to that supply have taken on new urgency." It reinforced the state of play that it had been unclear as to who had direct oversight of managing cybersecurity risk for the industry. The new TSA Cybersecurity Roadmap now settles this issue.
TSA Issues New Cybersecurity Roadmap
In unveiling its new Cybersecurity Roadmap (Roadmap), the TSA makes it clear for the first time ever that it has direct oversight of cybersecurity for all seven sectors that are part of the Transportation Systems Sector (TSS): pipeline systems, aviation, highway and motor carrier, maritime, mass transit and passenger rail, freight rail, and postal and shipping. The Roadmap discusses the urgent nature of the threat, stating that "the transportation systems' cyber environment and its underlying infrastructure are vulnerable to a wide range of risks stemming from both physical and cyber threats and hazards." It is also the first major public declaration by TSA that it has oversight of both cybersecurity and physical security and states that "The proliferation of technology presents cybersecurity challenges and leads to significant national risks."
Since 2004, TSA, PHMSA, DOE and the industry have focused on cybersecurity although without the clear lines of potential regulatory authority. More recently there have been other key activities, including:In March 2018, TSA issued an updated Pipeline Security Guidelines, which included cybersecurity guidelines stating, "The advancement of security practices to meet the ever changing threat environment in both the physical and cyber security realms required that the guidelines be updated again."1In October 2018, DHS and DOE met with the Oil and Natural Gas (ONG) Sector Coordinating Council to discuss a new pipeline cybersecurity initiative. It highlighted the role of the new DHS National Risk Management Center (NRMC) and the need to focus on key cyber risks for pipeline security. This also coincides with the broader DHS effort to focus on defining "national critical functions" of which, the pipeline sector would certainly fit.
The Roadmap makes clear that TSA is "responsible for the cybersecurity of the TSS sectors and [will] support it through several activities" and discusses a collaborative role working with the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA.) The Roadmap, supports the priority issues areas identified by the White House National Cyber Strategy, which specifically cited the transportation sector. It also reinforces the broad risks identified in the recently released U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity Strategy.
The Roadmap also outlines multiple cybersecurity priorities which clearly define that TSA will be proactively working with the pipeline sector:
TSA states that it has the responsibility to assess, prioritize and protect pipelines and other transportation subsectors.2 The report lists a series of new actions:Conducting a full assessment of the cybersecurity threats to the industryAssessing, prioritizing and identifying gaps in the cybersecurity readiness for pipelinesAdding, for the first time ever, cybersecurity into risk assessments that TSA will conduct on the sector and all modes within the TSS3Increasing the "... reporting and sharing of information on cyber-related incidents from owners and operators" to include "not just threat indicators and activity but also lessons learned, potential consequences and vulnerability-related information"4Looking at cyber risk to the industry from "non-regulated entities such as vendors, managed service providers and contracted services"
TSA also makes clear that it will use all necessary tools including not hesitating to "utilize its statutory and regulatory authorities to ensure the resilience of the TSS." Working with government and industry stakeholders it will also:Look to "to drive better cybersecurity by promoting the development and adoption of best practices and industry and/or international standards"6Direct industry efforts to mitigate systemic risk across the TSSMonitor and "engage TSS stakeholders on a regular basis to evaluate their implementation of guidance and to determine their cybersecurity practices and to promote resilience to malicious cyber activity"7Establish sector-wide guidance for all TSS stakeholders that aligns with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework, the National Cyber Incident Response Plan, and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 to increase reporting and facilitate response11
The Roadmap is not limited to just domestic oversight, TSA is also very clear that it intends to broaden its federal and international efforts. A number of companies who own and operate pipelines are also larger players in the energy sector, many of which are global companies.12 It is important to note that this may be the largest cybersecurity oversight ever of the pipelines sector. Efforts will include:Creating a process that will determine which "foreign transportation entities" will receive cyber threat information and include developing "cyber threat information sharing agreements that provide clear guidance on distribution and use of threat information"Developing an outline and rules of engagement that will include sharing pipelines cyber threats with "relevant foreign government and private sector entities"
The Roadmap indicates that TSA will work to leverage existing DHS capabilities and authorities in the cybersecurity arena and makes clear that it will be the primary agency overseeing cybersecurity for the pipelines sector.
New DoD Cybersecurity Strategy Impacts the Energy Sector
It is notable that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) also rolled out a Cybersecurity Strategy recently, and for the first time, included a priority focus on its role to protect privately owned Critical Infrastructure sectors. Pipelines are critical to the economy and the free flow of energy is a critical function. A cybersecurity attack and a resulting disruption in delivery, could have severe impact on the overall operation of the rest of the nation's critical infrastructure. The report explicitly states:
"The Department seeks to preempt, defeat, or deter malicious cyber activity targeting U.S. critical infrastructure that could cause a significant cyber incident regardless of whether that incident would impact DoD's warfighting readiness or capability. Our primary role in this homeland defense mission is to defend forward by leveraging our focus outward to stop threats before they reach their targets. The Department also provides public and private sector partners with indications and warning (I&W) of malicious cyber activity, in coordination with other Federal departments and agencies."
Congress Focuses on Cybersecurity Risks to the Energy and Pipeline Sector
Congress has expressed concerns over cybersecurity risks to the sector for many years, over time inserting a variety of provisions in energy- and homeland security-related bills mandating reviews of cybersecurity risks and other policy issues. Historically, the majority of concerns have been focused on grid security. In 2015, provisions in the P.L. 114-94, Section 61003 added section 215A to Part II of the Federal Power Act, granting new powers to the president for a "grid security emergency."13 In these instances, "The statute authorizes the Secretary of Energy to issue orders for emergency measures as are necessary, in the Secretary's judgment, to protect or restore the reliability of critical electric infrastructure or defense critical electric infrastructure during the emergency."14
Since that time, Congressional concerns have continued, and in particular, focused on the pipeline sector. In January 2018, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and two subcommittee chairmen sent a letter to Secretary of Energy Rick Perry seeking "information to assess the quality of coordination among various federal entities relating to cybersecurity of the nation's pipeline system." DOE responded in March and provided a briefing to the Energy and Commerce Committee staff. Among other things, the letter states, "Should a major event occur, DOE will actively engage with the sector to support a safe and timely response."
In July 2017, Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting a report on the effectiveness of current efforts and guidelines in the space. Notably, one question asked: "If Congress determines that mandatory cybersecurity standards are appropriate for the pipeline industry, which federal entity should enforce those standards?"
Pipelines represent a unique cross section of two Critical Infrastructure Sectors – energy and transportation. The sector is a crucial aspect of our economic and national security. Ensuring a continuous flow of oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and the like is key, and any disruption with it has serious consequences to the U.S. TSA has made clear that it is in charge of cybersecurity risk to the pipeline sector and will use all tools necessary, including regulations, to implement the effort. More information on these issues will be shared in future alerts or, for specific questions about the potential effect on your organization, contact Norma Krayem, Senior Policy Advisor and Chair of the firm's Global Cybersecurity and Privacy Policy and Regulation Team. She also served as a former Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=dc221240-7bb7-4e26-b72c-cce8da9c4d8a

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Environment News

Talks Adopt 'Rulebook' to Put Paris Climate Deal Into Action

Dec 16, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)

Almost 200 nations, including the world's top greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, have adopted a set of rules meant to breathe life into the 2015 Paris climate accord by setting out how countries should report their emissions and efforts to reduce them.
But negotiators delayed other key decisions until next year — a move that frustrated environmentalists and countries that wanted more ambitious goals in light of scientists' warnings that the world must shift sharply away from fossil fuels in the coming decade.
"The majority of the rulebook for the Paris agreement has been created, which is something to be thankful for," said Mohamed Adow, a climate policy expert at Christian Aid. "But the fact countries had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the finish line shows that some nations have not woken up" to the dire consequences of global warming as outlined in a report by the U.N Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
Officials at the talks, which ended late Saturday in the Polish city of Katowice, agreed upon universal rules on how nations can cut emissions. Poor countries secured assurances on financial support to help them reduce emissions, adapt to changes such as rising sea levels and pay for damage that has already happened.
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"Through this package, you have made a thousand little steps forward together," said Michal Kurtyka, a senior Polish official who led the talks.
While each country would likely find some parts of the agreement it did not like, he said, efforts were made to balance the interests of all parties.
"We will all have to give in order to gain," he said. "We will all have to be courageous to look into the future and make yet another step for the sake of humanity."
The talks took place against a backdrop of growing concern among scientists that global warming is proceeding faster than governments are responding to it. Last month, a study found that global warming will worsen disasters such as the deadly California wildfires and the powerful hurricanes that have hit the United States this year.
The recent report by the IPCC concluded that while it's possible to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times, doing so would require a dramatic overhaul of the global economy, including a shift away from fossil fuels.Editors’ PicksBare Knuckle Bouts in Madagascar? ‘It Is About More Than the Fighting’Why Do Asian-Americans Remain Largely Unseen in Film and Television?I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore.
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Alarmed by efforts to include that idea in the final text of the meeting, the oil-exporting nations of the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked an endorsement of the IPCC report midway through this month's talks. That prompted uproar from vulnerable countries like small island nations and environmental groups.
The final text omitted a previous reference to specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and merely welcomed the "timely completion" of the IPCC report, not its conclusions.
Johan Rockstrom, a scientist who helps to lead the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, called the agreement "a relief." The Paris deal, he said, "is alive and kicking, despite a rise in populism and nationalism."
His biggest concern, he said, is that the summit "failed to align ambitions with science, in particular missing the necessity of making clear that global emissions from fossil fuels must be cut by half by 2030" to stay in line with the IPCC report.
Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the talks created "a solid foundation for implementation and strengthening" of the Paris agreement and could help bring the U.S. back into the deal by a future presidential administration.
One major sticking point was how to create a functioning market in carbon credits. Economists believe that an international trading system could be an effective way to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and raise large amounts of money for measures to curb global warming.
But Brazil wanted to keep the piles of carbon credits it had amassed under an old system that developed countries say wasn't credible or transparent.Sign up for The Interpreter
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Among those that pushed back hardest was the United States, despite President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord and his promotion of coal as a source of energy.
"Overall, the U.S. role here has been somewhat schizophrenic — pushing coal and dissing science on the one hand, but also working hard in the room for strong transparency rules," said Elliot Diringer of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Washington think tank.
The U.S. is still technically in the Paris agreement until 2020, which is why American officials participated in the Katowice talks.
When it came to closing potential loopholes that could allow countries to dodge their commitments to cut emissions, "the U.S. pushed harder than nearly anyone else for transparency rules that put all countries under the same system, and it's largely succeeded," Diringer said.
In the end, a decision on the mechanics of an emissions-trading system was postponed to next year's meeting. Countries also agreed to consider the issue of raising ambitions at a U.N. summit in New York next September.
Canada's Environment Minister Catherine McKenna suggested there was no alternative to such meetings if countries want to tackle global problems, especially as multilateral diplomacy is under pressure from nationalism.
"The world has changed. The political landscape has changed," she told The Associated Press. "Still you're seeing here that we're able to make progress. We're able to discuss the issues. We're able to come to solutions."
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/16/world/europe/ap-climate.html

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Climate Deal Emerging Shows More Friction Between U.S. and China

Dec 14, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Bobby Magill and Jeremy Hodges

Envoys at a United Nations conference are preparing to endorse a set of steps on fighting climate change that falls short of the detailed action plan many countries and businesses were hoping for.
The delegates from almost 200 countries are drawing up rules for implementing the three-year-old Paris Agreement, which called for drastic cuts in fossil fuel pollution by the middle of the century. Draft texts of the deal emerging in Katowice, Poland, suggest many of the most thorny issues will be left for future meetings to determine.
Two weeks of talks in the Polish city best known for heavy industry and coal mining served to underscore the divisions between advanced nations including the U.S. and developing ones led by China on how to rein in greenhouse gases. The delegates Dec. 14 were struggling to reach common ground on issues from finance to measuring emissions cuts.
Wrong Direction
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Alden Meyer, who has been following UN climate politics for more than two decades at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. advocacy group. “A lot of people observe that this is a collective action problem -- everyone is responsible yet no one is accountable.”
One of the deepest divisions was over whether the envoys should “take note of” or “welcome” a report from the world’s top climate scientists showing the measures needed to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The U.S. joined with oil exporters including Saudi Arabia in resisting language that appeared to endorse the findings of the report.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions already have driven up the global temperature about 1 degree Celsius since the start of the industrial revolution, with scientists suggesting that current plans leave the planet on track to warm 3 degrees or more by the end of the century. That would mark the quickest shift in the climate since the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, and envoys at the talks expressed alarm that so little is being done.
Draft Circulating
Polish officials who are hosting the talks circulated a draft text outlining what the delegates may agree when the meeting concludes. Envoys worked through the night and were expecting to run past their scheduled finish time Dec. 14. The text calls for:
Developed countries to meet their longstanding promise to boost climate-related aid to $100 billion a year by 2020, “noting with concern the urgent and emerging needs” arising from more violent storms in recent years,Nations to submit final reports by 2024 assessing the progress they’re making on cutting emissions,A system for measuring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions in all nations,A “global stock-take” of overall progress on meeting the goals set out in the Paris Agreement, andDetails on how a Sustainable Development Mechanism might help expand the world’s network of cap-and-trade markets covering carbon emissions.
While the U.S. under then-President Barack Obama worked closely with China on the Paris Agreement, the two nations have diverged since then. President Donald Trump has pledged to scrap the accord and worked to boost use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. China stood with developing countries this week in demanding industrial nations make more progress meeting their pledge to boost climate-related aid to $100 billion a year by 2020.
China Fears Backsliding
“Some delegations we are seeing backsliding,” Xie Zhenhua, China’s lead envoy to the talks in Katowice, said at a Dec. 13 briefing. “There are still quite a number of developed countries who did not start” providing financial and technological support that they had pledged since 2009.
The Paris deal calls for countries to make voluntary cuts to their emissions. Katowice was to deliver a rulebook on accounting for those cuts -- and for the funds set to flow from rich nations to poorer ones to help them cope with the impacts of climate change.
Envoys have been working on that rulebook for months and have gotten bogged down in the detail. Richer nations wanted a more robust system of accounting, while poorer ones wanted any deal to recognize the wildly different capacity countries have in the measuring and reporting process.
Environmentalists and an increasing number of businesses were calling for as much detail as possible, giving them the guidance they need to make reductions in their own pollution and investment decisions.
“The text in its current form would not send a strong message to drastically increase emission cuts by 2020,” said Wendel Trio, director of the Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/climate-deal-emerging-shows-more-friction-between-us-and-china

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D.C. Circuit Poised To Hear Suit Over EPA's Tightening Of Ozone NAAQS

Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

By Stuart Parker

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is set to hear long-delayed oral argument Dec. 18 in consolidated litigation challenging the Obama EPA's decision to tighten the ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS), a revision that the agency's air chief has criticized but ultimately decided to uphold and defend in court.
Judge Thomas Griffith, a GOP appointee, and Judges Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins, both Democratic appointees, will hear the case, Murray Energy Corporation v. EPA. The suit combines arguments from industry and states opposing the decision to tighten the standard to 70 parts per billion (ppb) as too tough with legal arguments from other states and environmentalists both defending the standard and seeking to tighten it further.
The Obama EPA in October 2015 issued its rule strengthening the NAAQS from the prior level of 75 ppb set by the George W. Bush EPA in 2008. The Trump EPA under former Administrator Scott Pruitt considered launching a reconsideration of the decision, but ultimately decided not to change the standard. Instead, the agency is focusing on ensuring a quick Clean Air Act-mandated five-year review of the standard before deciding whether to revise it, slated for 2020.
The pending suit will revive familiar arguments from prior rounds of litigation over EPA NAAQS rules, where the courts have tended to grant EPA deference over its technical conclusions. To date, opponents of tougher regulations have not succeeded in scrapping a standard outright, but the D.C. Circuit has previously remanded NAAQS rules to EPA for failure to adequately explain, based on scientific data, why it has not tightened them.
Argument in the ozone NAAQS case was delayed pending the Trump EPA's decision on whether to reconsider the standard, but the agency subsequently decided to retain the 2015 rule and asked the court to schedule argument to defend the decision.
Environmentalists seeking an even-stricter limit than 70 ppb are likely to cite in court the fact that EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) -- an independent panel that advises the agency on NAAQS -- has twice unanimously recommended an ozone NAAQS in the range of 60 ppb to 70 ppb. The Clean Air Act requires EPA to set the standard sufficient to protect public health with an “adequate margin of safety.”
CASAC is currently working to assist EPA's review of the 2015 ozone standard, but panel members have warnedthat the tight 2020 timeline might be insufficient and could lead to an inadequate review.
Whatever the D.C. Circuit ultimately decides could have significant implications for the agency's upcoming proposed rulemaking for the 2020 review, in which it will say whether it wants to revise the NAAQS.
At oral argument next week, supporters of a tough ozone standard will query whether or not EPA has included a sufficient safety margin to protect vulnerable groups such as young children or asthmatics.
Meanwhile, industry opponents of the 2015 standard and states opposed to tougher limits will likely focus on whether “background” ozone renders the 70 ppb standard unachievable.
'Background' Ozone'
Background ozone is either naturally occurring or foreign in origin, and cannot be controlled by local regulators. In the mountain West, background ozone levels can sometimes come close to the level of the NAAQS, although the Obama EPA insisted that implementation tools such as its “exceptional events” rule allow states to exclude ozone formed beyond their control from demonstrations of compliance with the standard.
Under precedent set by the Supreme Court in its unanimous 2001 holding in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, EPA cannot consider problems of feasibility or implementation costs in setting “primary” NAAQS, which are intended to be purely health-based. Despite this, many critics argue that EPA should be allowed to take background ozone and other factors into account.
For example, in a Dec. 12 letter advising the court of “additional authorities” to support their case, industry opponents of the 2015 NAAQS, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cite several developments they say show the importance of background ozone.
The opponents cite EPA's 2016 revision of the exceptional events rule, “which recognized the difficulty posed by background ozone for attainment of the standard and made adjustments to the kinds of events that qualify as exceptional.” However, states defending EPA in the suit point to the revised exceptional events rule as working effectively, including for 2015 ozone NAAQS violations.
Industry groups further point to President Donald Trump's April 12 memo directing EPA to “act on demonstrations or petitions submitted under the Act’s provisions on exceptional events and international transport to provide relief to state/local agencies addressing background-related air emissions, and to evaluate whether EPA is fully complying with the Act’s requirement to obtain advice from” CASAC regarding background.
They also cite the subsequent May memo from former Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt “stating that, going forward, EPA will seek and give more attention to CASAC’s advice on the contribution of background concentrations and consider policy-relevant information that includes background levels.” EPA is actively considering how to factor background ozone into NAAQS-setting, the litigants state.
“These developments clearly recognize that the impact of background ozone levels on the attainability of the ozone NAAQS is an important aspect of the problem of setting and achieving the NAAQS. An agency rule is arbitrary and capricious if the agency fails to consider 'an important aspect of the problem.'
“That is what EPA did when setting the 2015 NAAQS by failing to adequately account for the impact of background levels on the standard’s attainability,” the industry groups say.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/dc-circuit-poised-hear-suit-over-epas-tightening-ozone-naaqs

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Scientific Study Reaffirms EPA's GHG Endangerment Finding

Dec 14, 2018 | Inside EPA

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science finds strong evidence to support EPA's 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, concluding that there is no reason for the agency to overturn its threshold legal determination that makes GHGs subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
The Dec. 13 study “Strengthened Scientific Support for the Endangerment Finding for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases,” assesses the scientific evidence that has emerged since EPA first issued its GHG risk finding. The researchers “find that this new evidence lends increased support to the conclusion that these gases pose a danger to public health and welfare.”
The study's abstract adds, “Newly available evidence about a wide range of observed and projected impacts strengthens the association between risk of some of these impacts and anthropogenic climate change; indicates that some impacts or combinations of impacts have the potential to be more severe than previously understood; and identifies substantial risk of additional impacts through processes and pathways not considered in the endangerment finding.”
The study comes as EPA is expected to soon finalize several rules to weaken Obama-era GHG limits for vehicles, power plants and oil and gas equipment.
EPA also recently sought comment on whether new power plants cause or contribute significantly to air pollution and must be regulated for their GHGs -- a key legal threshold. Long-time opponents of carbon controls have raised these claims to target GHG rules for the sector, but few expect EPA to ultimately advance this position.
Joe Goffman, who was a high-ranking Obama EPA official and now runs the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, told WBUR that the paper “stands in contrast to the arguments against the endangerment finding that have been offered again and again, because those arguments are rarely -- if ever -- based on science.”
Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center and a co-author of the study, added in the WBUR report that, “The science is going in one direction and the policies are going in exactly the opposite direction.”
To reach the study's conclusion that evidence of GHG's risk is growing, authors looked at factors including air quality, water quality, water resources, food production and sea level rise -- and found all of those show stronger evidence of impacts from GHGs. They also identified four new areas of concern: ocean acidification, violence, national security and economic well being, finding strong evidence that GHGs are having an impact there as well.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/scientific-study-reaffirms-epas-ghg-endangerment-finding

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Carbon Cutters Look Beyond the Power Sector in 2019

Dec 17, 2018 | E&E Climatewire

By Benjamin Storrow

Cities and states have trumpeted their climate ambitions ever since President Trump took office. Two years later, they have little to show for their efforts except bravado.
That could change in 2019. In recent weeks, city and state leaders have unveiled a bevy of legislative proposals aimed at curbing carbon emissions. The proposals are especially notable because they target sectors like transportation and buildings, which have previously eluded would-be carbon cutters.
In Washington state, Gov. Jay Inslee (D) is looking to flex enhanced Democratic legislative majorities in Olympia to pass a package of climate bills aimed at cutting emissions from transportation, buildings and the power sector.
Across the country in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker's (R) administration released a report recommending that the state establish a regional cap-and-trade system for transportation and require all automobile sales be electric by 2040.
And the New York City Council is debating a proposal to slash emissions from the Big Apple's largest buildings 40 percent by 2040.
"It's starting," said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a contributor to Baker's report on transportation. "Transportation is the biggest source of emissions [nationally], and that's beginning to be well-recognized."
Greens said the latest measures reflect the need to push beyond the power sector, which had previously drawn the majority of climate hawks' attention. Liberal states by and large have retired their coal plants and cut emissions from the sector in recent years. Yet those gains have frequently been offset or overtaken by rising pollution from tailpipes and buildings (Climatewire, April 17).
The new push follows a series of bitter setbacks for climate action advocates, who have previously championed carbon taxes as the chief means of reducing transportation and building emissions.
In Washington last year, a carbon tax failed in both the Legislature and at the ballot box. The Massachusetts Senate unanimously supported plans for a carbon fee, but the provision was ultimately stripped from a wider energy bill signed into law. Carbon tax proposals in other states haven't even gotten that far.
The proposals unveiled in recent weeks are more likely to succeed politically than the carbon tax measures. It's easier to rally support for cutting pollution for a specific sector, greens said. And they argue that the plans will be just as effective at cutting emissions.
"We are increasingly look to advance policies that are akin to carbon pricing, in that they are addressing problems economywide," said Reed Schuler, a climate adviser to Inslee. "We are tackling many sectors and not just the power sector."
Washington's carbon emissions increased 11 percent between 1990 and 2015, the most recent year for which state data are available, in large part because of rising transportation emissions and a building boom in the Seattle area. That has raised doubts about Washington's ability to meet a 2008 state law mandating a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2035.
Inslee's proposals are intended to make up the lost ground. One provision calls for a carbon-free power system by 2045. That would deliver a 5.9-million-ton emissions reduction. It also may be the easiest of his proposals to fulfill, given Washington's abundance of hydropower and the fact that the state's lone coal plant is already scheduled to shut down in 2025.
The governor's plan also calls for incentives to retrofit old buildings and enhance efficiency standards for new ones. The requirements are especially important given the rapid growth in and around Seattle, making buildings Washington's fastest-growing source of emissions.
And then there is a suite of policies aimed at transportation. One would require fuel providers to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels over time. Another provides a $1,000 sales tax exemption for electric vehicles. Still another proposes adopting California's ZEV program, which mandates that zero-emitting vehicles account for a rising percentage of auto sales each year.
Together, the legislation package is expected to cut emissions 16 million tons by 2035.
"This is a combination of smart, cost-effective sectoral policies that can be ramped up over time," Schuler said, adding that he does not see them as "second best" to a carbon tax.Buildings
In New York City, the bill that council members are debating would require retrofits for old buildings of 25,000 square feet or more.
Buildings account for 70 percent of New York's carbon emissions. Supporters say the measure would create jobs weatherizing buildings and swapping out inefficient heating systems, as well as lay down a marker for cities around the world for how to cut building emissions.
"What happens first in New York City historically gets exported to the rest of the country — whether it's food, music or fashion," said council member Costa Constantinides. "With the federal government's resignation to the fight against climate change, it is naturally up to the city of New York to lead that charge."
The proposal has generated some controversy. Greens and real estate interests are concerned about a loophole for buildings that house rent-controlled apartments, though for different reasons.
Some climate hawks worry that it would exempt roughly a third of the buildings that would otherwise fall under the law. Developers say the rules should be applied across the board.
Their critics point out that eliminating the exemption would enable landlords to pass along the cost of capital upgrades to rent-controlled tenants. There is talk of trying to protect low-income tenants, but that would require a change from state lawmakers in Albany.
Two mayors have tried and failed to establish revamped emissions standards for the world's most famous skyline. But advocates now believe they finally have enough support to pass more stringent guidelines. The bill has the support of Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Mayor Bill de Blasio.
"There is a lot of talk that we're going to achieve the Paris Agreement, but when you point at what's been done, it's stuff that produces some reduction here and there," said Pete Sikora, climate and inequality director at New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit that has championed the bill. "It's generally not at scale of the climate challenge. That's why this legislation is so important. It's an important worldwide marker."'We need specific action'
States and cities have made some progress on climate in recent years. New Jersey and Virginia are poised to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program covering the power sector in nine Northeastern states. RGGI agreed to a more stringent cap in 2017.
In Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper's (D) call for voluntary carbon reductions has been boosted by the state's largest power company's decision to close two large coal units and replace their power with renewables (Climatewire, Sept. 18). The Centennial State is also moving toward adopting California's fuel economy standard.
And California has forged ahead with its own ambitious climate goals. The state passed a bill calling for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045 this fall (Climatewire, Sept. 12). And on Friday, state regulators approved a new rule requiring public transit agencies to completely electrify their bus fleets by 2040.
While voters rejected Washington's carbon fee, the midterm elections also boosted climate hawks' hopes. Democrats' takeover of the New York State Senate has revived greens' hopes of finally passing major climate legislation, which has been stymied by Republican lawmakers in recent years.
A new wave of Democratic governors has also pledged action, with plans to boost renewable generation. But for the most part, those governors remain focused on the power sector. While that may produce considerable emissions reductions in Colorado, Illinois and New Mexico — states with significant coal fleets — power-sector efforts increasingly deliver diminishing returns in many blue states.
The dynamic was underlined in an energy plan Massachusetts released last week. The report, commissioned by Baker, found that a 50 percent increase in clean electricity would deliver a carbon reduction of 1 million tons by 2030. It recommended that the state pair increased renewable generation and energy efficiency measures with attempts to electrify the transportation and home heating sectors.
Transportation accounts for roughly 40 percent of Massachusetts' greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 20 percent from the power sector.
A second report released Friday by Baker's Commission on the Future of Transportation echoed that point. The study recommends measures to boost walking, biking and public transportation, as well as efforts to increase the build-out of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
But two recommendations were perhaps most notable. One advised that the commonwealth mandate that all new automobile sales be electric by 2040. Another suggested that the state join a regional cap-and-trade system for transportation modeled after RGGI, the power-sector program.
"The commission's report will help inform our administration as we look to future investments in the commonwealth's transportation system in a changing world and consider various factors such as regional transportation needs and inevitable advances in technology," Baker said in a statement.
The recommendation of a cap-and-trade program builds on comments Baker made in his re-election campaign and provides a major boost to climate action proponents, who have for years unsuccessfully argued for such a system to address transportation emissions. They contend that a regional program provides greater economic efficiencies while creating a revenue stream that can be used for investments in pollution reduction programs.
State Sen. Marc Pacheco, a Democrat and leading Bay State climate hawk, welcomed the governor's remarks and the report's findings, but said he was eager to hear how Baker intends to implement the recommendations.
"Everyone is in agreement with the broad goals, but aspirational goals don't achieve much," he said. "We need specific action that generates measurable progress."
Massachusetts climate action advocates roundly seconded that point. The state, they noted, has already passed strong climate legislation that should enable the governor to act on his own.
Kimmell, the Union of Concerned Scientists president, said he was optimistic that Baker is serious about moving ahead with a program for the transportation sector. He pointed to the makeup of the transportation commission, which was headed by former Baker chief of staff Steven Kadish and composed of environmentalists and industry representatives.
"My impression is the governor personally created this commission, put his ex-chief of staff in charge and was updated on its progress along the way," Kimmell said. "I think he very much intends to move forward, and this won't be another report that gathers dust on the shelf."
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/12/17/stories/1060109805

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Alaska Groups Sue EPA to Enforce Clean Air Laws in Fairbanks

Dec 14, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times)

Three Alaska groups sued Friday to demand the Environmental Protection Agency enforce the cleanup of some of the nation's most polluted winter air around the state's second-largest city.
The lawsuit filed in Seattle by environmental law firm Earthjustice says the state of Alaska has failed to submit a legally compliant plan to address the problem of particulate pollution caused by wood-burning stoves and other sources in the Fairbanks area. It urges the U.S. agency to set a deadline for a state cleanup plan and impose a federal proposal with stricter requirements if Alaska does not act within the timeframe.
"We've been waiting for over 10 years for action that results in cleaner air," Patrice Lee of Citizens for Clean Air, one of the groups suing, said in a statement.
Suzanne Skadowski, a spokeswoman for the EPA in Seattle, said she could not respond immediately to the lawsuit but that agency staff members have put a lot of time, effort and resources into helping the state and Fairbanks seek cleaner air.
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The agency designated the Fairbanks North Star Borough as out of compliance with federal air standards in November 2009. The borough has more violations than any other such area nationwide, according to the lawsuit.
A major source of fine particulate around Fairbanks is woodstoves, which many residents use to warm homes instead of more expensive fuel in a region that routinely sees winter temperatures dip to minus 40 degrees.
Fine particulate is a mix of solid particles and liquid droplets that can be inhaled deep in the lungs. It can cause premature death in people with heart and lung diseases. The young and the elderly are especially susceptible.
The pollution problem also is worsened by hills surrounding Fairbanks creating a bowl effect. Particulate can be trapped by inversions, layers of warmer air that cap cold, dirty air and keep it from dissipating.
State officials have pushed for a local solution, but limits on woodstoves are controversial. Fairbanks voters in October approved a measure prohibiting local officials from regulating how people heat their homes.
Citizens for Clean Air, Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the Sierra Club have previously sued three times to demand enforcement of deadlines under federal clean air laws.
The latest lawsuit asks a judge to compel the EPA to find that Alaska has failed to submit a serious plan to address the air in Fairbanks. Federal law required the agency to make such a finding by June 30, it says.
The finding would have started the clock on a two-year deadline for the state to submit an appropriate plan or for the EPA to prepare one. A federal plan carries the threat of sanctions and additional permit requirements for new pollution sources.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/14/us/ap-us-alaska-city-air-pollution.html

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