Preview Newsletter
AM ACC Clips Report - December 24, 2018
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EPA, Interior Snared in Shutdown With No Quick End in Sight
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Dean Scott
The EPA and Interior Department are ensnarled in a partial government shutdown that isn’t likely to be resolved until after Christmas, as House members and senators were told by leaders not to expect a vote on any compromise before Dec. 27. -
EPA Says It Can Remain Open For 'Limited Period' During Likely Shutdown
Dec 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Doug Obey
EPA has sufficient funds to weather a short government shutdown with relatively minimal disruption to its operations, according to a new contingency plan and assurances from acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent to agency staff. -
EPA Braces For Onslaught Of Lawsuits In 2019
Dec 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is confident that its prospects in federal court are about to change for the better when it comes to fights over regulatory rollbacks. -
Carper, Schumer Press Methylene Chloride Ban
Dec 24, 2018 | Inside EPA
Top Senate Democrats are urging acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to “immediately finalize” an Obama-era ban on the paint-stripper methylene chloride and renewing criticism of the Trump administration's implementation of the revised toxics law, highlighting issues likely to be raised during Wheeler's expected confirmation process. -
What Is Glitter?
Dec 21, 2018 | The New York Times
By Caity Weaver
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. -
Decision Imminent on GE’s Hudson River PCB Cleanup (1)
Dec 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Gerald B. Silverman
General Electric Co. is expected to get a long-awaited decision from the EPA within a few weeks on whether it’s off the hook for more cleanup costs related to contamination of the Hudson River from two of its plants. -
New York Again Threatens Suit If EPA Approves GE's Hudson Cleanup
Dec 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan
Top New York officials are urging EPA to require General Electric (GE) to continue cleaning up the Hudson River and threatening to sue the agency if it approves the cleanup conducted so far as complete after the state released a study showing the remediation the company has conducted failed to limit adverse effects of the contamination. -
EU Chemical Regulators Spell Out Future Assessment Priorities
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Hundreds of chemicals flagged for potential regulation will be getting the attention of European regulators, who must determine if they pose a risk to human health and the environment. -
Ohio EPA Issues Air Permit For Proposed Ethane Cracker Plant in Dilles Bottom
Dec 23, 2018 | Wheeling Intelligencer
By Jennifer Compston
A proposed ethane cracker plant is one step closer to becoming a reality after the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit for the project Friday. -
Shutdown Would Impact Chemical Plant Regulators, Investigators
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
Companies operating facilities handling high-risk chemicals will face an unsettled regulatory landscape in a partial government shutdown scenario. -
Worries About Worker Dangers Grow Amid US Oil and Gas Boom
Dec 23, 2018 | The Associated Press (In The New York Times)
By Joe Yerardi, Rachel Leven and Jamie Smith Hopkins
Parker Waldridge had worked in the Oklahoma oilfields since he was 16 and acquired the traits that make a good driller: fortitude, intellect and a healthy respect for the power of a runaway gas well. -
EPA Doesn’t Trust Its Own Methane Math, But Can’t Prove Why
Dec 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
he EPA is proposing to weaken Obama-era oil and gas methane controls that its own analysis shows are cost-effective—a disconnect that opponents say could legally doom the agency’s plans. -
Ted Lieu Starts Search For Climate Bill Co-Sponsors
Dec 21, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Nick Sobczyk
Rep. Ted Lieu is shopping for co-sponsors on a sweeping climate change bill as progressives continue to flex their muscles heading into the next Congress. -
Likely Chairwoman Defends House Climate Panel From Critics
Dec 24, 2018 | PoliticoPro
By Timothy Cama
House Democratic leaders have picked Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) to chair a special panel on climate change, which is already facing criticism from progressives over its goals and powers.
Congressional Hearings - There are no hearings to report at this time.
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LCSA News - There are no clips to report at this time.
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Transportation and Infrastructure News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
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EPA, Interior Snared in Shutdown With No Quick End in Sight
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Dean Scott
Trump, House and Senate need deal on new Continuing Resolution to end shutdown of EPA, Interior Department
House members, senators told not to expect vote until Dec. 27
The EPA and Interior Department are ensnarled in a partial government shutdown that isn’t likely to be resolved until after Christmas, as House members and senators were told by leaders not to expect a vote on any compromise before Dec. 27.
Both Interior and the EPA were among the departments and agencies ensnarled in a partial government shutdown that began midnight Dec. 21.
It was a partial lapse in government operations because only those agencies lacking a full-year spending bill—EPA and Interior, but also the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, and the Commerce, Justice, and Agriculture departments—were impacted.
The standoff between President Donald Trump, who has insisted that any funding extension include $5 billion for a border wall, and congressional Democrats, who firmly oppose that spending, is expected to continue at least into next week.
EPA Funded At Least One WeekThe EPA expects to continue its normal activities through Dec. 28 because the agency has carryover funds sufficient for ongoing operations up to that point, Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an email to agency employees Dec. 20.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Republican leaders informed senators and House members not to expect a floor vote on any compromise until Dec. 27. Republicans have “pushed the pause button until the president, from whom we will need a signature, and Senate Democrats, from whom we will need votes, reach agreement,” McConnell said in floor remarks Dec. 22.
Last week the House approved a funding extension until Feb. 8—including the border wall funding, but the Senate-passed measure did not. A compromise would require either President Trump to drop the demand for wall funding, or Senate Democrats to agree to fund it. Neither side appears ready to give ground.
Together, the agencies and departments impacted by the funding lapse represent about one-quarter of annual federal spending. Lawmakers have already funded roughly 75 percent of the federal government, including the Defense Department, through Sept. 30, 2019, the end of the current fiscal year.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-interior-snared-in-shutdown-with-no-quick-end-in-sight
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EPA Says It Can Remain Open For 'Limited Period' During Likely Shutdown
Dec 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Doug Obey
EPA has sufficient funds to weather a short government shutdown with relatively minimal disruption to its operations, according to a new contingency plan and assurances from acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent to agency staff.
The agency's planning comes amid President Donald Trump and Congress hurtling toward a likely midnight partial government shutdown, after Trump balked at a stopgap spending bill for the remainder of fiscal year 2019 for EPA and several other agencies because it did not include his controversial border wall funding request.
At press time, the Senate had rebuffed a House measure with the wall funds, approved in the waning days of GOP control of that chamber, a step that likely will cause FY19 funding to lapse, potentially until the new Congress begins Jan. 3.
The path to resolving such a shutdown is not clear, setting up the question of whether a shutdown will drag on long enough to exhaust EPA's reserves.
The Dec. 17 contingency plan specifies that 13,705 EPA staff -- out of 13,972 total permanent and temporary EPA employees -- are to be “retained,” despite an initial shutdown, based upon several factors. Specifically, it states that for these staff there are either sufficient “carryover of unexpired multiple and no-year appropriations, and/or their compensation is financed by a resource other than annual appropriations.”
In line with this language, Wheeler in a Dec. 20 note to agency staff says the agency has “sufficient carryover funds” to stay open the week of Dec. 24, even if a formal shutdown occurs. “We have . . . determined that EPA has sufficient carryover to operate for a limited period of time,” Wheeler says, telling staff to follow their planned schedule including holidays on Dec. 24 and Dec. 25.
But Wheeler also indicates that if a shutdown were to remain in place through Dec. 28, “we will provide further updates on the agency's operating status.”
Wheeler adds: “Thank you for your hard work, dedication, and patience through this process, and for all that you do for the EPA and the American people.”
The looming shutdown is in play with the current Congress nearly expired, and Democrats are poised to take control of the House.
That means one of the first acts of the new Democratic House could be to pass a measure to reopen the government -- without the border wall funding and with support of Senate Democrats -- setting up a situation where Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate would be under pressure to approve it or take the blame for a continued shutdown.
Trump has said he would be “proud” to shut down the government over his wall funding demands, relaying that message in a high-profile meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don't want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I'm not going to blame you for it,” Trump said during the Dec. 11 meeting. “The last time you shut it down, it didn't work. I will take the mantle of shutting down.”
Subsequently, the White House signaled that Trump might support a stopgap funding bill without the wall money, with Press Secretary Sarah Sanders saying Dec. 18, “At the end of the day we don't want to shut down the government, we want to shut down the border.”
Amid an outcry from some immigration hard-liners, however, Trump shifted positions again, saying he would not approve the Senate's bill to extend funding to Feb. 8.
Trump pledged Dec. 21 any shutdown would be in place for a “very long time,” and tried to argue it would be Senate Democrats' fault.
Wasted Resources, Productivity
The prospect of a near-certain shutdown -- even with some EPA reserve funds -- is already prompting a new wave of criticism that such budget brinksmanship degrades government services, even if a shutdown is ultimately short.
“Even a shutdown for a small amount of time can set administrative and organizational productivity back for weeks, preventing the public from accessing important information and delaying lifesaving activities at” EPA, the Environmental Defense Fund says in a Dec. 20 statement.
“For example, the EPA would be forced to pause hazardous waste cleanups, regulatory inspections and approvals. Without these critical services, the true victim of a government shutdown is the American public. Moving the funding bill forward is necessary to our nationwide fight against threats to our health and environment."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) similarly noted that, “This would be the third government shutdown in two years since President Trump assumed office.”
UCS added that “Shutdowns, which waste American resources and taxpayer dollars, have grave consequences for science and research, public health, public lands and species protections.” They include: stopping enforcement activities, scuttling the ability of the public near Superfund sites to get queries answered, and possibly causing agency scientists to miss research opportunities, with a “real impact on the agency's science based work.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-says-it-can-remain-open-limited-period-during-likely-shutdown
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EPA Braces For Onslaught Of Lawsuits In 2019
Dec 23, 2018 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is confident that its prospects in federal court are about to change for the better when it comes to fights over regulatory rollbacks.
Federal judges have frequently blocked the EPA’s attempts to implement President Trump’s aggressive deregulatory agenda by delaying or changing major environmental rules.
In the coming year, the EPA is expected to get sued over a slate of finalized repeals or rollbacks, mostly pertaining to Obama-era policies.
“On procedural grounds, we have lost a number of the last year-and-a-half,” acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler told The Hill in an interview this month. “And our goal is not to lose them going forward.”
Trump’s opponents, however, don’t see an end to their winning streak. Environmentalists and Democrats argue that the EPA is not living up to its statutory obligations, and they say federal courts are inclined to agree.
“We’re really alarmed by the climate and public health implications of all of those actions, and we see them as contrary to EPA’s mandate under the Clean Air Act, and in many cases, the record EPA has gathered in the past in supporting these standards,” said Tomás Carbonell, lead attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, which has successfully sued Trump over previous rollbacks.
The first major round of litigation at the EPA next year is likely to start in late March. That’s when Wheeler hopes to release a final version of the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule, the joint effort with the Department of Transportation to roll back fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas rules for cars made through 2026.
As proposed, the rollback would freeze standards in 2021, canceling out the plans to make them more stringent going forward.
The plan rests largely on the Trump administration’s argument that it would save 1,000 lives per year to stop the Obama administration’s standards — an estimate opponents say is critically flawed.
“A lot of the people who are criticizing the 1,000 lives saved are some of the people that think we should only be looking at energy efficiency and not lives saved or safety factors,” Wheeler said.
It’s a near certainty that once the forthcoming rules are finalized — a step expected next year for many of the most consequential rollbacks — environmentalists and Democratic state attorneys general will take legal action.
That case and other EPA-related lawsuits could even make their way up to the Supreme Court, where two new Trump-nominated judges will help decide their fate.
The EPA has been dealt court losses, either in full decisions or in smaller orders, for various actions and inaction: deciding not to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos; delaying its designation of which areas don’t comply with ozone pollution standards; postponing implementation of an Obama-era chemical plant safety rule; attempting to avoid enforcing pollution standards on certain heavy trucks; and delaying the Obama administration’s methane pollution rules for oil and natural gas drillers.
Wheeler said that writing legally defensible regulations has been an emphasis of his since he took over the agency following Scott Pruitt’s resignation in July.
“That has been the overarching message that I’ve given to all of our political [appointees] here, is that I want to put forward regulations that will be upheld by the courts,” Wheeler said.
But Wheeler’s confidence also stems from the fact that the upcoming battles will be about the merits of the regulatory rollbacks, like the agency’s weaker replacement for the Clean Power Plan, its attempt to stop automobile emissions rules from getting more stringent and and redefinition of which waterways are subject to federal jurisdiction.
That’s in contrast to the procedural problems the EPA had before, which courts said the agency didn’t follow the right processes.
“A lot of those were procedural and they were regulatory actions to delay Obama regulations,” Wheeler said. “As we’re moving forward, we’re replacing those. I certainly hope and expect that those replacements will go through.”
Thomas Lorenzen, an attorney at Crowell & Moring LLP and a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s environment division, said the EPA could fare better going forward.
“You would think the procedural issues would be the easier ones, and the substantive issues would be harder ones for EPA to nail. But it turns out that’s exactly the opposite in this realm,” said Lorenzen, who has represented some of the companies and industry groups who support the rollbacks.
When it comes to the EPA’s final regulations, “they do have the deck stacked slightly more in their favor,” he said. “The standards of review tend to be deferential to executive authority.”
Lorenzen expects judges reviewing lawsuits against the EPA’s final rules to stick to judicial precedent that defers to agencies in areas of their expertise, like science or how far rules must go to protect public health.
“They are the experts on environmental protection, and the courts are not expected to second guess them unless there really is no substantial evidence that supports the agency’s view,” Lorenzen said.
But the groups likely to sue the EPA say the agency has crossed that threshold, and that judges will overturn those changes.
Many of those lawsuits will come from Democratic attorneys general like California’s Xavier Becerra and Brian Frosh of Maryland.
“AGs are really uniquely situated to stop these rollbacks, because it’s their job to look out for the legal interests of all citizens in their states,” said David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, a project housed in New York University and funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“They come to litigation with a real credibility and responsibility to look out for the public welfare of their citizens,” he added.
Hayes, who served as deputy secretary of the Interior Department during the Obama administration, predicted that the state attorneys general suing Trump will keep racking up victories.
“The rationale cited in these rulemakings really opens them up to challenges, and to me, likely successful challenges,” he said.
“In a number of cases, the agency is openly admitting that it’s focused almost entirely on the cost to industry for compliance,” he said, arguing that the EPA isn’t properly accounting for the environmental and health benefits being lost when a rule is weakened.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/422394-epa-braces-for-onslaught-of-new-lawsuits-in-2019
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Carper, Schumer Press Methylene Chloride Ban
Dec 24, 2018 | Inside EPA
Top Senate Democrats are urging acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to “immediately finalize” an Obama-era ban on the paint-stripper methylene chloride and renewing criticism of the Trump administration's implementation of the revised toxics law, highlighting issues likely to be raised during Wheeler's expected confirmation process.
In a Dec. 17 letter, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), the ranking Democrat on the Senate environment committee, urge Wheeler to finalize the Obama administration's January 2017 proposed ban on methylene chloride that former Administrator Scott Pruitt shelved but later told families of workers killed while working with the substance he would finalize.
“Methylene chloride has killed dozens of people even when they were wearing protective gear and following recommended safety precautions,” the senators say in the letter that calls for EPA to finalize the ban.
The senators also reiterate criticism that Carper, along with several other Senate environment panel Democrats, including Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Ed Markey (MA) lodged in a July letter to Wheeler that the Trump administration's implementation of the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has fallen short of the law's mandates.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/carper-schumer-press-methylene-chloride-ban
“We are extremely troubled by the manner in which the new TSCA law, which was enacted with a near-unanimous vote and with the support of a wide range of stakeholders, has been implemented by the Trump Administration thus far,” Carper and Schumer say.
“Any further delay in finalizing this ban could jeopardize human health and the environment and undermine the efficacy of the bipartisan law passed by the Congress.”
The Obama EPA in January 2017 proposed the rule under TSCA section 6(a) authority, little used since EPA's attempt to ban most uses of asbestos in the 1980s. That rule was struck down by a federal court decision in 1991 in a decision that effectively shut down EPA's regulatory program of existing chemicals and prompted critics of TSCA to seek reform of the statute, eventually enacted in June 2016.
In December 2017, the Trump administration formalized indications that it would delay the ban and similar proposed rules on two other industrial chemicals. But in May Pruitt reversed course on shelving the MC ban after meeting with mothers of workers who died from exposure when using the substance as a paint stripper.
Despite Pruitt's reversal, EPA has not finalized the ban, nor sent a draft final rule for White House review.
Meanwhile, groups, including Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and the Natural Resources Defense Council this fall have lodged notices of intent to sue EPA over the agency's failure to finalize the ban, and numerous retailers are refusing to sell paint strippers containing the substance.
“It is shocking to think that a chemical and product that has made people really sick, even caused deaths, is available for sale in everyday stores and online while the federal government sits back and presses pause on a plan to remove it from the marketplace,” Schumer says in a statement announcing the letter.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/carper-schumer-press-methylene-chloride-ban
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Dec 21, 2018 | The New York Times
By Caity Weaver
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.
Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In homes and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and every kind of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It is glitter.
What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.
Ah, but if you, like an impertinent child seeking a logistical timetable of Santa Claus’ nocturnal intercontinental journey, demand a more detailed definition — a word of warning: The path to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, C.I.A. levels of obfuscation, the invisible regions of the visible spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as “10-6 m” and also New Jersey.
Humans, even humans who don’t like glitter, like glitter. We are drawn to shiny things in the same wild way our ancestors were overcome by a compulsion to forage for honey. A theory that has found favor among research psychologists (supported, in part, by a study that monitored babies’ enthusiasm for licking plates with glossy finishes) is that our attraction to sparkle is derived from an innate need to seek out fresh water.
Glitter as a touchable product — or more correctly, an assemblage of touchable products (“glitter” is a mass noun; specifically, it is a granular aggregate, like “rice”) — is an invention so recent it’s barely defined. The Oxford English Dictionary principally concerns itself with explaining glitter as an intangible type of sparkly light. Until the invention in the 20th century of the modern craft substance, one could either observe something’s glitter (the glitter of glass), or hold something that glittered(like, say, ground up glass). Tinsel, which has existed for centuries, does not become glitter when cut into small pieces. It becomes “bits of tinsel.” The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we are familiar with today are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey in the 1930s, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extremely small pieces. (Curiously, he did not begin filing patents for machines that cut foil into what he called “slivers” until 1961.) The specific events that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, all of a sudden, it was simply everywhere.
A December 1942 article in The Times — possibly the first mention in this newspaper of the stuff — advised New York City residents that pitchers of evergreen boughs, placed in their windows for the winter holidays, would offer “additional scintillation” if “sprinkled with dime-store ‘glitter’ or mica.” The pitchers were to replace Christmas candles, which the wartime Army had banned after sunset — along with neon signs in Times Square and the light from the Statue of Liberty’s torch — after determining that the nighttime glow threw offshore Allied vessels into silhouette, transforming them into floating U-boat targets.
Most of the glitter that adorns America’s name brand products is made in one of two places: The first is in New Jersey, but the second, however, is also in New Jersey. The first, the rumored farm site of glitter’s invention, refused to answer any of my questions. “We are a very private company,” a representative said via email. The second is Glitterex.
Glitterex was founded in 1963. Babu Shetty, 69, joined the company as president and C.E.O. in 1999, though he had been working to develop some of its glitter products since the 1970s, when he came to the U.S. from Mumbai to earn an advanced degree. His Ph.D. is in polymer science and engineering. He jokes that he fell into the plastic business because it was recommended to Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate.”
He also did not want me to visit his glitter factory. The jovial Mr. Shetty told me over the phone that people have no idea of the scientific knowledge required to produce glitter, that Glitterex’s glitter-making technology is some of the most advanced in the world, that people don’t believe how complicated it is, that he would not allow me to see glitter being made, that he would not allow me to hear glitter being made, that I could not even be in the same wing of the building as the room in which glitter was being made under any circumstance, that even Glitterex’s clients are not permitted to see their glitter being made, that he would not reveal the identities of Glitterex’s clients (which include some of the largest multinational corporations in the world; eventually, one did consent to be named: thank you, Revlon, Inc.), and that, fine, I was welcome to come down to Glitterex headquarters to learn more about what I could not learn about in person.
The glitter factory is located in a beige business park, a short walk from the office of a company that makes sidewalks for airports and a nut plant. Inside the Glitterex vestibule, a glass display case burst with glitter-suffused products that I agreed to not describe, even vaguely. Aside from the display, there were scant other hints of the building’s glorious purpose.
That is, until one entered the bottling warehouse itself, which looked like an industrial manufacturing plant colonized by pixies. The concrete floor was finely coated with what appeared to be crushed moonbeams. The forklift winked with shiny crimson flecks. The metal coils of the conveyor belt shone with a rainbow crust. And yet, the space gave the impression of being tidy and well-swept, not unlike a Dust Bowl kitchen if the prairie topsoil had been Technicolor. Near the entrance, metal shelves taller than a man were laden with over one thousand jumbo jars of glitter samples arranged by formulation, color, and size: emerald hearts, pewter diamonds, and what appeared to be samples of the night sky collected from over the Atlantic Ocean. There were neon sparkles so pink you have only seen them in dreams, and rainbow hues that were simultaneously lilac and mint and all the colors of a fire. On one shelf, hundreds of jars of iridescent white fairly glowed. The prettiest shade was slightly violet.
My guides through the glitter kingdom were Lauren Dyer, a Glitterex manager, and Jeet Shetty, who works alongside his father. The biggest seller, they told me, is always silver. They unscrewed several jars so I could compare different silvers side-by-side: sparkly silver and silver that flashed with the power of a thousand suns.
I met the elder Mr. Shetty in a conference room in the front of the office, where, beneath a glittering silhouette-style wall hanging of the pre-9/11 New York City skyline, he breezed through several advanced textbooks’ worth of chemical engineering in an attempt to tell me what glitter was.
“This polyester film” he began, picking up a strip of clear material, about five inches wide, “people might know as mylar. It’s the same polymer as used in a water bottle, so F.D.A.-approved. If you cut this you’d get a clear glitter.” The bulk of Glitterex glitter is made from plastic, though some varieties come from other sources, like aluminum. Clear glitter looks like tiny pieces of a dead jellyfish. “Then,” he said, “we go into the next iteration of a substrate, where the clear film is metalized.” He picked up a shining silver strip of material. “Potato chips bags start with the same polyester film; it’s metalized with aluminum.”
Metalization, he explained, is the process by which aluminum is deposited on both sides of the film. This made sense in theory, but how could aluminum go from being not on the film to being on the film without at least some Scotch tape? “They evaporate aluminum and deposit it on it,” said Mr. Shetty. This made sense in theory, but how could aluminum be evaporated? “It’s a very, very thin layer. They put it in a vacuum chamber, then evaporate the aluminum,” said Mr. Shetty. “With heat,” his son added. “What are they evaporating out of it?” I asked. “Aluminum,” said Mr. Shetty.
I have no idea how humans figured out how to do that, or why it occurred to them to even try, but it sounds expensive.
The primary functions of glitter are, of course, aesthetic; glitter exists so that glitter can be put on things that do not have glitter on them: Popsicle sticks, stuffed animals’ irises; Newt Gingrich. In 2011, the then-presidential candidate was the first prominent target of a “glitter bomb” protest when a 24-year-old activist named Nick Espinosa doused him with rainbow sparkles at a book signing event. It was not Mr. Espinosa’s first time employing mass quantities to make a point; a year prior he had dumped 2,000 pennies in front of a Republican gubernatorial candidate to protest the lowering of Minnesota’s minimum wage. It may also not have been, strictly speaking, a true glitter-bombing — news outlets at the time ran a photo of Mr. Espinosa holding up a bag of shiny party confetti — but the concept stuck.
There are a couple ways to achieve a rainbow effect on individual glitter particles, so useful for politics. Holographic glitter is made by embossing a fine pattern onto film, so that the surface reflects different colors of light in different directions — there is nothing intrinsically rainbow-colored about the glitter itself. Contrast this with more subtle iridescent glitter, which reveals various luminous colors depending on the angle at which it is viewed, and is made from a multilayered clear film, composed of polymers with different refractive indexes.
How many layers is multi?
“Two hundred and thirty three,” said Mr. Shetty, and grinned as he waved an almost invisible sheet of plastic. “It gets very technical,” he warned. “You know, the visible spectrum, and all.”
I nodded, indicating I followed.
“Each layer is half the wavelength of light,” he said.
“WHAT?” I wailed.・．✩・。
If you want to make something a cool color, it is almost always imperative that the color you select is one that human brains can process. The colors of the visible spectrum, arranged in order from longest to shortest wavelength, are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. How do we perceive them? Something about cones in our eyeballs. What do the cones detect? Light waves in lengths between about 400 and 700 nanometers. How long is a nanometer? The width of a human hair is the size of about 80,000 to 100,000 of them. What is the perfect thing to say to shatter my fragile sanity? “Each layer is over 230 nanometers,” said Mr. Shetty.
Because red has the longest wavelength, the layers of red iridescent film are the thickest; violet iridescent layers are the thinnest. Mr. Shetty began tilting the clear film backward. “That’s the red,” he said, as it flashed red. He continued tilting. “At some point it’ll go to green,” he said, just as the film flashed green, then blue, then violet. He picked up another clear sheet and began to tilt it. This one skipped red and green, starting with a blue flash and then moving to violet, before appearing clear again. “What happens below violet is UV,” he said. “You don’t see it.”
“So an animal would see something there that I can’t see?” I asked.
“If it can see in the ultraviolet range, yes,” he said.
The difference in thickness of the iridescent film strips was imperceptible by touch.
There are other more obvious size differences, of course. Craft glitter is the thickest and least technologically advanced. (To remove it, Mr. Shetty recommends soap and water or fabric softener sheets, to combat the plastic’s static cling.) The finest cosmetic glitter is used in products designed for lips.
It’s impossible to recreate the light-catching effect of glitter without using tiny particles of something, which means that if an object looks glittery upon close inspection (a credit card design; an N.F.L. helmet; a jet ski paint job), there are good odds that it contains glitter. Researchers and zookeepers sometimes mix glitter with animal feed to track animals (polar bears; elephants; domestic cats) via sparkly feces. Plywood manufacturers insert hidden layers of colored glitter in their products to prevent counterfeiting. Because glitter is difficult to remove completely from an area into which it has been introduced, and because individual varieties can be distinguished under a microscope, it can serve as useful crime scene evidence; years ago the F.B.I. contacted Glitterex to catalog samples of its products. The average American, said Mr. Shetty, sees glitter every day. Most of it is hexagonal.
The tiniest glitter Glitterex makes is 50 by 75 microns (a micron is one thousandth of a millimeter). The minimum order size the company will fill is enough to supply sparkle to “half a million bottles” of nail polish by Mr. Shetty’s estimation (10 pounds). Prices vary depending on particle size, the formulations and combinations of polymers involved, but at the upper end — which is to say: the smaller end — a 10-pound plastic bag of glitter costs about $1,000. The company offers over 10,000 varieties.
This was all very forthright, but it did not explain the air of oppressive secrecy that seems to permeate the glitter industry. Did Glitterex worry I would describe its equipment so accurately that readers might construct their own machines to manufacture their own glitter in bulk quantities? Mr. Shetty said that, trade secrets aside, confidentiality is a top-down requirement from clients. Companies do not want others in their industry to know what glitters are in their products, to prevent competitors from making identical formulations.
When I asked Ms. Dyer if she could tell me which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market, her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.”
I was taken aback. “But you know what it is?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said, and laughed. “And you would never guess it. Let’s just leave it at that.” I asked if she could tell me why she couldn’t tell me. “Because they don’t want anyone to know that it’s glitter.”
“If I looked at it, I wouldn’t know it was glitter?”
“No, not really.”
“Would I be able to see the glitter?”
“Oh, you’d be able to see something. But it’s — yeah, I can’t.”
I asked if she would tell me off the record. She would not. I asked if she would tell me off the record after this piece was published. She would not. I told her I couldn’t die without knowing. She guided me to the automotive grade pigments..｡*ﾟ
For people who love glitter, there is wonderful news: all the modern plastic glitter that has ever been created is still right here with us. According to Dr. Victoria Miller, a materials science and engineering professor at North Carolina State University, the plastic film from which most glitter is made takes about 1,000 years to completely biodegrade on Earth.
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Because each particle is less than five millimeters long, plastic glitter falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s definition of microplastic — a category of material that has lately become a focus of environmental advocacy. (In 2015, for instance, President Obama signed an act banning plastic microbeads from rinse-off cosmetics.) While the research is conclusive that the world’s oceans are a cold stew of man-made microplastics, the effect of their presence is not fully understood. NOAA’s “Ocean Facts” webpage warns that these particles pose “a potential threat to aquatic life,” but states that “not a lot is known about microplastics and their impacts yet.” A more fundamental problem, said Dr. Miller, is that, like all plastics, “glitter is a petroleum product. It comes directly from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are a very finite resource and we’re using them to make completely disposable things.” (There are natural sources of glittery effects, too, like mica, a substance used in many cosmetics. It is mainly harvested from India, frequently in illegal mines, by children.)
In short, Dr. Miller was adamant that glitter is “not good” for the environment, but she did not advocate a ban. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry,” she said.*:･ﾟ★
So: what is glitter?
A manipulation of humans’ inherent desire for fresh water. An intangible light effect made physical. Mostly plastic, and often from New Jersey. Disposable by design but, it turns out, not literally disposable. A way to make long winter nights slightly brighter, despite the offshore presence of Germans. An object in which the inside of a potato chip bag meets the aurora borealis.
I asked Jeet and Babu to answer the question.
“I would say they’re small decorative particles,” said Jeet. “But that’s not really correct because there are other small decorative particles.”
His father’s answer was simpler: “Since we’re a glitter manufacturer, anything we do is now called ‘glitter.’”
So that’s what it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html
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Decision Imminent on GE’s Hudson River PCB Cleanup (1)
Dec 21, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Gerald B. Silverman
GE expected to hear from EPA in weeks
Company could be off the hook for additional cleanup costs
General Electric Co. is expected to get a long-awaited decision from the EPA within a few weeks on whether it’s off the hook for more cleanup costs related to contamination of the Hudson River from two of its plants.
Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2 office in New York City are expected to grant the company a certificate of completion for the decades-long project, Ned Sullivan, president of the environmental group Scenic Hudson, told Bloomberg Environment.
He’s hoping that EPA officials at headquarters will overrule the region and declare that the project to remove polychlorinated biphenyls is incomplete.
Millions of dollars in potential additional cleanup costs for GE are at stake, as well as the future health of the river. GE has already spent almost $2 billion to clean up PCBs in the river.
PCBs in River SedimentGE is a responsible party for the cleanup under the federal Superfund law because it discharged PCBs into the river from 1947 to 1977 from two electric capacitor plants located in Hudson Falls, N.Y., and Fort Edward, N.Y.
PCBs were used in electric transformers and other equipment to prevent fires.
GE didn’t respond to a Bloomberg Environment request for comment.
New York State has pledged to sue the EPA if it grants the certificate of completion. The state, backed by Scenic Hudson and other environmental groups, contends that the cleanup is not done. They point to studies indicating that significant concentrations of PCBs remain in the river and say the goals of the project have not been reached.
“The health of the Hudson River estuary and the vitality of the communities along its banks are at stake and the EPA must not let GE off the hook for a job that is not done,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said in a Dec. 20 statement.
294-Page Study“The latest sampling data confirms the overwhelming body of evidence that PCB levels remain unacceptably high in both the riverbed and in fish,” he said, releasing a 294-page study of the upper stretch of the river by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
“If the EPA issues the certificate of completion for this cleanup, New York will take any action necessary to hold them accountable and demand they fulfill their obligation to restore our treasured river,” Cuomo said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have also concluded that significant amounts of the chemical remain in the river.
The EPA hasn’t yet made a decision on GE’s request for certification that the work has been completed or the five-year review, Sophia Rini, an agency spokeswoman, told Bloomberg Environment in an email Dec. 21.
“Our timeline is focused on ensuring that we have done a thorough and comprehensive analysis of all available information,” she said. “Our decision will come after we consider the results of exhaustive consultation and collaboration” with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/decision-imminent-on-ges-hudson-river-pcb-cleanup-1
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New York Again Threatens Suit If EPA Approves GE's Hudson Cleanup
Dec 21, 2018 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan
Top New York officials are urging EPA to require General Electric (GE) to continue cleaning up the Hudson River and threatening to sue the agency if it approves the cleanup conducted so far as complete after the state released a study showing the remediation the company has conducted failed to limit adverse effects of the contamination.
“The latest sampling data confirms the overwhelming body of evidence that PCB levels remain unacceptably high in both the riverbed and in fish,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said in a Dec. 20 statement.
Together with the state's top environment official, Cuomo said that if EPA fails to follow the state's advice, then New York will take legal action requiring GE to fulfill its cleanup obligations at the Hudson River polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) Superfund Site.
“If the EPA issues the Certificate of Completion for this cleanup, New York will take any action necessary to hold them accountable and demand they fulfill their obligation to restore our treasured river,” Cuomo said.
The comments come as the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Dec. 20 released a final data summary report examining 2017 sampling data of sediment and fish to fully assess contamination left after six years of GE's dredging the river to meet goals in an EPA 2002 record of decision (ROD), according to the state.
The sampling results confirm that elevated PCB levels remain in surface sediment in the river, and “in many areas, the average PCB concentrations exceed the 1 part per million cleanup level typically used by DEC for sediment cleanup projects,” the release says.
Overall, average PCB concentrations in sediment differed significantly among various reaches of the river, signaling certain areas of the upper Hudson still have PCB contaminated sediment.
The DEC also evaluated nearly 230 fish samples and fish data collected by EPA and GE, determining that fish recovery from PCB contamination is not recovering at the rate EPA expected. “The average fish PCB concentrations in the upper Hudson in the two years after dredging are essentially the same as concentrations prior to the start of the cleanup,” the release says.
The state says EPA should direct GE to collect additional data to determine how much more sediment cleanup work is needed to reach the ROD's cleanup objectives, the release says. “EPA must also refine its understanding of the relationship between the remaining PCBs in upper Hudson sediments and the fish PCB concentrations in the upper Hudson to determine where and how much further sediment cleanup should be required of GE,” it says.
Regarding the lower Hudson, the DEC says EPA should require GE to pay for a full investigation of that part of the river or EPA should fund the work.
Five-Year Review
At issue is whether EPA will finalize a draft five-year review finding that cleanup of the site is working as intended, although "not yet protective," and will grant GE's request to issue a certificate of completion for the dredging remedy. GE, the sole potentially responsible party at the site, completed a six-year, $1.7 billion sediment cleanup in 2015.
Last year, New York state officials first threatened to sue EPA if it certified the cleanup as complete and as environmentalists and others urged EPA to use the five-year review as an opportunity to strengthen the cleanup requirements for the site.
As a result, EPA in January 2018 signaled it was taking a step back and would collaborate with New York in evaluating the sediment samples taken by the state in the Upper Hudson River, before making decisions on the certification. But EPA has yet to announce a decision.
GE spokesman Mark Behan suggested to the Associated Press that the company continues to believe the cleanup is adequate and should be approved.
He said that the company had analyzed the state’s data and found 99.8 percent of samples showed PCB concentrations below the EPA’s threshold for requiring dredging. He said PCB levels are down 96 percent in sediment samples, as much as 78 percent in water samples and 58 percent in fish species that people might consume, the Associated Press reported.
“The data show conclusively that the Hudson River dredging project is working as the EPA and New York state predicted,” Behan said, according to the article.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/new-york-again-threatens-suit-if-epa-approves-ges-hudson-cleanup
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EU Chemical Regulators Spell Out Future Assessment Priorities
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Adam Allington
Watchdog group says agency taking too long with evaluations
Industry supports the agency’s plan to group similar substances
Hundreds of chemicals flagged for potential regulation will be getting the attention of European regulators, who must determine if they pose a risk to human health and the environment.
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) released its five-year strategic plan last week that focuses largely on identifying these “substances of concern,” a list of about 750 chemicals that have certain hazardous characteristics.
For example, the agency will look at compounds called co-formulants, which are used in biocidal products such as pesticides or surface cleaners. According to the agency, these substances have properties that still need to be identified and processed for potential regulatory action.
“Over the next five years, we will accelerate our implementation work,” Bjorn Hansen, ECHA’s executive director, said in a statement to Bloomberg Environment.
That work includes the compliance of REACH registration dossiers under the European Union’s comprehensive chemicals-evaluation law, Hansen said.
Dossiers are extensive files of documentation that must include information on substance identity and properties, guidance on safe use and proposals for testing if existing substance safety information is lacking.
“We will also work on better supporting the use of safety data in the supply chains and in integrating our work with other EU legislation and with the EU’s international chemicals agenda,” he said. “We have also reorganized the agency to better carry out this work.”
Groups of ChemicalsThe chemicals agency aims to have addressed all REACH (regulation No. 1907/2006 on the registration, evaluation, and authorization of chemicals) substances of concern in quantities above 10 tons by 2030, its strategic plan said.
To achieve this goal, the agency says it will prioritize groups of substances under different legal frameworks while also speeding up regulatory decision-making.
In the past, environmental and public health advocates have questioned ECHA’s ability identify all substances of concern quickly enough.
The chemical watchdog group ChemSec sent a letter to ECHA Aug. 24, saying its chemicals evaluations have been “far too slow” and unlikely to improve under the current roadmap.
“You say that data generation takes time, which is very true,” wrote Anne-Sofie Andersson, ChemSec’s executive director. “However, we would like to see ECHA´s committees and expert groups to more often act on the available data without routinely asking for more information.”
A European chemical industry trade group official told Bloomberg Environment the organization backs ECHA’s approach of grouping substances to accelerate the evaluations.
“We are supportive of this intention and the additional important benefit that it can provide to minimize animal testing,” said Irene van Luijken, director of communications at the European Chemical Industry Council.
Biocidal Chemical EvaluationsAlso on ECHA’s to-do list: continuing to review biocidal products. These are chemicals that can kill living organisms, from single-cell bacteria to rodents.
The agency has set a 2024 deadline to complete the review of “active substances” in products already on the market—which are sometimes referred to as the “magic fairy dust” that do the work in chemical products.
Under the Biocidal Product Regulation (BPR), active substances need to be approved by ECHA’s Biocidal Products Committee.
A number of companies have complained that these substance evaluations, which include new criteria for identifying endocrine disruptors, could be hampered because of a shortage of laboratories to complete all the testing.
ECHA, however, told Bloomberg Environment it remains confident enough capacity exists to handle any current or unforeseen testing.
Brexit PlanningThe agency is also planning in 2019 for an increased role advising British companies on how to maintain access to the European market in the event of a March 30, 2019, “hard Brexit,” in which the U.K. proceeds with its plan to leave the EU.
Companies based in the U.K. that don’t have an EU subsidiary could face additional registration costs and legal and tax expenses.
Hansen said ECHA will provide step-by-step instructions in the second half of January on how companies can transfer registrations from the U.K. to European Union companies.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/eu-chemical-regulators-spell-out-future-assessment-priorities
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Ohio EPA Issues Air Permit For Proposed Ethane Cracker Plant in Dilles Bottom
Dec 23, 2018 | Wheeling Intelligencer
By Jennifer Compston
SHADYSIDE — A proposed ethane cracker plant is one step closer to becoming a reality after the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit for the project Friday.
The air permit-to-install was issued for the PTT Global Chemical petrochemical complex that may be built in the Dilles Bottom area, specifically at Old Route 7 and Ferry Landing Road, Shadyside. A public hearing regarding the permit was held at Shadyside High School on Nov. 27, allowing area residents, labor unions, environmental advocates and others to weigh in on the potential effects of air pollution that might be released from the plant. More than 30 people offered official testimony during the session; while many expressed fear that the plant will harm human health and the region’s environment, others said they hope it will bring jobs and additional development to Belmont County.
“Ohio EPA is proud to be part of the effort to bring critical jobs to Ohio, with issuance today of the final environmental permit PTTGC America needs to proceed with its ethane cracker plant,” Ohio EPA Director Craig W. Butler said Friday.
“We have been careful to ensure this facility will not have an adverse impact on the air, water or health of the surrounding communities.”
The permit will allow Thailand-based PTT and its partner, Daelim Industrial Co. LLC of South Korea, to construct a 1.5 million tons-per-year ethane cracker plant, which has been projected to bring thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent positions to the Ohio Valley. The companies have invested millions of dollars in design work and planning and to buy property at the proposed site. However, they still have not committed to building the project, which could cost as much as $10 billion.
According to Ohio EPA, the plant would use six ethane cracking furnaces and manufacture ethylene, high-density polyethylene and linear low-density polyethylene, which are used in plastics and chemical manufacturing. As a result of this process, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and greenhouse gases are expected to be emitted from the plant, but Ohio EPA has determined those pollutants would not exceed acceptable levels as defined by state and federal laws.
Ohio EPA made the following changes to the proposed permit prior to approving it as a result of receiving public comment:
∫ The option to detect equipment leaks using an infrared camera was added to the permit. This means PTTGCA can use either the portable hand-held monitor or the infrared camera to detect leaks.
∫ Multiple minor errors were corrected throughout the document.
∫ The computer modeling of emissions was re-run to correct some minor inconsistencies between the original modeling and the permitted emission limits. The modeling continues to demonstrate that local air quality and public health will be protected, according to Ohio EPA.
Ohio EPA said its agents considered all comments received before making a final decision on the permit. The final permit and the Response to Comments document are available online at epa.ohio.gov/dapc/newpermits/issued.
Ohio EPA is still considering a modification to the company’s wastewater discharge permit and held a public hearing on that matter on Dec. 12, but the company could start building using its existing permit. The agency is expected to make a decision on the water permit modification later this month.
Belmont County Commissioner Mark Thomas, who will leave office at the end of the year, was excited to hear that the air permit had been approved.
“We are very pleased to receive news of this positive air permit issuance as it is one of the last few regulatory matters to clear the way to a positive PTTGC America and Daelim announcement,” Thomas said. “I would like to personally thank Director Craig Butler and the Ohio EPA staff for its professionalism, due diligence and efficiency during the permit process. I, too, thank everyone who spoke in favor of said permit at the public hearing for that process is very vital to any permit application.
“We are now poised to continue to move forward to a 2019 favorable final investment decision,” he added, “one of which will solidify the future economic growth for many years to come.”
Dan Williamson, spokesman for PTTGC America, agreed that the approval is a positive step for the project.
“This is good news from the Ohio EPA,” Williamson said. “Approval of the permit is a critical milestone for the final investment decision for the project.”
Ohio EPA pointed out Friday that issuance of final permits can be appealed to the Ohio Environmental Review Appeals Commission, generally within 30 days of the final action. Call ERAC at 614-466-8950 for more information on filing an appeal.
http://www.theintelligencer.net/news/top-headlines/2018/12/ohio-epa-issues-air-permit-for-proposed-ethane-cracker-plant-in-dilles-bottom/
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Shutdown Would Impact Chemical Plant Regulators, Investigators
Dec 24, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
Chemical facilities to see investigative board stand down
OSHA is funded, but EPA could close in a week
Companies operating facilities handling high-risk chemicals will face an unsettled regulatory landscape in a partial government shutdown scenario.
And that looks increasingly likely as House and Senate lawmakers struggled Dec. 21 to pass spending legislation that can secure President Donald Trump’s support while he insists on legislation with $5 billion for border wall construction.
Chemical facility operators are regulated by multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. Though it doesn’t conduct enforcement action, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board also plays a role in investigating major chemical incidents, often arriving on the scene in the immediate aftermath.
Unlike past government shutdowns in 1994 and 2013, only some agencies are slated to close at midnight Dec. 21.
OSHA Open, Others NotThe Occupational Safety and Health Administration—which enforces a process safety management program for highly hazardous chemicals—won’t shut down because the Labor Department’s funding legislation already has been signed into law. But chemical facilities may see reduced oversight by DHS’s Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program and EPA’s risk management program. And the safety board, which is funded under the same stalled appropriations bill as the Interior Department and the EPA, would go into hibernation.
According to the CSB’s most recent shutdown plan, released this month, the board will keep four employees on hand: its acting general counsel and senior adviser, Thomas Zoeller; Stephen Klejst, executive director of investigations and recommendations; Director of Administration Anna Brown; and an information technology employee. Its three Senate-confirmed board members aren’t subject to furlough.
A prolonged shutdown could delay work on ongoing investigations into companies like DowDuPont Co., Sunoco Logistics Partners, and Didion Milling Co. A report on a 2016 explosion and fire at a Mississippi natural gas plant operated by Enterprise Product Partners LP already has been approved by board members and is scheduled for release Jan. 23, spokeswoman Hillary Cohen told Bloomberg Law.
Should a major chemical incident occur during the shutdown, board leadership could recall investigators to work, but their task likely would be limited to securing evidence and asserting jurisdiction, Cohen said.
Homeland Security representatives didn’t respond to Bloomberg Law’s request for comment Dec. 21. The agency’s shutdown plan doesn’t address the CFATS program specifically. However, it states that emergency law enforcement operations like drug and undocumented immigrant interdiction will continue, but routine oversight tasks may lapse. More than 2,000 of the 3,531 employees in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—which includes the chemical security program—will remain on the job without pay during the shutdown.
Emergency OnlyThe EPA will continue normal activities through Dec. 28 because it has carryover funds sufficient for ongoing operations, Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an email to the agency’s employees Dec. 20. That could change if the shutdown goes longer.
In 2013, when the government was shut down for 17 days, about 90 percent of EPA employees were furloughed. That led to no compliance inspections being performed for any of the country’s high-risk chemical facilities under the risk management program for 20 days, according to EPA records.
The halt in inspections occurred because the shutdown leaves the agency to focus on emergencies, even if routine oversight can protect the public, said Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for land and emergency management—the division in charge of the program—from 2009 to 2017.
“There’s always going to be a set of inspections that are necessary to identify conditions that lead to catastrophic events,” Stanislaus said. “The longer you have gaps even assessing if those conditions exist, then you increase those risks.”
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/shutdown-would-impact-chemical-plant-regulators-investigators
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Worries About Worker Dangers Grow Amid US Oil and Gas Boom
Dec 23, 2018 | The Associated Press (In The New York Times)
By Joe Yerardi, Rachel Leven and Jamie Smith Hopkins
OKLAHOMA CITY — Parker Waldridge had worked in the Oklahoma oilfields since he was 16 and acquired the traits that make a good driller: fortitude, intellect and a healthy respect for the power of a runaway gas well.
And so, when Waldridge's wife, Dianna, heard there had been an accident on a rig he was working near Quinton, in the southeastern corner of the state, last January 22, she tried to stay calm. Parker, an independent contractor hired as a well site consultant, was obsessed with safety and had not once expressed fear about a job during their 34-year marriage, she told herself.
Still, on the four-hour drive to Quinton from their home in Crescent, north of Oklahoma City, dread began to creep in. Dianna had learned before leaving that Parker was among five men missing after an explosion on Patterson Rig 219, operated by Houston-based Patterson-UTI. At a church in Quinton, she sat with her four grown daughters, a son-in-law and the other workers' families, awaiting confirmation of what everyone there suspected: the men weren't coming back. They would have to be identified through dental records.
Drilling is an inherently dangerous undertaking, with a fatality rate nearly five times that of all industries in the United States combined in 2014, the last year such rates on oil and gas extraction were published by the government. Production pressures — and the temptation to cut corners — intensify during boom times, as America is experiencing now due to a rush of fossil-fuel exports.
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This story is part of a collaboration by the Center for Public Integrity, the Texas Tribune, The Associated Press and Newsy.
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The work of coaxing oil and gas from thousands of feet underground is performed in biting cold and breathtaking heat by stoics like Parker Waldridge, who burned to death at 60 in a driller's cabin, known as a doghouse, atop the floor of Rig 219.
"It is a macho world," said Frank Parker, a safety consultant in Magnolia, Texas, who has studied the industry and its workers for more than 50 years. "They get up in the morning and eat nails for breakfast. We need those people to do that kind of work. We've just got to find a way not to kill them."
From 2008 through 2017, 1,566 workers died from injuries in the oil-and-gas drilling industry and related fields, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's almost exactly the number of U.S. troops who were killed in Afghanistan during the same period.
From 2008 through October 25 of this year, the department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited companies in the extraction industry for 10,873 violations, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of OSHA data found. Sixty-four percent of the violations were classified by the agency as "serious," meaning inspectors found hazards likely to result in "death or serious physical harm." Another 3 percent were classified as "repeated," meaning the company previously had been cited for the hazard, or "willful," indicating "purposeful disregard" for the law or "plain indifference to employee safety."Editors’ PicksWhere Brexit Hurts: The Nurses and Doctors Leaving London3 Far-Flung Cities Offer Clues to Unsnarling Manhattan’s StreetsHow China Is Rewriting Its Own Script
During that period, OSHA investigated 552 accidents resulting in the death of at least one worker. Among these were 11 accidents involving Patterson-UTI; OSHA found violations in 10.
Initial penalties in the 552 accidents averaged $16,813, but later were reduced, on average, by 30 percent. (OSHA often cuts fines in exchange for quick settlements and hazard abatement). Some violations are still being contested by employers. Others were dropped by OSHA after negotiations with companies.
The number of workers exposed to death, injury and illness in the upstream portion of the oil and gas industry — exploration and production — is growing, especially in the frenetic Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. At the beginning of December, according to figures from oilfield services firm Baker Hughes, the basin accounted for more than half of the nation's operating drilling rigs — 489 in all.
In Texas, oil and gas extraction firms employ 2,400 more people than they did a year ago. But the real job growth has come in support activities: As of October, companies employed 170,600 derrick operators, rotary drill operators and other workers — 50,000 more positions than at the start of the decade. This puts more workers in the path of bone-crushing machinery, explosive gases and cancer-causing chemicals.
Asked how OSHA is responding, a Labor Department spokesman wrote in an email that enforcement crackdowns, centered on the oil and gas industry, are under way in five regions of the country. (The one covering Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico officially lapsed in October but OSHA inspectors are operating as if it were still in effect, the spokesman wrote.)
Nonetheless, the upstream industry is exempt from key OSHA rules that apply to other industries. It does not have to comply, for example, with the process safety management standard, which requires that refineries, chemical plants and other high-hazard operations adopt procedures to prevent fires, explosions and chemical leaks.
OSHA decided not to include upstream in the original standard in 1992 because it had proposed a rule specifically aimed at drilling. That rule was killed by the White House, whose occupant at the time, George H.W. Bush, had run his own oil company in Texas before entering politics. Unnerved by a catastrophic blast at a Texas fertilizer plant in 2013, then-President Barack Obama ordered OSHA to begin the process of updating the rule. The agency sought, among other things, to bring upstream into the fold.Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer
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The response was chilly. The International Association of Drilling Contractors said the removal of the exemption would do "little to improve safety," impose "unnecessary regulatory burdens and ultimately . result in Americans being put out of work." The exemption stayed.
David Michaels, who led OSHA at the time, said he met regularly with upstream leaders and they were not universally opposed to more regulation. Still, trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute argued for the status quo, pointing to the industry's relatively low injury rate. Michaels didn't buy it. "They have a low injury rate because they often don't report their injuries," he said in a recent interview. "They have a very high fatality rate, so it's simply not possible they have a low injury rate."
In a written statement, institute spokesman Reid Porter said, "API members strictly adhere to OSHA recordable injury reporting and other regulatory reporting requirements." He wrote that injury rates within the upstream industry are decreasing and that the process safety management standard "may not apply well to upstream activities." The Labor Department spokesman did not respond to a question on the standard.
The numbers, whatever they are, don't convey the warlike brutality inflicted in the oilfields when something goes wrong. On August 31, 2017, 38-year-old Juan Vicente De La Rosa was working on a platform above a wellhead in Midland County, Texas, when a cable snapped, freeing heavy blocks that struck De La Rosa and killed him almost instantly.
A photograph of the accident scene released by the Midland County Sheriff's Office under a public-records request shows De La Rosa's body on the ground, face up. His eyes are shut, his mouth agape. His blue shirt is smeared with what appears to be oil or grease. His left foot is bent outward at a 90-degree angle. His right lower pant leg is shredded.
"I tried CPR but could not get him going," a co-worker told sheriff's investigators. "He had a real slow pulse and then none."
De La Rosa worked for a well-servicing company called Big Lake Services LLC. Big Lake was hired by the owner and operator of the well, Pioneer Natural Resources USA, a major player on the Texas side of the Permian. A lawsuit filed against both firms by the mothers of De La Rosa's children alleges the Pioneer representative at the site — the "company man," in industry parlance — acknowledged to investigators "he had been told that the severed cable was in need of repair."
OSHA cited Big Lake for a single violation and proposed a $12,805 fine, which the company is contesting. It did not cite Pioneer. Pioneer and Big Lake representatives did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit; both denied the plaintiffs' allegations in court filings.
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'THIS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED'
Traumatic injuries like those that killed Parker Waldridge and Juan De La Rosa aren't the only existential hazards upstream workers face. Toxic gases — notably hydrogen sulfide, a component of crude oil that carries a distinctive rotten-egg odor — can be just as lethal.
It was hydrogen sulfide, also known as H2S, that took the life of Gregory Claxton, an Iraq War veteran and the father of a 3-year-old boy, in Montague County, Texas, on February 14, 2015. Claxton, 29, was a crude hauler for Twin Eagle Transport LLC of Houston. Twin Eagle was a contractor for EOG Resources, a large exploration and production company also based in Houston.
Claxton moved oil by truck from a battery of storage tanks at EOG's Cooper B Unit, near the unincorporated town of Forestburg, to a pipeline in Wichita Falls some 70 miles away. It was part of his job to dip a bottle on a rope, known as a thief, into the tanks to collect a sample so the oil's consistency, or specific gravity, could be ascertained. (The lighter the oil, the more it is worth). He also was to measure the oil's depth and temperature to calculate the volume in the tank.
On the morning of his death, Claxton climbed onto a catwalk above a tank holding crude from Well 1H. Opening the hatch, he was hit with a wave of H2S. He died so suddenly that his body was found upright, as if frozen in place. After performing an autopsy, a pathologist with the Dallas County medical examiner's office listed the cause of death as "Toxic effects of hydrogen sulfide."
Gregory's parents, Randall and Shellye Claxton of Nocona, Texas, have settled a lawsuit against Twin Eagle but are still fighting EOG in court. EOG posted no H2S warning signs at the Cooper B Unit, they claim, and Gregory was given no respiratory protection. Had EOG alerted Twin Eagle to the presence of the deadly gas, Shellye believes, Twin Eagle — lacking the proper safety equipment — would have turned down the job.
"He was a Marine," she said of her son. "He went to Iraq twice. He was willing to lay down his life for his country, and I just don't want him to have died in vain. I know these accidents happen, but this could have been prevented."
An EOG spokesman declined to comment; in a court filing, the company denied the allegations in the pending lawsuit. Twin Eagle did not respond to requests for comment but, in a court document, also denied the allegations before reaching a settlement with the Claxtons.
Randall, who was hauling crude for Twin Eagle from a different location the day Gregory died, left the oil business after the accident. Now a long-distance truck driver, he said there is a culture of denial on H2S that extends to the Texas Railroad Commission — which, despite its name, regulates oil and gas drilling in the state. "I've got a lot of friends who work in the oilfield," Randall said. "Every one of them told me there is no H2S in Montague County. They've been lied to."
In an email to the Center for Public Integrity, Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye wrote that agency inspectors conducted tests at the Cooper B tank battery on February 19, 2015 — five days after the accident that killed Gregory Claxton. Pulling air into a test tube from a catwalk above the tank Claxton was gauging, the inspectors found "no H2S levels above 2 parts per million," she wrote, and tests on April 10 of that year picked up no evidence of the gas. Nye added that "there are no H2S-designated fields in Montague County" — that is, no fields with H2S levels of 100 ppm or above. Such designations by the state require operators to provide worker training, post warning signs and implement safety and security measures.
Frank Parker, the safety consultant, said that by the time the Railroad Commission did its initial testing on February 19, the hydrogen sulfide levels just beyond the hatch of the tank would have dropped precipitously. "It's going to disperse within a few minutes" after the hatch is opened, he said.
OSHA says it takes at least 700 ppm of the gas to cause "rapid unconsciousness (and) 'knockdown' or immediate collapse within 1 to 2 breaths," as apparently happened with Claxton. "There's a great inconsistency between a two-part-per-million hydrogen sulfide reading and somebody dying from acute overexposure," Parker said. "It does not look to me like the Railroad Commission is trying to find out what really happened."
In an interview at Shellye and Randall Claxton's house in November, James York, a family friend and longtime oilfield worker now preparing wells for production in the Permian, called Nye's statement "bull----." York speaks from experience. He recalled working at a tank battery just north of Nocona around 2000 when H2S "pegged my monitor out," meaning the concentration was at least 100 ppm. He fled.
Why would a regulatory agency insist there was no problem in Montague County?
"They don't want to document it, because once they document it these companies will have to put procedures in place," York said. "That will cost them money they don't want to spend."
Asked to comment, Nye wrote: "Any operator found to be in violation of RRC rules (governing H2S) faces enforcement action by the Commission." During the 2018 fiscal year, which ended August 31, the commission took 19 such actions statewide. Ten resulted in collective fines of $47,610; the other nine are pending or were dismissed.
But if a field isn't designated "sour" — imbued with potentially dangerous levels of the gas — there are no H2S rules to violate.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, documented nine worker deaths nationwide during tank gauging between 2010 and 2014. These were likely due, NIOSH said, not to H2S but to inhalation of hydrocarbon gases or vapors or to asphyxiation by breathing oxygen-depleted air.
The research agency issued alerts in March 2015 and February 2016. The warnings led to an American Petroleum Institute standard urging (but not requiring) operators to find automated ways to measure and sample crude in tanks, so workers wouldn't have to open the hatches. The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management adopted a rule along these lines in 2016 for companies drilling on federal lands.
The NIOSH alerts came too late for Gregory Claxton. They might not have helped even if they'd come sooner. And other insidious threats lurk in the oilfields, in part because of the upstream industry's regulatory exceptionalism. The industry, for example, is exempt from a 1987 OSHA rule designed to strictly limit exposure to benzene, a highly volatile, carcinogenic component of crude oil. Instead, it is subject to a far more lenient limit, dating to OSHA's creation in 1971.
Benzene is often released during "flowback" operations at well sites in which hydraulic-fracturing fluids and volatile hydrocarbons are collected at the surface and sent to tanks or pits. The OSHA exposure limit for benzene in industries such as oil refining is one part per million averaged over an eight-hour workday. The short-term limit is 5 ppm over any 15-minute period. For upstream companies, the eight-hour ceiling is 10 ppm and there is no short-term limit at all.
In a 2014 paper, NIOSH researchers reported finding benzene spikes above 200 ppm during sampling of flowback operations in Colorado and Wyoming. That's enough to cause symptoms such as dizziness, headaches, tremors, confusion, rapid or irregular heartbeat and unconsciousness.
Co-author Max Kiefer, now retired, said the spikes suggest the flowback process is not well-controlled and that higher full-shift exposures may be occurring, even though the limited study did not find benzene levels above 1 ppm over a 12-hour workday. If the more restrictive benzene rule applied to the upstream industry, Kiefer said, "It's likely the industry would have taken action to reduce exposures." In a statement, API's Porter wrote that companies had "taken steps since (the NIOSH) findings to mitigate this risk."
A number of upstream leaders belong to the National Service, Transmission, Exploration & Production Safety Network, a government-industry collaboration that covers 20 oil- and gas-producing states. The network helps spread the word about oilfield hazards such as lung-damaging silica dust, generated by the large-scale use of sand to hold open fissures in underground rock formations during fracking.
In his statement to the Center, the Labor Department spokesman wrote that "OSHA is routinely in touch with employers in the oil and gas industry to improve health and safety." He pointed to a safety conference in Houston, co-sponsored by the department, that drew about 1,200 people in early December.
In Shellye Claxton's view, however, there is no substitute for the strict policing of companies bent on making as much money as quickly as possible.
"There are little things they can do" to enhance safety, she said, "but they don't want to spend the extra dollars."
'ROGUE CORPORATE ENTITY'
At 6 a.m. on January 22, Parker Waldridge reported for work at well 1H-9 on the Pryor Trust 0718 gas lease in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. As is typical, a tangle of companies was involved in the drilling of the L-shaped well, which had reached 13,435 feet. The lease holder was Red Mountain Energy LLC; the well operator, Red Mountain Operating LLC. The latter hired Patterson-UTI as the drilling contractor. Waldridge, an independent contractor, was working for a project-management firm called Crescent Consulting LLC.
Within hours of Waldridge's arrival on site, he and four others would be dead, burned beyond recognition in the 1H-9 doghouse. It was the deadliest drilling accident in the U.S. since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 workers.
A fact sheet issued by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which is investigating the Pryor Trust blowout, presents the following timeline:
At 6:48 p.m. on January 21, the Patterson-UTI crew began removing drill pipe from the well bore — an operation known as "tripping" — so the drill bit could be changed. A heavy fluid known as drilling mud was pumped into the well to fill the void created by the removal of the pipe. Shortly after midnight, the crew pumped a weighted cap known as a "pill" — consisting of a claylike mineral called barite and meant to keep gas from invading the well and creating a blowout risk — to about 7,000 feet, near the bend in the "L."
The tripping operation resumed, and by 6:10 a.m. on the 22nd as Waldridge's shift began, the crew had removed the drill bit and other components from the bottom of the hole.
Unbeknownst to the workers, gas had, in fact, entered the well during tripping. The well was equipped with a blowout preventer, but key parts of that device — blocks of steel known as "blind rams" — did not fully close. A towering, hissing fire erupted at 8:36 a.m. and was not extinguished until 4 p.m.
After an investigation, OSHA cited Patterson-UTI in July for six violations and proposed fines totaling $73,909; Patterson is contesting the citations. The agency cited Crescent Consulting for four violations and proposed fines totaling $36,586. It, too, is contesting. No citations were issued to either Red Mountain Energy or Red Mountain Operating.
Meanwhile, Parker Waldridge's wife, Dianna, has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Patterson-UTI, Red Mountain Energy, Red Mountain Operating, Crescent Consulting and mud-supplier National Oilwell Varco LP. The lawsuit calls Patterson a "rogue corporate entity" and accuses it of "a cascade of errors and multiple departures from safe drilling practices," including failing to take countermeasures against "underbalanced" tripping, when pressure in the hole is greater than it is on the surface. This can allow gas to migrate into the vertical section of the well.
The lawsuit cites deposition testimony from Patterson-UTI employees and internal company documents showing that the day crew on January 22 inherited "a ticking time bomb." Documents show, for example, that the machine that operated the balky blind rams on the well's blowout preventer "was improperly maintained and in a state of severe disrepair," the lawsuit says. It adds that an email warning to this effect — with a skull-and-crossbones graphic — was sent at least two days before the blowout to the Patterson-UTI rig manager and superintendent. The former testified that he never saw the email but agreed it "should have been taken seriously," and the latter "did not remember if he looked at it."
Patterson-UTI is one of the biggest drilling operators in the country, accounting for 15 percent of the active rigs in the U.S. as of late November. Its corporate culture was laid bare three years ago, when it settled a discrimination case with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $14.5 million.
A lawsuit brought against Patterson-UTI by the EEOC on behalf of some 1,000 employees alleged the company "engaged in a nationwide pattern or practice of discrimination based on race and national origin on its drilling rigs," assigning minority workers to the lowest-level jobs and disciplining, demoting or firing them disproportionately. Depositions associated with that lawsuit paint a grim picture of the work environment for people of color; one Native American driller, who kept a diary, testified that a supervisor regularly called him a "f------ Indian" and asked if he was "drunk" or "high."
The Waldridge lawsuit accuses the company of having "the second worst worker fatality rate among its peers in the industry," accounting for the deaths of at least 50 workers since 1999.
In a written statement, Patterson-UTI said that "while we have no intention of litigating this in the press, it is important to note that Red Mountain was the lease holder and operator of the well, which was drilled under its direction, supervision and control. Red Mountain was also responsible for the well's design and drilling program." The company said it disagrees with OSHA's findings and the "gross mischaracterizations" in the lawsuit and has "dramatically reduced workplace incident rates and significantly increased overall employee safety" in recent years.
Of the EEOC case, the company said, "Rather than pursuing costly litigation to dispute past claims, Patterson-UTI chose to work with the EEOC to institute additional human resources best practices and to enter into a no-fault settlement .. The Company is committed to providing a work environment for all employees that is inclusive, respectful and supportive."
A spokeswoman for Red Mountain Energy issued the following statement on behalf of company president Tony Say: "Safe, responsible operations are the top priority at every Red Mountain Energy well. Our deepest sympathies go out to those affected by this tragedy. We are confident the legal process will exonerate our company."
A Crescent Consulting official did not respond to requests for comment, though the company denied responsibility for the accident in court pleadings. A spokesman for National Oilwell Varco wrote in an email that the firm "denies all liability concerning the tragedy that occurred (on) Patterson Rig #219."
During a recent interview in Oklahoma City, Dianna Waldridge and one of her lawyers, Michael Lyons of Dallas, spoke at length about the Pryor Trust accident and its aftermath. Lyons said there was "a climate and a culture" of carelessness at Patterson-UTI, which made "terrible mistakes" on Rig 219. "It all starts in a boardroom many miles away," he said. "I don't blame the men who, unfortunately, died in this tragedy or were out there working. It's not their fault they were improperly trained and improperly supervised."
Dianna, who still works cattle and grows wheat on the 320-acre ranch she and her husband bought a quarter-century ago, struggled to maintain her composure during the interview. "I've lost the man that I love, that I wanted to grow old with," she said, her voice halting. "Not having him will affect me forever."
The anguish caused by the Pryor Trust blowout extends beyond the dead workers' families. In a September deposition for the Waldridge case, Sheriff Timothy Turner of Haskell County, Oklahoma — which adjoins Pittsburg County and is home to many oilfield workers — testified that the accident is a frequent topic of conversation among residents of southeastern Oklahoma.
"Every time there's an incident with a Patterson rig now, it's 'Patterson killed those guys.' . They believe that the person who oversaw that rig should be in jail," Turner said.
"He murdered five people. That's their belief."
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/21/us/ap-us-blowout-worker-hazards.html
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EPA Doesn’t Trust Its Own Methane Math, But Can’t Prove Why
Dec 23, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
EPA says analysis showing Obama controls cost-effective overstates emissions reductions
But EPA doesn’t say by how much, which critics say could draw legal scrutiny
The EPA is proposing to weaken Obama-era oil and gas methane controls that its own analysis shows are cost-effective—a disconnect that opponents say could legally doom the agency’s plans.
The Environmental Protection Agency in September proposed (RIN:2060–AT54) several changes to Obama-era limits on methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas, from new oil and gas operations. The EPA accepted input on its plans through Dec. 17.
The agency’s changes, which track closely with industry requests, include decreasing the frequency with which oil and gas operators must survey their facilities for leaks and lengthening the time that companies have before they must make repairs.
The EPA’s own math, though, shows the controls set in 2016 are cost-effective. So to back up its proposed changes, the agency claims the numbers aren’t what they seem.
The EPA said it “may have overestimated” the emissions reductions current controls would achieve, even in its most recent analysis updated for this proposal, the agency said in its plans. That uncertainty warrants changes to the controls, the EPA added.
But the agency doesn’t say how much it might have overestimated. In fact, the agency doesn’t include any specific numbers to support its claims. And those data gaps could prove fatal to the EPA’s effort to relax the 2016 rule, critics say.
More Harm Than Good?The methane rule revision isn’t the first instance in which the EPA’s numbers suggest softer controls could increase emissions. But in other cases, such as its plans to replace Obama-era carbon controls for the power sector, the agency argues it is correcting an overreach of authority.
Here, the Trump EPA isn’t arguing overreach. It is choosing to reconsider the methane controls, at the request of the industry.
“When you’re making a discretionary change, it’s even more problematic for the agency to take a net costly action,” Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, told Bloomberg Environment. “Why would you voluntarily take an action that your own analysis shows will do more harm than good for society?”
Natural gas operations are the second-largest U.S. source of methane emissions, and the largest industrial source, according to EPA’s April greenhouse gas inventory, which looks at 2016 emissions.
Emissions NumbersAt the crux of the EPA’s claims are questions about whether the agency is correctly quantifying emissions from the oil and gas sector.
Neither industry nor environmental advocates agree with the EPA’s estimates, and in some respects, they share similar critiques of the data discrepancies. For example, both industry and environmental groups take issue with the fact that the EPA’s emissions factor, estimating the leak rate from facilities, is based in data from the mid-1990s.
In addition, industry and environmental groups both question how one study the EPA uses, looking at emissions from 27 low-production gas wells in the Barnett Shale region in Texas, could be representative of emissions from wells across the country.
Over or UnderEnvironmental advocates say the EPA is far understating releases of methane from industry operations. Recent research led by scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund found emissions levels as much as 60 percent higher than the EPA’s estimates.
“The science is telling us pretty clearly that we have a far larger emissions problem than what our inventories have projected,” Peter Zalzal, a lead attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, told Bloomberg Environment. Studies also are saying the problem is coming from significant emissions events that are unpredictable, he added.
“That says we need a program the requires inspections and surveys comprehensively to reduce emissions,” Zalzal said.
Industry, though, argues its equipment doesn’t leak nearly as often or as much as the EPA says.
The EPA isn’t using enough up-to-date information about emissions from industry operations, particularly low-production oil and gas wells, Lee Fuller, executive vice president for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, told Bloomberg Environment.
“EPA is flying into it and making assumptions,” Fuller said. “That was not really what the intent of Congress was in putting them in charge of making these regulations that can have a dramatic effect on industry and the economy at large.”
No SpecificsThe EPA, in its proposal, signals that it is sympathetic to industry’s argument. The agency said it might be overstating how much emissions reductions more frequent monitoring would achieve, calling into question whether the 2016 controls are cost-effective.
But without specifics, the EPA hasn’t articulated a valid basis for changing the rules, Romany Webb, senior fellow and associate research scholar at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Bloomberg Environment.
“The courts are very clear. EPA has to provide strong justification for doing so, and the justification that EPA has provided is not particularly strong,” Webb added. “Its own analysis supports retention of the” Obama-era rule.
The American Petroleum Institute recently presented data to the EPA showing a lower rate of methane leaks from equipment than the agency has used in its analysis, it said in its comments. EPA staff, though, didn’t incorporate the data, raising concerns about whether it encompassed the full range of industry sources covered by the standards.
The oil group’s data, which it collected from leak surveys during normal operations of more than 4,000 sites, finds the vast majority of well sites have few leaking components, Howard Feldman, the group’s senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs, told Bloomberg Environment in an email. About 60 percent of all surveys the group collected didn’t find any leaks, he said.
“We encouraged EPA to recognize the value of the field data measurements that have been shared with the agency,” Feldman added.
Gaps in AnalysisThe EPA leaves a lot more out of its analysis, too, critics say.
For example, the EPA didn’t conduct any assessment of how much emissions would differ as sites are inspected less frequently, critics said.
“Even if the agency can’t precisely predict what the emissions effect will be, that doesn’t give it carte blanche to ignore the effects,” Lienke said.
The EPA could face legal scrutiny for that, as courts have ruled before that uncertainty about the magnitude of health effects isn’t a sufficient reason to not address those emissions impacts, he added.
Environmental advocates argue the EPA uses its proposal as a request for data. That calls into question whether the public will be able offer input on any updated data the EPA ultimately may use to justify its changes, they say.
“They’re using this to seek information, asking could people provide information that would support this concern” that it may have overestimated emissions reductions, Zalzal said.
“EPA can collect information if it wants through other mechanisms, but not through a proposed rule like this.”
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-doesnt-trust-its-own-methane-math-but-cant-prove-why
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Ted Lieu Starts Search For Climate Bill Co-Sponsors
Dec 21, 2018 | E&E News PM
By Nick Sobczyk
Rep. Ted Lieu is shopping for co-sponsors on a sweeping climate change bill as progressives continue to flex their muscles heading into the next Congress.
The California Democrat plans to introduce an updated version of the "Climate Solutions Act" he floated in 2015. The measure would have created a national renewable energy standard and called for increased energy efficiency.
The bill would mark another piece of climate groundwork amid growing pressure from progressives pushing the "Green New Deal." Lieu has endorsed the Green New Deal proposal from Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), which calls for a select committee to draft a broad measure with the goal of getting the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy in a decade.
Lieu's proposal is slightly less ambitious. The updated version of his bill would require 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 80 percent renewable energy by 2040. It would also set targets in an effort to massively slash emissions by 2050.
But it jibes with various other progressive proposals and talking points that have emanated from Capitol Hill in recent weeks. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for instance, is planning a Green New Deal-style bill for introduction next year (E&E Daily, Dec. 3).
Lieu circulated a letter to colleagues yesterday looking for co-sponsors. He cited a slew of recent warnings about global warming, including the most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
"Beyond these reports, we can see the climate crisis unfolding before our eyes," he wrote. "Less than two months ago, wildfires tore through California making it the most destructive fire season on record. While those in the West dealt with fires, communities in the Southeast, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands were recovering from devastating hurricanes."
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2018/12/21/stories/1060110435
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Likely Chairwoman Defends House Climate Panel From Critics
Dec 24, 2018 | PoliticoPro
By Timothy Cama
House Democratic leaders have picked Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) to chair a special panel on climate change, which is already facing criticism from progressives over its goals and powers.
Castor said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely incoming Speaker, asked her to chair the committee.
“It’s not official,” Castor told The Hill Friday, saying that the select committee’s structure needs to be voted on by the entire House after Democrats take control Jan. 3, and then the speaker can choose the chairman.
Castor faces a challenge as progressives push back on leadership's plans for the panel.
Despite demands from Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the panel will not be tasked specifically with formulating a Green New Deal, which includes a transition to 100 percent renewable electricity, a universal jobs guarantee and other features.
It will also lack subpoena power, and lawmakers who have received donations from fossil fuel companies won’t be banned from serving on it, two other demands Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters have made.
“I’m very disappointed,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of the most outspoken incumbents backing a Green New Deal.
On the fossil fuel donation ban, Khanna said it’s “a basic issue of ethical refusal. Democrats can’t on the one hand say we want folks to recuse themselves at the Justice Department who have a conflict of interest with [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s investigation, and then in the same breath say we want people on committees with climate change who have a conflict of interest with climate change.”
Castor said progressives have nothing to worry about with her leading the panel, and she defended some of the decisions leaders have made.
“There’s some fabulous proposals in the Green New Deal, and I’m excited about all that. You may see some similar language. Clearly, the focuses are going to be the same,” she said. “This will be a committee clearly in the spirit of the Green New Deal."
Castor said she intended to prioritize communicating effectively about the urgency of climate change, including the impacts on local areas like her home state of Florida.
Castor faced significant criticism from progressives after telling E&E News Thursday that she didn’t want to ban members who have gotten donations from the fossil fuel industry.
“I don't think you can do that under the First Amendment, really,” she said at the time.
“Without a mandate to create a plan and a requirement that its members don’t take fossil fuel money, we are deeply concerned that this committee will be just another of the many committees we’ve seen failing our generation our entire lives,” Varshini Prakash, co-found of the Sunrise Movement, said in a statement.
On Friday, Castor told The Hill her comments were “inartful.” But she stood by her belief that it’s improper to block certain members just because of their campaign donations.
“I’m hoping that folks will come to this committee ready to take on the corporate polluters and special interests. There shouldn’t be a purity test, that if a member of Congress has ever accepted contributions,” she said.
Castor herself has received just about $2,000 in campaign donations from the oil and natural gas industries during 12 years in office, she said.
Progressives have also objected to Democratic leaders’ decision not to give the panel subpoena power or the ability to pass legislation that could go straight for a House vote. The last climate change select committee, which existed from 2007 to 2011, had subpoena power.
Castor said she agrees with the progressives on that, but she understands why the decisions were made.
“My position is that the committee should have legislative authority and should have subpoena power,” she said. “But I think that has been negotiated with the standing committee chairs, and we’re going to work together.”
Castor’s qualifications and visions for the committee have the support of at least some in the environmental community.
“Rep. Kathy Castor is an outstanding choice to help lead the House’s renewed focus on climate change,” John Bowman, senior director for federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.
“As a longtime environmental champion, few are better suited to help shine a bright light on the threats Americans face from the climate crisis and advance the solutions we urgently need.”
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/422559-likely-chairwoman-defends-house-climate-panel-from-critics
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