ACC AM 27/12/18

Industry and Association News

1. 2019 Outlook: House Democrats to Take Aggressive Oversight Course

   Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Dean Scott
   
   
   House Democrats will return to power in 2019 united on the need for intensive oversight of the Trump administration.
2. ‘This Is Our Reality Now.’

   Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times

   By Eric Lipton, Steve Eder and John Branch
   
   
   In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century.
3. EU Leaders Strike Deal to Ban Disposable Plastic Straws, Cutlery, and Plates

   Dec 26, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News

   By Cheryl Hogue
   
   
   The market for single-use plastic cutlery, plates, and straws in the European Union would drop sharply under a deal reached by EU leaders Dec. 20.

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

Chemical Management News

4. Early Puberty in Girls Linked to Beauty Product Chemicals: Study

   Dec 27, 2018 | New York Post

   By Hannah Sparks
   
   
   As if being a pre-teen girl isn’t hard enough.
5. 2019 Outlook: More Scrutiny in Chemical Regulation in European Union

   Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Stephen Gardner
   
   
   Chemicals companies will face greater scrutiny in 2019 of the information they provide the European Chemicals Agency, under the European Union’s over-arching chemicals law.

Energy News

6. PTTCG America Receives Ohio EPA Permit for Cracker Complex

   Dec 26, 2018 | Platts

   By Kristen Hays
   
   
   PTTGC America has received a key permit to build a petrochemical complex in southeastern Ohio, the state's environmental agency said.
7. U.S. San Juan Basin Gas Eyed for Mexico LNG Exports

   Dec 26, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

   By Richard Nemec
   
   
   Mexico's Sonora state governor has signed a nonbinding agreement with U.S. counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico to interconnect existing natural gas pipelines allowing shipments from New Mexico's San Juan Basin to flow to a proposed export terminal on the Gulf of California in Mexico.
8. In Booming Oilfield, Natural Gas Can Be Free

   Dec 27, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal

   By Rebecca Elliott
   
   
   American energy companies have spent billions of dollars in the past decade exploring for natural gas.
9. Free Markets and U.S. Energy Independence

   Dec 27, 2018 | Chicago Tribune - Opinion

   The stunning turn of fortunes was largely overlooked in a whirlwind of other Washington news this month: Nearly half a century of free-market initiatives and government encouragement has turned what long looked like an American weakness into a strength.
10. Pennsylvania OKs Key Permits for Ethane Cracker Pipeline

    Dec 26, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

    By Jamison Cocklin
    
    
    The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has issued key construction permits for Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC’s Falcon Ethane Pipeline system, which would feed the multi-billion dollar ethylene cracker under construction...

Chemical Security News - There are no clips to report at this time

Transportation and Infrastructure News

11. FRA Gives $46 Million in PTC Grants in 10 States

    Dec 26, 2018 | Railway Track and Structures

    By Paul Conley
    
    
    Eleven projects to implement positive train control (PTC) systems will split more than $46 million in grants from the Federal Railroad Administration.

Environment News

12. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation

    Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times

    By Eric Lipton, Steve Eder and John Branch
    
    
    For nearly two years, President Trump has pursued an aggressive, far-reaching effort, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, to free American business from what he and many of his supporters view as excessive environmental regulation.
13. Trump Imperils the Planet

    Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

    It’s hard to believe but it was only three years ago this month — just after 7 p.m., Paris time, Dec. 12, to be precise — that delegates from more than 190 nations, clapping and cheering, whooping and weeping, rose to celebrate the Paris Agreement — the first genuinely collective response to the mounting threat of global warming.
14. Forget the Carbon Tax for Now

    Dec 27, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

    By Justin Gillis
    
    
    The angry graffiti have been blasted off the Arc de Triomphe with water jets, leaving unnaturally white patches scarring the base of France’s national monument.
15. NYISO Inches Forward First-of-its-Kind Carbon Pricing Proposal

    Dec 27, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

    By Jamison Cocklin
    
    
    The New York Independent System Operator has released its latest carbon pricing proposal, saying this version will provide...

Industry and Association News

1. 2019 Outlook: House Democrats to Take Aggressive Oversight Course

   Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Dean Scott

   House Democrats will return to power in 2019 united on the need for intensive oversight of the Trump administration.

   The Democrats intend to throw the spotlight on the Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Department, and other Trump administration agencies that got little scrutiny by a Republican-controlled Congress over the last two years.

   With GOP control of the Senate and President Donald Trump in the White House, incremental environmental legislation in general is likely to supersede broader initiatives.

   On chemical policy, expect incoming House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to push the EPA to step up implementation of chemical reviews under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which Congress amended in 2016.

   Pallone’s panel could also take up measures that might force the EPA to move faster on setting standards for synthetic contaminants in drinking water, such as perfluorinated chemicals found in Teflon or the rocket fuel component perchlorate.

   The Democratic-run House is also likely to bring more pressure to increase funding for water infrastructure projects. Incoming House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who has complained of inadequate funding for water projects, could push for bills to dramatically increase funding there.
   ‘Revenge Majority’

   “At some level, a Kierkegaardian dread must be settling in at EPA,” Lynn L. Bergeson, managing partner with Bergeson & Campbell P.C., told Bloomberg Environment, referring to Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish thinker considered the first existentialist philosopher. While hearings “are inevitable, their content and their ultimate purpose and utility are another matter,” she said.

   Some Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will use their majority power constructively.

   “The way I look at the House is, they are planning on a revenge majority,” Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s energy panel, told Bloomberg Environment.

   Democratic control of the House also will all but collapse GOP-led efforts to add environmental policy riders to appropriations bills, with Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), an environmental advocate, at the helm of the powerful House Appropriations panel.

   Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) also is vowing to bring science back to the House Science, Space and Technology panel as its next chairman, ending Republican control of a committee that has often been more concerned with how regulations are hurting industry.

   On climate change, the House Energy and Commerce Committee—along with panels on science, transportation, oversight and government affairs, and even foreign affairs—all expect to grill Trump officials on rollbacks of climate and other environmental rules and international climate policy. 
   Issues to Watch

   Other environment and energy issues to watch on Capitol Hill in 2019 include:
   A large infrastructure bill, an issue on which lawmakers in both parties, as well as Trump, see room for a possible compromise. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), however, has said any bill must address climate change.Congress will have to start from scratch on a bill to reauthorize the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act, which allows the collection of industry fees for the EPA office that approves pesticides and disinfectants. The legislation was derailed last year when Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) sought to block the EPA from rolling back various Obama administration farm worker protection rules, and House Republicans balked, and the pesticide fees were left out of the farm bill.Energy lobbyists are hoping the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will at least pass pieces of a long-stalled comprehensive energy bill with bipartisan backing, including those addressing smart-grid technologies and upgrading the grid, as well as those encouraging electric and other advanced vehicles and energy storage.The most recent reauthorization of the surface transportation act, in December 2015, authorized spending on federal highway and public transportation programs through September 2020. A new reauthorization could be an opening for Democrats to push climate-resilient infrastructure and low-carbon transportation options.Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) also is readying bills to encourage advanced nuclear technologies and more incentives for carbon capture and storage—legislation that has Democratic support.Familiar Senate Faces

   While a new cast of Democrats will hold committee gavels in the House in the 116th Congress, the Republican-controlled Senate will return with familiar faces atop Senate environment and energy panels, where most climate, energy, and environment-related legislation emerges.

   Republicans’ 53-47 control of the chamber gives them some wiggle room to confirm the next EPA administrator—possibly Andrew Wheeler, tapped as acting EPA head in July after embattled Scott Pruitt resigned. Trump has not officially nominated Wheeler for Senate confirmation, but told reporters in November that he plans to.

   Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) will head the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, while Wyoming’s Barrasso will head the environment panel. Murkowski said she wants to hold hearings on climate change.
   
   While Delaware’s Tom Carper will stay on Barrasso’s committee as the top Democrat in 2019, the ranking Democrat on the energy committee will be Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a choice that has raised concerns for climate advocates who see the coal-state senator as a threat to reviving far-reaching climate legislation if Democrats can oust Trump in 2020.

   Manchin told Bloomberg Environment that while he’s a pragmatist on energy issues he is concerned about climate change and wants to “find that moderate middle place” in any legislative solution.
   Climate Divide

   House Democrats remain divided on climate-change legislation. Battle lines are being drawn in the House between old-guard Democrats and new arrivals.

   “It’s a priority of Democrats. We believe climate change is real, we believe it’s an existential threat to the planet, and we believe we need to take definitive action,” DeFazio told Bloomberg Environment.

   Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her allies are pushing a “Green New Deal” creating a select climate panel to draw up a plan over the next year putting the U.S. on the path to 100 percent renewable energy. Backed by dozens of House Democrats, It also calls for building a national smart grid and rapidly decarbonizing U.S. manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation sectors.

   Ocasio-Cortez says she’s well aware such legislation isn’t politically viable in the near term. But she said Democrats should be working now to have a broad climate bill, one that can energize congressional support, and have it ready if Democrats can return to power in the White House and Senate.

   Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), seeking to return as House speaker, has vowed to resurrect a select panel she launched in 2007, later scrapped by a Republican majority in 2011, though it lacked legislative authority. 
   ‘Take a Shot’

   But Carper said nothing prevents Democrats from crafting compromises with Republicans to cut carbon emissions at the margins, while also laying the groundwork for comprehensive legislation.

   “You know, people used to ask [hockey legend] Wayne Gretzky, ‘Why do you take so many shots on goal?’ And he says, ‘Because I missed every shot I never took,’” Carper told Bloomberg Environment. “I think we take a shot and it makes sense to build support around a comprehensive approach.”

   “It also makes sense, if you have some low-lying fruit, such as removing emissions from mobile sources, to seize the day,” Carper said. “You can do both.”

   The first bipartisan climate legislation in a decade—a carbon fee bill (H.R. 7173)—was introduced in November by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Republicans Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Francis Rooney (Fla.), and David Trott (R-Mich.), who is retiring.

   But even it is reintroduced and passes the House, it faces extremely long odds in the Senate.

   —With assistance from Pat Rizzuto, Tiffany Stecker, Rebecca Kern and David Schultz.

   https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/2019-outlook-house-democrats-to-take-aggressive-oversight-course
   

   Return to headline | Return to top

2. ‘This Is Our Reality Now.’

   Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times

   By Eric Lipton, Steve Eder and John Branch

   In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century. Mr. Trump enthusiastically promotes the changes as creating jobs, freeing business from the shackles of government and helping the economy grow.
   

   The trade-offs, while often out of public view, are real — frighteningly so, for some people — imperiling progress in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink, and in some cases upending the very relationship with the environment around us.

   Since Mr. Trump took office, his approach on the environment has been to neutralize the most rigorous Obama-era restrictions, nearly 80 of which have been blocked, delayed or targeted for repeal, according to an analysis of data by The New York Times.

   With this running start, Mr. Trump is already on track to leave an indelible mark on the American landscape, even with a decline in some major pollutants from the ever-shrinking coal industry. While Washington has been consumed by scandals surrounding the president’s top officials on environmental policy — both the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior secretary have been driven from his cabinet — Mr. Trump’s vision is taking root in places as diverse as rural California, urban Texas, West Virginian coal country and North Dakota’s energy corridor.

   While the Obama administration sought to tackle pollution problems in all four states and nationally, Mr. Trump’s regulatory ambitions extend beyond Republican distaste for what they considered unilateral overreach by his Democratic predecessor; pursuing them in full force, Mr. Trump would shift the debate about the environment sharply in the direction of industry interests, further unraveling what had been, before the Obama administration, a loose bipartisan consensus dating in part to the Nixon administration.

   In the words of Walter DeVille, who lives on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, “This is our reality now.”

   THE CONTRIBUTORS

   Eric Lipton, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, has been at The New York Times since 1999. He covers Trump regulatory changes.

   Steve Eder, a reporter who shared in the Pulitzer Prize this year, has worked at The Times since 2012. He writes about the federal government.

   John Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has been at The Times since 2005. He is based in California.

   Gabriella Demczuk is a photographer and regular contributor to The Times, covering Washington politics and national policy.

   Dismissing Science

   The president’s distrust of expert studies and advice has put farm workers at risk in Kern County, Calif., where a pesticide the Obama administration moved to ban is still in widespread use.

   By John Branch and Eric Lipton

   BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — The spring air was cool. There was the slightest breeze. The smell floated into the cabbage field about six weeks after the newly installed Trump administration brushed aside scientifically established health concerns and overturned a planned ban of one of the world’s most potent pesticides.

   It was the early morning of Cinco de Mayo — May 5, 2017 — but there was no day off on this holiday. In three groups, 48 farm workers, most of them women, were scattered around a field in the southern part of California’s vast and flat Central Valley. Some did the back-aching work of bending over and using a knife to chop the heads from the plants. They passed them up to packers standing on a flatbed trailer behind a tractor.

   Vicenta Rivera, now 49, was one of the first to feel it — a pesticide drift, the agriculture industry calls it, in this case of chlorpyrifos, one of the most powerful and toxic pesticides in widespread use, that had been sprayed on a nearby grove of mandarin oranges. There was a strong odor, a taste in the back of the throat, numb lips, itchy skin and watery eyes. A headache set in quickly.

   Some workers scurried to nearby cars to avoid the toxic air. Others kept picking and packing, squinting and covering their faces and trying not to breathe. They were afraid of the repercussions of walking away. They needed the money. Women coughed. Some vomited.

   Bricmary Lopez fainted. A 37-year-old mother of three, she remembers the smell, the dizziness, the overwhelming feeling of nausea. Other workers thought she was faking it, trying to be funny, when she hit the ground and started convulsing.

    “We were teasing each other, saying, ‘Ha, you don’t want to work,’” said Lucia Martinez Polido, 57.

   Reality bit. Soon, nearly everyone felt the burning sensation and queasiness. Some fainted. Those not immediately incapacitated helped the others. They put a pillow under Ms. Lopez’s head and stood over her, waving their arms over her face, trying to offer fresh air.

   Fire trucks and ambulances came. They stayed out on Copus Road, a couple of hundred yards beyond the cabbage field and adjacent almond groves, because the rescuers did not want to get exposed.

   Ms. Lopez remembers being ushered behind curtains, a makeshift room assembled for roadside decontamination. She remembers being naked in a temporary shower, and the ambulance ride to a Bakersfield hospital, about 20 miles away.

   She said she was given medicine and released. No longer working the fields and riddled with health problems, Ms. Lopez has been searching for answers.

    “All I want to know,” she said at her home recently, “is am I going to be O.K.?”

   Trump Wins, and E.P.A. Quashes Chlorpyrifos Ban

   Had Donald J. Trump not won the presidency in 2016, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos most likely would not have been applied to American crops over the past 21 months. It would not have sickened substantial numbers of farm workers, or risked what the Environmental Protection Agency’s own studies suggest could be continued long-term health problems for others exposed to the chemical at low levels.

   Widespread concerns about chlorpyrifos led to its removal for nearly all residential uses in 2000. Environmental groups kept pushing, and two filed a petition with the E.P.A. in 2007 to ban it entirely on food crops. The E.P.A. eventually agreed in 2015, released its revised human health risk assessment in November 2016, and was ordered by a court to “take final action” by the end of March 2017.

   Days after the assessment was released, Mr. Trump won the election. DowDuPont, the leading maker of the pesticide, donated $1 million to his inauguration. One of the early acts of the man Mr. Trump appointed to head the E.P.A., Scott Pruitt, was to quash the chlorpyrifos ban on March 29, 2017.

   Since taking office, Mr. Trump has consistently sided with powerful economic constituencies in setting policy toward the air we breathe, the water we drink and the presence of chemicals in our communities.

   In the process, he has frequently rejected or given short shrift to science, an instinct that has played out most visibly in his disdain for efforts to curb global warming but has also permeated federal policy in other ways. Mr. Trump has expressed skepticism about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. His administration supported rolling back safeguards for workers exposed to some toxic substances. And in rolling back nearly 80 environmental regulations, he has regularly played down findings that bolstered the need for the rules in the first place.

   The administration’s decision not to curb the use of chlorpyrifos is a case study in how ideological and special-interest considerations outweighed decades of evidence about its potential harm.

   The administration’s choice not to curb the use of chlorpyrifos is a case study in how ideological and special-interest considerations outweighed decades of evidence about the potential harm associated with its use.

   The effects of such large-scale decision making are felt locally. And in the case of chlorpyrifos, there may be no place where the tension between science and the administration’s policy inclinations plays out more than in California’s Kern County, the vast crosshatched expanse roughly the size of New Jersey that surrounds Bakersfield.

   California is the nation’s leading state for agriculture production. Kern County is a primary hub, with more than $7 billion in agricultural commodities in 2017, led by almonds, citrus and grapes, among dozens of crops.

   It also leads the state in the use of chlorpyrifos. And its toll may extend well beyond farm workers. Neighborhoods and schools are carved out of old orchards and groves. They may be separated from crops by mere feet, maybe a road. Even in the middle of the small towns, nobody is far from the fields or the nearly 29 million pounds of pesticides — including 200,000 pounds of chlorpyrifos — spread on them in 2016, just within Kern County.

   “For the federal government to not just ignore, but throw away, 10 years of science showing that chlorpyrifos is damaging, we feel that at the local level,” said Valerie Gorospe, a community organizer in Delano, near Bakersfield, whose mother was a longtime advocate for farm workers and pesticide overhaul.

    

   Weighing the Risk When Exposed

   Chlorpyrifos is part of the same chemical family as sarin nerve gas. An estimated six million pounds are spread each year across dozens of agricultural crops nationwide, including alfalfa, almonds, citrus, corn, cotton and grapes. It is useful as a broad-spectrum pesticide, farmers and agricultural experts say, because it kills virtually every kind of insect.

   The chemical’s effect on humans is the subject of some debate but its toxicity is not in doubt. Acute poisonings, from things like spills or drift, can result in respiratory distress, vomiting, convulsions, unconsciousness and death.

   There is also broad concern over the impact of low-level exposure, including in drinking water and on the fruits and vegetables we eat. Chlorpyrifos is deemed particularly dangerous to young women in farming communities, as studies have found it in the blood of pregnant women and their babies. It has been linked to neurodevelopmental problems such as reduced birth sizes and weights, lower I.Q.s, attention deficit problems and disorders on the autism spectrum — symptoms found with higher frequency in farming communities, studies suggest.

   Those in the agriculture and chemical industries who say there is still doubt about the degree of the health risk often point, paradoxically, to the problem that the chemical is too toxic to be tested on humans, leaving scientists to rely on epidemiological studies of people who might have been exposed to it in their normal environment over long periods.

   An increasing number of the studies show correlations to neurological problems in children, among other issues. But are their problems the result of chlorpyrifos?

    

   Dow says no, and other people associated with the agriculture industry, in an echo of the argument against aggressive action to confront a warming planet, say not enough is known yet to come to a firm conclusion.

   “Our attitude is not that chlorpyrifos is good or bad,” said Gabriele Ludwig, the director for sustainability and environmental affairs for the California Almond Board. “We don’t know. We feel it hasn’t gone through the proper process.”

   Hundreds in California have been acutely sickened by chlorpyrifos in the last 15 years, mostly farm workers and mostly by drift. The incidences have slowed since 2015, when state regulators added restrictions to chlorpyrifos use, requiring licensing and training.

   But as chlorpyrifos use has continued, so have the accidents — at least a half-dozen reported episodes of drift in California, including the one in May 2017 that sent Ms. Lopez to the hospital and sickened 36 other cabbage pickers.

   More recently, in July, 10 workers were sickened in Solano County, between Sacramento and San Francisco. They were working in a sunflower field when chlorpyrifos apparently drifted from sprayers in an adjacent almond orchard.

   Kern County, a primary agricultural hub in California, also leads the state in the use of chlorpyrifos.

   The vast majority of incidents, involving chlorpyrifos or any other pesticide, go unreported. Most farm workers in California are undocumented immigrants. They worry about everything from missing much-needed work to reprisal from bosses and deportation from the authorities.

   “There is no incentive to report these things,” said Eriberto Fernandez, the research and policy coordinator for the United Farm Workers Foundation in Bakersfield, whose parents have worked the fields for decades.

   Most farm workers, like most other people in Kern County, do not distinguish chlorpyrifos among hundreds of pesticides used in agriculture. They may smell different, or cause different reactions, but few, if any, can name them. That was certainly true during the drift incident in May 2017. No one knew it was chlorpyrifos that was sickening the workers, because most had never heard of it until the Trump administration halted the proposed ban.

   “A pesticide is a pesticide,” said Lucia Martinez Polido, one of the women picking cabbage that day.

   If pesticides are not floating in the air, they are smeared on their fingers and skin from nearly everything they touch. Shiny citrus leaves are dulled by a white film. Pruning grape vines at the end of the season, for example, can free a chemical odor. Kicking up dust releases it from the soil.

    

   It is why many farm workers cover their skin from head to toe, wrapping bandannas around their noses and mouths, even in the teeth of triple-digit summer days. They bring snacks to the fields that they do not have to touch with their hands. They carry their own bottles of eye wash.

   But concern over chlorpyrifos extends well beyond farm workers and acute poisonings.

   Each spring, the dozens of schools and licensed child-care centers in Kern County within a quarter mile of an active crop receive a list of the restricted-use pesticides that the growers plan to use, sometime between July 1 and June 30. Some of the lists contain more than 50 different chemicals. Chlorpyrifos is often one of them.

   If the pesticides are known to drift, like those spread by crop dusters, they cannot be used within a quarter mile of schools, this year’s notifications state. If they are less susceptible to drift, “such as most applications using a tractor,” the buffers shrinks to 25 feet. Monday through Friday, they cannot be sprayed from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

   Precautions at the Day Care Center

   Among those notified is Sunset Child Development Center, a day care south of Bakersfield. It is part of the Arvin Migrant Center, commonly called a “labor camp,” with rows of housing for itinerant farm workers.

   The day care is next to grape vineyards. The children there range from 6 months to 5 years old. Because most of the parents are farm workers themselves, they drop off their children as early as 4:30 a.m. — within the allowable time slot for spraying pesticides like chlorpyrifos.

    

   One parent of a 3-year-old girl is Byanka Santoyo, 28, a single mother from Arvin. She is a daughter of farm workers, and spent time in the fields herself.

   Ms. Santoyo works as a community organizer for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. It was the area’s notoriously polluted air, sometimes the worst in the nation, that led her to activism. It was the drift episodes experienced by her parents over the years, and now the concern over her daughter’s health, that pulled her toward fighting unsafe use of pesticides.

   “We all live surrounded by ag,” Ms. Santoyo said. “We just want it to be safe.”

   The day care center is required to allow the children outside for parts of the day. There are sun shades to protect from the heat, but nothing to protect from whatever pesticides might be drifting in the air. Playground equipment is scrubbed several times a week because it often becomes covered in a sticky film that sometimes works its way indoors. Ms. Santoyo says her daughter’s clothes get tacky, and the residue is visible when she wears something like black leggings.

   Chlorpyrifos is not the most-used pesticide, but it is the most contentious. In California in 2016, according to the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation, 902,575 pounds of chlorpyrifos was used in more than 12,000 applications across 640,000 acres on more than 60 different crops.

   The fight to ban chlorpyrifos in California has several fronts, fought by organizations that include the United Farm Workers, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians for Pesticide Reform. They are ramping up pressure on state regulators and politicians as uncertainty over the federal ban persists.

    

   This August, a three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ordered the E.P.A. to ban it. In its ruling, the panel wrote, “There was no justification for the E.P.A.’s decision in its 2017 order to maintain a tolerance for chlorpyrifos in the face of scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children.”

   The ruling has been appealed, and in the meantime California is weighing tighter regulations of its own. While lawyers and lobbyists fight, the pesticide, sold under a variety of brand names like Lorsban and Vulcan and employed by farmers nationwide, remains in use.

   What Happens, a Farmer Asks, If It Is Banned?

   Dennis Johnston is a fourth-generation farmer in Exeter, east of Bakersfield. He remembers using chlorpyrifos on the citrus groves since he left college in 1980.

   “We use it for katydid, which takes a bite out of the fruit when it’s in the flower form,” Mr. Johnston said, referring to a pest that looks like a grasshopper. “It’s a little bite when they do it, but it grows and becomes a big chunk when it’s ripe and makes it unmarketable.”

   Chlorpyrifos, to Mr. Johnston and countless other farmers, is a go-to pesticide when others do not work. But Mr. Johnston, who said he has never had a drift incident, is using it less and less. He simply would like to have it available.

    

   The cloudy future of chlorpyrifos has left farmers like Mr. Johnston unsure how to proceed. Will the appeals court force the E.P.A. to ban it? Will California step in? And what if any of that happens while this season’s crop is growing?

   “We’re cautious about it, as most farmers are,” Mr. Johnston said. “Will it kill us if we can’t use it? Probably not, not in my business. Can we make something else work? Yes, but it’s what happens when you lose it. You have to use something in a different manner, or more of it. It’s kind of a daisy chain sometimes.”

   That concern echoes across the agricultural landscape, in Kern County and beyond.

   “That is a real dance that goes on out in the grove,” said Jim Cranney, the president of the California Citrus Quality Council. “You can have, at some point, the need to use a pesticide, but in other cases, you can allow the insects already in a grove to get rid of the harmful insects. When we use a pesticide that is harmful to the beneficial insects it can cause harmful insects to go haywire.”

   In November, in the absence of federal guidelines over chlorpyrifos, California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation announced tighter, though voluntary, restrictions, effective Jan. 1. The state agency wants to declare the chemical a “toxic air contaminant,” which would mean much stricter rules on chlorpyrifos use. But the process could take two years, so the agency made recommended changes in the interim.

   That was little relief to people like those in the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety.

   In November, in Lindsay, 60 miles north of Bakersfield, the group opened a storefront office. Staffed by volunteers, it is seen as a safe place for farm workers and concerned residents — most of them Latino, many of them undocumented — to ask questions without worry over repercussions from labor contractors or government officials.

    

   On the night of its opening, about 50 people stood in the dark parking lot. There were balloons and a ribbon to be cut. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate who entered politics partly because of concerns over pesticides, gave a short speech, pausing as each line was translated to Spanish.

   She spoke the language of organophosphates, with a deep knowledge of chlorpyrifos — its regulatory history and the risks increasingly attached to it. (She is an author of a 2000 report for Physicians for Social Responsibility called “In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development.”)

   “If it’s too dangerous to be used in the home, why isn’t it too dangerous for farm workers?” Ms. Stein said later, as people mingled inside and ate bowls of pozole.

   Unable, or Afraid, to Return to the Fields

   Lucia Montero came to the United States from Mexico at age 15 and immediately began working the fields. Now 33, she was a foreman in that cabbage patch on May 5, 2017, overseeing one of the three crews, when the invisible but toxic cloud of chlorpyrifos arrived.

   At first, she thought she smelled grease or burned oil. Believing it was the tractor, she turned off the engine.

    

   Then came the burning, the itching, the nausea. Ms. Montero called the supervisor on her phone, who told her to get her crew out of the field. By then, several were vomiting. Two or three fainted, she said.

   An investigation by the Kern County agricultural commissioner’s office was complicated by the fact that four separate pesticide applications took place that morning within 1.5 miles of the cabbage field.

   Ultimately, investigators found that a company called Sun Pacific applied chlorpyrifos at seven tangerine (a common name for a type of mandarin) sites half a mile to 1.5 miles from the cabbage field. Sun Pacific, a large grower behind the Cuties brand of mandarins, was fined $30,250.

   Another company nearby had sprayed grapes with a sulfur compound found to have drifted into the cabbage patch, too. That company was fined $20,000.

   The investigation said that 37 workers reported illness. Almost all declined medical treatment. In interviews, several said they were afraid of the repercussions, like missed paychecks or being blacklisted by contractors.

   Ms. Montero has not been back since that day. She said she cannot fully shake recurring headaches, dizziness and nausea. Still living in Bakersfield, she has taken courses to become a barber.

   This month, Ms. Montero learned she was pregnant. She no longer worries just for herself.

   “I am scared,” she said. “I just hope I have a healthy baby.”

   Bricmary Lopez, the only one of the workers in the field that day to be taken to a hospital, has not returned to the fields either.

   She fainted many times after she was sickened by the drift incident, three or four times a week at first, she said. Her asthma has spiked, her skin gets blotchy, and her red-blood cell count has dipped.

   She filed a workers’ compensation claim with the packing company she was working for, but action has been slow. Most farm workers, advocates said, never take it this far.

   But Ms. Lopez, who arrived from Colombia in 2015 and has filed for asylum, does not fear the repercussions.

   “I shouldn’t be worried about calling attention to this,” Ms. Lopez said in her living room. Her daughters, ages 15, 18 and 21, stood at her shoulder, her fiancé sat at her side. “It was not my fault it happened.”

   THE REGULATION Chlorpyrifos, developed as a nerve agent, has been in use as a broad-spectrum pesticide since 1965 despite growing evidence of its harmful effects, especially in children and pregnant women. Most residential uses ended in 2001. The E.P.A. moved to ban it for agricultural purposes, with a March 2017 deadline to act.

   THE ROLLBACK On March 29, 2017, the new E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, canceled the proposed ban on chlorpyrifos. The reason: not enough science. “By reversing the previous administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results,” Mr. Pruitt said at the time.

   THE CONSEQUENCES The use of chlorpyrifos, an estimated six million pounds a year, continues across the country. Only Hawaii has banned its use.

   Easing a ‘War on Coal’

   Describing the previous administration as hostile to coal-burning plants, the E.P.A. reversed a rule that would have further improved the air in Texas.

   By Eric Lipton

   THOMPSONS, Tex. — It is a once-common sight that is now less frequent: A mile-long freight train rolls up to a power plant in Texas — in this case, the W. A. Parish complex near Houston — and then slows to a crawl as its cars, each carrying 100 tons of coal, are tipped one at a time like child’s toys to deliver their load.

   Long reliant on coal as a major source of fuel for its electricity-generating plants, Texas is increasingly shifting to natural gas, wind and solar energy, prodded by the improving economics of these alternative sources and by tighter environmental regulation.

   The change has brought a degree of progress in cleaning up the air. Two Texas coal-burning plants, targets of an Obama administration policy intended to curb harmful sulfur dioxide emissions, have closed this year. A third, which has supplied power to San Antonio since the 1970s, will be mothballed at the end of this month.

   These Texas plants, and a fourth that closed this year, together produced 108,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2017, or 39 percent of the total state power plant emissions of the pollutant. That is an extraordinary decline in one year, and more than half of the 194,000-ton reduction called for in the Obama plan from late 2016.

   A mile-long freight train that carries coal to the Parish plant.

   But now, after years of policies that President Trump and others have derisively described as a “war on coal,” the Trump administration has called a timeout on a costly mandate that would have ensured continued improvement in the region’s air quality.

   The administration’s target has been an Obama-era rule that would have forced a group of coal-burning plants to install expensive scrubbers to cut sulfur dioxide discharges. For the owner of the W. A. Parish plant, NRG Energy, this would have meant either spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put in two of the huge devices, or shutting down the coal-burning operations there.

   Before Scott Pruitt left his post as Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the agency notified NRG, as well as the owners of eight other Texas power plants, that the agency was no longer demanding the air pollution retrofits.

   Instead, the agency is working out an industry-backed alternative that will require no immediate reductions in air pollution by the Texas plants still in operation.

   The result, according to some of the United States’ top air pollution experts, is measurable human and environmental costs.

    

   Texas has long been reliant on coal power.

   Even with the recent shutdowns of coal-burning plants, Texas remains one of the top sources of sulfur dioxide emissions.

   Every year that the W. A. Parish plant continues to operate as it has been, an estimated 180 people in Texas and surrounding states die prematurely, according to a recent study. Sulfur dioxide, colorless as it comes out of the smoke stacks, turns into tiny sulfate particles as it travels through the air — small enough to pass through the lungs and enter the bloodstream. These particles can cause aggravated asthma, heart and lung disease, and other serious health problems.

    

   For Jennifer Cantu, who lives a few miles from W. A. Parish, the regulatory reversal is deeply personal. The plant pumped 37,649 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air last year, one of the highest levels among power plants in the United States.

   “It is the kind of thing you don’t think about at all — until you notice that ugly smell every once in a while,” Ms. Cantu said. “And then you remember, ‘There is that plant down there and I wonder: Should my daughters be playing outside?’”

   The effects are not limited to the immediate area. Haze created by the plant’s exhaust mars mountaintop views in national forests and wildlife areas, including Caney Creek hundreds of miles away in Arkansas.

   No environmental issue has animated Mr. Trump more than coal. The president has often portrayed coal as the heart of a lost industrial glory he is determined to restore. And for political as well as economic reasons, he has sided regularly with the industry and users of coal, dismissing much existing environmental regulation as an unjustifiably expensive, job-killing intrusion on the American economy.

   The administration said emissions of many pollutants declined in Mr. Trump’s first year in office and that it expects the declines to continue. “Despite a misleading narrative, our air is getting cleaner,” said James Hewitt, a spokesman for the E.P.A.

   After decades of political, scientific and economic clashes over the issue, the trade-offs highlighted by Mr. Trump’s policy shift in Texas raise a fundamental question: When it comes to the pace of environmental progress in the United States, when is enough enough?

    

   The Parish plant has been blamed for a noticeable decline in visibility in the Caney Creek Wilderness Area hundreds of miles away.

   Supporters of Mr. Trump’s deregulatory philosophy believe that much of his predecessor’s approach placed unjustifiable costs on companies and the economy. In Texas, the Obama administration relied on a rule governing haze in national parks to push through what critics said was an excessively expensive and unnecessary set of requirements to limit emissions from burning coal.

   Texas officials and the power plant operators argue that Texas is much better off without the Obama-era mandate.

   They dispute that the sulfur dioxide discharged from the W. A. Parish plant is a health threat, or a major cause of haze in national parks and wildlife areas, despite the conclusions of the Obama-era E.P.A. and certain environmentalists.

   And more important, they say, the fact that power plants across Texas are cutting the overall amount of sulfur dioxide in the air at an even faster rate than the Obama E.P.A. had mandated — without being forced to make expensive upgrades — is proof that market forces are a better mechanism than the government for balancing the costs and benefits.

   “All of this basically is a question of how quickly do you get the desired results,“ said David Knox, a spokesman at NRG, as he gave a walking tour of the sprawling plant.

   Caney Creek

   To discourage the use of coal and promote alternatives, the Obama administration was creative and aggressive in wielding the regulatory tools available to it. On the issue of power generation in Texas, in 2016 the administration employed what is known as the Regional Haze rule, which was intended to deal not with air quality or public health in the immediate vicinity of the power plants, but with the effects their emissions had on visibility in national parklands far downwind.

    

   Patrons at the OK Cafe near Caney Creek were unfamiliar with the Parish plant, but not with the haze that moves into the area from the south.

   In this case, downwind included the Caney Creek Wilderness Area near Glenwood, Ark., 400 miles north of Houston.

   At the OK Cafe in Glenwood on a recent Sunday, the hot topics included the slow start of the deer hunting season and an upcoming runoff election for local sheriff.

   No one there had heard of the W. A. Parish plant. The Regional Haze rule was just as unfamiliar.

   John Sorrells, a disabled saw mill operator, has seen traces of the haze in question while hunting in the area near Caney Creek. The haze moves in from the south and takes over the hillsides, hitting up against the mountains, which run east to west here.

   “If the wind is blowing out of the south for five days or so, you will see it, especially in the summertime” Mr. Sorrells said. “It just covers the hills. It has got to be coming from somewhere.”

    

   “It just covers the hills,” John Sorrells said of the haze, which he has seen while hunting near Caney Creek. “It has got to be coming from somewhere.”

   The Regional Haze rule, which dates to the Clinton administration, has a goal of gradually cleaning up haze in 156 national parks and wildlife areas, including such landmarks as Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

   Caney Creek, a pristine, 14,290-acre federally protected wilderness area on the southern edge of Arkansas’ Ouachita National Forest, had its own visibility problems until that trend slowly started to turn around in the last decade. The improvement most likely accelerated this year, with the closing of several major coal-burning power plants in Texas. But the air clarity is still a long way from so-called natural conditions, when views can extend as far as 80 miles.

   The W. A. Parish plant, a 2016 E.P.A. assessment found, was noticeably causing haze at Caney Creek 22 days a year, and was a contributing factor in haze there on a total of 54 days.

   NRG called the E.P.A. calculations “fundamentally flawed,” disputing that W. A. Parish affects visibility at Caney Creek. But the agency’s findings gave the Obama administration legal justification to step in and propose mandating the installation of scrubbers on a power plant more than 400 miles away.

   W. A. Parish

   Hundreds of buttons, dials and gauges blink, buzz and slide in one of the control rooms at the W. A. Parish plant, the central nervous system of a 4,900-acre site that allows the crews to watch as coal is ignited by an enormous fireball inside the boiler.

   The goal is to hit just the right temperature, about 3,000 degrees, as the steam generator turns turbines with so much power that the entire complex vibrates amid a deafening roar.

    

   Monitoring operations in the Parish control room.

   One of Parish’s four coal-burning boilers already has a scrubber, which douses the emerging exhaust with a mixture of water and limestone, extracting most of the sulfur dioxide. But the other three coal-burning units have no scrubber.

   Parish’s control room monitors demonstrate in real time the difference a scrubber can make: The unit that has one was discharging 272 pounds of sulfur dioxide per hour from the 500-foot smokestacks. A separate unit with no scrubber was pumping out 3,250 pounds per hour.

   Stephen Hedge, the Parish plant’s manager, said it had already invested a tremendous amount into cleaning up its air discharges.

   “We have got a lot of environmental controls on these plants,” he said, detailing past efforts at Parish to significantly cut pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and mercury.

   Most significant, NRG in 2016 completed a $1 billion project — the largest of its kind in the world — that curbs the impact the plant has on climate change. Equipment collects some of the carbon dioxide generated by one of the four coal-burning units so it can be reused by injecting it into the ground to increase oil and gas production at nearby well sites.

   In the debate over how much more money should be spent to protect the environment, Texas residents have much at stake, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, and George D. Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University.

    

   Blades for the plant’s turbines, which make the entire complex vibrate as they turn.

   Mr. Cohan estimated in a study published in October that Parish causes 180 premature deaths a year, based on a detailed analysis of emissions from the plant in the summer of 2015. An estimated 120 of those premature deaths would be avoided if scrubbers were installed on the plant as the Obama administration proposed, Mr. Cohan said.

   Dr. Thurston produced his own study that examined the health benefits of the Obama plan in greater detail.

   Lowering emissions at nine Texas power plants targeted by the Obama-era E.P.A., including Parish, would mean 1,300 fewer cases a year of acute bronchitis, as well as about 100,000 fewer lost workdays from related illnesses and 125 fewer admissions a year to area hospitals for heart conditions, he concluded.

   Hoping to drive home the point to Mr. Pruitt, the former E.P.A. head, who is from Oklahoma, Dr. Thurston prepared a summary showing how the Obama policies would also benefit Oklahoma residents, given that air pollution from Texas often blows in that direction.

   The bottom line: Hundreds fewer Oklahomans would die prematurely each year, according to a chart that Dr. Thurston passed to Mr. Pruitt during a June 2017 meeting, where Dr. Thurston and other public health experts urged Mr. Pruitt not to reverse the Obama administration’s proposed order demanding plant upgrades under the Regional Haze rule.

    

    “People in your own state won’t get these health benefits from cleaner air if you don’t follow through on this,” Dr. Thurston said he told Mr. Pruitt.

   Mr. Pruitt’s response, Dr. Thurston said, was blunt.

   “This is a visibility rule,” Mr. Pruitt said. “Therefore the health impacts are irrelevant.”

   The agency a few months later notified Texas that it was rejecting the Obama-era proposal. W. A. Parish and the eight other coal-burning plants in Texas would no longer face specific orders mandating air pollution upgrades.

   Environmental groups sued late last year to try to block the rollback. But even while this lawsuit has been pending, coal-burning power plants in the state have been shutting down for reasons beyond the potential costs of complying with the Obama policy.

   Allan Koenig, a vice president at Vistra Energy, which owns three of the coal-burning plants that have shut down in Texas this year, said his company was shifting to energy generated by renewable sources, such as a solar plant in West Texas that came online this year.

   “This is what our customers want,” he said. “So a lot of this is taking place already.”

   But the progress that has been made, while considerable, is still far short of what the Obama-era E.P.A. sought.

    

   And even after subtracting the emissions from the Texas coal-burning plants that closed this year, the state remains the top source of sulfur dioxide releases in the country. The 26 states with the lowest sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants — a list that includes California and New York — collectively produced 157,000 tons in 2016. That is less than Texas is still generating on its own, E.P.A. data suggests.

   Installing the scrubbers on the six remaining Texas power plants targeted by the Obama administration, including Parish, would mean 11,400 fewer cases a year of asthma attacks spread across 14 states, according to Dr. Thurston’s calculations. It would also mean 600 fewer cases of acute bronchitis, about 40 fewer nonfatal heart attacks and about 310 fewer premature deaths every year.

   What these numbers suggest, Mr. Cohan said, is that now is not the time to stop.

   “Just because the water is getting cleaner does not mean we should not stop the industry from dumping huge amounts of hazardous waste in our rivers and lakes,” he said. “Just because cars are getting cleaner does not mean we should not regulate the dirtiest cars and trucks on the road. It is the same thing with coal-burning plants like Parish. Sure, they are cleaner than they used to be. But they are still not clean enough.”

   THE REGULATION The Environmental Protection Agency proposed in late 2016 that nine Texas coal-burning power plants upgrade pollution controls to reduce haze in nearby national parks and wilderness areas. The E.P.A. estimated that the move would cut sulfur dioxide pollution by 194,000 tons per year. It would also reduce the risk of heart and respiratory conditions for Texans and for people in nearby states.

   THE ROLLBACK The Trump administration decided in October 2017 to reverse that plan and allow the state and its utilities to come up with their own plan to reduce the haze.

   THE CONSEQUENCES Even without enforcement of the Obama-era plan, three of the nine targeted coal-burning power plants are shutting down this year, resulting in more than half of the reduction in sulfur dioxide the Obama administration wanted. It is unclear whether the rest of the reduction will happen, however, since the remaining plants are not required to install or upgrade scrubbers that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.

   Sidestepping Protections

   Decades of cooperation in Congress helped a polluted river in West Virginia. Now rigorous restrictions from the Obama era are being blocked, delayed or killed.

   By Steve Eder and Eric Lipton

   CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Kanawha River has never been clean, at least not since Colleen Anderson moved here nearly 50 years ago.

   The river is lined with so many chemical facilities that the area where the Kanawha cuts through the Charleston region is known as Chemical Valley. One town, Nitro, even gets its name from a chemical — the nitrocellulose produced there for explosives.

   In the 1980s, Ms. Anderson recalls, swimmers competing during an annual waterfront festival would enter the river with bright white swim caps, only to see them stained a murky brown.

   “It’s a beautiful river,” she said. “You just don’t want to fall in.”

    

   Colleen Anderson on the bank of the Kanawha. She evacuated Charleston during a chemical spill in 2014 so she and her family could find clean water.

   In fits and starts, the Kanawha has gotten the attention of environmentalists and federal officials concerned about water quality. Beginning in the 1960s, both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington made strides to restore polluted rivers across the country, including the Kanawha, the largest inland waterway in West Virginia.

   Last year, there were even academic papers drawn up to make the Kanawha more desirable for swimming and fishing over the next two decades, building on an aggressive push during the Obama administration to reduce fecal bacteria, industrial pollution and heavy metals in the river.

   But the environmental crackdown hit the chemical and coal industries hard, and they resisted much of it. Since the election of President Trump, the most rigorous Obama-era restrictions have been blocked, delayed or killed, allowing many industries along the Kanawha and its tributaries to sidestep some cleanup and protection efforts.

   The operator of the state’s largest power plant, which towers over the Kanawha about 20 miles downstream from here, has stopped design work on a water treatment system that would have removed most of the remaining pollutants — like arsenic, mercury and selenium — from discharges into coal ash ponds and the river.

   And coal-mining companies are off the hook for needing to step up protections on hundreds of miles of streams and rivers in the Appalachian Basin, which includes the Kanawha. Republicans in Congress, with the support of several Democrats, repealed a rule last year curtailing mining practices that threatened streams and forests.

   Pollutants flowing to Leatherwood Creek, which feeds the Elk and Kanawha Rivers.

   Rebecca McPhail, president of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, said the rollbacks under the Trump administration had “provided a boost to confidence for manufacturing investment” in the state. Even without the federal rules, she said, businesses were “working to improve our ability to make the water we are putting out cleaner than when we brought it in.”

   Many here cheer the counterattack on the mounting demands from Washington, which had been seen as a direct threat to jobs. Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said the Obama administration proposed “impossible standards” that were unfair to coal mining. “Things are now getting back to balance, creating some certainty,” he said.

   But others saw the Obama-era offensive as long overdue and mourn the faltering of decades of bipartisan consensus around clean-water protections. The likely consequences for ordinary people of the Trump administration’s interventions can be measured in many ways, including the hundreds of pounds of chemicals that continue to make their way into the river and the reduced protections for fish and sources of drinking water.

   “I’m angry, but not surprised,” said Ms. Anderson, 68, a writer, graphic designer and singer who spoke up publicly about protecting the environment after a chemical spill in 2014 contaminated the city’s water supply.

   During that emergency, she drove an hour from her Charleston home with her elderly parents to find a hotel — and a shower — with safe water. At a public hearing, Ms. Anderson sang her testimony — “If You Love My West Virginia” — a song she wrote about the neglect of the state’s waters and mountains.

    

   Pipes along the Kanawha funnel the John E. Amos Power Plant’s waste to a treatment facility. The plant has discharged arsenic, mercury and other toxic heavy metals into waterways.

   ‘Not Economically Practical’

   Of the big polluters benefiting from the rollbacks, none looms as large as the John E. Amos Power Plant. The coal-powered utility sits downstream, just after the Kanawha begins a U-shape turn from Charleston.

   Giant plumes of steam and exhaust spew around the clock from its cooling towers, but its discharges into waterways pose one of the greatest harms.

   The discharges have been highlighted repeatedly over the past two decades in studies by the Environmental Protection Agency. The waste has included arsenic, mercury and other toxic heavy metals, as well as selenium and other substances that kill fish or damage their reproductive systems.

   The owner of the plant, the Ohio-based power company A.E.P., has taken steps to address some of the worst problems. Nonetheless, E.P.A. records show, the plant continued to release significant levels of contaminants last year, including more than 400 total pounds of arsenic, mercury and selenium in the Kanawha and an adjacent stream.

   Tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals and other waste were dumped into coal-ash storage ponds next to the plant. Tests suggestedsome of the ponds had leaked substances, including arsenic and manganese, into groundwater, although A.E.P. said there was no evidence these contaminants reached the Kanawha.

   A treatment facility at the Mountaineer Power Plant in New Haven, W.Va. A delayed Obama-era order required plants to remove nearly all toxic chemicals from their wastewater.

   The E.P.A. has estimated that coal-fired power plants like Amos are responsible for one-third of the toxic pollutants released into surface waters in the United States. The Obama administration ordered Amos and scores of other plants across the country to close many of their storage ponds and eliminate nearly all contaminants in their wastewater, something likely to require additional treatment devices.

   The E.P.A. in 2015 estimated that the changes to wastewater treatment alone would prevent the release of 1.4 billion pounds of pollutants a year into holding ponds, rivers, streams and groundwater.

   “This is the most toxic, unregulated source of water pollution in the country,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who worked at the E.P.A. for three decades, before retiring last year as the head of the water pollution office. “And it threatens the drinking-water supplies and fisheries of 2.7 million people who live immediately downstream of these coal-fired power plants.”

   A.E.P. and other plant owners had begun complying with the new requirement by designing expanded treatment systems. Under the current system at Amos, waste is collected in a smelly, dusty building a mile from the plant. A maze of pipes, filters and tanks skims off some of the toxic contaminants, but leaves others in the water.

   The planning and design work for an expanded system was halted this past year at Amos and roughly two-thirds of the 80 power plants ordered to make the upgrades after the E.P.A. moved to delay the Obama-era order by two years. The agency also indicated it might ultimately weaken the requirements.

   The E.P.A. estimated that improving wastewater treatment would keep 1.4. billion pounds of pollutants a year out of holding ponds, rivers, streams and groundwater.

   A.E.P. prides itself on complying with environmental standards. But Melissa McHenry, an A.E.P. spokeswoman, said the company believed “it is not economically practical” to upgrade the wastewater treatment facility, given that its existing system can already remove about 90 percent of selenium, a major pollutant that kills aquatic life.

   Without a federal order to update the system, she said, the company might have a problem recovering the cost — estimated to total tens of millions of dollars — from ratepayers in West Virginia, as it needs permission from state regulators to make capital improvements.

   Closed, but Still Toxic

   Much of the coal fueling the Amos plant comes from mines in West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia that have produced tens of billions of tons in coal and provided jobs for generations.

   With the industry in decline, some of those facilities have shut down over the past decade. But there is a high risk that a mine will continue to pollute even after it closes. That’s what happened at Surface Mine No. 4A in Clay County, about 60 miles from Charleston.

    

   Leatherwood Creek, which environmentalists say has been contaminated by runoff from a shuttered mine.

   At first glance, a stream near the mine appears picturesque, but aquatic life is missing and the water is tinged in white. The stream flows into the Leatherwood Creek, which eventually meets the Elk River and ultimately the Kanawha River.

   Environmentalists sued the mine’s operator last year, contending that runoff from the mine contained high concentrations of sulfates, magnesium and other contaminants. The chemicals, they said, leached from soil that was dug out of the coal and later used to fill in missing hillsides.

   Representatives from Southeastern Land, which owns the mine, did not respond to requests for comment. In court papers, lawyers for the mine’s previous owner acknowledged that there were discharges, but said steps were being taken to minimize the impact on nearby waters.

   The federal government tried in 2016 to curb water pollution from mines by imposing the Stream Protection Rule. Finalized by the Interior Department in the waning days of the Obama administration, it mandated long-term monitoring and treatment of pollution from mines, even after active mining had ended.

   The rule, now repealed, required a more rigorous level of monitoring than West Virginia, including through tests of insects and other living organisms in streams. But it applied only to facilities that opened or expanded after the regulation went into effect, so Surface Mine No. 4A was likely to be exempted.

    

   A barge transporting coal from West Virginia mines. The coal industry has celebrated the rollback of Obama-era regulations it considered onerous.

   The new federal rule and other changes, the Interior Department estimated in 2016, were expected to improve the water quality nationally in 263 miles of rivers each year — 174 of them here in the Appalachian Basin.

   But the National Mining Association, which represents the coal industry, said that the rule would cost 78,000 coal mining jobs, and that suitable protections were already in place. Less than a month into the Trump administration, Congress passed a bill nullifying the rule, which Mr. Trump signed in front of coal miners.

   “This rule we’re eliminating, it’s a major threat to your jobs, and we’re going to get rid of that threat immediately,” Mr. Trump said.

   Joe Lovette, a lawyer and the founder of Appalachian Mountain Advocates, a group that handles litigation for residents hurt by mining pollution, considered the move a setback. “Old mines are the biggest concern,” Mr. Lovette said, adding, “There is this pollution that will discharge into perpetuity.”

   A Crisis Forces Action

   Many West Virginians have long accepted the environmental consequences of having polluting industries in the state, especially since they drive the local economy. Mr. Lovette would be the first to acknowledge that his objections do not reflect mainstream public opinion.

   But the chemical spill that contaminated Charleston’s drinking water in 2014 served as a catalyst for change.

    

   About 10,000 gallons of MCHM, used in cleaning coal, spilled from a ruptured storage tank at Freedom Industries, a company that processed and stored chemicals. The substance leaked into the Elk River, just upstream from the intake for the state’s largest water provider.

   By the next morning, 300,000 people across the Charleston region were told not to use their water for drinking, cooking or bathing. The crisis lasted for 10 days, bringing the region to a standstill and prompting people to seek medical care for nausea and vomiting. Restaurants closed, and bottled water was scarce. The chemicals in the air smelled of black licorice.

   “I was afraid and shocked,” said Ms. Anderson, who moved to the state in 1970 as a volunteer for the national VISTA service program and has lived for the past 37 years about a mile from the State Capitol and just a few blocks from the Kanawha.

   State lawmakers, usually reluctant to challenge industry, quickly passed a sweeping law that required, among other things, annual inspections of aboveground storage tanks. The law was subsequently weakened by exemptions — the number of tanks regulated was reduced to 5,300 from about 48,000 — but it remains one of the country’s tougher regulations on industrial tanks.

   The spill also focused the attention of federal regulators. After the contamination, a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups led to a consent decree requiring the E.P.A. to complete spill prevention rules by 2019. The E.P.A., under President Obama, considered a regulation that would have expanded its oversight of tanks, letting industry bear the compliance costs.

   But in keeping with the hands-off approach of the Trump administration, the agency took a different route. Scott Pruitt, who was forced to resign over the summer as administrator of the E.P.A., proposed as one of his last acts that the agency would take no action.

   “E.P.A. believes that additional regulatory requirements for hazardous substances discharges would be duplicative and unnecessary,” Mr. Pruitt said in a news release.

   If the E.P.A. enacts Mr. Pruitt’s proposal, new safeguards on storage tanks — expected to cover 350 hazardous chemicals and tens of thousands of facilities across the country — will be shelved.

    Profiting, at a Cost

   The flaring of natural gas fouls the air in North Dakota, demonstrating a trade-off between short-term economic gains and long-term environmental damage.

   By Eric Lipton

   FORT BERTHOLD, N.D. — In late June, a specially equipped truck from the Environmental Protection Agency drove through the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation to examine air hazards. What it found was sobering.

   Among the risks, according to confidential copies of inspection reportsobtained by The New York Times, were plumes of improperly burned methane from oil wells.

   One flare that was supposed to be burning gas was not lighted, allowing raw methane to spew into the air. In other spots, waves of benzene, a cancer-causing chemical, were leaking at high levels from a storage tank.

   Those hazards and others were not shared with Fort Berthold’s residents at a time when energy production in the region is booming. But the findings underscored the risks involved in the Trump administration’s decision to reverse a rule curbing leaks and flaring, both of which pose dangers and are increasingly common on federal and Indian lands across the West.

   The Trump administration reversed restrictions on the practice of burning methane and eliminated measures intended to curb gas leaks, which can fill the air with toxic chemicals.

   Like other communities around the country, Fort Berthold is confronting a tension at the heart of Mr. Trump’s unrelenting push to roll back regulations governing a range of industries: Cutting the costs associated with environmental protection can generate substantial short-term economic gains while producing longer-term and potentially profound health and environmental effects.

   The Flaming Landscape

   A 75 percent surge in oil production in the past two years has left Fort Berthold lighted by towering shafts of flame. Hundreds of controlled flares burn so bright in the cold night air that the sky turns a weird orange yellow, even as snow falls onto the frozen ground.

   An estimated three billion cubic feet of gas is burned or released each month here — a volume that could heat about 600,000 homes. Energy companies have figured out a way to capture the oil, but their pipelines are not big enough to handle all the less valuable gas that comes out of the ground. Much of the excess is torched.

   As oil and gas operations have intensified in this isolated stretch of North Dakota, so have residents’ concerns. The venting of unburned methane fouls the air with chemicals that are not only in some cases carcinogenic but over the next 100 years will be 30 times as potent a cause of global warming as carbon dioxide. At the same time, the improper burning of methane can create pollutants that cause a variety of respiratory problems.

    “My children and grandchildren breathe in this air,” said Lisa DeVille, whose family has lived on the reservation for generations. “How is this going to affect our health?”

   Ms. DeVille and her husband, Walter, are members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, the group of tribes living at Fort Berthold. She said they learned last year that she had a respiratory condition that her doctor compared to symptoms common among oil field workers. She called it Bakken cough, after the geological formation that is yielding so much oil and gas in the Dakotas and Montana.

   The Obama administration, concerned about the effects on health and global warming as well as the wasteful practice of simply burning off energy, moved to curtail leaks and flaring on federal lands and Indian reservations. But in September, under pressure from the energy industry, President Trump’s Interior Department eliminated the rule’s most important provisions.

   The move was in keeping with Mr. Trump’s effort to cut regulatory costs for industry and promote domestic energy production. And it will help protect a remarkable economic boom on this once-impoverished reservation, where the tribal government’s budget — 90 percent of which comes from energy-related sources — has surged over the past 15 years to $330 million from $20 million.

    

   Lisa DeVille, whose family has lived on the reservation for generations, developed a respiratory condition her doctor said was common among oil field workers.

   Tribal leaders and state officials here say they are committed to using their regulatory powers to try to confront the flaring and leaks. But in an interview last month, the top tribal oil and gas regulator, Carson Hood Jr., acknowledged that he had no plans to cut production until pipelines could be built to handle all the excess gas. That means the intense flaring will probably continue for at least several years, or until the boom in oil drilling subsides.

   And the state, which has its own flaring rules, recently moved to reconsider them, as it does not want to chase away any new investment by oil and gas companies, which fuel the state’s economy.

   The leaks and flaring are an increasing source of tension at Fort Berthold. Many are focused on the cash from the energy industry that is pouring into community and tribal government coffers. The tribes and some families are paid royalties for each barrel of oil pulled from the ground, revenue that has changed many lives for the better.

   “Sovereignty by the barrel,” is the slogan used by the M.H.A. Nation’s Energy Division, which both regulates and promotes oil and gas drilling here.

   Yet others are backing a lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s rollback of the federal rule, while also pressing tribal leaders to move aggressively on their own to confront the consequences of the burning and leaking of gas.

    

   An oil boom has brought wealth to the Forth Berthold Indian Reservation, where the local government and certain residents collect royalties for production on their land.

   “This is not just an empty worry — this is very real worry,” said Joletta Bird Bear, whose family collects oil production royalties but is pushing for greater regulations on reservation. “All you have to do is look around and you can see for yourself, the flares burning. They are huge. This is going to impact human life.”

   An Upsurge of Wealth

   The DeVilles set out for a drive through the Mandaree neighborhood of Fort Berthold to show off both the benefits and the costs that fracking has brought this tiny town.

   Oil revenues allowed the M.H.A. Nation to expand its elementary school. The tribes built an elaborate staging area for their annualsummertime powwow, which draws hundreds of dancers and drum groups from around the United States and Canada.

   Even the car the DeVilles used to cruise through their hometown — a 2019 Toyota Sequoia S.U.V. — comes in part from industry money, as Lisa’s mother receives large royalty payments from production on the land she owns, wealth she uses to help support her family.

   Besides royalties, residents also receive disbursement checks cut from the oil and gas money the tribal government collects. Some 16,500 members received $3,000 each last year.

    

   Oil workers gathered at the bar at Teddy’s Residential Suites, a hotel on the reservation, where oil production has jumped 75 percent in the past two years.

   But these benefits often have serious costs. Funding for an early-childhood learning center came from a $1 million donation made by a pipeline company, Crestwood, after it was blamed for spilling more than a million gallons of fracking wastewater. The spill reach

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3. EU Leaders Strike Deal to Ban Disposable Plastic Straws, Cutlery, and Plates

   Dec 26, 2018 | Chemical & Engineering News

   By Cheryl Hogue

   The market for single-use plastic cutlery, plates, and straws in the European Union would drop sharply under a deal reached by EU leaders Dec. 20.

   A plan provisionally agreed to by the European Parliament and the European Council would ban several plastic products in EU countries by 2021. Lawmakers in Parliament and the council, which consists of the heads of EU member countries, will have to endorse the deal in 2019 for the ban to take effect.

   The prohibition is focused on single-use plastic consumer items that are found in greatest numbers on EU shorelines. It covers cups made of expanded polystyrene, ear swabs with plastic sticks, and products made with transition metal–based oxo-degradable additives. Some companies have claimed that oxo-degradable plastics don’t add to marine plastic pollution but an investigation by the United Nations found otherwise.

   The pending agreement also calls for mandatory labeling on certain products containing plastic, including cigarette filters, single-use cups, and sanitary napkins, laying out their negative environmental impacts. It also sets a goal to collect 90% of plastic bottles used in the EU by 2029.

   https://cen.acs.org/policy/legislation-/EU-leaders-strike-deal-ban/96/web/2018/12
   

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Chemical Management News

4. Early Puberty in Girls Linked to Beauty Product Chemicals: Study

   Dec 27, 2018 | New York Post

   By Hannah Sparks

   As if being a pre-teen girl isn’t hard enough.

   A new study says some common soaps, shampoos and other personal care products may be putting adolescent girls at a higher risk of certain cancers and other developmental issues.

   Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that chemicals known as phthalates, parabens and phenols have all been linked to girls entering puberty at earlier ages. Their findings were published recently in the journal Human Reproduction.

   Parabens are used for preserving, and phenols are included for durability in personal hygiene products. Phthalates are used in beauty products such as cosmetics, nail polishes and perfumes to improve look and feel of the substance. These chemicals are believed to be endocrine disruptors for their ability to interfere with the body’s natural hormone regulation. In adolescents, experts say, this may mean advanced reproductive maturing — defined by signs of puberty, namely menstruation, in girls as young as 8 to 11.

   The effects these chemicals have on female reproductive hormones aren’t limited to the direct user, but in fact, harm infant girls whose mothers used these products while pregnant.

   “This is important, because we know that the age at which puberty starts in girls has been getting earlier in the last few decades; one hypothesis is that chemicals in the environment might be playing a role, and our findings support this idea,” Dr. Kim Harley, associate professor at U.C. Berkeley and the study’s lead author, says in a statement.

   “Earlier puberty in girls increases their risk of mental-health problems and risk-taking behavior as teenagers and increases their risk of breast and ovarian cancer over the long-term, so this is an important issue to address.”

   Researchers followed 179 girls and 159 boys from birth to adolescence between 1999 and 2000, and took urine samples at key ages to gauge the level of phthalates, parabens and phenols. They also collected samples from their pregnant mothers before they were born.

   Over 90 percent of samples contained these endocrine disruptors. Those who showed double the concentration of phthalates had girls who developed pubic hair 1.3 months earlier than typical girls. Certain phenols contributed to a one-month shift earlier in girls’ first menstruation.

   Parabens appeared to have the most intrusive impact, causing girls to develop breasts, pubic hair and their first menstruation about one month sooner. There was no similar association for boys.

   Phthalates, parabens and phenols are not easy to avoid. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that 96 percent of women in the study tested positive for these chemicals.

   https://nypost.com/2018/12/26/early-puberty-in-girls-linked-to-shampoo-and-toothpaste-study-says/
   

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5. 2019 Outlook: More Scrutiny in Chemical Regulation in European Union

   Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report

   By Stephen Gardner

   Chemicals companies will face greater scrutiny in 2019 of the information they provide the European Chemicals Agency, under the European Union’s over-arching chemicals law.

   The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is expected to issue a draft law early in the year that would require companies to update the registration dossiers under REACH (Regulation No. 1907/2006 on the registration, evaluation, and authorization of chemicals), which they have already submitted to ECHA.

   REACH includes a general obligation for companies to update their registration dossiers as new substance information becomes available. To trade legally on the EU market, companies must register the chemicals they produce or import in volumes above 1 metric ton annually.

   But implementing REACH has been dogged by concerns that the information provided in registration dossiers is insufficient for safe handling of substances, and by allegations that companies are failing to keep their dossiers up to date.

   In 2019, ECHA will “move strongly and forcefully forward” with recommendations in the commission’s review, especially on compliance with REACH’s chemical safety information provisions, Bjorn Hansen, ECHA executive director, told Bloomberg Environment. “We want the organization as a whole to focus more on compliance.”Checks and Evaluation

   Although the last REACH registration deadline passed in 2018 and all in-scope chemicals traded in the EU should now be registered, companies shouldn’t expect less regulatory scrutiny or fewer requests for new or updated information about their substances.

   “The ’R’ in REACH will still be active: Updates are needed to adjust dossiers according to current knowledge and guidelines,” said Volker Soballa, head of product stewardship at chemical company Evonik Industries AG.

   Companies also will have to come to grips with new provisions on nanomaterials in 2019.

   Substance evaluation under REACH is the process in which compounds with suspected hazards are assessed, often involving binding requests to registrants to provide new data. If substances are shown to be hazardous, they could be nominated for a range of regulatory measures, potentially including a ban within the EU.31 on the Menu

   During 2019, evaluations either will continue or start for 31 substances with suspected hazards. Evaluations are shared among authorities in EU countries.

   On nanomaterials, the commission in December adopted amendments to REACH that set out more clearly the specific data that should be provided in registration dossiers for the nanoforms of substances. Previously, REACH didn’t distinguish between the nanoforms and standard forms of substances.

   The new nanomaterial requirements will apply from Jan. 1, 2020, leaving companies all of 2019 to prepare.

   There could be problems implementing the nanomaterials requirement related to the analytical methods used to identify them and lack of specialist laboratories, Erwin Annys, director of REACH for the European Chemical Industry Council, told Bloomberg Environment.‘Constructive Exchange’

   For some companies, ongoing REACH compliance means managing hundreds of registration dossiers.

   At BASF SE that number is about 1,800 and each dossier is regarded as a living document that requires constant review, according to BASF spokesman Florian Tholey.

   Germany’s Lanxess has filed about 1,000 registration dossiers and REACH “is still a challenge for us,” spokeswoman Daniela Eltrop told Bloomberg Environment.

   Updating should be based on “constructive exchange and specific dossier compliance checks,” as “generalized criticism” from authorities about the quality of REACH dossiers is counterproductive, Eltrop said.

   “A dialogue between industry and ECHA is needed to reach a common understanding on the expected level of quality in dossiers,” said Eveline Kooiman, spokeswoman for Dow Europe.

   Exxon Mobil Corp. in 2019 “will continue to fully comply with the requirements of the REACH regulation,” spokeswoman Ann Wurman told Bloomberg Environment.Smoother Implementation

   Following the 2018 registration deadline—which marked 10 years of REACH—ECHA will “identify the lessons learned” so it can make “quicker decisions” with authorization, restrictions, and enforcement, ECHA’s Hansen said.

   Under REACH, substances can be banned from use in the EU, though companies can apply for specific continued-use authorizations. Restrictions are specific limitations on applications of substances, for example banning them from certain products.

   ECHA and EU countries will look at “key decision points” in these processes to see how they could be streamlined, Hansen said.

   For example, when applying for an authorization to use an otherwise banned substances, REACH requires companies to analyze possible substitutes to see if there are other alternatives. It could be clarified how extensive this evaluation of substitutes needs to be, Hansen said.

   Pushing to switch some substances because of their hazards “may lead to an increase of regrettable substitutions,” meaning substituting hazardous substances with equally or more hazardous alternatives, Dow Europe’s Kooiman said.

   In 2019, ECHA also will seek to identify process improvements that would lead to a reduction in the number of court cases challenging its decisions, Hansen said.Ready for Brexit

   During 2019, REACH must adjust to life without one of the EU’s main chemical industry powers: the U.K., which will leave the bloc March 29.

   Depending on the terms of Brexit, the registrations that U.K. companies file may no longer be valid, and companies would have to reregister through intermediaries or agents based in the remaining EU countries.

   The U.K. authorities also will no longer take part in REACH processes, such as evaluating suspected hazardous substances or assessing possible substance restrictions. British staff working for ECHA also could find that their rights to work in the EU are curtailed.

   “The U.K. is a very active member state and we will miss their capacity,” Hansen said.

   ECHA has been “preparing intensely” for Brexit, however, and implementing REACH for companies based in EU countries other than the U.K. will continue uninterrupted, he said.

   Brexit could leave companies in Europe facing two parallel regimes—REACH and a similar but separate system in the U.K.

   There should be “continued alignment” between the systems, for example to “avoid duplication of efforts on substance registrations,” BASF’s Tholey said.

    https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/2019-outlook-more-scrutiny-in-chemical-regulation-in-european-union

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Energy News

6. PTTCG America Receives Ohio EPA Permit for Cracker Complex

   Dec 26, 2018 | Platts

   By Kristen Hays

   PTTGC America has received a key permit to build a petrochemical complex in southeastern Ohio, the state's environmental agency said.

   The US arm of Thailand's PTT Global Chemical is planning a 1.5 million mt/year ethane cracker and four derivative polyethylene plants with a combined capacity of 1.6 million mt/year in Shadyside, Ohio.

   On Friday, Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit allowing PTTGC America and its partner, South Korea's Daelim Industrial, to build the complex alongside the Ohio River.

   The companies have yet to make a final investment decision on the project, however. That decision has been repeatedly delayed to allow more time to evaluate engineering designs submitted by US engineering and construction firms Fluor and Bechtel as well as the economic feasibility of the project, which has been in development since 2015. The company said in February it aimed to make an FID by the end of 2018, but no announcements have been made.

   PTTGC America did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

   The new complex, if built, would be part of a second wave of new petrochemical projects fueled by cheap feedstocks unearthed by the US natural gas boom and the second in the US Northeast, home to the prolific Marcellus and Utica natural gas shale plays. The first wave involves eight new crackers and 13 new polyethylene plants starting up in Texas and Louisiana in 2017-2019.

   Shell Chemical began construction on its new $6 billion petrochemical complex near Pittsburgh in 2016. That complex will have a 1.6 million mt/year cracker and three polyethylene plants with a cumulative capacity of 1.6 million mt/year.

   Ohio's EPA said in a statement that the agency was considering a change to PTTGC America's waste water discharge permit, but the company could start construction with the existing permit.

   https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/petrochemicals/122618-pttcg-america-receives-ohio-epa-permit-for-cracker-complex
   

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7. U.S. San Juan Basin Gas Eyed for Mexico LNG Exports

   Dec 26, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

   By Richard Nemec

   Mexico's Sonora state governor has signed a nonbinding agreement with U.S. counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico to interconnect existing natural gas pipelines allowing shipments from New Mexico's San Juan Basin to flow to a proposed export terminal on the Gulf of California in Mexico...

   Access to full text unavailable – subscription required.

   Story can be found here: 

   https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/116890-us-san-juan-basin-gas-eyed-for-mexico-lng-exports
   

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8. In Booming Oilfield, Natural Gas Can Be Free

   Dec 27, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal

   By Rebecca Elliott

   American energy companies have spent billions of dollars in the past decade exploring for natural gas. But in parts of Texas and New Mexico, there is now so much of it that it is sometimes worthless. Some companies have even had to pay buyers to take it away.

   Shale drillers in the Permian Basin are producing vast amounts of gas as a byproduct of prospecting for oil. But there aren’t enough pipelines to take all the gas to market, causing some of it to become landlocked, and sending local prices into free fall.

   Gas prices in parts of the prolific region hovered near zero last month and some trades went negative, to as low as a negative 25 cents per million British thermal units, according to S&P Global Platts. The price-reporting agency said it was the first time on record that gas traded for less than zero at the Waha hub in West Texas. While prices have since ticked up, averaging $1.68 per million British thermal units for the four weeks through Dec. 21, that is still 40% of the $4.20 per million British thermal units that gas has fetched in that time at the main U.S. benchmark, Henry Hub in Louisiana.Get Your Free GasInsufficient pipeline capacity has limited drillers' ability to move gas produced in the Permian Basin to market, reducing local prices and briefly sending them below zero. That means some companies had to pay for gas to be taken off their hands.

   Energy companies say last month’s zero pricing could be a sign of things to come in the Permian area next year, as more oil pipelines get built and companies ramping up production of crude, a far more lucrative product, get stuck with more gas that has nowhere to go. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates December gas production will top 12 billion cubic feet a day in the region, up about 34% from a year earlier.

   “You’ll see things get worse and worse and worse as oil production grows and gas production grows alongside it,” said J.R. Weston, an analyst for Raymond James & Associates Inc.

   Natural gas now helps generate about one-third of U.S. electricity, and it has become a valuable export commodity as ships take liquefied natural gas to Asia and Europe. For those fortunate enough to be near the Permian, getting it for nothing has been a boon.

   Vistra Energy Corp. —an electricity company with a power plant in Odessa, Texas, in the heart of the Permian—got paid last month to take gas.Permian Basin pipeline capacity

   “We were buying from intermediaries that I think were caught with gas, and they needed to get rid of it,” Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan said. “As long as we’re getting a discount for the gas, our plant is in the money.”

   Apache Corp. , which is developing a new gas field in the Permian, was among the producers that had to sell gas for pennies on the dollar. The company said it had protected itself using financial hedges, which can act as a form of insurance when prices drop.

   “That insulated us from the pricing dislocation that occurred around the beginning of December,” an Apache spokesman said.

   One option for Permian operators with too much gas is to light it on fire, a practice known as flaring. Flaring levels reached record highs in the Permian last quarter, when companies burned an average of 407 million cubic feet a day, according to analysis of public data compiled by Rystad Energy, an energy consulting firm.

   That has serious environmental consequences. The resulting greenhouse-gas emissions are equivalent to the daily exhaust emitted by about 2.7 million cars, according to estimates from the World Bank and Environmental Protection Agency.

   Texas has thus far allowed companies to flare freely. As of the end of November, state regulators hadn't denied a single permit request in more than five years, records show. But flaring isn’t always an option. Companies might not have the needed equipment set up in areas affected by pipeline outages. They also might have to pay landowners royalty payments for the gas they burn. And flaring gas on the spot means drillers miss out on more valuable products that come out of the ground with it, such as ethane, propane and butane, which are often processed out later.

   Technically, the Permian has more than enough pipeline capacity to accommodate all the gas being produced. But some of those pipes lead to Mexico, where demand hasn’t grown as quickly as anticipated.

   At least one new pipeline is expected to begin operating late next year, which should help ease bottlenecks. Built by Kinder Morgan Inc., it will carry gas from the Permian to the refining-and-export complex near Corpus Christi, Texas.

   But drillers have been more reluctant to commit to space on new natural-gas pipelines than they have on new oil pipelines. Pipeline companies generally want to secure such commitments before investing in new conduits.

   “Producers are going to be first interested in solving their crude-oil needs,” said Jeff Jorgensen, who leads energy-infrastructure research at Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which manages about $330 billion. “Signing up for a natural-gas pipeline is like going to the gym and stretching. You’re there to lift weights.”

   https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-booming-oilfield-natural-gas-can-be-free-11545906601?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1
   

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9. Free Markets and U.S. Energy Independence

   Dec 27, 2018 | Chicago Tribune - Opinion

   The stunning turn of fortunes was largely overlooked in a whirlwind of other Washington news this month: Nearly half a century of free-market initiatives and government encouragement has turned what long looked like an American weakness into a strength. “We’re becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, told Bloomberg. The United States is now the world’s biggest petroleum producer, ahead of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and all the others.
   

   That’s remarkable news for Americans with capacious memories. In the early 1970s, energy shortages pounded the American psyche and drove several of the world’s supposedly robust industrial economies into recessions. Arab members of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, retaliated for U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War by placing an embargo on oil shipments to this country.

   Humbled by the sudden realization that fickle Mideast regimes held so much clout over them, Americans sat in long lines to buy increasingly expensive motor fuels.

    SHAPE  \* MERGEFORMAT

   AP

   President Richard Nixon speaks near Orlando, Fla., in November 1973. It has been 45 years since President Richard Nixon, responding to an Arab oil embargo, vowed to make the United States energy independent- and do it in seven years. America is still waiting.

   President Richard Nixon speaks near Orlando, Fla., in November 1973. It has been 45 years since President Richard Nixon, responding to an Arab oil embargo, vowed to make the United States energy independent- and do it in seven years. America is still waiting. (AP)

   Declaring ‘Project Independence,’ Nixon’s the one

   On Nov. 7, 1973, Richard M. Nixon became the first of several U.S. presidents to declare the goal of U.S. energy independence, a mission that at the time seemed almost as crucial as the Manhattan Project — the quest to develop atomic bombs before Germany did — had been during World War II.

   Authors Rocks and Runyon, two of their generation’s most respected prophets of doom, warned Americans about the limited capacities of hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and wind generation to offset reductions in petroleum-based energy: “Despite obvious drawbacks, we can see that only coal holds prospects for saving the nation from an immediate energy shortage.”

   Such jeremiads seemed sensible at the time. But the pessimism discounted four factors that have radically improved the U.S. energy picture and delivered the nation to the role of net oil exporter. That distinction may be more temporary than enduring; the U.S. is likely to be a minor net importer for some time. Yet the net export of 211,000 barrels a day of crude oil and refined products is a stark contrast to the reliance on other countries at the peak of U.S. dependency. That came in 2005, when this country imported a net 12 million barrels every day — 60 percent of the nation’s crude oil consumption.

   The fracking revolution’s bonanza of energy production was mostly unanticipated. In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that U.S. oil and gas production would be flat to declining until about 2030. Instead, by 2013, U.S. crude production had leaped by 49 percent.

   And U.S. production continues to surge. The Wall Street Journal says America’s wells are expected to produce 28 percent more crude in 2019 than they did in 2017.

   The big four factors The energy crisis of the 1970s awoke consumers and the breadth of American industry — not just automakers — to the nation’s reckless squandering of petroleum and other resources. Government agencies have encouraged and demanded conservation measures across society. But the private sector supplied most of the initiative and the resulting innovations. Customer demand for more efficient automotive engines and other types of motors drove engineers and manufacturers to develop more efficient machines — many fueled by electricity, natural gas and hybrid combinations. The upshot: less reliance on petroleum fuels. Market forces and market freedoms birthed fracking and related extraction technologies that have vastly increased the potential supply of oil and natural gas. These techniques create their own environmental risks, and we won’t diminish or ignore them. That said, no incentive has been as integral to U.S. energy domination in recent years as the ability of wildcat drillers and other entrepreneurs to win returns on their investments. To see how industry employment has grown, visit three regions a modest distance from metropolitan Chicago: the Marcellus pumping fields of Pennsylvania, the Permian Basin of Texas and the Williston Basin, the rock formations that hold rich deposits of oil and gas beneath 140,000 square miles of high plains and rumpled valleys in the two Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In this country, governments let market pricing drive refiners’ decisions on how to align supplies with demands. The journal National Affairs has reported that of the world’s key petroleum-producing countries, only the U.S. allows private entities to control large-scale oil and gas reserves. When the federal government has tried to pick energy winners and losers via subsidies or taxation, its record is, as you’d expect, mixed: Ethanol mandates have done little more than prop up that industry, and tax breaks for the purchase of certain vehicles have won limited numbers of converts.

   Energy security at home, geopolitical influence abroad

   So the move toward energy independence — with its enhancement of affluence at home and U.S. influence overseas — has come more despite than because of government interventions. Not that Washington doesn’t benefit from the private sector’s risk-taking. America’s energy strength is a bulwark to the nation’s foreign policy. The U.S. is less hostage than before to geopolitical disputes or domestic unrest in dangerous neighborhoods of Africa, South America and, of course, the Middle East.

   Producing goods the world wants to buy is an expression of America’s economic strength. Each barrel of American oil shipped overseas helps offset purchases here of foreign-made electronics and other goods. And imagine how the notion of growing U.S. independence from global oil markets frustrates the leaders of Russia, Iran and other countries whose energy exports largely drive their economies.

   But we’re still burning fossil fuels

   By contrast, the frustration for many Americans is that the phrase “energy independence” keeps the policy and production focus primarily on petroleum products — and on the two-thirds of those products used by the transportation sector.

   Fossil fuels contribute to global warming. We empathize with environmental and clean-energy advocates in hoping that the practicalities and economics of wind, solar and other renewables free America and the world from reliance on petroleum and coal.

   America rode energy technologies and supplies to became the world’s leading nation in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maybe breakthroughs in energy storage, hydrogen, fusion or other fields we can’t today envision will revolutionize how we power, heat, cool, move and carry.

   Remember, coal is in decline largely because this century’s fracking advances have freed up great quantities of relatively cheap and clean-burning natural gas. That market-driven transformation at power plants, coupled with slower growth in demand for electricity and the rise of the renewable fuels, are the main reasons why U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have been declining.

   How growth drives energy innovation

   Based on the last two centuries of American history and the evidence now on (and under) the ground, the research and development that yield those breakthroughs are likeliest to occur if a free-market U.S. economy continues to grow and prosper. That economic expansion funds and incentivizes the risk-taking that has produced our greatest energy innovations.

   The startling rise of the U.S. energy outlook, including this month’s news about oil exports, once again reminds us:

   Prophets of doom tend to underestimate the power of liberated initiative — this ability of their fellow Americans to invent solutions that the prophets, blinded by their certitude, cannot see.

   https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-free-markets-energy-independence-fracking-oil-ntural-gas-20181208-story.html
   

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10. Pennsylvania OKs Key Permits for Ethane Cracker Pipeline

    Dec 26, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

    By Jamison Cocklin

    The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has issued key construction permits for Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC’s Falcon Ethane Pipeline system, which would feed the multi-billion dollar ethylene cracker under construction...

    Access to full text unavailable – subscription required.

    Story can be found here: 
    

    https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/116895-pennsylvania-oks-key-permits-for-ethane-cracker-pipeline
    

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Transportation and Infrastructure News

11. FRA Gives $46 Million in PTC Grants in 10 States

    Dec 26, 2018 | Railway Track and Structures

    By Paul Conley

    Eleven projects to implement positive train control (PTC) systems will split more than $46 million in grants from the Federal Railroad Administration.

    The winning PTC projects include a wide variety of rail projects, including freight (Alaska Railroad), intercity (Amtrak in Colorado, NCDOT in North Carolina)) commuter (Illinois’ Metra, California’s Caltrain and Metrolink, New Jersey Transit, and Massachusetts’ MBTA). The largest single grant is for up to $9,157,600 to install I-ETMS PTC wayside technology on approximately 179 miles  between Dodge City, Kan., and Las Animas, Colo. on the BNSF Railway, for use by the Amtrak Southwest Chief.

    News of some of the grants, notably more than $2 million to buy and install onboard I-ETMS PTC equipment on 24 new locomotives on the Chicago-area Metra, were announced by members of Congress earlier in the week. Additional details on the PTC grants can be found on the FRA website.

    The grants are the second wave of funds released by FRA in fiscal year 2018 from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program. Back in August, FRA announced $203.7 million in grant awards for PTC implementation to 28 projects in 15 states.

    The grants were announced just hours before the FRA was closed as part of the partial shutdown of the federal government.

    https://www.rtands.com/cs/ptc-grants-fra-gives-in-10-states/
    

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Environment News

12. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation

    Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times

    By Eric Lipton, Steve Eder and John Branch

    For nearly two years, President Trump has pursued an aggressive, far-reaching effort, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, to free American business from what he and many of his supporters view as excessive environmental regulation.

    The consequences are starting to play out in noticeable ways in communities across the United States.

    An investigation by The New York Times showed how Mr. Trump’s deregulatory policies are starting to have substantial impact on those who experience them close up — and often are economically dependent on the industries the president is trying to help.

    Here are five takeaways:Trump has quickly undercut Obama’s legacy

    President Barack Obama made protecting the environment a big part of his legacy. His administration, over eight years, carefully developed rules designed to clean up the environment, deter climate change and protect against dangerous chemicals. Many were completed in the final stretch of his presidency, often in ways that bypassed Congress.

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    But industry consistently balked at those regulations, calling them an overreach, duplicative and unnecessary, unleashing a backlash that has informed Mr. Trump’s approach.

    So, with equal decisiveness, Mr. Trump has sought to undo his predecessor’s agenda by blocking, delaying and killing measures. The Trump administration cited its rollbacks as a victory and the fulfillment of a campaign promise.

    The rapid change in policy direction shows how both presidents used their expansive executive powers — but for very different outcomes.Environmental impacts span the country

    The early impacts of the Trump rollbacks are beginning to emerge across the country, from California to North Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.

    The Times visited the communities facing these changes, and found that local residents and business leaders are often divided. Some believe that the Obama administration went too far in imposing new environmental demands, while others worry that the changes the Trump administration is making will hurt their families, in particular their children.Editors’ PicksDisney Is Spending More on Theme Parks Than It Did on Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm CombinedPalm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.The Year's Great Performers Dancing in a Series of Short Films

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    The geographic diversity of the places grappling with the trade-offs highlights how pervasive the connections are between natural resources, health and economic opportunity.

    In the vast farmlands of central California, day care centers have to take account of pesticide-spraying schedules. The local government’s revenues on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota have grown to $330 million from $20 million over the last 15 years because of vast fossil fuel reserves that can now be pumped from the ground using fracking. National forests 400 miles away can be clouded with haze produced by a coal-fired power plant near Houston.The rollbacks touch air, water, chemicals and climate

    No parts of the federal government during the Trump era have been more aggressive in rolling back rules than the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which between them regulate much of the intersection between the environment and the economy. Together their rule changes have touched nearly every aspect of environmental protection, including air pollution caused by power plants and the oil and gas industry, water pollution caused by coal mines, and toxic chemicals and pesticides used by farmers nationwide.

    In short, what is at stake is the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, the cleanliness of the rivers that flow past us, and the pace at which the climate is changing. Two years after Mr. Trump took office, the policy shifts are not nearly complete; dozens of other rules have been targeted for rollback.

    After decades of legislation and regulation, the environment in the United States continues to get cleaner. What has changed under Mr. Trump in most cases is the pace of improvement, which has been slowed in a number of key areas compared to what it would have been if the Obama rules had been preserved.The decline of coal has not been stopped

    If there is a single industry that has been at the center of the fight — both during the Obama expansion of rules and the Trump rollbacks — it is coal. Mr. Obama targeted the industry as a way to combat climate change. Mr. Trump has defended and promoted it as part of his populist political and economic strategy.

    Mr. Trump’s approach has been to slow demands for further steps to curb air and water pollution caused by coal-burning power plants.Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer

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    The tug-of-war involves coal mines as well, which were ordered by Mr. Obama to take steps to help clean thousands of miles of rivers and streams, only to be told by Mr. Trump that these measures were no longer necessary.

    What has not changed is the decline of coal — both coal mines and coal-burning power plants. Even as Mr. Trump has used his executive powers to help the industry, coal production in the United States continues to decline. As the Energy Department announced this month, the country’s coal consumption for 2018 is “expected to be the lowest in 39 years.” The decline is mostly a result of power plants shifting away from burning coal.Progress is slowing — but there’s still progress

    At the core of the fight between environmentalists and the Trump administration is a debate over a simple question: How much improvement is enough? By some measures — such as overall emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, two major air pollutants that cause smoke and haze and a variety of health ailments — environmental quality in the United States has continued to improve in the Trump era.

    That is in large part because of the rapid closure of more coal-burning power plants. But the pace of those declines would almost certainly have been greater had Obama-era policies continued. So what is happening in the United States is a slowing of the pace of progress — not a return to the era, before the E.P.A. was created in 1970, where a river in Ohio caught fire.

    Another factor is that environmental change happens slowly. So the real impact of the Trump-era policies may not be fully apparent until years after Mr. Trump leaves office.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/trump-environment-regulation-rollbacks.html
    

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13. Trump Imperils the Planet

    Dec 26, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

    It’s hard to believe but it was only three years ago this month — just after 7 p.m., Paris time, Dec. 12, to be precise — that delegates from more than 190 nations, clapping and cheering, whooping and weeping, rose to celebrate the Paris Agreement — the first genuinely collective response to the mounting threat of global warming. It was a largely aspirational document, without strong legal teeth and achieved only after contentious and exhausting negotiations. But for the first time in climate talks stretching back to 1992, it set forth specific, numerical pledges from each country to reduce emissions so that together they could keep atmospheric temperatures from barreling past a point of no return.

    Two weeks ago, delegates met at a follow-up conference in Katowice, Poland, to address procedural questions left unsettled in Paris, including common accounting mechanisms and greater transparency in how countries report their emissions. In this the delegates largely succeeded, giving rise to the hope, as Brad Plumer put it in The Times, that “new rules would help build a virtuous cycle of trust and cooperation among countries, at a time when global politics seems increasingly fractured.”

    But otherwise it was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, by backsliding among big nations, by fresh data showing that carbon dioxide emissions are still going up, by ever more ominous signs (devastating wildfires and floods, frightening scientific reports) of what a future of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions is likely to bring.

    The conference itself showcased the very fossil fuels that scientists and most sentient people agree the world must rapidly wean itself from. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, set the tone by declaring he had no intention of abandoning coal, which provides nearly four-fifthsof Poland’s electricity. The United States and three other major oil producers — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia — refused to endorse an alarming report issued in October by the United Nations scientific panel on climate change calling for swift reductions in fossil fuel use by 2030 to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, which it said were approaching much faster than anyone had thought.

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    Wells Griffith, Mr. Trump’s international energy and climate adviser, managed in one quote to summarize the dismissiveness of the American delegation and its fealty to the president’s apparently unshakable conviction that anything that helps the environment must inevitably hurt the economy. “The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground,” he said. “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice their economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.” The administration is full of zero-sum philosophers like Mr. Griffith. The idea that sustainability may be a necessary condition of future economic growth appears never to have crossed their minds.

    Further depressing the proceedings were recent defections and political troubles in countries that, along with the United States, had been expected to lead the way to a low-carbon energy future. Germany, which long ago walked away from carbon-free nuclear power, is having a hard time cutting back on coal because of political opposition. In Australia, a prime minister was kicked out of officebecause he wanted to reduce the use of coal, which Australia produces in abundance. China, despite admirably aggressive investments in wind and solar power, has yet to get a firm grip on its emissions from coal-fired plants. The new president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, not only named an outspoken climate-change denier as his foreign minister but also, reversing his predecessors’ policy, pledged to open up the Amazon to mining and farming. This will threaten biodiversity in one of the world’s great rain forests while crippling its ability to act as a sink for carbon emissions.

    No country’s backsliding, of course, compares with Mr. Trump’s. Determined to demolish President Barack Obama’s entire climate strategy, Mr. Trump has in the past year replaced Mr. Obama’s clean-power plan, which was aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, with an essentially useless substitute that would emit 12 times the pollution envisaged by the Obama plan. He has proposed weakening a major Obama regulation requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by 2025. (This rollback, The Times reported this month, came after a lot of whining by oil interests, not, as one might suspect, from the auto companies, which had accepted the challenge.) And the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department have taken multiple steps to roll back Obama-era efforts to control emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide. These three programs formed the basis of Mr. Obama’s pledge at the 2015 Paris meeting to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

    The health and environmental effects of the Trump rollbacks, as documented by a Times investigation published this week, are far-reaching and potentially devastating.

    This holiday season has brought more gifts to fossil fuel interests; every day is Christmas Day for the likes of Murray Energy and ExxonMobil. This month, the E.P.A. proposed killing an Obama rule that would effectively block the construction of new coal-fired power plants. The Interior Department relaxed restrictions on oil and gas drilling in areas inhabited by the sage grouse, a threatened bird. Also in December, the department released an environmental-impact statement that would open all or part of the 1.5 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to leasing and exploration. The area had been off limits to drilling for decades until Congress, late last year, approved an amendment sponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, to open it up.Editors’ PicksWhat the Mona Lisa Tells Us About Art in the Instagram EraChina’s Women-Only Subway Cars, Where Men Rush InHow China Took Over Your TV

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    All this is fundamentally Mr. Trump’s doing. A series of early executive orders established the pro-fossil fuel policy framework; Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, and Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, filled in the details. Mr. Pruitt has left Washington and Mr. Zinke is in his final days, both finishing under ethical clouds. They will deserve, along with Mr. Trump, history’s censure for doing virtually nothing to move to a more responsible energy future — and for not doing so at just the moment when the world needed the kind of leadership that Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry (and Bill Clinton and Al Gore before them), tried to provide.

    The numbers are not great. The goal in Paris was to keep warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, and if possible to hold the line at 1.5 degrees, thresholds that scientists deemed unacceptably risky. Delegates knew that even if every country managed to fulfill its individual pledges, the world would be on pace for 3 degrees of warming in this century. So they agreed to tighten the targets as time went on, but instead they’ve slid backward. Many large emitters are not on track to meet their self-imposed goals. That includes America, despite the retirement of many coal-fired plants in favor of cleaner natural gas, the increasing cost competitiveness of renewable fuels like wind and solar power, and the valiant efforts of states like California to sharply reduce their own emissions and lead where Mr. Trump will not.

    The bottom line, according to the Global Carbon Project, is that after three years in which emissions remained largely flat, global levels of carbon dioxide increased by 1.6 percent in 2017 and are on pace to jump by 2.7 percent this year. Some scientists have likened the increase in emissions to a “speeding freight train.” That has a lot to do with economic growth. It also has a lot to do with not moving much faster to less carbon-intensive ways of powering that growth. Or in Mr. Trump’s case, moving in the opposite direction.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/opinion/editorials/climate-change-environment-trump.html
    

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14. Forget the Carbon Tax for Now

    Dec 27, 2018 | The New York Times - Opinion

    By Justin Gillis

    The angry graffiti have been blasted off the Arc de Triomphe with water jets, leaving unnaturally white patches scarring the base of France’s national monument. The husks of incinerated cars have been cleared from the streets, the glass from shattered store windows swept up. The government has taken steps to appease the demonstrators, which may be working.

    With a bit of calm upon us, now would be a good time for those of us concerned about climate change to engage in some introspection.

    The violent demonstrations that flared this fall in France were a culmination of decades of rising anger among the working class, it is true, but they were triggered by plans to impose a tax hike on gasoline and diesel fuel at the pump in the name of fighting climate change. Only three years ago, French monuments were bathed in green floodlights to celebrate a global deal negotiated in a Paris suburb to limit emissions; now we are scraping ugly slogans off those monuments.

    Days before the French fury boiled over in November, voters in one of most liberal American states, Washington, once again rejected a plan to tax emissions of carbon dioxide in the name of fighting climate change.

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    These tax proposals all spring from basic economic theory. If people and companies are abusing a public good — in this case, by dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — the answer, economists tell us, is to put a price on that activity that reflects the harm and encourages the development of more benign alternatives. Because most of the gases that cause climate change contain carbon in some form, the shorthand term for this policy is a “carbon price.”

    Yet the climate movement has, I fear, turned this potentially useful tool into a fetish. Discuss any aspect of the emissions problem these days and you will quickly hear somebody say, “A price is the answer,” or equivalent words. You hear that from the lips of politicians, from newspaper editorial boards, from utility executives and even from the heads of oil companies.

    Yet the put-a-price-on-it mantra is proving, in practice, to be a political failure. The Democrats could not get such a policy through Congress even when they had big majorities in the first two years of the Obama administration. Efforts to sell Republicans on the idea that this is the most market-friendly approach to the emissions problem have failed miserably, and will continue to fail.

    Proponents of carbon pricing like to point out that variants of the idea have spread all over the world, including to all the countries of the European Union and several American states and Canadian provinces. This is true, but when you look at how these systems have worked in practice, the picture grows murky. Invariably, huge political capital was spent to push through a carbon price too low to spur the rapid reductions in emissions that we need.

    Cases that are held up as demonstrating the purported success of carbon pricing, like a tax in British Columbia, mostly prove that if you slap on a modest carbon price, you will get a modest economic response. That people may get used to paying the low tax does not seem to make it much easier, in these jurisdictions, to raise the price to a level where it will really bite.Editors’ PicksWhy Do Asian-Americans Remain Largely Unseen in Film and Television?Disney Is Spending More on Theme Parks Than It Did on Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm CombinedHow China Took Over Your TV

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    The basic political problem is that the climate movement still does not have the strength of numbers to overcome entrenched opposition and put in the kind of stiff-and-rising taxes we would need to do the job. The oil companies may claim they want carbon pricing, but a subset of them spent more than $30 million in Washington State to kill the tax proposal there, twice as much money as the proponents were able to raise in support of their intelligent, carefully designed plan.

    Damn the oil companies if you will, but they persuaded 56 percent of the voters to take their side, carrying every county in the state but two. What that vote, and the French protests, tell us is that any proposal to raise energy prices is going to run into a buzz saw of opposition, including from working-class people who already feel like they are being mistreated.

    The political difficulties are not the only issue with carbon pricing, though. Even in theory, the idea is expected to work in some economic sectors but not in others, yet the fetishists hold it up as the magic answer to all problems.

    For example, it is not at all clear that raising prices at the pump is the best way to reduce emissions from driving. European drivers already pay $6 to $7 a gallon for fuel, most of that in taxes, yet governments there have found that they still need efficiency regulations for cars. Moreover, if you want people to leave their cars at home, you have to give them alternative ways to get to work, and a hike in fuel taxes by itself does nothing to accomplish that. Much of the American public does not have access to public transit of any kind, and even in transit-dependent cities like New York and Washington, the subways have been allowed to fall apart.

    The single most important climate policy in the world might be the efficiency regulations that the American government imposes on cars and trucks, which are under attack by the Trump administration. Climate advocates are fighting to defend them in court, but we also need concerned citizens to crawl all over Congress, pushing legislators to stop the rollback. What are many of us doing instead? Trying to persuade Congress to pass a carbon tax, when the political conditions to achieve that simply do not exist.

    Here is more evidence that a carbon price is no magic bullet: One of the biggest climate problems is poorly constructed buildings that waste energy. A carbon price will not solve that problem, for the elementary reason that the people who put up the buildings, and have an economic motive to skimp on insulation and windows, are not the people who wind up paying the energy bills. The solution is building codes with strict energy requirements, vigorously enforced. Yet across huge swaths of the United States we still have weak building codes and lousy enforcement.

    Building codes, you’re thinking? Yes, I know they seem boring. I am writing a book with an energy expert, Hal Harvey, who has convinced me that they could hardly be more important. A bad building wastes energy for decades. Yet are climate activists swarming Topeka City Hall, the Colorado statehouse or your local county commission to demand tougher building codes? I wish.Get our weekly newsletter and never miss an Op-Doc

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    To be clear, I am not arguing that a carbon price is unimportant. I would repeal none of the ones that have already passed, and I am in favor of passing new carbon prices everywhere that the politics seem aligned to make it possible. The activists in Washington State who pushed that proposal made a noble effort, and in a better world they would have won — not least because their plan was designed with the interests of the working class in mind.

    What I am saying is that we cannot argue for climate policy in a vacuum, ignoring the dangerous political moment we are in, when the anger of working people is being misappropriated by demagogues like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen in France. We would be wise not to ratchet up that anger, as President Emmanuel Macron of France belatedly acknowledged when he yanked the proposed hike in fuel taxes.

    Any carbon tax that is put on the table needs to be designed with that in mind. Maybe the opening promise should be that every penny of the money will go to relieve the burden on the working class, perhaps by cutting payroll taxes and putting more cash into its pockets the day the carbon tax goes into effect. Some countries might be able to push that through, even if the United States cannot.

    In the final analysis, the economic theory is right, of course: We do need a price on carbon. Some of our most important goals, such as cutting emissions from heavy industries like steel mills and cement plants, are likely to be impossible to achieve without it.

    But just because a stiff carbon price is, in theory, the biggest tool in the toolbox, I am not sure that means we have to whip it out first. Many other tools are available. A policy known as a clean-electricity standard, which would require that a certain share of electricity generation come from low-carbon sources, could get us a long way in the United States. Republicans have shown some interest in it in the past. Stricter building regulations are also needed the world over.

    Maybe we need to use those techniques to convince people that emissions really can be cut without wrecking the economy or further impoverishing the working class. Then, having proved that, we would pull the big tool out last.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/opinion/carbon-tax-climate-change.html
    

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15. NYISO Inches Forward First-of-its-Kind Carbon Pricing Proposal

    Dec 27, 2018 | Natural Gas Intelligence

    By Jamison Cocklin

    The New York Independent System Operator has released its latest carbon pricing proposal, saying this version will provide...

    Access to full text unavailable – subscription required.

    Story can be found here: 

    https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/116887-nyiso-inches-forward-first-of-its-kind-carbon-pricing-proposal
    

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