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AM ACC 1/29/2019

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Did Trump’s Tax Cuts Boost Hiring? Most Companies Say No
Jan 29, 2019 | PBS NewsHour
By Gretchen Frazee

The vast majority of American businesses haven’t boosted hiring or investment as a result of the Republican tax law, according to a survey by the National Association for Business Economics.
(ACC Mentioned) NABE Survey Finds US Tax Cuts Have No Major Impact on Business Capex Plans
Jan 29, 2019 | Consulting Industry News
By Rahul Pandita

The Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut package which came into effect in January last year appeared to have no major impact on capital investments and hiring plans of businesses, according to a recently released survey.
(ACC Mentioned) On Patrol with the Enforcer of D.C.’s Plastic-Straw Ban
Jan 29, 2019 | Washington Post
By Fenit Nirappil

Warning letters in hand, Zach Rybarczyk patrolled the food court at Union Station, looking for offenders.
Starbucks Investors Bring Wave of Anti-Plastic Activism to Cups (1)
Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Andrea Vittorio

Starbucks Corp.'s board is pushing back against a coffee-cup recycling proposal from shareholders worried about ocean pollution.

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Exclusive: Trump EPA Won't Limit 2 Toxic Chemicals in Drinking Water
Jan 28, 2019 | Politico
By Annie Snider

The Trump administration will not set a drinking water limit for two toxic chemicals that are contaminating millions of Americans' tap water, two sources familiar with the forthcoming decision told POLITICO.
New Hampshire Declines Call to Set SDWA Technology Standard for PFAS
Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohannan

New Hampshire's top environment official is rejecting a request by environmentalists to set enforceable “treatment technique” standards for drinking water utilities to address the thousands of chemicals in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) class...
New Jersey Landfill Reviews Toxicity of 4,500-Ton Soil Shipment
Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Leslie A. Pappas

A New Jersey landfill has indefinitely postponed delivery of 4,500 tons of soil from a former naval base in Pennsylvania to investigate whether the soil is contaminated with fluorochemicals.

Energy News

DOE to Release Funds for 'Transformational' Projects
Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Christa Marshall

The United States is "more involved than ever" in carbon capture technologies and intends to announce funding in the coming months to support two commercial-scale systems that could be used on gas and coal plants, a senior Department of Energy official said yesterday.
Environmentalists Seek 60-Day Extension for NSPS Comments
Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA

Environmentalists are asking EPA to extend by two months the deadline to file comments on the agency's proposed rollback of an Obama-era greenhouse gas rule for new power plants...
Atlantic Coast Asks Court to Clear 'Permanent Obstacle'
Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Pamela King

Developers of the Atlantic Coast pipeline have asked an appellate court to reconsider its decision to strike critical permits for the natural gas project.
Corporations’ Hunger for Clean Power Has Never Been Bigger
Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Brian Eckhouse

Corporations couldn’t be any clearer: They want cheap renewable energy.
Investors in Energy Majors Step up Demands on Climate Action
Jan 29, 2019 | Platts
By James Burgess

Shareholder activism has a long history in commodities. In the early 17th century, Isaac Le Maire, grain trader and disgruntled former governor of the Dutch East India Company, attempted to break the company’s monopoly by speculatively trading its shares.
New Large Fossil Fuel Facilities Around Seattle Get Halted
Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Paul Shukovsky

A six-month moratorium on constructing new fossil fuel facilities or expanding existing ones took effect Jan. 28 in the county encompassing Seattle.

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Transportation and Infrastructure News

Oil by Rail Still Risky, Lac-Mégantic Expert Says
Jan 28, 2019 | Canada's National Observer
By Tracy Sherlock

A rail disaster like the Lac-Mégantic tragedy in 2013 could happen again, according to author Bruce Campbell.

Environment News

House Dems Demand EPA Docs on Rule Rollbacks
Jan 28, 2019 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Alex Guillen

Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee today fired their opening salvo in planned oversight of EPA's regulatory rollback agenda.
Municipalities, Environmentalists Attack EPA Ozone NAAQS Designations
Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Stuart Parker

Illinois, local governments in Colorado and New Mexico, and environmentalists in a new legal filing are attacking EPA’s abrupt reversal designating areas of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin as attaining the 2015 ozone standard after previously proposing to find them...
EPA Highlights Decrease in Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Deregulation in Annual Review
Jan 28, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Miranda Green

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is promoting its deregulatory agenda while also highlighting a measured drop in greenhouse gas emissions as part of its list of 2018 achievements.
EPA Ignored Own Data Letting Foxconn Site Off Hook for Ozone
Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid

The Wisconsin county where Foxconn Technology Group plans a $10 billion flat-screen manufacturing facility should have been forced to clamp down on ozone pollution, a coalition of environmental groups, cities, and counties told a federal appeals court.
Committee Plans Month of Hearings on Global Warming
Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk

The Natural Resources Committee is planning a full month of climate change hearings, as House Democrats look to bring the issue to the forefront of the 116th Congress.
Kamala Harris Endorses Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’
Jan 28, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Michael Burke

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Monday endorsed the "Green New Deal," a proposal that sets a goal of getting 100 percent of U.S. electricity from renewable energy.
Democrats Scold Facebook, Google, Microsoft
Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk

Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) want to know why three technology giants sponsored a conference earlier this month where climate change deniers touted the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions.
Inside the Push to Expand Carbon Capture with an 'Orphan'
Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By John Fialka

Political strategists have built an odd but durable alliance that is pioneering ways for U.S. companies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The uphill battle was born from the collapse of legislation in 2010 to cap carbon dioxide.
Fast-Food Investors Urge Cuts to Water Use and Emissions
Jan 29, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Dieter Holger

Investors managing more than $6.5 trillion in assets have asked fast-food multinationals to set tougher water use and greenhouse-gas emissions targets on their meat and dairy suppliers, environmental nonprofit organizations Ceres and the FAIRR Initiative said Monday.

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) Did Trump’s Tax Cuts Boost Hiring? Most Companies Say No

Jan 29, 2019 | PBS NewsHour

By Gretchen Frazee

The vast majority of American businesses haven’t boosted hiring or investment as a result of the Republican tax law, according to a survey by the National Association for Business Economics.
Eighty-four percent of businesses said they didn’t accelerate hiring because of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which President Donald Trump hailed as “a bill for the middle class and a bill for jobs.” Only 6 percent said they had more hires because of the law and 10 percent said they accelerated investments, according to the survey.
Trump and Republicans lawmakers argued the tax cuts would boost jobs and investment. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in October 2017that the tax overhaul would push GDP to a sustained level of 3 percent or higher, leading to “literally millions and millions of jobs.”
Democrats and some nonprofit organizations predicted the tax cuts would not lead to significant job gains and only benefit the wealthy.
The National Association for Business Economics survey appears to show job gains have not been widespread, but concentrated in specific sectors.
Half of the survey’s respondents from companies in the “goods-producing” sector — which includes mining, construction and manufacturing — said they accelerated investments because of the tax cuts. Twenty percent of companies in those industries said they redirected hiring and investment from foreign countries to the United States.
The 2017 law changed the federal tax code to give corporations an incentive to bring money they earned overseas back to the U.S. Previously, the tax penalty was so high that companies often chose to reinvest money overseas to avoid more taxes. It also cut the corporate tax from 35 to 21 percent, generating a corporate windfall that Republicans said companies would reinvest in their workers.
Instead companies put much of the money toward stock buybacks rather than investments. Buybacks hit a record $1 trillion in 2018, a nearly 50 percent increase from the year before.
Some experts argue buybacks are a good use of funds because if companies have too much cash on hand, they are more likely to spend it on risky ventures. Others, however, say stock buybacks disproportionately benefit company executives and wealthy shareholders.
The National Association for Business Economics survey showed some companies did use the repatriated earnings for new investments in the U.S.
Kevin Swift, the chief economist of the American Chemistry Council, and one of the experts who worked on the report, argued that the tax cuts, combined with low interest rates, made investments a smart business decision for goods producers.
Federal data of nonresidential fixed investment, which includes corporate purchases of equipment and software across all U.S. companies, grew at a rate of 1.47 percent and 1.15 percent, respectively, in the first two quarters of 2018. The gains were slightly higher than in the same quarters a year earlier. Investments increased 1.20 percent and 0.94 percent in the first and second quarter of 2017, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
“It has worked even better than we expected when we drew it up,” said Stephen Moore, who served as an economic adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign.
Moore also argued that the National Association for Business Economics’ survey questions were too narrow because business leaders rarely attribute their decisions to any one factor.
“But at the margin, when you make it financially attractive to purchase a new truck or invest more in a new company and reduce taxes on that, if you reduce the cost, you are going to get a bigger demand for these things,” Moore said.
Yet the survey findings suggest most companies prioritized stock buybacks over making new investments and hiring more workers.
And there is growing evidence that the tax law’s positive impacts are wearing off.
Nonresidential fixed investment increased only 0.35 percent in the third quarter, a drop from the 1.15 percent increase in the previous three months.
In the first half of 2018, the tax cuts also appeared to boost the nation’s GDP, which Republicans say would buttress the broader economy and lead to more job creation.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, growth is expected to slow this year. The CBO reported today that it expects the U.S. economy to expand 2.3 percent in 2019, down from 3.1 percent last year. The government report attributed the drop to the waning effects of the tax law as well as an expected decline in federal spending at the end of the year.
It is also possible that the effects the tax cuts had on the goods-producing sector, which appears to have seen the largest benefits, could “taper off” in 2019 because of the Trump administration’s trade policies, said Sara Rutledge, a managing director at StratoDem Analytics who also worked on the report.
Seventy-seven percent of all respondents said uncertainty over U.S. trade policy was not affecting their businesses. The “goods-producing” companies were the exception.
About 36 percent of mining, coal and other “goods-producing” companies said they are raising prices in response to U.S. trade policy, 27 percent are delaying investments, and 9 percent said they are delaying hiring, according to the survey. Only 27 percent said there was no change to hiring or investments because of the trade issues.
Tax cuts aside, the National Association for Business Economics survey found businesses are cautiously optimistic about the coming year. The majority of respondents said they expect economic growth to continue at a rate of between 2 percent and 3 percent through the end of 2019, although the number was lower than in previous months.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/did-trumps-tax-cuts-boost-hiring-most-companies-say-no

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(ACC Mentioned) NABE Survey Finds US Tax Cuts Have No Major Impact on Business Capex Plans

Jan 29, 2019 | Consulting Industry News

By Rahul Pandita

The Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut package which came into effect in January last year appeared to have no major impact on capital investments and hiring plans of businesses, according to a recently released survey.
As reported in Reuters, the National Association of Business Economics (NABE) published its quarterly business conditions poll on Monday, almost a year after the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in over 30 years.
In the survey, NABE found that due to lower corporate taxes, some organization reported increasing investments. On the other hand, 84% of respondents said they had changed plans that compares to 81% in an earlier survey published in October last year.
According to the Reuters’ news, by reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, the White House had envisaged that the massive fiscal stimulus package would improve business spending as well as job growth.
Kevin Swift, President of NABE had said that a large majority of respondents, nearly 84% indicate the corporate tax reform – even after a year of its passage – has not caused their organizations to change investment or hiring plans.
However, the reduction in tax rates had a remarkable impact on the goods producing sector, as half of the respondents from that sector reported accelerated investments at their firms and 20% said they redirected investments and hiring to the United States abroad.
The NABE survey also recorded a further slowdown in business spending following its sharp decline in the third quarter last year. The measure of capital spending dropped to its lowest level in the beginning of this year since July 2018. Furthermore, the capital spending expectations for the next three months also weakened.
In comparison with the October survey responses, fewer companies increased their capital spending, but the cutback seem to be confined more in structures than investments in information and communication technology, Swift said, who is also the American Chemistry Council’s chief economist.
The new survey also reported that employment growth improved modestly in the fourth quarter of 2018 than the same year’s previous quarter. More than a third of the respondents indicated growing employment at their companies over the past three months, increased by 31% from the October survey. The forward-looking measure of employment by the new survey fell to 25 in January from 29 in October.
https://www.consultingindustry24.com/nabe-survey-finds-us-tax-cuts-have-no-major-impact-on-business-capex-plans/

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(ACC Mentioned) On Patrol with the Enforcer of D.C.’s Plastic-Straw Ban

Jan 29, 2019 | Washington Post

By Fenit Nirappil

Warning letters in hand, Zach Rybarczyk patrolled the food court at Union Station, looking for offenders.
Past Auntie Anne’s, past Johnny Rockets. At Lotus Express, a Chinese food joint, Rybarczyk peeled the wrapper from a red straw and bent the end — the telltale giveaway.
Plastic.
Washington has become the latest city in a nationwide movement to ban plastic straws, and it’s up to Rybarczyk, an inspector for the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment, to enforce the new law.
The straw cop left the rattled cashier at Lotus Express with a warning that if the store was still using plastic straws by July, when a grace period expires, it could be fined up to $800.
Nine years after the District instituted a nickel tax on plastic bags and three years after it banned plastic foam food containers, it has turned on plastic straws — the newest target of environmentalists trying to reduce millions of tons of plastic that ends up in trees, waterways and in the bellies of wildlife. The effort has been galvanized by a viral video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nostril.
“It’s pretty absurd the amount of resources we put into creating plastic materials that we are using for five minutes to an hour, and then never again,” said Julie Lawson, director of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s Office of the Clean City. “Single-use plastics are taking the same cultural place as tobacco where it’s socially unacceptable.”
Straws and the District have a long history; the modern drinking straw was born in Washington in 1888, when inventor Marvin Chester Stone received the first patent for an “artificial straw” made from paper and produced them in his factory on F Street NW.
Over the next century, the straw evolved from straight to bendable, from paper to plastic.
But the popularity of the plastic straw, and its inability to decompose, is proving to be its undoing.
City officials estimate that plastic straws make up less than 1 percent of the trash in the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. Still, they pose a problem. Their thin design makes them too small for most recycling machinery, so they end up in trash and ultimately in waterways. Volunteers collected 10,000 plastic straws during the 30th annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup in April.
“Plastic pollution that ends up on the street is carried by rain water into storm drains and eventually into streams and rivers,” Laura Cattell Noll of the Alice Ferguson Foundation, a local environmental group, told the D.C. Council. “In many cases, this storm water is untreated, leaving local waterways choked with plastic bags, Styrofoam, plastic bottles and plastic straws.”
The plastics industry has been pushing for reduced use instead of a ban.
“We don’t think the ban is the right approach because it ends up substituting one material for another,” said Keith Christman, managing director of plastics markets for the American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers. “What we need to do here is reduce waste and not take a straw when you don’t need one.”
The District is among at least 15 jurisdictions that have outlawed plastic straws, including Seattle, Monmouth Beach, N.J., and a string of coastal cities in southern Florida and California, including San Francisco. There are no statewide bans, although California requires restaurants to serve straws only at customers’ request. An increasing number of corporations, including Starbucks, Marriott and American Airlines, are voluntarily phasing out plastic straws.
The effort in the District has been pushed along by Dan Simons, co-owner of the Farmers Restaurant Group.
Simons never stocked plastic straws at his seven restaurants, including the flagship Founding Farmers in Foggy Bottom, preferring bioplastic straws that are supposed to decompose.
But when he stuck a bioplastic straw in a container of salt water for six months and it didn’t change, he was convinced that they, too, have drawbacks.
Last spring, Simons formed Our Last Straw, a coalition of D.C.-area restaurants, bars, hotels, event venues and organizations to lobby for an end to single-use plastic straws. He said it was relatively easy to persuade others to join.
“When you are really getting into discussions with people on this topic and you look at photos and videos about the amount of trash in the ocean, this is just so logical and obvious that human behavior needs to change,” Simons said.
He argued that the added cost of alternatives to plastic could be offset if restaurants use less.
“If you spend twice as much but use half as many, the math is pretty simple,” Simons said.
At Union Station during the first week of January, when the ban took effect, many dining spots on the main level had already switched to compostable straws. But in the basement food court, Rybarczyk drew blank stares from cashiers who had no idea about the ban.
At Lotus Express, the inspector, one of three dispatched by the city to check cafeterias, bars and restaurants, scribbled the restaurant’s name on the paper sleeve of the plastic straw and tucked it into his back pocket, along with two others from scofflaw restaurants. He planned to later check whether they floated in water, another telltale sign of prohibited plastic.
“Obviously there will be some holdouts until July, when we start issuing fines. But it’s most fair to give businesses a heads up,” said Rybarczyk, who keeps a metal straw for his personal use in his backpack.
At Sakura Japan, Rybarczyk explained the new rules to a cashier as a man waiting for his lunch looked on in disgust.
“What, is this California now?” grumbled the customer, who declined to give his name. “All these laws are just spreading from California. Everything is getting taken away from us, man. This is so stupid.”
In 2014, D.C. lawmakers banned disposable food service items that can’t be recycled or composted, but the city’s Department of Energy and Environment released guidance saying plastic straws were acceptable to use.
D.C. Council members Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) sought to correct that last year by explicitly outlawing plastic straws, but the Bowser administration beat them to the punch, adding plastic straws and stirrers to the list of banned food containers and utensils that includes plastic foam boxes and foil-lined deli paper.
Bars and food establishments in the nation’s capital have been replacing plastic with straws made from paper, hay, bamboo or cornstarch.
“Honestly, we have not heard one complaint,” said Kathy Hollinger, who leads the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington. “Our folks will tell us pretty quickly if there’s a big impact on their bottom line, and we have not heard that with this issue.”
At Blue Bottle Coffee in Union Station, manager Derek Henry assured Rybarczyk that the store has been using straws made of vegetable material for four years.
“Every product we give a guest is compostable. It’s been one of our core values,” Henry said, although he acknowledged the straws end up in the trash because Union Station doesn’t offer composting.
Business is booming for manufacturers of straws made from eco-friendly alternatives to plastic.
Orders have gone up so much for Indiana-based Aardvark Straws — which has made paper straws for more than a decade — that there is a six-to-eight-week backlog, and the company needed to open a new manufacturing facility.
As New York City considers a plastic-straw ban, Aardvark Straws wants it to hold off until 2020.
“All these bans just started hitting at once,” said David Rhodes, global business director for Aardvark. “The last thing we want to do is start a movement and be in a position that we can’t meet the demand.”
One challenge facing D.C. restaurants, bars and coffee shops: What to do with outlawed plastic straws?
On the first day the law took effect, a Starbucks store downtown threw away large bags filled with straws, a move that seemed to defeat the purpose of the ban.
The D.C. Department of Energy and Environment advises businesses to keep a small stock of plastic straws for customers with disabilities who need them, while returning the rest to a supplier or sending them to businesses in Maryland or Virginia.
The issue came up in Seattle when activists heralded a restaurant that voluntarily ditched plastic straws before the ban took effect — only to realize that restaurant just gave the straws to a bar across the street.
“It was a reminder to us to not use them all up and not just throw them out,” said Dune Ives, the Seattle-based executive director of Lonely Whale, a nonprofit devoted to eliminating plastic straws. “If we are going to do the best possible job we can, we have to get these straws out of the waste stream.”
Ives has been collecting straws from businesses and has thousands piling up in her basement. She plans to ship them to a Netherlands company that makes furniture out of plastic.
In the District, Simons wants Our Last Straw to act as a repository for plastic straws from other businesses. He hopes to cut a deal with a recycling facility to accept a large shipment of straws at once, avoiding the problems of thin ones being lost in equipment during material sorting.
“I certainly don’t want to see them go in the trash,” Simons said.
Some conservatives and restaurant-goers say it’s heavy-handed to target plastic straws when they aren’t a leading source of pollution.
But environmentalists say straw bans can raise awareness about the bigger plastic pollution problem.
“Soon, it will be Our Last Plastic Fork,” Simons said. “It’s really an item-by-item, single-use plastic reduction and replacement strategy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/on-patrol-with-an-enforcer-of-dcs-plastic-straw-ban/2019/01/28/511e7bcc-1511-11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.51a10088efa1

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Starbucks Investors Bring Wave of Anti-Plastic Activism to Cups (1)

Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Andrea Vittorio

Starbucks Corp.'s board is pushing back against a coffee-cup recycling proposal from shareholders worried about ocean pollution.
The group of investors, led by shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow, has submitted a proposal for the coffee chain’s upcoming annual meeting asking its board to report on worldwide efforts to recycle its plastic and paper cups. The board told investors to vote against the proposal in a Jan. 25 proxy filing, citing Starbucks’ commitment to help develop a new kind of cup that can be recycled or composted as part of the NextGen Cup Challenge.
Starbucks has also been encouraging alternatives by providing a discount for customers who drink from reusable cups or tumblers, its board said.
As You Sow’s shareholder proposal rides a wave of activism against single-use plastics. Starbucks is one of several companies that have pledged recently to phase out plastic straws amid pressure from environmentalists and concern from consumers. Straws and other plastic packaging contribute to ocean pollution and harm birds and sea life.
‘To-Go’ Culture
“Concern over plastics puts a lot of pressure on the companies to do more,” said Conrad MacKerron, senior vice president of As You Sow. “It matters to their business and their customer base.”
Starbucks has set goals to serve more beverages in resusable cups and to ensure the recyclability of paper and plastic cups at coffeehouses that the company owns directly. The company later dialed back its reusable cup goal after limited customer uptake, while the recyclability goal depends in part on recycling infrastructure, which is lacking in some parts of the world.
A similar plastics proposal at Starbucks last year got support from almost 30 percent of voted shares, according to As You Sow.
As You Sow has filed two more shareholder proposals this year at other fast food chains—Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International Inc. and Yum! Brands Inc., which owns Taco Bell—targeting what it calls a “wasteful to-go culture” of disposable packaging.
Starbucks didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
(Updated with additional reporting throughout)
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/starbucks-investors-bring-wave-of-anti-plastic-activism-to-cups-1

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Exclusive: Trump EPA Won't Limit 2 Toxic Chemicals in Drinking Water

Jan 28, 2019 | Politico

By Annie Snider

The Trump administration will not set a drinking water limit for two toxic chemicals that are contaminating millions of Americans' tap water, two sources familiar with the forthcoming decision told POLITICO.
The expected move is yet another sign of the administration's reluctance to aggressively deal with the chemicals, which have been used for decades in products such as Teflon-coated cookware and military firefighting foam and are present in the bloodstreams of an estimated 98 percent of Americans. And it comes less than a year after the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency faced criticism for delaying publication of a health study on the chemicals, which a White House aide had warned could trigger a "public relations nightmare."
EPA's decision means the chemicals will remain unregulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to sources familiar with a still-unreleased draft plan that acting administrator Andrew Wheeler signed off on in late December. That means utilities will face no federal requirements for testing for and removing the chemicals from drinking water supplies, although several states have pursued or are pursuing their own limits.
The decision could complicate Wheeler's confirmation to lead the agency on a full-time basis. Both Republicans and Democrats have pressed EPA to do more to keep the chemicals out of drinking water and raised alarms about past political interference from the administration.
The chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS, have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, hypertension and other ailments. Major chemical companies like 3M as well as the Defense Department would face billions of dollars in liability from aggressive efforts to regulate and clean up the chemical, which has contaminated groundwater near hundreds of military bases and chemical plants.
While EPA has decided against a drinking water limit, the draft chemical plan includes a decision to list those two chemicals as hazardous under the Superfund law, according to the two sources, a move would help force polluters to pay for cleanup.Morning Energy newsletter
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The agency said it would not discuss the plan's contents until it is made public.
"The action plan is currently undergoing interagency review," EPA spokesperson John Konkus said by email.
It is unclear when the plan will be released, but it could come soon now that the partial government shutdown is over. During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Wheeler told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the plan had initially been scheduled for release in late January — but he refused to promise that it would set a drinking water standard for the chemical.
"I cannot make that commitment," Wheeler told Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), whose state has a major PFOA contamination problem, also pressed Wheeler on how he would handle the issue.
"We are going to be recommending and moving forward on a number of different areas under a number of different statutes," Wheeler told her. He specifically cited the EPA's Superfund toxic cleanup program as well as a recently revised regulatory framework for chemical safety.
The committee is scheduled to vote on Wheeler's nomination Feb. 5; Republicans have a one-seat majority on the panel. In the full Senate, Wheeler also likely would have to allay concerns from Republicans in other states that have experienced major problems with the class of chemicals, including North Carolina.
Federal scientists last summer concluded that PFOA and PFOS pose dangers at extremely low concentrations in a health assessment that POLITICO reportedTrump administration officials initially sought to block.
EPA-mandated testing has found the chemicals at unsafe levels in at least 16 million Americans' tap water, but activists say the problem is even more widespread.
When an advocacy group reanalyzed federal monitoring data to include lower levels of contamination, it estimated that as many as 110 million Americans may be drinking water with levels of the chemical that could cause harm. The problem is particularly acute near military bases, more than 400 of which the Pentagon suspects to be contaminated with the chemicals.
In order to regulate a chemical under the Safe Drinking Water Act, EPA must show not only that the contaminant is dangerous, but also that setting a limit offers "a meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction" and that doing so is financially justified.
Congress established these requirements in amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996. They have proven to be major hurdles to new regulations: EPA has not regulated a new contaminant under the drinking water law since then.
EPA issued a voluntary health advisory for PFOA and PFOS in 2016, recommending a lifetime limit in drinking water of 70 parts per trillion for both chemicals. A handful of states have established their own drinking water limits, some of which are significantly stricter than the EPA guidance. But other states have lacked the scientific expertise to act on their own, and have struggled to explain to their residents why their limits differ from those in neighboring states. Public health advocates say these are reasons a federal drinking water standard is necessary.
But some state and local officials, as well as rural water utilities, have argued against a federal drinking water standard. They say the problem is localized and that utilities across the country should not have to pay to test their water if they are unlikely to find the chemicals.
The Trump administration has generally pushed to have states take the lead in environmental regulations, and has taken some steps that suggested it may prefer that approach to setting a federal drinking water limit. For instance, officials at EPA opted to release only toxicity information for two other chemicals in the same class, called GenX and PFBS, and left it to the states to use that information to decide what a safe limit is.
A number of the political appointees at EPA come from industry backgrounds, including the No. 2 political official in the chemical safety office, who previously worked for the chemical industry's main lobbying group. The No. 2 official in the agency's Office of Research and Development came to the agency last fall from Koch Industries.
Industry groups, including the American Chemistry Council, have backed the Trump administration's work on the class of chemicals, expecting that it will be as industry-friendly as they can hope for.
The Trump administration's approach to PFOA and PFOS has also been shaped by the Defense Department, which faces potentially massive liability for the hundreds of contaminated sites it owns around the country.
Internal emails show that Pentagon officials last year raised alarm with the White House over a draft study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found the chemicals cause harm at far lower levels than EPA had said were safe. And POLITICO reported earlier this month that the Defense Department sought to hire a scientist with a reputation for downplaying chemicals' risks to work on PFOA and PFOS, even though his prior work on the chemicals was so controversial that even Republicans had opposed his nomination for an EPA post.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/28/epa-toxic-chemicals-drinking-water-1124797

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New Hampshire Declines Call to Set SDWA Technology Standard for PFAS

Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA

By Suzanne Yohannan

New Hampshire's top environment official is rejecting a request by environmentalists to set enforceable “treatment technique” standards for drinking water utilities to address the thousands of chemicals in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) class, claiming it would contradict the state's statutory authority.
The state's response is the first formal stumbling block that environmentalists have hit since they launched a campaign to press states to set a technology-based standard under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to address thousands of chemicals in the class.
They have launched their campaign seeking an alternative to widespread calls for EPA to set a health-based drinking water standard on a chemical-by-chemical basis to address the far-reaching contamination.
But New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) Commissioner Robert Scott told the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), a New England environmental group, in a Jan. 10 letter that such standards would not apply to the chemicals.
He explains that NHDES is authorized to establish treatment technique standards “only for contaminants whose level in the water provided by the public water system cannot feasibly be determined.
“Given the ever-increasing ability to reliably detect PFAS compounds down to the single-digit parts per trillion level, NHDES believes that proposing treatment technique standards for a broad family of PFAS would be contrary to NHDES' statutory authority,” he says.
According to EPA's website, the agency sets a treatment technique instead of a health-based maximum contaminant level (MCL) “[w]hen there is no reliable method that is economically and technically feasible to measure a contaminant at concentrations to indicate there is not a public health concern.” It is “an enforceable procedure or level of technological performance which public water systems must follow to ensure control of a contaminant.”
PFAS are a class of chemicals that are toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative and that have been prompting growing concern around the country, particularly in the Northeast, due to their presence in drinking water systems and links to adverse health impacts at low levels.
The chemicals have been used widely in non-stick applications such as clothing, cookware and firefighting foam.
Their presence in drinking water has prompted broad concerns in states from Michigan to New Jersey and across the Northeast, with many federal lawmakers, environmentalists and others urging EPA to set one or more MCLs to address the chemicals. EPA so far has set non-enforceable drinking water advisory levels for just two PFAS: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), and is weighing other measures to be announced in an upcoming national PFAS management plan, but has been criticized for the little action it has taken.
CLF's Effort
Scott's letter responds to a Dec. 19 petition from CLF to NHDES asking for a treatment technique-based drinking water standard for PFAS as a class.
CLF also sent a similar letter Dec. 19 to Maine's Department of Health and Human Services. The letters are part of an effort launched in the fall by CLF and other environmental groups to press states in New England to set treatment technique standards for the non-stick class of chemicals as an interim step they hope will limit exposures while awaiting chemical-by-chemical health-based drinking water standards.
CLF previously sent letters to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.
And the Natural Resources Defense Council has also begun to push for such standards, urging officials in Michigan last month to set both health-based chemical-specific drinking water levels for some PFAS as well as technology-based standards for the class, as the state undertakes a sweeping examination at the extent of PFAS contamination in Michigan.
In its recent letter to NHDES, CLF and Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water, New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, Testing for Pease and Toxics Action Center called for a drinking water standard for PFAS that is protective of public health. The groups say they are supportive of NHDES' work, per recently passed state laws, to establish enforceable drinking water levels, known as MCLs, for four specific PFAS, but say that is not enough.
“We are supportive of the Department's work in this regard, but we also recognize . . . that there are now thousands of PFAS requiring regulation to protect the public's health and that a treatment technique approach, rather than a chemical by chemical approach, is warranted,” they say.
They ask NHDES to “as soon as practicable, and no later than upon its completion of final rulemaking establishing MCLs for PFOA, PFOS, [perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) and perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS)], commence rulemaking to adopt and implement a treatment technique drinking water standard for the remaining PFAS in the PFAS class of chemicals.”
On Jan. 2, NHDES announced it was proposing a rulemaking for setting MCLs and ambient groundwater quality standards for the four PFAS, responding to new state legislation requiring the actions.
The groups in their letter note that PFAS have been identified in drinking water systems across the state, and many studies have linked the chemicals to significant health risks, including cancer.
In its petition to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, CLF and the Toxics Action Center urge the department to adopt a treatment technique standard for the class in lieu of setting chemical-specific MCLs. But if Maine declines to do the former, the groups ask that, at a minimum, it “should adopt an MCL for the PFAS class or MCLs for each PFAS chemical that poses a risk to public water systems in Maine.” Further, they suggest Maine take the interim step of protecting public health by immediately adopting Vermont's health advisory of 20 parts per trillion -- which is more stringent than EPA's -- and apply it to the full PFAS class as an MCL.
An attorney with CLF has previously said that the groups are also preparing to press state legislatures in New England to act on the issue if regulatory agencies reject their petitions and are unwilling to consider solutions.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/new-hampshire-declines-call-set-sdwa-technology-standard-pfas

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New Jersey Landfill Reviews Toxicity of 4,500-Ton Soil Shipment

Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Leslie A. Pappas

A New Jersey landfill has indefinitely postponed delivery of 4,500 tons of soil from a former naval base in Pennsylvania to investigate whether the soil is contaminated with fluorochemicals.
“We’ve put a hold on the delivery of the dirt, and are going to evaluate the information and make a final determination going forward,” Jerry Velazquez, president of the Cumberland County Improvement Authority, the quasi-public agency that runs the landfill, told Bloomberg Environment Jan. 28.
The soil in question comes from the Willow Grove Naval Air and Air Reserve Station in Horsham Township, where years of firefighting drills with chemical foams are suspected to have contaminated the groundwater.
The scheduled shipment was first reported in NJ Spotlight, a website that covers state politics and public policy.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been involved in cleanup of the 1,200-acre site, about 25 miles north of Philadelphia, after tests found the drinking water had high levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid.
The dirt was planned for the Cumberland County Solid Waste Complex near Vineland, N.J.
Shipment Approved Earlier
The county made the determination, based on federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulations, that the soil is suitable for daily landfill cover, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Hajna said.
Velazquez approved the shipment in a Dec. 13 letter, writing that testing results of the material found it met criteria for nonhazardous soil that could be used as cover at the landfill.
The landfill is lined and the liner doesn’t allow chemicals to seep into the soil, Velazquez said. The landfill is now working with its attorney and environmental engineer to further evaluate the safety of the shipment, and the board will likely review the matter, he said.
There are about 3,500 chemical compounds known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). New Jersey has set or is in the process of finalizing standards for three types of fluorochemicals: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA).
Once widely used in nonstick cookware, fire-retardant upholstery coatings, and other consumer products, PFAS chemical compounds don’t break down easily in the environment and can remain in the body for a long time.
Studies show long-term exposure may affect liver and immune system function, increase blood cholesterol levels, cause developmental delays, and increase cancer risk.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/new-jersey-landfill-reviews-toxicity-of-4-500-ton-soil-shipment

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Energy News

DOE to Release Funds for 'Transformational' Projects

Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Energywire

By Christa Marshall

The United States is "more involved than ever" in carbon capture technologies and intends to announce funding in the coming months to support two commercial-scale systems that could be used on gas and coal plants, a senior Department of Energy official said yesterday.
Speaking at the Atlantic Council n Washington, D.C., DOE Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy Steven Winberg said the not-yet-released funding announcement would support at least two front-end engineering design (FEED) studies for commercial-scale carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). There would be additional funding announcements from DOE to support "transformational" technologies that can provide real-time sensing of carbon dioxide below the Earth's surface, he said.
"The United States will remain a strong global voice for CCS," Winberg said. "I expect that we will be more involved than ever ... and develop and broadly deploy these critical technologies."
Winberg and Energy Secretary Rick Perry are among a handful of Trump administration officials advocating for technologies that remove carbon dioxide emissions. Trump has broadly spoken in favor of "clean coal" but has not expressed strong support for CO2 capture from fossil fuels. Trump's budget requests would have slashed funding for such equipment at DOE.
Congress ignored those requests, and DOE has supported about $400 million in research and development on CCUS in the first two years of the Trump administration, Winberg said. The goal is to reduce capture costs by about half to about $30 a metric ton of CO2. He said there needed to be more "robust" policies supporting the technology, adding officials were "excited" about the upcoming Clean Energy Ministerial, an international forum of energy leaders.
Until this month, it was not fully clear how DOE might direct money for CCUS this year. DOE posted information about the coming funding for coal and gas projects on its website on Jan. 16.
At the same event, Lynn Brickett, technology manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, said there would be at least $30 million for the FEED studies. The projects would aim for something on the scale of NRG Energy Inc.'s Petra Nova project in Texas, the world's largest retrofit of a coal plant with CO2 capture, she said. The FEED studies are designed to support a CCUS retrofit of a coal plant, and a system on a coal or gas plant that generates greenhouse gas for storage or utilization, according to DOE.
Winberg added that DOE's plans to support small coal units would also provide an opportunity for CCS. The agency currently is weighing proposals received this month for small modular coal as part of its Coal FIRST (Flexible, Innovative, Resilient, Small, Transformative) initiative (E&E News PM, Dec. 7, 2018).
'The clock is ticking'
Also at the Atlantic Council, the Global CCS Institute released its report assessing the state of projects. In 2018, there were 18 operational CCUS initiatives globally and five under construction, although most of those are not on power plants.
Much of the U.S. industry is awaiting guidance from the U.S. Treasury on expanded tax credits for carbon storage that were signed into law last year (Greenwire, Feb. 9, 2018). Projects wanting to take advantage of credits under Section 45Q must start construction by 2023, according to the law.
"The clock is ticking," Winberg said. "Now that the shutdown is over, I'm quite hopeful the IRS will get to work developing needed rules and regulations" related to 45Q, he said.
Perry recently sent a letter to the Treasury Department suggesting DOE would be happy to "assist" with 45Q guidance, Winberg said.
Kurt Waltzer, managing director at the Clean Air Task Force, suggested an extension of the 2023 deadline. It may work well for industrial facilities but would be "tight" for power plant projects with a four- to five-year timeframe to go from planning to construction.
"The power sector is kind of at a disadvantage right now with the way the [45Q] law is currently structured," Waltzer said.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2019/01/29/stories/1060118817

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Environmentalists Seek 60-Day Extension for NSPS Comments

Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA

Environmentalists are asking EPA to extend by two months the deadline to file comments on the agency's proposed rollback of an Obama-era greenhouse gas rule for new power plants, arguing the just-ended government shutdown limited their ability to analyze all of the underlying technical data for the plan.
Meanwhile, an appellate court panel is rejecting EPA's bid for more time to file a status report on the rulemaking's development, ordering it to provide an update on the progress within three days.
In their Jan. 18 request for a longer comment period, five major environmental groups argue that “explicit requirements” in the Clean Air Act obligate EPA to extend the deadline by at least 30 days following a public hearing on the plan, given that a previously scheduled hearing has been scrapped twice because of the shutdown.
But the groups cite various other reasons for why the agency should extend the current Feb. 19 comment deadline “by at least an additional 60 days after the shutdown ends.”
These reasons include that several technical documents with copyright restrictions were unavailable during the shutdown because they are only available at EPA's public reading room for regulatory dockets.
“EPA has not provided information that is necessary for the public meaningfully to evaluate and comment upon the proposal,” the groups say, citing several attachments to the proposal's preamble and memos that are only available in the reading room and on government websites that were closed during the shutdown.
These documents “provide specific information EPA relied on when formulating the proposal, but without access to this information, commenters have no way to evaluate EPA’s decisions and provide informed feedback.”
President Donald Trump signed legislation Jan. 25 providing EPA and various other agencies with funding through Feb. 15, though he threatened to force another shutdown if lawmakers do not reach a deal on border security funding that he deems satisfactory.
EPA's website says that it has “temporarily postponed” its public hearing on the proposed changes to the 2015 power plant new source performance standards (NSPS), and that it will provide updated information after the shutdown. It pledges to provide at least two weeks' notice before a new hearing.
The hearing was initially slated for Jan. 8, and the environmentalists' letter said it was delayed until Jan. 30, even though a formal notice had not been sent. The latter date now also has slipped.
Combined with the air act's required 30-day extension after the hearing occurs, that likely means EPA will be forced to extend the comment deadline until at least mid-March.
The proposal would rescind the current NSPS' GHG targets for new coal plants, which are based on the installation of partial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, and replace them with far weaker limits that some environmentalists argue would allow emissions above the levels achieved by state-of-the-art coal plants without CCS.
Litigation over the Obama-era rule is paused indefinitely as EPA crafts the replacement rule, though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is requiring EPA to submit periodic status reports.
During the shutdown, EPA had asked the court to extend the most recent report deadline of Jan. 22 until seven days after EPA and Justice Department (DOJ) funding was restored.
However, a unanimous three-judge D.C. Circuit panel rejected the request in a Jan. 28 order, directing EPA to file its report “within three days of this order.”
One environmentalist previously said groups had objected to EPA's request because of the interaction between the shutdown and the rule's comment period. “With the government shut down and no one letting us know what is up, pushing DOJ to provide information there seemed like an appropriate avenue,” the source said.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/environmentalists-seek-60-day-extension-nsps-comments

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Atlantic Coast Asks Court to Clear 'Permanent Obstacle'

Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Energywire

By Pamela King

Developers of the Atlantic Coast pipeline have asked an appellate court to reconsider its decision to strike critical permits for the natural gas project.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month nixed a Forest Service approval for the 600-mile pipeline to cross two national forests and parts of the Appalachian Trail. Environmental opponents celebrated as the project's backers, who had halted construction after the same court vacated a separate permit, reviewed their options (Greenwire, Dec. 13, 2018).
The 4th Circuit's finding that the Forest Service does not have the authority to grant a right of way along the Appalachian Trail introduced a "more permanent obstacle" for the embattled Atlantic Coast project, attorneys for the developers argued yesterday.
"That holding ignores key provisions in several statutes, contradicts the longstanding views of every agency involved, and converts a special rule about National Park Service lands into an impregnable barrier dividing energy sources west of the Trail from consumers east of the Trail," the attorneys wrote in their petition for rehearing en banc.
"The stakes could hardly be higher," they said.
Joining the litigation on Atlantic Coast's behalf is Kirkland & Ellis LLP attorney Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under former President George W. Bush.
Clement and his co-counsel contend that the 4th Circuit's ruling last month flies in the face of the Supreme Court's holdings on agency deference and suggests that Congress must now authorize any pipeline crossing along the Appalachian Trail. The trail extends more than 2,000 miles along the East Coast and runs through a region where a network of natural gas transport projects is beginning to bloom.
"Both sets of errors will have serious, widespread ramifications and merit rehearing en banc," the petition says.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2019/01/29/stories/1060118845

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Corporations’ Hunger for Clean Power Has Never Been Bigger

Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Brian Eckhouse

Corporations couldn’t be any clearer: They want cheap renewable energy.
Companies and government agencies last year signed contracts to buy 13.4 gigawatts of clean power, comparable to Nevada’s total generating capacity. That easily shattered the prior record of 6.1 gigawatts that was set in 2017, according to a Jan. 28 report by BloombergNEF.
The contracts still account for just a fraction of the total electricity corporations use. Even a group of companies that has pledged to ultimately get 100 percent of their power from renewables still relies on other resources for about two-thirds of its demand.
The tech giants of the world stand out as leaders in the space: Facebook Inc. alone accounted for more than 2.6 gigawatts of clean-energy deals last year, vaulting it over Alphabet Inc.’s Google, the longtime leader as the world’s biggest corporate buyer.
Corporations’ sustainability targets and concerns about climate change are driving a green boom that has been propelled by renewable-energy subsidies and government mandates. While those subsidies are waning or expiring in many markets, wind and solar power is now often the cheapest electrical source, making these record volumes possible.
“It’s no longer a safe bet to assume that utilities are the biggest source of clean-energy demand,” Kyle Harrison, a New York-based analyst at BloombergNEF, said in an interview. “The sheer scale of renewable-energy purchases is unprecedented and only poised to grow.”
Even Exxon Mobil Corp. signed clean-power deals last year, for the Permian Basin, the fastest-growing U.S. oil field.
Other findings from the report:
The U.S. made up 63 percent of global corporate renewables deals last year—8.5 gigawatts in total, almost triple the volume from 2017.
Businesses with more modest appetites for electricity are banding their load together to capture “economies of scale of large renewables projects.”
India signed more than 1.4 gigawatts of corporate renewables deals last year, the most in Asia-Pacific.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/corporations-hunger-for-clean-power-has-never-been-bigger

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Investors in Energy Majors Step up Demands on Climate Action

Jan 29, 2019 | Platts

By James Burgess

Shareholder activism has a long history in commodities. In the early 17th century, Isaac Le Maire, grain trader and disgruntled former governor of the Dutch East India Company, attempted to break the company’s monopoly by speculatively trading its shares.
His scheme failed, but Le Maire’s desire to shake up the status quo of the trade route between Europe and India eventually led to the discovery of Cape Horn.
Skip forward 400 years and shareholder activism in another Dutch-origin resources giant has taken on a less selfish hue.
In December, the Church of England, along with other investors in Shell, helped to persuade the energy giant to commit to setting targets to cut its carbon footprint by 20% by 2035 and half by 2050. The company’s achievements in reducing carbon emissions is to be linked to executive pay, subject to a shareholder vote in 2020.
The commitment by Shell came in the wake of a startling special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in October. The report, commissioned following the 2015 Paris agreement, charts the consequences of a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures from pre-industrial levels.
The Paris agreement commits signatories to taking action to limit temperature rises “well below” 2 C, though many poorer and low-lying coastal countries felt this did not go far enough, and wanted an agreement to limit rises to 1.5 C. Global temperatures have already climbed by around 1 C.
The significant findings of the IPCC special report are that serious environmental changes occur at lower temperatures than previously thought and, while more damaging than a 1 C rise, 1.5 C represents a much more habitable planet than 2 C.
National commitments fall short
One important factor in these changes is the potential feedback loops at certain critical trigger points. For example, the thawing of the northern permafrost, or melting of large sections of polar ice caps. Such events would release large amounts of additional greenhouse gases, or lead to large rises in sea levels. Such events could create feedback loops in the global climate system, locking in further heating of the planet.
So far, so terrifying. But there’s more.
Current commitments by national governments are expected to lead to around 3 C of warming by 2100, with further warming beyond that date. The IEA said in its latest World Energy Outlook that CO2 emissions under planned policies are on a slow upward trend to 2040, and are “far out of step” with what is needed to tackle climate change.
The IPCC says staying within a 1.5 C rise requires “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and building), and industrial systems” that are “unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed.”
On the current course, global warming is expected to reach 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052. Limiting temperature rises to 1.5 C requires a 45% reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 2030 from 2010 levels, and net zero by 2050, according to the IPCC report.
The scale of the challenge highlights the importance of commitments made by the likes of Shell, and the influence shareholders can have in the fight against climate change. National governments – on current commitments – will fall short of their obligations. And with important consumer and producer countries such as the US and Brazil under climate-change-skeptical leadership, the onus falls increasingly on other sections of society.
The motive goes beyond the purely altruistic, though. Agricultural companies’ businesses could be devastated by climate change, with crop yields potentially falling, and harvests failing more often. And energy giants could find themselves owners of billions of dollars of stranded assets, should climate change come to be taken seriously enough to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Shell case emboldens activists
Following its success with Shell, the Church Commissioners for England, along with the head of New York State’s retirement fund, Thomas DiNapoli, turned their attention to American giant ExxonMobil. Shortly before Christmas, the investor-campaigners filed a shareholder resolution for consideration at the major’s next annual meeting requiring it disclose greenhouse gas reduction targets for the short-, medium- and long-term, in an effort to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 C.
But the campaigners could have their work cut out. ExxonMobil has already attempted to block the Massachusetts Attorney General’s investigation into its research into climate change, although the US Supreme Court rejected the appeal in early January.
As pressure mounts on the energy industry to change, both from governments and from shareholders, we may yet see more companies taking a lead on climate change policy.
This article previously appeared as a column in The National
https://blogs.platts.com/2019/01/29/investors-energy-majors-demands-climate-action/

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New Large Fossil Fuel Facilities Around Seattle Get Halted

Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Paul Shukovsky

A six-month moratorium on constructing new fossil fuel facilities or expanding existing ones took effect Jan. 28 in the county encompassing Seattle.
The 6-3 vote by the King County Council affects large-scale facilities, including refineries, and fuel extraction and other fossil fuel infrastructure, but especially targets wholesale distribution and bulk maritime terminals.
The ordinance says that fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases that warm the Earth, threatening the state and county with impacts from climate change, including higher temperatures, sea-level rise on coastal communities, diminishing snowpack and water availability, ocean acidification, and forest decline.
Fuel use produces harmful air pollution, and its production and distribution carries the risk of spill and natural gas pipeline explosions, the ordinance said.

Only unincorporated areas of the county are covered under the ordinance, which means facilities in the city of Seattle aren’t affected.
Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, opposed the moratorium, saying that “a sustainable energy future cannot be achieved through bans of oil and gas, which the federal government estimates will continue to make up about 80 percent of the energy mix through 2040.”
Fossil Fuel Bans Burgeoning
The ordinance is the latest example of a Pacific Northwest jurisdiction using land-use or zoning authority to stymie growth of fossil fuel infrastructure.
Portland, Ore., in December 2016 prohibited the development of new bulk fossil fuel terminals capable of handling more than 2 million gallons and the expansion of existing ones. The city declared in an ordinance that the fuels are “major contributors to climate change and pollution.”
The Port of Tacoma Commission voted unanimously a year later to ban the development of new facilities for the international export of bulk fossil fuel on port-owned property.
“We need to make bold steps with regard to climate action,” King County Council member Jeanne Kohl-Welles, who co-sponsored the measure, said in a telephone interview before the vote.
The nonpartisan council also called for a study during the moratorium on the impacts from major fossil fuel facilities so they can be addressed in an update to the county’s comprehensive land-use plan.
Changes in Zoning
The study also will evaluate whether the state Ocean Resources Management Act—which requires balancing economic benefits of coastal development when permitting projects with habitat protection and limiting fossil fuel production—applies to King County, which is on Puget Sound and not the ocean.
If the state statute doesn’t cover King County, the county will consider whether it should adopt a similar, local ordinance.
Kohl-Welles anticipates further regulation on fossil fuel infrastructure. She said the county executive, Dow Constantine, likely “will come back with really strong recommendations. And what we can do is make changes in zoning and permitting.”
Kohl-Welles said she received about 800 emails in favor of the moratorium and none in opposition. One of them, from Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, called for a permanent ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and included a reporton such facilities in western Washington.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/new-large-fossil-fuel-facilities-around-seattle-get-halted

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Transportation and Infrastructure News

Oil by Rail Still Risky, Lac-Mégantic Expert Says

Jan 28, 2019 | Canada's National Observer

By Tracy Sherlock

A rail disaster like the Lac-Mégantic tragedy in 2013 could happen again, according to author Bruce Campbell.
There are still many safety risks in transporting oil by rail, Campbell said in an interview with National Observer on the eve of the Vancouver launch of his book, book: The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied.Bruce Campbell doesn’t buy the argument that pipelines are safer than shipping oil by rail, saying it’s a false choice.#Lac-Mégantic #climate #energy
He is a former executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and adjunct professor at York University in Toronto.
Part of Lac-Mégantic's downtown was destroyed and 47 people were killed when an unmanned, parked train derailed and exploded in the small Quebec town. The train was carrying crude oil from the Bakken Formation — named after a farmer from North Dakota — which is considered to be more volatile than the heavy bituminous oil found in Alberta's oilsands.
While some new safety measures have been introduced, Campbell says shipping oil by rail is still risky.
“When I look at whether the regulator has done all that is necessary to reduce the risks that would prevent a recurrence, I have to answer no, they haven’t,” Campbell said in an interview with National Observer. He blames decades of deregulation, privatization and austerity.Oil shipped by train skyrocketing
In Canada, the amount of oil shipped by rail is growing by leaps and bounds.
“Right now, in oil by rail, we are at record volumes. It’s almost three times the volume at the time of Lac-Mégantic. It’s become a more visible issue than it was in 2015 or 2016,” Campbell said.
The National Energy Board reports that 55,014 barrels of oil were shipped by train each day in 2012. In November 2018, shipments had skyrocketed to more than 330,000 each day.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced in November that her government plans to buy rail cars to transport an additional 120,000 barrels of oil a day.
At the same time, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Canada's rail system has become safer since the Lac-Mégantic disaster.
“We have put in place a very large number of measures to improve railway safety, and some specifically targeted at the movement of oil products by rail,” Garneau told National Observer in November. Those measures include retiring older models of tank cars and adding speed restrictions “when dangerous materials are being carried.”
Campbell says a lack of infrastructure means railway tracks in Canada are already quite congested and there is competition from grain farmers and the forest products industry for railway time.
Campbell doesn’t buy the argument that pipelines are safer than shipping oil by rail, saying it’s a false choice.
“It’s not the one or the other, they’re both happening,” Campbell said. “The prime minister argued for pipeline expansion because he said they’re safer than dangerous rail. For me, that sounded a little disingenuous because that’s his responsibility – the responsibility for government to make it as safe as possible.”Northern B.C. residents concerned
Campbell had just finished a book tour between Prince George and Prince Rupert in northern B.C. and said people in that region are very concerned.
“The railway runs through pretty much every community and they’ve got big plans for expanding oil by rail,” Campbell said. “There are a number of projects … one that would transport petroleum products, diesel gasoline, methanol and possibly propane and then there are two possible propane export projects as well.”
He noted that research is underway by CN Rail to develop Canapux, small pellet-like products made from wrapped raw bitumen.
“They’re going to evaluate them and they’re going to say they’re safe and if they spill, they float, and they don’t break up, but I would advise for people living along that railroad and concerned about the environment and their safety from a blast, I would make sure that there is good, strong, independent evaluation of that process.”
Campbell was awarded a Law Foundation of Ontario fellowship for his work on the Lac-Méganticdisaster. He spent a year on research and worked with students on the issue.
Campbells publisher says the book includes first person interviews with many of the key players in the disaster, analysis of the corporate executives and the companies involved, an examination of the complex world of transport safety regulation in Canada, and an account of the trials of the three accused.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/01/28/news/oil-rail-still-risky-lac-megantic-expert-says

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Environment News

House Dems Demand EPA Docs on Rule Rollbacks

Jan 28, 2019 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard

By Alex Guillen

Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee today fired their opening salvo in planned oversight of EPA's regulatory rollback agenda.
The Democrats requested EPA hand over communications and other documents and answer questions about a wide variety of policy changes.
Specific topics covered in their letter include mercury pollution from power plants, air permitting requirements for industrial facilities, emissions from "glider" trucks, EPA's process for setting ambient air quality standards, and various changes to the agency's science advisory boards.
“These actions are particularly alarming in light of the recent warnings underscoring the impacts of climate change on air quality and the health of the American people,” wrote E&C Chairman Frank Pallone(D-N.J.), along with Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.).
WHAT’S NEXT: The lawmakers asked EPA to respond by Feb. 11.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard

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Municipalities, Environmentalists Attack EPA Ozone NAAQS Designations

Jan 28, 2019 | Inside EPA

By Stuart Parker

Illinois, local governments in Colorado and New Mexico, and environmentalists in a new legal filing are attacking EPA’s abrupt reversal designating areas of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin as attaining the 2015 ozone standard after previously proposing to find them in nonattainment, claiming EPA lacked justification for the change.
In their opening brief filed Jan. 25 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Clean Wisconsin, et al. v. EPA, petitioners accuse former Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt of interfering with agency designations of which areas meet the 2015 ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS). The petitioners claim Pruitt and his officials in their final designations issued last year arbitrarily upgraded the status of several areas to “attainment” of the standard, set at 70 parts per billion (ppb) by the Obama administration.
Pruitt faced political pressure not to find parts of Wisconsin and neighboring Illinois in nonattainment, which would require local air regulators to impose tougher pollution control measures. Nonattainment status can also hinder new industrial development -- such as the building of a Foxconn electronics manufacturing facility, now under construction near Racine, WI, in an area now designated attainment for the ozone limit.
Petitioners also challenge EPA’s designations with respect to parts of Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Texas, and southern Illinois. They further note EPA initially delayed issuance of any designations for the 2015 ozone NAAQS to beyond the Clean Air Act deadline of Oct. 1, 2017, only issuing them later under court order.
“Having been forced to identify nonattainment areas by a court-ordered deadline, the Agency applied an erroneous legal standard for contribution to nonattainment, ignored or contradicted its own record (even by suggesting that geographic features are located in areas where they do not exist), cherry-picked data, failed to properly apply its own Designations Guidance factors, changed its mind without explanation, and violated statutory procedural requirements -- all in a transparent effort to minimize the extent of nonattainment areas,” petitioners say.
“Minimizing nonattainment area boundaries and excluding areas that contribute to poor air quality, as EPA has done here, will result in continued adverse public health impacts, contrary to the requirements and purposes of the Clean Air Act,” they say.
In several parts of the country, petitioners say EPA’s actions contradict the scientific record and the agency’s earlier recommendations about which areas should be designated nonattainment based on their contribution to the nonattainment of surrounding areas. Courts have typically deferred to EPA’s decisions on this issue, provided the agency follows its own guidance and shows its decision to be rational. But here, petitioners argue, EPA has failed to show why it changed course in several situations.
“EPA’s final decision modifying all of EPA’s intended nonattainment designations in Wisconsin ignores its own analysis of the factual record, laid out carefully in its intended designation,” petitioners say, noting in once instance, EPA changed its mind about the designation of a Wisconsin county only four days before the final designations were signed, without offering a convincing reason why.
Calling EPA’s actions a “blatant” attempt to engineer attainment where it was undeserved, petitioners say EPA “misapplied the law it is tasked with implementing, and failed to consider important aspects of its own record. In some cases, EPA abruptly reversed course between its announced intended and final designations and without record support or even a discernable path in the record. In others, the Agency’s application of the record is implausible.”
In conclusion, this “is the epitome of an Agency acting arbitrarily, capriciously, and unlawfully,” petitioners say, asking the court to vacate the challenged designations and direct EPA to find the areas at issue in “nonattainment.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/municipalities-environmentalists-attack-epa-ozone-naaqs-designations

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EPA Highlights Decrease in Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Deregulation in Annual Review

Jan 28, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Miranda Green

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is promoting its deregulatory agenda while also highlighting a measured drop in greenhouse gas emissions as part of its list of 2018 achievements.
Accomplishments highlighted in the agency’s annual year in review, released Monday on the first workday back after the end of the partial government shutdown, include accomplishments that have been highly criticized by environmentalists as well as contradicted claims.
The review highlights regulatory reform, a reduction in air pollution, deletion of Superfund sites and sizable grant funding numbers as some of the major accomplishments it achieved in a year where leadership was split between former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and current acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler.
“Over the past year, the Trump Administration has continued to deliver on its promises to the American public. Not only are the economic prospects of Americans brighter and improving by the day, but so are environmental and public health conditions. Under President Trump, America is on a path to a stronger, safer, and cleaner future,” Wheeler said in a statement.
Items the EPA highlighted as accomplishments include a number of policy points the Trump administration has long advocated.
The document counted 13 deregulatory actions that were finalized in 2018 and a total of 33 major deregulations done under Trump that EPA says saved Americans nearly $2 billion. Actions mentioned included the replacement of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and proposed changes to the national vehicle emissions standard.
However, many policies highlighted have drawn past criticism.
One highlight EPA promoted was its annual enforcement against corporate polluters, saying in Fiscal 2018, EPA enforcement actions lead to the treatment or disposal of 809 million pounds of pollutants and waste, “almost twice as much as FY 2017.”
“The focus on these areas has resulted in larger, more complex cases with greater reductions in Pollution,” the review reads.
However, EPA under Trump has pivoted from an emphasis on legal enforcement against polluters, towards a push towards remedial compliance. The agency’s 2017 enforcement numbers showed a dramatic decrease from the number of civil cases settled and remediated under Obama. And numbers for 2018 are anticipated to be much lower.
Another item highlighted by EPA involved grant funding. The agency in Fiscal 18 awarded more than $4 billion in grants. But EPA has also fought to narrow who can receive grant funding. In 2017 former Administrator Pruitt instituted an agency rule that no scientist who currently received an EPA grant could also sit on its science advisory board. That rule has been challenged in court.
The White House has also made moves to dramatically cut the agency’s grant funding. The proposed EPA budget submitted last February aimed to reduce categorical grants by $469 million from the 2017 enacted budget's $1 billion in order to "better focus and prioritize environmental activities on core functions required by Federal environmental laws."
The agency's review also highlighted an October study released this year that found greenhouse gas emissions had dropped in 2017. In addition to emphasizing the lofty environmental deregulations the Trump administration enacted since the president took office, the review lauded Trump for being responsible for the drop in emissions.
“EPA reported that, during President Trump’s first year in office, greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources decreased by 2.7 percent,” the review read.
Experts have largely attributed the new trend to the cheaper price of natural gas, which is cleaner when burned than traditional coal and emits less carbon. Coal is a top contributor to greenhouse gas emissions globally.
The fossil fuel industry, which the EPA is tasked to oversee was mentioned multiple times throughout the review. With Coal, natural gas, and oil receiving 13, 43 and 36 mentions each in the 44-page report. Climate change was not mentioned once.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/427334-epa-highlights-decrease-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and

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EPA Ignored Own Data Letting Foxconn Site Off Hook for Ozone

Jan 28, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Amena H. Saiyid

The Wisconsin county where Foxconn Technology Group plans a $10 billion flat-screen manufacturing facility should have been forced to clamp down on ozone pollution, a coalition of environmental groups, cities, and counties told a federal appeals court.
The groups in their Jan. 25 brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allege the Environmental Protection Agency ignored relevant data that show communities in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin either violated federal ozone pollution standards or contributed to pollution problems elsewhere.
The EPA offered “no reasonable or rational connections between the facts it found and the choices it made,” the coalition said.
The brief was filed jointly by a coalition that is challenging the EPA’s May 2018 decisions on which communities violate federal ozone standards of 70 parts per billion set in 2015, and which communities do not. Communities violating, or contributing to the violation of federal ozone limits are required under the Clean Air Act to control pollution from ozone-forming sources including coal-fired power plants, factories, and vehicles.
The coalition includes the cities of Chicago and Sunland Park, N.M., as well as the environmental and public health groups Clean Wisconsin, Center for Biological Diversity, Familias Unidas del Chamizal, and the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Environment is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.
Ground-level ozone, a chief component of smog, forms when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds released by the burning of fossil fuels react in the presence of sunlight. Even at low levels, ozone can cause respiratory ailments especially in children and elderly.
Decisions Contradict Data
For instance, the coalition told the court the EPA unlawfully excluded McHenry County, Ill., and Porter County and portions of Lake County in northwest Indiana, despite substantial evidence and EPA analysis in the record that directly contradicts their contribution to Chicago’s inability to meet the ozone standards.
The coalition also noted that the EPA under the Obama administration had decided to include these counties, but then reversed course under the Trump administration on the basis of brief phone conversations and a single letter.
Likewise, Sunland Park objected to EPA’s decision to exclude El Paso, Texas, from the nonattainment designation. Sunland Park claims the Texas city is chiefly responsible for its inability to meet the ozone limits.
The EPA’s response is due April 25.
The case is Clean Wis. v. EPA, D.C. Cir., No. 18-01203, 1/25/19.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-ignored-own-data-letting-foxconn-site-off-hook-for-ozone

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Committee Plans Month of Hearings on Global Warming

Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Daily

By Nick Sobczyk

The Natural Resources Committee is planning a full month of climate change hearings, as House Democrats look to bring the issue to the forefront of the 116th Congress.
It will start next week on Feb. 6 with a full committee and a broad focus. Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said Democrats have tentatively scheduled two panels — one with two witnesses and another with four — to come before the committee.
That will include "a good mixture" of people from the science and advocacy worlds, mostly from outside Washington, D.C., Grijalva said yesterday.
For the rest of February, each subcommittee will hold its own climate hearings, with the ultimate goal of developing climate legislation, he added.
It's one of many signs that Democrats are shaping their environmental message around climate change in the new Congress, and the hearings could mark the first substantive step in developing climate legislation that environmental groups have long hoped for.
In the more immediate future, the Natural Resources Committee's Democrats will meet today to discuss their plans and subcommittee chairs, with a formal organizational meeting with the full committee scheduled for tomorrow at 10 a.m.
Democrats still haven't finalized their Natural Resources roster.
"I'm still three short, but we're going to go ahead with the reorganization three short," Grijalva said. "Hopefully we'll stick together and the rules don't get all messed up."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/01/29/stories/1060118833

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Kamala Harris Endorses Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’

Jan 28, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Michael Burke

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Monday endorsed the "Green New Deal," a proposal that sets a goal of getting 100 percent of U.S. electricity from renewable energy.
"I support a Green New Deal," she said during a CNN town hall in Iowa.
"Climate change is an existential threat to us, and we have got to deal with the reality of it," she added.
Harris, who hadn't previously thrown her support behind the proposal popularized by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), doubled down on the endorsement in a tweet Monday night following her remark at the town hall.
"I support a Green New Deal. Climate change is an existential threat to all of us, and we have got to deal with the reality of it," she tweeted.
Harris became the latest high-profile Democrat and 2020 presidential candidate to indicate some level of support for the "Green New Deal," joining Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.
Harris, Gillibrand, Warren and Castro are also each running or exploring a run for president.
The "Green New Deal" has attracted the support of a number of progressives. Last year, Ocasio-Cortez proposed that House Democrats create a select committee for a "Green New Deal." She has pushed for such goals in the new Congress along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).During the town hall Monday night, Harris also said lawmakers "who are in the pocket of big coal and big oil" don't fully understand the risk of climate change and said children "need to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water."
"I think that the fact that we have policymakers who are in the pockets of big oil and big coal don't fully appreciate the fact that we are looking at something that is presenting an existential threat to our country," Harris said.
"And, listen, all children need to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and we've got to have a commitment to a policy that will allow that to happen for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. And right now we don't," she added.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/427386-kamala-harris-endorses-ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal

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Democrats Scold Facebook, Google, Microsoft

Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Daily

By Nick Sobczyk

Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) want to know why three technology giants sponsored a conference earlier this month where climate change deniers touted the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions.
Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. were all sponsors of LibertyCon, an annual libertarian convention, alongside the CO2 Coalition and the Heartland Institute, both prominent groups pushing counternarratives to mainstream climate science.
According to an article by Mother Jones, one speaker for the CO2 Coalition gave a presentation called "Let's Talk About Not Talking: Should There Be 'No Debate' That Industrial Carbon Dioxide Is Causing Climate Catastrophe?"
In a letter dated Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and Pingree questioned why the three tech companies would put their names on the conference, given their long-standing public support for climate science and efforts to reduce emissions.
The letter is short on specific questions or hard reprimands, but it's another sign Democrats are looking to tackle climate change from every conceivable angle in the new Congress.
"As Members of the House of Representatives, we have already begun our individual, committee, and caucus efforts to make this issue a top priority in the 116th Congress," they wrote. "That is why we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference this month in Washington D.C., known as LibertyCon, that included a session denying established science on climate change."
Ocasio-Cortez has come out swinging on climate in her first term. She's championed the "Green New Deal," an ambiguous set of progressive policy goals aimed at getting the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy in a decade.
In the missive to the three tech giants, Ocasio-Cortez and Pingree note that companies commonly sponsor conferences, even if they don't agree with every view expressed there.
Google, Facebook and Microsoft have reason to dip their toes into the libertarian political world, as they look to regulatory fights in the U.S. in the near future.
But the lawmakers wrote they wanted to be sure the climate "misinformation" espoused at the conference does not align with the companies' views.
"Today's coordinated campaign to deny climate change, or to put a positive spin on its effects, is not unlike that of the tobacco companies which once sought to discredit their product's link to cancer," they wrote. "Their propaganda kept the nation from addressing a public health crisis for years, leading to many preventable deaths. We cannot afford to make the same mistake again with climate change."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/01/29/stories/1060118839

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Inside the Push to Expand Carbon Capture with an 'Orphan'

Jan 29, 2019 | E&E Climatewire

By John Fialka

The first in a two-part series.
Political strategists have built an odd but durable alliance that is pioneering ways for U.S. companies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The uphill battle was born from the collapse of legislation in 2010 to cap carbon dioxide.
Congress teemed with a new class of Republicans a year later; many of them wanted concerns about climate change to die with the spectacular failure of cap and trade.
But two advocacy groups, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) and the Great Plains Institute (GPI), stumbled across a political formula for survival. It was a federal tax credit called 45Q that gave companies incentives to store CO2 underground. It had been on the books for three years, but it wasn't attracting investors.
As Jeffrey Bobeck, energy policy director for C2ES, recalled, 45Q was "something of an orphan." Oil companies wanted it because it helped them finance ways to pump more crude from old underground wells. C2ES was intrigued. Fixing 45Q might open the door to permanently storing more CO2 in rock formations underground.
C2ES encountered GPI in 2010. The Minneapolis-based group works on technologies that help energy companies, labor unions, conservation organizations and energy state governors. The two groups found a common interest.
"We're not an environmental group," Brad Crabtree, policy director, noted in an interview. But GPI saw possibilities to create domestic jobs and income.
"Our bread and butter is to help different coalitions work together on challenging issues. Once we find some consensus, then we help them advocate it to government bodies," explained Crabtree. The two organizations formed a working group that held meetings in Washington, D.C., to explore whether other groups might help adopt the "orphan."
Getting an agreement seemed, at first, like a political fairy tale.
There were representatives of American oil companies that had pioneered uses for CO2 in the 1970s by collecting it, compressing it and then piping it underground to force oil from rock formations. That produced income, but the oil companies were concerned about the impending expiration of 45Q. An earlier Congress had put limits on the amount of CO2 that could be stored using the tax credit, at 75 million tons. And the threshold was about to be reached.
The working group included people from environmental groups, many of whom had spent years fighting Big Oil. Sitting beside them were representatives of coal companies. They wanted research incentives for taking CO2 out of the emissions stream at power plants and in other industries, a step that might help the coal industry survive.
Meanwhile, there was some promising research. Department of Energy laboratories found that the carbon in captured CO2 might be restructured into low-carbon fuels. That could begin to reduce emissions from the transportation sector, such as airlines and heavy-duty trucking. Those industries saw their futures threatened by laws that would tax carbon emissions.
The idea of pulling CO2 out of industrial emissions for use in new products found some traction.
"The beauty of it at the time was that you could build support for both products and infrastructure for managing carbon at a large scale, but still have the support of coal, oil, natural gas and other entities for reasons other than just emissions reductions," Crabtree said.
The result was a proposed amendment to 45Q that would raise the limits on the amount of carbon dioxide that the tax credit could be applied to. It also provided more incentives for recycling CO2 into new products. The consensus led the two groups to form the "National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative." The amendment was tailored to fit into the federal budget for 2012.
"It didn't make it," recalls Crabtree. "But it gave the group confidence that having stayed together through some fairly challenging political discussions" it might work in the future. In all, he figures, "it was a pretty good first year."
The idea to fix 45Q went through three different iterations. Crabtree visited oil company representatives in Texas and sought opinions from members of Congress. The ideal bill, he concluded, would "have to be not only bipartisan, but would have to appeal fundamentally to conservatives."
The group discovered that it appealed to a number of companies considering new ways to use carbon dioxide. One of them was LanzaTech Inc., a Chicago-based company. It had plans for a low-emitting jet fuel that could be made from the carbon emissions of steel plants. The approach relied on biotechnology developed by a New Zealand scientist using aerobic bacteria initially found in rabbit droppings and catalysts developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), part of DOE.
A two-step approach was focused on making a jet fuel that could substantially reduce CO2 emissions from transportation. That would be no small achievement. According to PNNL, 30,000 commercial flights take off each day in the U.S. During a 10-hour flight, a passenger jet burns 36,000 gallons of fuel, about a gallon every second.
There was a catch.
Making the new jet fuel uses carbon monoxide, which turns into carbon dioxide after it's emitted. So the initiative agreed to a slight wording change that further widened the proposed tax credit.
The 45Q amendment also attracted fans in Texas. One company, NET Power, was planning a small natural gas-fired power plant in La Porte that would emit no carbon dioxide because it burns oxygen rather than air. That allowed its CO2 emissions to be easily collected and stored.
Bill Brown, the CEO of NET Power, wanted to take advantage of the modified 45Q to build a larger power plant by 2021 using the U.S.-engineered process to store carbon dioxide or to use it to make low carbon fuel. "We don't like to rely on policy around here," Brown said. "We like to rely on science."
Roger Ballentine, a consultant to NET Power and former climate change adviser to President Clinton, said that Occidental Petroleum Corp. has since become involved with NET Power. "45Q is important," he stressed.
A coal-fired power plant owned by NRG Energy Inc. near Thompsons, Texas, was planning on using a Japanese process to capture an annual 1.6 million metric tons of CO2 and then pipe it 82 miles into a mature oil field. Partly the result of a $190 million grant from DOE, the hoped-for outcome was lower CO2 emissions going into the atmosphere.
Despite applause from the oil patch, the fate of 45Q remained a nail-biter right up to the end.
There were rumblings of discontent in the environmental community, which was deeply split. Some groups objected, others remained on the sidelines. After showing some interest, the Natural Resources Defense Council rejected the initiative.
"We don't support fossil fuel subsidies, including subsidies for enhanced oil recovery that would conflict with the need to reduce our dependence on those fuels," explained Ana Unruh Cohen, NRDC's director of government affairs.
Crabtree of GPI recalls watching the floor action in Congress on his computer screen at 5 a.m. on Feb. 9, 2018, when the omnibus budget bill came up for a final vote. This time, 45Q had made the cut. It had 24 co-sponsors in the Senate and 50 in the House.
He had the feeling that since 2010 the initiative had expanded its support in the middle of the political spectrum. But after more than nine years of failed amendments, Crabtree wouldn't accept victory until he saw senators who had never agreed on energy issues voting for 45Q.
Two weeks later, there was a rally at AFL-CIO headquarters, where the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative renamed itself the Carbon Capture Coalition, with the support of 50 groups and companies. They included Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the Clean Air Task Force, Arch Coal Inc., the National Audubon Society, Peabody Energy, the Nature Conservancy, the United Mine Workers of America, Occidental Petroleum and the Renewable Fuels Association.
The orphan had found a home.
There was even a kind of victory lap to celebrate the new life of 45Q during the era of the Trump administration. That came on Oct. 4, 2018. Two partners of LanzaTech — Boeing Co. and Virgin Atlantic — sponsored a commercial flight from Orlando, Fla., to Gatwick Airport near London. The jet's tanks held the largest batch of low carbon fuel that LanzaTech had ever made. It came from the carbon monoxide emissions of a steel plant in China.
After reviewing the results of more than 100 tests, ASTM International, which sets the global standards for jet fuel, had allowed airliners to use up to a 50 percent mix of the new, low carbon and cleaner-burning fuel. One passenger on the flight was Sean Simpson, the co-founder of LanzaTech and a biologist. He had put together a way to use bacteria to ferment ethanol from carbon monoxide wastes in 2005, after an earlier company that he had worked for had gone bankrupt.
Seated next to him was John Holladay, deputy manager of energy efficiency and renewable energy at PNNL, where he helped a DOE team develop the catalytic process that turned the ethanol into jet fuel. During the flight, the two men talked about LanzaTech's next steps, including a commercial-sized jet fuel plant in Georgia and perhaps one or more in England.
There were also potential new partners that showed the fuel can also be made from carbon emitted from an oil refinery in India, municipal sewage in Japan and agricultural wastes in California.
So far, according to LanzaTech, it has raised over $250 million from investors. "Having partners like this are really important," explained Holladay of PNNL. "We can see products that we've been working on can go out and get commercialized."
Next: Machines pull CO2 out of the air.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2019/01/29/stories/1060118815

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Fast-Food Investors Urge Cuts to Water Use and Emissions

Jan 29, 2019 | Wall Street Journal

By Dieter Holger

Investors managing more than $6.5 trillion in assets have asked fast-food multinationals to set tougher water use and greenhouse-gas emissions targets on their meat and dairy suppliers, environmental nonprofit organizations Ceres and the FAIRR Initiative said Monday.
Eighty-three investors sent letters written jointly with the nonprofit organizations late last week, requesting six companies--Domino’s (DPZ), Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG),McDonald’s (MCD), Restaurant Brands International (QSR), Wendy’s Co (WEN) and Yum Brands (YUM)--explain by March 2019 how they will cut water use, land use and greenhouse-gas emissions more aggressively, and to encourage their suppliers to disclose more data.
“Farsighted investors cannot ignore the headwinds facing the meat and dairy sector,” said Alice Evans, co-head of responsible investment at BMO Asset Management, one of the signatories to the letter. Other signatories include Aviva Investors and Aegon Asset Management.
McDonald’s, Yum Brands and Restaurant Brands International said they were committed to sustainability when contacted about the initiative.
Domino’s said it had received the letter and was reviewing it, and added that the company has no global procurement program as it is 97% franchised and most of its international stores have their own supply chains.
Chipotle and Wendy’s didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The campaign marks the latest in a string of investor initiatives pressuring publicly traded companies to set tougher targets on their environmental impact. European banks HSBC(HSBC) and Lloyds Banking Group (LYG) adopted new climate policies in 2018 after pressure from investors and, late last year, Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) said it would halve its carbon footprint by 2050.
Investors now have the food industry in their sights.
“Increased environmental regulation, rising consumer demand for plant-based food and fears over water pollution from intensive farms are all ingredients in the rising threat to the long-term value of the fast food multinationals,” Ms. Evans said.
The signatories of the letter recommend that the companies’ meat and dairy suppliers commit to emission targets in line with the Paris Climate Agreement, while lowering water usage based on a company’s needs.
Livestock production accounts for 14.5% of greenhouse-gas emissions world-wide, according to a 2018 report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It also accounts for close to one-third of all the water used in agriculture, according to the same U.N. report.
“From an investor perspective, especially an investor that is looking at this issue in the long term, I think the long-term risks on climate and water impacts outweigh the short-term costs,” said Aarti Ramachandran, head of research and engagements at the FAIRR Initiative, which focuses on livestock production.
“Clearly the extent of these risks create operational, reputational and market risk for the sector, for companies that are sourcing from the sector and obviously for investors that have these companies in their portfolios,” she said.
The world’s population is set to grow to around 10 billion by 2050, depleting freshwater and placing more than half of the world’s population in water-stressed areas, the U.N. estimates.
More than 90 food, beverage and agriculture companies flagged water risks such as droughts and price volatility in 2017 earnings calls, Ceres said. The nonprofit organization said 85% of 42 companies it scored for water usage reported the resource as a material risk in financial filings.
The Coller FAIRR Protein Producer Index, which ranks companies according to their sustainability management, labeled 60% of the 60 largest global meat, dairy and fish suppliers in 2018 as “high risk” because they didn’t disclose certain environmental targets, ranging from deforestation and pollution to water usage and greenhouse-gas emissions. Some 72% of the suppliers had poor or no reporting on greenhouse gas emissions.
In their letter, investors said fast-food companies should start publishing time-bound targets and metrics on their meat and dairy supply chains while disclosing their progress in annual financial statements.
Despite the lack of data and environmental targets in the food industry, some companies are taking action.
Tyson Foods , the second-largest processor of animal proteins in the world, has committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions 30% by 2030 and is lowering water use in its supply chain by 12% by 2020.
“We’ve deepened our commitment to sustainability in recent years and have set aggressive goals for reducing our environmental footprint,” a Tyson Foods spokesman said.
McDonald’s, which had not seen the letter from Ceres and the FAIRR Initiative when approached for comment last week, said that it has also taken steps to lower its carbon footprint. In 2018, the company became the first restaurant to commit to a science-based target of reducing emissions by 31% in its supply chain by 2030.
“We are committed to using our scale for good to create a food system in which people, animals and the planet thrive. Sourcing our food sustainably is a critical piece of that commitment,” a McDonald’s spokeswoman said.
Yum Brands, the owner of KFC and Taco Bell, has disclosed the water use of its restaurants since 2013 and lowered water consumption by 10% between 2015 and 2017. The company, which also had not seen the letter when asked for comment, has an “environmental stewardship” program to cut pollution and boost conservation in its supply chain.
“We also look forward to collaborating with global suppliers to lower their impact in line with leading markets in reduced emissions and impact,” a Yum Brands spokeswoman said.
A spokeswoman for Restaurant Brands International--the owner of Burger King and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen--who had seen the letter said the company is committed to sustainability and it would provide more information soon.
“We are reviewing the letter, and we will provide information related to our work on sustainability on our website,” she said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fast-food-investors-urge-cuts-to-water-use-and-emissions-11548761368?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2

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