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AM ACC Clips Report - February 6, 2019
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(ACC Mentioned) Trump EPA Hires Adviser Who Says Fossil Fuels Are Good for the Earth
Feb 5, 2019 | Shareblue Media
By Caroline Orr
The Trump administration is stacking the EPA's Science Advisory Board with anti-science conspiracy theorists and industry insiders. -
Wheeler EPA Nomination Advances on Party-Line Panel Vote
Feb 5, 2019 | Roll Call
By Elvina Nawaguna
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-10 along party lines to advance the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to become administrator of the EPA. -
EPW Approves Wheeler But Democrats Seek Policy Deals Before Floor Vote
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
By David LaRoss and Doug Obey
The Senate environment panel in a 11-10 party line vote has approved Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler's nomination to head the agency permanently, but Democrats who were unable to block his nomination proceeding are hoping to win concessions on top EPA policy changes before agreeing not to slow a full Senate floor vote. -
(ACC Mentioned) Flame Retardant Still Put Kids in Danger and Still Don’t Stop Fires
Feb 5, 2019 | Fatherly
By Joshua A. Krisch
Flame retardant chemicals, synthetic combinations of bromine and chlorine, are woven into crib mattresses, changing table pads, nursing pillows, and children’s clothing. -
Chemical Emissions Spike Near Sterigenics Facility in Illinois
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Stephen Joyce
Peak ethylene oxide emissions from Sterigenics U.S. LLC’s Willowbrook, Ill., facility spiked to nearly twice the levels detected in earlier testing, according to Environmental Protection Agency data released Feb. 5. -
Wheeler Has GOP Senators’ Support Even Absent Chemicals Pledge
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith and Dean Scott
Andrew Wheeler appears to have alleviated the concerns of some Republican senators urging the EPA to take stronger action to limit fluorinated chemicals in drinking water—a step that could further solidify his confirmation to the agency’s top slot. -
Ohio Joins New York in Seeking Break from PFAS Litigation
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Ohio is joining New York state in seeking to break its legal suit against the manufacturers of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and PFAS-containing fire-fighting foam from inclusion in consolidated multidistrict litigation (MDL) to be heard by a federal district judge in South Carolina. -
Lawmakers Make PFAS Push During Trump Speech
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Manuel Quiñones
Lawmakers from several states sought to highlight concerns about chemicals in drinking water during last night's State of the Union address. -
Our Plastics, Our Selves
Feb 6, 2019 | Grist
By Eve Andrews
When I arrive at the marina in Victoria on a late-July morning, the sky and water are complementary shades of azure, and there is not one cloud in the sky — a Pacific Northwestern idyll. On the deck of the 72-foot shiny-bright Sea Dragon, moored here in the island capital of British Columbia for just one day, are four young women, part of the crew of the research voyage “eXXpedition.” -
Qatar and Exxon Mobil Plan $10 Billion Gas Investment in Texas
Feb 5, 2019 | The New York Times
By Clifford Krauss
Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil said on Tuesday that they are making a big investment in American natural gas exports. The deal is designed in part to strengthen Qatar’s ties with the United States nearly two years after Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a trade embargo against the country. -
Exxon, Qatar Petroleum Give Go-Ahead on Texas Project
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Jenny Mandel
Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil Corp. will move forward with a $10 billion redevelopment project to turn an idle natural gas import plant into an export hub, the two companies announced yesterday. -
Golden Pass LNG Sanctioned by ExxonMobil, Qatar
Feb 5, 2019 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Carolyn Davis
The U.S. natural gas export project long envisioned by sponsors ExxonMobil Corp. and state-owned Qatar Petroleum (QP) was sanctioned Tuesday, with construction on the Texas coast in Sabine Pass set to begin before the end of March. -
Trump Touts U.S. as Net Energy Exporter—but He’s a Bit Early
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Feb. 5 to tout “a revolution in American energy” that has made the U.S. “a net exporter”—but some of his celebration might be premature. -
Murkowski, Manchin Get to Work on Grid, Technology
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Dylan Brown
Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski set the tone at this year's first Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, with new ranking member Joe Manchin in lockstep. -
Federal Judge Orders Chemical Safety Board to Require Disclosure of Chemical Emissions from Accidents
Feb 5, 2019 | The Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
In a lawsuit filed after Hurricane Harvey, a federal judge has ordered the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board to force the disclosure of chemical emissions resulting from accidents. -
District Judge Orders CSB to Issue Accident Reporting Rule
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
A federal district judge is ordering the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) to issue within one year a final rule requiring chemical facilities to report their accidental releases following an incident, backing labor and public interest groups’ claims that CSB has unreasonably delayed the rule mandated by law. -
Trump Sidesteps Environment, Calls for Infrastructure Deal
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By George Cahlink, Kellie Lunney and Nick Sobczyk
Energy and environmental initiatives were largely absent last night by President Trump in a State of the Union address that mixed a call for bipartisanship infrastructure work with warnings about engaging in partisan politics. -
Trump Wants Infrastructure — Is It a Deal or a Disaster?
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Hannah Northey and Christa Marshall
President Trump last night revived his calls for a sweeping infrastructure bill while touting the nation's status as a net energy exporter — a direct challenge to newly elected progressive Democrats eager to replace oil, gas and coal with carbon-free energy. -
Trump Leaves the Details to Congress
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss and Nick Sobczyk
After two years of congressional clamoring for more details on his much-touted infrastructure plan, President Trump's vague State of the Union call for lawmakers to send him a bipartisan package raised new questions over whether the issue could take off in the 116th Congress. -
Air Permitting Violations May No Longer Be an EPA Priority
Feb 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Refineries and power plants that need permits for their air pollution could face less scrutiny from the EPA as the agency considers dropping a 20-year-old enforcement priority. -
That Makes 3. Trump Is Silent on Climate in Third Address
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Mark K. Matthews and Scott Waldman
President Trump spoke for more than an hour yesterday and never said the words "climate change" or "global warming" — a rhetorical feat that keeps alive Trump's streak of ignoring an issue that scientists have described as a looming catastrophe. -
Climate Change Takes Center Stage in the House
Feb 6, 2019 | PoliticoPro
By Anthony Adragna
House Democrats are taking their first crack at climate policy with a pair of hearings Wednesday that offer an opportunity to convince the liberal upstarts who have forced the issue onto the party's agenda that they all share the same goals. -
House Hearings To Build Case For Climate Action Ahead Of Policy Details
Feb 6, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Doug Obey
House Democrats are rolling out a blitz of hearings on the implications of climate change, seeking to highlight such threats in order to build a case for policy to reduce greenhouse gases, while also creating a contrast with the Trump administration on the issue in advance of more complicated efforts to reach consensus on climate legislation. -
DOJ Disputes Right to ‘Stable Climate System’ in Youth Climate Suit
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is arguing that there is no constitutional right to a stable climate in its opening brief in a high-profile appeal of litigation brought by a group of youth who charge the federal government is violating the Constitution’s due process clause by promoting fossil fuels that cause global warming. -
GOP Blasts 'Leftist' 'Green New Deal' as Details Emerge
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Republicans yesterday blasted the "Green New Deal," marking a new phase in the messaging war, as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prepares to release a resolution outlining the progressive climate platform in broad strokes.
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(ACC Mentioned) Trump EPA Hires Adviser Who Says Fossil Fuels Are Good for the Earth
Feb 5, 2019 | Shareblue Media
By Caroline Orr
The Trump administration is stacking the EPA's Science Advisory Board with anti-science conspiracy theorists and industry insiders.
The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment by acting as a watchdog over industry and big business.
Under Trump’s watch, however, the EPA has turned into a cesspool of industry insiders and lobbyists who have hijacked the agency by replacing science with politics and prioritizing corporate interests above all else.
And now, things are getting even swampier at the EPA, thanks to new leadership.
Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who was appointed by Trump to be the agency’s acting director, is in the process of picking new members for the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, which is supposed to serve as a team of external experts to advise the agency on scientific matters like evidence-based policies and regulations.
Thus far, the new members include a political insider from a Koch-funded conservative think tank, several industry-funded researchers, and — most recently — an outspoken climate change denier who believes that burning fossil fuels is actually good for the earth.
Last week, when his advisory position was announced, John Christy, told E&E News, which covers energy and the environment, that “there’s a benefit, not a cost, to producing energy from carbon.”
He has previously expressed similar sentiments, saying, “Carbon dioxide makes things grow. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. There is absolutely no question that carbon energy provides … longer and better lives.”
Christy, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama in Hunstville, also thinks that regulations on greenhouse gases should be undone because he doesn’t believe human activity is related to global warming — which he’s not even entirely confident is real.
When asked about the overwhelming scientific consensus that refutes his claims, Christy has attributed it in part to censorship, making the baseless assertion that scientists are too afraid to speak up and come forward with evidence contradicting mainstream climate science.
At one point in the past, Christy even put forth research asserting that the earth was actually cooling, not warming. Those findings were swiftly debunked, and Christy later admitted that his conclusions were erroneous.
Still, he continues to argue that the earth isn’t warming at the rate that scientific agencies say it is, and his research continues to be refuted by mainstream scientists. He counters the scientific consensus by saying that whatever happens to the environment is God’s will.
Upon being named to the advisory board, Christy told E&E news that he will use his position to “question the results of climate models.”
According to Christy, he got his seat on the board after being asked to apply by EPA officials.
He will join other new members chosen by Wheeler, including Richard Williams, who has downplayed the link between formaldehyde exposure and cancer during his time as a member of the American Chemistry Council’s formaldehyde panel, and Brant Ulsh, who has criticized how much effort is spent trying to minimize radiation exposure at nuclear power plants.
Barbara Beck, another new pick for the board, once wrote that researchers should be more careful in making the determination that that low levels of lead exposure are harmful to children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is “no safe blood lead level in children.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists slammed Wheeler’s decision to pack the scientific advisory board with industry insiders and anti-science skeptics.
“Scientists on the SAB should be providing an independent check on the work of the EPA, not using their positions to push fringe scientific views or further a specific policy agenda at the agency,” the organization declared in a statement Friday.
“It’s a shame that the independence and quality of the SAB is being so badly decimated at a time when oversight at the EPA is sorely needed to ensure that science is being used to inform policies that should be protecting Americans and our environment,” the group added, noting that this is “part of a general trend of the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on science and sidelining of science advice.”
Meanwhile, as Wheeler was busy stacking the science advisory board with politically motivated insiders, he still found time last week to sign off on a plan that would allow toxic chemicals to go unregulated in our nation’s drinking water supply.
Among the results of the administration’s anti-science agenda is a mass exodus of scientists and researchers, with nearly 1,600 EPA employees leaving during the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency. At the same time, fewer than 400 new employees were hired, and many of them were pro-industry political appointees, not scientists.
In the words of former surgeon general Richard Carmona, the Trump administration’s war on science is as “egregious as I’ve ever seen it, starting from the very top with the president just denying the existence of science, manipulating the system on behalf of special interests.”
And now, those special interests have their very own representatives to manipulate the system from the inside out.
https://shareblue.com/trump-epa-hires-adviser-who-says-fossil-fuels-are-good-for-the-earth/
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Wheeler EPA Nomination Advances on Party-Line Panel Vote
Feb 5, 2019 | Roll Call
By Elvina Nawaguna
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-10 along party lines to advance the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to become administrator of the EPA.
He was among five of President Donald Trump’s nominees who moved a step closer to taking key administration jobs on Tuesday, including two for the EPA and one who would fill a two-year-old vacancy at the top of the Federal Highway Administration.
Wheeler, currently the agency's deputy administrator, has been leading the agency in an acting role since July, when Scott Pruitt resigned from the position amid ethics allegations, and will likely be confirmed by the Republican Senate majority when a vote is arranged.
Wheeler’s nomination advanced despite questions by lawmakers from both parties on the panel about whether the agency will issue clean water standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, toxic chemicals that are resistant to degradation in the environment and have been linked to numerous health problems.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who last week had expressed fears that Wheeler may not issue the PFAS standards, on Tuesday said the acting administrator had visited her office and assured her that he would address her concerns.
“With that in mind, and considering other policy concerns to West Virginia, I have no concerns supporting his nomination,” Capito said. “However I intend to closely track the steps EPA and other agencies are taking to address this public health and environmental health crisis, which has had a particular impact on West Virginians living in affected communities to ensure that the federal government is efficiently responsive to their concerns.”
Despite their opposition to Wheeler, Democrats stopped short of trying to delay the vote on the former Environment and Public Works Committee staffer who also later had a long career as a lobbyist and fossil fuel attorney. Ranking member Thomas R. Carper of Delaware lamented what he called the rushed process and the rollbacks of several regulations at the EPA under the nominee.
“We should not move so quickly with Mr. Wheeler’s nomination in light of his failure to ensure that EPA acts responsibly, especially in areas where there are such clear ‘win-wins’ that most EPA administrators would have welcomed the opportunity to implement,” Carper said.
But Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming commended Wheeler for doing “an outstanding job” leading the agency since July.
As the head of the nation’s top environmental regulator, Wheeler can expect to be summoned by House Democrats to explain his justifications for the agency’s policy actions, including rewriting or rolling back several rules meant to control greenhouse gas emissions and public health.Chemical Lawyer
At the same Tuesday meeting, the panel voted 11-10, also along party lines, to advance former chemical industry attorney Peter Wright to lead the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management, which oversees the Superfund program and coordinates emergency responses to toxic spills and unauthorized chemical discharges.
Wright was once a lawyer with The Monsanto Co. before its acquisition last year by Bayer AG, and also spent much of his career as counsel for the Dow Chemical Co., now DowDupont, which has been found responsible for several Superfund sites.
While awaiting confirmation, Wright last year started working at the EPA as special counsel, causing Senate Democrats to accuse the Trump administration of trying to circumvent Congress’ role of providing advice and consent for the position to which he had been nominated.
The lawmakers on the panel also voted by voice to approve Nicole Nason’s nomination to become the first administrator of the Federal Highway Administration in two years.
The post of FHWA administrator has been vacant since Trump took office in 2017. His first nominee for the post, Paul Trombino III, withdrew in December 2017.
Nason is currently the assistant secretary for administration in the State Department. She won Senate voice vote approval twice in President George W. Bush’s administration, when she was confirmed to run the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2006 to 2008, and to be assistant secretary of transportation for government affairs from 2003 to 2006.
Her federal career also includes serving as assistant commissioner for government affairs at Customs and Border Protection, and as counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. She has a black belt in karate, and founded a group focused on women’s empowerment through martial arts.
At a hearing last week, Nason said she would emphasize making highways safer, especially in rural areas, and would work with Congress to find a solution to the looming shortfall of funding in the Highway Trust Fund.
The last highway bill (PL 114-94) plugged the funding gap through 2020 by taking money from the general budget. The next bill will require finding $85 billion, according to Carper, who on Tuesday said he hoped Nason will work with the panel on the legislation.
The committee also voted to approve former Louisiana congressman John Fleming’s nomination to become assistant secretary of Commerce for Economic Development and John Ryder, who has served as counsel to the Republican National Committee, to become a member of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board of directors.
https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/wheeler-nomination-epa-advanced-senate-panel
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EPW Approves Wheeler But Democrats Seek Policy Deals Before Floor Vote
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
By David LaRoss and Doug Obey
The Senate environment panel in a 11-10 party line vote has approved Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler's nomination to head the agency permanently, but Democrats who were unable to block his nomination proceeding are hoping to win concessions on top EPA policy changes before agreeing not to slow a full Senate floor vote.
“There is a pretty solid roadmap that we could follow that would lead to a vote on the floor sooner rather than later,” Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), ranking member on the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee (EPW), said following the panel's Feb. 5 vote to approve Wheeler's nomination as EPA administrator during a business meeting.
Without a path to blocking Wheeler's approval by the full Senate outright given Republicans' 53-47 majority, Democrats' only leverage to extract concessions from the agency is to use procedural moves to draw out the confirmation process for as long as Senate rules allow, such as by using the full 30 hours of debate before cloture can be invoked.
“There are five issues” that the minority is linking to Wheeler's confirmation, Carper continued: limits on the perflourinated chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS); hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) controls under the long-pending Kigali treaty; EPA's proposal to undo the cost-benefit finding underpinning the Obama-era mercury and air toxics standards (MATS) for power plants; a proposed but never-finalized ban on use of methylene chloride (MCL) as a paint-stripper; and the contentious rollback of vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards set during the Obama administration.
In particular, Carper said, Democrats are asking for EPA to enact enforceable drinking water limits on PFOA and PFOS within two years, and for the White House to send the Kigali treaty to the Senate for ratification.
He did not name specific changes or deadlines the agency could agree to that would satisfy the party's objections on the other three points, beyond Democrats' overall goals of dropping the proposed MATS and vehicle rollbacks in their entirety or finalizing the MCL ban proposed by the Obama EPA.
Speaking to Inside EPA after the hearing, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) said of the MATS rule, “We don't want any weakening of the standards. [Wheeler] has said publicly that he is not intending to do that, it would be good if we saw action on it.”
Carper in his remarks during the hearing and to reporters after it adjourned said Democrats' calls for EPA to revise the five policies he identified have at least some support from GOP lawmakers, industry, or both.
His comments suggest Democrats could have a path to winning concessions on policy changes before a full Senate floor vote on Wheeler's nomination, even though Republicans expanded their Senate majority in the midterm elections.
“We're not asking for crazy stuff,” he said during the hearing, and added that Wheeler's eventual confirmation is not in doubt. “You all have the votes to get him confirmed in the Senate, I think."
'Not Big Asks'
Following the hearing Carper told Inside EPA, “I've talked to a number of Republican senators who share the concerns I've expressed, with respect to fuel efficiency standards, with respect to mercury [and] air toxics standards, with respect to hydrofluorocarbons, with respect to the PFOA substance that gets in the water, groundwater and causes cancer, with respect to the paint stripper. These are not big asks.
“I won't say who I talked to on the Republican side this morning about one of them, the drinking water standard on PFOA, but my colleague said, 'that's not a big ask. Why wouldn't we do that?'”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told Inside EPA, “When we get to the floor hopefully some of our Republican colleagues who share some of our concerns will express them to Wheeler, and maybe we can get some concessions.”
However, Republican opposition to Wheeler's policy on perfluorinated chemicals seems to be softening, after strong push-back to recent reports that EPA's plan to address the substances would not include enforceable limits under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In particular, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), who has been one of her party's most outspoken supporters of strict drinking water regulation of the chemicals, voted for Wheeler at the EPW hearing and said she was satisfied for the moment by promises he made in recent meetings with her and her staff.
“Mr. Wheeler and his staff came to my office and addressed those concerns by pledging to look at all available statutory authorities the EPA has been granted by Congress to address this potential crisis."
But she added, “I intend to closely track the steps EPA and other agencies are taking to address this public-health and environmental-health crisis.”
Wright Nomination
At the Feb. 5 EPW meeting, senators in an 11-10 party line vote also advanced the nomination of former Dow Co. attorney Peter Wright to be EPA's assistant administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM).
Following the vote Carper similarly called for concessions on major OLEM policies before the full Senate votes on Wright's nomination.
Specifically, the senator called on EPA to stand by assurances Wheeler offered late in 2018 where it would have added both PFOA and PFOS to the Superfund hazardous substance list, advanced a long-sought draft formaldehyde risk assessment and revised the agency's controversial science rule, among other concessions, following Wright's confirmation.
That deal fell apart over Sen. Bob Menendez's (D-NJ) insistence on a recorded vote, which was impossible given time constraints at the end of the 115th Congress, but Carper said during the Feb. 5 hearing that he hopes to revive it.
“EPA has not yet indicated now whether it is willing to make those same commitments, and so for now I will refrain from supporting Mr. Wright's nomination. I hope those commitments are forthcoming soon,” Carper said during the hearing.
EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the status of the agreement.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epw-approves-wheeler-democrats-seek-policy-deals-floor-vote
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(ACC Mentioned) Flame Retardant Still Put Kids in Danger and Still Don’t Stop Fires
Feb 5, 2019 | Fatherly
By Joshua A. Krisch
Flame retardant chemicals, synthetic combinations of bromine and chlorine, are woven into crib mattresses, changing table pads, nursing pillows, and children’s clothing. They are present in strollers and car seats. They surround American newborns, collect beneath our toddlers’ fingernails, and represent the fibrous foundation of a $4 billion industry. The most well-known class of these chemicals, polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDE, are everywhere. And everywhere, worryingly, includes the growing bodies of our children.
Flame retardants, it turns out, have a nasty habit of leaching into the environment. They chip off your old furniture and taint the dust on your floor. They decay into cattle feed and persist all the way up the food chain, where they land on supermarket shelves in cartons of milk and fatty cuts of beef. The chemicals created and placed in our homes, on our furniture, in our children’s clothing—ostensibly to prevent fire and stay put—have gone feral. “Everyone is exposed to PBDEs,” says Ann Vuong, who studies the health impacts of PBDEs at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. “Everyone has levels of PBDEs in their bodies.”
That’s cause for concern, especially for parents. Mounting evidence suggests that flame retardants interfere with hormones and reproductive systems, stunting child development and harming fetuses. This data forces us to ask the question: is the trade-off between short-term safety and the potential for long term harm worth it? Even as federal and state governments ban the most worrisome chemicals (prompting manufacturers to introduce new and sometimes even less safe and less reliable alternatives) the answer seems to be no. Worse, the issue is not simply that vestiges of flame retardants persist in the environment and in the food chain for generations, but that these chemicals may not meaningfully retard flame. The trade off may have never been between fire safety and biological harm—but between the suggestion of fire safety and the reality of risk.
“We need a better name for these chemicals,” says Tracy Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco, anexpert in how environmental chemicals impact early development. “After testing these flame retardant chemicals, it makes maybe a second-or-two difference [in time to combustion].”
“It’s not really meaningful when it comes to preventing the effects of a fire.”
A Brief History of Flame Retardants
The story of how we ended up with children’s items (and children) full of flame retardants begins in the early 1970s, when manufacturers began incorporating the flame retardant TDCPP (Tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate) into kid’s pajamas and then, gradually, into furniture, mattresses, and other flammable items. They didn’t have much choice in the matter. Smoldering cigarettes had started thousands of deadly fires and, when lawmakers called upon Big Tobacco to create a flame retardant cigarette, they passed the buck. Textiles and furniture companies stepped up. If the cigarettes weren’t safe, at least the couch could be.
But concerns quickly mounted, with studies suggesting that this chemical could cause cancer, and TDCPPs were banned from children’s sleepwear in 1977 (although they still exist in other children’s products). Touted as safer alternatives, polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs, appeared in the early 1980s. These chemicals, too, were banned after the manufacturer mislabeled a series of shipments and inadvertently supplemented the diets of thousands of Michigan cattle with brominated chemicals. Millions of people were exposed through meat before the mass culling of chemically-tainted cows that followed. The industry’s creative solution was to slightly alter the chemical structure of PBBs, with the addition of an ether group (an oxygen molecule connected to two carbon-hydrogen molecules). The contemporary PBDE was born.
For the next 25 years, PBDE was the flame retardant of choice; virtually every product that contained polyurethane foam came with a brominated chemical. PBDEs, too, were banned at the federal level in 2005, but their presence in the environment and in older consumer products continues to be a public health concern. “In 2010, more than 80 percent of the products we tested contained a flame retardant,” Heather Stapleton, who studies how flame retardants impact the environment at Duke University, told Fatherly. Fortunately, Stapleton says, progress has been made. “Our testing today suggests less than 20 percent of products contain a flame retardant.”
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health monitor new flame retardants and continue to gather studies on the adverse effects of older chemicals. And a dozen U.S. states regulate flame retardants to some degree, usually in children’s products. California, which once had some of the strictest laws in the country requiring consumer items to contain flame retardants, recently signed a bill that will all but ban these chemicals from furniture, children’s products, and mattresses.
But PBDE flame retardants persist—and they’re still inside of us, too. One 2018 study of 334 mother-child pairs found the chemical present in every child tested. “You can get exposed through old furniture and also through food, especially if you eat a high fat diet, because these chemicals tend to accumulate in fat and then bioaccumulate up the food chain,” Woodruff says, explaining that if PBDEs end up in a cow’s food supply, for instance, they enter our guts when we eat beef or drink milk. “It’s in dust, too, and kids crawl around in the dust, put their hands in their mouths. They’ll have higher exposures because of that.”
The Potential Dangers of PBDEs
Most flame retardants are structurally similar to thyroid hormone chemicals, and can easily interact with the thyroid hormone. Studies have found strong associations between exposure to flame retardants and thyroid disorders, as well as poor performance on neurodevelopmental tests and reductions in fertility. “There is concern about effects on the developing brain—similar to concerns related to lead exposure,” Stapleton says.
Reiko Kishi and colleagues at the Hokkaido University Center for Environmental and Health Sciences in Japan have been at the forefront of studying how the phosphate-based flame retardants TDCIPP, TCIPP, and TNBP may impact children’s health, specifically when it comes to asthma and allergies. “We found significant associations between increasing levels of TDCIPP and TCIPP in house dust and increased risk of atopic dermatitis, as well as increased levels of TNBP and asthma,” Kishi told Fatherly. In a separate study, Kishi and colleagues also found a link between TDCIPP in dust and allergies and eczema in children.
That’s particularly disappointing, because phosphate-based flame retardants have long been touted as safer alternatives to PBDEs and other bromine-based chemicals. “Because of their endocrine disrupting effect and bioaccumulation, brominated flame retardants were phased out, and phosphate flame retardants have been used as alternatives,” Kishi says. “But there is little awareness of the potentially harmful effects of phosphate flame retardants among the general population.”
Not that there appears to be any safe flame retardant on the market. Other work has linked a variety of flame retardant chemicals to infertility in women and decreases in male reproductive hormone. And there’s a strong correlation between PBDE exposure in childhood (even in the womb) and poor cognitive development. “Epidemiological studies have provided evidence that PBDEs are neurotoxicants,” Vuong says, citing reports of “decreased full scale IQ, impairments in executive function, and more hyperactivity and aggression problems in children who were exposed to higher PBDE levels during gestational development.”
Indeed, one recent study by Woodruff of nearly 3,000 mother-child pairs, found that every 10-fold increase in a mother’s PBDE levels corresponded to a drop of 3.7 IQ points in her child.“We do not yet know whether these fears are an overreaction,” Kishi says. “But this could be a widespread problem.”
“Better to avoid unnecessary usage of materials with flame retardants.”
Do Flame Retardants Actually Retard Flame?
Whether flame retardants actually prevent fires and save lives is a subject of fierce controversy. On one hand, the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups maintain that flame retardants are necessary and effective. “Without flame retardants, the time of flashover occurs in three minutes or less and, if you’re trapped in an airplane or in a house, you have only three minutes to escape,” American University’s Douglas Fox says in a video for the ACC’s North American Flame Retardant Alliance. “The purpose of flame retardants is that it delays that. You now have 10 to 15 minutes to get out.”
“Having extra time to egress is a matter of life and death.”
Harvard University’s Joseph Allen disagrees. “One of the misnomers about flame retardants is that they actually provide a fire safety benefit. Everything that I have read and seen indicates that they really don’t,” he says in a video for Harvard’s Sustainability mini-site. “I have been working with the FAA on this. [Flame retardants are] used in just about every component of airplanes, and the fire safety experts there say they don’t do anything against the type of fires that are typically encountered on an airplane. I have seen the same kind of reports for the fires that are typical in our homes. They don’t really work.”
Woodruff provides some population-level evidence to support Allen’s claims. “California had a strong flame retardant standard [requiring products to contain these chemicals] but didn’t have any fewer deaths because of it,” she says. “This was not preventing fire deaths in California.”
Flame retardant chemicals may even make some fires worse. “The presence of flame retardants in these products results in the production of hazardous chemicals in the air when they do burn, including carbon monoxide, soot and hydrogen cyanide,” Stapleton adds.
Besides, even if the ACC and industry groups are correct that flame retardants are somewhat effective, it is unclear what they’re doing in products that seldom catch fire—especially given the evidence of their negative health effects. “Most children’s products, like nursing pillows and changing table pads, are not fire risks,” Stapleton says. “The data does not suggest that these are products are ignition sources in home fires.”
“We should ask whether or not we need flame retardants in all these products.”
What Parents Can Do About Flame Retardants
Since flame retardant chemicals are often found in dust around the home, the simplest steps parents can take to cut down exposure is mopping and vacuuming regularly (sweeping just moves the dust around), ensuring that all family members wash their hands before they eat, and checking labels before buying mattresses and car seats. In many cases, manufacturers are proud to clarify that they do not use flame retardants. If you are particularly concerned, Duke University offers a free testing service to detect flame retardants in furniture.
But there’s a limit to what parents can do to cut down on the family’s exposure. A lot of it is a waiting game. In time, as flame retardants are phased out and the environment heals, we’ll see fewer and fewer chemicals in our food supply and dust. Until then, Woodruff suggests parents temper their flame retardant fears, if only a little.
“As a parent, it’s really frustrating—people have a right to be angry about flame retardants,” she says. “We have a lot of problems we’re dealing with. Wooden toys versus plastic…it’s overwhelming. You work in this field, and it does feel like every time you turn around you’re saying ‘Oh, that chemical is bad’. But we do have a problem and, at the same time, kids are generally healthy and there are a lot of things you can do to help them be resilient.”
“What’s the right level of concern? I don’t know. Every parent has to decide that for themselves.”
The Moral of the Fire Retardant Story
Consider the household cat. This friendly feline has been introduced all over the world as a means of catching rats and mice. Since becoming a global species, felis catus, has also hunted literally hundreds of species to extinction, disrupting ecosystems around the world. Flame retardants are, in some ways, the cats of the chemical world. They were brought in to solve a clear problem—cigarettes causing house fires, and airplanes burning up in the sky—but the unintended consequences have been nothing short of horrific.
Why were American parents so quick to allow chemicals they didn’t understand into their homes, and why were manufacturers so quick to start weaving them into pajamas? The answer is relatively simple: flame retardants replaced a visceral problem with a complex one, and an immediate problem with a long-term one. Humans, possessed of Pleistocene brains and living in an Anthropocene world, are wired to react. We tend to default to short-term thinking, specifically in situations of danger. Give a parent a fireproof pair of pajamas for their kids—or a cat that solves a pesky mouse problem—and they’ll seldom ask any questions.
The fire retardant saga, if nothing else beyond a health hazard, is an object lesson in the need to find direct solutions to public health concerns. Complexity can be a solution but, in a world where even fabrics are hard to understand, inconvenient or unpleasant simplicity is probably the way to go.
https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/flame-retardants-pbde-dangerous-for-kids/
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Chemical Emissions Spike Near Sterigenics Facility in Illinois
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Stephen Joyce
Peak ethylene oxide emissions from Sterigenics U.S. LLC’s Willowbrook, Ill., facility spiked to nearly twice the levels detected in earlier testing, according to Environmental Protection Agency data released Feb. 5.
Air monitoring results from late November through late December over 12 days of tests at eight monitoring sites near the facility showed ethylene oxide emissions as high as 11.7 micrograms per cubic meter on Dec. 6 and 10.8 micrograms per cubic meter on Dec. 26.
Earlier emissions conducted Nov. 13-19 showed a peak level of 6.31 micrograms per cubic meter on Nov. 19.
U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), who lives fewer than three miles from the Sterigenics facility, called on the EPA to shut the facility immediately. The agency shouldn’t reopen it until a plan to protect the public from the emissions is in place, “if that is possible,” Lipinski said in a Feb. 5 statement to Bloomberg Environment.
The company contends its Willowbrook facility emits less than 0.1 percent of the ethylene oxide used during its process of sterilizing medical equipment and that its operations comply with all state and federal permitting and air-emissions limit regulations.
It also asserts ethylene oxide is present in ambient air and could be present in the Willowbrook area for reasons that don’t involve its facility.
“We acknowledge that there are several readings closer to the Willowbrook facility that are higher than background levels and we will be meeting soon with the U.S. EPA and IL EPA to discuss those readings,” the company said in a Feb. 5 statement.
The Clean Air Act lists ethylene oxide as a hazardous air pollutant that at certain levels causes an elevated risk of cancer.
Calls for ShutdownNeringa Zymancius, a spokeswoman for a Willowbrook community group that wants the facility to shut down immediately, said the latest monitoring results demonstrate Sterigenics doesn’t have control over emissions at its facility.
That the EPA doesn’t shutter the facility immediately is especially concerning because ethylene oxide can take up to 200 days to dissipate, she said.
“We need to ban emissions in every state because nobody should have to live through this,” Zymancius said.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) in a Feb. 5 statement said the data demonstrate that the facility continues to pose a threat to the health of its neighbors.
“EPA must immediately tell the public whether these elevated EtO levels pose the ‘substantial and imminent threat’ to public health that, under the Clean Air Act, provides EPA with broad authority to shut down dangerous facilities,” Duckworth said in her statement.
EPA’s full assessment of risk from ethylene oxide, also called EtO, in Willowbrook is scheduled to be completed by the spring, the agency said Feb. 5 when announcing the latest monitoring data.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/chemical-emissions-spike-near-sterigenics-facility-in-illinois
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Wheeler Has GOP Senators’ Support Even Absent Chemicals Pledge
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith and Dean Scott
Andrew Wheeler appears to have alleviated the concerns of some Republican senators urging the EPA to take stronger action to limit fluorinated chemicals in drinking water—a step that could further solidify his confirmation to the agency’s top slot.
Wheeler, currently serving as the Environmental Protection Agency’s acting chief, hasn’t committed to set a national drinking water standard for per- and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, also known as PFAS.
A group of 20 senators—including Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)—wrote to Wheeler Feb. 1 asking the EPA to develop enforceable national standards for the compounds, which may cause adverse health effects such as developmental harm to fetuses and testicular and kidney cancer.
It isn’t clear whether the EPA’s pending national plan to address PFAS will include work on a drinking water standard, but Wheeler seems to have reassured Capito and Tillis that the EPA will sufficiently address the contaminants.
‘Positive Steps’Capito voted Feb. 5 along with her Republican colleagues to advance Wheeler’s nomination out of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee. Senate Republican leaders, including environment committee chairman Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), want to move Wheeler’s nomination quickly to a vote from the full chamber.
“He came to my office, and I told him that this deeply affects my communities and encouraged him to be more aggressive,” Capito told Bloomberg Environment. “And in our conversation, I think that message was received, and so I would look for some more positive steps from him.”
Tillis also said he’s likely to support Wheeler’s nomination.
“We’re working right now,” he told Bloomberg Environment of securing a commitment from Wheeler to address PFAS through a drinking water standard. “We feel confident that we will.”
‘Lockstep’Senate Democrats, however, aren’t as confident in Wheeler’s promises.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), ranking member on the Senate environment committee, told reporters that lawmakers want Wheeler to commit to setting a national drinking water limit for the contaminants within two years. But Carper said he doesn’t know if they’ll get that commitment.
“It would be helpful to him in his nomination if he did,” Carper said.
But he also suggested there isn’t much Democrats can do to stop Wheeler’s nomination.
“Eventually if all the Republicans vote lockstep, he’ll get confirmed,” he said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/wheeler-has-gop-senators-support-even-absent-chemicals-pledge
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Ohio Joins New York in Seeking Break from PFAS Litigation
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Ohio is joining New York state in seeking to break its legal suit against the manufacturers of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and PFAS-containing fire-fighting foam from inclusion in consolidated multidistrict litigation (MDL) to be heard by a federal district judge in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, producers of the chemicals and foam in a legal filing are pushing back against New York's attempt to convince the federal multidistrict court from severing the state's case from the MDL -- which includes dozens of personal injury, groundwater contamination and other suits related to PFAS found in aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), used to extinguish hydrocarbon fuel fires.
The U.S. Judicial Panel on MDL included the New York case -- State of New York v. 3M Company, et al. -- in a Dec. 7 transfer order consolidating 75 separate suits from eight federal courts brought by thousands of local governments, individuals and others against a range of defendants over contamination stemming from the use of AFFF.
The court, at the urging of defendants in the consolidated case, on Jan. 22 also issued a conditional transfer order adding Ohio's suit against 3M, a supplier of PFAS-related materials to manufacturers, and other companies to the MDL.
The MDL judicial panel has assigned the consolidated case, In Re: AFFF Products Liability Litigation, to Judge Richard M. Gergel, with the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.
But Ohio, in a Jan. 29 motion to vacate the MDL panel's conditional transfer order, makes arguments similar to New York state's in asking for its case to remain separate from the consolidated litigation. In State of Ohio v. 3M Company, et al., Ohio is making various common law claims and is seeking compensatory and punitive damages. In its role as a public trustee, it is also pursuing natural resource damages, including the costs to assess, investigate and remove perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) contamination stemming from defendants' AFFF products and to restore impaired natural resources, the state's brief says. The Ohio suit addresses excessive levels of PFOA/PFOS at several Ohio locations, including Wright-Patterson Air Force base production wells, as well as other wells not on federal property.
Ohio's arguments to split the case from the MDL track closely with those made by New York in a brief filed Dec. 31. Ohio's case “differs materially from the other actions transferred to the MDL and the factual and legal issues that will arise in the State's case will predominate over any issues shared in common with other cases in the MDL,” Ohio says.
Both Ohio and New York argue that adding their cases to the MDL “unduly delay and complicate” their own individual cases and other cases already in the MDL. They also say their individual cases must meet a bar that is lower than what other plaintiffs in the MDL have to meet in terms of showing the toxicity of PFAS. This is due to their status as parens patriae -- which refers to a government entity acting to protect citizens on behalf of the public.
Further, both Ohio and New York question the defendants' claim of federal jurisdiction due to the defendants' plan to assert the federal officer/government contractor defense and federal enclave jurisdiction. One of the key common questions the MDL panel identified for the dozens of cases in the MDL was the defendants' “'likely . . . assert[ion] [of] identical government contractor defenses' in the AFFF actions."
But Ohio notes that “the government contractor defense is irrelevant to the majority of the Ohio locations identified in the complaint."
Meanwhile, in their opposition to New York's arguments to remove its case from the MDL, defendants 3M, Tyco Fire Products and several other companies contend in a Jan. 22 response brief that the MDL panel already rejected most of the state's arguments in its initial transfer order and that the arguments lack merit.
New York in a Jan. 29 reply brief though maintains its arguments to remove the case from the MDL, in part contending that the other MDL cases “are simply much narrower in scope than the State's case, and therefore those cases will raise far fewer site-specific issues than the State's case will raise."
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/ohio-joins-new-york-seeking-break-pfas-litigation-0
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Lawmakers Make PFAS Push During Trump Speech
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Manuel Quiñones
Lawmakers from several states sought to highlight concerns about chemicals in drinking water during last night's State of the Union address.
Among numerous guests with ties to energy and environmental issues were advocates fighting contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) invited Cathy Wusterbarth, who has fought PFAS pollution from firefighting foam used at an Oscoda, Mich., military base.
"For years, Cathy has worked to ensure everyone has access to clean drinking water," Kildee said. "Because of Cathy's advocacy, the state and federal government have started to act to protect public health from dangerous PFAS chemicals."
New York Democratic Rep. Antonio Delgado invited Michael Hickey of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., who tested his town's water after his father died of cancer and found large amounts of PFAS.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) invited Andrea Amico, co-founder of a group focused on testing in the Portsmouth, N.H., area.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/02/06/stories/1060119767
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Feb 6, 2019 | Grist
By Eve Andrews
When I arrive at the marina in Victoria on a late-July morning, the sky and water are complementary shades of azure, and there is not one cloud in the sky — a Pacific Northwestern idyll. On the deck of the 72-foot shiny-bright Sea Dragon, moored here in the island capital of British Columbia for just one day, are four young women, part of the crew of the research voyage “eXXpedition.” They’re hauling heavy buckets of black sludge up to the deck from the ocean floor, their labor set to a tinny radio serenade of Drake and Selena Gomez.
The team will meticulously pack the sludge — actually wet sand from the harbor floor — into little glass jars like you would some fresh vegetables you planned to pickle. These jars will be added to a library of sand, water, and air samples that they’ve collected over the past six weeks from across the North Pacific. They’ll ship some of those samples off to Plymouth, England, to be analyzed by eXXpedition’s marine scientist Imogen Napper. The idea is that by cataloging this library, she and the team will begin to get a better sense of what kind of plastic is out there in the ocean.
One thing they already know, because they’ve seen it every day for weeks: There is a whole lot of it. The Sea Dragon, with an all-woman crew of 14 aboard, launched from Hawaii in mid-June, traversing a part of the North Pacific Gyre known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a swirling mass of trash the size of two Texases. The name conjures the image of great islands of refuse gently bumping up against each other, like a Waterworld made of old tires and sandwich bags. But, as eXXpedition founder Emily Penn tells me as we sway a bit on deck, it’s really more of a plastic soup, trillions of little bits and particles seasoning a million square miles of ocean.
“When we sailed into the southern edge of the Gyre, we started to see a piece of plastic over the side of the boat every 10 seconds — a cigarette lighter, a bottle, some sort of container,” she said. Her skin is tanned and her hair is bleached from weeks in Pacific sun, and as she describes the voyage, she’s dodging the spray of some deck-hosing that’s going on around us: “Then when you wake up the next morning, and it’s still going, and wake up seven days later, and it’s still going, and you’re 800 miles from the nearest human being — it’s that relentlessness that’s just so overwhelming.”
With this voyage, the eXXpedition is trying to make sense of that relentlessness. The women, a mix of scientists, sailors, writers, and activists, collected those samples of plastic from the air, water, and ocean floor to be analyzed not just in Napper’s lab but in others across the world. The point is that this problem is far larger than one very large patch in the North Pacific — plastic is found throughout all the oceans, in fish, in turtles, in shellfish, everywhere.
The samples that eXXpedition collected will help us understand how plastic might pick up other pollutants, like pesticides and industrial waste, and transfer them to humans through the food chain. In parallel with that work, the team also wrote about its experiences to raise awareness, and began developing ideas for both policy and technology to address this giant plastic dilemma.
One major mystery within that dilemma: what all these bits of plastic might be doing to us. For every tidbit of understanding we gain about the health consequences of chemicals released by plastics, there remains a Gyre-sized quantity of unknowns. But a growing body of evidence suggests some chemicals commonly found in many plastics are associated with everything from breast and prostate cancer, to underdeveloped genitalia and low sperm count in men, to obesity.
You’ve probably already heard about compounds like bisphenol A, which seeps into food and drinks from plastic bottles and canned-food liners — and has been tentatively linked to breast cancer and prostate cancer. That’s just one. There are many others. Some are merely suspected to be bad for human health; others are known to be dangerous.
They are scattered all around us — and even within us.
“So often when we talk about environmental problems we hear about things that are happening somewhere else, to somebody else, at some point in the future,” Penn wrote in the U.N. Chronicle magazine in 2014. “You and I already have a body burden, a chemical footprint that we will never get rid of.”
In particular, some of the substances that stick to plastics, seep out of them, or are released when they decay are endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), meaning that they interfere with the normal function of hormones in the human body. Some may contribute to cancer. They may also cross from a pregnant woman’s body into her fetus, potentially changing the way a baby develops.
It’s that last potential consequence of plastic junk that made Penn decide to found eXXpedition as an all-women’s endeavor. Men get these chemicals inside them as well, of course. “For women,” she said, “it felt like it was a greater significance because we’re passing them on to the next generation.”
All of us live with those compounds. You can’t live on this planet and not come into contact with the indelible dusting of plastic that covers it. We know it’s everywhere, but we don’t know nearly everything about what it does or how we’ve been changed by it. Penn and her team plan to help us find out.
The scientific exploration of the hormonal effects of compounds in plastics dates back to July 1991, when physician and biologist Ana Soto traveled to Wisconsin to attend a conference on the potential effects of chemical exposure on human sexual development. She had been invited because her lab had made an important, impromptu discovery two years earlier: The suppliers of a plastic tube that Soto and her colleague Carlos Sonnenschein used in their lab had changed the tube’s formula, in order to make it stronger. The researchers then noticed that the nutrient mixture they stored in these new tubes was causing cells in their test cultures to proliferate when they hadn’t before. Soto and Sonnenschein eventually figured out the cells were responding to a compound leaching from the new tubes, nonylphenol, as if it were the natural sex hormone estrogen.
This was the first compound in plastic ever identified as an “endocrine disruptor,” a term Soto and 20 other researchers introduced at the conference to refer to synthetic chemicals that interfere with hormone signals.
Your endocrine system includes glands like your thyroid, pancreas, and sex organs which release hormones that attach to receptors on the cells of your brain and organs, instructing your body how to behave or how to turn food into energy. In particular, these hormones coordinate growth and development. If you interfere with the activity of a hormone just a little bit, you can make big changes in how the body develops.
Exposure to sex hormones in the wrong quantity and at the wrong time may increase the likelihood that a person could one day develop cancer. Once Soto and her colleagues discovered what nonylphenol was doing, they suspected that it and other compounds that acted like sex hormones could also increase a person’s risk of cancer.
The best evidence to support that suspicion was a large, unintended human experiment involving diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen prescribed to women from the 1940s through the 1960s to prevent miscarriages. It was eventually proven to be ineffective at preventing miscarriages, but tragically effective in producing babies who would grow up to develop vaginal cancer as adults. The incidence of vaginal cancer in women exposed to DES before birth was as much as 40 times higherthan that of the rest of the population. (That said, it was still just a small risk: Only about 0.1 percent of DES-exposed babies went on to develop vaginal cancer.) Their rate of breast cancer was also about twice as high.
Soto’s laboratory experiments on endocrine disruptors, conducted at Tufts University in partnership with Sonnenschein, started in the mid-1990s and continues today. Her research has shown that rats exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA while still in the womb are more likely to develop tumors in their mammary glands, as well as fertility problems, obesity, and behavioral issues as adults.
But there are two major obstacles to answering the question of whether being exposed to compounds from plastic while still in the womb eventually causes cancer or other health problems later on in humans. For starters: We’re all exposed! How could you possibly find a control group — that is to say, people who don’t touch plastic all the time?
Secondly, even if you were able to find the very isolated person who had never been exposed to plastics, the timelines make it really challenging to identify the cause of a disease. Cancer can take decades to develop after an exposure — even a lifetime. On top of that, there’s reason to believe that EDCs have an outsized impact on fetuses, which are still developing and therefore are especially susceptible to the shifts in hormones caused by endocrine disruption. Exposure can cause subtle changes to the structure of an organ in development — a small abnormality in the breast ducts, a slightly atypical uterus shape — that grow into bigger problems like cancer or infertility as the organ matures. That’s why the results of endocrine disruption may not be seen until much later in life.
Nearly 30 years of research have transpired between that Wisconsin conference and today, Soto explained. And that work has produced a body of evidence that prenatal exposure to EDCs is tied to a higher incidence of various disorders. Animal experiments link prenatal EDC exposure to a higher incidence of altered behavior and cancer. These results, Soto said, “provide strong support to the idea that environmental chemicals that have hormone-like properties are at least one of the causes of the increase in breast and prostate cancer and reproductive problems throughout the population.”
Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, agrees that scientists studying plastic pollution are generally confident of the mechanisms by which EDCs are toxic to the human body: They imitate hormones and mess up the signals in our bodies. Halden’s own 2010 review of studies concerning the impact of plastic exposure on human health collected evidence that there’s reason to be concerned.
For example, in epidemiological studies, there’s a correlation between exposure to EDCs and endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome in women, and reduced sperm count and genital abnormalities in men. Similarly, the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children is correlated with their mothers’ exposure to EDCs — mothers with higher exposures to the compounds have children who are affected by these conditions at a higher rate. Other studies find a similar relationship between breast cancer in the children of mothers exposed to the endocrine-disrupting pesticide DDT.
In terms of everyday exposures to EDCs from plastics, however, the evidence isn’t always as clear. I asked Ruthann Rudel, a toxicologist with the Silent Spring Institute who researches the impact of environmental chemicals on breast cancer, exactly what that impact is. Rudel recently oversaw a review of studies of environmental factors that cause breast cancer, including endocrine disruptors in plastics. None of the studies were able to overcome those two major obstacles — the lack of the control group and the long delay.
“There wasn’t a human study that we thought was informative about plastics-related chemicals and breast cancer, although evidence from laboratory studies continues to raise concerns,” she said.
The official position of the Endocrine Society, the largest international medical organization devoted to endocrinology, is that there is a “possibility that low-level environmental exposure may still have significant and/or long-term biological impact.”
Just that possibility is concerning considering that the list of endocrine-disrupting chemicals now includes some phthalates — a component in many plastics, like Saran wrap, that makes them soft and pliable — which have been banned from products for small children in the European Union and are now starting to be phased out of products there and in the U.S. An estimated 1,000 others, many derived from plastics, are suspected to also interfere with normal hormonal function.
The problem is that our ingenuity in developing plastics has led to a bewildering variety of possible culprits to test — more than any scientist can ever hope to explore. “If we have to do all the research that we have done to determine endocrine-disrupting characteristics of BPA and nonylphenol and some phthalates, we will exterminate the rats and mice produced for research,” Soto said.
It’s a bigger job than researchers, studying one compound at a time, can hope to finish. That’s why Emily Penn believes that her work — sailing the world to build knowledge about plastics in the ocean, and get people to care about the problem — can make a difference. They cannot answer all those questions, but she and her crew can at least begin to raise the alarm about how much of this stuff is out there, what’s in and on it, and what impact it might have.
In the cramped common room below deck on the Sea Dragon, a table is scattered with Petri dishes containing pebbles of plastic in cobalt, lime, cream, and rose. They range somewhere between ice cream-sprinkle-sized and pea-sized. These have all come out of samples of water or sludge. Laura Leiva, a Honduran doctoral student at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, shows me how they look under the microscope, with many, many little fibers sprinkled throughout each piece.
The sailboat’s seemingly endless nooks and crannies are packed with hundreds of these samples. There are little tubes of plastics that were pulled out of the water with a trawl. There are larger jars of ocean air samples — yes, there’s plastic in the air, too — which are going to be analyzed by Stephanie Wright, a researcher at King’s College London. She’ll examine whether fibers like the ones I saw under the microscope, when airborne, pose a risk for human lungs and airways.
She’ll also begin to theorize how airborne plastic fibers in marine environments end up there. A hypothesis with some traction is those fibers come off our clothes when we wash them, entering the ocean through sewage systems. That’s what Sarah Dudas, a British Columbia-based biologist with the government agency Fisheries and Oceans Canada and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Victoria, tells me their team has gleaned from its research. “Out of all the plastic particles we found,” she said, “most of them are textile-based” — tiny filaments from fabrics such as nylon and polyester.
Dudas began studying plastic in seafood in 2015. When shellfish farmers expressed concern that their aquaculture equipment might be shedding microplastics and contaminating their oysters and clams, she worked with the University of Victoria, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the British Columbia Shellfish Growers Association to find out. What would that do to the shellfish? they wondered. You and I might wonder: What would it do to the people who ate the shellfish?
Firm answers on that are yet to come. But what Dudas’ graduate researcher, Garth Covernton, did find was that all shellfish they sampled, whether they grew near a wild or farmed beach, had similar amounts of microplastics in them. The explanation for that, Dudas says, is likely just that microplastics are ubiquitous.
In one sample from the eXXpedition trip, the team counted more than 500 pieces of microplastic, which extrapolates to half a million pieces of plastic in a square kilometer of open sea. That’s not including all the far tinier nanoplastic shards that they know will show up on further inspection under a microscope.
This was not how it was supposed to be; plastics were developed to be indestructible. But it turns out they gradually disintegrate over time.
In 2009, Katsuhiko Saido, then a researcher at Nihon University in Japan, found that plastics are actually far less stable than believed; they decompose into pieces and particles. Saido’s research showed that as they break down into tinier and tinier pieces, plastics release endocrine-disrupting compounds such as BPA. Due to this process, he says, plastic debris in the ocean will give rise to new sources of global contamination that will persist long into the future.
The tininess of plastic pollution also can make it more dangerous to living things. These minute particles may persist for millennia, and they can also cross human tissue and embed themselves into organs, theoretically delivering a toxic payload at close range.
If you slurped down an oyster that had caught a plastic microbead, it would probably pass through your system and continue on its merry way. But a five-micrometer fiber in that oyster — perhaps shed from a jacket — is small enough to slip through the throat tissue, for example, and lodge in your body.
And now, you may have acquired a very, very, very tiny pollutant-soaked sponge. In addition to potentially releasing endocrine-disrupting chemicals itself, plastic is lipophilic — meaning it attracts other oil-based chemicals and can act as a magnet for organic pollutants around it, like DDT, flame retardants, and waterproofing materials that have washed into the water.
According to Arizona State’s Halden, plastics can concentrate those contaminants up to 100,000-fold, and then, at least in theory, carry that super-concentrated contaminant into the next creature that consumes it — a bit of plankton, a shrimp, a fish, and, continuing on down the food chain, maybe eventually to a human.
One test of that theory is being conducted by the crew of the Sea Dragon. During my visit, about half a dozen women of the eXXpedition crew gather around a bolted-down table below deck to snip clippings of each other’s hair and seal them away in little glassine envelopes. These samples will be analyzed for mercury, a persistent ocean pollutant that the team hypothesizes can be carried by plastic.
Because all of this is still mostly hypothetical, the eXXpedition team is sending the samples they’ve collected from the ocean water and air for the past six weeks to laboratories all around the world to test whether toxic compounds are in fact adhering to the plastic. Counting, identifying, and analyzing toxic substances in microscopic bits of plastic throughout nature is tedious and costly, to say the least. “But I do think that technology is developing so rapidly, that we’ll get there,” Dudas said. “It will just take some time.
Plastic is an element of our world now, and one that will probably be with us for a very long time. “The amount of plastic waste in our natural environment is reaching a tipping point where nature cannot digest it,” Katsuhiko Saido said.
So it’s not realistic to rid the entire ocean of plastics. We humans cannot clean up the mess we created. It’s just too big. And we will not stop producing these products altogether. “There is nothing that comes risk-free,” said Soto, the biologist who did early research on endocrine disruptors in plastic. “And I’m not saying we should be Luddites or return to the Paleolithic era.”
It is realistic and urgent, in the opinion of every scientist I spoke to for this article, to stop pursuing product innovation above all else, because new variations of synthetic materials are approved for market release every day without much analysis of their environmental or health impact. There are already ways to prevent the plastic problem from continuing to get worse, such as implementing stronger regulations to study a material’s impact before it’s sold, rather than after it’s ubiquitous. Shrinking the waste stream is also necessary.
After all, the problem will not just drift away. Before the eXXpedition reached Victoria, its last stop was at the Broken Group Islands, a smattering of remote, barely inhabited scraps of rock and greenery off the western coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. This atoll is protected as part of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, and the only way to set foot on the islands is if you row, swim, or sail up to them yourself. In the mythology of the local Tseshaht tribe, part of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation, this is where the first man and woman were put on Earth.
Laura Leiva, the Honduran student studying in Germany, tells me that on the shores of these islands, the team found plastics in big, recognizable chunks. The bits that retained recognizable labels showed Japanese characters, indicating that they’d floated all the way across the Pacific.
Even in Eden, there is plastic.
https://grist.org/article/whats-plastic-doing-to-our-bodies-this-all-female-team-is-investigating/
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Qatar and Exxon Mobil Plan $10 Billion Gas Investment in Texas
Feb 5, 2019 | The New York Times
By Clifford Krauss
Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil said on Tuesday that they are making a big investment in American natural gas exports. The deal is designed in part to strengthen Qatar’s ties with the United States nearly two years after Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a trade embargo against the country.
The companies said they would spend more than $10 billion to turn Golden Pass, a terminal in Texas originally built to import gas, into an export hub for gas extracted from shale fields in Texas, New Mexico and elsewhere.
A deeper push into the United States would give state-owned Qatar Petroleum, already the biggest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world, quicker and cheaper access to Latin America, freeing more of its domestic production for lucrative Asian markets.
Qatar is also making a bid to strengthen its relationship with the Trump administration, which has established close ties with Saudi Arabia.
“For Qatar, this serves as a counterbalance to the Saudi-U.S. relationship,” said Leslie Palti-Guzman, president of GasVista, a New York-based consulting firm. “Saudi Arabia and Qatar right now are looking to invest in the U.S. liquefied natural gas play, and both think it’s going to carry favor with the Trump administration.”
The administration has attempted periodically to mediate Qatar’s dispute with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Egypt since the Saudi-led bloc cut economic and diplomatic ties with Qatar in 2017. But President Trump has sent conflicting signals about his intentions by, at times, appearing to support Saudi Arabia and its alliesin the dispute.
Qatar has long leveraged its gas wealth to exert political influence around the Middle East and North Africa, with television broadcasting, financial support for Hamas in Gaza and alliances with Muslim Brotherhood chapters and militia groups around the region. The country also hosts a major American military base.
Qatar Petroleum has been a big investor in Golden Pass for years. Originally the giant terminal in Sabine Pass, Tex., was designed to import gas, and cost $2 billion to build about a decade ago. But the frenzy of natural gas drilling in shale fields created a domestic glut, and the facility has been dormant for the last eight years.
Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum will reverse some pipelines and add several enormous refrigerant plants to Golden Pass. The plants will cool gas to minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit and condense it into a liquid to be loaded onto tankers and shipped to Latin America, Asia and Europe.
Golden Pass is expected to create about 9,000 jobs during five years of construction and 200 permanent positions. The announcement had been delayed for years by regulatory hurdles. In 2017, the Energy Department approved exports from Golden Pass.
“Golden Pass will provide an increased, reliable, long-term supply of liquefied natural gas to global gas markets, stimulate local growth and create thousands of jobs,” Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Darren Woods, said in a statement.
Qatar Petroleum will own 70 percent of the project, with Exxon Mobil as its junior partner. The two companies have a long relationship that includes projects in Argentina, Brazil and Mozambique.
“The politics and the economics are aligned,” said Nikos Tsafos, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to Golden Pass.
Qatar Petroleum’s footprint is expanding at home and worldwide. In Qatar, it is working with international companies to increase L.N.G. production capacity by more than 40 percent.
It is also expanding in Morocco, Cyprus, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Mozambique, and has expressed interest in making billions of dollars of additional investments in United States oil and gas production.
Much of the money is coming from investments Qatar removed from countries around the Middle East in retaliation for the blockade. In December, the country said it would leave the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, to focus on its gas business.
Qatar is stepping up investments in the United States and elsewhere in response to changes in the global gas market.
In the last few years Qatar’s dominance in long-distance shipping of natural gas has been challenged by Australia, and more recently by the United States. Last year, the United States became the fastest growing exporter of liquefied natural gas as the global gas trade increased by 10 percent, primarily because of growing demand in China, Japan and South Korea.
The Energy Department projects that American L.N.G. export capacity will increase from 3.6 billion cubic feet a day, to 8.9 billion cubic feet a day by the end of the year, as companies finish several facilities across the Gulf Coast.
Natural gas is the fossil fuel with the fastest growing demand worldwide. The number of countries importing L.N.G. has more than doubled to over 40 in the last decade.
Asian countries are using gas to replace coal and oil in their power sectors. Thailand and the Philippines are considering L.N.G. imports as a replacement for declining domestic gas production. Many European countries are seeking L.N.G. imports to reduce their dependence on Russia and because gas production on the continent is in decline.
“We see the number of buyers increasing very fast,” said Jean-Baptiste Dubreuil, a senior gas analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “In most cases, gas is replacing more carbon-intensive fuels, so it’s a positive.”
For Exxon Mobil, the investment marks significantly increased interest in the L.N.G. trade that should fit neatly with its growing investment in oil and gas production in shale fields, particularly in Texas and New Mexico.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/energy-environment/qatar-exxon-mobil-gas-export.html
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Exxon, Qatar Petroleum Give Go-Ahead on Texas Project
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Jenny Mandel
Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil Corp. will move forward with a $10 billion redevelopment project to turn an idle natural gas import plant into an export hub, the two companies announced yesterday.
The plan will expand the underused Golden Pass LNG import terminal in Texas' Sabine Pass to serve as an outlet for exports of liquefied natural gas from the Permian Basin and other U.S. gas fields.
The companies plan to break ground on the plant within weeks and aim to begin operations in 2024. The project encompasses three LNG processing trains that could collectively ship about 16 million tons of LNG per year.
Qatar Petroleum has a 70 percent stake in the project and is expected to contribute about 80 percent of the upfront construction cost, while Exxon Mobil owns 30 percent and will finance the remainder of construction costs.
Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar Petroleum's president and CEO, who also serves as the country's energy minister, said the investment decision on Golden Pass LNG is the first step in its plans to invest $20 billion in the United States.
Al-Kaabi said the Texas plant would extend the partnership between the two firms and bring "depth and flexibility" to his company's global LNG portfolio. Exxon Mobil is a partner in 12 of the 14 LNG export facilities that Qatar Petroleum operates in Qatar.
The Golden Pass plant is near Cheniere Energy Inc.'s Sabine Pass LNG export terminal, which was similarly redeveloped from import-only to bidirectional service, launching for exports in late 2016.
A final investment decision on Golden Pass LNG has been pending since early 2017, when the project secured its major federal permits.
Sean Ryan, president of Golden Pass Products, declined to discuss how the company is structuring its LNG sales, whether it has secured long-term off-takers or where it will source natural gas supplies. He did say that some portion of its natural gas needs will be met with upstream delivery agreements, while the balance will be pulled from the broader market.
He said the timing of the investment decision plays to the momentum of what industry watchers call a "second wave" of domestic LNG projects.
The Golden Pass announcement is the first of several anticipated this year as a number of projects reach permitting and contracting milestones; six major LNG export terminals are in service or currently under construction, while more than a dozen are either in permitting or awaiting construction decisions.
Al-Kaabi and Energy Secretary Rick Perry both spoke at yesterday's deal signing, where Perry stressed the importance of LNG exports in the context of America's international relationships.
"Imagine how Europe feels when those winter winds crank up" and European natural gas customers feel the stress of relying on Russian supplies for crucial heating, Perry said, suggesting that U.S. LNG can counterbalance Russian energy diplomacy.
"This is a good day for the world and our allies, when you think about what we're going to be making here," Perry added. "The relationship between the U.S. and Qatar is as important as any in the world."
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2019/02/06/stories/1060119719
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Golden Pass LNG Sanctioned by ExxonMobil, Qatar
Feb 5, 2019 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Carolyn Davis
The U.S. natural gas export project long envisioned by sponsors ExxonMobil Corp. and state-owned Qatar Petroleum (QP) was sanctioned Tuesday, with construction on the Texas coast in Sabine Pass set to begin before the end of March.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods had hinted last Friday during the quarterly conference call that the estimated $10 billion project would pass muster if it could compete with the bevy of liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in progress along the Gulf Coast.
“The extensive experience of ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum provides the expertise, resources and financial strength needed to construct and operate an integrated liquefaction and export facility in the United States,” Woods said Tuesday in announcing the final investment decision.
Golden Pass, with capacity of about 16 million metric tons/year (mmty) or 2 Bcf/d, is to include three liquefaction trains, each with capacity of 5.2 mmty. Also planned are associated utility systems, interconnections and an expansion of the facility’s storm protection levee system.
“Our team has worked diligently on the design, development and permitting for this world-class LNG export facility, and we are eager to begin construction to bring this exciting project to life,” Golden Pass President Sean Ryan said.
Support by employees and the coastal community “has been absolutely critical in getting to this point, and we look forward to a long partnership going forward.”
Houston-based Golden Pass sponsors originally designed a gas import project in 2003, when U.S. gas stores were depleted and unconventional resources had yet to be affirmed.
The export design is using the existing infrastructure, which includes five storage tanks, two marine berths to accommodate the largest LNG carriers, and an existing 69-mile pipeline system with access to U.S. markets. Additionally, the project may include more compressor stations for the existing pipeline to receive and deliver up to 2.6 Bcf/d of supply.
Construction is expected to take about five years and be operational in 2024.
Engineering, procurement and construction contracts were awarded to a joint venture of Chiyoda International Corp., McDermott International Inc. and Zachry Group. A 20-year firm transportation agreement has also been sealed with Enable Midstream Partners LP, and pipeline capacity was secured with Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America LLC.
Golden Pass agreed to be a 20-year cornerstone shipper for Enable’s proposed interstate gas system Gulf Run Pipeline, with a commitment of 1.1 Bcf/d. Gulf Run, launched last fall, is proposing to move up to 2.75 Bcf/d from Northern Louisiana to the Gulf Coast to supply export projects. Enable is anticipating a late 2022 in-service date, including filing for required approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Enable CEO Rod Sailor said the Golden Pass partners were “proven global leaders in producing, shipping and marketing natural gas worldwide, and we look forward to providing Golden Pass unrivaled market access to diverse natural gas supply sources."
The agreement with Enable “is a key component in securing transportation for our export facility’s natural gas supply,” said Ryan.
“The Lone Star State leads the nation in domestic oil and gas production, and today’s announcement further solidifies that reputation,” Gov. Greg Abbott said. “This expansion represents not only an investment in creating jobs and growing our state’s economy, but also in expanding our nation’s international export reach and energy independence.”
Golden Pass expects to support about 9,000 construction jobs over the construction period and employ more than 200 people when it is operational. According to a preliminary independent study by The Perryman Group, the $10 billion-plus infrastructure investment could generate up to $31 billion in U.S. economic gains and $4.6 billion in taxes for the United States at local, state and national levels, ExxonMobil noted.
“Jefferson County is ready to see this project come to life,” County Judge Jeff Branick said. “After the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, our region looks forward to the economic boost this project will bring, and through its Opportunity Roadmap program Golden Pass has laid the groundwork to make sure local residents and businesses have access to the opportunities.”
The Center for LNG’s executive director Charlie Riedl noted that Golden Pass has become the first global gas export project to be sanctioned this year, paving the way “ for a great year for U.S. LNG...Community involvement has been a hallmark of the Golden Pass project, and its role in the community will continue to grow” with the news.
While the size of Golden Pass “is exciting,” Riedl said, “amazingly it represents only a tiny fraction of the enormous supply of natural gas that is domestically available.”
Golden Pass is part of ExxonMobil’s plans to invest more than $50 billion over the next five years to build and expand manufacturing facilities in the United States, including through its Growing the Gulf initiative, which could create about 45,000 jobs along the Gulf Coast.
The export project could portend “a record year” for global final investment decisions (FID) for LNG projects, according to Wood Mackenzie. Principal analyst Alex Munton said it is “one of the few remaining brownfield LNG development opportunities on the U.S. Gulf Coast…
“Even if costs come in at slightly above the $10 billion mark, on a dollars/metric ton basis, it's still one of the lowest-cost opportunities for new large-scale liquefaction capacity anywhere in the world.”
Because ExxonMobil is the second-largest gas producer in the Lower 48, Golden Pass also could support additional upstream supply development, Munton said.
Working interests in Golden Pass project are 70% owned by QP and 30% owned by ExxonMobil. The project builds upon an international relationship between the two giant producers, with QP also joining ExxonMobil in exploration and development activities in Argentina, Brazil and Mozambique.
https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/117305-golden-pass-lng-sanctioned-by-exxonmobil-qatar
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Trump Touts U.S. as Net Energy Exporter—but He’s a Bit Early
Feb 6, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Feb. 5 to tout “a revolution in American energy” that has made the U.S. “a net exporter”—but some of his celebration might be premature.
Although the U.S. briefly became a net petroleum exporter during one week last November, government analysts say it will be at least September 2020 before it claims that title on a steady basis, by shipping out more energy than it imports on an annual basis. The nation is already a net exporter of coal and natural gas.
Trump’s brief salute to U.S. fossil fuel dominance—one passing mention in a speech that lasted roughly an hour and 20 minutes—also invoked a milestone that was partially achieved before he won the White House, under former President Barack Obama.
Trump cheered the nation’s role as “the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world,” provoking steady applause in the U.S. House chamber.
The U.S. has been the world’s top natural gas producer since at least 2009, accordingto the Energy Information Administration. And it surpassed Russia as as the world’s largest crude oil producer last year—although the U.S. has led the world when it comes to a wider array of petroleum hydrocarbons since 2013.
Trump’s decision to hail fossil fuels isn’t unique in this forum. Obama touted natural gas production in his 2012 State of the Union speech, back when many environmentalists welcomed it as a cleaner-burning coal alternative that could be a bridge to a lower-carbon future.
But Trump’s fossil push stands in stark contrast to the priorities of many environmentalists today—as well as a campaign by progressive Democrats to ratchet down U.S. reliance on oil, gas, and coal.
A draft of the so-called Green New Deal framework developed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) calls for drawing 100 percent of U.S. power from “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources.’’
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/trump-touts-u-s-as-net-energy-exporter-but-hes-a-bit-early
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Murkowski, Manchin Get to Work on Grid, Technology
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Dylan Brown
Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski set the tone at this year's first Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, with new ranking member Joe Manchin in lockstep.
The Alaska Republican praised the "remarkable" shift during the past decade as the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts the United States will become a net energy exporter in 2020.
"It's a good thing that we are now the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas, with renewables growing rapidly, as well," Murkowski said.
But she questioned the "reliability and resiliency" of the nation's energy grid as coal and nuclear plants keep closing at a rapid clip.
With that, Manchin touted an uptick in coal use during the nation's recent polar vortex — an industry talking point but something utilities say only demonstrated the reliability of a grid more reliant than ever on natural gas and renewables.
"Even in states with aggressive clean energy goals, if it gets cold, we're still all going to need to work together," Manchin said.
The West Virginia Democrat did not mention his home state's iconic fuel again, but fossil fuels remain central to his calls for innovation to tackle the pressing threat of climate change — the focus of the committee's next hearing tomorrow (E&E Daily, Feb. 4).
"If the United States does not lead in developing the technologies that will incentivize China and India to burn coal and natural gas in a cleaner way, it will not matter what we do here," he said.EIA projections
Under current conditions, EIA projects renewable power generation will surpass nuclear in 2020 and coal after 2025.
But Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) criticized "wild inaccuracies" in prior EIA projections, "spectacularly" underestimating gas and renewable growth.
At the hearing, EIA chief Linda Capuano argued that EIA provides a "base case" — projections based on current conditions.
"Where else do you go to figure out how impactful your policies are or if your policies are being effective?" she said.
But Heinrich said the model is too "divorced from reality" to be useful.
"You have to break the model," he said after the hearing. "You have got to look at the variables and say ... how do we come up with something that is more predicative from a year-to-year basis."
Heinrich argued that private-sector modeling, while not perfect, has been far better, but EIA figures continue to mislead people making financial decisions.
"EIA has been a source of frustration to those in the clean energy sector for a long time, and I think increasingly in the conventional energy sector as well," Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Ethan Zindler told the committee.
For instance, EIA predicts coal will generate 17 percent of U.S. power in 2050, while Zindler's firm expects it to be closer to 10 percent.
Coal and nuclear advocates say either way the downturn poses a threat to the grid, backing various subsidy plans.
But Travis Kavulla, energy and environment policy director for the libertarian think tank R Street Institute, said the volatility of energy markets undermines any subsidy, including for renewables.
"Nearly everywhere consumers are paying more than they need to for power plants that are not necessary to deliver them energy," he said.Critical minerals, EVs
Murkowski also took the chance yesterday to highlight her long-running concerns about the nation's dependency on foreign minerals.
Of 35 critical minerals identified by the Interior Department last year, foreign nations supplied 100 percent of 14 elements and more than half of 16 others.
"It's really our Achilles' heel that serves to empower and enrich other nations, while costing us jobs and international competitiveness," she said.
A key area will be electric vehicles.
One in 3 cars on the road in 2040 will be EVs, Zindler said, as the cost of lithium-ion batteries drops dramatically.
Driving the decline will be China's dramatic increase in battery production.
"We are in the midst of a global battery arms race in which the U.S. is presently a bystander," said Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Whereas China has 46 of the world's 70 lithium-ion battery megafactories, the U.S. has only one — Tesla Inc.'s Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.
Batteries require lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite to be mined and refined, but the U.S. does not mine any cobalt or graphite and relies heavily on imports for lithium and nickel. It also has almost no refining capacity for any of them.
"Those that control these supply chains will hold the balance of industrial power for the 21st-century auto and energy industries," Moores said.
He questioned the United States' role in the coming energy storage revolution.
"You have the ingredients — the raw material, the know-how," he said. "But there is just no impetus to link that all together at the moment."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/02/06/stories/1060119747
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Feb 5, 2019 | The Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
In a lawsuit filed after Hurricane Harvey, a federal judge has ordered the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board to force the disclosure of chemical emissions resulting from accidents.
More than 1,000 industrial chemical accidents take place every year. The biggest include the explosions that killed 15 people at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex., and the explosions that took place at the Arkema chemical plant in the Houston area after unprecedented flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey.
Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said that the Clean Air Act required the federal agency, known as the Chemical Safety Board, to investigate chemical fires, explosions, leaks and other accidents. But the board has not yet put regulations into place that require disclosure.
Mehta observed that the agency has had more than 20 years — far in excess of any “unreasonable delay” — to promulgate a final regulation and ordered the board to come up with a regulation within 12 months. “The court will not grant it two full years to do what it should have done long ago,” Mehta wrote.
The lawsuit was filed by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and other nonprofit environmental groups: Air Alliance Houston, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities.
PEER also represented former CSB managing director Daniel Horowitz, who was ousted last summer after being on administrative leave for three years. Horowitz has advocated for a stronger role for the board.
“CSB has been collecting accident data for a while, just haphazardly and without a regulation,” Horowitz said in an email, adding that it would not “add that much workload” for the board. He said that the CSB created reporting forms and a database for the information when he was still managing director there.
Horowitz said that the ruling was “a major victory for community groups seeking better information about industrial chemical accidents. Too often, the public and first responders have been left in the dark about the hazardous chemicals released during plant emergencies.”
Last September, a group of first responders exposed to smoke from a chemical plant fire in Crosby, Tex., after Hurricane Harvey sued the owner of the plant for more than $1 million, saying that they vomited and gasped for air in the middle of the road in a scene the suit described as “nothing less than chaos.”
The responders alleged that the plant owner, Arkema, minimized the dangers of exposure to the fire and failed to warn the responders on the perimeter of the mandatory 1.5-mile evacuation area to move farther away from the fumes after the first of nine trailers full of volatile organic peroxide burst into flames in the early nighttime hours of Aug. 29, 2017.
“Emergency personnel arrived on scene, and even before exiting their vehicle, they became overcome by the fumes as well,” the lawsuit said. “Medical personnel, in their attempts to provide assistance to the officers, became overwhelmed and they too began to vomit and gasp for air.”
Arkema said it regretted that anyone suffered harm, particularly first responders, but added in a statement that it rejected suggestions that it misled anyone or failed to warn of the dangers of breathing smoke from the massive fire.
“Now, all companies will have to report the details of accidents, and those reports will be available to the public from a single reliable source,” Horowitz said.
The CSB has been a controversial agency for many years. It fought with other agencies to get access to the blowout preventer that was one of the causes of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It tangled with the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general over document releases. And later, it was subject to infighting. But the small agency has also been the source of detailed analyses of chemical accidents.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/federal-judge-orders-chemical-safety-board-to-require-disclosure-of-chemical-emissions-from-accidents/2019/02/05/8f2f128a-2968-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?utm_term=.e399da191809
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District Judge Orders CSB to Issue Accident Reporting Rule
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
A federal district judge is ordering the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) to issue within one year a final rule requiring chemical facilities to report their accidental releases following an incident, backing labor and public interest groups’ claims that CSB has unreasonably delayed the rule mandated by law.
In a Feb. 4 order in the case, Air Alliance Houston, et al., v. CSB, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that plaintiffs have standing to bring their suit seeking a rule, and that the CSB has unreasonably delayed issuing the rule for more than 20 years.
“In this case, although the CSB’s enabling act does not require the agency to establish reporting regulations by a date certain, there can be no doubt that the congressional directive to adopt such regulations is a discrete act that the CSB is required to take,” the ruling says.
“In the past, the CSB readily conceded that ‘a reporting regulation is clearly required by the statute.’”
The ruling that compels CSB to issue a rule requiring facilities report accidental releases is a victory for advocacy groups that have struggled to stop the Trump administration from stonewalling or rolling back Obama-era rules increasing accident prevention requirements on industrial facilities.
EPA is planning to issue a final rule early this year curtailing a 2015 final rule strengthening that agency’s Risk Management Plan (RMP) facility accident prevention program. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) appears to have shelved a planned update to its Process Safety Management facility worker safety regulation.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) touts the judge’s requiring CSB to issue a reporting rule as a victory for greater public disclosure of industrial facility hazards.
"This ruling vindicates a community's basic right to know what chemical insult has been visited upon it," PEER General Counsel Paula Dinerstein says in a Feb. 5 statement. "Accidents do not relieve industries of their clean air obligations or their duties to protect both worker and public health."
PEER along with Air Alliance Houston, United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade filed the case in December 2017, several months after emergency workers responding to an Aug. 31, 2017 fire at an Arkema, Inc. facility in Crosby, TX, were exposed to hazardous substances.
The lawsuit alleged that the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that created CSB to investigate facility accidents and inform the regulations of EPA, OSHA and other agencies, also tasked CSB with a “non-discretionary duty” to promulgate a rule requiring facilities to report accidental releases to ambient air subject to the board’s jurisdiction.
CSB argued that plaintiffs lacked standing for their suit and had not unreasonably delayed issuing the rule.
Mehta ruled that plaintiffs have been denied information that would have been collected under a CSB reporting rule and that their interests had been harmed, in part because they spent resources seeking similar data from other sources.
“There can be little doubt that, on its face, the statute presumptively would make public any ‘records, reports or information obtained by the Board’ as a result of a mandatory reporting requirement of accidental chemical releases,” Mehta says. “Plaintiffs’ assertion of informational standing -- they are injured because they cannot access information that the statute mandates the agency collect and then make available -- therefore would appear to be straightforward.”
While CSB had asked to be given two years to issue a final rule, the judge required a final rule within one year.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/district-judge-orders-csb-issue-accident-reporting-rule
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Trump Sidesteps Environment, Calls for Infrastructure Deal
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By George Cahlink, Kellie Lunney and Nick Sobczyk
Energy and environmental initiatives were largely absent last night by President Trump in a State of the Union address that mixed a call for bipartisanship infrastructure work with warnings about engaging in partisan politics.
Trump renewed pleas he and other administration officials have made during the past two years to rebuild the nation's roadways, bridges and other infrastructure, which he said are "crumbling."
"I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill — and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future. This is not an option. This is a necessity," Trump said, drawing one of the evening's few rounds of bipartisan applause.
Facing a divided Congress for the first time, Trump did not acknowledge the Democrats winning control of the House this year. Instead, he framed his calls for working across party lines in the rhetoric of the campaign trail by asking lawmakers to "choose greatness" and often trumpeting his own successes.
"We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction," Trump said.
With House Democrats promising intense oversight of the administration, Trump warned lawmakers about moving too aggressively in "ridiculous partisan investigations."
"If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn't work that way!" said Trump in remarks that seemed aimed at the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and drew some jeers from Democrats.Energy, climate given short shrift
Trump touted his energy record in his speech, saying his policies had "unleashed an American energy revolution" and that the nation now is the leading global producer of oil and natural gas.
Those lines about America's energy dominance galvanized Republicans in the chamber, who whooped and hollered. Reps. Greg Walden of Oregon and Rob Bishop of Utah, the top Republicans on the Energy and Commerce and Natural Resources committees, respectively, rose clapping.
Trump, however, did not offer any specifics on what new energy policies or legislation he would pursue over the next year. In that regard, it was fitting that Energy Secretary Rick Perry skipped the speech as the designated Cabinet survivor in the event of a catastrophe.
The president's more than 5,000-word speech lasted 81 minutes and did not make any reference to climate change. It was a notable omission given how House Democrats have placed it at the top of their agenda, and several invited environmental activists to the State of the Union as their guests.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the chairwoman of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, said Trump "ignored the most significant crisis of our lifetime — climate change" and continued "the same old embrace of fossil fuels."
At least half a dozen Democrats invited guests from the environmental community, including 350.org founder Bill McKibben, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski and Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash.
Also in attendance were several Democratic guests who have worked on issues related to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, as EPA navigates controversy over whether to regulate the cancer-causing group of chemicals (see related story).
Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, said Democrats were looking to "make a statement" to a president who in his remarks said he has cut more regulations than any other president.
Democrats "want to talk about the urgency and the importance of responding to climate change, the need to reduce carbon pollution in the atmosphere," Tonko told reporters last night ahead of the speech.
Tonko's panel will hold a hearing on climate change today, marking the first time Energy and Commerce will attempt to tackle the issue in nearly a decade.
"In essence, it's an eight-year dry spell, and we think that this issue deserves for many reasons to be addressed," he said.
Those words, however, stand in direct contrast to Trump's energy "revolution" rhetoric last night, and environmental groups quickly took notice.
"Trump may tout the surge in oil and gas production in the United States because his oil and gas boosters tell him to, but the reality is that continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry will lead us off the cliff and unleash a climate of chaos," David Turnbull, spokesman for Oil Change USA, said in a statement.
Acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler sent out a statement after the speech that said the state of the environment is "strong, safer and healthier" under Trump policies that have brought "regulation certainty," cleaned up hazardous waste and financed water infrastructure.
In the Democratic response, Stacey Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor last year, made a mention of "taking action on climate change" during her remarks.Familiar trade, border themes
Trump reiterated his long-standing concerns with trade deals, saying he would reverse decades of "calamitous trade policies" and lambasting the North American Free Trade Agreement as a "historic trade blunder." He noted he has negotiated a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and called on lawmakers to ratify it.
Additionally, Trump asked Congress to get behind legislation that would allow the U.S. to place reciprocal tariffs on other nations that raise their levies against the U.S.
On immigration, Trump broke little new ground in railing against migrants coming across the U.S. southern border illegally and said of his long-standing call for a wall, "I'll get it built."
He offered no new proposals on the wall as lawmakers scramble to reach a Feb. 15 deadline for border security funding.
"Let's work together, compromise and reach a deal that will truly make America safe," said Trump, making no mention of the 35-day partial government shutdown that was sparked over his insistence on building the barrier.
Many female lawmakers wore white in honor of suffragists and women's rights. Trump devoted a portion of his speech to praising women's contributions to society and the workforce, which attracted applause from both sides. But Democratic women erupted in cheers, high-fiving one another and chanting "USA, USA" for a moment, drowning out Trump.
A lone female voice from the Republican side of the room said, "Let the man speak."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/02/06/stories/1060119769
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Trump Wants Infrastructure — Is It a Deal or a Disaster?
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Hannah Northey and Christa Marshall
President Trump last night revived his calls for a sweeping infrastructure bill while touting the nation's status as a net energy exporter — a direct challenge to newly elected progressive Democrats eager to replace oil, gas and coal with carbon-free energy.
"We have unleashed a revolution in American energy — the United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas in the world," Trump said during the State of the Union speech.
That comment prompted a smile and wink from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of coal-rich West Virginia, ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
"And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy," Trump added, to applause. What the president failed to note is that the United States was the top producer of natural gas and oil before he took office.
Trump also threw a bone to Congress and Democrats on infrastructure, saying both parties should "unite for a great rebuilding."
"I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill, and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future," Trump said. "This is not an option. This is a necessity."
The White House homed in on energy in a subsequent fact sheet and called on Congress to streamline permitting "so a six-month project does not turn into a 10-year odyssey." Such reforms are "especially critical for energy infrastructure and the ability of Americans to access reliable, affordable, and domestically-produced energy," according to the White House.
But even as bipartisan lawmakers expressed hopes of pushing through Trump's repeatedly promised $1 trillion infrastructure bill, energy insiders privately expressed skepticism ahead of Trump's remarks.
Some said they're awaiting a series of executive orders the Trump administration is crafting to boost the proliferation of pipelines across the nation and limit state interference on water permitting (Greenwire, Jan. 24).
Other energy insiders said they are eyeing legislative vehicles to ease permitting of pipelines and other energy projects should congressional talks surrounding infrastructure fizzle, including discussions on a highway funding bill set to expire in 2020.
"The highway bill expires soon, so even if an infrastructure package doesn't gain momentum — I don't know of anyone who thinks it will — Congress is going to have to act soon on surface transportation," said one industry source. "It's the right conversation to be discussing permitting; the same lack of certainty that applies to roads and bridges applies to pipelines and gas plants."'800-pound gorilla'
Ahead of the speech last night, lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they were eager to see energy and broadband included in infrastructure discussions.
"Infrastructure is all a part of [energy], how we deliver it and how we grow our economy," Manchin said. "I need high-speed, broadband. I need it all."
Manchin also has been pushing his state's interest in being a major petrochemical manufacturing hub. That kind of economic win for the state would also bring pipeline projects and gas storage development to the region. "That would be great news, my God, for the security of the nation," Manchin said. "We have an abundance of energy in that part of the Mid-Atlantic region. We've been talking about it. [Energy Secretary] Rick Perry and I have talked about it in great detail."
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said she and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) are planning to reintroduce parts of their comprehensive energy efficiency bill soon, and it "absolutely" could fit into an infrastructure package.
Other lawmakers said that ultimately, the method of payment would be a final factor in those discussions. "The dreams are easy. Paying for it is difficult," said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
Similarly, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) agreed that the "800-pound gorilla" is how to pay for any package.Green infrastructure?
In the new era of politics in Washington, an infrastructure package that deals only with oil and gas pipelines has to contend with the aspirations of Democrats in the House. Bill sponsors must find a midpoint between the interests of backers of the "Green New Deal" on the left and the supporters of conventional energy on the right.
"Infrastructure has become the poster child for doing something bipartisan in this Congress," said Greg Wetstone, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy.s
That could be pivotal, considering that Democratic leaders have insisted that any infrastructure package must address climate change and transition the electricity mix toward low-carbon energy.
In the Democratic rebuttal last night, Stacey Abrams — who recently lost the race for Georgia's governor — said, "We can do so much more — take action on climate change."
In a letter to Trump last December, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, "A single infrastructure bill will not solve our climate problem in its entirely, but it is an important first step."
With that in mind, proponents of renewables and low-carbon technologies have been floating their own wish lists in Congress.
Wetstone, for example, said he's been talking to lawmakers about investments in transmission lines and advanced grid technologies. "I think there are a lot of players in our sector that understand the importance of getting these decisions right. We really are falling behind in our electrical infrastructure," he said.
Similarly, more than 40 organizations, utilities and companies sent a letter to congressional leaders last month arguing that efficiency represents a "rare" bipartisan opportunity to address climate change. Congress should reinstate expired tax incentives and include various provisions in any infrastructure package, including incentives to states to adopt and enforce updated building energy codes, they said.
"Otherwise, Congress runs the risk of locking in decades of high costs and unnecessary energy waste for the duration of the physical infrastructure our economy needs," said the letter, which was signed by entities ranging from chip maker Intel Corp. to utility Southern California Edison.
For others, infrastructure offers a way to push for so-called clean coal, which typically refers to the capturing of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel plants. Trump's budget requests have proposed slashing funding for those technologies — including for natural gas and industrial emitters — but the president also has signed legislation boosting tax credits for carbon storage.
Kurt Waltzer, managing director of the Clean Air Task Force, said there are about 4,000 miles of CO2 pipelines, but that may need to at least quadruple, according to some estimates of what's necessary to add new projects that control emissions from fossil fuels. Infrastructure legislation could be a way to address that, according to advocates.
"What we don't really have are the large trunk lines that would move CO2 from one region to another, which we're likely going to need if we're going to see significant deployment of carbon capture," Waltzer said.
"What the [CO2] pipeline system needs is a kick-start," he said.What if talks fizzle?
Despite Trump's comments last night, some said there are unique challenges to moving an infrastructure package.
Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, lamented that the challenge with the Trump administration's effort to get an energy infrastructure package on the books is Democratic leaders in Congress.
Pyle questioned what concessions Republicans could make to reach a bipartisan agreement, noting that energy issues are already deeply ingrained along political divides. "Republicans aren't going to sign up for the socialism of the 'Green New Deal,'" Pyle said.
Furthermore, "infrastructure" has been a talking point in Trump's speeches to Congress since he took office. Yet nothing has moved, suggesting Congress may not want to prioritize it, said James Curry, an assistant professor of political science at University of Utah.
"Trump may have a particularly hard time with this, because he has less political capital than he did a couple years ago," Curry said. "Presidents tend to find more legislative success in their first two years in office."
Unlike two years ago, when Trump first mentioned his desire for a $1 trillion infrastructure package, there doesn't appear to be any behind-the-scenes negotiating for what fits the bill. In 2017, Trump's transition team generated a list of 50 infrastructure projects nationwide — a total of $137 billion — that included the creation of a $2 billion lab to focus on infrastructure research, upgrading hydroelectric dams and bolstering construction of high-voltage transmission lines to transport renewable energy.
But the National Governors Association, which at the time had reportedly weighed in on those lists, told E&E News no similar process is underway — that the focus, for now, is simply getting the word out.
"We're taking a big-picture view rather than advocating for specific projects," said James Nash, NGA's senior content editor.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2019/02/06/stories/1060119773
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Trump Leaves the Details to Congress
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Geof Koss and Nick Sobczyk
After two years of congressional clamoring for more details on his much-touted infrastructure plan, President Trump's vague State of the Union call for lawmakers to send him a bipartisan package raised new questions over whether the issue could take off in the 116th Congress.
"I was expecting more," said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a onetime Trump energy adviser and a close ally of the president, after the speech.
He acknowledged that Trump laid out "a little more specificity" in last year's annual address to Congress but suggested that the president may have created an opening for members to step in and fill in the policy details.
"This time, he just laid down the challenge, and it's up to us," Cramer said.
Although the White House signaled that infrastructure would be a major component of the speech, Trump devoted just a handful of lines to the issue.
"I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill — and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future," Trump said in the one-hour, 20-odd minute address. "This is not an option. This is a necessity."
A White House fact sheet released during the speech offered few new details but laid out the scope of the administration's view of what a package could include.
It said the president wants a bill "that delivers new and important infrastructure investment to rebuild our crumbling roads, aging bridges, crowded airports, and other infrastructure."
The White House document also called for investment in "visionary projects that leverage cutting-edge technologies in order to dominate the industries of the future and lead America into the 21st century."
It reiterated past calls for streamlining the permitting projects for infrastructure projects "so a six-month project does not turn into a ten-year odyssey," while also noting that "efficient permitting is especially critical for energy infrastructure and the ability of Americans to access reliable, affordable, and domestically-produced energy."
Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who has repeatedly called for more administration engagement on infrastructure over the past two years, was underwhelmed by the scant attention paid to what is a personal priority for him.
"I thought it was thin, thin on the particulars," Carper told E&E News, laughing. "He laid out a lot of things to try to accomplish for our country and our people, some of them very expensive. Not a mention of how to pay for any of that stuff."
Carper said the lack of detail from the administration would not help push infrastructure to the finish line.
"Actually, if we don't do it together, we're not going to get it done," he said. "We've got to do it together. This is the same president that said in a meeting in the White House last year, when I was present, that we needed to pay for transportation and infrastructure, people who use it should pay for it, and we didn't hear that tonight."'Take it and run with it'
EPW Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said he was glad the president issued the call and noted that he plans to visit the White House today for a meeting to flesh out the infrastructure plan.
"The president talked about the need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. I agree with him, and I'll be at the White House tomorrow," he told E&E News.
Barrasso also noted ongoing efforts behind the scenes to launch the infrastructure push, including his inaugural meeting with House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) last week and his ongoing talks with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on the subject.
"It's a legislative process, and we're going to continue," he said.
One Democratic senator who was pleased with Trump's infrastructure call was new Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
"It was encouraging that he put it in the speech," Manchin told E&E News after the address. "We hope we can take it and run with it; God knows, we need it so bad. We've just got to look at what the particulars are, where the money comes from."
Manchin said the Energy and Natural Resources Committee's bipartisan energy package that has been lingering after passing the Senate by a broad margin two years ago would be a starting point for that panel's contribution to infrastructure.
"We're going to take a look at that," he said.'Nothing like a deadline'
Still, lawmakers from both parties said there are plenty of ideas on infrastructure, including how to pay for it. Cramer said it's up to Congress to "pick the priorities."
"I think this president is open to all kinds of things. Tonight, I get the sense that he's asking us to come up with a plan, and certainly, he'll lend support and perhaps some guidance, but I think he could take whatever we can give him," Cramer said.
The senator also noted that the upcoming expiration of the highway bill will help get things rolling.
"At the very least, we're driven by the fact that the highway bill is authorized for specific times, so there's nothing like a deadline to motivate Congress, so let's hope we can inspire some creative thinking," he said.
While Trump was also silent on the tricky question of how to pay for infrastructure, a pair of senators earlier in the day laid out their own vision of one method: the use of "Move America Bonds."
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said the bonds he and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have proposed would "give the states really the ability to decide what they have to have, 'cause they know what projects are really critical in their state."
He said the plan has been well-received by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and by state and local government groups. "We have quite a bit of support," Hoeven told E&E News.
The proposal would cost the federal government about $8 billion but would leverage about $50 billion in tax credits to promote infrastructure projects, Hoeven said.
"Just like you're putting equity in that project, so you not only get that state and local money, but you get the private-sector investment. It's a real leveraging device," he said.
For his part, Wyden touted a similar bond effort in the 2009 economic stimulus that is credited with stimulating $180 billion in investments.
"Sen. Hoeven and I have picked up with a different approach that gives a bigger role for the states, but it's basically building on the model. I think it's proved itself," he said yesterday ahead of the speech.
Wyden said he envisions qualifying projects addressing "critical infrastructure," which he said could include electric grid upgrades.Climate
Democrats signaled last night that they would continue to press their own climate-friendly policies in the infrastructure push, including by promoting clean energy and resilience, traditionally areas of Republican skepticism.
If Trump had given more substantive details, "that would have then enabled us to hang some green infrastructure opportunity onto it," Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) said after the speech.
But some Republicans suggested last night that they still might be willing to play ball on climate. Cramer suggested clean energy provisions could come in exchange for Republican priorities, such as permitting reform.
"I actually think this divided government presents an opportunity for compromise that we haven't had in a while," he said.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), another member of the EPW Committee, also suggested he would be open to addressing climate change in an infrastructure bill, so long as it goes by a "state-by-state basis."
"I think most infrastructure should be determined state-by-state," Rounds told reporters last night. "In some states along the coastline, they may very well want to raise the levels of their highways, bridges and so forth. They want to make improvements in their utilities, their sewer systems and so forth."
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) offered perhaps the best summary of Democratic skepticism after the speech.
"I want to lower health-care costs and prescription drug costs; I want an infrastructure bill. But I've heard this before. He talked about this during the campaign," McGovern told reporters. "He didn't do a damn thing in two years."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/02/06/stories/1060119771
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Air Permitting Violations May No Longer Be an EPA Priority
Feb 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Refineries and power plants that need permits for their air pollution could face less scrutiny from the EPA as the agency considers dropping a 20-year-old enforcement priority.
As part of its assessment of which environmental violations will most need attention in fiscal years 2020 through 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency is weighing whether new source review permitting should be dropped from the list after 21 years.
Making the permitting process easier has been a top priority of the Trump administration.
“This latest maneuver to downgrade enforcement further is part of an EPA vendetta against sensible health safeguards that prevent industries from increasing danger air pollution wildly,” John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Clean Air, Climate & Clean Energy Program, told Bloomberg Environment on Feb. 5. “Americans deserve better than lax EPA law enforcement.”
The EPA said the air pollution permitting enforcement initiative, which began in 1999 and targeted energy giants like Duke Energy Corp. and American Electric Power, doesn’t present nearly as many targets that would provide significant public health gains at this point.
Permitting ProcessLarge industrial facilities like power plants are required to obtain new source review permits when they expand or make modifications that increase air pollution.
The proposal is included in EPA’s draft four-year national compliance initiatives plan,released Feb. 4.
The plan, updated every four years, is meant to help the EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance target resources on the most serious environmental violations.
The EPA also is seeking comment on new initiatives to reduce children’s exposure to lead, improving the ability of water utilities to meet drinking standards, and whether to continue addressing violations stemming from leaks of hazardous air pollutants.
Pollution DroppingAccording to the agency, its enforcement efforts since 1998 have led to a 90 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions and an 83 percent drop in nitrogen oxides.
More than 90 percent of facilities in the glass, cement, and acid manufacturing sectors have installed new pollution controls as a result of the initiative, the EPA said.
The EPA, however, “fails to mention other major industrial categories with NSR grandfathering concerns like petroleum refineries and power plants,” Meredith J. Hankins, a Shapiro Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, told Bloomberg Environment Feb. 5.
Far from being resolved, avoidance and outright noncompliance with new source review remains a pressing issue, Hankins said.
The EPA itself said that more than 80 percent of existing coal-fired power plants have emission rates exceeding those typically required under new source review program, Hankins said, citing the Trump EPA’s rewrite of carbon dioxide standards for power plants. That rule included a provision to streamline the new permitting program.
Streamlining?Businesses have complained that the new source review permitting process is burdensome and complicated.
The Trump administration has sought to change how nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide pollution increases are calculated for permitting purposes. It also has issued a rule allowing power plants, factories, and refineries to treat multiple changes at their facilities as a single project for permitting purposes.
Eric L. Hiser, a partner with Phoenix-based Jorden Hiser & Joy PLC who regularly blogs about new source review developments, said it makes sense for the EPA to stop making new source review violations an enforcement priority.
“They are not seeing the emissions reductions that were to be had in the earlier days when it was an enforcement priority,” Hiser said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/air-permitting-violations-may-no-longer-be-an-epa-priority
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That Makes 3. Trump Is Silent on Climate in Third Address
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Mark K. Matthews and Scott Waldman
President Trump spoke for more than an hour yesterday and never said the words "climate change" or "global warming" — a rhetorical feat that keeps alive Trump's streak of ignoring an issue that scientists have described as a looming catastrophe.
Instead, Trump used his second State of the Union speech, and his third annual address to Congress, to reiterate his support for administration priorities such as a border wall with Mexico. In both 2017 and 2018, Trump also failed to mention climate change.
It's an approach that stands in contrast to the previous three presidents, who all talked about climate change in at least one State of the Union address. His omission also could develop into a political liability, critics contend, because some of the problems Trump highlighted yesterday have a connection to a warming planet.
Those include issues such as cross-border migration, which experts expect to increase with climate change, and a broad range of threats to U.S. national security. Intelligence officials warned last week that global warming puts the United States more at risk for dangers such as infectious diseases and international strife.
That Trump again ignored climate change is hardly surprising. The president previously described global warming as a hoax, and he claimed without evidence last year that climate change would reverse itself on its own (Climatewire, Nov. 5, 2018).
"Drink every time the President talks about climate change during his speech," joked Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) on Twitter a few hours before the address. "I mean, it's a Tuesday."
But to environmentalists and many on the left, the actions taken by the Trump administration on climate change are more distressing than Trump's ignorance of the issue.
During his first two years in office, Trump took steps to roll back regulations on cars and power plants to reduce emissions, and announced plans to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord.
"My administration has cut more regulations in a short period of time than any other administration during its entire tenure," Trump said in his address. "We have unleashed a revolution in American energy — the United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world."
Yet his support of fossil fuels, notably coal, has come at a cost.
"This is a president who has gone out of his way to overturn the most important climate protections ever undertaken in the United States," said Paul Bledsoe, who served as the director of communications for a climate change task force under President Clinton.
"To say [Trump] is a climate denier is not enough," Bledsoe added. "He is a climate exacerbater. He is actively tearing down the few protections we have to limit emissions."
These actions, argued Bledsoe, ultimately could come back to haunt Trump.
For one, he saw Trump's deceit on climate change as part a larger narrative about his trustworthiness. "That's when climate change becomes most politically important — when it reflects a broader pattern of behavior," Bledsoe said.
And two, he said more Americans are recognizing the impact that climate change has on their daily lives. A big part of that understanding comes from the shared trauma of more intense natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires.
Concern about climate change has only grown during Trump's presidency, including with Republicans, according to recent polling from Yale University's Program on Climate Change Communication.
Now, two-thirds of voters say they are concerned about climate change.
After Trump's election, Republican concern about climate dipped, but it has increased in the last year after deadly storms and wildfires killed hundreds of Americans.
In the last year, Republicans' acknowledgment that climate change is real and caused by humans increased by 5 and 7 percentage points, respectively, according to the analysis.
Though only a third of conservative Republicans are now worried about climate change, the number has increased by 9 points during Trump's time in office.
Congressional Republicans have done little in recent years to address the threat, though there's been a small movement in the past few months among a handful of GOP members to get behind ideas such as a carbon tax.
One of those lawmakers is Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.). A couple of hours before the speech, he said it was his hope that Trump would mention climate change.
"It's a significant threat to our national security," he said. "It's a significant economic threat."
U.S. policymakers need to "treat it as the crisis that it is," Fitzpatrick said. "I know I'm one of the few voices in my caucus that believes that, but I really do believe it. I also reject this notion that preserving the environment and growing our economy are mutually exclusive."
Among Democrats, efforts to fight climate change increasingly have become a rallying cry. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Democrats viewed that issue as a top priority — more than triple the level of their GOP counterparts.
Environmental groups such as the Sunrise Movement have helped keep climate change in the public consciousness, and Sunrise's push to promote a "Green New Deal" — its idea of a climate-friendly jobs program — has become almost a litmus test among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
"There's nothing left to debate," wrote one of those hopefuls, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), in a tweet yesterday. "Climate change is an immediate and catastrophic threat to our future. It's time for bold action, now. We need a #GreenNewDeal."
There's cross-party appeal too. The Yale polling found that the "Green New Deal" was extremely popular among voters of all parties, with 81 percent in support, including 92 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of independents and 64 percent of Republicans.
Support is not universal, however, and conservative climate groups in recent weeks have stepped up their efforts to promote alternatives such as a carbon tax.
Those include the Alliance for Market Solutions, led by Executive Director Alex Flint. He predicted that Trump would be the "last president of either party to give so little attention to climate change in a State of the Union address."
"The scientific consensus is becoming a political consensus that this is an issue that has to be addressed," he said. "It is becoming a political imperative."
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2019/02/06/stories/1060119761
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Climate Change Takes Center Stage in the House
Feb 6, 2019 | PoliticoPro
By Anthony Adragna
House Democrats are taking their first crack at climate policy with a pair of hearings Wednesday that offer an opportunity to convince the liberal upstarts who have forced the issue onto the party's agenda that they all share the same goals.
The staid gatherings with their panels of governors and expert witnesses will be a marked contrast from the noisy demonstrations that have been mounted at congressional offices and campaign rallies in recent months, and the host panels feature few of the young freshman Democrats who have pushed for aggressive, immediate action to reduce carbon emissions.
Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee, says he is encouraged by the energy Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her allies have brought to the climate change issue, even as he reserves judgment on the "Green New Deal" resolution she is expected to introduce as soon as this week.
“I’m encouraged by not only the passion that they bring, but the attention they’ve drawn to the issue,” Tonko said. “There’s more commonality among us than we would imagine.”
Tonko's subcommittee will hear from a panel of experts on environmental justice, labor, energy and other green issues at its first hearing on climate change in six years Wednesday morning.
At the same time Wednesday, the House Natural Resources Committee will convene its own climate hearing that will include testimony from a bipartisan set of governors — Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) and Charlie Baker (R-Mass.) — in addition to a second panel of witnesses.
“What we have not seen from this committee for a decade plus is attention to climate change,” Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said in a video ahead of the hearing. “We are both excited by the challenge and committed to having solid, bold initiatives come forth from this committee.”
Progressive activists are split on the utility of the hearings themselves, arguing a recent federal report outlining hundreds of billions of dollars in annual costs stemming from inaction and a U.N. report warning of the need to rapidly decarbonize the economy as crystal clear signs the science is settled.
"Obviously, we think it’s a great first step that these hearings are happening," said Thanu Yakupitiyage, a spokesperson for 350.org, which has championed the Green New Deal and helped in the resolution's drafting. "[But] it’s not enough to just sit in a couple of hearings. … The hearings need to be the start of really starting to ramp up actual action."
Ocasio-Cortez has teamed up with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009, to write a new Green New Deal resolution that is expected to call for achieving "net-zero greenhouse gas emissions" by 2030 while ensuring "a fair and just transition for frontline communities and displaced workers."
While that goal is more ambitious than anything previously floated in Congress, the pair of lawmakers already are taking steps to make the plan attractive to as many Democrats as possible. For example, they are not explicitly calling to end fossil fuels in the resolution, POLITICO reported Monday — a concession that leaves the door open to controversial unproven technologies such as carbon-capture and may ease concerns among labor unions whose members work in the energy industry.
Almost all of the declared or potential Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed some version of a Green New Deal, but few have spelled out specific goals or policies to get there. Tricky issues like whether to allow for continued use of natural gas or nuclear power as part of that approach will be key topics of debate on the 2020 campaign trail and in the House as majority Democrats hone their policy ideas.
Democrats are also divided over whether they should accept campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies or employees and how quickly to demand greenhouse gas reductions. But many advocates and Democrats argue those divisions aren’t as vast as many think.
“We are thrilled to see so much energy and attention and enthusiasm for climate action and the hearings are an important first step,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters.
Others point to the prominent climate advocates who attended the State of the Union as a positive indication that the issue has further percolated into the conscience of Democrats. For example, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) brought Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org; Tonko brought League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski and Markey took Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/article/2019/02/climate-change-takes-center-stage-in-the-house-1144677
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House Hearings To Build Case For Climate Action Ahead Of Policy Details
Feb 6, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Doug Obey
House Democrats are rolling out a blitz of hearings on the implications of climate change, seeking to highlight such threats in order to build a case for policy to reduce greenhouse gases, while also creating a contrast with the Trump administration on the issue in advance of more complicated efforts to reach consensus on climate legislation.
The Feb. 6-7 hearings in two House committees -- which will coincide with a Feb. 7 Senate energy committee session on “energy innovation” -- come as progressive lawmakers are poised to float new details for a “Green New Deal” that would speed the transition to renewable or other low-carbon energies.
But the hearings themselves represent the House Democrats' first step to seize the climate change narrative since the 2010 elections and the party's failure to enact cap-and-trade legislation -- using their newfound leverage at the helm of House committees that their Democratic Senate counterparts lack.
“The more the merrier,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Inside EPA Feb. 5, in response to the flurry of House hearings on climate issues this week and next. “We need there to be a massive public education campaign, and the hearings are a big part of [that]."
Markey -- co-author of the 2009 cap-and-trade bill that cleared the House but failed in the Senate -- is expected this week to introduce a resolution alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) outlining key elements of the Green New Deal, including a call to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2030.
A House “dear colleague” letter being circulated ahead of the resolution's release includes other sweeping goals, including “a fair and just transition for all communities and workers,” infrastructure investment, and securing “clean air and water, climate resiliency, healthy food, access to nature and a sustainable environment for all generations to come.”
The efforts come as President Donald Trump is poised to deliver his State of the Union Address on Feb. 5, and Markey has invited the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash, to the event, underscoring efforts by Democrats to draw contrasts with the Trump administration's climate policies.
But the House hearings -- starting with separate Feb. 6 hearings in the Energy and Commerce Committee and Natural Resources Committee -- are far more basic in their efforts to publicize and reiterate the scientific and economic case for curbing GHGs and planning for climate impacts.
They thus provide an opening for Democrats to unify around calls for action -- and criticism of Trump administration rollbacks of climate change initiatives even as lawmakers concede the prospect for major climate legislation in the current Congress is unlikely.
'Long Past Time'
The Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, convened by the panel's environment and climate subcommittee, is titled “Time For Action: Addressing the Environment and Economic Effects of Climate Change.” Democrats are touting it as the first climate-related hearing in the committee since a 2013 proceeding Republicans convened to pick apart the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan.
“It is long past time for this Committee to begin seriously examining how climate change is affecting our communities, environment and economy, and take action to reduce its harmful effects,” said committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and subcommittee Chairman Paul Tonko (D-NY).
Democratic witnesses at the event will be Union of Concerned Scientists climate science director Brena Ekwurtzel, Leo Woodberry of the Kingdom Living Temple Church, Michael Williams of the Blue Green Alliance, and former Obama administration climate adviser Rick Duke, a list that suggests Democrats hope to highlight environmental threats, environmental justice concerns and arguments that climate action could create jobs.
The Natural Resources Committee, meanwhile, is convening a separate Feb. 6 climate hearing -- the first in a month-long series of such hearings. It will discuss “climate change and its impacts on American communities, natural resources and economic well being.”
The first witness panel features North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) -- both of whom have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance that was formed after Trump pledged to leave the Paris climate deal. Democratic witnesses on the second panel include several academics and climate advocates.
A second hearing scheduled for Feb. 7 in the committee's water panel will focus on climate change and ocean health, including testimony from former EPA Administrator Carol Browner.
Further, the House science committee is poised to kick off its own climate activities with a Feb. 12 hearing on “The State of Climate Science and Why It Matters,” featuring testimony from environment and public health experts.
The announced hearings come before a barrage of expected oversight of EPA and other agencies' regulatory rollbacks, and well in advance of a longer-term effort to hammer out major climate legislation, though Democrats also hope for near-term action on more modest climate initiatives, perhaps related to infrastructure.
But Senate Democrats -- who cannot convene hearings of their own -- say the initial House hearings are necessary to build momentum for action among the public, while also pressuring Hill Republicans to embrace proactive policies.
“It is important to build an argument with the public,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), a member of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, told Inside EPA Feb. 5.
Van Hollen says he plans to soon re-introduce cap-and-dividend legislation he has previously supported that would rebate revenues from emissions controls back to the public.
But he also acknowledges the uphill battle for any sweeping climate bill in the Senate. “We still have a lot of climate deniers,” he says.
The senator sees an important House role in generating specific ideas that boost pressure for Senate action and elevate discussion of climate change in the 2020 presidential campaign. “It will help build momentum, and, look, this is also going to be an active part of the conversation in the presidential election.”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) similarly sees the House hearings as a way to cement a case for affirmative climate policy, suggesting the events may help mobilize a public that is less partisan than Capitol Hill on the climate issue, and in so doing also help bring Republicans on board.
“Climate change is one of the paramount issues of our time. It does not cut across partisan lines with the public. It does here. The more we can put a spotlight on the science and the realities of what is happening, the more we can put a spotlight on the global interest in dealing with these issues,” he said. “All of that helps galvanize the fact that the United States must lead.”
Cardin asserts that the public is “on our side” in viewing some of the Trump administration climate rollbacks as wrongheaded. “And I think we are going to have Republican interest in this trend.”
'Must Push Harder'
Jeremy Symons, a private consultant whose previous stints include the Senate environment committee, Environmental Defense Fund and EPA, in a recent op-ed characterized the House climate hearings as part of an immediate Democratic agenda -- including oversight of Trump administration rollbacks and “misuse of science” -- that is necessary but not sufficient to address climate change.
“Democrats must push harder, take more risks and go further than poll-tested comfort zones in order to prepare the way for a turbo-charged plan of action should they take the White House in 2020,” Symons said. At the same time, Symons is also suggesting that increased momentum on the issue could provide some opportunities to “get some things done before the elections where you might not have expected.”
But most observers say viable long-term climate policy will require Republican support, and the Republican response to Democrats' efforts is decidedly mixed.
The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, headed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has convened a Feb. 7 hearing to discuss “energy innovation,” which appears likely to include significant discussion of research opportunities for addressing climate change and energy needs. Witnesses include former Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, the Bipartisan Policy Center's Jason Grumet, and Jay Faison of the conservative clean energy group ClearPath.
Faison's group favors non-regulatory, technology-focused approaches to climate change and embraces nuclear power and carbon capture. Another ClearPath official is set to testify at the Energy and Commerce hearing after being invited by minority Republicans.
The Senate hearing will also be the first session in which coal-state Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is the top Democrat on the committee, and many observers will be looking to see how he addresses the climate issue after some environmentalists had unsuccessfully pushed party leadership to select a climate hawk for that role.
But in the other hearings, Republicans are also inviting witnesses that have downplayed global warming risks, including Dr. Judith Curry of the Climate Forecast Applications Network -- slated to testify at the Natural Resources panel's Feb. 6 hearing -- and University of Delaware's David Legates at the committee's Feb. 7 session.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/house-hearings-build-case-climate-action-ahead-policy-details
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DOJ Disputes Right to ‘Stable Climate System’ in Youth Climate Suit
Feb 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is arguing that there is no constitutional right to a stable climate in its opening brief in a high-profile appeal of litigation brought by a group of youth who charge the federal government is violating the Constitution’s due process clause by promoting fossil fuels that cause global warming.
Its Feb. 1 filing in Juliana v. United States asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to reverse a November 2016 procedural ruling by a lower court that allowed the youth to proceed to trial in their constitutional and public trust doctrine claims. DOJ is urging the appellate court to order the lower court to dismiss the case.
The court is hearing the case in an unusual interlocutory appeal, before the case goes to trial at the Oregon district court. DOJ has taken extraordinary steps to avoid trial -- including twice going to the Supreme Court -- in a case that could create political problems for the Trump administration by pitting government officials against youth plaintiffs and forcing the officials to reveal the government’s knowledge of climate change risks.
Now, DOJ says in the opening brief that not only do the youth lack standing to bring their constitutional claim that they have been harmed by the effects of climate change but that, “There is no fundamental right to a ‘stable climate system.’”
The filing notes that the Supreme Court has “repeatedly instructed courts considering novel due process claims” to “exercise the utmost care whenever . . . asked to break new ground.” Also, the high court has said due process only protects fundamental rights and liberties deeply rooted in the nation’s history.
The government adds: “The district court’s recognition of an ‘unenumerated fundamental right’ to a ‘climate system capable of sustaining human life’ squarely contradicts that directive, because such a purported right is entirely without basis in this Nation’s history or tradition.”
DOJ notes that the district court cited as an analogous right the high court’s 2015 recognition of same-sex marriage. But “[t]here is, to understate the point considerably, no meaningful analogy between a distinctly personal and circumscribed right to same-sex marriage and a purported right to particular climate conditions that apparently would run indiscriminately to every individual in the United States and the judicial recognition of which would affect every person in this country and the world.”
DOJ argues that-sex marriage and other due process rights directly protect deeply intimate personal choices, while a “right to a ‘climate system capable of sustaining human life’ is simply nothing like any fundamental right ever recognized by the Supreme Court. The state of the climate, however, is a public and generalized issue having no connection to personal liberty or personal privacy.”
The youth plaintiffs’ reply brief is due Feb. 22, and the appeal is being considered for argument later this year in Portland, OR, where the district court is located, rather than in San Francisco, where the 9th Circuit is based.
DOJ Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark plans to argue on behalf of the government, a move that shows the department thinks the case has national significance.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/doj-disputes-right-%E2%80%98stable-climate-system%E2%80%99-youth-climate-suit
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GOP Blasts 'Leftist' 'Green New Deal' as Details Emerge
Feb 6, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
Republicans yesterday blasted the "Green New Deal," marking a new phase in the messaging war, as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prepares to release a resolution outlining the progressive climate platform in broad strokes.
At their weekly press conference yesterday, Senate GOP leaders called the plan a "raw deal" that would raise household energy costs by "up to $3,000 every single year."
"The Democrats' agenda is a leftist agenda that would reverse the gains and progress that we have made," said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), adding that marginal tax rates have not hit 70 percent in more than 50 years.
The "Green New Deal" does not yet include any hard policy proposals, but Thune pulled the numbers from an analysis by the right-leaning American Action Forum, which found that transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy would "translate to an average of between $576 and $3,882 more spent on electricity per year per residence." Ocasio-Cortez has also floated top income tax rates as high as 70 percent as a pay-for.
The comments are the strongest Republican response yet to the "Green New Deal," a set of ideas that would have been considered fringe just a few months ago. They are also similar to talking points and press releases circulated in recent weeks by conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute.
Still, Ocasio-Cortez has built a significant base of Democratic support for her resolution ahead of its release, even if some veteran climate hawks are staying on the sidelines.
The resolution is essentially a framework for the "Green New Deal," a guide to what Democrats should eventually put into law. It will "call for a national, social, industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II," according to a memo call for co-sponsors circulated by Ocasio-Cortez's office.
The memo, first reported by Axios and Bloomberg, is light on details. But it lays out an approach to tackling climate change closely mirroring the ideas Ocasio-Cortez has been talking about for months, including a move to net-zero emissions, large investments in climate resilience and technology, and a just transition for fossil fuel workers.
Other reports have suggested the resolution won't call for a ban on fossil fuel development, a controversial proposal popular in some progressive circles.
"The goals set by the Green New Deal resolution will be accomplished through a 10-year plan that takes on a series of industrial and infrastructure projects that will transform every sector of our economy and society," the memo reads. "Throughout the resolution, we establish requirements of justice and economic security to ensure that the society we create through the Green New Deal ensures a new era of shared prosperity for all."
House co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, a longtime climate hawk and carbon tax supporter, and Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, Joaquin Castro of Texas, Yvette Clarke of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Ro Khanna and Ted Lieu of California, Joe Neguse of Colorado, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
A number of progressive groups, including 350.org, the Sunrise Movement and NextGen America, are listed as supporters of the resolution, pending the final legislative language, which is still in the works.
League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said his group is "applauding it in general," though he stopped short of specifically endorsing the resolution.
"We're in touch with them constantly," he told reporters last night ahead of the State of the Union, which he attended with Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.). "The details aren't yet totally nailed down, but I'm certain it will be positive."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will introduce a companion in the Senate, but the messaging measure will be much more powerful in the House, where Democrats control the agenda and have sought an intense focus on climate change.
It's not yet clear whether House leadership will allow a vote on the resolution. But while many Democrats are excited by the enthusiasm that activist groups have brought to the "Green New Deal," some are keeping a cautious outlook.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said he doesn't plan to sign on as a co-sponsor yet, though he said he is "strongly supportive" of the "Green New Deal."
"I want to engage more with my colleagues and work through the parameters of the eventual legislation," Schatz told reporters yesterday. "As you know, the resolution from Senator Markey frames the concept, which I think is constructive, but I'll be working on my own legislation."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) similarly said he is "looking at" the Markey resolution, but he warned against policy fights while Republican climate skeptics still control the Senate.
"The key thing is not to get into any internal circular firing squads over what should and should not be in a Green New Deal until we're in a position to win the battle," he told E&E News. "Fighting over the prize before you're ready to win the battle is bad sequencing."
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/02/06/stories/1060119731
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