Preview Newsletter
AM ACC Clips Report 2/11/2019
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Hearing on Climate Change
Feb 12, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
Location: 1324 Longworth / 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Climate Change
Feb 12, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the United States
Location: 1324 Longworth / 2:00 PM -
Hearing on the State of Climate Science
Feb 13, 2019 | House Science, Space and Technology Committee
Location: 2318 Rayburn / 10:00 AM -
Oversight Hearing: Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program
Feb 13, 2019 | House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies
Location: 2362-B Rayburn / 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Climate Change
Feb 13, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Natural Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
Location: 1324 Longworth / 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Nominations
Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Judiciary Committee
Location: 226 Dirksen / 10:00 AM -
America’s Infrastructure Needs: Keeping Pace with a Growing Economy
Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
Location: G-50 Dirksen / 10:15 AM -
Markup of Legislation on Nominations
Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Rules and Administration Committee
Location: 301 Russell / 10:30 AM -
Hearing to Consider the Status and Outlook for Cybersecurity Efforts in the Energy Industry
Feb 14, 2019 | Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Location: 366 Dirksen / 10:00 AM -
(ACC Mentioned) About to Buy Penny Stocks? Look at These 3 Companies First.
Feb 9, 2019 | Motley Fool
By Maxx Chatsko, Chris Neiger, And Neha Chamaria
Penny stocks are the get-rich-quick scheme of investing. But like most wealth-building shortcuts, they often end in disaster. -
Some House Climate Panel Democrats Accepted Energy Industry Cash
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter and Bill Allison
Some Democrats named to a newly revived House committee on climate change received contributions from the oil, gas, and utility industries, campaign finance data show. -
Why Glass Recycling in the US Is Broken
Feb 11, 2019 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Mitch Jacoby
Americans dispose of some 10 million metric tons of glass annually. Most of it ends up in the trash. Only about one-third gets recycled. That’s not because of some intrinsic materials or chemical property that makes glass difficult to recycle. -
Do You Know What’s in Your Cosmetics?
Feb 9, 2019 | New York Times
By Editorial Board
In a 1988 hearing, Congress took the cosmetics industry to task for a rash of health and safety problems. Cosmetologists were reporting serious respiratory and nervous system damage -
EPA Decision Soon on Chemical Compounds Tied to Health Risks
Feb 11, 2019 | AP (In The New York Times)
By Ellen Knickmeyer, Michael Casey and John Flesher
The chemical compounds are all around you. They're on many fabrics, rugs and carpets, cooking pots and pans, outdoor gear, shampoo, shaving cream, makeup and even dental floss. Increasing numbers of states have found them seeping into water supplies. -
EDF Urges OMB to Protect Workers in EPA Methylene Chloride Ban
Feb 8, 2019 | Inside EPA
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is urging the Trump administration to ensure that EPA’s final rule banning use of methylene chloride in paint strippers protects workers by covering most commercial uses, fearing that the agency is likely to rely on a proposed training program... -
3M Slapped With Suit Alleging Dairy Milk Contamination (1)
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Steven M. Sellers
3M Co. should be held liable for damage caused to a New Mexico dairy farm by cancer-causing chemicals that leached into groundwater, a new lawsuit alleges. -
EU Chemicals Agency Warns About Brexit Registration Pitfalls
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environments Report
By Stephen Gardner
Some U.K. chemical companies are running out of time to ensure they can keep selling products in the EU after Brexit, the European Chemicals Agency said. -
Public Comments for Three LNG Projects Reopened in Aftermath of Federal Shutdown
Feb 8, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has reopened public comment periods for three proposed liquefied natural gas export terminals after the partial federal government shutdown prevented some federal agencies from participating in the process. -
Agency Set to Issue Clean Power Plan Replacement This Spring
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E News PM
By Niina Heikkinen
EPA is still planning to finalize a replacement for the Clean Power Plan close to its original schedule, the agency told a federal appeals court today. -
Why an ‘All of the Above’ Energy Policy Is Wrong for Fighting Climate Change
Feb 8, 2019 | Environmental Working Group
By Grant Smith
This week Capitol Hill was abuzz with talk of climate change. Along with the hotly anticipated unveiling of a framework for the Green New Deal, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the environmental and economic effects of the climate crisis. -
Pennsylvania Freezes All Energy Transfer Pipeline Permits
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Leslie A. Pappas
Pennsylvania regulators have suspended all permit approvals or modifications for Energy Transfer Partners’ pipelines until the company stabilizes an area around a pipeline that exploded in western Pennsylvania in September 2018. -
Pressure Mounts to Shut Down Sterigenics Facility
Feb 11, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Stephen Joyce
Illinois’ state and federal lawmakers ramped up pressure on the U.S. EPA to shut down a facility in the state that sterilizes medical equipment, saying it emits hazardous levels of ethylene oxide. -
Committee Digs into Energy Sector's Cyberdefenses
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Blake Sobczak
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is set to host its first cybersecurity hearing of the year Thursday, two weeks after top intelligence officials warned of urgent threats to U.S. power utilities and gas pipelines. -
Safety Officials Concerned by Sharp Increase in Oil Train Traffic from Canada
Feb 11, 2019 | Minnesota Star Tribune
By Mike Hughlett
Oil imports by rail from Canada have hit a historic high, meaning more oil trains are rolling across Minnesota and raising the alert level of local emergency managers. -
Wastewater Utilities Eye House Infrastructure Package to Address Priorities
Feb 8, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Lara Beaven
Wastewater and stormwater utilities are eyeing a future House infrastructure package as a vehicle to address their priorities including reauthorization of a key EPA infrastructure funding program... -
EPA to Hold Hearing Next Week on Ozone Nonattainment Plan
Feb 8, 2019 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
An EPA plan for addressing ozone problem areas around the country that is getting mixed reviews could get a full-throated airing at a public hearing next week. -
President Trump, Here’s ‘What the Hell Is Going on’ with Global Warming
Feb 8, 2019 | Washington Post
By Editorial Board
“WHAT THE hell is going on with Global Waming?” President Trump tweeted last week in the midst of a cold snap. “Please come back fast, we need you!” -
House Lawmakers Introduce Resolution to Support Paris Climate Agreement
Feb 8, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Dozens of House Democrats and one Republican introduced legislation Friday meant to demonstrate congressional support for the Paris climate agreement. -
Leader of New Climate Panel Talks of Need for ‘Bold Action’
Feb 9, 2019 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Matthew Daly
It does not yet have office space, staff or even Republican members, but Florida Rep. Kathy Castor is confident that a special House committee on climate change will play a leading role on one of the most daunting challenges facing the planet. -
What Key 2020 Candidates Are Saying About the Green New Deal
Feb 10, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Brett Samuels
The Green New Deal has emerged as a key litmus test for prospective 2020 presidential candidates, with high-profile candidates jumping on board to back the progressive environmental pitch. -
Can 'Green New Deal' Avoid Cap and Trade's Fate?
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Mark K. Matthews, Adam Aton and Scott Waldman
The last time congressional Democrats tried to pass major climate legislation, the effort barely cleared the House before hitting a wall in the Senate. -
‘It's Crazy. It's Loony': Republicans Giddy as Democrats Champion Green New Deal
Feb 9, 2019 | Politico
By Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman
Prominent Democrats have rushed to embrace the Green New Deal — and Republicans couldn't be happier about it. -
All You Need Is a Congress and a Dream
Feb 10, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Barton Swaim
It’s hard to know what to make of the “Green New Deal” put forward last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D., Mass.). -
EPA Touts 2018 Compliance Wins, but Critics Say Data Shows Drop off
Feb 8, 2019 | PoliticoPro
By Alex Guillén
EPA issued new data on Friday that it said showed its enforcement of environmental regulations had yielded significant public health benefits — though critics said the figures proved the Trump administration was going easy on big polluters. -
Test of Batteries as Air Pollution Tool Heads to Court (1)
Feb 9, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Four environmental groups are challenging an EPA-issued air pollution permit to build a proposed natural gas-fired power plant north of Los Angeles because it didn’t consider batteries to reduce emissions. -
Chicago Scion Pledges to Make City Carbon Neutral by 2050
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Daniel Cusick
Climate change is on the ballot in this month's Chicago mayoral election.
Congressional Hearings
Industry and Association News
TSCA News There are no clips to report at this time.
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation and Infrastructure News
Environment News
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Feb 12, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
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Feb 12, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the United States
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Hearing on the State of Climate Science
Feb 13, 2019 | House Science, Space and Technology Committee
Witnesses
Dr. Natalie M. Mahowald, Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering, Faculty Director for the Environment, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University
Dr. Robert Kopp, Director, Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, and Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University
Dr. Jennifer Francis, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center
Dr. Joseph Majkut, Director of Climate Policy, Niskanen Center
Dr. Kristie L. Ebi, Rohm & Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences, Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE) University of Washington
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Oversight Hearing: Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program
Feb 13, 2019 | House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies
Witnesses
Michael Furze
Assistant Director, Energy Division, Washington State Department of CommerceAnnamaria Garcia
Director, Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs Office, U.S. Department of EnergyTerry Jacobs
Housing and Energy Director, Great Lakes Community Action PartnershipAmy Klusmeier
Weatherization Assistance Program Director, National Association for State Community Services Program -
Feb 13, 2019 | House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Natural Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
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Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Judiciary Committee
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America’s Infrastructure Needs: Keeping Pace with a Growing Economy
Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
Witnesses:
Mr. William Friedman, Chairman, American Association of Port Authorities, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority
Mr. Ian Jefferies, President and Chief Executive Officer, Association of American Railroads
Mr. Matthew Polka, President and Chief Executive Officer, American Cable Association
Mr. Chris Spear, President and Chief Executive Officer, American Trucking Association
Mr. Larry Willis, President, Transportation Trades Department
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Markup of Legislation on Nominations
Feb 13, 2019 | Senate Rules and Administration Committee
Omnibus Committee Funding Resolution, Committee Rules, and S. Res 50; Improving procedures for the consideration of nominations in the Senate.
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Hearing to Consider the Status and Outlook for Cybersecurity Efforts in the Energy Industry
Feb 14, 2019 | Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Witness Panel 1
· The Honorable Neil Chatterjee
Chairman
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
· The Honorable Karen Evans
Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response
U.S. Department of Energy
· Major William J. Keber
Executive Officer
West Virginia National Guard Critical Infrastructure Protection Battalion
· Mr. James B. Robb
President and Chief Executive Officer
North American Electric Reliability Corporation
· Mr. David Edward Whitehead
Chief Operating Officer
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.
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(ACC Mentioned) About to Buy Penny Stocks? Look at These 3 Companies First.
Feb 9, 2019 | Motley Fool
By Maxx Chatsko, Chris Neiger, And Neha Chamaria
Penny stocks are the get-rich-quick scheme of investing. But like most wealth-building shortcuts, they often end in disaster. Considering the deceptive and desperate measures undertaken by penny stock scammers, it shouldn't be too surprising that most "investments" in microcap companies disappear into thin air. The overwhelming evidence makes it clear: Don't waste your time or money!
Instead, individuals looking to build long-term wealth can rely on the tried-and-true method of buy-and-hold investing. While it's simple, it's not easy. But investors who can suppress bias and emotion to buy great businesses and hold on for sufficiently long time periods can sleep soundly at night.
We recently asked three contributors at The Motley Fool for their top stock picks right now that fit the bill. Here's why they like Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE:EPD), Square (NYSE:SQ), and Franco-Nevada (NYSE:FNV).A leader of the American energy revolution
Maxx Chatsko (Enterprise Products Partners): Perhaps OPEC hasn't figured it out yet, but every time the cartel agrees to production cuts, it's really just handing over market share to American oil and gas producers. Thanks to unparalleled expertise and a steady stream of new technology, shale oil and gas from the U.S. are among the cheapest in the world. Combine that with brand-new export infrastructure, and the fact that market-driven domestic producers really don't care about production quotas, and OPEC's relevance is waning by the barrel.
Enterprise Products Partners is one of the companies positioned to capture the most benefit from America's redirection of global energy trade flows. The $60 billion business focuses primarily on pipeline infrastructure for shuttling natural gas liquids (NGLs), crude oil, and natural gas across North America. That provides steady and predictable fee-based cash flow and supports a 6.1% distribution yield -- and surging domestic production is leading to truly amazing results.
In 2018, the business reported $4.2 billion of net income and $6 billion in distributable cash flow -- both records -- representing year-over-year growth of 47% and 33%, respectively. Companies as large as Enterprise Products Partners don't typically grow at that rate, but perhaps no other company is as well positioned to capitalize on growing demand for NGLs -- a class of petrochemicals largely overlooked by investors.
NGLs are by-products of oil and gas production. Because they're so bountiful and cheap, petrochemical manufacturers are racing to utilize them. In fact, close to $200 billion in investments have been announced for upgraded or new petrochemical facilities in the U.S., according to the American Chemistry Council. That will help the United States boast an expected trade surplus in chemicals of $71 billion by 2023.
Enterprise Products Partners will be the foundation for it all, transporting NGL feedstocks to facilities in dedicated pipelines, carrying refined products to market and export facilities, and storing excess product throughout its nationwide network. Simply put, this giant is only just beginning to awaken. The future of mobile payments is already here
Chris Neiger (Square): Instead of riding the roller coaster of penny stocks with shaky business foundations, Square offers plenty of potential for share price gains and a solid market opportunity in the expanding contactless-payment space.
Square's point-of-sale terminals allow the company to collect a fee every time someone makes a payment through its devices (either using their phone or credit card). These transactions make up 74% of the company's total sales -- and business is booming. In the most recent quarter, total revenue jumped 51%, and the company's gross payment volume (GPV) -- the total dollar amount of processed payments through Square -- was up 29%. Even more impressive is the fact that the company just posted its first quarterly net profit in the most recent quarter.
But it's not satisfied with just collecting transaction fees; it's also expanding its reach with its Square Cash App and a potential move into banking. Square Cash App downloads outpaced PayPal's popular Venmo app in 2018 and in the first month of this year. That's no easy feat, and it shows just how competitive Square is as it takes on established players.And the company has applied for a license that would allow it to lend money. If it gets approved, the company would be able to lend money directly to customers (it lends some money now, but only through a third-party bank) and open up an entirely new way to make money.
If you're chasing penny stocks for their potential for massive share-price gains, consider that Square has lots of upside as it continues to grow, but it comes with a stable business rooted in the expanding mobile payments market. The company's share price is up 744% over the past three years. And with contactless transactions expected to grow from $8.8 billion in 2017 to $27.2 billion in 2023, there's still plenty of runway left for Square.A gold stock like none other
Neha Chamaria (Franco-Nevada): You might have heard time and again how precious metal stocks can help diversify your portfolio, but mining stocks aren't necessarily the only way to gain exposure to metals like gold. In fact, a gold streaming stock like Franco-Nevada has handily outperformed its mining peers over the years, and there's a fair chance it will continue to do so, making it one stock you'd want to pick over the lure of several mining penny stocks that could eventually burn your fingers.
Franco-Nevada shares have nearly quadrupled in the past 10 years, thanks primarily to its streaming business model. The company doesn't own and operate mines, but instead buys precious metals like gold from mining companies at discounted prices in return for funding them up front. It's a high-margin business, as Franco-Nevada doesn't have to bear mining-related costs and can also secure metals for low prices. In the past decade or so, the company has built a solid portfolio of streaming assets with leading mining companies and has even diversified into oil and gas royalties, adding another offbeat yet lucrative source of revenue to gain an edge over its streaming peers.
Between 2017 and 2022, Franco-Nevada expects to grow its gold-equivalent-ounce production by 17%, and oil and gas revenue by nearly 177%, to achieve at least 30% growth in EBITDA. The company looks well positioned to grow its cash flows in coming years and maintain its industry-leading dividend track record that boasts 11 consecutive years of annual dividend increases.
Steadily growing dividends add significant appeal to Franco-Nevada shares as dividends not only reflect the resilience of the company's underlying business model in a volatile industry, but also contribute substantially to investors' total returns from the stock in the long haul.
With Franco-Nevada's portfolio exhibiting strong growth options and management affirming its commitment to shareholders, you shouldn't regret having invested your hard-earned money in this stock when you look back some years from now.
10 stocks we like better than Franco-Nevada Corp
When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has quadrupled the market.*David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now… and Franco-Nevada Corp wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/about-to-buy-penny-stocks-look-at-these-3-companie.aspx
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Some House Climate Panel Democrats Accepted Energy Industry Cash
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Ari Natter and Bill Allison
Some Democrats named to a newly revived House committee on climate change received contributions from the oil, gas, and utility industries, campaign finance data show.
Democratic members of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis accepted more than $238,000 in total from sectors tied to the energy industry, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission 2018 campaign spending data by the Center for Responsive Politics.
New Mexico Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan and his political action committee was the top recipient, totaling nearly $120,000 in contributions, including nearly $88,000 from electric utilities such as PG&E Corp., and $25,000 from the oil and gas sector. That figure includes $7,500 from BP PLC, the company responsible for the worst offshore oil spill in the nation’s history.
So far, only one member of the climate committee, California Democratic Rep. Mike Levin, a freshman, has signed a pledge against accepting fossil fuel donations, according to David Turnbull, a spokesman for Oil Change USA, part of the coalition that is behind the pledge.
“Rejecting the industry’s influence by taking the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge should be a prerequisite to these discussions,” Turnbull said. “By joining the committee, these members have shown they’re interested in tackling this issue; they can show they’re serious about showing true climate leadership by standing up to the industry directly.”
In a statement, Lujan, who has a lifetime score rating of 96 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, said his “values and voting record are clear.”
“I’ve been battling climate change and advocating for the generation of renewable resources and energy efficiency since my time as the chairman of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, before I was a member of Congress,” he said. “I respect and recognize New Mexico’s long history as an energy state, that is why, throughout my career, I have fought to ensure that New Mexico is a leader in our clean energy future.”
Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, who was named to chair the climate committee, has received more than $7,500 from utilities that include Tampa-based TECO Energy Inc., which produces electricity from a mix of coal, natural gas, and renewable sources. The investigative website Sludge reported last month Castor and her husband sold an investment of as much as $100,000 in a mutual fund made up of fossil fuel utility holdings.
Castor spokesman Steven Angotti didn’t respond to a request for comment. In an email to Sludge, he said Castor had “divested from the Franklin Utilities Fund to build confidence in her leadership of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.”
Some members of the committee have also received contributions from environmental groups, and renewable energy companies. Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, a freshman Democrat, has received $6,500 from the League of Conservation voters for instance, according to the Center for Responsive Politics data.
Yet the contributions the fossil fuel industry had been an acrimonious issue leading to the committee’s creation, with hundreds of activists storming Nancy Pelosi’s office with a demand that Democrats vow to reject any funding from the oil, gas, and mining industries. There are nine Democrats on the select committee.
“For many contributions, the whole purpose is to get access to a lawmaker with the intent on influencing them,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “Often they are seeking to influence the legislative process for the sole purpose of protecting their financial bottom line.”
The committee had been disbanded after Republicans took control of the House, but was restored by Pelosi when she returned as speaker.
Republican members of the committee have yet to be named. New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who urged unsuccessfully that the committee be given the power to craft legislation, subpoena witnesses, and ban members from accepting fossil fuel donations, said she had been offered a seat but declined in order to serve on other panels.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/some-house-climate-panel-democrats-accepted-energy-industry-cash
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Why Glass Recycling in the US Is Broken
Feb 11, 2019 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Mitch Jacoby
Americans dispose of some 10 million metric tons of glass annually. Most of it ends up in the trash. Only about one-third gets recycled. That’s not because of some intrinsic materials or chemical property that makes glass difficult to recycle.
“Glass is 100% recyclable,” says Robert Weisenburger Lipetz, executive director of the Glass Manufacturing Industry Council (GMIC), a nonprofit trade association. “It has an unlimited life and can be melted and recycled endlessly to make new glass products with no loss in quality,” he adds.
Related: What’s glass, and how are modern-day researchers enhancing its properties?
And the US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate, which pales compared with the 90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries, is not the result of a lack of technical know-how.
“Recycled glass is nearly always part of the recipe for making new glass,” says Joseph J. Cattaneo, executive director of the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI), a trade association representing the North American glass-container industry. The glass industry regularly mixes cullet—a granular material made by crushing bottles and jars usually collected from recycling programs—with sand, limestone, and other raw materials to produce the molten glass needed to manufacture new bottles and jars.
Manufacturers agree that using cullet benefits glassmakers, the environment, and consumers. And national surveys show that Americans overwhelmingly favor glass recycling and deem it to be important. Yet as the percentage of glass recycled in Spain and the UK, for example, has doubled and tripled in the past 25 years, respectively, the numbers in the US have barely budged.
“There are many reasons why more glass isn’t recycled in the US,” says David Rue, an engineer at the Gas Technology Institute near Chicago who recently completed a yearlong study of US glass recycling as a consultant for GMIC. The US glass-recycling shortfall comes down to the interplay between the quality and availability of cullet and the economics of making glass, he explains. And, he says, the recycling rate discrepancies between the US and other countries result mainly from differences in government policy and consumer education and habits. By understanding these hurdles to glass recycling, GMIC, GPI, and other industry groups hope to boost the rate in the US.
CULLET’S MANY BENEFITS
When studying glass recycling, the first thing that becomes clear is that cullet is extremely useful. It provides many benefits to glass manufacturing.
First, cullet allows glass manufacturers to reduce their need for raw materials. The key ingredients used in glassmaking are sand (mainly silica, SiO2), sodium carbonate (also known as soda ash, Na2CO3), and limestone (CaCO3). One kilogram of cullet replaces 1.2 kg of raw materials, according to James V. Nordmeyer, vice president of global sustainability at Owens-Illinois, a major manufacturer of glass bottles and containers.
Cullet also helps manufacturers save on energy costs. For every 10% of cullet included in the glassmaking feed mixture, the energy needed to keep the furnace at temperatures high enough to generate molten glass falls by nearly 3%, Rue says. Running furnaces at lower temperatures extends furnace lives and reduces operating costs and, as a result, the price of the final glass products.
According to Pennsylvania State University’s John C. Mauro, adding cullet to the feed mixture also improves the quality of glass products. Mauro is a materials scientist and glass specialist who spent nearly 20 years at the glassmaker Corning. He explains that melting cullet doesn’t release carbon dioxide or other gases that can form unwanted trapped bubbles in the glass. Also, using cullet limits the deposition of crystals of unmelted starting materials, as well as the formation of streaks and optical imperfections due to incomplete mixing of those materials.
Finally, cullet has a significant environmental benefit. Adding the material to the mix reduces greenhouse gas emissions during manufacturing, Nordmeyer points out. When the carbonates from limestone melt with the other materials, they release CO2. Using 10% cullet in the manufacturing feed lowers emissions of CO2 by roughly 5%. Basically, for every 6 metric tons of cullet used in manufacturing, glassmakers can cut 1 metric ton of CO2 emissions.
THE PROBLEMS WITH US RECYCLING
Despite cullet’s long list of benefits, glassmakers are limited by what recycled material is available to them at a manageable cost. Getting cullet in a clean, furnace-ready form generally requires a lot of processing. And depending on how the US recycles, that processing is done relatively inefficiently compared with what happens in Europe.
US municipalities manage residential recycling primarily via single-stream curbside collection. Single-stream means residents use their recycling bins to comingle glass with aluminum and steel cans, various types of plastic, newsprint, junk mail, cardboard, and other paper products.
People also tend to throw in a lot of things that shouldn’t go in the bin, such as plastic bags, batteries, light bulbs, soiled food containers, used napkins, and what Nordmeyer and others call “wish-cycling” materials. One example is a popular single-serve coffee-brewing product that features a plastic cup and foil lid. Well-meaning people think since those components can be recycled, they’re justified in tossing the whole thing—dirty filter, wet coffee grounds, and all—into a recycling bin.
Garbage, like those products, contaminates all the recyclables in the bin, Nordmeyer says. “You have to sort through all the trash to get to the material that manufacturers want and are willing to pay for.”
That sorting happens via a combined manual-plus-automated multistep process at a materials recovery facility. About 400 such facilities operate in the US, according to Rue.
To start the sorting process, front-end loaders dump huge piles of single-stream recyclables onto conveyor belts. Trained operators manually remove scrap metal, textiles, hoses, and other materials that never belonged in the recycling bin and can damage sorting equipment. Next, automated separators called star screens, together with powerful air jets, remove cardboard and paper, while magnets pull out iron-containing materials. After several more separation steps, a device known as a glass-breaking screen removes most of the glass from the single-stream load so it can be sent to cullet suppliers, who clean it and make it furnace ready for glass manufacturers.
Multistream recycling, which is a far less common approach in the US, is simpler on the processing end. In these programs, consumers separate glass from other recyclables, depositing them in glass-only collection bins. This type of collection requires a high level of consumer education and is considerably more expensive than single-stream collection. But glass from multistream collection is much cleaner than what comes out of the single-stream supply. Multistream glass typically bypasses materials recovery facilities and goes directly to cullet processors. Because of the difference in the quality of glass from the two streams, just 40% of glass from single-stream collection ends up being recycled into new products, compared with about 90% of glass from multistream systems.
o one key factor that stands in the way of the US glass industry’s ability to boost recycling numbers is the limited availability of satisfactory cullet produced via single-stream processing. “Large quantities of high-quality cullet are essential to further increase the recycled content in our products,” says Frank O’Brien-Bernini, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Owens Corning, a major fiberglass manufacturer.
Compared with multistream recycling, “single stream is an inherently inefficient and expensive recycling method,” Lipetz says. But most municipalities in the US stick with single stream because the collection costs are lower than those with multistream systems. To switch to multistream systems, these municipalities would need to introduce taxes or fees to meet the higher collection and handling costs. And most municipalities are reluctant to do so.
But even if the US shifted more to multistream collection, there are other economic factors standing in the way of increasing glass-recycling rates to European levels. One significant difference between the US and European nations is size. Distances in the US between a materials recovery facility and a cullet supplier, or a cullet supplier and a buyer tend to be greater. Transporting glass waste and cullet is costly because of their weight, and those costs can be a deal breaker for some glassmakers and can prevent would-be cullet suppliers from opening processing facilities. For example, in the US, some materials recovery facilities do not recover any glass from their single streams because there are no nearby buyers to make it worthwhile, according to Rue.
Another factor affecting the costs of recovering cullet from glass waste is that cullet specifications vary from one manufacturer to another depending on the intended application. If a supplier needs to process multiple types of cullet to meet various manufacturers’ needs, their production costs increase. In addition, common soda-lime cullet made from bottles and jars isn’t compatible with window glass and the type of fiberglass used in reinforced composites, further limiting recycling opportunities.
These costs and limited supplies of quality cullet continue to stand in the way of US manufacturers increasing their use of recycled material. “We are a ready and willing customer for increased output from consumer recycling,” O’Brien-Bernini says, but the economics of producing cullet aren’t always favorable for would-be suppliers.
RECYCLING LOCALLY
Most of the efforts to boost glass-recycling rates in the US have been state and local affairs. For example, 10 states have passed so-called bottle bills that require consumers to pay deposits on beverage bottles. The idea is consumers will be more likely to recycle the bottles to get back their deposits. The laws are having the intended effect. In states with those laws, 98% of bottles are recycled, compared with the national average of roughly 33%.
A few communities have set up bottle-redemption centers and instituted separate curbside glass collection. California passed legislation requiring that insulation glass used in the state contain 30% cullet and that container glass be made with at least 35% cullet. And North Carolina enacted an on-premise recycling bill that requires alcoholic-beverage-permit holders to recycle bottles and cans.
But sometimes solving a problem requires grabbing the bull by the horns. That’s what Boulevard Brewing did about 10 years ago. The Kansas City, Missouri–based beer maker bemoaned the absence of an active local recycling program, which meant that millions of its empty beer bottles were ending up in landfills. There was hardly any recycling in the community because there was no local cullet processor. And there was no processor because locals didn’t recycle much. “It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem,” says Michelle Goth. So Boulevard helped launch Ripple Glass, a cullet supplier for which Goth serves as general manager.
Following a European model, Ripple placed 60 large glass-only collection bins across Kansas City and nearby locations and has been successful in spreading the word about the benefits of recycling. The effort has driven locals to regularly fill the bins with clean, high-quality recyclable glass. The majority of Ripple’s cullet feeds the local Owens Corning fiberglass plant, and a portion goes to a beer-bottle maker in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that supplies Boulevard and other companies with new bottles.
Will efforts like these local and state ones bump up recycling rates across the US? Probably not quickly, experts say.
It’s unlikely in the foreseeable future that the economics of recycling in communities throughout the US will change to favor multistream recycling collection, as is commonly practiced in Europe, Lipetz says. Another factor helping Europe maintain high recycling rates is high landfill costs, which make trashing glass in those countries more expensive than recycling. And, unlike in the US, recycling is legislated in many European countries nationally, not locally.
Finally, in Europe, “recycling is the cultural and social norm,” Nordmeyer says. Europeans have been recycling for many years, and children there are educated about it at school and at home starting at a young age. “In the US, we tend to teach to the test, and recycling isn’t on the test,” he says. “But it should be.”
https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6
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Do You Know What’s in Your Cosmetics?
Feb 9, 2019 | New York Times
By Editorial Board
In a 1988 hearing, Congress took the cosmetics industry to task for a rash of health and safety problems. Cosmetologists were reporting serious respiratory and nervous system damage. At least one woman had been permanently disfigured by flammable hair spray. And according to government data, nearly 1,000 toxic chemicals were lurking in countless other personal care products. Cosmetics companies were not doing enough to ensure that these products were safe, and the Food and Drug Administration did not have enough power to adequately police them.
When Edward Kavanaugh, president of the industry’s leading trade group, disputed those claims, Ron Wyden, then an Oregon congressman, stood firm. The industry’s safety apparatus was “a piecemeal patchwork system in dire need of repair,” Mr. Wyden said. Legislative reform was clearly needed.
That was 30 years ago. To date, no such reforms have been passed.
The American cosmetics industry is a $70 billion-a-year behemoth. The Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Cosmetics and Colors has an annual budget of just $8 million and 27 staff members. The lawsgoverning the office’s authority run just two pages long and have not been updated since 1938, when they were first enacted. Such meager tools leave federal officials nearly powerless to regulate the makeup, lotions, toothpastes, deodorants and other elixirs that often are applied to the most intimate parts of the human body.
Industry leaders are right to note that, on the whole, cosmetic products have a good safety record. But in recent years, a fresh round of health and safety risks have left people wary.
Independent researchers have found asbestos in glittery products marketed to young girls; they’ve linked chemicals in nail polish to serious health problems in nail technicians; and they’ve traced reproductive health issues and mercury poisoning to hair and skin products used by many women of color. At the same time, some 200 people reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit against Wen Hair Care, whose products they say burned their scalps and gave them alopecia; and nearly 12,000 people have sued Johnson & Johnsonclaiming that asbestos in the company’s baby powder gave them ovarian cancer. (Wen has said it believes that its products are safe; Johnson & Johnson has said its baby powder is safe and has never contained asbestos.)
Owing to a lack of resources or authority, the F.D.A.’s response to these issues has been incomplete.
House and Senate members have introduced several bills in recent years that would give cosmetics regulations a much needed face-lift and could allay a rising tide of consumer anxiety. But so far none of these bills has seen a vote.
While lawmakers dither, the F.D.A.’s oversight of the cosmetics industry remains astoundingly limited. The agency cannot require companies to submit safety data before they market a product, to adhere to basic manufacturing standards once they do or even to register with the agency, things drug and medical device makers are mandated to do. Companies don’t have to report problems — or “adverse events” — that consumers relay to them. And if regulators do hear of incidents, they cannot demand to be allowed to inspect a company’s records; they can only check a facility for visible flaws, like mold.
The F.D.A. also can’t ensure the safety of imported cosmetics, which have doubled in volume in the past decade. The agency inspects less than 1 percent of the three million or so cosmetics shipments that come in every year. Among those that it does test, roughly 15 percent are found to be contaminated or to contain dangerous ingredients.
The only panel tasked with determining the safety of individual cosmetic ingredients, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, is funded and staffed by the Personal Care Products Council, a trade group that spends roughly $2 million a year on the panel — or about as much as it spends lobbying Congress. Industry leaders say that investment is proof of their commitment to safety. But, as the Environmental Working Group and other advocacy organizations have pointed out, it also creates a substantial conflict of interest.
That’s particularly alarming given that some of the panel’s conclusions have been at odds with those of impartial government entities like the National Toxicology Program. Of more than 5,000 chemicals that the panel has evaluated since its inception in 1976, only 11 have been found unsafe for use. The panel made those determinations not by testing chemicals or cosmetics directly, but by reviewing available data, which for many ingredients is paltry at best.Get our newsletter and never miss an Op-Doc
"We have learned a lot about these chemicals in recent decades,” says an F.D.A. regulator who is not authorized to speak to the press. “But we still don’t have a clear understanding of if or how well they might be absorbed through the skin or mucous membrane. That means women and children slather this stuff on every day without knowing what the real impact might be.” The Cosmetic Ingredient Review does not evaluate the risks of aggregate or cumulative exposure to an ingredient, from multiple products over many years, or the ways in which different ingredients might interact with one another. Its recommendations are not binding, and its member companies don’t have to say whether they follow them.
Industry trade groups have spent years quashing efforts to close these gaps in regulatory oversight. As court records show and several news outlets have reported, the Personal Care Products Council (then called the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association) waged a decades-long war with regulators and consumer safety advocates over asbestos-laced talcum powder. As far back as the 1960s, the organization insisted that such powder was safe, even as its own members’ scientists warned that it might not be.
The group resisted calls to add warning labels to talc-based products and pressured government agencies to refrain from listing the ingredient as a carcinogen. It also attacked safety advocates, calling them “chemical terrorists,” while giving pricey vacations to lawmakers who had the power to act on those advocates’ concerns.
More recently, the industry has been split. Larger companies, including Johnson & Johnson, the leading talcum powder manufacturer, now say that they welcome stronger oversight, for the regulatory certainty and consumer confidence that it would bring. But smaller companies still argue that more regulations would crush them.
The cosmetics industry and the F.D.A. have also been divided. In 2014, when negotiations between the two sides collapsed, each side blamed the other. Amid their bickering, the status quo has remained — few regulations, growing consumer anxiety and no one with any power to fix the situation.
Consumer fear of chemicals is so great these days that scientists have a name for it — chemophobia. It leads people to avoid everything from genetically modified foods to essential medicines, often in search of “natural” alternatives. Such fears are frequently overblown or misplaced, but they underscore a real problem: Most of the products on store shelves are probably safe, but many may not be; how is anyone supposed to know the difference?
When it comes to cosmetics, it is nearly impossible to determine which products to worry about. But as incidents stack up and consumer confidence wanes, individual states are stepping in with their own rules.
Such patchwork fixes can only lead to more confusion. Passage of a strong federal bill is the only way to reverse those trends. A good one would enable the F.D.A. to commission independent reviews of cosmetic ingredients and recall tainted products, and would require cosmetics companies to register with the agency and report adverse events. Such measures are not too much to ask of an industry whose products are used by virtually everyone every day.
Taxpayers also will have to shoulder some new costs — for such efforts to succeed, Congress will need to grant the F.D.A.’s Office of Cosmetics and Colors a sizable budget increase.
Cosmetics companies want unfettered access to a multibillion-dollar market. Consumers want to know that the products they’re putting on their bodies are safe. Both sides can win — but only if Congress acts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/opinion/cosmetics-safety-makeup.html
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EPA Decision Soon on Chemical Compounds Tied to Health Risks
Feb 11, 2019 | AP (In The New York Times)
By Ellen Knickmeyer, Michael Casey and John Flesher
The chemical compounds are all around you. They're on many fabrics, rugs and carpets, cooking pots and pans, outdoor gear, shampoo, shaving cream, makeup and even dental floss. Increasing numbers of states have found them seeping into water supplies.
There's growing evidence that long-term exposure to the perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, or PFAS, can be dangerous, even in tiny amounts.
The Environmental Protection Agency is looking at how to respond to a public push for stricter regulation of the chemicals, in production since the 1940s.
A decision is expected soon.
At hearings around the country last year, local and state officials asked the agency to set a maximum level for PFAS in drinking water nationwide. It will take that, officials said, to stop contamination and hold polluting parties responsible.
But it's more than a U.S. problem.
In Europe, Australia, Asia and elsewhere, regulators and consumers are confronting discoveries of PFAS contamination, especially around U.S. military bases, where they're used in firefighting foam.
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WHAT ARE PFAS?
Industries use the chemicals in coatings meant to protect consumer goods from stains, water and corrosion.
DuPont says its scientists invented the earliest form of the nonstick compound in 1938. They were impressed with how water and grease slipped off the new substance and how it seemed never to break down — winning it the name "forever compound." Various types soon were on the market, first in Teflon products. Thousands of variants have been produced since then, for a host of uses.
By the 1970s, manufacturers conceded that PFAS were building up in the bodies of employees who worked with them. Recent scientific reports have estimated that nearly all people in the U.S. have some PFAS chemicals in their blood. Studies of workers exposed on the job and people who drank contaminated water, in addition to lab analyses of animals, have pointed to ties between some PFAS types and human illness.
Industries have phased out two of the most-studied versions of PFAS. Manufacturers say newer forms are safer and don't remain in the human body as long as older types. Some researchers say too little is known about them to be sure of that.
WHAT DOES THE SCIENCE SAY?
DuPont agreed to a court-supervised public health study after a farmer in Parkersburg, West Virginia, brought a lawsuit blaming runoff from a PFAS facility for the deaths of his cattle. The 2005-2013 study monitored and tested nearly 70,000 people who had been drinking water tainted with PFOA, one of two kinds of PFAS since phased out of production.
The study found "probable links" between high levels of PFOA in the body and excessive cholesterol levels, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular and kidney cancer, and problems in pregnancies.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said last year that medical studies pointed to "associations" between the industrial compounds and those ailments, and also to liver problems, low birth weight and other health issues.
The federal toxicology report also says EPA's "advisory level" of 70 parts per trillion of PFOA and PFOS — the two older, phased-out versions — in drinking water is too weak. Before the report was released, a White House email disclosed by Politico called it a "potential public relations nightmare."
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HOW WIDESPREAD IS EXPOSURE?
EPA-mandated testing of about 5,000 of the roughly 150,000 public water systems in the U.S. that was completed in 2016 found dangerous levels of the same two PFAS compounds in 66 systems. Local and state testing since then has identified high levels in scores of additional systems.
Contaminated materials are disposed of in landfills and sewage treatment systems. Firefighting foams are sprayed on the ground. The chemicals seep into soils, waterways, sediments and groundwater; some are incinerated, generating air pollution.
Many states aren't waiting for the EPA, particularly regarding groundwater and, more recently, drinking water.
New Jersey and Vermont are among those that have set standards more stringent than the EPA's; New Hampshire may join them.
New York is considering the toughest standard yet. In December, a state drinking water commission recommended a maximum limit of 10 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS. That follows revelations of widespread PFAS contamination in several communities.
Other states are trying to determine the extent of the contamination, according to the National Conferences of State Legislatures. North Carolina lawmakers approved money for monitoring and treatment. Washington state's Department of Health plans to test hundreds of water systems for any trace of the chemicals.
Legislation in other states has proposed things such as banning use of PFAS in food packaging and prohibiting its use in firefighting foam.
Dozens of military installations have been affected. Tests found drinking water contamination exceeding the EPA's health advisory for a lifetime of exposure for two PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA.
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WHAT ABOUT WILDLIFE?
Unsurprisingly, the chemicals have turned up in a variety of wildlife species, including fish, bald eagles and mink.
Michigan agencies plan to sample a variety of wild game, such as ducks and other waterfowl, for the chemicals. They already test fish and deer. The state issued a "do not eat" advisory last October for deer taken near a marsh polluted with PFAS — probably from a former Air Force base — after one of the animals registered 5,000 parts per trillion in its body.
Michigan, Minnesota and New Jersey include PFAS chemicals in fish advisories, warning people to limit consumption of such popular game species as bass, walleye and brook trout.
"If it's affecting human beings, it will be affecting wildlife as well," said Cheryl Murphy, a Michigan State University biologist.
The harm to wildlife is unclear, partly because PFAS chemicals don't necessarily accumulate in animals the way other chemicals do, she said. Older, larger fish have higher levels of mercury and PCBs because those contaminants are passed up food chains, from smaller species to bigger ones. But high levels of PFAS are being found in middle-sized fish such bluegill.
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Casey reported from Concord, New Hampshire, and Flesher reported from Traverse City, Michigan.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/02/11/us/politics/ap-us-forever-chemicals-emerging-threat.html
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EDF Urges OMB to Protect Workers in EPA Methylene Chloride Ban
Feb 8, 2019 | Inside EPA
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is urging the Trump administration to ensure that EPA’s final rule banning use of methylene chloride in paint strippers protects workers by covering most commercial uses, fearing that the agency is likely to rely on a proposed training program in lieu of a comprehensive ban on the substance’s paint-stripping uses.
During a Feb. 7 meeting, EDF staff urged White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials to finalize the Obama EPA’s January 2017 proposed rule banning methylene chloride paint strippers, according to a blog postthat EDF Project Manager Lindsay McCormick and Legislative Director Joanna Slaney posted after the meeting.
“Despite the facts that workers represent the vast majority of reported deaths and face the highest risks of other health effects, it appears that EPA is poised to finalize a rule that excludes a ban on commercial uses entirely -- and will instead merely initiate a lengthy, uncertain process that may lead to certification and training approaches EPA had already considered and rejected as inadequate to protect workers,” the blog says.
“During our meeting with OMB, we reiterated our full support for a ban on consumer uses, which is long overdue and absolutely necessary; but we urged that workers not be left behind,” they add.
The meeting comes after EPA Dec. 21 sent for OMB review a draft final rule, “Commercial Paint and Coating Removal Training, Certification and Limited Access Program,” with no further details available.
EDF and other advocacy groups said that the addition of a training program suggests that the Trump EPA intends to scale back the Obama EPAs’ January 2017 proposed version of the rule by excluding commercial uses from the ban.
Narrowing of the proposed ban to exclude commercial uses would be a win for paint stripper manufacturers who said in comments on the Obama-era proposed ban that EPA should pursue alternative measures, including risk management options aimed at reducing worker exposures.
It would also be the latest reversal in EPA’s efforts to limit exposures to methylene chloride paint strippers.
Former Administrator Scott Pruitt announced May 10 that EPA planned to finalize the Obama-era methylene chloride rule, despite the Trump administration's shelving of that proposed ban and several others in 2017 after critical comments from the chemical sector.
The reversal came days after Pruitt met with families of workers killed from inhaling methylene chloride while paint stripping.
Environmentalists sued EPA Jan. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, soon after raising concerns that the rule under White House review suggests that the Trump administration is retreating from the broad ban the Obama EPA had proposed.
At the meeting, EDF told OMB that the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires that EPA ban commercial uses after past findings that methylene chloride paint strippers pose risks to workers. They also argued that certification and training programs would not fully protect workers.
The group also argued that EPA cannot adequately protect consumers without also banning commercial uses because consumers would use commercial paint strippers. And they said that TSCA only allows EPA to exempt uses from the restrictions necessary to mitigate unreasonable risks if those uses are critical or essential.
“The law provides no basis for EPA to exclude from restrictions any non-critical or non-essential uses -- yet that appears to be what EPA is doing by excluding all commercial uses from the ban.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/edf-urges-omb-protect-workers-epa-methylene-chloride-ban
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3M Slapped With Suit Alleging Dairy Milk Contamination (1)
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Steven M. Sellers
3M Co. should be held liable for damage caused to a New Mexico dairy farm by cancer-causing chemicals that leached into groundwater, a new lawsuit alleges.
The owner of Highland Dairy in Clovis, N.M., a farm with 1,800 dairy cows, says the business was significantly damaged from perfluorooctanoic acid and other chemical runoff from fire suppression foam used at nearby Cannon Air Force Base.
3M, E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co., Tyco Fire Products LP, and other companies manufactured and distributed the PFOA-containing products used to extinguish aviation, marine, and other flammable liquid fires, according to the Feb. 7 complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico.
Dairy owner Art Schaap says he noticed a decline in milk production that has cost him over $1 million in lost revenue for several years. He didn’t consider water contamination to be the cause until last year, when the Air Force notified that it would be sampling wells for the presence of toxic chemicals, the complaint states.
That testing allegedly confirmed PFOA more than 23 times above EPA water quality standards, as did further testing of water and milk at the dairy.
Schaap also claims that levels of another chemical, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, were 200 times higher than EPA limits.
The underground plume affected drinking water wells in a four-mile radius from the southeastern corner of the Air Force base, according to the complaint.
The suit alleges that 3M has known about the toxic qualities of PFOA and PFAS since the 1970s, and that is liable on strict liability, negligence, nuisance, and other grounds.
Doer & Knudsen PA and Napoli Shkolnik PLLC represent Schaap.
A 3M spokeswoman told Bloomberg Law the company “cares deeply about the safety and health of New Mexico’s communities.
“3M acted responsibly in connection with products containing PFAS and will vigorously defend its environmental stewardship,” she said in a Feb. 8 email.
The case is Schaap v. 3M Co., D.N.M., No. 19-cv-00105, filed 2/7/19.
(Adds response from 3M.)
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/3m-slapped-with-suit-alleging-dairy-milk-contamination-1
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EU Chemicals Agency Warns About Brexit Registration Pitfalls
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environments Report
By Stephen Gardner
Some U.K. chemical companies are running out of time to ensure they can keep selling products in the EU after Brexit, the European Chemicals Agency said.
The Helsinki-based agency Feb. 8 published a list of nearly 1,200 chemicals that have been registered under REACH only by U.K.-based companies. When the U.K. leaves the European Union on March 29, unless specific arrangements are put in place, those registrations will lapse because they can be held only by EU-based companies.
The substances make up about 5 percent of all substances registered under REACH (Regulation No. 1907/2006 on the registration, evaluation, authorization, and restriction of chemicals), the bloc’s primary industrial chemicals law.
Registration of substances under REACH is a requirement for companies that want to sell chemicals in the EU. Any registration lapse would have two effects: The U.K. companies holding the registrations would no longer be able to sell the substances in the remaining EU countries, and companies in the EU would no longer be able to buy from U.K. companies.
For substances that have only been registered by U.K. companies, this could mean a sudden cut to the supply in the EU, unless U.K. registrants make alternative arrangements.
The terms on which the U.K. will leave the EU remain uncertain, and it “urges companies to act now to continue complying with their obligations” under REACH, the chemicals agency said.
Transferring Registrations
Those most likely to be affected include smaller U.K. companies that supply specialized chemicals. For example, among the substances on the ECHA list are hydrolyzed quinoa, which is used in hair products, and zinc phenylphosphonate, which is used in the production of plastics.
For both substances, the only REACH registrant is U.K.-based Envigo Ltd. Envigo was unable to comment to Bloomberg Environment Feb. 8, but on its website it said it established a Brexit task force that would “anticipate and minimize the impact of Brexit on our business.”
U.K. companies that want to maintain their REACH registrations can transfer their registrations to a company in another EU country. Alternatively EU-based companies that import chemicals from the U.K. can obtain REACH registrations to ensure they can continue their imports.
Large companies with business units in different countries would be able to switch their registrations out of the U.K., according to Michael Leise, senior regulatory consultant with Intertek Group Plc.
Intertek acts as an only-representative, or an agent via which non-EU companies can register substances under REACH. Intertek is already moving its registrations out of the U.K. to other EU countries.
‘Financial Approvals’
Some companies were switching their registrations but others were slow to act because of the costs and administrative obligations, he said.
“You need to get financial approvals within the company and all that stuff,” Liese said.
ECHA said it hasn’t seen any uptick in the number of REACH registrations being switched out of the U.K so far.
The number of substances on the chemicals agency’s list was more than anticipated, making it urgent that the U.K. and the EU agree on a Brexit deal, rather than defaulting to a sudden break or no-deal Brexit, according to U.K. Chemical Industries Association spokesman Simon Marsh.
Companies could arrange to switch their registrations out of the U.K. the moment Brexit happens at midnight central European time on March 29, the agency said. In this case, they should file their registration changes in the REACH computer system between March 12 and March 29, it said.
Each change of identity of a registrant involves a fee of 1,631 euros ($1,847), according to the schedule of REACH fees.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/eu-chemicals-agency-warns-about-brexit-registration-pitfalls
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Public Comments for Three LNG Projects Reopened in Aftermath of Federal Shutdown
Feb 8, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has reopened public comment periods for three proposed liquefied natural gas export terminals after the partial federal government shutdown prevented some federal agencies from participating in the process.
FERC issued notices on Thursday reopening the public comment periods for draft environmental impact statements issued for three projects – Kinder Morgan's Gulf LNG project in Pascagoula, Mississippi; Exelon's Annova LNG export terminal in Brownsville, Texas and Eagle LNG Partners' Eagle LNG project in Jacksonville, Florida.
Public comment periods for Gulf LNG and Eagle LNG have been reopened through Feb. 25 while Annova LNG has been reopened through March 13.
Although FERC is funded through Sept. 2019 and was not impacted by the 35-day partial federal government shutdown that ended on Jan. 25, other federal agencies that typically file comments for proposed LNG projects were affected.
The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, Fish & Wildlife Service, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and Coast Guard routinely file public comments for proposed LNG projects but were affected by the shutdown.
Public comments on the draft environmental impact statements for Gulf LNG and Eagle LNG were originally due Jan. 7 while comments for Annova LNG were due Feb. 4.
So far, reopening the public comments period has not changed the deadlines in other areas of the permit review process for the three projects.
Permit decisions for Eagle LNG are still scheduled for July 11 while Gulf LNG remains scheduled for July 16 and Annova LNG is scheduled for July 18.
FERC is currently reviewing more than a dozen permit applications for LNG export terminals amid record natural gas production in U.S. shale plays and burgeoning demand overseas.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Public-comments-for-three-LNG-projects-reopened-13601225.php
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Agency Set to Issue Clean Power Plan Replacement This Spring
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E News PM
By Niina Heikkinen
EPA is still planning to finalize a replacement for the Clean Power Plan close to its original schedule, the agency told a federal appeals court today.
EPA is aiming to finalize the Affordable Clean Energy rule in the second quarter of 2019. The agency is also "evaluating the impacts that the recent lapse in appropriations has had on the Agency's schedule for taking final action," according to a status update to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In the Trump administration's 2018 fall Unified Agenda, EPA had initially proposed completing the rule at the end of the first quarter, in March.
The agency noted it had not been able to review public comments or work on the rule between Dec. 28, when EPA temporarily closed due to lack of appropriations, and Jan. 25, the last day of the partial government shutdown.
The agency continued to ask the court to stay a case on the Clean Power Plan as it works as "expeditiously as practicable" to complete the replacement.
This is not the first time a government shutdown has affected EPA's efforts to draft regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Joe Goffman, who was a senior official in EPA's air office during the drafting of the Clean Power Plan, recalled the agency was two months into working on the CPP at the time of the October 2013 shutdown.
At that time, the agency had a June 2 deadline to publicly release the proposal and had to compensate for lost time due to the shutdown.
"Somehow we managed despite that to meet the deadline. The career staff are not just pros, but superstars," he said in an interview last month.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2019/02/08/stories/1060120087
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Why an ‘All of the Above’ Energy Policy Is Wrong for Fighting Climate Change
Feb 8, 2019 | Environmental Working Group
By Grant Smith
This week Capitol Hill was abuzz with talk of climate change. Along with the hotly anticipated unveiling of a framework for the Green New Deal, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the environmental and economic effects of the climate crisis. Both centered on a crucial question: Can the U.S. transition quickly to 100 percent renewable energy sources?
At the House hearing, witnesses across the ideological spectrum agreed that climate change is an enormous threat to national and global security, that federal engagement in both policy and action is essential, and that the transition must support communities and workers impacted by the move away from fossil fuels. Good. But each of the witnesses endorsed the all-of-the-above approach – that the transition must include natural gas plants and nuclear reactors.
We recently argued against that notion, saying that natural gas and nukes are neither clean nor safe. But there are two more reasons: They’re too expensive, and they will slow down the transition to renewables.
New, large-scale wind and solar installations are already competitive in cost with existing coal and nuclear plants. As these plants age, their operating costs escalate, and for nukes, the longer they operate, the chance of a catastrophic accident greatly escalates.
States including Illinois, New York and New Jersey are bailing out some of their old nuclear plants with billions of dollars of ratepayer money – resources that could be better spent building out renewables, energy efficiency and battery storage technology. Keeping these aging and costly plants running gives utilities an incentive to tamp down any renewable and efficiency investments that might threaten their economics. Across the nation, big utilites are working to derail customer-owned solar and weakening energy efficiency programs that potentially cut into their profit margins.
This also goes for natural gas plants. Last year, the Rocky Mountain Institute estimated that $112 billion in natural gas plants, either under construction or planned, were threatened financially by declining costs of wind, solar and energy storage. Once built, utility companies will jealously protect those investments. The preference of the all-of-the-above crowd for building out natural gas plants before seriously considering renewable energy is setting us up for yet another massive ratepayer bailout of the utility industry.
Utilities are holding workers and communities hostage while they enjoy excessive profits from building increasingly expensive power plants, whose costs are passed on to ratepayers. Their accomplices are state policies that bail out money-losing plants instead of helping workers and communities while moving quickly away from jobs and a tax base built on fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
A more sane, safe and fair approach can be found in a recent report by the Nuclear Information Resource Service and the Alliance for a Green Economy. They compared the cost of keeping the FitzPatrick nuclear plant, in New York, running with taxpayer subsidies to replacing it with wind and energy efficiency.
They found that replacing the plant with clean options would not only be cheaper but also create twice as many jobs. A bailout would cost $40 million to $60 million a year – money that could be used to support the community’s tax base and displaced workers during the transition. Some plant workers could stay on for the years it takes to decommission a reactor, and others retrained for jobs in energy efficiency or wind jobs.
Transition policies should support people instead of utilities. Workers can leave behind jobs in old energy technologies that are inevitably and irreversibly dying. Moving to renewables and efficiency now, rather than later, can save communities money while making them safer and healthier.
https://www.ewg.org/news-and-analysis/2019/02/why-all-above-energy-policy-wrong-fighting-climate-change
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Pennsylvania Freezes All Energy Transfer Pipeline Permits
Feb 8, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Leslie A. Pappas
Pennsylvania regulators have suspended all permit approvals or modifications for Energy Transfer Partners’ pipelines until the company stabilizes an area around a pipeline that exploded in western Pennsylvania in September 2018.
In a Feb. 8 letter, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said it would withhold all approvals from ETC Northeast Pipeline LLC, Sunoco Pipeline LLP, Energy Transfer LP, and all other subsidiaries until the company complied with an October 2018 order to control erosion and landslides around the Revolution Pipeline.
“There has been a failure by Energy Transfer and its subsidiaries to respect our laws and our communities,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) said in a statement in response to DEP’s action. “This is not how we strive to do business in Pennsylvania, and it will not be tolerated.”
The 24-inch natural gas gathering line that exploded early Sept. 10 forced several homes to evacuate and caused a landslide in Beaver County, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh.
Energy Transfer is “committed to bringing this project into full compliance with all environmental permits and applicable regulations,” company spokeswoman Vicki Granado told Bloomberg Environment in a Feb. 8 email.
The action does not affect the operation of any of the company’s pipelines that are already in service or any areas of construction where permits have already been issued, she added.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/pennsylvania-freezes-all-energy-transfer-pipeline-permits
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Pressure Mounts to Shut Down Sterigenics Facility
Feb 11, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Stephen Joyce
Illinois’ state and federal lawmakers ramped up pressure on the U.S. EPA to shut down a facility in the state that sterilizes medical equipment, saying it emits hazardous levels of ethylene oxide.
But the company, Sterigenics U.S. LLC, says its emissions of the toxic gas are low and that it is in compliance with all federal and state permits.
Jim Durkin, the Republican leader in the Illinois state House, told Bloomberg Environment Feb. 8 that state and county officials are working are working towards an emergency legal move that would force the facility to close. Action could come as soon as the week of Feb. 11, he said.
Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) and Mayor Frank Trilla, of Willowbrook, Ill., where the Sterigenics’ facility is located, asked the EPA to shut down the plant at a Feb. 8 news conference outside the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said an “urgent, immediate response” was needed from the EPA in a Feb. 8 conversation with EPA acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, according to Durbin’s statement.
The EPA released data Feb. 5 showing ethylene oxide emissions from the facility spiked to nearly twice the levels detected earlier. Lipinski said this was the evidence needed to shut the facility down.
Federal agencies have found exposure to the gas—also used in products like antifreeze and textiles—could cause an increased risk of cancer.
The company said in a Feb. 8 statement that the levels of ethylene oxide released are extremely low and that the facility complies with all state and federal air emissions regulations. Monitoring data the EPA collected at and near the facility is limited in scope, inconclusive, and has been misinterpreted, the statement said.
“Any action to shut down a business operating well within regulatory limits, based on incomplete data taken out of context, sets an extremely bad precedent,” the company said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/pressure-mounts-to-shut-down-sterigenics-facility
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Committee Digs into Energy Sector's Cyberdefenses
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Blake Sobczak
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is set to host its first cybersecurity hearing of the year Thursday, two weeks after top intelligence officials warned of urgent threats to U.S. power utilities and gas pipelines.
A sobering assessment from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats offers a stark backdrop to the hearing on the outlook for energy industry cybersecurity efforts.
"Russia has the ability to execute cyber attacks in the United States that generate localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure," Coats warned in a Jan. 29 threat analysis.
He added that China possesses similar cyber capabilities and could disrupt a natural gas pipeline "for days to weeks" (Energywire, Feb. 5).
ENR Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has spoken out about the need to secure oil and gas pipelines from emerging cyberthreats, at one point questioning an industry representative about whether the sector would be better served by mandatory cybersecurity regulations.
"No," said American Gas Association President Dave McCurdy in 2017.
Gas sector cybersecurity is overseen on a voluntary basis by the Transportation Security Administration.
Last year, Murkowski urged grid experts and lawmakers to consider the "increasing risks presented by cyberattacks" to the power grid, and to determine the country's ability to bounce back from a crippling outage caused by hackers.
This week's hearing will offer a chance for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), new ranking member of the ENR Committee, to lay out his cybersecurity priorities, as the issue is expected to remain a major focal point for the committee in the 116th Congress.
Manchin has questioned expert witnesses in the past about security considerations surrounding "baseload" sources of power generation, such as coal and nuclear power.
Schedule: The hearing is Thursday, Feb. 14, at 10 a.m. in 366 Dirksen
Witnesses: TBA.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1060120193
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Safety Officials Concerned by Sharp Increase in Oil Train Traffic from Canada
Feb 11, 2019 | Minnesota Star Tribune
By Mike Hughlett
Oil imports by rail from Canada have hit a historic high, meaning more oil trains are rolling across Minnesota and raising the alert level of local emergency managers.
Rail shipments from Canada to the United States more than doubled during 2018 as Canadian oil production outstripped the capability of pipelines to ship the stuff, including the six Enbridge-owned lines crossing northern Minnesota.
“It is a case of supply overtaking pipeline capacity, so oil moves to the next available form of transportation — trains,” said Kevin Birn, an oil industry analyst with IHS Markit in Calgary.
Oil train traffic through Minnesota from North Dakota was also up noticeably in 2018, though nowhere near peak levels of 2014. The North Dakota rail uptick is largely rooted in oil price shifts.
Minnesota isn’t much of a destination for oil by rail, but it’s a significant transshipment point.
Canada’s two big railroads, the Canadian National (CN) and the Canadian Pacific (CP), have major routes in the state, the former running through the Twin Ports, the latter through the Twin Cities. The BNSF Railway also moves some Canadian crude in Minnesota.
BNSF said it’s seen a “moderate” increase in Canadian oil shipments. Canadian Pacific declined to release any oil train details. Canadian National said its total oil shipments jumped 77 percent from 2018’s third quarter to the fourth quarter, though it didn’t disclose more specific data.
Over the last four months of 2018, 299 oil trains on the Canadian National’s tracks crossed from Ontario at Ranier, Minn., up from 121 during the same time a year ago, said Willi Kostiuk, emergency management coordinator for Koochiching County.
Said Ranier Mayor Dennis Wagner: “I see tons of oil cars go through and they are always a concern.” Oil trains typically have 100 tank cars, each carrying around 30,000 gallons.
Scot Olson became Kittson County’s emergency management director last year, and local fire departments told him they were seeing an increase in oil trains crossing the border from Manitoba. “That’s a big concern when I talk to county safety people,” Olson said. The CP and BNSF both run oil trains through Kittson County in the state’s northwest corner.
Oil production grows
High-profile accidents thrust oil trains into the spotlight a few years ago, the biggest being a fiery 2013 disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people. A year later, a BNSF oil train crashed and burned near Casselton, N.D., about 20 miles west of Fargo. Over 1,400 people were evacuated, but there were no injuries.
Both of those trains were carrying North Dakota’s Bakken crude during the height of that state’s oil boom. Last June, a BNSF train carrying Canadian oil derailed during a flood in northwest Iowa and spilled 160,000 gallons of crude. The oil did not ignite.
The BNSF said in a statement that it has reduced mainline derailments by nearly 50 percent over the past decade and continues to use technology to improve safety.
The Fort Worth, Texas-based railroad is a prime hauler of Bakken crude. In one week during December, BNSF moved five to 11 Bakken oil trains through Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, Dakota, Washington and Stearns counties, according to filings with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. That compares to only two to seven oil trains during the first week of January 2018.
Still, the recent tally is significantly below the 29 to 39 Bakken oil trains BNSF ran through those Minnesota counties during one week in September 2014, a time of peak North Dakota production coupled with inadequate pipeline capacity. The Dakota Access pipeline’s opening in 2017 dramatically cut oil shipments by rail from North Dakota.
Oil producers prefer to ship oil by pipeline. It’s by far the most cost-effective — and therefore most common — form of crude transportation. Calgary-based Enbridge now moves 2.8 million barrels per day on its six-pipeline corridor from Alberta to Superior, Wis., the largest conduit of Canadian oil into the U.S.
By contrast, total Canadian oil exports by rail in November were 330,402 barrels per day, according to Canada’s National Energy Board. Still, that’s the highest on record since data collection began in the early 2010s. Birn expects that number to hit 400,000 barrels per day when December data is released.
Oil production rose worldwide in 2018 as oil prices generally climbed, though much of the increase in Alberta stemmed from new oil projects coming online and continued productivity improvements, Birn said. Oil was “piling up” in Alberta, he said.
The problem: pipeline limbo. Two of three major Canadian pipeline projects drifted further into uncertainty last year. The third, Enbridge’s new Line 3, is under construction in Canada and was approved by Minnesota utility regulators in June. But the controversial pipeline still needs additional government permits.
The oversupply of Alberta crude led to a collapse in Canadian oil prices last year, giving producers an incentive to pony up the premium for rail shipment.
Derailment risks
The increasing volume of oil-by-rail means more vigilance for emergency managers like Kostiuk in Koochiching County. One of his prime concerns is a derailment on or near the 111-year-old railroad bridge crossing the Rainy River at Ranier.
Water intakes for International Falls and Fort Frances, Ontario, are about 800 yards west of the bridge, Kostiuk said.
“My concern is that when you look at Alberta oil, it clogs up and moves to the bottom.” A heavier crude, it doesn’t sit on top of the water for as long as lighter oils like those from North Dakota, he said.
Canadian National “has been very good to work with,” but it would take the railroad four to six hours to get a full complement of equipment to contain a spill at Ranier, Kostiuk said.
Canadian National said in a statement that it has “developed and maintains a spill response plan that meets the requirements and timeline” of Minnesota law.
Canadian heavy oil is “not as explosive, from my understanding, as Bakken oil,” Kostiuk said. “But that’s not to say it’s not dangerous.”
Indeed, a Canadian National train carrying oil from Alberta derailed in 2015 near the small town of Gogama in northeastern Ontario, sparking a fire that burned for three days. That incident followed another fiery CN train derailment in the same region just a few weeks before.
It’s not clear how long the Canadian oil train influx will last. After the government of Alberta curtailed the province’s oil production in December, the price of Canadian crude jumped significantly.
That has made shipping Canadian oil by rail less economical this year. Earlier this month, Exxon Mobil’s Canadian arm, Imperial Oil, said it would virtually stop oil shipments by rail due to rising costs. Imperial is one of Canada’s top oil shippers.
Analysts expect to see a decline in Canadian oil exports in data for January. But the Alberta-mandated oil production cuts are expected to phase down in the coming months, and rail traffic could pick up again.
“We expect a good year for [oil] movements in 2019,” Canadian National said.
http://www.startribune.com/safety-officials-concerned-by-sharp-increase-in-oil-train-traffic-from-canada/505579362/
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Wastewater Utilities Eye House Infrastructure Package to Address Priorities
Feb 8, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Lara Beaven
Wastewater and stormwater utilities are eyeing a future House infrastructure package as a vehicle to address their priorities including reauthorization of a key EPA infrastructure funding program, assisting low-income customers with their water bills, and building resilience to natural disasters, financial challenges and workforce changes.
“I can speak for my municipal water sector colleagues in communities across the nation that we support improving upon and increasing funding for existing water infrastructure funding programs and, when appropriate, developing new funding tools,” Angela Lee, director of Charlotte Water in North Carolina, testified Nov. 6 to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (T&I).
While Congress has made important strides in recent years to elevate water infrastructure as a national priority, more needs to be done to ensure the federal government prioritizes investments to support a strong, modern water infrastructure network -- as it does for other sectors, she said.
Lee testified at a hearing titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why Investing in Our Nation’s Infrastructure Cannot Wait,” that covered all aspects of infrastructure but emphasized the need to address roads, railways and airports.
However, a background memorandum sent to T&I members ahead of the hearing from committee staff includes clean water infrastructure as a pressing need.
And Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA), the chair of T&I's water panel, questioned representatives of the National Governors Association and U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) on the need to invest in water infrastructure.
Napolitano said last year that Congress might move to reauthorize the clean water state revolving fund (SRF) and consider legislation to address household affordability of water services after affordability provisions failed to make it into compromise legislation to codify EPA's integrated planning policy, which the House and Senate approved in late December.
And dozens of industry, state, water and environmental groups earlier this year urged lawmakers to ensure that any infrastructure bill include a range of water and wastewater projects in addition to transportation infrastructure.
“The stars are aligned for a big infrastructure bill,” Ray LaHood told the committee, but warned that “it's got to be and bold. It can't be chintzy.” LaHood, a former Republican congressman who served on T&I from 1995-2000 and as the Transportation secretary in the Obama administration, currently serves as the co-chair of Building America's Future, a bipartisan coalition of elected officials championing federal investment in infrastructure.
LaHood urged the lawmakers “to try and get a signal from the White House” on what President Donald Trump will support in an infrastructure package. Trump highlighted the need for infrastructure funding in his State of the Union address.
LaHood said he thinks the House can easily pass an infrastructure package, but “if President Trump isn't with you on it,” it will be hard to get it passed in the Senate. However, “if he is with you, he will help sell it in the Senate,” LaHood said.
Water Infrastructure Loans
Lee, who testified on behalf of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) and the Water Environment Federation (WEF), urged T&I to explore how the federal capitalization grant to the state-run SRF programs could be maximized better and how the SRF loans can be delivered more effectively.
She also encouraged the committee to look hard at how the SRF, as well as other current and potential federal funding programs, can provide more funding for stormwater infrastructure and water reuse and recycling projects.
Authorization for the clean water SRF program lapsed in 1994, although Congress has continued to appropriate money for the infrastructure funding program since then. The committee background memo notes that the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2017 Infrastructure Report Card gave wastewater treatment infrastructure a grade of D+, which is only a slight improvement from its previous grade of D in the 2013 Report Card.
Currently municipalities face a backlog of more than $40 billion in clean water infrastructure projects and, according to EPA, these communities need at least $271 billion of investment over the next 20 years to bring their systems to a state of good repair, the memo says.
Of that $271 billion, $150 billion is needed for stormwater and combined sewer overflow infrastructure improvements, Lee said in her written testimony.
“Communities are moving deliberately to secure sources of funding for stormwater and green infrastructure upgrades but lack funding sources and a comprehensive set of tools to construct and maintain the required improvements,” she said. “Federal loans and grants for communities can help them pursue approaches to financing the required infrastructure.”
The background memo notes that over the past few Congresses, legislation has been introduced to reauthorize and increase federal appropriations for the clean water SRF, as well as address the cost of wastewater service to low-income customers and households.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year approved legislation that would have required EPA to revise 1997 guidance to assess municipalities' ability to pay for infrastructure upgrades to prevent combined sewer overflows, but which has since been used in other areas. It would have also prohibited EPA from using median household income “as the sole indicator of affordability for a residential household” and outlined numerous other criteria the agency must consider in developing new guidance.
The affordability provisions were part of a broader water infrastructure bill but did not survive negotiations with House lawmakers that led to compromise legislation to authorize Army Corps of Engineers projects and reauthorized EPA's drinking water SRF, among other things.
“For most communities, the most restrictive component to a utility increasing rates to pay for necessary infrastructure investments is the desire and responsibility of the utility not to overburden their lower-income rate payers,” Lee said in her written testimony. “Utilities in cities and rural areas with low-income populations, elderly and fixed-income populations, and jurisdictions with declining populations struggle to keep water affordable, while funding infrastructure needs to protect public health and comply with regulations. In many communities the lowest 20 percent of earners pay almost one-fifth of their income towards their water bill.”
Public utilities may be forced to delay much needed projects to avoid overburdening customers, and the committee should explore approaches to help utilities address these burdens on lower-income ratepayers, she said.
Funding Assistance
In response to questioning from Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH), Lee suggested that in addition to policy changes, increased funding for the clean water SRF could help with affordability. “When we can get those SRF loans, it allows us to manage our rates for our ratepayers,” Lee said.
Lee also discussed the need for technical and funding assistance to utilities, particularly medium and smaller ones, to address resilience, which she said “ is not just building infrastructure designed to withstand the physical impacts of climate change, it also involves financial resilience, workforce resilience, technology resilience and long-term planning resilience.”
“No other form of infrastructure will be impacted by the need for resilience more than wastewater and stormwater infrastructure -- from extreme weather to population shifts to economic swings to regulatory changes,” she added.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) asked witnesses about the likelihood of using public-private partnerships (P3s) for water and other infrastructure projects.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said that “at their best,” P3s leverage additional dollars, but there is “very little” private capital for water projects.
And Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who used to sit on T&I when he was a congressman, said “no one is going to invest without” the stability of government funding.
Napolitano, in her questioning of witnesses, noted that Congress has not reauthorized the clean water SRF in 32 years and asked what more Congress can do.
Without that reauthorization, we won't have clean water, Garcetti, testifying on behalf of USCM, replied. He added that while P3s can be great options for other types of infrastructure, they don't work well for water because there are no revenue streams to provide an ongoing payback for private investors.
Walz said there “is a real crisis in rural America” where small towns cannot raise property tax rates high enough to pay for water and other infrastructure due to their small tax base.
“Give us the stability” of regular federal funding, he said.
Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) asked whether Congress should divest itself from some types of infrastructure funding to streamline the process.
“Everyone's for streamlining until you take their category,” Garcetti said, adding that the majority of water infrastructure funding already comes from states and municipalities.
Garcetti agreed with Babin that high-quality infrastructure projects will attract attention and be good candidates for private investment, “but there are things [private investors] won't touch,” including most water infrastructure projects, he said.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/wastewater-utilities-eye-house-infrastructure-package-address-priorities
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EPA to Hold Hearing Next Week on Ozone Nonattainment Plan
Feb 8, 2019 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
An EPA plan for addressing ozone problem areas around the country that is getting mixed reviews could get a full-throated airing at a public hearing next week.
Under a proposed rule in November, EPA offered a variety of options for dealing with 11 areas currently classified as in "moderate" nonattainment for its 2008 ground-level ozone standard. For two of those areas — Baltimore and Mariposa County in central California — the proposal dangled the welcome news that they were poised to be reclassified as meeting the 75-parts-per-billion limit.
Other parts of the draft are proving more divisive. EPA, for example, wants to give the Denver Metro/North Front Range area, home to more than 3 million people, another year to meet the standard. That earned the agency a note of thanks from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which said in written comments in December that the state is "aggressively pursuing strategies" to cut ozone-forming emissions but continues to face challenges.
But the same proposal led Robert Ukeiley, an attorney representing a number of environmental groups, to request a public hearing on behalf of members "who will be killed or seriously injured" by the planned one-year extension.
But while Ukeiley asked that a hearing take place in Denver, EPA has instead scheduled it for Feb. 15 at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters. In a Federal Register notice today, officials said they are also giving the public another chance to provide written feedback until Feb. 22.
Also seeking a hearing was the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, albeit for a different motive: On the five-point scale used to rank compliance with the ozone standard, EPA wants to downgrade the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas from moderate to serious nonattainment. That step would require the state to turn in a more stringent cleanup plan within a year. The commission prefers 18 months, saying it needs more time to complete photochemical modeling performance evaluations and other technical chores.
Ozone, a lung irritant spawned by the reaction of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, is tightly linked to production and consumption of fossil fuels. The resistance EPA is facing on the proposed downgrades and compliance extensions for the 2008 standard could offer a taste of what's ahead as it begins the process of implementing the more stringent 2015 ozone benchmark of 70 ppb.
That tighter standard will eventually prevent hundreds of premature deaths each year, according to an official forecast.
EPA last year completed the first round of nationwide nonattainment designations. But in their comments, Colorado health and air quality officials warned they will face the same formidable challenge in complying with the 2015 limit: namely, that "the large majority" of ozone concentrations in the Denver Metro/North Front Range area outside the state's control, stemming from both naturally occurring emissions and pollution "transported from other states and countries."
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2019/02/08/stories/1060120105
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President Trump, Here’s ‘What the Hell Is Going on’ with Global Warming
Feb 8, 2019 | Washington Post
By Editorial Board
“WHAT THE hell is going on with Global Waming?” President Trump tweeted last week in the midst of a cold snap. “Please come back fast, we need you!”
If Mr. Trump had consulted scientists in the government he works for, they could have helped with his basic understanding, as well as his spelling: The warming of the Earth is unmistakable, as seen in a global temperature record that offers no reason for laughter. Experts from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year on record, according to two separate estimates, one from each agency.
A single year’s temperature readings do not constitute a trend. But there is a trend. The five warmest years have come in the past five years. Eighteen of the 19 warmest years on record have come since the beginning of this century. That 2018 did not quite match the record-setting 2016 for warmth is in part because a warming El Niño effect in 2016 raised temperatures even higher than human influence alone would have. By contrast, 2018 saw a cooling La Niña and was still fourth-warmest. The overall direction is relentless: This decade will be warmer than the last, which was warmer than the one before it, and so on.
As more and more of their predictions have come true, scientists have become more confident in their models — and more alarmed. Some effects of climate change remain difficult to predict or plan for. Warming could even contribute to cold snaps such as the one that prompted Mr. Trump to mock climate science on Twitter last week. Other effects are all too predictable: rising seas, stronger storms, more heat waves, more droughts, more flooding, invasive species, the proliferation of disease, depleted fisheries, dying ecosystems, more acidic oceans, crop failures, mass migrations, days so hot that people cannot work. Experts warn that Americans are already likely feeling global warming’s influence in the super-wet storms that have pummeled places such as Houston, feeding on extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the face of ever-rising evidence, the president did not even mention climate change in Tuesday’s State of the Union address. His administration still intends to remove the United States from the Paris climate agreement, the world’s best hope to get all major contributing countries moving in the same direction. While the Trump administration ripped up clean-air rules, U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions shot up 3.4 percent last year, putting the lie to the argument that market forces alone will adequately drive down the country’s carbon footprint.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, have announced a “ Green New Deal” whose goal seems to be radically reshaping U.S. society and vastly expanding government rather than simply addressing the climate problem, which is hard enough — and important enough. Though not nearly as harmful as Mr. Trump’s rank denialism, engaging in this sort of fantasy also hurts the cause of practically addressing the issue.
The world needs rational U.S. leadership. Unfortunately, global warming will not stop in the meantime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-world-needs-rational-american-leadership-on-climate-change/2019/02/07/1b1e7014-2a4b-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.353bc8a01415
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House Lawmakers Introduce Resolution to Support Paris Climate Agreement
Feb 8, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Dozens of House Democrats and one Republican introduced legislation Friday meant to demonstrate congressional support for the Paris climate agreement.
The short, nonbinding resolution would declare that Congress “reaffirms its commitment” to the 2015 pact that every other nation in the world has signed onto, and that the United States “should not withdraw.” The measure would not mandate that the U.S. return to the agreement.
The move is designed to rebuke President Trump’s 2017 announcement that the U.S. would pull out of the landmark global accord, under which nearly 200 countries made nonbinding pledges to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“I’m glad my colleagues on both sides of aisle are joining me on this bipartisan resolution to set the record straight and support the Paris agreement on climate action,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), a lead sponsor of the legislation along with Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), said in a statement.
“The Still-In Resolution is an important message that the world desperately needs to hear," Huffman said. "It's by no means the only thing this Congress needs to do on the climate crisis, but it's an important starting point.”
“Climate change must be addressed proactively with leaders from both sides of the aisle working to protect our planet,” Fitzpatrick said in Friday's statement. “I continue to urge the administration not to leave the Paris Climate Accord — but in the meantime, Congress should send a message to the world: the people of the United States remain committed to pursuing bipartisan solutions to address climate change and protect our environment.”
Fifty-eight other Democrats have signed on as initial sponsors.
Despite Trump’s announcement, the United States is still in the pact, meaning it's still expected to live up to the pledge former President Obama made to cut emissions 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, when compared to 2005 levels.
The United States cannot fully withdraw from the agreement until November 2020 at the earliest.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/429171-house-lawmakers-draft-resolution-to-support-paris-climate-agreement
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Leader of New Climate Panel Talks of Need for ‘Bold Action’
Feb 9, 2019 | AP (In The Washington Post)
By Matthew Daly
It does not yet have office space, staff or even Republican members, but Florida Rep. Kathy Castor is confident that a special House committee on climate change will play a leading role on one of the most daunting challenges facing the planet.
Castor, who chairs the new panel, says those early obstacles can be overcome as lawmakers move to reduce carbon pollution and create clean-energy jobs.
“The Democratic caucus is unified under the belief we have to take bold action on the climate crisis,” Castor said in an interview.
While that can take many forms, the transition to renewable energy such as wind and solar power is “job one,” she said.
Castor, who’s in her seventh term representing the Tampa Bay area, said Congress has a “moral obligation” to protect future generations from the costly effects of climate change, including more severe hurricanes, a longer wildfire season and a dangerous sea-level rise.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Castor to lead the panel in December, saying she brings experience, energy and urgency to what Pelosi called “the existential threat of the climate crisis” facing the United States and the world.
The climate panel is similar to one Pelosi created when Democrats last controlled the House from 2007 to 2010. The panel was eliminated when Republicans took the majority in 2011.
While the previous panel played a key role in House approval of a landmark 2009 bill to address global warming, Castor said the new panel is likely to focus on a variety of actions rather than a single piece of legislation.
She and the eight other Democrats named to the panel “are ready to stand up to corporate polluters and special interests” as they press for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and move toward a clean-energy economy, Castor said.
“Climate deniers, fossil fuel companies and other special interests have had an outsized influence” in Congress in recent years, she said, promising to “stand up” to those forces to protect the environment and create green jobs.
The climate panel is separate from an effort by Democrats to launch a Green New Deal to transform the U.S. economy and create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.
Castor dismissed the idea that the Green New Deal — put forth by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and veteran Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts — will conflict with the climate panel.
“My job and the committee’s job is to take the general concepts (of the Green New Deal) and turn them into a real policy framework and legislative language and eventually law,” she said.
Pelosi agreed, saying in a statement that the climate panel will “spearhead Democrats’ work to develop innovative, effective solutions to prevent and reverse the climate crisis.”
Pelosi invited Ocasio-Cortez, a social media star and the best-known member of the large class of freshman Democrats, to join the climate panel, but she declined, saying she wants to focus on the Green New Deal and other committee assignments.
Three freshmen — Sean Casten of Illinois, Mike Levin of California and Joe Neguse of Colorado — serve on the panel, along with veteran lawmakers such as Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, and Californians Julia Brownley and Jared Huffman, both close Pelosi allies.
“We need their passion and energy, and we need support from all corners all across the country,” Castor said of the freshmen members. “It’s all hands on deck right now.”
Republicans have not named anyone to the climate committee, but six GOP members are expected to join the panel this month.
While she would have preferred that the committee be given subpoena power and legislative authority to draft their own bills, the panel’s more limited power “is not going to hamper us,” Castor said. Most invited witnesses will be eager to testify, she said, and those who resist — including members of the Trump administration — can be compelled to appear by other committees such as Energy and Commerce or Natural Resources.
While the earlier climate panel focused on establishing the threat posed by climate change, Castor said the time to debate climate science is long past.
“People understand the problems,” she said. “They see the effects of sea rise and more dangerous storms. They understand it. They look at Washington and kind of throw up their hands and say, ‘Why don’t you guys do something?’ ”
The committee’s challenge, she added, will be “to restore the faith of people and show them Washington can do some things.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/leader-of-new-climate-panel-talks-of-need-for-bold-action/2019/02/09/5f219bf4-2c50-11e9-906e-9d55b6451eb4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1d1e0a90d2f5
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What Key 2020 Candidates Are Saying About the Green New Deal
Feb 10, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Brett Samuels
The Green New Deal has emerged as a key litmus test for prospective 2020 presidential candidates, with high-profile candidates jumping on board to back the progressive environmental pitch.
On Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) entered the 2020 race after supporting the proposal. Four other senators who have declared presidential bids have co-sponsored the resolution, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is mulling a 2020 campaign and has previously supported the concept, will back the plan.
Their support highlights one of the progressive ideas at the center of the Democratic race, while the Republican National Committee dismissed the proposal as a "massive taxpayer boondoggle and a socialist dream come true."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a resolution last week that would lay the groundwork for implementing the Green New Deal legislatively.ADVERTISEMENT
The resolution calls for the United States to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within 10 years, and a host of other environmental changes less directly related to climate change including support for family farming and investments in high-speed railroads.
Some have expressed skepticism about its chances of success or put caveats on their support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) referred to the proposal as the "Green dream, or whatever they call it," and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) stressed that a Green New Deal should offer realistic solutions and not "things that are pie in the sky." Bloomberg is considering a 2020 bid, and has long been an advocate of combating climate change.
Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D), who has said he will decide soon on a 2020 bid, last month expressed support for the "concept" of a Green New Deal.
Here's where most declared candidates for the 2020 nomination stand on the Green New Deal:
Kamala Harris:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution, which she touted as a "bold plan" to address an "existential threat to our nation."
The Green New Deal is a bold plan to shift our country to 100% clean and renewable energy. We do not fight this fight for our generation alone but for generations to come.https://t.co/Mzi2Y2LZg0— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) February 8, 2019
The California senator laid out her support for the proposal in a blog postlast week on Medium, where she called the proposal a "bold plan," and pressed the need to "aggressively tackle climate change which poses an existential threat to our nation."
"Bold action takes bold leadership, and I’m grateful to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey for leading the charge on this critical resolution," Harris wrote.
Elizabeth Warren:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who on Saturday officially declared her candidacy for president weeks after forming an exploratory committee, signed on as a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal after her office initially said she supported the "idea" of such a proposal.
"Climate change is real, it threatens all of us, & we have no time to waste to address it head-on," the Massachusetts senator tweeted in sharing her support for the resolution.ADVERTISEMENT
She listed the Green New Deal alongside other progressive proposals she supports, including "Medicare for all," student loan relief and overturning Citizens United.
Warren has tied in her support for the Green New Deal to another of her most progressive proposals, an “ultra-millionaire tax,” that would apply to the wealthiest Americans.
She suggested in a tweet earlier this month that revenue from such a tax could go toward a down payment on the Green New Deal, or other proposals like Medicare for all.
With the revenue from the #UltraMillionaireTax, we could provide universal childcare for working parents across America. A path to student debt relief for those who need it. Down payments on a Green New Deal & Medicare for All. Schultz might not need those things. America does.— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 4, 2019
Cory Booker:
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is another Senate co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, and made his support for the measure clear during a recent campaign stop in Iowa.
The New Jersey senator shared a video on Twitter of a voter asking about the proposal and his explanation of the need for imminent action to address climate change.
"Doing nothing is not an option right now because our planet really is in peril," Booker said.
"So the question is, what’s the United States of America going to do?" he continued. "Is it going to lead the planet in terms of dealing with this crisis? Or is it going to pull back from global leadership when we are the biggest economy on the planet Earth?"
"I believe that America should lead, and it should lead boldly," he continued, calling the Green New Deal a "bold idea" that would benefit the environment and the economy.
The first question I was asked in Iowa was about #GreenNewDeal. The hard truth is climate change has imperiled our planet—it’s going to take bold action now to save it including dramatic investment in green energy that will create the jobs of the future. We can do this. pic.twitter.com/zdU26AjcNN— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) February 8, 2019
Kirsten Gillibrand:
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) co-sponsored the Green New Deal, but had made clear her support for the idea roughly two weeks before it was formally introduced.
“The way I see a green economy is this: I think we need a moonshot," the New York senator told Pod Save America late last month. "We need to tell the American people ‘we are going to have a green economy in the next 10 years, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because it’s a measure of our innovation and effectiveness.' "
Gillibrand also said on the liberal podcast that she supports putting a tax on carbon, likely through something similar to a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
There's nothing left to debate. Climate change is an immediate and catastrophic threat to our future.
It's time for bold action, now. We need a #GreenNewDeal. https://t.co/YpVK11VGEK— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) February 5, 2019Amy Klobuchar:
The Minnesota senator on Sunday became the latest Democrat to officially join the field of presidential candidates, launching her campaign from snowy Minneapolis.
A spokesperson for Klobuchar told The Associated Press last week that she would sign on to support the Green New Deal. While the senator made no mention of the specific proposal in her speech on Sunday, she emphasized her commitment to environmentally friendly policies.
Klobuchar vowed to "put forth sweeping legislation to invest in green jobs and infrastructure" if elected president, and declared that she would direct the U.S. to rejoin the Paris climate accord "on day one" of her administration.
Julián Castro:
Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and an ex-Housing and Urban Development secretary, has yet to publicly weigh in on the Green New Deal since the resolution was announced late last week.
However, he has been a proponent of the concept since he first announced his White House bid.
"As President, my first executive order will recommit the United States to the Paris climate accord," he said on Jan. 12. "We’re gonna say no to subsidizing big oil and say yes to passing a Green New Deal.”
Castro has embraced a number of other progressive policy positions, including Medicare for all and "tuition-free" public colleges.
Tulsi Gabbard:
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has not offered a specific position on the Green New Deal resolution, but has a track record of backing environmentally friendly policies that address climate change.
She introduced legislation in the last Congress that would have required 100 percent of electricity to be generated by clean sources by 2035.
In a tweet last month, Gabbard said the country needs "a green economy that rewards clean energy industries & ensures access to fresh, affordable, pesticide-free foods for all."
Gabbard's campaign did not respond to a request for comment on her views on the Green New Deal.
Pete Buttigieg
Pete Buttigieg on Sunday emerged as the latest Democratic presidential hopeful to offer his support for the Green New Deal, calling it "the right beginning" and a framework for addressing climate change.
"Obviously, the Green New Deal, as we have seen it so far, is more of a plan than it is a fully articulated set of policies," the Indiana mayor said on CNN. "But the idea that we need to race toward that goal and that we should do it in a way that enhances the economic justice and the level of economic opportunity in our country, I believe that's exactly the right direction to be going in."
Buttigieg noted that he's seen the effects of climate change firsthand as mayor of South Bend, Ind., which experienced historic floods in recent years. He argued the Green New Deal could simultaneously address the environmental and economic impacts of the changing climate.
"I think the elegance from a policy perspective of the concept of the Green New Deal is, it matches a sense of urgency about that problem of climate change with a sense of opportunity around what the solutions might represent," he said.
John Delaney
Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney (D) has not publicly commented on the Green New Deal in recent days, but said last month that any such proposal should feature a carbon tax at its center.
“As Democrats and climate advocates, we can’t turn this into an effort to move the goalposts," the former Maryland congressman in a statement. "We need to unite behind a solution that will work and a solution that can win the support of a broad coalition – that’s what we’re going to need to take a big step forward. A carbon tax should be the centerpiece of the Green New Deal.”
Delaney's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his views on the Green New Deal.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/429342-what-key-2020-candidates-are-saying-about-the-green-new-deal
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Can 'Green New Deal' Avoid Cap and Trade's Fate?
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Mark K. Matthews, Adam Aton and Scott Waldman
The last time congressional Democrats tried to pass major climate legislation, the effort barely cleared the House before hitting a wall in the Senate.
A decade later, its two main authors are back — this time in support of the "Green New Deal." And both Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and former Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) have argued in recent days that a "Green New Deal" ultimately has a better chance of passage because of its potential to be more than just a piece of legislation.
What's emerging is a two-track process. While activists build public support for the most ambitious tenets of the "Green New Deal," lawmakers in Congress are advancing smaller proposals to keep up the momentum.
"The green generation has risen up," said Markey on Thursday during a rollout of the "Green New Deal." "We now have the troops. We now have the money. We're ready to fight."
There are some similarities between what's happening now with the "Green New Deal" and what Waxman and Markey tried to do in 2009 with their greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill.
For one, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is in the same role as House speaker. And two, the Senate remains just as much of an obstacle — if not more so, given that Republicans now control the upper chamber, rather than the Democratic majority of 2009-10.
But both Markey and Waxman said the political landscape has shifted in such a way that climate change — and Democrats' aspirational response to it — has the potential to be a force that sweeps into office a new generation of leaders willing to support it. That's a departure from typical politicking in which activists try to convince the people already there to back an idea.
"This is going to enter the 2020 election cycle as one of the top two or three issues [that] every candidate on both sides [will] have to answer," Markey said.
Signs of this new approach can be seen in the proposal unveiled Thursday by Markey and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The nonbinding resolution reads like a liberal wish list, as it pairs the desire to cut greenhouse gas emissions with aspirations to implement universal health care, close income gaps and "promote justice and equity."
In other words, it's the political equivalent of an all-in bet in poker.
"We tried to pass legislation by putting in a cap-and-trade bill or a tax on carbon, and Republicans are not open to anything," Waxman, who is now a consultant, told E&E News. "Rather than saying that's the way to go until we get a time when we can pass legislation, we should get more force behind a 'Green New Deal.'"
With little chance of passage in the next two years anyway, Waxman said it's not a bad idea to focus attention on ginning up political support for like-minded candidates.
"Whatever we want to do, we can't do it right now, because Republicans can stop it," he said. "So let's get more involved in trying to find a solution, and then we can figure out what can actually happen when we get a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate."
A number of Republicans, for their part, are willing to take up Democrats on their bet.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who worked on the Senate cap-and-trade bill before ultimately walking away from talks, said he was ready to see the proposal on the floor. "Let's vote on the Green New Deal!" he wrote. "Americans deserve to see what kind of solutions far-left Democrats are offering to deal with climate change."
The National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is to elect GOP House members, took a similar stance as it targeted individual Democrats with messages slamming the idea.
"The extreme socialist Democrats are out with their 'Green New Deal' plan," read one.
Caught in the fray are more established Democrats who have signaled recently that they may try to use the rubric of a "Green New Deal" to pass related legislation — as the resolution itself barely speaks to the "how" of achieving its ambitious goals.
At its current stage, the "Green New Deal" is largely a "combination of policy and D.C. theater," said Adele Morris, policy director for climate and energy economics at the Brookings Institution and the former economic adviser to the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.
To get closer to an actual policy that has a chance of succeeding on Capitol Hill, the "Green New Deal" must move beyond the regulatory mandates and standards the resolution centers upon, she said.
While the "Green New Deal" now works as an ambitious vision statement, it doesn't currently lay out the road map for policy that can get buy-in from a wide swath of lawmakers, Morris said.
"The challenge is going to be when you really try to translate it into statutory authority for specific agencies to do specific things," she said. "It's going to be really tough to come up with that legislative language that really implements the ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"My hope is that we can move quickly past the vision statement to doing something pragmatic and truly action-oriented."
Possible paths through Congress
A possible legislative route for "Green New Deal" legislation runs through two House committees — where the resolution's co-sponsors have enough power to bend policies on fossil fuel extraction, forests, research and other areas critical to the policy's success.
The proposal's supporters are also stacked on the Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over EPA, the Interior Department and other environmental agencies. A near-majority of the panel — five of the 11 members — have co-sponsored the "Green New Deal" resolution, including Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the subcommittee's chairwoman.
The only Democrat on the subcommittee not co-sponsoring the resolution, Rep. Derek Kilmer of Washington, has previously told activists he does support the proposal, according to 350.org.
Appropriators will be key for a proposal whose critics emphasize cost.
The Natural Resources Committee, another center of gravity for the policy, is run by two co-sponsors of the resolution, Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Vice Chairwoman Deb Haaland (D-N.M.). Co-sponsors also run two critical subcommittees: Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) chairs the Water, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee.
Grijalva and Huffman last week offered the outlines of an agenda — one that seems to use the umbrella of the "Green New Deal" to advance priorities they've eyed for years, like restricting offshore drilling and restoring ecosystems.
"We will prioritize ocean-related climate adaptation and mitigation measures as we go forward," Huffman said.
He was most specific about strengthening three existing policies: the Coastal Zone Management Act, the National Sea Grant College Program and the Coral Reef Conservation Act.
None are the sweeping, transformative policies outlined in the "Green New Deal" resolution. But they do serve as the vehicles for climate funding, which could spur the research and jobs that proponents are seeking.
"With this resolution as our guide, our emphasis on climate action is only going to get stronger," Grijalva said.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2019/02/11/stories/1060120117
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‘It's Crazy. It's Loony': Republicans Giddy as Democrats Champion Green New Deal
Feb 9, 2019 | Politico
By Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman
Prominent Democrats have rushed to embrace the Green New Deal — and Republicans couldn't be happier about it.
As liberal groups pressure presidential candidates and lawmakers to back the ambitious climate proposal, Republicans hope their opponents may drift so far to the left that they will be more vulnerable in 2020. Since the election of President Donald Trump — who dismisses the link between carbon emissions and rising temperatures — Republicans have mostly steered clear of climate change, but in the Green New Deal they see a chance to pivot the argument back towards economics as growing majorities accept the underlying science.
“I would like them to push it as far as they can. I’d like to see it on the floor. I’d like to see them actually have to vote on it,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior Appropriator, told POLITICO. “It’s crazy. It’s loony.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump's most vocal champions, echoed that sentiment. “Let’s vote on the Green New Deal!” Graham tweetedFriday. “Americans deserve to see what kind of solutions far-left Democrats are offering to deal with climate change."
Trump on Saturday sarcastically called the proposal "Brilliant!" in a tweet.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) formally introduced their Green New Deal vision on Thursday, with a nonbinding resolution that is just 14 pages long (compared to the more than 1,400 pages in the cap-and-trade bill that passed in 2009). This leaves myriad details to be worked out before Democrats would have actual legislation ready to bring to the House floor.
Still, the resolution is more ambitious than any climate proposal previously floated on Capitol Hill: It calls for a 10-year “national mobilization” to move the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, provide health care for all, increase wages and expand union rights through a massive federal stimulus. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated she has no immediate plans to bring the resolution up for a vote.
Several high-profile presidential candidates have already co-sponsored the resolution, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
Republicans quickly bashed the concept as technologically impossible, unimaginably costly and a “socialist fever dream” that they said would ultimately cost Democrats moderate seats across the country.
“I think this will be a piñata that Republicans will continue to hit and use to their advantage in the 2020 elections. It’s a policy piñata,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist.
Ocasio-Cortez says Democrats should not fear the coming GOP attacks.
"We have tried their approach for 40 years. For 40 years we have tried to let the private sector take care of this. They said, ‘We got this, we can do this, the forces of the market are going to force us to innovate,’" she told NPR on Thursday. "Except for the fact that there’s a little thing in economics called externalities. And what that means is that a corporation can dump pollution in the river and they don’t have to pay, but taxpayers have to pay.”
Other Democrats say they are not giving up on the chance for bipartisanship.
“Who knows what they’re cooking up on their side?” asked Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), a Green New Deal backer. “But I think we have some Republicans that have evolved on this issue and potentially even some partners in moving bipartisan things forward.”
Meanwhile, polls have shown growing acceptance of the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change — even among Republicans. Monmouth University polling from November 2018, for example, found 64 percent of Republicans now believe the science, up 15 percent from just three years prior. That same study found 51 percent of GOP voters supported the government doing more to address the causes of climate change.
Conservative Republicans, such as Environment Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), are denouncing it as a "socialist manifesto." More moderate Republicans are avoiding that rhetoric, but say they would prefer more immediate — if incremental — advancements in innovation, boosting clean manufacturing, infrastructure projects and improving soil quality for farmers.
“I think everyone on our side would say that the Green New Deal is a little bit much,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a senior Energy and Commerce Republican, told reporters.
Others see early signs that the progressive faction may paint Pelosi into an unworkable position that could end up costing Democrats seats.
“There’s this new wave of Democrats that make Pelosi look moderate and I never thought I’d see that day,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the Energy and Commerce Committee's top-ranking Republican. “You see this Green New Deal rollout, you see Medicare for all rollout and you don’t see her buying into those proposals in any great embrace. I think it’s going to be important for the American people to understand the consequences of those proposals.”
Another Republican, Rep. Francis Rooney (Fla.) didn’t immediately discount the climate aims of the Green New Deal, but noted it had “big goals but there’s nothing of substance to figure out how to get there.” He favored technological innovation and a price on carbon to drive down emissions, like the bipartisan carbon fee legislation he’s offered.
George David Banks, a former climate and international energy adviser to Trump, said the Democrats' proposal should not be dismissed out of hand, praising elements such as calls to address soil health or increase research and development.
“If you’re pretty clear that a significant part of the Green New Deal isn’t based in political reality or economic reality but there is some common ground that would win the support of most Americans, I think that’s fine,” said Banks, who is now executive vice president of the American Council for Capital Formation.
That tenor emerged in the run-up to Ocasio-Cortez and Markey unveiling their plan. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee emphasized the need for research spending, noting they agreed with scientists that greenhouse gases from human activity were warming the planet.
Given that a number of high-profile House Democrats have declined the co-sponsor the Green New Deal, such as Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (N.J.) and Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Chairwoman Kathy Castor (Fla.), there appears to be enough of a political middle to strike bipartisan deals, said Rich Powell, executive director at ClearPath, who testified at the Energy and Commerce hearing.
“It seems like a lot of folks are tacking toward a more moderate position on this,” said Powell, whose group advocates for research and development in emissions-reduction technology such as next-generation nuclear power and carbon capture, and sequestration for coal and natural gas power plants.
The tone differed in the House Natural Resources Committee. Republicans downplayed climate change by pointing to warmer periods during the world’s long history. Scientists say combustion of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels and other sources has driven current levels of CO2 and average temperatures much higher than they normally would be given the planet’s position and angle relative to the sun.
Industry and conservative groups are ready to give such sentiments backing. Many came out strong against the Green New Deal, demonstrating that Republican allies off the Hill will be keeping a close eye on how members position themselves.
“The Green New Deal is nothing more than the latest job-killing, socialist wish list from the radical left obsessed with climate change, Medicare-For-All, free college, and a total redistribution of wealth,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said in a statement.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/09/gop-sees-political-advantage-in-green-new-deal-1160725
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All You Need Is a Congress and a Dream
Feb 10, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Barton Swaim
It’s hard to know what to make of the “Green New Deal” put forward last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D., Mass.). The pair’s nonbinding resolution calls for, among many other things, a 10-year plan to meet “100 percent of the power demand of the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” and to upgrade “all existing buildings in the United States . . . to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability.” It also aims to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities and youth.”
Good thing it’s nonbinding.
Maybe the resolution is a starting point in a negotiation, but its sponsors don’t seem in a mood to bargain. Their aims are total. They seem to believe that the Trump presidency’s illegitimacy and all-around awfulness (as they see it) have radicalized the public and made possible the fulfillment of progressive longings.
The Green New Deal is an expression of dreams, but that doesn’t make it pointless or merely comical. Take it seriously, not literally. Much of it reads like a leftist manifesto from half a century ago—I thought of the Port Huron Statement, issued by the founders of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, which crammed scores of hopelessly vague and muddled objectives into a single document for the purpose of movement cohesion: “The economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation,” and so on.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi can still distinguish dream from reality. In 2009 she spent enormous political capital to push through a cap-and-trade bill—a kind of proto-Green New Deal that would have given federal authorities broad powers to regulate atmospheric pollutants—only to be swept from power in 2010. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Mrs. Pelosi said in an interview on Wednesday about the Green New Deal. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
The imperturbable Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t offended by the word “dream.” “I don’t consider that to be a dismissive term,” she said. “I think it’s a great term.” It’s certainly an apt one, and makes sense of the resolution’s weirdly vatic language. Mr. Markey, sounding a little like the prophet Isaiah, said: “We will save all of creation by engaging in massive job creation.”
The word “dream” almost always has a happy connotation in American politics. To dream is to desire worthy and noble ends. Sometimes the ends really are worthy and noble, as in the most famous dream in American politics, Martin Luther King’s. But mostly they are not. Communism was always a dream, always a future state toward which its adherents had to struggle. Recall the haunting line of the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott: “The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.”
The political dream, Oakeshott wrote, “is a vision of a condition of human circumstance from which the occasion of conflict has been removed, a vision of human activity coordinated and set going in a single direction and of every resource being used to the full.” That is just about a perfect description of the progressive outlook. What else could inspire two members of Congress, one a neophyte and one with more than 40 years’ experience, to write a bill mandating—all at once, as if they could bring about paradise through legislation—clean water and air, affordable housing, access to healthy food, and “millions of high-wage jobs”?
American progressives are fond of the word “democracy,” but it is not democracy they want, because democracy is messy. What they want—and it is Mr. Trump’s strange genius to make them say it—is the noumenal perfection of a dream.
Mr. Swaim writes a political-books column for the Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-you-need-is-a-congress-and-a-dream-11549829073
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EPA Touts 2018 Compliance Wins, but Critics Say Data Shows Drop off
Feb 8, 2019 | PoliticoPro
By Alex Guillén
EPA issued new data on Friday that it said showed its enforcement of environmental regulations had yielded significant public health benefits — though critics said the figures proved the Trump administration was going easy on big polluters.
Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler has argued that his agency is working better with industry to meet early compliance requirements, which has helped to head off violations that require enforcement and punishment.
“We are working very hard on compliance assurance. I think the agency has for a number of years,” Wheeler said at his confirmation hearing last month. “I think the more compliance assurance that we have, the fewer enforcement actions that we need to take.”
But Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project and a former director of civil enforcement at EPA, said the data show steep drops in penalties paid by violators.
"These declines are the result of a shrinking workforce, and an EPA agenda that is all about unraveling our public health standards, instead of enforcing the laws that Congress wrote,” he said in a statement.
Wheeler noted that EPA increased the number of criminal cases open last year, interrupting a downward trend that started in 2011. He also refuted reports from public watchdog groups, saying they erred in calculating enforcement metrics such as administrative compliance orders, which he said rose slightly.
EPA last year also boosted commitments from companies by 24 percent to fix or curb amounts of pollution. The agency said it has addressed the biggest sources of air pollution, so it has shifted to focus on toxic pollutants, "which are less in volume but higher in toxicity."
EPA “continued our focus on expediting site cleanup, deterring noncompliance, and returning facilities to compliance with the law, while respecting the cooperative federalism structure of our nation’s environmental laws,” EPA enforcement chief Susan Bodine said in a statement on Friday.
Enforcement statistics can swing sharply from year to year, especially when major cases — such as the Volkswagen or Fiat Chrysler emissions cheating scandals — generate outsized monetary penalties that are far larger than typical violations.
However, Cynthia Giles, EPA’s enforcement chief during the Obama administration, said that key metrics released by EPA show enforcement is down.
“Not only are the Trump EPA’s enforcement numbers at historic lows, they are on track to get worse,” she said in an email.
She cited the figures on injunctive relief, the amount that violators agree to spend on pollution controls, remediation and other efforts in order to comply with environmental standards.
EPA secured $3.95 billion last year in that category, the lowest level since EPA's enforcement office was created 25 years ago and around half of the lowest annual relief under the Obama administration. Fiscal year 2017's injunctive relief totaled more than $20 billion, boosted by an unusually high by $16 billion settlement connected to the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal.
Civil penalties also fell to a 15-year low, according to Giles.
EPA reported securing $69.5 million in civil or administrative penalties, 38 percent below the lowest full year of the Obama administration. As with injunctive relief, fiscal year 2017's penalties of $1.6 billion were unusually high due to Volkswagen-related cases. The year before that was even higher due to a $5.7 billion penalty paid by BP related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Inspections also continued to decrease, dropping to about 10,600 last year, nearly half of 2010's level. EPA said it "continues to use data analytics and other tools to improve inspection targeting, which allows it to use its inspection resources more efficiently."
Those weakened enforcement numbers are an indicator of how EPA will act during the remainder of Trump’s time in office, Giles said.
“These numbers are good surrogates for whether EPA is taking on the biggest cases with the most significant public health impact. These are the big cases with correspondingly big effects on health that require expertise and staying power, and that states can’t or won’t do,” she said. “If EPA is not taking on these biggest polluters, no one will.”
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/article/2019/02/epa-touts-2018-compliance-wins-but-critics-say-data-shows-drop-off-1159644
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Test of Batteries as Air Pollution Tool Heads to Court (1)
Feb 9, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
Four environmental groups are challenging an EPA-issued air pollution permit to build a proposed natural gas-fired power plant north of Los Angeles because it didn’t consider batteries to reduce emissions.
Led by the Center for Biological Diversity, the groups are challenging the Dec. 11 air pollution permit that Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 issued for a 645-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant that Palmdale Energy LLC is building in Palmdale, Calif. They filed a lawsuit Feb. 8 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The lawsuit will be a test of the EPA’s decision that batteries aren’t yet a viable alternative to control air pollution.
The groups are opposed because the EPA-issued Clean Air Act permit requires the use of the best pollution controls to maintain air quality limits. They say the EPA ignored batteries as a viable and less-polluting alternative when it permitted Palmdale, a solely owned subsidiary of Summit Power Project Holdings LLC, to use duct burners with their combined-cycle gas turbines instead of battery storage.
The EPA rejected the group’s prior petition on a draft permit, saying it doesn’t consider battery storage to be a viable alternative because it has never been used at natural gas-fired plants.
Palmdale didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The EPA declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Robert Ukeiley and Lisa Belenky, the Center for Biolgoical Diversity’s senior attorneys, didn’t respond to requests for comment. They are also representing the Desert Citizens Against Pollution, California Communities Against Toxics, and the Sierra Club in the lawsuit.
The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Environment is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.
The case is Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. EPA, 9th Cir., No. 19-70340, 2/8/19.
(Adds EPA Region 9 declined comment.)
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/test-of-batteries-as-air-pollution-tool-heads-to-court-1
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Chicago Scion Pledges to Make City Carbon Neutral by 2050
Feb 11, 2019 | E&E Climatewire
By Daniel Cusick
Climate change is on the ballot in this month's Chicago mayoral election.
William Daley, the former White House chief of staff who once observed that making global warming a frontline campaign issue was political suicide, has championed climate action as a candidate to run the nation's third-largest city.
On Friday, the 70-year-old Democrat and son of legendary Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (and brother of former Mayor Richard M. Daley) rolled out a five-point climate plan that includes making Chicago carbon neutral by 2050.
"Chicago was the first big city to make environmental protection a priority, and as mayor I promise to build on that legacy," Daley said during a campaign appearance with former Vice President Al Gore.
The two men are well-acquainted, as Daley was Commerce secretary during the final years of the Clinton administration and was the chairman of Gore's unsuccessful 2000 campaign for president.
"Bill has a proven track record of achieving results for the people he is serving," Gore said in a statement. "The climate crisis is an urgent threat, and cities are on the front lines of the impacts and the solutions."
If elected, Daley would be the second former chief of staff to President Obama to lead Chicago after Rahm Emanuel, who left the White House in 2010 and won the mayor's office in 2011. Emanuel was re-elected in 2015 but decided not to stand for a third term.
Daley's climate platform includes initiatives that gained traction under Emanuel, including replacing coal-fired power generation with renewables like wind and solar power, and cutting transportation-sector emissions by offering more alternatives to driving.
Daley pledged to continue working with Chicago building owners to cut emissions and improve energy efficiency. He also endorsed efforts to extend the Chicago Transit Authority's Red Line in South Chicago, with hopes of easing congested city streets and highways.
Asked if Gore's endorsement would improve his standing with Chicago voters, Daley told the Chicago Tribune: "Hopefully it will sink in to people to say, 'We are getting a clear picture of who Bill Daley is, not only as a candidate, but what he will do if he is allowed to be mayor of Chicago.'"
According to a 2014 Washington Post report, Daley, reflecting on Obama's second presidential campaign, said advisers were sharply divided about whether the former president should make climate a top priority.
"There was a sense then it just wasn't the sort of thing you could tee up in [2011], with an election coming up," Daley told the Post. "With respect to my friends in the environment community, to put this at the front of the list, you might as well have taken a gun to your head and shot yourself."
Daley is one of 14 candidates in the Feb. 26 election. Others include Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza; former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy; Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle; and Paul Vallas, former Chicago Public Schools CEO and city budget director.
If no candidate wins a majority of the vote this month, a runoff election will be held April 2.
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2019/02/11/stories/1060120123
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