Preview Newsletter
PM ACC Clips Report - February 20, 2018
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House Panel Schedules Hearing on 'Dismal' EPA Enforcement Numbers
Feb 20, 2019 | Inside EPA
House Democrats are ramping up their oversight of the Trump EPA, with the Energy & Commerce oversight subcommittee turning its focus to the agency's “troubling enforcement record” in a hearing scheduled for next week. -
Conservatives Line up behind Wheeler
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Kevin Bogardus
Several conservative activists are urging the Senate to confirm Andrew Wheeler as head of EPA. In a letter sent yesterday to senators, 11 conservative leaders said the acting EPA administrator is capable of continuing President... -
Plastics Exposure a Global Health Crisis, Says NGO Report
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Leigh Stringer
Plastic and its impact on human health is poorly understood and presents a "global health crisis", according to a report by a group of international NGOs. The report, Plastic and Health: The hidden cost of a plastic planet, says that... -
EPA Releases First Major Update to Chemicals List in 40 Years
Feb 20, 2019 | AllOnGeorgia
Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an update of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Inventory listing the chemicals that are actively being manufactured, processed and imported in the United States. -
Asbestos: EPA Refuses to Require TSCA Reporting
Feb 20, 2019 | EHS Daily Advisor
By William C. Schillaci
It is not a stretch to say that the 2016 amendments to the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) were motivated to a large extent by the EPA’s inability under the law to ban, or at least significantly restrict, industrial and commercial... -
California Names Nail Products Containing Toluene a Priority Product
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Lisa Martine Jenkins
California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control has proposed listing nail products containing toluene as its latest priority product under its Safer Consumer Products programme. If adopted, the designation will prompt... -
Environmental Groups Sue EPA in Bid to Ban Toxic Paint Strippers
Feb 19, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Environmental groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a bid to ban the sale toxic paint strippers. Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and related groups argue that the agency hasn’t taken... -
Baltimore Sues Monsanto over PCB Pollution
Feb 20, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
Baltimore has filed a lawsuit against the agrochemical giant Monsanto and two other companies, accusing them of polluting city waterways and stormwater. The legal effort focuses on polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, the... -
Massachusetts Legislators Renew Effort to Ban Flame Retardants
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Nick Hazlewood
Legislators in Massachusetts are again considering legislation to ban 11 flame retardants from a number of consumer products, including bedding, carpeting and children’s toys. Representative Marjorie Decker (D) and Senator Cynthia... -
EPA Denied Public's Right to Know about Exposure — Lawsuit
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
Public health advocacy groups this week sued EPA over its decision to deny a petition aimed at increasing asbestos reporting requirements. "We cannot afford to stand by while EPA irresponsibly abdicates its duty to protect public... -
Lawsuit Targets EPA’s Asbestos Reporting Loopholes
Feb 19, 2019 | Courthouse News Service
By Nicholas Iovino
Traces of asbestos were recently found in crayons and makeup, but the Environmental Protection Agency has no way to track how much of the toxic chemical gets made, imported or put into U.S. products, public health groups claim in... -
The Lost Generation Trump’s Environmental Policies Are Putting the Health of American Children at Risk.
Feb 20, 2019 | NY Magazine
By Stephen S. Hall
Monterey County, in Northern California, is one of those places that appear to tell a tale of two Americas. The part that runs along the Pacific coastline, from Pebble Beach and Carmel in the north down to Big Sur, is breathtaking and... -
The Elephant in the Room: Potential Biopersistence of Short-Chain PFAs
Feb 20, 2019 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
In January 2018, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists published a peer-reviewed journal article stating a commonly used raw material to make greaseproof paper is likely to persist in the human body. FDA scientists’... -
A New Analysis Shows a ‘Compelling Link’ Between Roundup and Cancer
Feb 20, 2019 | Care2
By Steve Williams
Monsanto has long denied a link between its globally-used weed killer, glyphosate, and cancers in humans, but a new meta-analysis finds a “compelling link” that could finally prompt the EPA to reevaluate its own classification of the... -
EU Member States Reject First Reach Authorisation Application
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Luke Buxton
EU member states have for the first time voted not to grant an application for authorisation for a specific use of a substance of very high concern (SVHC). At the REACH Committee meeting on 14-15 February, the competent... -
2 Years In, Perry Makes First Advisory Board Picks
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Jeremy Dillon
Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced today the selection of eight members to his advisory board, a list that leans heavily on industry officials in the nuclear, oil and natural gas, and reliability sectors. The new members are Perry's... -
Green Groups Seek to Block Atlantic Offshore Oil Testing
Feb 20, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Environmental groups are asking a federal court to block testing for oil and natural gas in the seafloor under the Atlantic Ocean. While the Trump administration has not issued the final permits to five companies who want to do the... -
Greens Go after Atlantic Seismic Testing
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Margaret Kriz Hobson
A group of conservation organizations today asked a federal court judge to prevent seismic testing in the Atlantic Ocean, the latest step in the ongoing legal battle over offshore oil and gas exploration along the East Coast. -
Al Gore Meets with Va. Residents Fighting Compressor Station
Feb 20, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
By Denise Lavoie
Former Vice President Al Gore urged residents of a historic African-American community in Virginia yesterday to continue their fight against a plan to build a natural gas pipeline compressor station in their neighborhood. Gore and... -
CSB: Thermal Fatigue Likely Cause of Pascagoula Gas Plant Incident
Feb 19, 2019 | Oil & Gas Journal
By Nick Snow
Thermal fatigue was likely the cause of the explosion and fire at Enterprise Products Partners’ Pascagoula, Miss., gas plant late in the evening of June 27, 2016, a US Chemical Safety Board investigation concluded on Feb. 19. The failure... -
Pipeline Safety Update - Issue No. 145
Feb 20, 2019 | National Law Review
By Susan A. Olenchuk, Bryn S. Karaus, and Marco Bracamonte
On February 5th, the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a Notice inviting the public to file comments identifying guidance documents issued by DOT modal agencies, including the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials... -
DOT Agencies Requiring Spill Response Plans for HHFTs
Feb 20, 2019 | Occupational Health & Safety
Two agencies within the U.S. Department of Transportation have issued a final rule aimed at strengthening railroads' preparedness for oil spills. The final rule from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the... -
Railroads Will Be Required to Submit Oil-Spill Plans
Feb 20, 2019 | Transportation Today
By Melina Druga
A recent federal rule will require railroads to develop and submit comprehensive oil-spill response plans for routes that include high hazard flammable trains (HHFTs). The rule will apply to HHFTs transporting petroleum oil in blocks of 20... -
(ACC Mentioned) Oral Arguments for Trump's 'Once in' Repeal Set for April 1
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
A contentious legal clash over EPA's repeal of Clinton-era air toxics restrictions is set for April 1 oral arguments before a panel of federal appellate judges. The panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will... -
White House Prepares to Scrutinize Intelligence Agencies’ Finding That Climate Change Threatens National Security
Feb 20, 2019 | Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan
The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have... -
EPA Gets Day in Court to Defend Toxic Air Pollution Stance
Feb 20, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
The EPA will get its day in court April 1 to defend relaxing toxic air pollution control requirements for power plants, refineries, and other industrial sources that bring their emissions below certain thresholds. The U.S. Court of Appeals... -
Group Founded by Former EPA Official Targets 'Green New Deal'
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Nick Sobczyk
Another conservative group has signed up for the crusade against the "Green New Deal," joining a growing list of GOP operatives and politicians railing against the progressive climate plan. Energy 45 Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit founded... -
Is Cheap Money the Key to Solving Climate Change?
Feb 20, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By James Osborne
Cheap, below market-rate loans have been used by the U.S. government to do everything from bail out the U.S. automotive sector to help millions of Americans attend college But could cheap money now offer the key to climate...
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House Panel Schedules Hearing on 'Dismal' EPA Enforcement Numbers
Feb 20, 2019 | Inside EPA
House Democrats are ramping up their oversight of the Trump EPA, with the Energy & Commerce oversight subcommittee turning its focus to the agency's “troubling enforcement record” in a hearing scheduled for next week.
The Feb. 26 hearing, “EPA's Enforcement Program: Taking the Environmental Cop Off the Beat,” comes after EPA released fiscal year 2018 enforcement numbers showing a sharp drop of in civil and criminal penalties, data that has already prompted Obama EPA enforcement chief Cynthia Giles to call the agency's enforcement trends “worse than expected.” Giles in a recent analysis said that the combined civil and administrative penalties were the lowest since the creation of the enforcement office in 1994.
Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) in a video announcing the hearing said the recent data indicates a “dismal enforcement record” at EPA.
“The problem is that the Trump administration has . . . diminished the number of staff people that work at EPA that do enforcement,” Pallone said.
Pallone said the oversight subcommittee is “going to try to get to the bottom of the problem and try to bring back in a more robust way the enforcement that should be done by EPA” to protect public health and safety.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/house-panel-schedules-hearing-dismal-epa-enforcement-numbers
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Conservatives Line up behind Wheeler
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Kevin Bogardus
Several conservative activists are urging the Senate to confirm Andrew Wheeler as head of EPA.
In a letter sent yesterday to senators, 11 conservative leaders said the acting EPA administrator is capable of continuing President Trump's agenda at the agency. They noted that Wheeler's nomination is likely to receive a confirmation vote later this month.
"The result of that confirmation vote should be 'yes' with a strong majority," they said. "Wheeler is supremely qualified to continue the outstanding record of accomplishment at the EPA under President Trump."
The letter's signatories included Myron Ebell, who led Trump's transition team at EPA and is director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks; former Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas), president and CEO of the Heartland Institute; and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.
In their letter, they noted the Trump EPA's rollbacks of several environmental rules and the agency's proposed replacement of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, as well as its initiatives to limit settlement payments to third parties and the use of scientific studies that depend on confidential health data in crafting regulations.
"EPA is now back to carrying out its original mission of protecting our air and water as opposed to shutting down coal plants and making promises we can't keep," they said.
As Wheeler moves toward confirmation, he is facing questions over how EPA has handled biofuels, which have tripped up past agency nominees.
His predecessor, Scott Pruitt, signed off on waivers for refiners from the renewable fuel standard, which angered farm-state Republican senators and stalled the confirmation of EPA air chief Bill Wehrum. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry has bristled at the demands of the RFS program, which requires them to blend biofuel into gasoline.
Last week, five GOP senators sent a letter to Wheeler with questions about what EPA could do to lower refiners' costs from the program, which was first reported on by Bloomberg. They also said his confirmation could be at stake.
"Without an adequate proposal to meaningfully lower the regulatory burden," the senators said, "we will have serious concerns with your nomination."
Signing on to the letter were Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy of Louisiana and Mike Lee of Utah.
Democrats are expected to oppose Wheeler's confirmation as head of EPA. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) is pursuing a strategy to have EPA make policy concessions in order to speed up his nomination process.
That approach has had some success. Yesterday, the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee cheered when EPA committed to set drinking water standards for chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) (Greenwire, Feb. 19).
Wheeler has already been confirmed once by the Senate, last April as deputy EPA administrator. He has been the acting head of the agency since July, after Pruitt resigned in the wake of ethics allegations.
Trump formally nominated Wheeler for EPA administrator last month, and he is moving toward confirmation.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) filed a cloture motion on Wheeler's nomination. That will set up a vote to end debate followed by a confirmation roll call, which could come as early as next week when senators return from recess.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121635
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Plastics Exposure a Global Health Crisis, Says NGO Report
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Leigh Stringer
Plastic and its impact on human health is poorly understood and presents a "global health crisis", according to a report by a group of international NGOs.
The report, Plastic and Health: The hidden cost of a plastic planet, says that health impact assessments have focused solely on the plastic components of products while ignoring the thousands of additives within the plastics and their behaviour at every stage of the plastic lifecycle.
The report labels the "current narrow approaches to assessing and addressing plastic impacts" as "inadequate and inappropriate".
"Understanding and responding to plastic risks, and making informed decisions in the face of those risks, demands a full lifecycle approach to assessing the complete scope of the impacts of plastic on human health," it says.
One of the authors, David Azoulay, director of environmental health for the Centre for International Environmental Law (Ciel), says that because supply chains and the impacts of plastic cross borders, continents and oceans, "no country can effectively protect its citizens from those impacts on its own, and no global instrument exists today to fully address the toxic lifecycle of plastics".
"Countries must seize the opportunity of current global discussions to develop a holistic response to the plastic health crisis that involves reducing the production, use and disposal of plastic worldwide," he says.
‘Underestimated problem’
The report says plastics additives are an "underestimated problem". Research that has identified negative human health impacts of many plastic additives is conclusive, it adds. "There are significant risks to human health and a precautionary approach is warranted."
Chemical additives may be used in the manufacturing process to create a polymer, including initiators, catalysts and solvents, while others are used to provide functions including stabilisers, plasticisers, flame retardants, pigments and fillers. Some are used to inhibit photodegradation, increase strength, rigidity and flexibility, or to prevent microbial growth.
The report says that "most of these additives are not bound to the polymer matrix and, due to their low molecular weight, easily leach out".
Of the chemical additives, phthalate plasticisers, bisphenol A, antimicrobial agents and polybrominated flame retardants "are of particular concern", the report says.
"Once these additives have been released, including through incineration of plastic, they persist in the environment, building up in the food chain."
The report says that while the health effects of many are conclusive, those associated with inhaled chemical additives and "accumulated toxics in plastic particles" are not yet clear.
"As plastic production increases, this exposure will only grow," it warns. It is estimated that there will be a four-fold increase in plastic production by 2050.
Plastic a POP?
The report says that, while plastic is not officially recognised as a persistent organic pollutant (POP) under the Stockholm Convention, the material's "characteristics and its chemical additives and contaminants make it potentially as harmful as, and portraying similar characteristics to, officially recognised POPs".
These characteristics, the report says, include: the degradation of persistent plastic into micro- and nano-plastic particles, which facilitates their uptake by marine biota, indicates they accumulate in the food chain; some chemical additives and contaminants present in plastic polymers have endocrine disrupting properties and may be harmful at extremely low doses; and there is a "continuous flow of ‘fresh’ plastic waste", marking a significant persistence in the marine ecosystem.
The report adds that Echa’s recent restriction proposal for intentionally added microplastics "supports a POPs classification".
Echa’s proposal says the persistence and the potential for adverse effects or bioaccumulation of microplastics is a "cause for concern".
"Once released, they can be extremely persistent in the environment, lasting thousands of years and practically impossible to remove," the proposal adds.
BOX
Report authors and their organisations: David Azoulay - Centre for International Environmental Law (Ciel); Priscilla Villa - Earthworks; Yvette Arellano - Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (Tejas); Miriam Gordon - UPSTREAM; Doun Moon - Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA); and Kathryn Miller and Kristen Thompson - Exeter University
https://chemicalwatch.com/74500/plastics-exposure-a-global-health-crisis-says-ngo-report
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EPA Releases First Major Update to Chemicals List in 40 Years
Feb 20, 2019 | AllOnGeorgia
Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an update of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Inventory listing the chemicals that are actively being manufactured, processed and imported in the United States.
A key result of the update is that less than half of the total number of chemicals on the current TSCA Inventory (47 percent or 40,655 of the 86,228 chemicals) are currently in commerce. As the result of a tremendous effort on behalf of thousands of stakeholders and manufacturers from across the country, this information will help EPA focus risk evaluation efforts on chemicals that are still on the market.
“It’s important for us to know which chemicals are actually in use today. This will help us with our work prioritizing chemicals, evaluating and addressing risks. This information also increases transparency to the public,” said Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Assistant Administrator Alexandra Dapolito Dunn.
As recently as 2018, the TSCA Inventory showed over 86,000 chemicals available for commercial production and use in the U.S. Until this update, it was not known which of these chemicals on the TSCA Inventory were actually in commerce. Under amended TSCA – The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21 Century Act – EPA was required to update the list and designate which chemicals are active or inactive in U.S. commerce.
More than 80 percent (32,898) of the chemicals in commerce have identities that are not Confidential Business Information (CBI), increasing public access to additional information about them. For the less than 20 percent of the chemicals in commerce that have confidential identities, EPA is developing a rule outlining how the Agency will review and substantiate all CBI claims seeking to protect the specific chemical identities of substances on the confidential portion of the TSCA Inventory.
From August 11, 2017 through October 5, 2018, chemical manufacturers and processors provided information on which chemicals were manufactured, imported or processed in the U.S. over the past ten years, the period ending June 21, 2016. The agency received more than 90,000 responses, which represents a significant reporting effort by manufacturers, importers and processors.
https://www.allongeorgia.com/national-news/epa-releases-first-major-update-to-chemicals-list-in-40-years/
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Asbestos: EPA Refuses to Require TSCA Reporting
Feb 20, 2019 | EHS Daily Advisor
By William C. Schillaci
It is not a stretch to say that the 2016 amendments to the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) were motivated to a large extent by the EPA’s inability under the law to ban, or at least significantly restrict, industrial and commercial uses of asbestos. Under new authority provided in the amendments, the Agency promptly named asbestos as one of the first 10 chemicals that would undergo risk evaluations; based on the results of those evaluations, the EPA is empowered to manage any identified risk to people from exposure to asbestos, which may include anything from restrictions to a total ban on asbestos use.
That substantial new authority and the EPA’s ongoing work would seem to resolve many concerns about asbestos, a substance that is universally recognized as having no safe level of exposure for people. But recently, a group of environmental and human health organizations told the Agency in a petition that its risk evaluation was being conducted without critical information on asbestos being imported into the United States. According to the groups, the Agency’s main tool for collecting data about chemicals—called the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) rule—does not require that companies inform the EPA about imported asbestos and its use.
The main request in the petition is that the Agency quickly write a new rule to require such reporting. In a formal response that, at this writing, has not yet been published in the Federal Register (FR), the EPA said that even if it agreed to issue such a rule, this could not be done in a time frame that would affect the current reporting requirements and, therefore, could not be factored into the asbestos risk evaluation, which must be completed by December 22, 2019. Moreover, the Agency said it disagreed with the groups’ contention that it lacked the information about asbestos imports and use that are necessary to complete the risk evaluation as required by law. The Agency, therefore, denied the request to amend the CDR rule. The groups also made half dozen associated requests regarding the regulation of asbestos under TSCA, and the EPA denied each of those as well.
The CDR Rule
Promulgated in 2011 under TSCA Section 8, the CDR rule requires manufacturers (including importers) to provide the EPA with information on the production and use of chemicals in commerce. The rule generally applies to 25,000 pounds (lb) or more of a chemical substance at any single site, with a reduced reporting threshold of 2,500 lb for chemical substances subject to certain TSCA actions. As the petition points out, and as the EPA agrees, the CDR rule is the Agency’s primary TSCA tool for obtaining basic information on the manufacture, importation, and use of chemicals and the nature and extent of exposure to these substances.
Imported Asbestos and the Asbestos Exclusion
The arguments in the petition are derived from what the EPA has so far revealed about what it knows about asbestos in the United States. For example, for each of the initial 10 chemicals for which the Agency is conducting risk evaluations, the EPA first developed a problem formulation document. In the asbestos problem formulation document, the Agency identified eight product categories (e.g., asbestos diaphragms used in the chlor-alkali industry and oil-field brake blocks for the petroleum industry) that will be addressed in the risk evaluation. But the petitioners assert that the EPA’s descriptions of asbestos uses in the problem formulation are “limited, vague, and incomplete.”
“For example,” the petition continues, “the problem formulation indicates that EPA identified one company that imports asbestos-containing brake blocks for oil field use, but fails to quantify the amount of these imports or how and where they are used and acknowledges that ‘[it] is unclear how widespread the continued use of asbestos brake blocks is for use in oilfield equipment.’”
The EPA’s legal argument against including asbestos in the CDR rule is that asbestos is a naturally occurring substance for which reporting is not required.
“EPA’s interpretation of the CDR rule means that no manufacturers or importers of asbestos or asbestos-containing products were required to report on their activities,” the petition states. “Accordingly, the rule has played no role in informing EPA about asbestos uses that could be addressed in the Agency’s TSCA risk evaluation. This loophole in the rule has resulted in a troubling—and wholly avoidable—lack of reliable information about who is importing asbestos and in what quantities, where and how asbestos is being used in the U.S., and who is being exposed and how that exposure is occurring.”
Accordingly, the petition requests that the EPA amend its CDR rule to decouple asbestos from the exemption for naturally occurring chemical substances. Because the EPA’s asbestos risk evaluation is ongoing, the petition continues; the revision adding asbestos to the CDR rule should trigger immediate reporting on asbestos for the 2012–2016 reporting cycle. The petition states that the amendment would include the following sentence: “For asbestos, the 2016 CDR submission period is from January 1, 2019, to April 31, 2019.”
“This will make it possible for EPA to review and analyze the reports submitted while the risk evaluation is underway and revise the draft evaluation on the basis of new information reported on asbestos importation and use,” the petitioners continue. “To assure that it has time to consider the CDR reports, EPA should extend the completion date for the asbestos risk evaluation by six months.”
EPA Responds
In the context of the asbestos risk evaluation, the core of the EPA’s denial is that the Agency does not believe that the requested amendments would result in the reporting of any information that is not already known to the EPA. The EPA states that after more than a year of research and stakeholder outreach, it believes it is aware of all ongoing uses of asbestos and already has the information that it would receive if it were to amend the CDR requirements as requested.
While the Agency recognizes that it made use of information reported under the CDR rule to identify the conditions of use for asbestos and the rest of the first 10 chemicals undergoing risk evaluation, the CDR was not the only source of information needed to conduct a valid risk evaluation. Additional sources of information the Agency says it used to understand conditions of asbestos use include: Published literature and online databases, including safety data sheets, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodities Summary and Minerals Yearbook, the U.S. International Trade Commission’s Dataweb, and government and commercial trade databases. Communication with federal partners, such as Customs and Border Protection, to enhance the EPA’s understanding of import information on asbestos-containing products. Reviews of websites of potential manufacturers, importers, distributors, retailers, and other users of asbestos. Receipt of public comments during the February 2017 public meeting listing the risk evaluations for the first 10 chemicals. Meetings with companies, industry groups, chemical users, and other stakeholders. Comments received on an EPA proposed significant new use rule for asbestos. The Agency said it obtained no new information on any ongoing uses.
Furthermore, the EPA asserts that even if it believed that the requested amendments would produce information on any new ongoing uses, the Agency said it would not be able to finalize such amendments in time to inform the ongoing risk evaluation or, if needed, any subsequent risk management decisions. The petitioners submitted their request on September 27, 2018, less than 120 calendar days before they would like the submission period to begin. The Agency states:
“While EPA understands that petitioners desire prompt collection of the requested information under the CDR rule to inform the ongoing risk evaluation, this request does not factor in the necessary timeframes [sic] for any rulemaking processes that would be required to propose and then finalize such amendments. To allow for the notice and comment period for the public and regulated community required under the Administrative Procedure Act and for appropriate internal deliberation prior to proposal and after the close of the comment period, EPA typically needs at least 18 months to finalize a rulemaking. Furthermore, even if EPA were able to use expedited rulemaking procedures to quickly promulgate a requirement to report additional information on asbestos for the 2016 CDR cycle, it is important to note that potential reporters have had no prior notice or expectation of a need to retain the records necessary to report on past chemical manufacturing. Therefore, EPA has no reason to expect that potential reporters subject to such a rule amendment would have information that could be reasonably ascertainable for submission.”
Other Requests/Responses
Following are the additional requests made by the petitioners and the reasons the EPA gave for denying them: End the naturally-occurring chemical exemption for asbestos. The EPA responded that manufacturers and importers of asbestos are already required to report asbestos under the CDR rule if they meet the production volume threshold of 2,500 lb and do not qualify for the naturally occurring substances exemption. “Mined materials such as metal ores, minerals, and clays that are separated from the natural environment by only physical means are examples of chemical substances that are considered naturally occurring for TSCA purposes and are exempt from reporting under the CDR rule,” says the EPA. “If this specifically defined exemption does not apply (and no other exemption applies), then a manufacturer or importer of asbestos must report under the CDR rule.”Require reporting of imported articles containing asbestos. The EPA responded that it has sufficient information on imported articles containing asbestos to conduct the risk evaluation and to inform subsequent risk management decisions.Lift the by-product and impurity exemption for asbestos. The EPA responded that it is unaware of any examples of asbestos as a by-product. Thus, the Agency anticipates that there would be no new information reported if the Agency were to lift the by-product exemption for asbestos.Lower the asbestos reporting threshold to 10 lb. The EPA responded that since asbestos is no longer mined in the United States and that the only importation of raw asbestos is for production of asbestos diaphragms, for which yearly imports for each site well exceed the threshold of 2,500 lb, lowering the reporting threshold would not provide additional information.Require processors of asbestos to report under the CDR rule. The EPA responded that it knows of only two ongoing uses of asbestos that constitute processing—the processing of raw asbestos into diaphragms and the fabrication of gaskets from imported asbestos-containing sheet gaskets. Information on these uses is well understood by the EPA as a result of direct communication with the processors. Accordingly, the EPA does not believe that requiring processors of asbestos to report under the CDR rule will provide useful information not already in the Agency’s possession.Lift confidential business information (CBI) claims for all CDR asbestos reports. The EPA responded that the TSCA mechanism the petitioners used to make their requests (TSCA Section 21) cannot be applied to CBI issues. Even if this were not the case, the EPA believes disclosure of CBI would have no practical relevance to the risk evaluation, as CBI claims are limited, and the EPA retains the ability to characterize the information without revealing the actual protected data.
https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/2019/02/asbestos-epa-refuses-to-require-tsca-reporting/
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California Names Nail Products Containing Toluene a Priority Product
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Lisa Martine Jenkins
California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control has proposed listing nail products containing toluene as its latest priority product under its Safer Consumer Products programme.
If adopted, the designation will prompt manufacturers either to phase out the substance’s use in that application or to undertake an alternatives analysis if they want to continue serving the California market.
Toluene is used as a solvent in a variety of nail products, including polishes, hardeners and thinners. But it has been linked with damage to the nervous system and respiratory tract, as well as developmental effects such as low birthweight. The DTSC said this presents concern for the state’s more than 130,000 nail salon workers, many of whom are women of childbearing age.
Meredith Williams, acting director of DTSC, said industry "has known for a long time that toluene is a problematic chemical in these products".
"Responsible manufacturers have moved away from it. We want to make sure that others do the same," she added.
As a first step, the DTSC has released a draft technical report outlining the scientific basis of the proposal. A comment period on the draft will be open until 15 March and the department will also host a public workshop to receive comments on 13 March. The technical report will then be updated, based on the comments, and submitted to an independent scientific review panel.
Toluene is also the subject of recent state-level legislation in states like New Jersey and New York, which are considering banning its use in nail products, alongside dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and formaldehyde.
In 2016, the DTSC sought feedback on this so-called "toxic trio" of substances. But in its technical report, it said that most nail product manufacturers have largely phased out formaldehyde and DBP, while some are continuing to use toluene.Safer Consumer Products programme
California’s Safer Consumer Products programme identifies products that contain potentially harmful chemicals and has manufacturers look for potential replacements via alternatives analyses. The programme took effect in 2013 as a consequence of California’s green chemistry laws, passed in 2008.
Other products that have been adopted as SCP priorities include: paint or varnish paint strippers containing methylene chloride;spray polyurethane foam with unreacted MDI; and children’s foam-padded sleeping products with the flame retardants TDCPP or TCEP.
Aside from nail products containing toluene, other proposed priority products include: perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in carpets and rugs; laundry detergents containing the surfactants nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs); and paint and varnish strippers and graffiti removers containing N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP).
https://chemicalwatch.com/74479/california-names-nail-products-containing-toluene-a-priority-product
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Environmental Groups Sue EPA in Bid to Ban Toxic Paint Strippers
Feb 19, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Environmental groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a bid to ban the sale toxic paint strippers.
Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and related groups argue that the agency hasn’t taken sufficient action even though the Toxic Substances Control Act compels the EPA to prohibit paint strippers that contain methylene chloride.
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency knows that methylene chloride is killing workers, and it knows that only a ban will protect them," Earthjustice attorney Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, the main lawyer on the case, said in a Tuesday statement. "Yet the Trump administration is so beholden to the chemical industry that it has chosen to leave workers and consumers in harm’s way."
“If more than 50 coroner's reports are not enough to get EPA to ban one of the most dangerous chemicals on the market, what is?” he added.
The EPA formally determined in January 2017 that methylene chloride presents an “unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment,” a finding that triggers regulatory action under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
But despite then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s public pledge to move toward further regulating the substances in 2018, the agency has not proposed a ban, leading to accusations that the EPA has been dragging its feet.
The agency completed a proposed rule on methylene chloride in December 2018, and sent it to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review, the final step before it can be released to the public.
Long-term exposure to methylene chloride, often by workers who use it to strip paint, has been linked to liver and lung cancer. It’s also been blamed on acute illnesses and multiple deaths.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/430642-greens-sue-epa-to-get-paint-stripper-banned
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Baltimore Sues Monsanto over PCB Pollution
Feb 20, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
Baltimore has filed a lawsuit against the agrochemical giant Monsanto and two other companies, accusing them of polluting city waterways and stormwater.
The legal effort focuses on polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, the industrial chemicals that have long accumulated in animals, plants and people around the globe. Baltimore alleges Monsanto knew its PCB chemicals were toxic and didn't degrade in nature.
Baltimore Solicitor Andre Davis says Maryland's biggest city intends to "hold corporations accountable for cleaning up their toxic messes."
In a statement yesterday, Baltimore said its lawsuit is the first of its kind on the East Coast and the 15th nationally. Places such as San Diego and Seattle have filed similar suits.
Monsanto says it believes that Baltimore's complaint is without merit. The company stopped producing PCBs more than 40 years ago.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121571
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Massachusetts Legislators Renew Effort to Ban Flame Retardants
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Nick Hazlewood
Legislators in Massachusetts are again considering legislation to ban 11 flame retardants from a number of consumer products, including bedding, carpeting and children’s toys.
Representative Marjorie Decker (D) and Senator Cynthia Stone Creem (D) presented companion bills to the state legislature after the governor "pocket vetoed" a similar measure in January. That bill, H5024, had won wide support in the state legislature, but opposition from industry.
In choosing to use his veto on the first bill, Governor Charlie Baker wrote it would "make Massachusetts the only state in the United States to ban certain flame retardants in car seats and the non-foam parts of adult mattresses, products already subject to federal flammability requirements".
The latest bills (HD3012 in the House, SD1573 in the Senate) largely return to the draft as first proposed in the last legislative session. The measures seek to ban the sale or manufacture of bedding, carpeting, children’s products, residential upholstered furniture and window treatments with more than 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of the following substances in any component part: TDCPP; TCEP; antimony trioxide; HBCD; TBPH; TBB; chlorinated paraffins; TCPP; pentaBDE; octabBDE; and TBBPA.
And they also would direct the environmental protection department to identify chemical flame retardants to ban if they are known or reasonably anticipated to be known to cause harm or have persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) characteristics.
If passed, a manufacturer or retailer will not be allowed to sell, distribute or import into Massachusetts a product in scope of the law that contains any of the 11 substances above the stated levels, except for inventory manufactured prior to 1 June 2020.
The movers of the bill are looking to get it into law by 31 December.
https://chemicalwatch.com/74481/massachusetts-legislators-renew-effort-to-ban-flame-retardants
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EPA Denied Public's Right to Know about Exposure — Lawsuit
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
Public health advocacy groups this week sued EPA over its decision to deny a petition aimed at increasing asbestos reporting requirements.
"We cannot afford to stand by while EPA irresponsibly abdicates its duty to protect public health and consumer safety," said Linda Reinstein, president and co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO).
"Americans have the right to know how much asbestos is present in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities; where it's being used; and the potential for exposure to workers and the public," Reinstein continued in a statement.
The petition sought changes to EPA's Chemical Data Reporting Rule that the groups said would increase asbestos reporting. The amendments would also provide EPA with asbestos use and importation data they said the agency needs for the substance's ongoing risk evaluation.
EPA recently denied the petition, stating that it "does not believe that the requested amendments would result in the reporting of any information that is not already known to EPA" (Greenwire, Feb. 12).
The agency added that even if it thought the proposed amendments would bring in new information, it would not be able to finalize the changes in time for use in the ongoing risk evaluation.
"The petition denial is a weak and irresponsible response to the compelling case we made for the need for comprehensive and current information about asbestos to meet the requirements of the law, and fully inform the public," said Bob Sussman, a former EPA official who served in the Obama administration and is now providing legal counsel for ADAO.
Fifteen attorneys general last month filed a similar petition against EPA (E&E News PM, Jan. 31).
Joining ADAO in the lawsuit are the Environmental Working Group, the American Public Health Association, the Center for Environmental Health, the Environmental Health Strategy Center and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.
EPA does not comment on pending litigation.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121603
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Lawsuit Targets EPA’s Asbestos Reporting Loopholes
Feb 19, 2019 | Courthouse News Service
By Nicholas Iovino
Traces of asbestos were recently found in crayons and makeup, but the Environmental Protection Agency has no way to track how much of the toxic chemical gets made, imported or put into U.S. products, public health groups claim in a federal lawsuit.
Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and four other groups sued the EPA on Monday, challenging the agency’s decision to allow exemptions to asbestos reporting rules. The groups also criticized the EPA’s denial of a petition to impose stricter reporting requirements on companies that handle asbestos.
“There is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos,” the groups state in their 16-page complaint.
Recognized as a human carcinogen since the 1970s, asbestos exposure has been linked to cancers of the lungs, ovaries and larynx. The EPA banned asbestos in 1989, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ban two years later.
In Monday’s lawsuit, the public health groups claim the lack of reliable data weakens the EPA’s ability to track where asbestos is made, processed and imported in the U.S. – all information they say could help the agency as it embarks on a required risk assessment for the toxic chemical.
The EPA published a scoping document in June 2017 identifying asbestos-containing products, but the plaintiffs say the document provides “virtually no information” on how much asbestos exists in each product, the quantities produced and imported, sites where it is used, or the number of individuals exposed to it.
The EPA’s Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) rule, enacted in 2011, mandates that companies report asbestos levels in their products. But in July 2017, the EPA exempted the Occidental Chemical Corporation, which uses asbestos to make chlorine and other products, from those rules because “reporting is not required for ‘naturally occurring chemical substances,'” according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs filed a petition in September 2018 asking the EPA to eliminate this loophole. The agency denied the petition in December.
The EPA insisted that stricter reporting rules would not produce new information “that is not already known to EPA” and that the agency is “aware of all ongoing uses of asbestos and already has the information that EPA would receive if EPA were to amend the CDR requirements.”
The plaintiffs dispute that claim, arguing the EPA is ignoring “serious, well-documented concerns,” including the discovery of asbestos in Playskool crayons in 2018 and in makeup sold at the retailer Claire’s in 2017.
“EPA has greatly overstated its knowledge of asbestos use and exposure in the United States,” the plaintiffs stated in a letter urging the EPA to reconsider its decision on Jan. 31, 2019.
The public health groups accuse the EPA of violating the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. They seek a declaration that asbestos poses an unreasonable risk to human health and a court order directing the EPA to start a rulemaking process for new asbestos reporting requirements.
Other named plaintiffs include the American Public Health Association, the Center for Environmental Health, the Environmental Working Group and the Environmental Health Strategy Center.
Michael Connett of Walters Kraus and Paul in El Segundo, California, and Robert Sussman in Washington D.C. represent the public health groups.
The EPA did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday afternoon. A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment.
https://www.courthousenews.com/lawsuit-targets-epas-asbestos-reporting-loopholes/
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Feb 20, 2019 | NY Magazine
By Stephen S. Hall
Monterey County, in Northern California, is one of those places that appear to tell a tale of two Americas. The part that runs along the Pacific coastline, from Pebble Beach and Carmel in the north down to Big Sur, is breathtaking and breathtakingly affluent. Travel 20 miles inland, over a narrow ridge of mountains, and you end up in the Salinas Valley, informally known as the Salad Bowl of the World, which is greened by endless rows of lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli erupting out of rich brown soil and tended by a predominantly immigrant and poor community of farmworkers. Some of those fields run practically up to the main entrance of Natividad Medical Center in the town of Salinas, where, more than two decades ago, an environmental epidemiologist named Brenda Eskenazi came to study the effects of pesticides on children’s brain development. If there is a comforting illusion that barriers — be they a ridge of mountains or sheer wealth or a “wall” — can somehow seal off the dangers of modern life, the data that Eskenazi and her colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have produced tell a different story.
Sitting in an office on the grounds of the Natividad center recently, Eskenazi, by turns caustic and conscientiously precise, jokes that she could not have picked a more inconvenient group of experimental subjects. More than half of the primarily Latina mothers she and her team began studying in 1999 lived at or below the poverty level, 85 percent of them came from Mexico (some of uncertain immigration status), almost none of them spoke English, and they were scattered across 100 miles of rich agricultural real estate — “in a place,” says Eskenazi, a native New Yorker, “where there’s no public transportation.” Despite the inconvenience, these women and their children helped the Berkeley group make a series of alarming discoveries: Elevated levels of pesticide exposure in the womb were linked to neurological delays and autismlike symptoms in 2-year-olds; by age 7, the children with the highest exposures showed behavioral problems and a loss of IQ; by age 14, the link to autism-spectrum traits persisted; and researchers continue to assess these problems in older teens who return for assessments at 18 years old. Other research has found traces of the same pesticides to be ubiquitous in the U.S. population, and no one yet knows what a safe level of exposure might be.
It’s a cliché to say children are the most vulnerable members of society, but over the past three decades, scientists have established this as a physiological fact. Children eat more food and drink more water per unit of body weight than adults. They breathe more rapidly (and tend to breathe that air close to the ground). Those facts alone make children particularly susceptible when they are exposed to chemicals and pollutants. But that is especially true in the prenatal period and during early childhood, when the brain undergoes tremendous development.
Eskenazi’s project — the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS) study — was part of a wave of epidemiological studies launched in the late 1990s to explore the possible effects of environmental chemicals and toxins on fetuses and children. Eskenazi and her fellow scientists across the field have amassed an increasingly consistent, grim picture of possible neurological harms from a variety of environmental poisons, including chemicals found in agricultural pesticides (that also turn up in food), microscopic particles of carbon and other pollutants in the air, barely detectable levels of lead in the water — all are toxins that travel across state lines and abide by no barriers, socioeconomic or otherwise. In 2012, David Bellinger of Harvard’s school of public health published an eye-popping analysis of the impact of just three toxins — lead, methylmercury, and organophosphate pesticides — on neurological development, concluding that American children between the ages of 0 and 5 had suffered a collective loss of more than 41 million IQ points because of their environmental exposure. That may not sound like a lot when spread across 24 million children, but Bellinger analyzed only three types of toxicants out of an estimated 40,000 chemicals currently in use, many of which have not been studied in children to the same extent.
It’s hard to underestimate the impact of this research. Until the mid-1990s, regulatory agencies had calculated health risks based on studies of adult males; children didn’t become part of the calculus until 1996, when Congress mandated they be considered. And not until 2016, after years of “hotly debating” the issue, according to a former EPA official, did the agency finally embrace epidemiological studies, for the first time, in its decision to ban virtually all uses of chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate pesticide among the chemicals in use during Eskenazi’s Berkeley study. It was a huge moment for the scientists who study children’s environmental health.
The celebration was short-lived. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, overturned the proposed ban on chlorpyrifos — a decision that Columbia University scientist Virginia Rauh, in a commentary for The New England Journal of Medicine, said “may be putting an entire generation of young brains in harm’s way.” Since then, the EPA has relaxed air-pollution standards, proposed rolling back regulations on mercury emissions, and introduced a plan for lead poisoning that critics say turns back the clock 20 years — all acts concerning toxins that epidemiologists have flagged as harmful to children. At the same time, the agency overhauled the regulatory process to diminish scientific input. Beginning last summer, the EPA requested raw data from Eskenazi and other scientists whose research has shown adverse neurological effects in children; public health experts view the move as a hostile act meant to either discredit or exclude the findings from consideration in setting federal health standards. And in September, the EPA abruptly placed Ruth Etzel, its highest-ranking (and most tenacious) advocate for children’s health, on administrative leave. It was, writ large, an attempt to purge the science that has established compelling evidence of environmental harms to the neurological development of children throughout the country.
The story of how epidemiology has revealed “silent epidemics” in children, and how the Trump administration is systematically denigrating that child-centric science, begins and ends with lead poisoning. In 1979, in The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard scientist Herbert L. Needleman published the results of the first study laying out the public-health implications of minuscule lead exposures — cognitive delays, behavioral anomalies, and lower IQ. Those results highlighted a debate that has roiled environmental science ever since: Epidemiology had revealed that low levels of lead exposure caused brain damage in children, whereas most traditional toxicology experiments — conducted on animals — had not.
After Needleman’s work, laws requiring reductions of lead in gasoline and paint led to dramatic declines in the amount of lead in the blood of virtually every American child. The Flint water crisis notwithstanding, reduction of environmental lead is widely considered one of the public-health triumphs of the past half-century. But Needleman paid dearly for it.
Gasoline and chemical companies like E.I. DuPont, Dutch Shell, and the Ethyl Corporation of America attacked the lead studies as inconclusive and poorly conducted; one scientist allied with the gasoline industry argued that the loss of IQ in children was due not to lead but to their parents’ low IQs. Needleman, who had moved to the University of Pittsburgh, later faced allegations of scientific misconduct from industry-associated researchers, prompting a two-year investigation by the National Institutes of Health, in which he was ultimately exonerated. In a bid for “transparency,” recalled Philip Landrigan, who headed children’s environmental health research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine for three decades, lead-industry representatives gained access to Needleman’s raw data and tried to use it to discredit his findings.
The lead findings were debated for more than two decades, and Needleman, denied access to his own research files for two years, emerged a bruised and embittered figure. In a 1992 article for the journal Pediatrics chronicling his travails, Needleman made clear he felt like the victim of a witch hunt; the title was “Salem Comes to the National Institutes of Health.” “Needleman was hounded,” said Lynn R. Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “But by the time it was all done, there were a dozen other studies showing exactly the same thing.” By 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded there was no safe level of lead exposure, in part because its deleterious effects were irreversible.
In April 1979, in the same week the New England Journal paper on lead poisoning came out, Eskenazi interviewed with Needleman for a job at Harvard. Eskenazi — a proud alumna of Flushing High School, Queens College, and Woodstock Nation (she attributes her original interest in neuropsychology to watching a young man at the music festival who dove headfirst into the pavement while tripping) — had just gotten a Ph.D. at the City University of New York, and one of her first research projects focused on lead. She didn’t get the job, but she and a new generation of environmental epidemiologists considered Needleman’s paper revolutionary. “It was like the first really good study to do what we were doing,” she recalls.
Eskenazi went on to join the faculty at UC Berkeley. In 1998, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the EPA began to fund ambitious research projects on children’s health, and her CHAMACOS study was among the first. The Berkeley researchers chose the Salinas Valley, which generates some $4.4 billion worth of lettuce, produce, and fruit each year, in large part because the mild, Mediterranean-like weather extends the growing season to 11 months. “We might lose families more easily in the Central Valley, whereas in the Salinas Valley they were more likely to stay put,” Eskenazi explains. As is standard in human-subject research, the Berkeley group baked in absolute privacy protections, including a “certificate of confidentiality” from the NIH pledging that the researchers could not “be compelled to reveal to anyone outside of the study the identity of study participants or information about them.” By 1999, the group had recruited 601 pregnant women to join the study; in 2000, the first children were born.
Since then, the Berkeley group has collected upwards of 350,000 biological and environmental samples — blood, urine, breast milk, saliva, and even household dust — from participants and has published more than 150 papers on the health effects on children of environmental toxins, including elevated levels of organophosphate (or OP) pesticides, which account for roughly 70 percent of all pesticide use in the U.S. There was good reason to study OP pesticides: They block an enzyme in nerve cells, essentially causing a synaptic stutter of hyperstimulation. That nervous-system frenzy makes for a highly effective insecticide, but in animal experiments, researchers have shown that this class of chemicals disrupts the formation and proper function of synapses, which are crucial to brain function. The Berkeley group found an association between in-utero exposure to OP pesticides and adverse neurological effects, including loss of IQ, cognitive deficits, behavioral issues like lack of attention, and respiratory problems. The effects are long-lasting, Eskenazi said, “from early age into the teens.”
Other research groups from that era, funded by both the NIEHS and the EPA, have reported similar findings. As any savvy consumer of medical news knows, correlation does not equal causation, and single studies should be viewed with caution, but as Eskenazi and others noted in a commentary published last fall, 26 of 27 studies have found a link between OP-pesticide exposure and adverse neurological effects in children. As Harvard’s Bellinger put it, “What’s important is the weight of evidence that accumulates, study after study … If all that kind of evidence together seems to be telling a consistent story, then I think the inference of causality becomes progressively more tenable.”
Studies relying on brain imaging to show the effects of environmental toxins on a child’s neurological development have only reinforced that link. In 1997, Virginia Rauh, deputy director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, and her colleagues began studying the prenatal effects of exposure to airborne pollutants on a group of pregnant women who lived in Washington Heights, central Harlem, and the South Bronx. Part of their study focused on chlorpyrifos. It is the most widely used insecticide in the country, according to the EPA, even though its use has declined since Rauh and Eskenazi began their studies; farmers use it on everything from Georgia peaches and California tree nuts to Kansas corn and Christmas trees grown in Oregon. The women in the Columbia study, mostly African-American or of Dominican ancestry, encountered chlorpyrifos because it was also widely used at the time as the active ingredient in household insecticides, including Raid. EPA scientists became so concerned about the possible health effects that in 2000 the agency began to phase in a ban on most residential uses of the chemical.
The Columbia group has followed approximately 370 children who were born to women exposed during pregnancy. Every few years, they bring the children in for psychological and cognitive tests and, more recently, brain-imaging sessions with an MRI machine. In a series of papers, Rauh and her colleagues have documented a link between higher levels of exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb and early cognitive and behavioral deficits. MRI images showed that children with the highest prenatal exposure had structural “anomalies” in parts of the brain involved in attention, language, and executive function; Rauh is reluctant to call them abnormalities, because no one knows exactly what they mean. But the study showed, Rauh says, “significant differences, years later, in structural characteristics of the brain” between kids who had high versus low pesticide exposure in the womb. In some cases, higher exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb was linked to surprising changes in brain architecture: females exhibited structural features typical of the male brain and males exhibited features typical of female brains. More recently, the Columbia researchers have reported that about 40 percent of the children who had the highest exposures to chlorpyrifos in the womb exhibited “mild to moderate tremor” in at least one arm.
The insidious thing about environmental toxins is that they can turn up far from farm fields or cockroach-infested housing units. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a research project conducted by the CDC, has consistently detected the breakdown products of OP pesticides in the urine of a random sample of Americans. “It’s not like the exposures that the farmworkers are getting are so outside of the realm of possibility of the general U.S. citizen,” says Eskenazi. “They’re also getting exposure from residues in food, just like we are.” Chlorpyrifos, Rauh adds, is widely used on golf courses.
At the start of 2015, around the same time the tremor findings came out, Ruth Etzel, a pediatrician and international leader in children’s environmental health, became head of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection. Although this was a tiny 15-person office in a vast 15,000-employee bureaucracy, Etzel had the ear of top officials at the agency.
She had monthly one-on-one meetings with EPA administrator Gina McCarthy and weighed in on the robust, wide-open scientific debates McCarthy famously convened to reach consensus on safe health standards. Etzel soon found herself involved in the long-running debate about the proposed ban on chlorpyrifos.In 2007, two public-interest groups petitioned the EPA to ban all uses of the pesticide, arguing that there was no safe level of exposure in food. That triggered a legitimate debate within the EPA about whether the agency should weigh epidemiological studies more heavily than animal testing to establish safe health standards. Chlorpyrifos emerged as the test case. EPA scientists and administrators concluded in November 2016 that the epidemiological findings out of Columbia, Berkeley, and elsewhere warranted a total ban on chlorpyrifos. “Everybody was in agreement that it should be banned,” Etzel recalled during several interviews last fall, “because the scientific data were so compelling. There were no dissenters at EPA that I’m aware of, at least not that were in our discussions.”
The whole process for determining health risks changed with the arrival of the Trump administration. Pruitt took over as EPA administrator in February 2017 and immediately struck a new tone: Industry had a more prominent presence (Dow, the manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, contributed $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund), and career staff were reduced to being spectators at Pruitt’s weekly staff meeting. “The nonpolitical people were just there to listen,” says Etzel, one of about 15 top-echelon career officials who attended the meetings. Secrecy was in, and science was out. Pruitt installed a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office, and security guards limited access to a long corridor on the third floor that led to the EPA administrator’s office, according to Elizabeth Southerland, who resigned in 2017 after 33 years at the agency and now consults with the Environmental Protection Network, an organization of former EPA employees. She said only political appointees were typically allowed to pass the Pruitt checkpoint. “Scientists just became irrelevant at the agency,” Southerland said, “because we were not allowed in the room where the decisions were being made.” The freeze-out extended to the Office of Children’s Health Protection; rather than having the ear of the EPA administrator, Etzel says, “the meetings stopped altogether.” Her supervision was reassigned to the acting deputy chief of staff, and she never again met one-on-one with the EPA administrator.
Pruitt’s reversal of the planned total ban on chlorpyrifos was an explicit repudiation of the epidemiological studies. “By reversing the previous administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world,” Pruitt said in announcing the decision, “we are returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results.” An EPA press release dismissed the peer-reviewed epidemiological findings as “novel and uncertain,” adding that “reliable data, overwhelming in both quantity and quality, contradicts the reliance on — and misapplication of” — the epidemiological studies.Scientists just became irrelevant at the agency, because we were not allowed in the room where the decisions were being made.
Chemical and agricultural interests have long insisted that use of the pesticide is both safe and essential. DowDuPont, whose Dow AgroSciences division makes chlorpyrifos, cited “fundamental limitations” in epidemiological studies, and said the Berkeley and Columbia findings were “unreliable and not valid for purposes of regulatory decision-making,” according to a company spokesperson.
DowDupont says chlorpyrifos use is supported by “more than 4,000 studies and reports examining the product in terms of health, safety and the environment.” And Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of the Department of Agriculture, alluded last fall to “significant flaws” in the EPA’s 2016 assessment of health risks, adding that “the available scientific evidence does not indicate the need for a total ban.” By contrast, the American Academy of Pediatrics says the evidence of chlorpyrifos’s risk to children is “unambiguous.”“We were stunned,” Etzel says of Pruitt’s decision. “I was not consulted. Nobody in my office was consulted. We learned about the decision when we picked up the newspaper or turned on the radio that day.” The courts were stunned too. In August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered the agency to reinstate the total ban within 60 days. Earlier this month, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to rehear the case.
Despite the chlorpyrifos decision, Etzel, oddly, remained cautiously optimistic about the new EPA regime. “I’m a Midwesterner,” she says. “I look at the world through rose-colored glasses.” In a three-minute pitch to Pruitt, Etzel pushed the idea of an ambitious federal strategy to eliminate lead poisoning. An estimated 500,000 American children still have elevated levels of lead in their blood. “That is an epidemic in anybody’s book,” said David Jacobs, chief scientist for the National Center for Healthy Housing, “and requires urgent action.” Etzel had been co-chairing a multiagency presidential task force to develop just such a plan since 2016, and she felt Pruitt was genuinely interested in what he called a “war on lead.” In fact, he set a June 2018 deadline to present the government’s new lead strategy.
But events — including mounting pressure on the scandal-challenged Pruitt to resign — intervened. On July 5, Pruitt was gone, and Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist who had served as Pruitt’s deputy, was installed as acting EPA administrator. As Etzel’s staff put it to her, “unusual things were happening.”
In late June, just before Pruitt’s resignation, Etzel and Eskenazi found themselves together at a scientific meeting in Taipei. Informally voicing the sentiments of the scientific community, Eskenazi implored Etzel not to quit her key regulatory post at the EPA. “We need you there,” she said. “We need you to protect the children.”
Etzel chuckles when I ask her if she recalls the conversation. “I do, I do,” she says, “because so many people felt like we needed to just stand up despite the guerrilla warfare and continue to say what needed to be done.”
Although things were “really tough,” she told Eskenazi, “I’m going to stay.”
And she did — though things only got tougher. EPA administrators, who had defended Pruitt’s $43,000 phone booth and $3.5 million taxpayer-supported security detail, began to question the staff of the Office of Children’s Health Protection in an apparent attempt, Etzel believes, to find financial irregularities within her department. During the summer, the employees responsible for travel expenses and grants in her office were called to the office of the administrator and, according to her, were “tormented” by the questioning. “Ruth, they’re after us,” one of her staffers told her. Another amended that impression: “I’m not sure they’re after us, but they’re after you!”
At the same time, progress on the federal lead initiative appeared to stall, according to Etzel, just as the plan was due to be finalized. The perception among other agencies in the presidential task force, she says, “was that EPA was holding it up. Nobody knew exactly why.” In early August, Etzel’s standing meeting with her supervisor were permanently canceled without explanation.
No sooner had Eskenazi returned to California from the Taiwan conference than she had her own issues with the EPA. On July 12, she received an email from someone in the EPA’s “Pesticide Re-Evaluation Division,” asking her to turn over her raw data from the CHAMACOS study; the EPA group wanted “to explore the uncertainty” about how pesticides affected developing brains. Eskenazi immediately referred the inquiry to University of California lawyers.
This request was not an isolated incident. In April 2018, resurrecting tactics from the Needleman era, Pruitt had announced a policy called Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, which stipulated that no research could be used to establish health standards for EPA regulations unless the scientists made their data publicly available. “The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end,” Pruitt declared at the time. (This tactic dates back to the Obama era: Beginning in 2010, the EPA — “spurred by industry,” according to an agency source — has repeatedly requested the Columbia group’s data; the university has, while working to accommodate the EPA’s request, repeatedly expressed concerns about compromising the confidentiality of study participants.)
Although the idea of transparency sounds reasonable, even desirable, scientists regarded the intent behind the EPA policy as “very misleading and very disingenuous,” according to Landrigan, who fought the lead wars of the 1980s before helping to set up the Office of Children’s Health Protection. “We have an old saying in epidemiology,” Etzel says. “ ‘If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.’ ” The real motive, Landrigan said, was “to reanalyze the data and try to come up with different conclusions than the original authors. Another aim, he said, would be to use the data to track down individual study subjects and try to get those people to change their stories. “This happened in the 1970s and 1980s during the lead wars,” he said. Lynn Goldman, the dean of the public health school at George Washington University, said, “The thing that is worrisome is that they’re doing it because they’re trying to destroy you.” And epidemiologists have been especially targeted, she said, because “often from epidemiology, we see that things are far more hazardous than the animal data would have predicted.”
The surrender of raw data is a particularly sensitive issue to researchers who study children’s health, because potential violations of privacy could strip away the anonymity of minors with intellectual disabilities, mental-health issues, or, in the case of the CHAMACOS study, immigration-related concerns. In addition to Eskenazi’s, two other research groups, both of which had reported links between pesticide exposure and neurodevelopmental deficits, received requests from the EPA to turn over their raw data during the summer. In Landrigan’s view, whether the scientists comply or not, the transparency policy — which is still under review by Wheeler — is a win for the Trump EPA in its attempt to exclude the epidemiological studies from influencing regulations. If the scientists submit their data, they’ll open it to attack; if they withhold it on privacy grounds, they will effectively give the agency an excuse to ignore evidence of harms to children when they consider regulations.
Four days after the data request from the EPA, Eskenazi received another bombshell: The office of the director of the NIH informed her that it would not be renewing her $7.5 million grant. She had only a month to secure new funding. She does not believe the NIH decision was politically motivated (an NIH spokesperson said that, “regrettably,” the Berkeley study did not meet the requirements of the grant), but the action stunned other researchers, who have described the CHAMACOS study as “groundbreaking” and “a national treasure.” “I don’t really know why they pulled the money,” Eskenazi says. “I lay awake a lot at night, wondering what it was all about.”
While Eskenazi scrambled to find new funding to keep the CHAMACOS study afloat, the Trump EPA spent much of August announcing deregulatory initiatives that appeased the fossil-fuel industry — and ignored the science suggesting that those policy changes would perpetuate harm to children.
On August 2, the Trump administration announced its intention to delay emissions standards for cars and light trucks, in effect sanctioning continued high levels of traffic-related air pollution; a growing body of evidence links exposure to it to respiratory problems, early signs of neurodegenerative disease, and even autism-spectrum disorder. On August 21, the Trump EPA opened the door to increased amounts of black carbon and small particulate matter in the air with a planned rollback of restrictions on pollution from coal-burning power plants; even the EPA’s own analysis predicts 1,400 more deaths annually due to the increased pollution that will result. And on August 29, the Trump administration took the first step in dismantling Obama-era regulations governing mercury emissions from power plants; scientists have known for decades that developing fetuses are especially susceptible to mercury poisoning. “What became crystal clear to me is that EPA knew full well, because of the robust scientific literature, that chlorpyrifos and mercury and lead were harming the next generation,” Etzel says. “And despite that full knowledge, they refused to take action.”
Etzel’s final battle on behalf of children’s health may have been over lead. An August 31 draft of the federal lead policy was circulated internally to members of the president’s task force. Etzel declines to discuss any specifics of the lead strategy, but this version represented a retreat from previous versions, according to a source who saw multiple drafts. It abandoned provisions Etzel had argued for, including specific goals for eliminating lead and a specific budget to accomplish those goals. Conspicuously missing were any new regulations.
Throughout August and September, Etzel sent weekly emails requesting a meeting with Wheeler to discuss the lead plan. She was repeatedly told Wheeler was not available. Then, on the morning of September 25, while the rest of the country was gripped by the imminent Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Etzel’s scheduler got a call from the acting deputy chief of staff’s office, requesting a meeting that afternoon. At 4 p.m., Helena Wooden-Aguilar walked in, paused to compliment one of Etzel’s office decorations — a wall hanging from Guatemala — and then slid a piece of paper across her desk. “I’m putting you on administrative leave,” she said. Wooden-Aguilar refused to give a reason. “Give me your keys,” she said, according to Etzel. “Give me your iPhone and your credit card and your badge. And then I’ll walk you out.” Two people who appeared to be security personnel were waiting in the hallway, and the three EPA officials escorted Etzel to the door. She is not allowed to communicate with any EPA employees, including her former staff, and she still has not been told, more than four months later, why she was so unceremoniously evicted from her office, although she is still being paid. (The EPA press office did not respond to requests for comment.)
At 5:21 p.m., barely an hour later and still in shock, Etzel fired off a plaintive email to Landrigan and other colleagues, describing what had happened. “I appear to be the ‘fall guy’ for their plan to ‘disappear’ the office of children’s health,” she wrote. First reported by BuzzFeed, the email went viral in the children’s-health community.
“Based on all the facts I can see, including the timing of the drafts, it really appears that putting Ruth Etzel on administrative leave was at least partially driven by a desire to remove her from the discussion on lead specifically,” said Tom Neltner of the Environmental Defense Fund, who is also on EPA’s Children’s Health Protection advisory committee. “They’d clearly taken steps backward in the August 31 version, then three weeks later she gets put on administrative leave. That’s about the time it takes for a bureaucratic organization to review it, recognize that Ruth would be vocal on the issue, and figure out a strategy to silence her.”
In late December, just before the government shutdown, the EPA released the president’s long-delayed lead-poisoning plan. The National Resources Defense Council called it a “lead balloon.” Neltner said the final document did not amount to a strategy at all. “From my perspective,” he said, “the plan goes backwards from where we were in 1999.”
There are approximately 4 million children born every year, and roughly 24 million children under 5. They may be the biggest losers. “Anything that opens up exposure of children to myriad factors that have the potential to cause brain injury, reduce intelligence, shorten their attention spans, and diminish their emotional stability is really bad for this country,” said Landrigan. “This affects kids in red states, kids in blue states, kids in purple states — everybody’s children are at risk.”
On January 9, the president formally nominated Wheeler to be the permanent administrator of the EPA. During his confirmation hearing, Wheeler touted the agency’s record. “The American public have a right to know the truth about the risks they face in their daily lives,” he said, “and how we are responding.” The reality, according to Etzel, is that the current EPA has “dismantled the processes” that allowed it to find those truths in the first place.
When I last talked to Eskenazi, she was still working through the logistics of keeping the Salinas study going on a shoestring. She was optimistic that a separate branch of the NIH, the NIEHS, would provide bridge funding to allow data collection to continue. At the same time, she is processing what is happening to her life’s work. “I just don’t even know how to deal with all the feelings,” she tells me. “I can’t stand it anymore to know that this is really happening. And that there are ignorant people who are making regulations that are going to affect their own children and their children’s children. And they don’t care.”
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/trump-epa-risking-health-of-american-children.html
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The Elephant in the Room: Potential Biopersistence of Short-Chain PFAs
Feb 20, 2019 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
In January 2018, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists published a peer-reviewed journal article stating a commonly used raw material to make greaseproof paper is likely to persist in the human body. FDA scientists’ sophisticated analysis and remarkable conclusion raises questions about the broad assumption that short-chain perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), as a class, did not accumulate.
Strangely, two recent reviews funded by the FluoroCouncil, ignored FDA scientists’ study even though it was published ten months before the industry group submitted their analysis for peer-review. The peer reviewers appear to have missed the omission as well. As a result, the industry evaluations continue to perpetuate the flawed assumptions, concluding that perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA) and related short-chain PFAS “present negligible human health risk” and that this substance alone is a suitable marker for the “safety of fluorotelomer replacement chemistry.”
In this blog, we discuss the differences between the studies and the implications of the discordance between FDA’s and industry’s conclusions for the safety assessment of short-chain PFAS.
What do we know about short-chain PFAS?
With the phase-out of long-chain PFAS to make water- and grease-proof materials, companies shifted to short-chain fluorotelomer-based chemistry.[1] These new raw materials are used to build polymers and include chemicals that contain six fully-fluorinated carbon groups with additional non-fluorinated carbons. These molecules are usually known as C6 and a common starting material for polymers is a 6:2 fluorotelomer alcohol (6:2 FTOH) that has six fully-fluorinated carbons and two non-fluorinated carbons with an alcohol on the non-fluorinated end.
Industry expected that these C6 compounds, among them 6:2 FTOH and its main manufacturing impurity perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), would: 1) be less toxic than long-chain PFAS such as 8:2 FTOH, PFOA and PFOS; and 2) not accumulate in the body.
However, these expectations do not hold up under scrutiny. A 2015 study by an FDA scientist concluded that “significant data gaps remain” about the toxicity of the 6:2 FTOH, and in the 2018 study, the agency scientists raised the potential for biopersistence.
Significance of FDA’s conclusion about potential biopersistence of C6 fluorotelomer alcohol
FDA scientists’ thorough evaluation of publicly available[2] animal and human exposure data on 6:2 FTOH provided important insight into the body’s transformation of the chemical. They identified three metabolites, namely the PFHxA mentioned above, 5:3 fluorotelomer carboxylic acid (5:3 A) and perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA) that could be used as markers of 6:2 FTOH exposure. For each metabolite, they also provided internal exposure estimates. The figure below shows 6:2 FTOH (in blue box) and how the body converts it to the three metabolites (in red boxes).
As a result of their analysis, FDA scientists identified 5:3 A as an important biomarker for the potential biopersistence of 6:2 FTOH because:5:3 A had the highest internal exposure and the slowest elimination by the body; and 5:3 A’s elimination was reduced when exposure to 6:2 FTOH increased.
FDA’s scientists also concluded there are sex-based differences in the elimination of the other two metabolites, PFHxA and PFHpA, in animal studies. Although human data was only available in men, the difference observed in animals could mean that men and women may have different internal exposures and, therefore, experience different toxicity.
FluoroCouncil-funded reviews reached a different conclusion
In January 2019, two reviews (HERE and HERE) funded by the FluoroCouncil were published concluding that: PFHxA “is less hazardous to human health than PFOA”; “PFHxA and related fluorotelomer precursors currently appear to present negligible human health risk to the general population”; and PFHxA is not expected to bioaccumulate due to its “rapid and nearly complete elimination” from the body.
These reviews evaluated the toxicology, exposure and biomonitoring data available for PFHxA. The analysis included the estimation of a toxicity reference dose and drinking water and residential groundwater screening levels. The overall conclusion was that “PFHxA levels currently present in the environment are well below levels that may present a concern for human health.”
The main difference between these reviews and the study by FDA scientists is that the industry-funded scientists focused exclusively on PFHxA. Their goal was to review the literature relevant to risk assessment to answer questions regarding “potential human health risks associated with exposure to fluorotelomer-based products” using PFHxA as a reference chemical for the entire short-chain PFAS class.
The two industry-funded reviews reported that PFHxA has been measured in water, soil, household dust, human serum, plasma, whole blood, urine, breast milk, and food with various frequencies. And that the substance is environmentally persistent, mobile and may accumulate in the leaves and fruits of plants. The reviews also reference a 2013 publication estimating that the mean half-life in humans is 32 days. In other words, it may take a month on average for half the amount present in the body to be eliminated.
Although the industry-funded reviews narrowly focused on a single chemical, the authors extended their conclusion to the entire fluorotelomer-based chemical process when they say that PFHxA is a “suitable marker for the safety of fluorotelomer replacement chemistry used today.” That is quite a bold statement that was not fully explained.
Following their reasoning, any other short-chain PFAS used in fluorotelomer-based products would be assumed to be as safe as PFHxA, including 6:2 FTOH. That assumption, however, appears to be flawed based on FDA scientists’ study showing that 6:2 FTOH metabolite 5:3 A is an important biomarker for the potential biopersistence of 6:2 fluorotelomer alcohol.
Conclusion
The study by FDA scientists has the potential to be a game changer in the safety assessment of short-chain PFAS. Based on their conclusions, safety studies must:Assess how the body breaks down these chemicals and how fast they are eliminated; andBe redesigned to account for biopersistence by including long-term exposures and exposures during development.
A decade ago, industry led us to believe that the new technology replacing toxic long-chain PFAS would be “more favorable” to human health and the environment. As a result, FDA has been approving short-chain fluorotelomer chemicals to make polymers for use in contact with food without information on the potential biopersistence of the chemicals themselves or their metabolites.
As we have noted in previous blogs, it is time to start making decisions on chemicals’ safety based on scientific evidence – not on assumptions. For PFAS, FDA needs to reassess the safety and environmental impacts of these chemicals for use as food contact substances. Until that review is complete, companies should avoid using products treated with the chemicals.
[1] For more information see Buck et al. 2011. Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in the Environment: Terminology, Classification, and Origins. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management — Volume 7, Number 4—pp. 513–541.
[2] Except for Nilsson et al. (2013), all the publications were by DuPont scientists. Russell et al. (2015). Himmelstein et al. (2012). DeLorme et al. (2011). Himmelstein et al. (2012).
http://blogs.edf.org/health/2019/02/20/potential-biopersistence-short-chain-pfas/
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A New Analysis Shows a ‘Compelling Link’ Between Roundup and Cancer
Feb 20, 2019 | Care2
By Steve Williams
Monsanto has long denied a link between its globally-used weed killer, glyphosate, and cancers in humans, but a new meta-analysis finds a “compelling link” that could finally prompt the EPA to reevaluate its own classification of the ubiquitous herbicide.
The review, published this month in “Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research“, looks at the broad spectrum herbicide and investigates studies that deal with high cumulative exposures. The University of Washington researchers wanted to give a definitive answer on whether there is evidence that glyphosate—often sold under the brand name Roundup—is a carcinogenic. They were specifically looking at whether it leads to higher incidences of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in humans.
The researchers looked at all published studies available on the impact of glyphosate on humans, including a 2018 study called the “Agricultural Health Study“. They found that people who have been exposed to high levels of glyphosate had a 41 percent higher risk of developing NHL. The outcome did not meaningfully alter, even after multiple sensitivity testing.
To give more context, the researchers then turned to animal and so-called “mechanistic” studies—those that focus on what or how a pathogen or drug does what it does. The team found further evidence to support the link between high exposure and increased NHL risk.
They also note that there was evidence to support an increase in malignant lymphoma, suppression of the immune system, endocrine disruption and genetic changes that overlap with NHL.
With all of this evidence, the researchers arrive at a stark conclusion, saying, “All of the meta-analyses conducted to date, including our own, consistently report the same key finding: exposure to GBHs (glyphosate-based herbicides) are associated with an increased risk of NHL.”
In 2015 the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) categorized glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, saying that if exposure is high enough, there was evidence of an increased risk of NHL.
Monsanto has always argued that the scientists ignored important studies when they made this determination. This argument has allowed several agencies—including the EPA and Health Canada—to say there are no credible findings that support glyphosate being cancer-causing.
However, this latest analysis comes on the heels of a plagiarism scandal in Europe, where it was revealed last year that EU regulators had based a decision on whether to reauthorize glyphosate on evidence that was directly lifted from Monsanto’s own internal studies, without giving proper context or a thorough and balanced critique. This wasn’t just a few passages. A report made to the European Parliament found that over half of the text was copied from industry sources, sometimes lifting entire pages. This, campaigners said, explained why the EU’s findings were so different from the IARC’s classification.
The analysis has an added layer of importance. “Three of the study authors were tapped by the EPA as board members for a 2016 scientific advisory panel on glyphosate,” The Guardian notes. “The new paper was published by the journal Mutation Research /Reviews in Mutation Research, whose editor in chief is EPA scientist David DeMarini.”
While obviously this does not directly affect how the EPA might position itself on glyphosate, it does mean that the public is now well aware that several key members of the EPA know glyphosate’s potential as a carcinogen. They also know that several members of the EPA have been critical of the agency for failing to apply its own rules to its review of glyphosate.
Bayer, who now owns Monsanto, has said this new analysis is “statistical manipulation” that has “serious” methodological problems, and that it ”provides no scientifically valid evidence that contradicts the conclusions of the extensive body of science demonstrating that glyphosate-based herbicides are not carcinogenic.”
The researchers readily admit that their analysis isn’t without its problems. For one thing, there are only a relatively limited amount of independent, high quality studies available on this topic. Furthermore, because of the limited number of studies available, the researchers could not control the population sample sizes the studies used, meaning that they varied quite dramatically from study to study. Yet they found the cancer risk consistently from study to study. For this reason, the researchers stand by their analysis, saying they find the link “compelling”.
So what to take away from this study? Does it prove that there is a risk of NHL for the general public who use Roundup or other glyphosate-containing weed-killers? The data don’t support that conclusion. However, this analysis gives a strong, if not definitive, answer on whether there is evidence that glyphosate is carcinogenic. The answer to that question is yes.
More high quality studies on this topic are needed, because for too long Monsanto appears to have set the agenda on how its products have been reviewed. If nothing else, this analysis should demonstrate the need for in-depth, independent reviews funded by national governments to ensure the highest levels of rigor and transparency.
The EPA has said it is now reviewing this analysis.
https://www.care2.com/causes/a-new-analysis-shows-a-compelling-link-between-roundup-and-cancer.html
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EU Member States Reject First Reach Authorisation Application
Feb 20, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Luke Buxton
EU member states have for the first time voted not to grant an application for authorisation for a specific use of a substance of very high concern (SVHC).
At the REACH Committee meeting on 14-15 February, the competent authorities dismissed Hapoc’s application to use sodium dichromate in a molten bath form for the treatment of certain micro-surgery medical instruments.
Sodium dichromate, one of 197 SVHCs on the REACH candidate list, is a known carcinogen.
According to a European Commission release, the application did not conform to the information requirements under REACH. It was "lacking sufficient elements to assess the risk associated with this use, and failing to provide such information on request".
The REACH Committee followed Echa’s recommendations, the Commission said. In April last year, Echa’s Committees for Risk Assessment and Socio-economic Analysis (Rac and Seac) found Hapoc’s application to be "not in conformity" with REACH. This marked the first time an application has been found non-compliant.
Hapoc’s Dr Uwe König told Chemical Watch that the application describes a new technology. Other applications by Hapoc are based on existing technologies currently used for production, he said, and "therefore, all data needed are given and an adequate review period can be defined".
But due to the development process of the new technology, some [of the] data changes during application. "We offered to submit updated information and asked for an adequate prolongation. Unfortunately, this was not accepted for equality reasons."
While he said the current authorisation process is "suitable with regard to existing technologies and processes", it "should be modified and adapted as soon as new developments and technologies are affected".
MEPs and NGOs have criticised the system, saying that granting an application to use an SVHC where suitable alternatives exist "violates REACH".
Chromium trioxide
The REACH Committee members also backed two applications for various uses of chromium trioxide – also a carcinogen – in the automotive, aerospace and other sectors.
One application, led by Lanxess Deutschland along with six other companies – referred to as the Chromium Trioxide Authorisation Consortium (CTAC) – covers six different uses. These companies are responsible for more than 1,500 sites and tens of thousands of jobs.
The summarised uses are: formulation of mixtures; functional chrome plating; functional chrome plating with decorative character; surface treatment in aeronautics and aerospace applications, unrelated to functional chrome plating or functional chrome plating with decorative character; surface treatment (except passivation of tin-plated steel (electrolytic tin plating – ETP)) for applications in architectural, automotive, metal manufacturing and finishing, and general engineering industry sectors unrelated to functional chrome plating or that with decorative character; and passivation of tin-plated steel (ETP).
For some uses, the recommended review period is seven years from the sunset date. In three uses – functional chrome plating with decorative character, surface treatment in sectors other than aviation, and passivation of tin plated steel – CTAC has four years before the review.
EU member states also approved another application to use chromium trioxide in the chrome plating of plastic parts in the automotive industry. It was submitted by a group of 13 companies, led by Gerhardi Kunststofftechnik.
Initially proposed by Rac and Seac for 12 years, the reduced duration of the review period to seven years is intended to "incentivise innovative development of substitutes" for chrome plating by reviewing their availability earlier, the Commission said.
When a company is granted an authorisation and sells an authorised substance to a downstream user, that user has to make a notification to Echa. In accordance with REACH Article 66, this must be done within three months from purchase.
"We have received these notifications for quite some time for other substances, but this is the first time for hexavalent chrome," Matti Vainio, Echa’s head of risk management implementation, said. "This is a big thing because now we will get to know much more information about the users of hexavalent chrome."
There are two things that are "not well known" in the authorisation system, Mr Vainio added. One is the importance of review reports (which are essentially updated applications) and the other is the Article 66 notifications to get to know who actually uses the substance.
[BOX OUT:
Authorisation numbers to date
-Echa has so far received applications for 209 uses and review reports for five uses, totalling 214 uses;
-the agency has sent Rac and Seac opinions on 204 uses to the Commission;
-so far the Commission has decided on 115 uses (published in the EU’s Official Journal); and
-in the last REACH Committee, 13 uses were agreed and the Commission will now decide on them in the coming weeks and publish in the Official Journal.
https://chemicalwatch.com/74499/eu-member-states-reject-first-reach-authorisation-application
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2 Years In, Perry Makes First Advisory Board Picks
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Jeremy Dillon
Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced today the selection of eight members to his advisory board, a list that leans heavily on industry officials in the nuclear, oil and natural gas, and reliability sectors.
The new members are Perry's first appointments to the board, originally established to offer advice and recommendations to the department. All Obama-era members of the board resigned in January 2017.
The board has remained empty for much of the past two years.
Perry tapped Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental Petroleum Corp., and Richard Mies, a retired Navy admiral, as the chairwoman and vice chairman of the panel, respectively.
Notable among the six other advisers is David Dewhurst, chairman and CEO of Falcon Seaboard, an energy investment company with ties to the oil and natural gas industry in Texas. Dewhurst served as Texas' lieutenant governor from 2003 to 2014, during Perry's tenure as the state's governor.
Not listed among the eight adviser appointees is an executive with extensive renewable or energy efficiency private-sector experience.
The five other appointees: Norman Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. David Lockwood, former chairman and CEO of EnergySolutions Inc. Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International.Samantha Ravich, chairwoman of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit.
Additional members may be announced in the coming weeks, DOE said, indicating that today's announcement marks "the first of multiple installments of the board."
The new board's first meeting is likely to occur March 5 at DOE headquarters, according to a notice in the Federal Register.
The board was first established during the George H.W. Bush administration. It later lapsed under the George W. Bush administration, but the Obama administration reconstituted it in 2010.
The panel's work, DOE said, is likely to include advice and recommendations on "promoting America's energy security, spurring innovation, reducing regulatory burden, modernizing the nuclear security enterprise and enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science and any other activities and operations of the Department of Energy as the Secretary may direct."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121617
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Green Groups Seek to Block Atlantic Offshore Oil Testing
Feb 20, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
Environmental groups are asking a federal court to block testing for oil and natural gas in the seafloor under the Atlantic Ocean.
While the Trump administration has not issued the final permits to five companies who want to do the testing using seismic airguns, the green organizations, led by the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, say the permits are “imminent” and testing could begin within 30 days.
“Seismic airguns create an underwater blast louder than all but military-grade explosives,” the groups wrote to the District Court for the District of South Carolina.
“For many marine species, seismic blasting will interfere with the ability to find food, care for their young, and communicate — behaviors critical to survival. [National Marine Fisheries Service] concedes that marine mammals will suffer harms like these hundreds of thousands of times,” they said.
They're seeking a preliminary injunction, in which the court would stop officials from allowing the testing while their larger case is being considered.
Seismic testing is a likely precursor to offshore drilling. As part of President Trump’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda, the Interior Department proposed last year to allow drilling along the entire Atlantic coast.
The request is part of a lawsuit the groups filed last year to overturn the November decision by the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to formally allow the five companies to harm marine species when they do testing.
The groups say those authorizations illegal disregarded scientific findings about the harm to species such as the endangered right whale. A coalition of coastal states opposed to drilling is also suing in the same lawsuit.
The NMFS permit is a necessary step toward seismic testing. But the final permit has to come from the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, an action that hasn’t yet happened but that the green groups say could happen soon.
The Justice Department will likely have the opportunity to rebut the green groups' arguments.
The groups and states scored a temporary win last month when the South Carolina federal court blocked the Trump administration from granting any seismic permits during the partial government shutdown.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/430770-greens-seek-to-block-atlantic-offshore-oil-testing
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Greens Go after Atlantic Seismic Testing
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Margaret Kriz Hobson
A group of conservation organizations today asked a federal court judge to prevent seismic testing in the Atlantic Ocean, the latest step in the ongoing legal battle over offshore oil and gas exploration along the East Coast.
The green groups are seeking a preliminary injunction against NOAA Fisheries, which granted incidental harassment permits to five seismic operators. The petition charges that the seismic surveys would include air gun blasting, which they say would violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
The seismic opponents contend that the companies plan to conduct overlapping and simultaneous seismic surveys that could cause irreparable harm to all forms of marine life, from zooplankton to the great whales. Specifically, they warn that seismic blasts could affect the 400 endangered North Atlantic right whales that make the Atlantic their home.
Laura Cantral, executive director of the Coastal Conservation League, charged that "the harm seismic blasting will inflict on dolphins and whales can't be reversed, that's why it is so important to have a full and open debate in court before allowing boats in the water."
"We have a chance to stop harm before it begins and to prevent the precursor to offshore drilling, something that no coastal communities in South Carolina want," she said.
Catherine Wannamaker, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charleston, said that "there are so few right whales left that risking harm or death to a single calf or a single female would be a devastating blow to the population."
"This season, we know seven calves were born, which is a remarkable turnaround from last year when none were," Wannamaker said. "These new calves are a small but critical step for this species, and we shouldn't do anything to jeopardize that."
The nine environmental groups — including the Southern Environmental Law Center, the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League and Oceana — filed the petition with the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.
The request for a preliminary injunction comes as the conservation groups are already in court seeking to halt the Trump administration's plan to allow energy exploration in the Atlantic (Greenwire, Dec. 11, 2018). No oil and gas exploration has been conducted in the Atlantic since the 1980s.
A separate legal challenge was filed in the same court by a group of South Carolina municipalities and a small business coalition (E&E News PM, Dec. 20, 2018).
In addition, the top legal officers for nine East Coast states filed a motion to intervene in support of the environmentalists' lawsuit. Those officials represent Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Virginia.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121619
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Al Gore Meets with Va. Residents Fighting Compressor Station
Feb 20, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
By Denise Lavoie
Former Vice President Al Gore urged residents of a historic African-American community in Virginia yesterday to continue their fight against a plan to build a natural gas pipeline compressor station in their neighborhood.
Gore and social justice advocate the Rev. William Barber II met with residents of Union Hill, a rural community about 70 miles west of Richmond that was founded by emancipated slaves after the Civil War.
The visit by Gore and Barber, part of an environmental justice tour, came weeks after a racial scandal rocked state government when both Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and Attorney General Mark Herring (D) acknowledged wearing blackface in the 1980s.
Gore told residents that the proposal to build the compressor station in the African-American community is a "vivid example of environmental racism."
"This proposed pipeline is a reckless, racist rip-off," Gore said.
He said Northam should fulfill his promise for racial reconciliation by opposing the pipeline project.
"This is an ideal opportunity for him to say, 'I've seen the light,'" Gore said.
During a raucous meeting before more than 700 people at Buckingham County Middle School, Barber said Dominion Energy Inc. — the lead developer of the pipeline — is "practicing sin" by proposing to build the compressor station in Union Hill.
"I want to say tonight that any governor or legislator, Democrat or Republican ... that has chosen Dominion over this community is scandalous," Barber said.
The Atlantic Coast pipeline would run 600 miles and carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina.
Opponents are concerned that exhaust from the 54,000-horsepower compressor station would hurt low-income and elderly residents living in Union Hill. Supporters say it will boost development.
Compressor stations are used to power interstate natural gas pipelines, moving gas through the system.
Dominion Energy, Virginia's most powerful corporation, has said it chose Union Hill for the compressor station because the community had enough land for sale and it intersects with an existing pipeline.
The company has also said that most air emissions at the station will be 50 to 80 percent lower than at any other compressor station in Virginia.
With a current price tag of more than $7 billion, the pipeline has recently suffered significant legal setbacks, including a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling throwing out a permit for the pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail. Dominion has suspended all project construction and said it plans to appeal the ruling.
Some residents of Union Hill, while not in favor of the project, have come to accept it.
Dominion has offered to give more than $5 million to help improve Union Hill.
Michelle Ford, a 47-year-old trainer and instructor for the state Department of Corrections who has lived in Union Hill her whole life, said she is not happy about the compressor station but she can see some economic benefits from the project, including job opportunities in the rural area.
"Nobody is saying, 'Yes, we want it, hooray,' Ford said. "What we're saying is, 'If it is going to come, what can Dominion do for the Union Hill community?'"
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121573
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CSB: Thermal Fatigue Likely Cause of Pascagoula Gas Plant Incident
Feb 19, 2019 | Oil & Gas Journal
By Nick Snow
Thermal fatigue was likely the cause of the explosion and fire at Enterprise Products Partners’ Pascagoula, Miss., gas plant late in the evening of June 27, 2016, a US Chemical Safety Board investigation concluded on Feb. 19.
The failure of the plant’s brazed aluminum heat exchanger (BAHX) led to the release of methane, ethane, propane, and other hydrocarbons that then ignited, CSB’s final report on the incident said. The resulting explosion and fires ultimately shut the site down for 6 months, it noted.
“More than 500 gas processing facilities operate across the country and the use of similar heat exchangers is common,” CSB Interim Executive Kristen Kulinowski said. “Extending the life cycle of equipment at these facilities requires more robust inspection protocols. Operators shouldn’t take the risk of waiting to find a leak because, as this case demonstrates, that leak could result in a catastrophic failure.”
EPP’s Pascagoula plant receives raw natural gas through a pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico and separates it into natural gas liquids and a natural gas fuel stream. The BAHX allows for the transfer of heat between two different process streams while keeping the streams separate, the report said.
Thermal fatigue can occur between a BAHX’s aluminum parts, which expand or contract as the exchanger is heated or cooled, the report said. “If the parts change temperature at sufficiently different rates, the expansion and contraction can be disproportionate,” it stated. “Over time, this process weakens metal and ultimately causes cracks, which can lead to the escape of hydrocarbons.”
Typically, when a leak is found, it can be repaired with minimal expense or consequence before a loss of containment occurs, the report said. “Assuming that leaks will be discovered and can be repaired prior to a catastrophic failure is referred to as a ‘leak-before failure’ assumption,” it pointed out.
Assessing industry guidance
Thermal fatigue is a known factor to BAHXs and there is industry guidance on recommended limits for maximum cyclic temperature fluctuations during operation and rates of cooling or heating during startup and shutdown. However, the CSB found this guidance was not robust for the diverse operations and environments where BAHXs operate, the report said.
At the Pascagoula gas plant, process data for the exchangers show that the BAHXs were repeatedly subjected to temperature changes that exceeded industry-recommended practices, it said. This increases stresses on the connections within the heat exchangers as the aluminum parts push against and pull apart from each other. At EPP over a 17-year period four different BAHX heat exchangers were repaired nine times, the report said.
It said the 2016 incident, as well as four other BAHX failure events at other facilities, illustrate that relying on a leak-before-failure assumption is not adequate. Operators of midstream gas plants need a more robust assessment and risk management plan that considers thermal fatigue to prevent the risk of a BAHX’s sudden and catastrophic rupture, it said.
“A number of midstream gas plant operators have reported that the limits and rates in existing industry guidance may not be realistic,” Investigator William Hougland said. “Our report encourages a meaningful dialogue among BAHX manufacturers, gas processors, and repair technicians. The CSB concluded that more realistic and updated guidance is needed to improve the safe use of BAHX.”
CSB also issued recommendations to the American Petroleum Institute and the GPA Midstream Association to share information related to failure hazards of BAHX’s from thermal fatigue.
https://www.ogj.com/articles/2019/02/csb-thermal-fatigue-likely-cause-of-pascagoula-gas-plant-incident.html
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Pipeline Safety Update - Issue No. 145
Feb 20, 2019 | National Law Review
By Susan A. Olenchuk, Bryn S. Karaus, and Marco Bracamonte
DOT Invites Public Input on Agency Guidance Recommended for Repeal or Revision
On February 5th, the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a Notice inviting the public to file comments identifying guidance documents issued by DOT modal agencies, including the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), that should be repealed or revised. DOT is interested in identifying guidance documents that (1) are no longer necessary; (2) spur cost-inducing actions by regulated entities; (3) are inconsistent or unclear; (4) may not be conducive to uniform or consistent enforcement; or (5) need to be updated. This notice is a continuation of an October 2017 notice requesting input on regulations and other agency actions that should be suspended, repealed, replaced or modified because they impose unnecessary burdens on the use of domestically-produced energy resources.
PHMSA issues various types of guidance, including advisory bulletins, frequently asked questions (FAQs), letters of interpretation, and inspection protocols. Comments are due April 8.
PHMSA Suspends Enforcement of Plastic Pipe Rule
We understand that PHMSA has suspended enforcement of the final rule amending the pipeline safety regulations applicable to the use of plastic pipe in the transportation of gas until PHMSA acts on a petition for reconsideration of the final rule filed by the American Gas Association (AGA) on December 20, 2018. The petition raised concerns about the ability of operators to implement the rule by the January 22, 2019 effective date. PHMSA also recommended that state regulators exercise their discretion to suspend enforcement. PHMSA did not appear to publically post the suspension of enforcement, but the action has been reported by other sources.
The NTSB’s 2019-2020 Ten Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements Addresses Pipelines
On February 11th, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued its 2019-2020 “Ten Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements,” including the safe transportation of hazardous materials. The NTSB stated that aging pipeline infrastructure poses increased risk of pipeline ruptures and urged the pipeline industry to conduct adequate risk assessments. The NTSB also provided the status of numerous safety recommendations that have been issued to PHMSA, operators and others. The NTSB also urged the railroad industry to meet existing federal deadlines for replacing or retrofitting DOT-117/DOT-117R rail tank cars.
PHMSA Rulemakings Update. The tables below summarize the status of the PHMSA’s pending pipeline safety rulemaking initiatives as reflected in the DOT’s November Significant Rulemaking Report, the Office of Management & Budget’s (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Fall 2018 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, and PHMSA’s Chart summarizing actions required by the 2016 Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety (PIPES) Act. OIRA’s Unified Regulatory Agenda appears in two principal parts, Current Agenda Agency Regulatory Entries for Active Actions and Current Long Term Actions.
Many of the estimated publication dates have passed. DOT has not released an updated Significant Rulemaking Report since November 2018.
Pending Final Rules
-Enhanced Emergency Order Procedures
-Plastic Pipe Rule
-Safety of Gas Transmission Pipelines, MAOP Reconfirmation, Expansion of Assessment Requirements and Other Related Amendments
-Safety of Gas Transmission Pipelines, Repair Criteria, Integrity Management Improvements, Cathodic Protection, Management of Change, and Other Related Amendments
-Safety of Gas Gathering Pipelines
-Safety of Onshore Hazardous Liquid Pipelines
-Underground Natural Gas Storage Facilities
Pending Notices of Proposed Rulemakings
-Class Location Requirements
-Gas Pipeline Regulatory Reform
-Liquid Pipeline Regulatory Reform
-Periodic Standards Update
-Repair Criteria for Hazardous Liquid Pipelines
-Valve Installation and Minimum Rupture Detection
Pending Advanced Notices of Proposed Rulemakings
-Coastal Ecological Unusually Sensitive Areas
OTHER PHMSA UPDATES
PHMSA seeks comments on several expiring information collections. On February 5, PHMSA issued a Notice and Request for Comments on several information collections that PHMSA intends to request that OMB extend without modification. The information collections expire April 30 and relate to gas transmission pipeline integrity management, control room management, gas distribution integrity management and response plans for onshore oil pipelines. Comments must be submitted to PHMSA by April 12.
UPDATES FROM INDUSTRY
Natural Gas Council issues report on pipeline cybersecurity. The Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council of the Natural Gas Council (NGC) issued a report entitled “Cybersecurity in the Natural Gas & Oil Industry.” The report describes how owners and operators pipelines communicate and collaborate with the U.S. intelligence community, other governmental organizations, and each other to bolster cybersecurity of the nation’s oil and gas pipeline infrastructure. Given increased sophistication and adaptiveness of cyber adversaries, the report urges that industry be allowed continued flexibility and agility to respond effectively and that government and industry continue their partnership in sharing cyber threat intelligence and strengthening cyber defenses.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/pipeline-safety-update-issue-no-145
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DOT Agencies Requiring Spill Response Plans for HHFTs
Feb 20, 2019 | Occupational Health & Safety
Two agencies within the U.S. Department of Transportation have issued a final rule aimed at strengthening railroads' preparedness for oil spills. The final rule from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration will take effect 180 days after being published.
It requires railroads to develop and submit Comprehensive Oil Spill Response Plans for route segments traveled by High Hazard Flammable Trains that are transporting petroleum oil in a block of 20 or more loaded tank cars and also trains that have a total of 35 loaded petroleum oil tank cars.
"This new rule will make the transport of energy products by railroad safer," U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said Feb. 15.
The rule revises the oil spill response plan requirements currently in place to require railroads to establish geographic response zones along various rail routes and ensure that both personnel and equipment are staged and prepared to respond in the event of an accident. It also requires railroads to identify the qualified individual responsible for each response zone, as well as the organization, personnel, and equipment capable of removing and mitigating a worst-case discharge. The rule also requires rail carriers to provide information about HHFTs to state and tribal emergency response commissions in accordance with the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015.
https://ohsonline.com/articles/2019/02/19/dot-agencies-requiring-spill-response-plans.aspx?admgarea=news
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Railroads Will Be Required to Submit Oil-Spill Plans
Feb 20, 2019 | Transportation Today
By Melina Druga
A recent federal rule will require railroads to develop and submit comprehensive oil-spill response plans for routes that include high hazard flammable trains (HHFTs).
The rule will apply to HHFTs transporting petroleum oil in blocks of 20 or more loaded tank cars or trains that have 35 total loaded petroleum oil tank cars.
The rule also requires rail carriers provide information about high-hazard flammable trains to state or tribal emergency response commissions, establishes geographic response zones along various rail routes, and requires qualified individuals and equipment capable of mitigating a worst-case incident for each zone.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration issued the final rule.
U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Jack Reed (D-RI) worked for several years to modernize oil-spill response plans and are supportive of the rule.
“Millions of barrels of crude oil are transported across our country by rail every day,” Collins said. “The bulk of these shipments are completed safely, but catastrophes can occur.”
The rule is long overdue to improve the safety of crude oil shipments, Reed said. Communities, the environment and rail employees will be protected from the harmful effects of oil spills, he said.
https://transportationtodaynews.com/news/11936-railroads-will-be-required-to-submit-oil-spill-plans/
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(ACC Mentioned) Oral Arguments for Trump's 'Once in' Repeal Set for April 1
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
A contentious legal clash over EPA's repeal of Clinton-era air toxics restrictions is set for April 1 oral arguments before a panel of federal appellate judges.
The panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will review the agency's decision last year to scrap the 1995 "once in, always in" policy, according to an orderissued late yesterday.
That policy required "major" industrial sources of arsenic, benzene and other hazardous pollutants to abide by "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) standards, even when their emissions fell below the levels that initially triggered that requirement.
In opting to end the policy early last year, EPA air chief Bill Wehrum wrote that it was contrary to the plain language of the Clean Air Act and could discourage businesses from reducing releases of hazardous pollutants. In that respect, Wehrum wrote in a memo to regional air division directors, repeal meant that "many types of sources" would now be afforded "meaningful incentives to undertake such projects."
Strongly opposed are California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) and environmental groups, which say the result will be more toxic air releases. Because EPA has now created "a loophole" for major sources to escape aggressive controls, "states like California can no longer rely on that federal framework to protect their residents from hazardous air pollutants," Becerra's office wrote in a brief earlier this month. He and the environmental plaintiffs also fault EPA for failing to give the public an advance chance to weigh in. While Wehrum has said that the agency will also pursue repeal through a formal rulemaking, it has yet to do so.
Backing EPA are the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute and four other business groups. Contrary to the "parade of horribles" predicted by California and environmentalists, repeal of the "once in, always in" policy removes a "disincentive for companies to innovate and reduce emissions beyond existing" MACT requirements, they wrote in a recent friend-of-court filing.
Following standard practice, the D.C. Circuit will announce the makeup of the panel to hear the April arguments later, according to yesterday's order.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060121613/search?keyword=%22American+Chemistry+Council%22
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Feb 20, 2019 | Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan
The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.
The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, has said that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant.
The initiative represents the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to question the findings of federal scientists and experts on climate change and comes less than three weeks after Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats delivered a worldwide threat assessment that identified it as a significant security risk.
In late November, Trump dismissed a government report finding that global warming is intensifying and poses a major threat the U.S. economy, saying, “I don’t see it.” Last month, his nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, acting administrator Andrew Wheeler, testified that he did not see climate change as one of the world’s pressing challenges.
According to the NSC discussion paper, the order would create a federal advisory committee “to advise the President on scientific understanding of today’s climate, how the climate might change in the future under natural and human influences, and how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States.”
The document notes that the government has issued several major reports under Trump identifying climate change as a serious threat. “However, these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security,” it said.
Francesco Femia, chief executive officer of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, said in an interview that the plan appeared to be an effort to undermine the existing consensus within the national intelligence community that climate change needs to be addressed to avert serious consequences in the future.
“This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn’t think nuclear weapons exist,” he said. “It’s honestly a blunt force political tool designed to shut the national security community up on climate change.”
It is unclear how much support Happer’s initiative has inside the administration: Deputies from more than a dozen agencies have been invited to attend a meeting on the topic on Friday in the White House Situation Room.
Several agencies declined to comment on the matter this week, including the NSC, the Pentagon, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Happer, who worked at the Energy Department under George H.W. Bush and joined the White House in September to work on “emerging technologies,” is not formally trained as a climate scientist. He developed a national reputation for his work on laser technology used in missile defense and on the interactions between light and atoms.
He has sat on the boards of two advocacy groups that have questioned whether global warming poses a serious risk, the CO2 Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute. Last March, when asked in connection with court proceedings whether he had received money from the fossil fuel industry, Happer said he had been given somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 from Peabody Coal to testify before a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing.
During a December 2016 energy and climate policy summit sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Happer explained that the CO2 Coalition aimed to counter the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant because it is the primary driver of recent climate change.
“I like to call this the CO2 anti-defamation league,” he said, gesturing to a slide, “because there is the CO2 molecule, and it has undergone decade after decade of abuse, for no reason.
“We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant,” he said. “It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.”
Most scientists have taken a different view, concluding that the world must curb its carbon output in the next few decades or risk dire consequences. Global temperatures have risen roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels. A U.N. report issued in October said the world has to cut its emissions by more than 1 billion tons each year over the next decade to keep the rise from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Trump administration, however, has accelerated domestic fossil fuel production and sought to reverse most of the curbs on greenhouse gas emissions adopted under President Barack Obama. Last year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published an analysis predicting that global temperature rise could reach 4 degrees Celsius, or 7 degrees Fahrenheit, under the government’s current trajectory.
While several Trump appointees have argued that climate change does not pose a significant risk to the nation’s defense capabilities, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have reached the opposite conclusion.
The assessment Coats submitted on Jan. 29 to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, for example, states, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.
The Defense Department said in a report submitted to Congress in mid-January that several dozen military installations around the nation are experiencing climate impacts. The assessment, which called climate change “a national security issue,” said rising seas, wildfires and other such disasters are likely to create more severe problems for the military in the coming years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/white-house-readies-panel-to-assess-if-climate-change-poses-a-national-security-threat/2019/02/19/ccc8b29e-3396-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.2b46371c4def
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EPA Gets Day in Court to Defend Toxic Air Pollution Stance
Feb 20, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
The EPA will get its day in court April 1 to defend relaxing toxic air pollution control requirements for power plants, refineries, and other industrial sources that bring their emissions below certain thresholds.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Feb. 19 scheduled oral arguments in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s new policy.
Clean Air Act emissions control requirements for toxic air pollution kick in for large industrial facilities that emit at least 10 tons per year of a single hazardous pollutant or 25 tons of two or more air toxics. Facilities emit below that limit don’t have to meet the most stringent pollution control requirements.
The EPA had previously said that large industrial facilities must continue to operate their toxic air pollution controls even if they eventually reduced their emissions below the threshold for regulation, EPA air chief Bill Wehrum in a January 2018 memo reversed that 1995 policy.
The EPA plans to issue a proposed rule this year that builds on that memo. The policy is supported in court by national industry groups representing industrial boilers, electric utilities, oil companies chemical manufacturers, and automakers.
Challenging the EPA in court will be California and a coalition of environmental groups that sued the agency in March. They claimed the EPA’s change in approach is illegal because it was made without public comment and would result in increased toxic air pollution.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/epa-gets-day-in-court-to-defend-toxic-air-pollution-stance
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Group Founded by Former EPA Official Targets 'Green New Deal'
Feb 20, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Nick Sobczyk
Another conservative group has signed up for the crusade against the "Green New Deal," joining a growing list of GOP operatives and politicians railing against the progressive climate plan.
Energy 45 Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit founded this month by a former EPA official, has launched an online petition urging people to reject the "Green New Deal" and "fight back against the radical liberals."
The group — founded this month by Mandy Gunasekara, a former EPA political appointee who helped craft the Trump administration's climate policies — is pouncing on a growing trend.
The "Green New Deal" has come into the political limelight for both sides of the aisle since Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rolled out their resolution earlier this month.
Gunasekara suggested the resolution makes for an easy GOP target.
"The Green New Deal is socialism masquerading as climate policy," she said in an email to E&E News. "[It] flies in the face of reality and the entire premise is wrong. The US is already leading the world in GHG emission reductions — no government takeovers required."
Progressive groups are pushing every 2020 presidential contender to endorse the idea, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is planning a floor vote on the resolution as he and other GOP leaders pan it as "socialist," a move to put centrist Democrats on the spot.
Republican lawmakers have also repeatedly warned against what they see as the outlandish tenets of the "Green New Deal," claiming it would go so far as to ban cows and ice cream.
Energy 45 and other GOP advocacy organizations are now throwing their own weight into that opposition campaign.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee connected to House Republicans, is running ads targeting Democrats on the "Green New Deal" (Greenwire, Feb. 11).
And Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist, is also helping a PAC fundraise off the "Green New Deal" (E&E News PM, Feb. 19).
The goal of Energy 45's campaign is not to fundraise but to connect "with folks who are opposed to the deal," Gunasekara said.
Gunasekara incorporated Energy 45 on Feb. 8 — the day after she left EPA (Greenwire, Feb. 7).
The Mississippi-based group says it is "dedicated to informing the public about the environmental and economic gains made under the Trump administration." Gunasekara declined to disclose its donors; 501(c)(4) organizations are not required to do so.
Asked whether she worked on the group while still at EPA, Gunasekara said she has "thought about how best to communicate President Trump's energy and environmental successes for a long time."
"Energy 45 was incorporated after I left EPA, which is when I started working for the organization," she said.
Gunasekara and her husband, Surya Gunasekara, have indeed been intricately involved in conservative energy politics for a while.
Before EPA, Gunasekara worked for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), perhaps the Senate's most prominent skeptic of mainstream climate science.
As majority counsel for the Environment and Public Works Committee, she was famously involved with a stunt in which Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor in an attempt to show that cold weather disproves climate change.
Surya Gunasekara, previously a staffer for former Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), has worked as a lobbyist in the past year, lobbying EPA and lawmakers on energy issues, according to disclosure forms. He is not directly involved with Energy 45, Mandy Gunasekara said.
Gunasekara detailed much of the worldview she now brings to the advocacy world in her EPA resignation letter, which praised Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the agency's work to roll back the Clean Power Plan.
"As a conservative Mississippian, environmental lawyer and the mother of two, I am increasingly concerned with dangerous rhetoric from the far-left supportive of Venezuelan-style socialism, government take-overs and crony 'green new deals' that do little for the environment and threaten our economic success," she wrote.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/02/20/stories/1060121609
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Is Cheap Money the Key to Solving Climate Change?
Feb 20, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By James Osborne
Cheap, below market-rate loans have been used by the U.S. government to do everything from bail out the U.S. automotive sector to help millions of Americans attend college.
But could cheap money now offer the key to climate change, through low-interest rate loans to developing countries for the construction of wind, solar and other zero-carbon energy sources?
The answer is yes according to a new study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which was commissioned by the Clean Technology Fund, a fund to which the United States and other developed nations contribute. The fund is administered by the World Bank.
"For years, concessional finance has been recognized as a "secret sauce" for accelerating development of low-carbon technologies in emerging economies," Bloomberg said in a press release. "Pairing clean energy with affordable, flexible financing can make infrastructure like wind or solar power more cost-competitive, even more so than fossil-fuel sources."
Countries worldwide are seeking to cut greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But doing so in developing countries is proving more difficult, as existing coal and oil burning power plants are expected to operate for decades,
The report lays out that critical to reducing emissions will be reducing the cost of new wind and solar projects to the point they are not only cheaper than new coal plants but existing fossil fuel facilities as well.
"When a clean energy facility becomes cheaper to build than a new gas or coal plant. In developing markets where this has not yet occurred, this could take five to ten years from today to achieve, or even longer. BNEF's analysis, however, found that concessional finance can shave years off this timeframe," the report said.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Is-cheap-money-the-key-to-solving-climate-change-13630145.php
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