Preview Newsletter
PM ACC Clips Report - March 18, 2019
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Some Climate Change Panel Members Are Literally Invested in the Issue
Mar 18, 2019 | Roll Call
By Benjamin J. Hulac
One member of the House committee created to address climate change stands out for what he owns: hundreds of oil and gas wells in North Dakota oil fields worth millions of dollars. Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican from North... -
Plastic Bag Bans Can Backfire If Consumers Just Use Other Plastics Instead
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Governments are increasingly banning the use of plastic products, such as carryout bags, straws, utensils and microbeads. The goal is to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills and waterways. And the logic is that... -
IRIS and TSCA: Chemical Assessments Face Budget and Time Challenges
Mar 18, 2019 | EHS Daily Advisor
By William C. Schillaci
Chemical assessments, a core activity at the EPA, are conducted under two separate but closely related programs—the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) and implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and its 2016... -
TSCA 2019 and Composite Wood Products: The March 22 Deadline for Formaldehyde Declaration and Upcoming EPA Prioritization Activities
Mar 18, 2019 | Wiley Rein
By Martha E. Marrapese, Tracy Heinzman, Roger H. Miksad, and Grace Caroline Mahan
This month marks a major milestone for compliance with the Formaldehyde Emission Standards for Composite Wood Products Act, otherwise known as Title VI of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). These rules require hardwood... -
EPA Updates TSCA Chemical Inventory List for First Time in 40 Years
Mar 18, 2019 | MSDS Online
EPA recently updated its Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) inventory, which lists the chemicals being actively manufactured, processed and imported in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at this update and what it means... -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Bans Household Use of Deadly Paint Stripper
Mar 18, 2019 | Planet News
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a ban on retail sales for household use of methylene chloride, a powerful and dangerous paint stripping chemical linked to dozens of deaths. But health advocates were disappointed... -
The Energy 202: EPA Struggles for Public Victory with New Toxic Chemical Protection.
Mar 18, 2019 | Washington Post
By Dino Grandoni
It was a rare step for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump: The EPA decided to create a new public health protection, when so far it has focused on loosening or outright eliminating rules seen as bad for business. -
Kentucky Legislature Passes PFAs Foam Restrictions, Sends Bill to Governor
Mar 18, 2019 | Chemical Watch
Kentucky’s legislature has passed a bill to restrict the use of firefighting foams containing intentionally added per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). If signed into law by Governor Matt Bevin, the measure (SB 104) would ban the... -
Gillibrand Highlights Contaminated Water in N.H.
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
By Holly Ramer
Democratic presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to connect with voters' important issues on the ground — or, in some cases, underground. The U.S. senator from New York held two roundtable discussions Friday in New... -
Rhode Island Denies Environmental Groups Request for Revised Drinking-Water Safety Standards
Mar 18, 2019 | EcoRI
By Tim Faulkner
Rhode Island won’t be regulating perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of toxic chemicals commonly known as PFASs. But it will continue testing for them. PFASs help products repel water, moisture, oil, and grease. -
EU Begins Consultation on Guidance for Phthalates in Medical Devices
Mar 18, 2019 | Chemical Watch
The European Commission has begun public consultation on a set of guidelines looking at the benefit-risk assessment of phthalates in certain medical devices. The move comes after the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental... -
The Trump Administration Is Opening Millions of New Acres to Drilling — and That’s Just the Start
Mar 15, 2019 | Washington Post
By Darryl Fears and Juliet Eilperin
The Trump administration is aggressively pressing ahead in expanding federal oil and gas industry leases that could lead to more drilling on land and at sea, defying an assessment by government scientists that the production and use... -
Texas LNG Project Clears FERC Hurdle
Mar 18, 2019 | Rigzone
By Matthew V. Veazey
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has issued the final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for Texas LNG Brownsville LLC’s proposed LNG export facility. Receiving the 800-page, two volume FEIS represents... -
Ewire: Climate Emerges as Key Topic in Oil & Gas Confab
Mar 18, 2019 | Inside EPA
Climate change has emerged has one of the major topics at a major energy conference in Houston that just wrapped up -- even though the event has long been dominated by oil and gas issues -- reflecting a gradual shift in how the -
New Tech Elbows Its Way into Oil and Gas Gabfest
Mar 18, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Ben Lefebvre
One of the energy industry’s most prestigious conferences used to feature a parade of oil and gas industry titans taking to the stage to extol advances in fracking or the latest offshore oil discovery. But at this year’s annual... -
Big Tech Aims for a Piece of Big Oil
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
Twenty years ago, Darryl Willis was an oil and gas geoscientist, spending hours staring at computer screens displaying spreadsheets and seismic maps as he tried to collect and interpret data. “I would spend a lot of my time trying to get... -
Fire Breaks out at Houston-Area Petrochemicals Terminal
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
Some Houston-area residents were urged to remain indoors as a fire burned at a petrochemicals terminal. The fire started yesterday morning at Intercontinental Terminals Co. in Deer Park, Texas, about 15 miles southeast of Houston... -
Deer Park Plant Fire Spreads to Eight Tanks; Shelter-In-Place Lifted
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Julian Gill
The petrochemical fire at the Deer Park plant has now been burning for 24 hours as emergency crews work to control it with foam. Deer Park officials have lifted the shelter-in-place, but the fire has now spread to a total of eight tanks. -
Deer Park Plant Fire: What You Need to Know about the Chemicals
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Julian Gill
At least three identifiable chemicals are involved in the ongoing fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company facility in Deer Park, according to plant officials. The fire initially spread to two tanks containing Naphtha and Xylene, two... -
2 Injured in Los Angeles Explosion Following Gasoline Leak
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
A tanker truck leaking gasoline caught fire and caused an explosion that injured two people and sent up a huge plume visible across Los Angeles yesterday, authorities said. The blast reverberated through storm drains and sent manhole... -
Graves Sees a Positive Role for GOP in New Select Climate Committee
Mar 18, 2019 | Roll Call
By Elvina Nawaguna
Rep. Garret Graves says he wasn’t keen on joining the select committee to address climate change formed by the new Democratic House majority in January. But on Feb. 28, weeks after the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis had... -
How Trump's New Rule-Slashing Judge Could Sway Green Issues
Mar 18, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Ellen M. Gilmer and Niina Heikkinen
Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler noted Rao's confirmation does not change the D.C. Circuit's balance; she'll take the seat vacated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who reviewed D.C. Circuit cases from a...
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Environment News
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Some Climate Change Panel Members Are Literally Invested in the Issue
Mar 18, 2019 | Roll Call
By Benjamin J. Hulac
One member of the House committee created to address climate change stands out for what he owns: hundreds of oil and gas wells in North Dakota oil fields worth millions of dollars.
Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican from North Dakota, received at least $400,000 from those wells and as much as $1.1 million in the previous year, as well as $75,000 in salary from Armstrong Corp., his family’s oil and gas business. He also owns at least 289 wells, worth between $2.9 million and $11.5 million, though in a recent interview Armstrong said he owns more than 300 wells.
A review by CQ Roll Call of the personal finances of all 15 members of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, a House panel created in January, found that a majority of the members have some personal investment in fossil fuel companies, often through broader investments such as mutual or index funds, or through their spouses.
It also found at least two Democratic Reps. — California’s Mike Levin and Illinois’ Sean Casten — who worked in clean-energy industries, which would stand to benefit if Congress regulated carbon emissions more aggressively.
Three Republican members on the committee — Armstrong and Alabama Rep. Gary Palmer and West Virginia Rep. Carol Miller — have direct ownership of oil and gas businesses, which would be penalized if Congress chose to regulate carbon emissions.
Asked if these investments pose conflicts of interest while serving on the committee, a spokesman, Brandon VerVelde, said Armstrong would use his business experience to “educate” the committee and follow “applicable” laws.
“My dad’s been in the oil and gas industry since 1975,” Armstrong told CQ in a 2018 interview for his member profile, adding that in 2011 he joined Armstrong Corp., moving from practicing law.
Palmer owns direct stock in Marathon Petroleum Corp. and CVR Energy Inc., a petroleum refining firm owned by Icahn Enterprises LP, the holding company of activist investor Carl Icahn. Icahn was an advisor to President Donald Trump in 2017, before resigning that August.
Palmer reported that his stake in each company is between $1,000 and $15,000.
And Miller owns through her spouse between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of shares in three oil-and-gas companies: Chevron Corp., Halliburton Co. and Phillips 66. She also owns between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock in two utilities, Spark Energy Inc. and Exelon Corp., which both use some fossil fuel-generated power.Imprecise numbers
Congressional rules allow members to disclose investment income in wide ranges, making pinpointing their net worth an impossible task.
Representatives for Palmer and Miller did not answer questions of how their personal stock holdings might pose conflicts of interest in serving on the committee and gave no indication of selling specific stocks.
Palmer has been dismissive of human-made climate change. In a statement after being named to the committee, he said: “My hope is that the Committee will examine the underlying causes of ‘climate change’ and focus on sensible solutions,” placing the term in quotation marks.
“I am focused on finding solutions on this committee that will allow the United States to become energy independent, preserve our environment, and build a strong economy,” Miller said in a statement.
While California Democrat and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who established the committee, has said she would not require its members to reject campaign donations from energy companies, far less attention has been paid to members’ personal finances.
In an interview, Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said Congress has never adopted standards for when members should recuse themselves from a committee.
“Congressional committees should strongly consider barring members of Congress from serving on committees over which they have a financial stake, because you can’t be a judge and jury at the same time,” Scherb said. “And for many members of Congress that’s the case on a daily basis,” he said. “They can’t conduct true oversight when they have a financial stake in them.”
Levin reported that in the previous year he had received $160,000 for work for FuelCell Energy Inc. and $26,000 in consulting fees from Energy & Environment Inc., an engineering company.
A Levin spokesman, Eric Mee, said the lawmaker no longer has financial ties to either firm.
Casten, who worked to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the private-sector before his election, prioritized addressing climate change in his campaign.
He made more than $800,000 from two companies, Recycled Energy Development and Ironclad Energy Partners, in the latest year, according to the latest figures available.
Spokeswoman Maddie Carlos said Casten, who was the CEO of RED, does not have financial ties to either company.
The majority of the committee has either arms-length investments in fossil fuel industries, through mutual funds or broader investment pools, or no apparent ties, according to the latest disclosures available.
Nine members own fossil fuel stocks through broader funds. Disclosures from Democratic Reps. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Joe Neguse of Colorado, along with Virginia Republican Morgan Griffith, reveal no apparent ties to fossil fuel firms.
Committee Chairwoman Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, and ranking member Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican who says he owns an electric car and didn’t seek out this role, both have small fossil fuel investments through broad funds.
Armstrong filed an unusually long 41-page document while running for Congress, which included the information about his income from his wells and other sources.
It shows a sprawling web of investments, including hundreds of wells and seven real estate rental properties in southwestern North Dakota, skirting the southern edge of the Bakken oil patch.
He does own at least one asset not connected with drilling: Army’s West Sports Bar in Dickinson, North Dakota, which says it houses the “largest antique gun collection in the Midwest.”
http://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/some-climate-change-panel-members-are-literally-invested-in-the-issue
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Plastic Bag Bans Can Backfire If Consumers Just Use Other Plastics Instead
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Governments are increasingly banning the use of plastic products, such as carryout bags, straws, utensils and microbeads. The goal is to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills and waterways. And the logic is that banning something should make it less abundant.
However, this logic falls short if people actually reuse those items instead of buying new ones. For example, so-called ‘single-use’ plastic carryout bags can have a multitude of unseen second lives – as trash bin liners, dog poop bags and storage receptacles.
A U.K. government study calculated that a shopper would need to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to reduce its global warming potential – its expected total contribution to climate change – below that of plastic carryout bags used once to carry newly purchased goods. To have less impact on the climate than plastic carryout bags also reused as trash bags, consumers would need to use the cotton bag 327 times.
My research has evaluated carryout bag regulations from many angles. In a recent study, I examined how plastic carryout bag bans in California have changed the types of bags people use at checkout, as well as these bans’ unintended impacts on consumer purchasing habits. My results showed that bag bans may not reduce total plastic usage if people begin purchasing trash bags to replace the carryout bags they were previously reusing for their garbage. As this finding shows, well-intended product bans can have unintended consequences.
Plastic bag use in California
California provides a unique laboratory for studying plastic bag regulations. From 2007 through 2015, 139 California cities and counties implemented plastic carryout bag bans. This local momentum led to the first statewide plastic bag ban in the United States, voted into law on Nov. 8, 2016. Because these restrictions were adopted at different times across the state, I was able to compare bag usage at stores with bans to those without, while also accounting for potentially confounding factors, such as seasonal shopping patterns.
Using sales data from retail outlets, I found that bag bans in California reduced plastic carryout bag usage by 40 million pounds per year, but that this reduction was offset by a 12 million pound annual increase in trash bag sales. This meant that 30% of the plastic eliminated by the ban was coming back in the form of trash bags, which are thicker than typical plastic carryout bags.
In particular, my results showed that bag bans caused sales of small (4 gallon), medium (8 gallon) and large (13 gallon) trash bags to increase by 120%, 64% and 6% respectively.
Disposable does not automatically mean single-use
Although plastic carryout bags are widely referred to as ‘single-use,’ consumers don’t necessarily treat them that way. By comparing the reduction in plastic carryout bags used at checkout to the increase in trash bags sold, my results revealed that 12% to 22% of plastic carryout bags were reused in California as trash bags pre-ban. Each reuse avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag.
Moreover, my study underestimated reuse because it did not examine other ways in which people use plastic carryout bags, such as wrapping fragile items for shipping or storage instead of using plastic bubble wrap. Nor did it address increased use of reusable bags made of thicker plastic in place of disposable plastic bags.
The U.K. study did examine the impact of shifting to thicker reusable plastic bags. It found that if these thicker bags were not reused between 9 and 26 times, they would have a higher global warming potential than disposable plastic carryout bags reused as trash bags.
Who bears the burden?
Who were the people who reused plastic carryout bags pre-ban, and presumably bore the burden of buying trash bags post-ban? I found that bag reuse was higher for people who purchased pet items and baby items – in other words, who needed to collect and dispose of excrement. In 2017, nearly 6% of U.S. households had a child under 5 years old, 44% owned a dog, and 35% owned a cat.
I also found that plastic bag reuse was higher among people who shopped for bargains. Although reusing shopping bags as trash bags could be motivated by environmental concern, it also could be motivated by frugality. Interestingly, I did not find a correlation between plastic bag reuse and income or political leaning, but I did find a positive correlation with higher levels of education.
The case for fees instead of bans
Why didn’t policymakers foresee that bag bans could drive up trash bag sales? Policies typically miss the mark because policymakers either do not understand people’s current behaviour or fail to anticipate how people will respond in a completely new situation.
Banning carryout bags illustrates the first problem. Before plastic bags were banned, there was little data on who reused plastic bags or how they reused them. California’s natural experiment revealed this information for other jurisdictions to improve upon.
In my view, policymakers who want to minimize plastic use should consider ways to help people who want to reuse disposable bags. One option would be to offer incentives for producing inexpensive, thin carryout bags specifically designed and marketed to be used first as carryout bags, then for trash. Such bags would need to sell for less than 9 cents per bag to be price-competitive with current 4-gallon trash bags. Ideally, they would be thin enough to contribute no more to climate change than traditional carryout bags.
Another route that some jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C., have implemented is adopting plastic bag fees instead of bans. This approach, which allows customers to continue using plastic carryout bags as trash bags for a small fee, has been shown to be as effective as bans in encouraging consumers to switch to reusable bags.
However, current bag fees have not promoted other uses for disposable carryout bags. These policies could be improved by educating customers about the environmental benefits of reusing disposable products. As a general rule, the more an object can be reused – even a disposable item – the better for the environment.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.
https://environmentjournal.online/articles/plastic-bag-bans-can-backfire-if-consumers-just-use-other-plastics-instead/
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IRIS and TSCA: Chemical Assessments Face Budget and Time Challenges
Mar 18, 2019 | EHS Daily Advisor
By William C. Schillaci
Chemical assessments, a core activity at the EPA, are conducted under two separate but closely related programs—the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) and implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and its 2016 amendments. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report on how these two programs are completing their mission to evaluate the risks chemicals pose to human health and the environment, transmit that information to the EPA offices that make regulatory decisions, and make the information available to the public.
RomoloTavani / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images
Generally, the GAO found that IRIS has improved its operation by streamlining administration and installing modern software, but work appears to be stalling because of decisions by upper management. Meanwhile, implementation of TSCA is occurring on multiple levels, but there are questions about whether the EPA offices shouldering the efforts have the resources and staff to meet all the Agency’s statutory deadlines.
Here we summarize the GAO’s findings on how these two EPA chemical programs are performing.
IRIS
The IRIS program was introduced in 1985 to develop consensus opinions within the EPA about the health effects from lifetime exposure to chemicals. As of November 2018, information on 510 chemicals was included in the IRIS database.
“The program’s importance has increased over time as EPA program offices and regions have increasingly relied on IRIS chemical assessments in making environmental protection and risk management decisions,” says the GAO. “In addition, state and local environmental programs as well as some international regulatory bodies rely on IRIS chemical assessments in managing their environmental protection programs.”
According to the GAO, the primary work of the IRIS staff is to review the scientific literature on chemicals, extract relevant data, derive chemical toxicity values, and integrate the evidence into draft assessments. The draft goes through internal agency and interagency review, public comment, and peer review. After making revisions to address comments, the draft is sent through another round of internal and interagency review before the final assessment is posted to the IRIS website. Approximately a dozen staff members are drawn from several different backgrounds (e.g., toxicologists and epidemiologists) to work on each assessment.
In 2011 and 2014, the National Academy of Sciences recommended ways the IRIS program could be improved, particularly by shortening the length of time it took to complete chemical assessments. Based on those recommendations, as well as suggestions from industry and other stakeholders, the GAO states that the EPA has implemented the following enhancements:
-IRIS officials began incorporating lean management techniques to improve efficiency and effectiveness by reducing unnecessary process steps and waiting time. Also, a model was introduced to train staff to be proficient in all phases of the systematic review process (i.e., screening, data extraction, study evaluation, and evidence synthesis). This modularity makes it easier for staff members to work across teams and on multiple projects, assisting with systematic review needs while also contributing in their areas of expertise.
-The program adopted software to enable staff to perform literature searches faster. The software filters search results, allowing staff to more quickly find the most relevant information for an assessment. Use of software tools with machine-learning capabilities facilitate the staff’s ability to screen studies for relevance more quickly compared with approaches used before 2017. Previously, much of the development of an assessment was manual (i.e., using a spreadsheet). For example, contactors working manually on one IRIS assessment took over 200 hours to screen and catalog 1,200 epidemiological studies, including carrying out quality assurance checks. By comparison, using machine-learning tools, EPA staff members were able to screen almost 5,500 articles in about 30 hours. With the new tools, quality assurance was embedded into the workflow by having two independent reviewers and a software-facilitated process track and resolve screening conflicts.
-IRIS staff members are tailoring assessments to program and regional office needs, called fit-for-purpose assessments. The idea is that instead of producing a wide-ranging assessment, the program can produce assessments that are more limited in scope and targeted to specific program and regional office needs, thereby reducing the amount of time IRIS staff needed to search for information; synthesize it; and draft, review, and issue an assessment. The fit-for-purpose assessments have also shortened the peer review process.
-Transparency has been improved by using a structured and transparent process for identifying relevant studies, reviewing their methodological strengths and weaknesses, integrating these studies as part of a weight-of-evidence analysis, and increasing outreach to stakeholders and the public in terms of both the frequency and the depth of content about assessment preparation. Better communication is also occurring between the IRIS program and the EPA program and regional offices about overall program priorities and individual assessments.
New Directions from Leadership
These and other changes resulted in the IRIS program meeting internal deadlines for work on nine different chemical assessments from January through May 2018. However, beginning in June 2018, EPA leadership made changes that affected the program’s production of assessments. Specifically, top management in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, in which the IRIS program is housed, informed IRIS managers that they could not release an assessment without a formal request for that assessment from the heads of a program office. Also, in December 2018, leadership issued a memo that reduced the number of assessments the IRIS program would develop from 22 to 11. IRIS officials told the GAO that the program was unable to release any work since June 2018 while it was waiting for feedback from the administrator’s office regarding whether its assessment workflow was consistent with agency priorities.
The IRIS program has been funded at about $38 million annually since fiscal year (FY) 2013. However, the administration has sought to reduce funding for FYs 2018 and 2019 to $22.5 million and $22.2 million, respectively. Congress did not support the reductions, but IRIS officials said the proposed budget cuts have caused them concern about whether they will have sufficient resources to expand assessments in the future. Also, as explained below, the EPA has been directing IRIS staff to work on TSCA implementation.
TSCA
TSCA is a 1976 law that in 2016 underwent a revision that created significant new requirements for assessing risks posed by chemicals in commerce. The amendments are packed with deadlines the EPA must meet, including the requirement to complete risk evaluations by December 2019 for the first 10 chemicals identified under the amendments. The GAO found that Agency resources appear to be inadequate to ensure that the risk evaluations and other requirements under the amendments can be completed on time. Concerns about meeting TSCA’s statutory deadlines have forced EPA leadership to have IRIS staff members spend up to 50 percent of their time on TSCA implementation. This may not be good news for non-TSCA activities at the EPA.
“TSCA establishes a regulatory standard that generally differs from those under other environmental laws, so the TSCA assessments will not necessarily be relevant to other EPA programs that have relied on IRIS endpoint values in making their regulatory decisions,” says the GAO.
There is also legal uncertainty about how the EPA is carrying out its TSCA responsibilities. Mainly, environmental and public health groups have filed suits challenging the EPA’s decision to omit legacy uses of chemicals from its TSCA risk evaluations; legacy uses are those for which a chemical is no longer marketed. Also, environmental groups are asking the court to find that the EPA is unlawfully expanding the range of people who may assert business confidentiality claims about chemicals in the TSCA Inventory. EPA officials told the GAO that they are trying not to anticipate the results of these cases, but should the courts rule against the Agency, the implications for TSCA implementation are not promising.
“If EPA loses any of these lawsuits, it may need to devote additional resources to implement the relevant provisions of TSCA,” states the GAO. “For example, if the suit involving the risk evaluation rule is successful, EPA may be forced to redo parts of its risk evaluations close to the December 2019 deadline to finalize these evaluations.”
Achievements
Despite the threat of lawsuits, the EPA has made progress in implementing TSCA. The initial 10 chemical risk evaluations are progressing, guidance was issued for stakeholders who wish to develop and submit draft risk evaluations, and four final rules were issued—the risk prioritization rule, which explains the EPA’s process for prioritizing existing chemicals for risk evaluation; the risk evaluation process rule, which explains how the Agency conducts risk evaluations on existing chemicals; the inventory notification rule; and a framework rule that authorizes the EPA to collect fees for carrying out a number of different activities under TSCA.
But given that the initial 10 risk evaluations have not been issued, the GAO cautions that it is difficult to tell how far along the EPA actually is in satisfying that key responsibility. The GAO also notes that the EPA is facing challenges in developing guidance to ensure consistency in implementing the law. EPA officials said that given the tight timelines that TSCA requires, they have not yet created all the necessary guidance for staff implementing the law.
“Officials likened it to building an airplane as they fly it, as they must create guidance and processes, while simultaneously applying them to chemical evaluations,” said the GAO.
New Chemicals
There have also been glitches in the new chemical approval process. Representatives from two industry stakeholder organizations told the GAO that the new chemicals program is too slow and unpredictable, which can negatively affect innovation. For example, one company informed the GAO that it submitted a premanufacture notice for a substance that would decrease the potential for worker and environmental exposure while providing improved product performance. The approval process extended to nearly 550 days compared with the 90 days it typically took to obtain approval before the 2016 amendments. The EPA can request extensions, and submitters can voluntarily suspend the review process; therefore, the overall process can extend beyond the 90-day requirement. These delays can have a detrimental effect on the U.S. economy. The GAO explains:
“Representatives we interviewed from industry stakeholder organizations told us that delays motivate companies to introduce chemicals first in foreign markets. For example, one company told us through comments it provided through an industry stakeholder organization we interviewed that it developed a new technology in the United States, but because of the lengthy delays experienced with new chemicals reviewed under TSCA, they will neither register nor commercialize the product in the United States at this time. Rather, the company has decided to pursue commercialization in Europe, which will enable the company to deliver the benefits of this new technology to their customers in the European market sooner than is possible in the United States.”
The GAO provided a draft of its report to the EPA, which responded that the GAO correctly identified the challenges facing the IRIS and TSCA programs, but focused too little on what the Agency is achieving in the two chemical programs.
The GAO’s report is here.
https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/2019/03/iris-and-tsca-chemical-assessments-face-budget-and-time-challenges/
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Mar 18, 2019 | Wiley Rein
By Martha E. Marrapese, Tracy Heinzman, Roger H. Miksad, and Grace Caroline Mahan
This month marks a major milestone for compliance with the Formaldehyde Emission Standards for Composite Wood Products Act, otherwise known as Title VI of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). These rules require hardwood plywood, medium-density fiberboard, and particleboard products sold, supplied, offered for sale, imported to, or manufactured in the United States to demonstrate compliance with emission standards through a third-party certification program that includes laboratory testing. To stay in compliance, companies must now make the transition from California third party certification to using EPA-approved third party certifiers (TPCs). Beyond this, formaldehyde and formaldehyde emissions, which are already highly regulated, are slated to receive even more scrutiny under TSCA in 2019 and beyond.
As of March 22, 2019, regulated composite wood products manufactured in or imported to the United States must be certified and labeled as TSCA Title VI compliant by an EPA-accredited TPC. To continue to certify these products, these TPCs must comply with new accreditation requirements as of this date. Additionally, moving forward U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will require regulated composite wood products that are imported into the U.S. to be certified as TSCA Title VI compliant. Up to now, domestically manufactured or imported composite wood panels and finished products containing them have had to be certified as compliant with either TSCA Title VI or California’s Phase II emission standards. The standards themselves are virtually identical, but certification by a TPC that has been approved by CARB will no longer be recognized by EPA or CBP as compliant.
“Composite wood products” regulated by TSCA include panels made from pieces, chips, particles, or fibers of wood bonded together with a resin. Regulated products are those that take the form of hardwood plywood (HWPW), particleboard (PB), and medium density fiberboard (MDF). The 40 C.F.R. Part 770 regulations also apply to composite wood products used in finished goods such as cabinets, doors, furniture, flooring products, moldings, toys, mirror and photo frames, audio speakers, base boards, shelving, and countertops. Under 40 C.F.R. § 770.10, the emission standards that these products must meet, which are based on using test method ASTM E1333–10, are as follows:
(1) For hardwood plywood made with a veneer core or a composite core, 0.05 parts per million (ppm) of formaldehyde.
(2) For medium-density fiberboard, 0.11 ppm of formaldehyde.
(3) For thin medium-density fiberboard, 0.13 ppm of formaldehyde.
(4) For particleboard, 0.09 ppm of formaldehyde.
In addition to these limits, third party certification and import certification requirements, other provisions include product-testing requirements (with exceptions), labeling, and recordkeeping. EPA’s final rule on formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products is available at: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPPT-2016-0461-0001.
Formaldehyde also is slated to be taken up this year under TSCA’s existing chemical prioritization process under the new risk evaluation provisions in section 6 of the Act. In March, EPA is initiating prioritization of at least 20 “high priority” chemicals for risk evaluation under TSCA and formaldehyde is slated to be on the list. The prioritization process is expected to take about 9 months, and the risk evaluation process that will follow will take about 3.5 years. Within two years of this risk evaluation process, a rulemaking will then be implemented to control any uses of chemicals that do not meet the TSCA safety standard. EPA is required to consider all known and reasonably foreseeable uses of a chemical in this process and determine whether the use meets TSCA’s safety standard of no unreasonable risk. Accordingly, despite Title VI requirements for emissions in composite wood products, industry stakeholders should be ready to engage on the record concerning their uses of formaldehyde with respect to worker and consumer exposures to composite wood products, general population exposure, and exposures in susceptible subpopulations.
Finally, as a brief reminder, this industry sector should remain mindful of California’s 2018 updates to Proposition 65 rules and the impact of these requirements on web-based advertising and sales. Formaldehyde, which has been on the Prop 65 list since 1988, has a No Significant Risk Level (NSRL) of 40 µg/day. The new content and methods for Prop 65 safe harbor warnings became effective Aug. 30, 2018. Warning language previously approved under court orders are still effective. Otherwise, the use of a yellow triangle symbol, warning language that specifies the identity of one or more listed chemicals in the product, and referral to the state website for more information are needed to meet the new safe harbor warning standards. Compliance with these changes, as well as attention to placement and prominence of the safe harbor warnings and use of the optional short form label warning that references the specific hazard and the state website, are likely to be scrutinized under Prop 65’s citizen enforcement provisions. We expect on-line compliance to be a particular focus for enforcement going forward.
https://www.wileyrein.com/newsroom-articles-TSCA-2019-and-Composite-Wood-Products-The-March-22-Deadline-for-Formaldehyde-Declaration-and-Upcoming-EPA-Prioritization-Activities.html
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EPA Updates TSCA Chemical Inventory List for First Time in 40 Years
Mar 18, 2019 | MSDS Online
EPA recently updated its Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) inventory, which lists the chemicals being actively manufactured, processed and imported in the United States.
Let’s take a closer look at this update and what it means for chemical safety and compliance.
The Background
In 2016, President Obama signed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (Lautenberg Act), which represented the first substantive revision of TSCA since it went into effect in 1976. The Act improved TSCA by introducing a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals, perform risk-based assessments of newly-manufactured chemicals before they can be introduced into commerce, and provide increased public transparency of chemical information.
The Act also required anyone who has manufactured, processed or imported chemicals within the past ten years to identify and report those chemicals to the EPA, thereby allowing the agency to classify those chemicals as “active” or “inactive” in U.S. commerce. Between August 11, 2017 and October 5, 2018, chemical manufacturers and processors were required to report this information for the ten-year period prior to June 21, 2016.
The Updates
EPA used information submitted during this process, along with notices of commencement received since June 21, 2016 and data from the 2012 and 2016 Chemical Data Reporting cycles to update the TSCA inventory. The latest version of the inventory includes an updated commercial activity status field designating chemicals as either “active” or “inactive.”
The data shows that only 40,655 of the 86,228 chemicals (47%) listed in the Inventory are currently active in commerce. Prior to the update, the TSCA inventory showed over 86,000 chemicals as being active and available for commercial production and use.
In a news release, EPA stated that this update will help the agency with its work in prioritizing chemicals, evaluating and addressing risks” by clarifying which chemicals are actually in use. Since the identities of more than 80% of the chemicals in the Inventory are not protected as Confidential Business Information (CBI), the public will have access to most of the updated inventory.
All of the non-confidential chemical data in the inventory is currently available to the public, and EPA provides options for users to download the data in either a CSV format or in a Microsoft Access version.
What’s Next?
The initial deadline for manufacturers, importers and producers to report their chemical production information to EPA may have passed, but obligations have not. Manufacturers and processors are required under TSCA to notify EPA before re-introducing a substance currently identified as inactive on the TSCA inventory into commerce. Manufacturers and processors can notify EPA via Notice of Activity Form B, available on the Agency’s Central Data Exchange (CDX).
Producers of chemicals should be familiar with the chemicals they produce and their status on the updated TSCA inventory to be able to comply with the new regulatory obligations under TSCA.
https://www.msdsonline.com/2019/03/18/epa-updates-tsca-chemical-inventory-list-for-first-time-in-40-years/
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Bans Household Use of Deadly Paint Stripper
Mar 18, 2019 | Planet News
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a ban on retail sales for household use of methylene chloride, a powerful and dangerous paint stripping chemical linked to dozens of deaths. But health advocates were disappointed that the EPA allowed its continued use in commercial settings.
The agency cited “acute fatalities that have resulted from exposure to the chemical” in its reasoning and said methylene chloride poses “unreasonable health risks” to users.
At least 64 deaths have been linked to exposure, according to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, which has advocated against the chemical.
Methylene chloride exposure can cause build-up of fluid in a person’s lungs, headaches, dizziness and difficulty walking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC notes that after serious or “repeated exposures,” the chemical can cause brain damage and at high levels of exposure, it can cause “fainting and even death.”
The ban does not restrict industrial or commercial uses of the chemical, which is also used in plastics processing. But the EPA said it would take public comments on whether a training and certification program could be developed for commercial users.
If “we determine that the risks to users of this chemical for paint and coating removal in the workplace cannot be managed, then EPA would make a legal finding again under the statute and make the appropriate risk management decision which could be banning it or restricting its use in some way,” Alexandra Dunn, the assistant administrator for chemical safety, told reporters on a conference call.
The ban is expected to take effect in mid-to-late November.
Major retailers, including Home Depot and Lowe’s, say they have already removed products containing methylene chloride from their shelves.
The American Chemistry Council said it supported the EPA’s ban and consideration of “a federally-enforceable training, certification and limited access program.”
But the Environmental Working Group criticized the administration for making “a significant retreat” and not extending the ban to commercial uses. EWG attorney Melanie Benesh accused the administration of “catering to the wishes of the chemical industry.”
https://planet-news.info/2019/03/18/epa-bans-household-use-of-deadly-paint-stripper/
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The Energy 202: EPA Struggles for Public Victory with New Toxic Chemical Protection.
Mar 18, 2019 | Washington Post
By Dino Grandoni
It was a rare step for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump: The EPA decided to create a new public health protection, when so far it has focused on loosening or outright eliminating rules seen as bad for business.
But any credit from environmentalists the EPA might have been seeking for its partial ban on the use of a deadly paint-stripping chemical was quickly blunted by criticism from by families of those killed by it -- and public health advocates who say the EPA did not go far enough.
The outcry highlights the growing gulf between the Trump administration and major environmental groups after more than two years of rollbacks of dozens of environmental rules. Even as Trump's EPA opted to create more regulation -- over objections from chemical manufacturers -- environmentalists and Democratic allies are still not satisfied with its strategy.
The EPA restricted the use of paint strippers containing methylene chloride by regular consumers after dozen of deaths have been linked to the toxic chemical. But the agency stopped short of a total ban, as The Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report.
That means that while do-it-yourselfers will no longer be able to use the paint strippers, commercial painters can as long as they are trained to do so. The agency is seeking public input in creating a certification program.
The problem with that plan for public health advocates is that the victims include professional workers like Kevin Hartley, a 21-year-old who died while refinishing a bathtub despite being trained to use the stripper, according to his mother, Wendy Hartley.
Wendy Hartley were once "cautiously optimistic" about a full ban on the chemical after meeting last year with Trump’s top environmental minister at the time, Scott Pruitt. But now a year later, she says she is “deeply disappointed” with the EPA’s decision.
“Workers who use methylene chloride will now be left unprotected and at risk of health issues or death,” Hartley said in a statement. “I will continue my fight until the EPA does its job.”
But the brother of another victim, Drew Wynne, who died while using a paint stripper on the floor of his North Charleston, S.C. coffee company, still described the decision has a victory.
“You take a win when you can get a win,” Brian Wynne told The Post. “And in this climate, a win is almost impossible.”
Last year, Pruitt had signaled the EPA would follow through on an Barack Obama-era proposal to ban paint strippers containing a toxic chemical. Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) said his office was “assured in writing would be a ban that protected both consumer users and workers from this deadly chemical.”
Now Carper, along with a senator who co-wrote the chemical safety law the EPA used to limit use of the chemical, Tom Udall (D-N.M.), are criticizing the agency for not following through.
“EPA’s action today is a watered-down protection that apparently values industry profits at the expense of public health and safety — particularly for the hard-working people who will still be risking their lives with exposure to these deadly products,” Udall said.
Perhaps anticipating the backlash, the EPA did leave the door open for a further ban on the commercial use of products containing methylene chloride.
Alexandra Dunn, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, told reporters that “if the agency decides the chemical cannot be used safely in commercial operations, it could determine that it also poses an unreasonable risk to public health,” Eilperin and Brady write.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/03/18/the-energy-202-epa-struggles-for-public-victory-with-new-toxic-chemical-protection/5c8e9c3c1b326b0f7f38f1ac/?utm_term=.b5feaa38a921
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Kentucky Legislature Passes PFAs Foam Restrictions, Sends Bill to Governor
Mar 18, 2019 | Chemical Watch
Kentucky’s legislature has passed a bill to restrict the use of firefighting foams containing intentionally added per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
If signed into law by Governor Matt Bevin, the measure (SB 104) would ban the use of these products for training or testing purposes, with some exceptions.
Using the foams at facilities that have implemented "best industry practices to prevent uncontrolled releases…into the environment" would still be allowed. Their use in emergencies would also not be affected.
The restrictions are scheduled to take effect on 15 July, 2020.
The bill’s supporting information cites environmental concerns, centered around water system contamination and the resulting human health impact.
Introduced initially in the Senate amid growing public concern over the class of substances, the bill passed nearly unanimously in both of the state’s legislative chambers. The legislation was delivered to Governor Bevin on 13 March. He will now have 10 working days to sign or veto it – if he does nothing, it will become law without his signature.
Kentucky’s action comes after Washington state passed a law largely banning PFAS foams with some exemptions for federally-mandated uses, such as at airports.
Recent federal legislation, meanwhile, has directed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to no longer require that foams contain PFASs to meet federal requirements. A group of 40 organisations has recently pushed the agency to begin implementing this change.
https://chemicalwatch.com/75123/kentucky-legislature-passes-pfas-foam-restrictions-sends-bill-to-governor
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Gillibrand Highlights Contaminated Water in N.H.
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
By Holly Ramer
Democratic presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to connect with voters' important issues on the ground — or, in some cases, underground.
The U.S. senator from New York held two roundtable discussions Friday in New Hampshire communities struggling with contaminated water. The second was in Merrimack, where hundreds of private wells in the town near a plastics factory have been contaminated with suspected carcinogens and the state has closed two of the town's public wells.
The same company has caused contamination woes in New York, and Gillibrand highlighted her efforts to help affected residents there. But she also broadened the conversation, arguing that similar incidents across the country point to larger problems of racial injustice and income inequality because they often hurt residents who can't afford water testing, health monitoring or new homes when their wells are polluted.
"This goes to the much bigger problem. There's a growing divide in this country where the wealthy have access to every politician, access to every decisionmaker, and get to set the stage for America. The rest of the country gets no say," she said. "If you are in a low-income community or a community of color, a lot of this environmental degradation follows you. It's where polluters pollute. It's where you have less power because you don't have the money."
Gillibrand was joined by several local activists and freshman state lawmakers who were spurred by the contamination issue to run for office and dubbed themselves "Water Warriors."
Democratic state Rep. Kathryn Stack of Merrimack said she learned her well was contaminated about two years ago, and she is frightened every day remembering how her children drank the water as they were growing up. Now that they've grown and left home, she's stuck in a house that is too large because no one will buy it.
"A purchaser can't get a mortgage on a contaminated well," she said. "I wait, and I struggle."
Gillibrand's first discussion Friday was in Portsmouth, where decades of use of a toxic firefighting foam at a former military base contaminated wells later used by businesses and a day care facility. She said she will continue to elevate the issue.
"I think that's what running for president is all about. I'd like to serve this country, and to serve this country well, I need to hear directly from the people I will represent," she told reporters. "For any family, there is no more crippling issue than to know that their water is polluted, to know their child might be at risk or their own health might be at risk because of legacy pollution."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/18/stories/1060127511
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Rhode Island Denies Environmental Groups Request for Revised Drinking-Water Safety Standards
Mar 18, 2019 | EcoRI
By Tim Faulkner
Rhode Island won’t be regulating perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of toxic chemicals commonly known as PFASs. But it will continue testing for them.
PFASs help products repel water, moisture, oil, and grease. They coat non-stick cookware, fast-food containers, waterproof clothing, stain-resistant carpeting, and some dental flosses. Teflon is a common PFAS. Deli paper, microwave popcorn bags, and compostable take-out containers also contain PFASs.
PFASs can be ingested through consumption of food and water, and breathing inside and outside air.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PFAs are linked to kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disruption, high cholesterol, developmental disorders, decreased fertility, and damage to the immune system.
Firefighting foam is another common source of PFASs and a fire department is being blamed for contamination of the Oakland Association public water system in Burrillville. The site is one of three in Rhode Island to contain high levels of PFASs, discovered by a 2017 study of 40 small public water systems. Conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Health (DOH), the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and Brown University, the study tested for nine PFAS compounds with a threshold of 70 parts per trillion.
A source well in North Providence had to be connected to the public water system after it tested for excessive levels of PFASs. PFASs have also been found in water supplies in Cumberland, Westerly, and in ground water at Naval Station Newport.
DOH recently denied a request by the Toxics Action Center (TAC) and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) to adopt drinking-water standards for five of the most common PFASs.
“Additional research and analysis are needed to better assess the threats of PFASs on public water systems,” DOH wrote in its March 11 rejection letter to TAC and CLF.
DOH said it “lacks sufficient quantitative and qualitative data upon which to base appropriate regulations.”
This spring the state health agency plans to test school wells after it learned through the EPA and regional entities that common floor waxes containing PFAS have been drained into onsite septic systems or poured directly onto school grounds.
TAC and CLF want Rhode Island to follow the lead of its New England neighbors. Massachusetts and Vermont plan to test for five PFASs and treat contaminated sources. Vermont has a bill that requires annual testing and sets a level of 20 parts per trillion for public drinking-water supplies. New Hampshire is proposing rules for testing and treatment and introduced legislation that requires testing in three communities with sites polluted by PFASs. Maine recently created a task force to study PFAS contamination and remediation.
TAC and CLF proposed setting drinking-water thresholds of 20 parts per trillion for five PFASs. In their petition to DOH, the environmental groups noted that there are more than 3,000 PFASs and that chemical manufacturers such as DuPont and 3M have known for decades about the health impacts of PFASs in their products but failed to stop using them. TAC and CLF blamed the EPA for taking a sluggish response once it learned of the health risks. The EPA doesn’t require public water systems to regularly test or treat for PFASs. The federal agency also gave chemical companies 10 years to phase out their use of PFASs.
“Rhode Island can—and must—take the lead in the absence of federal safeguards,” according to the TAC and CLF letter to DOH.
“Until we have more robust standards, people are going to get sick,” said Sofía Owen, TAC’s community organizer for eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
The Superfund Research Program Center at the University of Rhode Island was created to identify and reduce the risks of PFASs on public health.
https://www.ecori.org/public-safety/2019/3/18/environmental-groups-denied-request-for-pfass-safety-standards
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EU Begins Consultation on Guidance for Phthalates in Medical Devices
Mar 18, 2019 | Chemical Watch
The European Commission has begun public consultation on a set of guidelines looking at the benefit-risk assessment of phthalates in certain medical devices.
The move comes after the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (Scheer) drafted the preliminary guidelines on the presence in the devices of phthalates that are: carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic to reproduction (CMR); or endocrine-disrupting (EDC).
The Scheer mandate was agreed in September 2017 and covers devices that:are invasive and come into direct contact with the human body;(re)administer medicines, body liquids or other substances, including gases, to/from the body; ortransport or store such medicines, body fluids or substances, including gases, to be (re)administered to the body.
The draft describes the methodology for performing a benefit-risk assessment for justifying the presence of a CMR 1A or 1B and/or endocrine-disrupting phthalates in medical devices and/or parts or materials used in them at percentages above 0.1% by weight.
The preliminary guidelines also consider the evaluation of possible alternatives and are intended for use by the manufacturers, notified and regulatory bodies.
Scheer has called a public meeting on the subject for 4 April in Brussels. The consultation will close on 29 April.
https://chemicalwatch.com/75132/eu-begins-consultation-on-guidance-for-phthalates-in-medical-devices
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The Trump Administration Is Opening Millions of New Acres to Drilling — and That’s Just the Start
Mar 15, 2019 | Washington Post
By Darryl Fears and Juliet Eilperin
The Trump administration is aggressively pressing ahead in expanding federal oil and gas industry leases that could lead to more drilling on land and at sea, defying an assessment by government scientists that the production and use of fossil fuels is accelerating climate change.
On Friday, the administration announced a final decision to lift protections for a uniquely American bird, called the greater sage grouse, on nearly 9 million acres to provide more leasing opportunities to oil, gas and mining industries.
A day earlier, an Interior Department assistant secretary confirmed that he told leaders of the fossil fuel industry last month that the Atlantic coast will almost certainly be included in the administration’s plan to expand federal leasing to nearly the entire outer continental shelf. Offshore leases haven’t been granted in the Atlantic for decades, and drilling hasn’t been allowed for a half-century.
Joe Balash, assistant secretary for land and minerals management, said the department’s determined effort to approve seismic surveys is a sign that the Eastern Seaboard is in serious play — despite concerns that blasting piercing sounds every 10 seconds for weeks on end pose risks to whales and dolphins, according to conservationists and some scientists.
“I will tell you, we wouldn’t work really, really hard to get seismic permits out if that area wasn’t going to be available,” Balash said during a question-and-answer session following his speech at the International Association of Geophysical Contractors conference in Houston.
In his remarks, Balash said he found it “absolutely thrilling” that President Trump’s “knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else” has allowed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management employees to process the permits without much scrutiny. In an email to The Washington Post on Thursday, Balash said his comments reflected his appreciation that the president’s leadership style made it easier to execute his energy dominance agenda.
In pursuit of that agenda over the past two years, the administration has sought to reverse dozens of regulations aimed at making oil platforms safer, reducing carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere, and protecting the habitats of endangered animals and those on the verge of an endangered status.
Administration officials have argued that animals can adapt more easily to changes in habitat than conservationists believe. Critics counter that these intrusions pose an added threat to the greater sage grouse, which is imperiled, and North Atlantic right whales, which are endangered.
Interior has offered nearly 16.8 million acres of federal land for oil and gas leasing since Trump took office, according to the Center for Biological Diversity — a swath of land larger than the combined size of Maryland and New Jersey. Of those acres, more than 2.3 million were leased, and the department plans to auction off another 1.3 million acres in the spring.
Under Friday’s decision, oil and natural gas operations can more easily conduct horizontal drilling in sage grouse habitat.
Sage grouse exist only in the United States. Scientists consider them an indicator species because their status reflects the overall well-being of many animals in the sagebrush sea, which encompasses about 160 million acres across 11 states.
Sixty-seven million of those acres were designated for protection under a 2015 federal plandesigned to increase the bird’s population and bring it back from the brink of being placed on the endangered species list. The new decision eliminates or weakens protections on 75 percent of the area in the original plan.
On their expedition across what became the United States, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted that flying sage grouse blackened the skies, leading to unconfirmed estimates that their historical numbers stood at 16 million. Since the bird’s habitat has been cut in half by human expansion and development, those changes, coupled with invasive species and disease, have shrunk their numbers to fewer than 500,000.
Acting interior secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement that the department’s final decision demonstrated that the administration could achieve several goals at once. The new plan will shift significant power to the states, including leaving it up to state officials whether energy companies have to offset the environmental impacts of their development.
“The plans adopted today show that listening to and working with our neighbors at the state and local levels of government is the key to long-term conservation and to ensuring the viability of local communities across the West,” Bernhardt said.
Governors from several Western states — including some prominent Democrats — praised the new plan for scaling back restrictions adopted in 2015 and empowering state officials to authorize energy development without imperiling the sage grouse’s survival. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), for example, thanked Interior officials for addressing the state’s concerns in a statement, adding, “Our focus now turns to implementation and creating successful outcomes on the ground.”
Sam Eaton, policy director and counsel to Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R), said in an interview Friday that the revisions reflect the collaborative process the state had launched under the previous administration that was upended shortly before the 2015 plan was finalized.
“We live, breathe and understand the terrain, the environment, and we have the experts here and know what’s best for the species,” Eaton said, adding that the state had consulted with biologists as well as industry and other groups when drafting its plan. “While we understand the federal framework, we feel we’re best suited to manage the species.”
Terry Messmer, a professor of wildlife conflict management at Utah State University, said the 2015 regulations under the Obama administration, resulting from a five-year collaboration between affected states and the Fish and Wildlife Service, was an overstep. He said areas of focus that federal authorities blanketed with protections didn’t necessarily need them.
“The folks that are doing the assessments, the state biologists, clearly understand the needs of the birds,” Messmer said. “Good, quality habitat will trump the impacts of [human] disturbance.” Sage grouse can adapt to the footprint of mining and drilling operations and the electric power grid that follows them."
That view was dismissed by a conservationist who has worked in the sagebrush sea for years. “It’s interesting, because we’ve had repeated letters sent to this administration by the most renowned sage grouse scientists urging them to not walk away from the most valuable habitat, to maintain a commitment to leasing and drilling outside the habitat — all the things that have been abandoned by this record of decision,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society.
“Because of the types of designations that were eliminated, the vast majority of protections that remain are weaker,” Culver said. “When you add up what’s left, it’s just so much less.”
Ed Arnett, chief scientist for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said that some of this recent leasing is now taking place in large areas that serve as critical migration corridors for wildlife in the West. “We’ve seen a dramatic shift away from prioritizing energy leasing away from the best habitat and are now witnessing leasing of some of the very best remaining tracks of un-fragmented land."
Concern for the well-being of animals extends to oil and gas exploration in the sea.
Balash’s speech belied the administration’s statements that approval of seismic survey permits and the offering of federal leases in the Atlantic are still up in the air. Asked about his February remarks on Thursday, Balash backtracked.
“As these documents are yet to be finalized, no final decisions have been made on the [outer continental shelf] oil and natural gas program,” he said.
Offshore drilling in the Atlantic has been a thorny proposition since the administration proposed it in January 2018. Governors along the coast opposed it. Less than a week after announcing the proposal, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke flew to Florida to guarantee a Republican ally of the president that his state would not be included in the proposal.
The acrimony continues more than a year later. During a contentious hearing in the House last week, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official defended seismic testing, saying that firing commercial air guns underwater every 10 seconds in search of oil and gas deposits over a period of months would have next to no effect on marine mammals.
When the official, Chris Oliver, an assistant administrator for fisheries, admitted he had never heard the sound of a seismic test, Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.) blasted him with an earsplitting air horn and asked if he found it disruptive. Oliver said he didn’t.
A spokeswoman for the International Association of Geophysical Contractors said Balash and the administration are simply doing their jobs. “One of the things they’re supposed to be doing is evaluating the potential resources in the outer continental shelf ... so they can make informed decisions about what the next steps should be, whether it’s to lease it for oil and gas exploration or not,” said Gail Adams, vice president of communications for the group. “Seismic surveys provide that data.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/03/16/trump-administration-opens-millions-new-acres-drilling-thats-just-start/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0ac808e53268
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Texas LNG Project Clears FERC Hurdle
Mar 18, 2019 | Rigzone
By Matthew V. Veazey
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has issued the final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for Texas LNG Brownsville LLC’s proposed LNG export facility.
Receiving the 800-page, two volume FEIS represents the final step in the environmental review process leading toward the June 13, 2019, federal authorization decision deadline and anticipated FERC approval, Texas LNG Brownsville noted in a written statement emailed Sunday evening to Rigzone. The company received its draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) last October.
“We are very pleased with the FEIS report conclusions and appreciate the hard work and effort involved in the generation and compilation of the FEIS, especially from FERC and all the supporting agencies … and others that have been involved in the process,” noted Vivek Chandra, co-founder and CEO of Texas LNG LLC. “As we head toward Final Investment Decision (FID), we look forward to substantive discussions with potential LNG customers to secure binding agreements over the next few months.”
The LNG export facility would be built on a 625-acre (253-hectare) site on the Port of Brownsville’s deepwater ship channel near natural gas supplies and pipelines, according to Houston-based Texas LNG.
The company’s project fact sheet notes that Brownsville is one of the closest U.S. ports to the Panama Canal, which would facilitate trans-Pacific access to customers in Asia. Texas LNG Brownsville’s two-train, 4 million tonnes per annum facility would receive natural gas from the Agua Dulce trading hub in South Texas. The company has stated that the Permian Basin associated gas it would liquefy is cheaper than the Henry Hub-indexed gas that would feed into other Gulf Coast terminals.
“We look forward to receiving FERC approval in the next few months which is one of the important steps to allow construction to begin and LNG production to commence by 2024,” noted Langtry Meyer, Texas LNG co-founder and chief operating officer. “This project will bring jobs and investment to Cameron County and deliver clean, safe, abundant Texas natural gas energy to the world.”
https://www.rigzone.com/news/texas_lng_project_clears_ferc_hurdle-18-mar-2019-158400-article/
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Ewire: Climate Emerges as Key Topic in Oil & Gas Confab
Mar 18, 2019 | Inside EPA
Climate change has emerged has one of the major topics at a major energy conference in Houston that just wrapped up -- even though the event has long been dominated by oil and gas issues -- reflecting a gradual shift in how the industry is thinking about global warming.
Several outlets noticed the change at the week-long CERAWeek conference, including Inside Climate News, which noted that several oil and gas executives urged the industry to reinvent itself as low carbon or risk “becoming irrelevant,” speeches that “would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.”
The article cited remarks by an executive with oil and gas giant Shell, who described how the company would shift in the coming decades to “service an electrified, hydrogen- and bio-fueled vehicle market and provide natural gas for heavy transportation.”
Another Shell executive also urged EPA to retain methane emissions limits on oil and gas production facilities -- a stance that would eventually obligate the agency to regulate existing sources in the sector.
Axios also highlighted the trend, reporting that that almost all executives at the event “acknowledged climate change as a pressing issue,” and that CEOs from BP and Equinor “implored the industry to do more and embrace big policy changes.”
Also, Politico reports that while the event still included plenty of traditional oil-related information, “climate change was given a more prominent place on the agenda, with lots of talk about carbon capture technology, electric vehicles and hydrogen power.”
While European majors had the biggest focus on climate issues, that story adds that U.S. independent companies that are big players in the shale boom “had little if any presence.”
The oil and gas sector's changing stance on climate change has been slowly percolating for years, though it has yet to manifest in major policy shifts.
Even so, one group with major industry backing -- the Climate Leadership Council -- is poised to introduce a bill this summer that organizers hope will have the backing of several Senate Republicans. The move could represent a “jailbreak moment” for the GOP and signal a significant shift on the need for major legislation to reduce carbon emissions.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/ewire-climate-emerges-key-topic-oil-gas-confab
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New Tech Elbows Its Way into Oil and Gas Gabfest
Mar 18, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Ben Lefebvre
One of the energy industry’s most prestigious conferences used to feature a parade of oil and gas industry titans taking to the stage to extol advances in fracking or the latest offshore oil discovery.
But at this year’s annual CERAWeek gathering, a group of interlopers interrupted that oil-centric narrative: Tech companies, sustainability advocates and even a handful of executives from major oil producers issued calls for the industry to launch a transition to achieve steep cuts in the emissions causing climate change.
Although many of the largest oil and gas producers, like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, are digging in and boosting spending to hike their oil output, there is rising pressure on companies to respond to climate change from governments and — perhaps more importantly — from shareholders. And that's giving the issue a more prominent place on the industry's agenda and bringing new voices to the podiums at industry events like CERAWeek.
“It’s a much broader conversation with more people in it,” Fiona Wild, vice president of environment and climate change at oil and mining company BHP Billiton told POLITICO at the CERAWeek conference.
Dialogues on climate change at oil industry conferences in the past tended to be between environmental groups that demanded companies change their business practices and C-suite executives who defended their work to satisfy the growing global need for energy. But now the pressure on companies is coming from a more diverse set of players.
“It used to be a conversation between oil companies and environmental NGOs,” said Wild. “The scope was relatively contained. Now it’s a conversation between oil companies and investors, NGOs, policy makers and local communities and peers and every type of stakeholder you can imagine. The nature of the conversation is changing and the number and range of stakeholders is changing. It means you can’t compartmentalize it the same way companies used to be able to.”
That broadened focus certainly benefited CERAWeek’s organizer, IHS Markit. A record 5,300 people attended the conference this year, up from the previous high of 4,500 in 2018, according to CERA co-founder James Rosenfield. This year’s events included a major focus on carbon capture technology, nearly two dozen sessions touching on electric vehicles and several on hydrogen power.
And while in the past, the only mayor to address the conference was from the host-city and oil industry capital of Houston, this year, three other mayors joined him on a panel to discuss how their cities were adapting to climate change or preparing to expand electric vehicle usage.
“In years past, CERAWeek was where the industry came together and focused on the future of energy,” Rosenfield said. “Now it has broadened to focus on solutions.”
That the industry was making room for newcomers was evident even in the conference’s physical layout.
Agora, a tech-centric exhibition that started three years ago at CERAWeek as just a few booths within the main event’s hotel conference center, has expanded to the point that, this year, it was moved to the adjacent George Brown Convention Center, where attendees slurped free pineapple and mango smoothies and checked out innovations like Ford Motor’s prototype all-electric F-150 pickup truck.
Those exhibits competed for attention with speeches from traditional oil industry luminaries, such as OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo, who argued against legislation that would open the group up to antitrust lawsuits. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a keynote speech pledging to wield surging U.S. oil and gas exports as a diplomatic and economic battering ram against Russia and China.
Still, the industry appeared split in its outlook. European producers dominated the discussions on addressing climate change and the need for companies to transition from oil and gas to “energy companies.” Meanwhile, U.S. independent oil and gas companies Continental Resources and Chesapeake Energy — whose shale wells helped lift the U.S. oil and gas output to record levels and featured heavily at the conference in past years — had little if any presence.
More attention was paid to speakers from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Ford who discussed technology that could increase efficiency and reduce carbon emissions than those who discussed new drilling techniques.
“Gone are the days when oil set the agenda at CERAWeek, you only needed to spend five minutes over at the Agora to understand that technology of every sort is coming at the industry at full force,” said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, which is working with companies to reduce methane emissions. “You get the sense the oil and gas companies either get with the trend toward climate and sustainability or get run over, and the smart CEOs are the ones that don’t want to be run over. They are going with the trend.”
Those trend-setters included Norwegian Equinor’s CEO Eldar Sætre and BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley, who brought up progressive Democrats’ push for a Green New Deal to rapidly transition to zero-emissions energy, as well as the pressure from company investors to adhere to the principles in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
“Shareholders are increasingly asking how our strategies relate to the Paris goals. There is a rising tide of concern on many fronts about the lack of progress on climate issues. Not just concern — anger,” Dudley said.
“We get our license to operate from society, but we get our capital from investors and it’s our duty to spend it wisely and deliver the returns they expect, both shorter-term and long term,” he added. “In other words, we have to be progressive for society and pragmatic for investors.”
Meanwhile, Chevron CEO and Chairman Mike Wirth focused on the company’s offshore drilling strategy and Australian liquefied natural gas business. He mentioned the company’s investments in technology that would remove carbon directly from the atmosphere only in passing, and he downplayed the notion of an energy transition as transformative for the industry.
“It’s interesting that this gets talked about as if energy transition is a new thing,” Wirth said on stage. “It’s not. We used to produce petroleum to replace whale oil for lighting. We’ve been in an energy transition for 140 years.”
But at an event where oil and gas seems to be losing its lock on setting the parameters of the discussion, some attendees said it was clear where the agenda was shifting.
“CERA is famously focused on oil and gas,” Cathy Zoi, the chief executive of EVgo and a former Obama-era DOE official who made her first visit to the conference this year, told POLITICO. “But I was in three executive room forums on electrification and innovation, EV charging, and all three were standing room only.”
“There’s an overwhelming change,” Ted Halstead, chief executive of the Climate Leadership Council, a Republican-backed initiative to implement a carbon tax, told POLITICO. “The oil and gas industry has never faced this much pressure from a variety of poles for climate action. This is a major turning point. I think the industry is sincere on finding a lasting solution.”
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/article/2019/03/new-tech-elbows-its-way-into-oil-and-gas-gabfest-1276482
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Big Tech Aims for a Piece of Big Oil
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
Twenty years ago, Darryl Willis was an oil and gas geoscientist, spending hours staring at computer screens displaying spreadsheets and seismic maps as he tried to collect and interpret data.
“I would spend a lot of my time trying to get data into shape so I could actually utilize it,” he said. “That problem shouldn't exist.”
Today, Willis is solving that problem, working for Silicon Valley technology giant Google to drum up energy industry customers who want to access and analyze data as easily as typing a query into Google’s search engine. As he put it in an interview at the annual energy conference, CERAWeek by IHS Markit, “How could that help us transform the delivery of oil and gas to the billion people on the planet who don' t have access to energy?”
Big Tech came to Houston in a big way last week, fanning out across the panels, showcases and reception rooms of CERAWeek, hoping to capture a piece of a multibillion industry in the midst of a wave of digital transformation. As energy companies begin to embrace the power of the cloud, the potential of artificial intelligence and reach of virtual reality, technology companies were there to help push them along.
Amazon Web Services plastered its logo around conference, held at the Hilton Americas hotel downtown. Microsoft’s cloud computing unit Azure ran demos of its Hololens virtual reality goggles. Google held private leadership dialogues with energy executives.
“This is the first year they've come in force (to CERAWeek),” said Peter Zornio, chief technology officer at Emerson, a St. Louis engineering and technology company that caters to the energy industry. “The cloud guys are here for a very simple reason. They see a business opportunity.”
For decades, the oil and gas companies have created a wealth of information about their own operations. Each oil well, for example, produces about 1 to 2 terabytes of data a day, according to Accenture, a global consulting and professional services firm. (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.) But Willis estimates that oil and gas companies are only using about 1 to 4 percent data available to them.
While a late comer to the game, the energy industry is quickly adopting advanced analytics and machine learning to make their operations more efficient, which in turn is leading them to the computing power of the cloud, the term used to described massive data centers operated by tech companies. The services offered by the likes Amazon, Google and Microsoft, can unlock companies’ ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data quickly, providing new insights on drilling strategies, equipment monitoring and maintenance, well planning and reservoir exploration.
Real money
That’s spurring a fundamental shift in how companies conduct operations and make decisions.
“Until about five or 10 years ago, you didn’t really have that kind of computational power at scale in a central location,” said Binu Mathew, senior vice president the Houston oilfield services company Baker Hughes. “People had to build their own data centers and you had to figure out how to move the data. Now, it’s all done on the cloud.”
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can cut out tedious tasks such as checking the chemical levels in a storage tank so experts can focus on higher level decision making. Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence that allows computer systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed
Shell’s Chief Technology Officer Yuri Sebregts said the company’s machine-learning technology can process seismic data to find geologic faults faster. Depending on the geology, some fault lines can help oil and gas migrate to the surface while others can disrupt drilling operations. Machine learning allows him to do that work in two hours for about $20 when it used to take geologists two months through pore through the data at cost of tens of thousands of dollars. “That’s transformational,” he said.
That frees up the geologists to focus on creative solutions rather than the monotonous work of combing through data themselves And having data in one centralized location on the cloud that can be accessed anywhere is saving companies millions, energy executives say.
For instance, if a Chevron oil rig goes down off the coast of Nigeria, a field worker there can wear Microsoft’s augmented reality glasses so an expert an Houston can see exactly what the field worker sees on the ground and point to what needs to be fixed, said Michelle Pflueger, a Chevron general manager who last year was put in charge of a team to accelerate the oil company’s digit
The cloud and the digitization it enables translates to meaningful profits for Chevron, Pflueger said. At one liquefied natural gas facility in Australia, Chevron increased the revenue it gets from the liquefied natural gas it processes by $240 million after implementing new advance automated process controls, Pflueger said
“That’s real dollars,” she said.
Chevron announced a far-reaching, seven-year partnership with Microsoft in 2017 worth billions of dollars. That same year, Chevron sold its data center in San Antonio to Microsoft for $80 million.
Marriage made in (data) heaven
Pflueger said the partnership goes beyond just putting its data on Microsoft’s cloud platform.
“They've got folks embedded in our teams and we've got folks sitting in their office,” she said. “Along with the partnership with Microsoft, you have a whole suite of technology and technology expertise that we get to leverage in our business.”
In the past year, Microsoft has also announced major partnerships with energy majors Exxon Mobil, BP and Equinor and the oilfiled services companies Schlumberger and Halliburton. Google Cloud has major partnerships with the French oil company Total, as well as Schlumberger, Baker Hughes and The Woodlands oil and gas company Anadarko Petroleum. Amazon Web Services hashed out eals with Australian oil company Woodside Energy BP and Baker Hughes, among others.
These companies are at the forefront of bringing together two of world’s most lucrative industries - a marriage that will likely leave both sectors transformed.
“What the (energy) industry has historically done is look inside itself for solution to problems. So it tries to do everything in a very insular way,” said Willis of Google. “And I think going forward, the companies that ultimately win will be companies that figure out how to partner with innovative startups create unusual partnerships with companies like Google.”
For Big Tech, the potential lies not just in getting energy companies onto the cloud but in the potential partnerships that sprout from it.
For example, if an energy company stores its data on Amazon Web Service’s platform, it may be more inclined to use Amazon’s analytics or other services to have everything in one interface, said Muqsit Ashraf, global head of energy for Accenture Strategy. That presents a host of potential business models.
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Fire Breaks out at Houston-Area Petrochemicals Terminal
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
Some Houston-area residents were urged to remain indoors as a fire burned at a petrochemicals terminal.
The fire started yesterday morning at Intercontinental Terminals Co. in Deer Park, Texas, about 15 miles southeast of Houston, and continued to burn this morning. Deer Park officials issued a shelter-in-place directive after the fire was reported.
Efforts to extinguish the fire with foam continue. A statement this morning from the company said the fire has spread to more tanks, affecting eight total. Readings from air monitoring so far are "currently well below hazardous levels," the statement said.
Harris County officials say the fire started at the terminal that stores petrochemical liquids and gases, including fuel oil and bunker oil. The company's website says the terminal has a storage capacity of 13.1 million barrels.
The fire is the second in as many days at a Houston-area petrochemical facility. A fire at an Exxon Mobil Corp. plant in nearby Baytown that broke out Saturday has been contained.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/18/stories/1060127523
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Deer Park Plant Fire Spreads to Eight Tanks; Shelter-In-Place Lifted
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Julian Gill
The petrochemical fire at the Deer Park plant has now been burning for 24 hours as emergency crews work to control it with foam.
Deer Park officials have lifted the shelter-in-place, but the fire has now spread to a total of eight tanks. Risk of explosion is minimal, but plant officials are taking precautions to reduce that possibility, according to a press release from the Intercontinental Terminals Company.
Deer Park emergency officials said at 5:30 a.m. that no air quality readings from the fire at ITC "have exceeded action levels."
Air quality levels are currently listed as "moderate," according to AirNow.gov.
Low levels of particulate matter have been detected, and a "single volatile organic compound detection" has been found about 6 miles southwest of the facility, according to ITC news release.
The air quality readings are currently below hazardous levels, ITC said.
The fire broke out Sunday morning and burned overnight. No injuries have been reported.
The chemicals in most of the involved tanks are used in the production of finished gasoline and base oil used in machine lubricants, according to a news release from Intercontinental Terminals Company. The chemical in one newly involved tank, Toluene, is used in the production of nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner, according to ITC.
The chemicals in the original two tanks that caught fire are Naphtha and Xylene, both components in gasoline. Naphtha can irritate the nose and throat when breathed, and poisonous gases are produced when it's exposed to fire.
Deer park officials have re-opened State Highway 225. Portions of Independence Parkway will remain closed until further notice.
Meanwhile, Deer Park Independent School District closed all campuses today, as well as all after school activities. La Porte ISD also canceled classes.
"Emergency Services Director Robert Hemminger indicated that this is still a dynamic incident and air monitoring will continue," according to a tweet from the Deer Park Emergency Management Office. "Residents are encouraged to monitor City social media for updates."
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Deer-Park-plant-fire-spreads-to-five-more-tanks-13696392.php
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Deer Park Plant Fire: What You Need to Know about the Chemicals
Mar 18, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Julian Gill
At least three identifiable chemicals are involved in the ongoing fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company facility in Deer Park, according to plant officials.
The fire initially spread to two tanks containing Naphtha and Xylene, two components used in gasoline. The fire spread overnight to more tanks, one of which was storing Taluene, a chemical used in nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner.
The fire has now been burning for 24 hours, affecting a total of eight tanks. While air quality levels were listed as "moderate" in Houston as of 9 a.m., health officials warn of side effects from exposure to these chemicals.
Naphtha can irritate the nose and throat when breathed, and poisonous gases are produced when naphtha is exposed to fire, according to earlier reports in the Houston Chronicle.
Luke Metzger, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Environment Texas, previously told the Chronicle that Naphtha can cause headaches, dizziness nausea and vomiting in the short term. Long-term side effects include risk of cancer and risk to the nervous system, he said.
Xylene exposure produces similar side effects, including including headaches, dizziness, confusion and change in one's sense of balance, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease registry.
Exposure to Xylene at very high levels can cause unconsciousness and, in some cases, death, according to the registry.
Toluene's short-term side effects also include confusion, headaches and dizziness. Weakness, memory loss and nausea can also occur, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
In the long-term, Toluene can cause brain damage, as well as damage to the kidneys and liver. Read more about the side effects here.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Deer-Park-toxic-chemicals-toxic-poisonous-fire-gas-13696801.php
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2 Injured in Los Angeles Explosion Following Gasoline Leak
Mar 18, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
A tanker truck leaking gasoline caught fire and caused an explosion that injured two people and sent up a huge plume visible across Los Angeles yesterday, authorities said.
The blast reverberated through storm drains and sent manhole covers into the air, fire department officials said.
"There was a big explosion — we thought it was an earthquake," resident Joseph Casillas toldthe Los Angeles Times. "There was a fireball and a tornado of fire."
Crews responding to reports of a gas smell found the tanker fully engulfed and then were forced back by the force of the blast, officials said. Dozens of firefighters took nearly two hours to douse the stubborn blaze in a neighborhood about 6 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Thick, black smoke snaked into the sky and eventually blew out to sea.
Two people were hospitalized, one with injuries described as serious. The other victim suffered minor injuries, fire officials said.
The flames burned a two-story home and displaced a family, authorities said.
The smoldering tank, which was in a storage yard, lay on its side with one end blown wide open. Officials didn't immediately know how much gas was originally inside the tank, which could hold up to 9,000 gallons.
The leak and subsequent explosion are under investigation.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/18/stories/1060127509
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Graves Sees a Positive Role for GOP in New Select Climate Committee
Mar 18, 2019 | Roll Call
By Elvina Nawaguna
Rep. Garret Graves says he wasn’t keen on joining the select committee to address climate change formed by the new Democratic House majority in January.
But on Feb. 28, weeks after the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis had been formed and long after the Democrats had announced their roster, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appointed the Louisiana Republican as co-chairman.
“There were a number of people both on and off the Hill that had encouraged me to do this earlier, and I didn’t really have it on my radar and quite frankly, wasn’t very interested,” Graves said.
But now he says he’s optimistic some bipartisan ideas can come out of the panel. Graves hails from a state dependent on oil and gas for a big portion of its economy and on its coastline for tourism and seafood industry. Louisiana is also adversely affected by climate change, including sea level rise and coastal erosion.
“There are adaptation and mitigation measures that I think should be carried out, and it’s a mistake to pretend as though those changes aren’t happening or to not acknowledge it,” Graves said during an interview in his Capitol Hill office. “I think the fiscally conservative thing to do is actually to make proactive adaptation type investment. … I do feel strongly about that.”
Graves hasn’t worked directly with the select committee chairwoman, Kathy Castor, on legislation before, but said he has met with the Florida Democrat “a couple of times” since becoming co-chairman.
“This is a new friendship at this point,” Graves said.
Castor has — at least publicly — embraced Graves as her counterpart.
“Mr. Graves represents a state and district that is bearing escalating costs from climate change, just like my district and the state of Florida,” she said in an emailed response to questions. “These impacts do not discriminate based on political party. … The good news is that climate solutions, from deploying more clean energy to making our homes and businesses more energy efficient, enjoy broad bipartisan support.”
Graves said he sees opportunity to work with Democrats on common issues that include making coastal areas more resilient to climate impacts.
“I suspect that this committee — part of the intention by the speaker — is to try to make this a divisive political issue, but when I look at it, I actually see some areas where we absolutely should be cooperating and working together,” he said. “And that’s what I intend to attempt to do, and that includes focusing on the greatest urgency that faces us right now, which is the sea rise, the mitigation or adaptation type investments.”
Voted against climate action
Although unlike many Republicans, Graves acknowledges the need to act on climate change, he has been criticized by green groups for often voting otherwise. In 2015, Graves voted with House Republicans to reject the Clean Power Plan. Last year, he voted for a resolution rejecting a carbon tax and for an amendment to the Interior-Environment spending bill prohibiting the government from considering the social cost of carbon. The League of Conservation voters has awarded him a 3 percent lifetime score for his environmental record.
He rejected calls from progressive groups that members of the climate select committee should be precluded from taking money from fossil fuel donors.
“I vote against companies; I vote against organizations; I represent people, so I don’t subscribe to the premise that members of Congress are wholesale bribed by campaign contributions,” he said.
The oil and gas industry was Graves’ top industry donor from 2013-2018, giving him more than $500,000, according to analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org.
Although he wasn’t in Congress yet, Graves said he was “the hardest person on BP when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened.” After the 2010 accident that gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for about three months, Graves was appointed as Louisiana’s lead representative in assessing the damage to natural resources and negotiating with the company in the recovery efforts.
After Hurricane Katrina, Graves became chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, an EPA office established to bolster hurricane protection, flood control, ecosystem restoration and other community resiliency efforts.
Though a surprising choice received with cynicism by several climate advocates, the Environmental Defense Fund, which often works with oil and gas companies on climate action, embraced Graves for the role.
Elizabeth Gore, EDF’s senior vice president for political affairs, described the selection of Graves to lead Republicans on the select committee as a “constructive step” toward bipartisan progress on climate change.
‘Ground zero’
“Louisiana is ground zero for both climate impacts and carbon production. Congressman Graves understands the impacts deeply and has been a leader in addressing them,” Gore said in a March 1 news release. “Mr. Graves also recognizes the established science of climate change. That recognition is critical in addressing carbon emissions — the unaddressed critical component of climate policy.”
When the select committee was formed, progressive advocates, including New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had pushed for its formation, shunned it as toothless for its lack of power to write legislation or issue subpoenas.
Some centrist Democrats including House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey suggested that standing committees were the best avenues for legislative action on climate change. Graves echoed those views.
“You have standing committees that have expertise in these areas,” he said. “I don’t think that you come in and just provide legislative and subpoena authority to this committee that has cross-cutting jurisdictions, because then all you do is you cause all sorts of consternation and conflict among different committees in the Congress and that doesn’t lead to improved functionality.”
The select committee’s job description doesn’t include the Green New Deal, as initially sought by the Democrats’ progressive wing. The Green New Deal, an agenda that calls for a massive remake of the U.S. economy and a range of social justice reforms as part of a plan to combat climate change and help the country adopt, has divided some Democrats and been framed as a punchline by Republicans.
“The reason you have a committee like this and the reason that you go through and do hearings is to help to get input from experts to help inform the actions of the Congress, and so on the one hand, I’m trying really hard to keep an open mind,” Graves said. “On the other hand, I think that when you go through and you read components of this thing, it more so resembles a high school, maybe grade school, term paper that is full of idealism and virtually absent of reality.”
The proponents of a Green New Deal had a somewhat messy rollout of their nonbinding resolution in February, and that put them on the defensive against conservative pundits and lawmakers.
“I love throwing things at the wall … but I think that if I were some of the authors and advocates of the Green New Deal, I first would have spent a little bit more time thinking through it and refining it,” Graves said. “I would have spent a whole lot more time working with people that are actually in the real world, real industry, even innovators in the energy space, learning about what’s actually doable, what’s achievable, as opposed to throwing out these things that I think just lack reality and would destroy the United States economy to the benefit, quite frankly, of other countries.”
http://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/graves-sees-a-positive-role-for-gop-in-new-select-climate-committee
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How Trump's New Rule-Slashing Judge Could Sway Green Issues
Mar 18, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Ellen M. Gilmer and Niina Heikkinen
President Trump's deregulatory boss is now seated on one of the most powerful courts in the nation, where she'll have lifetime tenure to influence environmental policy and other issues.
Neomi Rao will be sworn in this afternoon to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a forum with broad authority to review regulations and federal agency decisions, among other things.
Rao is well-versed in the issues, having served as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and as an administrative law professor before that.
In those roles, she's been vocal in her skepticism of what many conservatives consider an unrelenting expansion of power for federal agencies.
Environmental advocates are watching closely to see how Rao's background affects her disposition from the bench. They are concerned she will be quick to overturn certain anti-pollution rules or broad regulatory programs that come before the court.
"We'll be waiting to see what kind of judge she is," Ben Driscoll, head of the judicial program at the League of Conservation Voters, said in a recent interview. "It's going to be an interesting and scary time to see."
Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler noted Rao's confirmation does not change the D.C. Circuit's balance; she'll take the seat vacated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who reviewed D.C. Circuit cases from a reliably conservative lens.
Joseph Goffman, an Obama-era EPA official and executive director of Harvard Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program, pointed out that like her predecessor, Rao built her career among "extremely conservative members of the legal community centered around the Federalist Society."
Another Kavanaugh-style judge on the powerful court is not good news for environmental litigants, Driscoll said.
"In terms of political ideology, she's right there with him," he said. "I don't think we'll expect any better outcomes with her on the bench."
Stepping aside
A critical question, especially for the early years of Rao's tenure: Which cases will require her recusal? As head of OIRA since mid-2017, Rao's fingerprints are on nearly every major regulatory decision the Trump administration has made.
Federal law requires circuit court judges to step aside from matters they worked on as government lawyers or advisers, and from cases where there could be a perception of bias. But judges have wide discretion when applying those standards, and it remains unclear where Rao will draw lines (Greenwire, Nov. 20, 2018).
For example, should she recuse herself from litigation involving a regulatory mandate that predates her time at OIRA but that she promoted — as is the case for President Trump's "two-for-one" executive order, which requires agencies to toss two rules for every new one created?
And should she step aside from cases involving a final EPA regulation if she was involved only in OIRA's consideration of an earlier proposal?
During a confirmation hearing last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pushed Rao to commit to recusing herself from cases involving regulations she worked on at OIRA. Rao refused to make a firm commitment but said she would follow the relevant recusal standards.
"This is of great concern as other nominees have understood the appearance of bias and unequivocally made such commitments," Feinstein said in a statement last week.
Driscoll said he's hopeful Rao will "do the right thing."
"For the near future," he said, "it's hard to imagine many cases where she doesn't have some conflict in considering the case."
Environmental docket
Rao's influence on environmental issues will be somewhat limited by her recusals and the random selection process for the three-judge panels that hear most D.C. Circuit cases. She'll join 10 other active judges and seven senior judges who often participate in the court's docket.
During the course of her tenure, however, she is likely to hear scores of disputes with implications for environmental policy, including fights surrounding recent Trump administration moves.
"It seems to me any sort of EPA rulemaking that's going to be finalized any time soon ... are going to end up before the D.C. Circuit," Goffman said.
Those include reversals of Obama-era rules such as the Clean Power Plan and controls on vehicle emissions under the corporate average fuel economy standards.
The D.C. Circuit could also field environmental lawsuits pushing the Trump administration to regulate certain sources of greenhouse gas emissions outside the electricity and car sectors, said UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson.
Rao could also hear challenges to how EPA regulates coal ash disposal. The D.C. Circuit last year ordered EPA to strengthen its regulation for the coal-fired power plant residue.
"So now the administration needs to issue a new rule that continues their deregulatory agenda, and conforms to the ruling by the D.C. Circuit, which will be interesting," said Caitlin McCoy, climate, clean air and energy fellow at Harvard's Environment and Energy Law Program.
Advocates hope Rao would recuse in many of those cases, plus others that deal more directly with the regulatory process: EPA's "secret science" proposal to ditch research that lacks publicly available data from rulemaking; the agency's ongoing consideration of whether to include "co-benefits" when weighing the costs and benefits of new rules; and the Trump administration's "two-for-one" executive order prioritizing regulatory rollbacks.
"That issue area is squarely within the purview of OIRA," said Center for Progressive Reform senior policy analyst James Goodwin. "They bring a unique expertise to that issue, so presumably they would have taken a very close look at that rule. She should really recuse."
Other issues that could land on her docket: endangered species protections, offshore drilling, pipelines and environmental waivers for border wall construction.
Two Federal Energy Regulatory Commission pipeline permits are at issue in cases pending before the D.C. Circuit: one for the Atlantic Coast gas project and one for the PennEast line. Either one could be crucial in the legal battle over pipeline development and climate change.
Finally, Rao could influence a key administrative law debate simmering in federal courts regarding the Chevron standard directing judges to give deference to agencies interpreting ambiguous laws. Other recent Trump appointees, including Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch, favor narrowing or striking down the precedent.
"It's not as clear from her record what she would do," Driscoll said, "but the table has been set for the D.C. Circuit to set up a case for the Supreme Court to review."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/18/stories/1060127541
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