Preview Newsletter
AM ACC Clips Report - May 20, 2019
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Hearing on PFAS Risks
May 22, 2019 | Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee
Location: 406 Dirksen/ 10:00 AM -
Hearing on EPA Mercury Policies
May 21, 2019 | House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Location: 2322 Rayburn/ 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Renewable Energy and Efficiency
May 21, 2019 | Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Location: 366 Dirksen/ 10:00 AM -
Markup of Energy-Water and Defense Funding Bills
May 21, 2019 | House Appropriations Committee
Location: 2359 Rayburn/ 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Climate Change and Transportation Infrastructure
May 21, 2019 | The House Science, Space and Technology Committee
Location: 2318 Rayburn/ 10:00 AM -
Hearing on Creating a Resilient Climate in America
May 23, 2019 | Select Committee on the Climate Crisis
Location: 2247 Rayburn/ 9:00 AM -
Hearing on NAFTA Enforcement
May 22, 2019 | Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade
Location: 1100 Longworth/ 10:00 AM -
(ACC Mentioned) Humanity Is Drowning in Plastic
May 17, 2019 | Jacobin Magazine
By Edward Carver
Avoiding plastic is the new radical chic. On April 21 the Guardian ran a long storysuggesting that “zero-waste shops” are the way to “avert catastrophe.” -
(ACC Mentioned) How America Is Sabotaging The Global War On Plastic Waste
May 17, 2019 | Huff Post
By Dominique Mosbergen
When President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Save Our Seas Act into law last October, he painted a grim picture of just how dire marine plastic pollution had become. -
Trump Lifts Metals Tariffs, Easing Passage of New North American Trade Deal
May 17, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Alexander Panetta, Megan Cassella and Sabrina Rodriguez
The Trump administration has reached a deal with Canada and Mexico to lift steel and aluminum tariffs immediately, marking a significant step forward on the path to approval of the new North American trade pact. -
EPA Eyes Supplemental Plan As It Seeks To Speed Science Data Rule
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA is considering issuing a supplemental plan for its controversial science transparency rule, a measure that is part of Administrator Andrew Wheeler's stepped up effort to complete the rule within a year -- though the effort faces widespread criticism, little regulatory justification and a massive number of of public comments to address, sources say. -
SAB Seeks To Expand Transparency Rule Review Beyond Wheeler's Call
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
A work group of EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) is asking the agency a series of questions about its controversial science transparency rule, a move that appears aimed at broadening advisors' review of the measure beyond what Administrator Andrew Wheeler proposed last month. -
Court Seeks More Briefing On Groups' Challenge To TSCA Evaluation Rule
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
A federal appellate panel is asking EPA and environmentalists to provide additional briefing on the petitioners' standing to challenge the agency's framework rule governing how it will evaluate existing chemicals under the revised toxics law and the ripeness of their suit after recent arguments in what one of the judges called a “very difficult case.” -
(ACC Mentioned) Opinion: Why The Pool Poll Should Give Us Pause
May 18, 2019 | NPR
By Scott Simon
The next time anyone reports the results of a poll or survey, even NPR, remember: A new survey says 51% of the adults in America splash around in swimming pools instead of showering or bathing. -
Senators take their turn scrutinizing PFAS bills
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Arian Figueroa
Senate Environmental and Public Works lawmakers will review bills to address toxic chemicals found in drinking water this week. -
Millions of Abandoned Wells Spark Climate, Safety Fears
May 20, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Lee
A couple of years ago, Charlie Brethauer started to smell gas in the backyard of his home. -
Corrosion Led to Worst U.S. Gas Leak Ever, and There Were Others
May 17, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Mark Chediak
The worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, which broke out at a Sempra Energy storage field near Los Angeles almost four years ago, was caused by corrosion -- and there were others before it, according to a report commissioned by California regulators. -
National Grid Halts New NYC Gas Customers Until Pipeline OK’d
May 20, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Keshia Clukey
National Grid Plc won’t take any new natural gas customers in the New York City area and on Long Island until New York State approves Williams Cos.’ $1 billion shale gas pipeline project, the company said May 17. -
New Jersey Chemical Plant Fire Sends Fumes over Pulaski Skyway
May 18, 2019 | New York Post
By Ben Feuerherd
A chemical plant fire in New Jersey sent noxious smoke billowing into the air near Newark — and officials urged residents to shut their windows to avoid the smoke. -
Trump to Talk Funding with Dems as Panels Weigh Reforms
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Maxine Joselow
Infrastructure Week has come and gone, but the issue remains in the spotlight. -
(ACC Mentioned) States Crack Down on Environmental Activists
May 20, 2019 | Sierra Magazine
By Jacob Shea
On May 7th, Texas state legislators approved legislation that imposes harsh criminal penalties for protest around critical infrastructure projects. Under the rule, actual damage or intent to damage critical infrastructure now includes peaceful process, so long as the protest interrupts operations. -
States Aren’t Waiting for the Trump Administration on Environmental Protections
May 19, 2019 | The Washington Post
By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin
More than a dozen states are moving to strengthen environmental protections to combat a range of issues from climate change to water pollution, opening a widening rift between stringent state policies and the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. -
E.P.A. Could Make Thousands of Pollution Deaths Vanish by Changing Its Math
May 20, 2019 | The New York Times
By Lisa Friedman
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to adopt a new method for projecting the future health risks of air pollution, one that experts said has never been peer-reviewed and is not scientifically sound, according to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans. -
Trump’s EPA Shifts More Environmental Enforcement to States
May 20, 2019 | AP (In the Washington Post)
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Susan Holmes’ home, corner store and roadside beef jerky stand are right off Oklahoma Highway 31, putting them in the path of trucks hauling ash and waste from a power plant that burns the high-sulfur coal mined near this small town. -
Republicans Aim to Counter Climate Criticism with New R&D Bills
May 20, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Eric Wolff
Stung by criticism that they've ignored climate change, Senate Republicans are planning to roll out a suite of bills designed to help develop technology to reduce carbon dioxide — but not requiring states or companies to cut their emissions. -
Oil Majors Put $2M Behind Carbon Price Lobbying Push
May 20, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Zack Colman
Two of the world’s biggest oil companies are putting $2 million behind a lobbying effort to impose a price on carbon emissions in exchange for nixing federal greenhouse gas regulations and shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits. -
Select Committee Looks to Build 'a Relationship'
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will cross its fingers and hope for bipartisanship this week as it takes up climate resilience, an area that both sides believe is ripe for compromise.
Congressional Hearings
Industry and Association News
TSCA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation and Infrastructure News
Environment News
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May 22, 2019 | Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee
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Hearing on EPA Mercury Policies
May 21, 2019 | House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
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Hearing on Renewable Energy and Efficiency
May 21, 2019 | Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
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Markup of Energy-Water and Defense Funding Bills
May 21, 2019 | House Appropriations Committee
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Hearing on Climate Change and Transportation Infrastructure
May 21, 2019 | The House Science, Space and Technology Committee
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Hearing on Creating a Resilient Climate in America
May 23, 2019 | Select Committee on the Climate Crisis
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May 22, 2019 | Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade
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(ACC Mentioned) Humanity Is Drowning in Plastic
May 17, 2019 | Jacobin Magazine
By Edward Carver
Avoiding plastic is the new radical chic. On April 21 the Guardian ran a long storysuggesting that “zero-waste shops” are the way to “avert catastrophe.” Lifestyle magazines champion bamboo toothbrushes and buying grains in bulk. Last year at least five books were published on living without plastic, and plastic-free community groups have popped up across Europe and North America. Many middle-class shoppers are so scared to be seen using plastic bags that they end up with a massive pile of canvas tote bags at home — one for each time they showed up at the supermarket empty-handed.
This trend is particularly strong in the UK. Many Britons watched David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II, a 2017 BBC series that showed the tragic consequences plastic waste has for wildlife. This led to a lot of guilt and a fair bit of green proselytizing. As one reviewer put it “If you are still getting over the albatrosses feeding their young plastics on Blue Planet 2, now is the time to go and manically recycle.”
But this energy is misdirected. Amid all the fuss about coffee cups and recycling, there’s one thing that we never hear about: the plastics industry. Since plastic drink bottles first appeared in the 1970s, global plastic production has increased twenty-fold, and it is expected to quadruple again by 2050. Yet the problem is still framed as a matter of consumers’ individual conscience. That suits the plastics industry just fine. When Theresa May proposed a tax on plastic packaging — the world’s first — the British Plastics Federation said that it was “very disturbed” at her tone and pointed out that “littering” was a matter of “personal behavior.”
In reality, the massive expansion of plastics production makes a mockery of attempts to mitigate the effects through eco-conscious consumerism. Fracking has led to a glut of cheap plastic feedstock and what the president of the American Chemistry Council called “an astonishing gain in competitiveness” in chemical and plastics manufacturing — keeping production rising. Instead of turning off the “tap” of cheap plastics, the industry is building facilities that will lock us into mass plastic production for decades. This is what needs controlling.
The Plastics Front Line
Jim Ratcliffe is Britain’s richest man, with a net worth of about $24 billion. So proud is he of this fact that before the Sunday Times published its Rich List last year, he contacted an editorto point out that his wealth had been underestimated in previous rankings. The Queen knighted him for “services to business” last year. We might doubt if his riches are really worth celebrating. For one thing, he rose to the top on a sort of plastic bubble.
His multinational petrochemical company Ineos produces more plastic than any other firm in Europe, and, like many US energy companies, it’s investing in more. Ineos recently announced that as well as expanding its recently upgraded plastics facilities in Norway and Scotland, it would spend more than $3 billion on a new factory in Belgium. Often referred to as “crackers,” these factories crack ethane molecules in half and turn them into ethylene, the base chemical for most plastics.
Ineos used to get its ethane from North Sea crude oil, but now uses fracked ethane from the US. Tapping into the fracking bonanza, it commissioned the construction of eight ships — total cost: $2 billion — to carry ethane across the Atlantic. This has helped Ineos’s Scottish facility double its plastics output, even before planned upgrades. Despite their proclaimed environmental ambitions, EU countries have offered the firm financial support and loan guarantees. While there isn’t much fracking in the UK — only small earthquakes are allowed before drilling must stop — Ineos is lobbying the government to loosen fracking laws.
As ethical consumers swap tips on refillable laundry detergents, the plastic boom continues unabated. Ethylene is now so cheap to produce that it’s no sweat for Coca-Cola to make 100 billion plastic bottles a year. Since shale gas became plentiful, the US chemical and plastics industry has invested more than $200 billion in new infrastructure, especially for crackers and related facilities along the Gulf Coast. Chemicals and plastics are already especially profitable for firms like ExxonMobil, and they are set to become even more important. New facilities should allow production of ethylene and propylene (another common base chemical for plastics) to increase by more than a third by 2025. Right now, about 8 percent of the world’s oil is used for plastics, but as production increases, that figure is expected to grow to 20 percent by 2050.
People are more likely to be concerned about where plastics end up, than how they are produced: we worry about garbage patches in the ocean or beaches strewn with packaging waste. But the downsides begin well before plastics are disposed of. “We’re really trying to paint a more holistic picture of what the impact of plastics are, starting at the wellhead,” Priscilla Villa, an Earthworks campaigner in Texas, told me. “When we talk about fracked gas, we’re talking about fracked plastic.”
Some communities that Villa works with are just a few hundred meters from petrochemical facilities or find themselves surrounded by the industry. They see firsthand health impacts that go well beyond consumer concerns like potential exposure to phthalates in baby diapers or endocrine disruption from take-away packaging. For the underprivileged, the dangers start with things like industrial storage tanks near their homes. Late March and early April saw two petrochemical fires in the greater Houston area, causing one death and huge pollution. During such incidents, people in nearby communities receive “shelter in place” instructions that would seem apocalyptic to most Americans: Saran wrap your doors and windows, turn off your air conditioning (no matter how hot it is), move to the center of the house, and wait for the all-clear. (Saran wrap, no surprise, is made from ethylene.)
Yet plastics injustice, as it might be called, is not on many environmentalists’ radar. Some are rightly concerned with communities in the Global South that have become overrun with imported Western trash. Villages in Southeast Asia reek of burning plastic, and over half the waste in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is openly dumped. But the other front of the war on plastic has been forgotten. Meadhbh Bolger, a resource justice campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, told me about a talk she recently gave in Leuven, Belgium, less than an hour from the site of Ineos’s planned new “cracker.” No one had heard about the cracker — and she was speaking to graduate students in sustainable development. You can’t help but think that if she had been speaking about avocados wrapped in plastic, many of the students would have spoken up, outraged, ready to denounce their fellow consumers.
Plastic Cups Overfloweth
When the petrochemical industry addresses the plastic problem at all, it frames it as a waste management issue. Never does it recognize that we need to stop making so much plastic to start with. Most of it ends up as waste that we’ll be dealing with forever, perhaps as an invisible part of our food chain or, if it’s burned, our air.
For decades, the industry has blamed consumers for littering and heralded recycling as the be-all, end-all solution. However, the global plastic-recycling rate is less than 20 percent, and even if it reaches 50 percent by 2050 — considered a best-case scenario — increased production means that plastic pollution will still double by then, possibly leaving the ocean with more plastic than fish. Recycling itself requires energy, and plastics degrade in quality when they are melted down; the polymers in a soda bottle, for example, can only be reused in another bottle five or ten times.
When it needs a break from blaming Western consumers, the industry points the finger at Asia, where most plastic enters the ocean. The Trump administration is pushing this narrative. Doubtless countries such as China do need more recycling and waste infrastructure. But one reason the infrastructure is so inadequate is that it’s been overrun with Western trash, mostly low-grade plastic such as berry or yogurt containers. At the start of last year, China came to its senses and placed a ban on imports of post-consumer plastic. Other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia soon became overloaded with plastic waste, and imposed similar bans, although they aren’t always enforced.
“It’s transparently us offshoring our mess,” Sam Chetan-Welsh, a political campaigner at Greenpeace UK, told me. “We’re making crappy packaging and it’s going to other countries to be dumped, burnt, or clog up their waste systems. We chuck it in the bin of the Global South and hope they clean it up.”
Local councils in the UK are burdened with plastic waste, while plastics manufacturers are currently obliged to cover only about 10 percent of waste disposal costs. Both groups usually pay export companies to take the problem off their hands, meaning that two-thirds of plastic in UK recycling bins ends up abroad. The plastic is considered “recycled” once it’s on a ship at port. The government issues the export company a credit — no matter if the plastic later gets dumped in the ocean — and the Environment Agency doesn’t inspect overseas recycling sites or confirm that the plastic ever arrives. Moreover, the export companies aren’t honest about how much plastic they ship out. The Guardian recently found that British firms hungry for these credits had claimed to export tens of thousands of tons more plastic waste than customs had recorded leaving the country. “The system is rife with corruption,” Labour MP Mary Creagh, head of the Environmental Audit Select Committee, told me. “It is open to free-riding. Anyone can be a licensed ‘waste operator.’ Every cowboy in the world is a waste operator.”
Most plastic that isn’t exported goes to landfills or incinerators. Waste companies like to refer to incinerators as “energy recovery” plants, as many are designed to convert waste into heat or electricity. However, such plants are basically “bonfires in a box.” They are a hugely inefficient energy source that creates large amounts of ash. By burning plastic, they also create significant carbon emissions: one London materials consultant told me that incinerators would better be called “skyfill” plants. Most environmentalists agree that letting plastic sit in a landfill, as unappealing as that might sound, would be the better option.
Despite these damaging emissions, governments often treat incineration as a form of recycling. Though the UK environment office’s chief scientific advisor has voiced opposition to incineration, its data still combines “recovery” (read: incineration) and recycling rates. Such accounting measures help justify the incineration infrastructure supported by government in recent years. The amount of plastic waste sent for “recovery” in the UK increased more than six-fold between 2006 and 2016. Overall, more than 40 percent of Europe’s plastic ends up in incinerators.
Many of us, as kids, are taught not to burn plastic, as it can release toxic fumes, yet waste companies somehow sell the idea to policymakers and local councilors. It’s no surprise that incinerators, which emit high levels of particulate matter, are built in low-income areas. “Incineration goes hand in glove with systemic racism and systemic inequality,” Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law, told me. “The plants are overwhelmingly located in areas with people of color.”
LondonEnergy, until recently called LondonWaste, happens to be the company that burns my trash — which, despite some effort on my part, contains a good deal of plastic — along with that of several affluent boroughs in North London. Our black bags are sent to the company’s EcoPark (sic!) in Edmonton, one of the city’s most deprived neighborhoods. A visitor, dressed in hazmat gear, can look down at the EcoPark’s canyons of trash and be made to feel small by the vastness of the accumulated material. The smokestack runs 24/7, and the facility will soon be rebuilt and expanded, locking in skyfill for decades to come. (There is, however, a new campaign to stop the rebuild.)
Like petrochemical companies, waste companies such as Viridor and Veolia receive a lot of government support for their incineration efforts. LondonEnergy’s new facility in Edmonton will be financed by public borrowing; the project’s estimated capital costs, which don’t include operating expenses, are about $850 million. Such facilities also receive another form of implicit government support: they are exempted from the EU’s greenhouse-gas-emissions trading scheme, so waste companies don’t have to pay for carbon allowances.
The companies don’t always show their gratitude. An incinerator in Baltimore recently sued the countyfor $32 million for not providing it with enough waste — testimony to the discouragement of recycling, if ever there was one.
Is Taxing Plastic the Solution?
Plastics-industry firms including ExxonMobil, Shell, DowDuPont, Veolia, and Proctor & Gamble have formed a nonprofit called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Its mission statement proclaims that plastics “have an important place in our world — but not in our environment.” Never has humanity’s separation from nature been so complete.
Indeed, it’s hard to see how they can achieve this objective while they invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new plastic production infrastructure, and while trade groups formed by similar companies lobby against plastic bag levies or taxes like the one proposed in the UK. The industry also has a history of a different sort of lobbying. Mobil Chemical, part of what is now ExxonMobil, pushed plastic bags on supermarkets in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The UK tax on plastic packaging, if it withstands industry resistance, will apply to products not made of at least 30 percent recycled plastic; it’s tentatively set to come into effect in 2022. The UK is also considering “extended producer responsibility” legislation, so that companies have to pay disposal costs. The proposed regulations also aim to make recycling collection more consistent — so it will be clearer what can be put in a recycling bin — and establish a deposit-bottle scheme like the one many US states have. Ideally, the new laws would also force the industry to design products in a way that reduces waste. For example, if a soda bottler were to forgo dyes and use easy-to-remove labels, its bottles would be more valuable to recycling plants.
It’s heartening that there is cross-party support for some of these measures (unusual for environmental legislation), and that the tax’s stated objective is not to raise revenues but to change industry behavior and influence production decisions. When global oil and gas prices are low, as they have been since 2014, plastic producers have no incentive to use recycled material. It’s cheaper to produce virgin plastics. Governments have to step in to change the accounting equation. Plastics, after all, are not cheap per se. It’s just that their health and environmental costs aren’t being accounted for.
But if a plastics tax is to be fair and win broad public support, it should be designed to minimize economic impacts on people with low incomes — even if that means it will be less effective from an environmental standpoint. It will be more progressive if it’s applied earlier in the supply chain — when fossil fuels become plastic feedstock — because the industry will be more likely to absorb some of the new expenses instead of passing them on to consumers. The UK government hasn’t decided where it will implement its tax, but thankfully it appears to be looking upstream.
Such a production tax has limitations: companies like Ineos might just absorb the cost and keep producing virgin plastics apace. A tax aimed at everyday consumers, visible to shoppers when they bought packets of ramen, would do more to change individual behavior and drive the public conversation. But if a consumer tax might reduce plastic use faster, it wouldn’t be easy to implement — accounting for the different packaging in millions of end products would be a logistical nightmare and it wouldn’t be as fair. Such class-blind environmental policy is what started the gilets jaunes movement: invoking climate change when he proposed a fuel-tax hike Emmanuel Macron placed the burden of change on ordinary car users — and they weren’t happy about it.
The UK’s environment secretary, Michael Gove, has been trying to outdo his European counterparts on plastics. The EU recently banned some single-use plastic items, including straws, but has made no serious move toward a plastics tax. Gove, a Conservative Brexiteer, may take some pleasure in Europe’s dithering. But it’s hypocritical for the UK to tax virgin plastics while also helping companies like Ineos produce more of them. And the Conservatives’ proposed legislation, while ostensibly aiming to change industry behavior, does so only in a very limited way: it treats increased recycling as the end policy goal. “Gove hasn’t got any plans or targets to reduce or cap plastic production,” Julian Kirby, a plastics pollution campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK, told me. “You can recycle more while still producing more. There’s nothing in the government plans to address the fundamental trend of increasing plastic use.”
A plastics tax is not alone sufficient to address the production problem. We also need to stop petrochemical projects before they break ground. In the US, the resistance has already begun. Community groups in Portland, Texas, are trying to block ExxonMobil’s latest cracker, which it plans to build on 1,400 acres of farmland just outside the town, and there are similar efforts across the Gulf Coast and Appalachia.
To match the size and power of the petrochemical industry, the resistance needs force of numbers. It would help if environmentalists put down their shampoo bars, came out of their zero-waste shops, and started actively opposing the interests of Jim Ratcliffe and company. Reacting to Blue Planet II by seeking a purer lifestyle isn’t going to cut it. We can’t afford to Saran-Wrap ourselves off from the problem or fall back on classist assumptions about “good” and “bad” consumers. Choosing a plastic-free shop over Tesco or Walmart is not an option for most people, and in any case, it’s too little, too late. The petrochemical industry is setting up far bigger shops, and it’s these that we need to visit, hopefully with a few banners in hand.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/plastic-production-recycling-waste
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(ACC Mentioned) How America Is Sabotaging The Global War On Plastic Waste
May 17, 2019 | Huff Post
By Dominique Mosbergen
When President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Save Our Seas Act into law last October, he painted a grim picture of just how dire marine plastic pollution had become.
“Every year, over 8 million tons of garbage is dumped into our oceans,” he declared. “This waste, trash and debris harms not only marine life, but also fishermen and coastal economies along America’s vast stretches.”
However, the Trump administration has refused to recognize America’s role in the ocean plastic crisis and has repeatedly tried to stymie international efforts to tackle the problem, while boosting the plastic industry at home.
Trump has blamed “many countries of the world” for the marine plastic problem, calling out China and Japan by name. “The bad news is [this garbage] floats toward us” from “other countries very far away,” the president said last year, adding that the U.S. is then “charged with removing it, which is a very unfair situation.”
While it is true that Asia is the source of an estimated 80% of marine plastic pollution, what Trump failed to mention was that most of it doesn’t actually originate there.
“It’s an uncomfortable fact that ... the vast majority of the waste in these Asian countries that are ending up in the oceans actually come from the U.S. and Europe,” David Azoulay of the Center for International Environmental Law said from Geneva on Thursday.
The U.S., which is one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of plastic, is also the No. 1 exporter of plastic scrap.
For decades, it sent much of this waste to China, which had processed about 45% of the world’s plastic scrap until it decided in 2018 to bar most of these imports. As a result, China’s Southeast Asian neighbors have been deluged with American plastic waste. Unlike China, however, countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam have neither the infrastructure nor the resources to properly handle this onslaught.
As a HuffPost investigation uncovered earlier this year, bales of plastic trash from countries like the U.S., U.K. and Australia are being illegally dumped or burned across Southeast Asian countries. Local activists in Malaysia said at the time that the U.S. and other wealthy nations were using the region as a “dumping ground.”
Yet, despite Americans’ contribution to the global plastic waste crisis ― and despite the recent efforts of most of the world’s governments to develop solutions to address it ― the Trump administration has chosen to take an “obstructionist” stance on this issue, activists say.
The U.S. is “very clearly isolating itself from the rest of the world on this issue,” said Azoulay, who directs CIEL’s environmental health program.
Just last week, the U.S. was accused of attempting to undermine a landmark Basel Convention proposal to control the flow of plastic waste to developing countries ― a set of rules that would shut the U.S. off from many of the countries where it currently ships its plastic scrap.
“It was another clear example of the U.S. playing an obstructive role in international negotiations,” Von Hernandez, global coordinator for the Break Free From Plastic initiative, said on Tuesday, speaking from the Philippines. “This has long been their playbook for anything to do with the plastic waste trade; they obfuscate the issue, they try to delay the process.”
On Friday, 186 countries and the European Union — all parties of the 1992 Basel treaty, which controls the transboundary movement of hazardous waste between nations — signed a legally binding agreement to track and limit the trade of lower-quality, mixed and contaminated plastics. These materials are typically difficult or impossible to recycle and are the plastics that often end up in landfills or polluting waterways. They also make up the vast majority of the plastic scrap exported by developed countries to poorer ones.
The U.S. is one of two countries that signed but never ratified the Basel treaty ― and, as such, was not among the countries that signed on to the new agreement, dubbed the Norwegian amendment after the country that first proposed it. That didn’t stop the American delegation from rabble-rousing, however.
There was an overwhelming consensus in support of the amendment, an unusual scenario for international agreements of this kind, according to Hernandez, Azoulay and Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, who were all in the room during the Basel negotiations last week. Even countries that have historically been antagonistic to plastic waste regulation, like Japan and Canada, backed the proposal.
There was just one tiny faction of countries that opposed the amendment, they said. The U.S. was vocal in its opposition, they noted. The others were Argentina and Brazil, neither of which export very much plastic scrap; the South American duo appeared to parrot the U.S. line.
“The U.S. delegation’s argument was the same argument we always hear from them: ‘We need more time, we cannot make a decision now, we need more data,’” Hernandez said. “You could tell that other parties were frustrated by their behavior.”
Puckett estimated that about 90% of the plastic exported to developing countries is mixed or contaminated. Under the new agreement, which will come into effect in January 2021, parties to the convention that wish to export most mixed and contaminated plastics will first need to obtain consent from the receiving nations.
Puckett described the new rules as “historic” and one of the convention’s greatest achievements to date.
The regulations, he said, are expected to have a profoundly positive effect on the plastic waste and recycling industry worldwide. There will be more transparency to what has historically been the very opaque international trade of plastic scrap. Recyclers in wealthy nations will be compelled to improve their sorting practices, which is expected to increase the rate that plastics are actually recycled. (Since 1950, the plastic waste recycling rate has been an abysmal 9% globally.)
The measures are also expected to significantly reduce the amount of contaminated plastics flowing into Southeast Asia, Africa and other developing areas ― and, in turn, slash the amount of marine plastic pollution originating from these nations.
It’s not hard to imagine why the Trump administration would oppose the Norwegian amendment. Hernandez said the U.S. has long opposed the Basel Convention and has a terrible track record when it comes to regulations related to waste of any kind.
Plus, he noted, the new rules are expected to hit the U.S. especially hard.
According to recent estimates by industry publication Resource Recycling, the U.S. currently exports at least 80% of its mixed plastics. Since the U.S. has not ratified the Basel Convention, however, developing countries that are parties to the treaty will no longer be able to accept most mixed plastics from the U.S. under the new rules.
“As a nonparty, the U.S. won’t be allowed to trade with parties” except for the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Puckett explained, noting that OECD members are mostly high-income economies known more for exporting plastic scrap than for importing it.
“The United States has been exporting so much of its scrap [to developing countries],” Puckett said. “They’re going to have to figure out something very different” after 2021.
Under Trump, a self-declared anti-globalist, the U.S. has increasingly been steered onto an isolationist path. It’s distanced itself from traditional trade partners and allies, has pulled out of international treaties like the landmark Paris climate change agreement and now, on the issue of plastics, has emerged starkly as a global outlier ― one that, according to activists, has attempted to dismantle the progress that other nations have made in this area.
Azoulay said this American separateness and antagonism was particularly obvious at a United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) meeting held in Kenya in March. During that meeting, almost all countries agreed to a proposal calling for U.N. members to phase out “most problematic single-use plastic products by 2025.” The U.S., with the support of Saudi Arabia and Cuba, however, took issue with this pledge and ultimately succeeded in watering down the language of the commitment to say only that countries would aim to “significantly reduce” single-use plastics by 2030.
According to Azoulay, who attended the Kenya meeting, the U.S. also played a “very strong obstructionist role” during discussions about broader frameworks related to marine litter and microplastics. “Again, the U.S. was a very lonely voice opposing the [plastic proposals] at UNEA,” he said.
Azoulay, a veteran attorney of environmental law, said he’s never seen the world’s nations as united over an issue as they appear to be regarding plastic waste.
“Today, if you look at those international gatherings, almost all countries are supporting tighter controls of plastic and they’re moving very fast,” he said. “In my whole career, I’ve never seen any international regulation move as fast.”
“Since there’s such a wide consensus,” Azoulay added, America’s opposition appears even “more radical.”
Observers have suggested that Trump’s chummy relationship with the fossil fuel industry, as well as influence from the American recycling lobby, could be a root cause of the administration’s hostile position.
Plastic production had been ramping up in the U.S. even prior to Trump’s ascent to the presidency. In 2015, the American Chemistry Council, an oil and gas trade association, declared that a plastics “renaissance” was underway in the U.S.
Trump’s support of natural gas and other fossil fuels has further boosted America’s plastics industry, according to Azoulay and others.
As a 2017 CIEL reports detailed, 99% of the world’s plastics are produced from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels, and the “availability of cheap shale gas in the United States is fueling a massive wave of new investments in plastics infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad, with $164 billion planned for 264 new facilities or expansion projects in the U.S. alone,” the report said.
If this investment is spent in the way that it’s intended, CIEL said, virgin plastic production is slated to increase by 33%-36% in the U.S. by 2025.
“With the current administration relying so much on a good relationship with the fossil fuel industry, you can see a pattern in their [international] negotiations ― they oppose any source of restriction or anything that would result in a tighter control on plastic, whether virgin plastic production or plastic waste,” Azoulay said. “Their policy line at this point is, basically, don’t touch the plastic industry and let them deal with these issues themselves.”
U.S. politics has for decades been heavily influenced by the fossil fuel industry, ― and the country has historically been known for its generally anti-regulatory stance in the global arena. But Jesse Bragg of the Boston-based nonprofit Corporate Accountability International said the Trump administration has been unique in its strident approach.
Even the Obama administration, which positioned the U.S. as an environmental leader and the country that spearheaded the Paris agreement, has been accused of weakening global environmental agreements, Bragg said, noting that “if you speak to most developing countries, they’ll tell you the reason the Paris agreement is as weak as it is, is because of the U.S.” But the Obama White House took pains to obscure this side of the negotiations.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, appears to have “less interest in hiding their true intentions,” Bragg said. “It doesn’t take much to see what they’re doing ... and that’s a big departure from past administrations. The Trump administration doesn’t care what the world thinks.”
This attitude, Bragg warned, is a “dangerous place to be.”
“If they don’t care what their international reputation is, there’s nothing keeping the administration from continuing the obstruction that has been the [U.S.] trend for decades,” he said, “and they can operate in some dangerous ways to advance the financial interest of those in the administration ― and those supporting the administration.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/plastic-regulation-us-obstruction-basel-convention_n_5cde76f0e4b00e035b8da236
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Trump Lifts Metals Tariffs, Easing Passage of New North American Trade Deal
May 17, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Alexander Panetta, Megan Cassella and Sabrina Rodriguez
The Trump administration has reached a deal with Canada and Mexico to lift steel and aluminum tariffs immediately, marking a significant step forward on the path to approval of the new North American trade pact.
The deal clears a major hurdle to ratification of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in all three countries and moves President Donald Trump closer to realization of a signature trade achievement that he could tout during his 2020 reelection campaign. It also carries broader significance as it helps to repair frayed ties with two top U.S. allies at the same time that the Trump administration is ramping up trade tensions with China.
“I'm pleased to announce that we've just reached an agreement with Canada and Mexico, and we'll be selling our product into those countries without the imposition of tariffs or major tariffs. Big difference,” Trump announced in a speech in Washington on Friday.
Under the tariff agreement, the U.S. will remove metals duties against Canada and Mexico and will not impose quotas in their place. Trump had imposed the duties last year, relying on a little-used law that allowed him to apply tariffs on goods deemed essential to national security.
The tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, which Trump imposed to defend U.S. national security, will be gone within 48 hours, the three countries announced. In exchange, Canada and Mexico will lift the retaliatory tariffs they had imposed on scores of U.S. products, the bulk of which were American farm goods. Canada had imposed retaliatory tariffs against more than $12 billion in U.S. goods, while Mexico had established similar penalties against more than $3 billion in American exports.
The deal came together quickly in recent days but followed months of deadlock between the U.S. and its two North American trading partners. In a phone call on Sunday, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland got an invite to Washington.
When she arrived for a meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on Wednesday, she was presented with the kind of deal Canada had been craving: no tariffs, no quotas and a promise to create a mechanism to limit Chinese steel imports.
The Canadians were thrilled — and also terrified by the possibility of word leaking out.
That’s because Lighthizer had berated his Canadian counterparts more than once over leaks during the negotiations to update NAFTA. This time, the Canadians were petrified that loose lips might set off the publicity-averse U.S. trade representative and torpedo the talks.
So Freeland spoke in generalities in a subsequent press conference. Staff wouldn’t speculate on the likelihood of a deal. Even Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, who officials said was integral to helping pull together the deal, professed to be in the dark after meeting Freeland that day.
The Iowa Republican became a key ally of the Canadian minister ever since a February meeting where he expressed to Freeland his annoyance over the tariffs. In the weeks that followed, he and like-minded officials in Canada and Mexico kept repeating a single mantra: If Trump wanted his cherished trade deal to be ratified, he would need to drop the tariffs.
In recent weeks, other Republican members of Congress from rural states had also been pushing the White House to act, especially as the China trade talks appeared to be falling apart. Trump and his aides felt he needed a win following a slew of bad headlines regarding the China trade war.
So Freeland left Washington on Wednesday for a previously planned trip to Cuba. Between meetings in Havana, she called officials back home to work out details of the steel component. She cut that trip short, and, finally, it was during her layover in Panama City that she and Lighthizer sorted out the final sticking points.
The deal serves as a relief for pro-traders on Capitol Hill and could alleviate some of the pain and uncertainty in American farm country, which is bearing the brunt of myriad retaliatory trade actions from around the globe. U.S. farmers have been increasingly concerned about long-term economic damage from Trump's trade agenda, particularly after the escalation of the tariff battle with China earlier this month.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in its official announcement laying out details of the deal, called the arrangement “great news” for American farmers while emphasizing that it will “continue to protect America’s steel and aluminum industries.”
Canada and Mexico were similarly upbeat about the agreement. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the announcement “good news for North America,” while Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s office welcomed the deal as “beneficial for both sides.”
Trudeau and López Obrador both acknowledged that removing the metals tariffs will help propel each of their countries toward approval of the new North American trade deal, which the three sides signed in late November. In the United States, Friday’s announcement was welcomed by lawmakers who had long warned the administration that trying to push the USMCA through Congress while the steel and aluminum duties remained in place would prove to be a painful and potentially fruitless effort.
Grassley, who will play a pivotal role in congressional consideration of the NAFTA replacement, expressed optimism on Friday that the tariff fix creates a "renewed sense of momentum" that will help get the new trade pact passed this year.
"The Trump administration has done its part,” the Iowa Republican said. “Now it’s Congress’s turn."
While the tariff-relief deal helps to improve prospects for ratification of the USMCA, it does not guarantee its passage. Many lawmakers — particularly House Democrats, who will be crucial to the deal’s approval — have repeatedly laid out concerns with the trade pact’s labor standards and enforcement provisions, among other issues, that they insist must be addressed before they will consider it.
The tariffs have "needlessly complicated the NAFTA renegotiation dynamics over the past year," House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said Friday afternoon, but he added that Democrats' concerns with USMCA remain unresolved.
"Those issues still need to be remedied," he said.
Immediate implications for the new NAFTA aside, however, the steel deal helps highlight a new front in trade policy for Trump — a self-proclaimed “Tariff Man” who until now had focused far more often on imposing tariffs rather than removing them. The metals agreement was announced on the same day the White House unveiled a decision to delay potential automotive tariffs against two other top trading partners, the European Union and Japan.
U.S. agriculture groups were quick to welcome the deal as a move that will help ease financial strain on American farmers, with Grassley, for one, saying farmers from his state could now “breathe a sigh of relief.”
But more broadly, the tariff decisions in tandem also highlight a shift in the administration’s focus — drawing down trade tensions with allies as it confronts China.
And repairing the relationship within North America could be the first step toward pulling allies onto the U.S.’s side in its escalating fight with China. The Trump administration more than doubled tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports a week ago, and it is considering adding penalties on another $300 billion.
Grassley regarded the positive step toward USMCA passage as a move that will help boost the administration's credibility in trade talks with Beijing.
“Ratification of USMCA will show that the United States can be trusted to follow through on its commitments," Grassley said. "It’s up to China to show that it can do the same."
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2019/05/trump-lifts-metals-tariffs-easing-passage-of-new-north-american-trade-deal-1453541
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EPA Eyes Supplemental Plan As It Seeks To Speed Science Data Rule
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
EPA is considering issuing a supplemental plan for its controversial science transparency rule, a measure that is part of Administrator Andrew Wheeler's stepped up effort to complete the rule within a year -- though the effort faces widespread criticism, little regulatory justification and a massive number of of public comments to address, sources say.
"A decision on a supplemental rule has not really been made," one agency source says. "Nobody has pulled the trigger." But, the source adds that a supplemental "probably will happen."
The source says the supplemental plan will allow the administration to take comment on changes it plans to make to address the widespread concerns received on the original proposal -- issued by former Administrator Scott Pruitt -- without drawing legal challenges.
A supplemental rule is necessary when “whatever they want to do, they can't do it without legal challenges.”
Issuing a supplemental acknowledges significant change to the rule since it was proposed, the source adds. “In a rulemaking, the action has to be within the bounds of what you said were going to do,” the source says. “It's unclear what this means” in the case of the transparency rule, the source says, noting that some lawyers raised concerns about the original proposed rule.
The rulemaking generally seeks to bar the agency's use of any information in decision-making that is not publicly available. The measure has sparked significant controversy from states, environmentalists and even the agency's own science advisors, who charged that by insisting on only publicly available data, the proposed rule would eliminate the use of studies based on confidential health and other data and undermine future rulemakings.
In addition to such criticisms, the proposed rule also punted on a host of tricky legal and implementation issues, including statutory mandates to use the best available science and how to address confidential trade secrets and medically protected data.
Instead, the proposed rule -- which cleared White House regulatory review within days of its submission -- sought public comments on multiple topics, including whether there are additional statutory authorities the agency could use and what criteria it should use to justify any exceptions.
Now that the agency has received hundreds of thousands of comments on the initial proposal, their plan for a supplemental proposal would allow them to preview their responses, fill in legal and other gaps and take comment on the new package.
But the effort faces a steep hurdle especially because Wheeler is reportedly seeking to quickly advance the effort. A former EPA source says Wheeler has said that he wants a final rule by the end of the year, while also saying that he does not want to “water down the rule.”
The former EPA source adds that more “onerous items” will be added to the rule. “Let’s just say he is doubling down on everything bad in there,” the source adds.
Asked for comment, an agency spokeswoman tells Inside EPA that “EPA is reviewing the more than 597,000 comments received” on the proposed rule. “EPA will determine a timeline for a decision after it has more fully assessed the comments.” She added that the most recent unified agenda, released last fall, “provides the most recent updates about regulatory activity.”
That unified agenda indicated the rule had been placed on the “long-term” agenda with a deadline of January 2020. A new unified agenda is expected to be released any day, and could shed light on the planned schedule for the rule.
Dunlap's Meetings
One informed source says Wheeler hosted an internal meeting in late April to discuss re-starting the science transparency rulemaking.
The informed source noted that the top Trump EPA appointee to EPA's research and development office (ORD), David Dunlap, attended the recent meeting with Wheeler, as well as David Harlow, counsel to EPA's air office.
Dunlap, an engineer who came to EPA from Koch Industries, has already raised environmentalists' concerns over potential conflict of interest in his handling of ORD's long-stalled Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) assessment of formaldehyde.
It is clear from entries in Dunlap's calendar last fall, released under the Freedom of Information Act, that Dunlap was holding regular meetings on the transparency rule since shortly after his arrival at the agency.
One such meeting, held last Nov. 1, is described as a “Biweekly Transparency Check‐in” where participants, mainly top career ORD officials, were slated to hold a “[d]iscussion on responding to public comments.”
Later that same day, Dunlap attended an “[EPA Office of General Counsel (OGC)] briefing on legal components of the transparency rule.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-eyes-supplemental-plan-it-seeks-speed-science-data-rule
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SAB Seeks To Expand Transparency Rule Review Beyond Wheeler's Call
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
A work group of EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) is asking the agency a series of questions about its controversial science transparency rule, a move that appears aimed at broadening advisors' review of the measure beyond what Administrator Andrew Wheeler proposed last month.
The work group on May 17 posted on SAB's website a series of questions on the proposed rule, which generally seeks to bar EPA's use of scientific research where they underlying data are not public, including how key terms are defined, as well as the agency's view of SAB's role in reviewing it.
SAB plans to consider the issue at its upcoming June 5-6 meeting, according to the agenda, which allots an hour to the discussion after remarks from Wheeler.
The questions respond to Wheeler's April 19 letter, in which the EPA chief largely rejected SAB's request to review four climate rules and instead asked SAB to review a narrow issue related to how the science data rule could be amended to allow non-government entities to review confidential business or health data on which many studies rely.
“EPA would benefit from an SAB consultation on existing mechanisms for secure access to confidential business information and personally identifiable information as discussed in the proposal,” Wheeler said.
He also sought to remind SAB of its place in EPA activities and to control the breadth of any advice the board may provide.“SAB provides advice as requested by the EPA Administrator, and I believe it is critical for the EPA to clearly establish the scope and timing for such scientific advice,” he wrote.
But in its response, the SAB workgroup appears to question Wheeler's approach, asking a series of detailed questions about the rule as well as the board's role in reviewing it.
“What form of consultation does EPA envision? What does 'existing mechanisms' mean to EPA?” the workgroup writes.
The debate stems from SAB's meeting last year, when the board voted unanimously to review the science behind the science transparency rule and several deregulatory actions -- a vote seen as a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration's agenda.
Former Administrator Scott Pruitt released the controversial science transparency rule last year after Republicans failed to advance similar legislation beyond the House.
The proposal generally seeks to bar EPA's use of any scientific research where the underlying data is not publicly available, a move which could block many existing studies from EPA's use. Critics, including SAB, have raised particular concerns about the rule limiting EPA's access to studies involving human health effects and trade secret information.
EPA and other sources say the agency is currently weighing whether to issue a supplemental proposal, which would allow officials to take comment on changes it plans to make to address the widespread concerns received on the original proposal without drawing legal challenges.
Key Definitions
The series of questions SAB asks in its latest document indicates the breadth of interest in the proposed rule. It asks EPA to provide definitions to several terms used in Wheeler's letter and in the Federal Register notice of last year requesting comment on the proposed rule, such as “data” and “replication.”
“For the purposes of this rule, what is the definition of the 'data' underlying a peer-reviewed study?” SAB's document asks. “In particular, would it suffice that researchers make available the data on which they performed the bulk of their calculations (the analysis dataset), which typically follows some initial preprocessing or aggregation, or does EPA expect full raw data down to the level of individual measurements, including data directly used to carry out the reported statistical analysis and model development? What level of detail would be provided (e.g., if subjects are removed from the study, would these subjects be identified and reasons given)?”
SAB in its memo also requests more information regarding EPA's definition of replication, validation and related terms, since these are the stated reasons for the proposed rule. “How does EPA define 'replication,' 'validation,' and 'publicly available' for the purposes of this rule? Does 'replication' consist of anything other than verifying that applying the same calculations to the same data yields the same results that have been published? Does 'validation' consist of more than verification of calculations?”
Picking up on numerous critiques over the affect of the rule as written on EPA's ability to utilize epidemiology studies, SAB asks about how to validate these studies specifically. “Given that there are multiple ways to assess validity of epidemiological studies (some of which do not require public access to all data and methods), what does EPA consider to be adequate validation of a study?”
SAB is also scheduled to discuss a related effort of Wheeler's. He has asked EPA's Science Technology and Policy Council and its Risk Assessment Forum to update and harmonize EPA's existing risk assessment guidelines. Language proposing to alter EPA's long-standing default of assuming conservative linear extrapolation of dose-response in cancer risk assessment is included in both the transparency rule and a document proposing the risk assessment guidance update.
Interestingly, a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) provides some definitions of these and other related terms, which could be considered at the upcoming meeting. The May 7 report, “Reproducibility and Replicability in Science,” defines “replicability to mean obtaining consistent results across studies aimed at answering the same scientific question, each of which has obtained its own data.” By contrast, it defines reproducibility as “computational reproducibility -- obtaining consistent computational results using the same input data, computational steps, methods, and code, and conditions of analysis.”
“While one expects in many cases near bitwise agreement in reproducibility, the replicability of study results is more nuanced,” the report adds. “Non-replicability occurs for a number of reasons that do not necessarily reflect that something is wrong.”
Perhaps more important for EPA's rule, NAS argues that “A predominant focus on the replicability of individual studies is an inefficient way to assure the reliability of scientific knowledge. Rather, reviews of cumulative evidence on a subject, to assess both the overall effect size and generalizability, is often a more useful way to gain confidence in the state of scientific knowledge.”
Further, NAS describes notes that a variety of methods are used to assess replicability, adding that the method chosen can affect the outcome. “Importantly, the assessment of replicability may not result in a binary pass/fail answer; rather, the answer may best be expressed as the degree to which one result replicates another.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/sab-seeks-expand-transparency-rule-review-beyond-wheelers-call
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Court Seeks More Briefing On Groups' Challenge To TSCA Evaluation Rule
May 17, 2019 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
A federal appellate panel is asking EPA and environmentalists to provide additional briefing on the petitioners' standing to challenge the agency's framework rule governing how it will evaluate existing chemicals under the revised toxics law and the ripeness of their suit after recent arguments in what one of the judges called a “very difficult case.”
Issued hours after the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit heard May 16 arguments in Safer Chemicals Healthy Families et al. v. U.S. EPA et al, the order directed the petitioners -- a coalition of environmental, labor and public health groups -- to “file, on or before June 3, a supplemental brief addressing the Article III justiciability of each issue raised in the Petition for Review.”
The order requires EPA to respond within 14 days.
The order seeks to clarify a series of concerns the judges raised at oral argument over petitioners' standing to sue and the ripeness of their case.
The suit, consolidated in the 9th Circuit, challenges the Trump EPA's framework rules for evaluating risks of existing chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and for prioritizing existing chemicals for future assessment and possible regulation, though the procedural issues have only been raised over the challenge to the evaluation rule.
The petitioners are challenging EPA's decision -- spelled out in the rule's preamble -- that it “may” narrow the scope of any evaluation in part by precluding consideration of substances' legacy uses, as well as uses already regulated by other EPA programs and other agencies.
The petitioners charged that such an approach is unlawful because the revised law requires the agency to assess all uses.
But EPA argued it has discretion to limit its review of the risk of such uses and that petitioners generally lack standing to challenge the preamble language in part because it is not a final action and because the petitioners suffer no injury as a result.
For example, attorneys for EPA and industry intervenors argued that petitioners' case would be better brought against final agency action -- after EPA finalizes its first 10 risk evaluations under the revised TSCA in December.
During oral argument, the judges appeared to agree generally that the petitioners lacked standing on most issues though they suggested that they may have standing to challenge EPA's preclusion of legacy uses.
“I do wonder whether the legacy issue is a little different. Some of these rules seem to be a little vague,” Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland said. “It seems the legacy one is a little different. We may learn more in the application. But if they just stop, we may never learn more about legacy” uses.
But Friedland noted that EPA's preamble to its rule states that it “may” preclude legacy uses, adding, “until they do, we don't know if your clients are injured. . . . I don't understand how we review this.”
She went on to state that it is “troubling, we don't have normal briefing before the court. You may be absolutely right, but they haven’t responded to that.”
Sarah Tallman, the Natural Resources Defense Council attorney representing the plaintiffs, replied that petitioners “would be happy to submit supplemental briefing” and acknowledged that they could challenge the final evaluations. She argued that fact does not mean the case does not have standing now, and delaying their case would result in “undue harm to petitioners” from continuing exposures.
The judges also questioned Tallman and Samara Spence, the Justice Department attorney representing EPA, about the status and timing of TSCA risk evaluations.
The agency is working against a December 2019 statutory deadline to complete its first 10 risk evaluations. EPA could trigger a six-month extension, but toxics chief Alexandra Dunn has pledged that EPA will complete the first 10 evaluations on time, even as the agency has released just one draft for public comment and has yet to hold peer review on any of the draft assessments.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/court-seeks-more-briefing-groups-challenge-tsca-evaluation-rule
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(ACC Mentioned) Opinion: Why The Pool Poll Should Give Us Pause
May 18, 2019 | NPR
By Scott Simon
The next time anyone reports the results of a poll or survey, even NPR, remember: A new survey says 51% of the adults in America splash around in swimming pools instead of showering or bathing.
Further results get even yuckier. Forty percent of American confess that they — how to put this delicately? — have voided in pools. Experts warn the resulting effluence reduces the antiseptic potency of the chlorine.
Dr. Chris Wiant, chair of the Water Quality & Health Council, says, "When dirt, sweat, personal care products, and other things on our bodies react with chlorine, there is less chlorine available to kill germs."
The results grow ickier still.
The Sachs Media Group conducted the survey of 3,100 people online. I think I would be reluctant to shake any of their hands.
The survey reassures people they can check pools in which they're about to paddle with test strips, thoughtfully available at no cost from the Water Quality & Health Council website, to see if the pools are adequately chlorinated.
A survey like this sounds compelling, doesn't it? It might spare millions of Americans from immersing themselves, head to toe, in feculence and exudation.
But Jessica Huseman, a reporter for ProPublica and adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School, says that although at least seven national news sites reported the story as some kind of revelation — Woodward and Bernstein Go Swimming, and What They Found Will Shock You! — she discovered by just a few quick clicks that the Water Quality & Health Council is sponsored by the Chlorine Chemistry Division of the American Chemistry Council.
That's a trade group for the chlorine industry. The chlorine industry must be as concerned about the rise of saltwater pools, which use less chlorine, as gas companies are about electric cars. Or as the Yankees are about the Red Sox.
You might recall this survey about America's showering choices when you see other polls on urgent issues — immigration, abortion, guns — especially if they're promoted by advocacy groups. Questions can be phrased in ways to tilt results the way a group wants. But professional pollsters who work with news organizations have an interest in offering surveys that illuminate the range of diverging views people can hold in a huge and varied country, regardless of results.
In the meantime — everybody into the pool!
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/18/724462203/opinion-why-the-pool-poll-should-give-us-pause
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Senators take their turn scrutinizing PFAS bills
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Arian Figueroa
Senate Environmental and Public Works lawmakers will review bills to address toxic chemicals found in drinking water this week.
Those chemicals are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and were once championed for their nonstick properties in cookware and use in firefighting foam, but are now linked to cancer, thyroid issues and other health problems.
Last week, House Energy and Commerce lawmakers held a long-awaited hearing, which followed the introduction of numerous measures in response to PFAS worries around the country (E&E Daily, May 16).
The EPW Committee and its chairman, Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, taking up the issue is further evidence members of both parties are looking for some action on the issue.
There are nearly 10 PFAS bills introduced in the Senate, with the most recent one introduced in recent days by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).
The legislation, S. 1534, would require the Department of Defense to create measures to address PFAS contamination.
Additionally, Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.), the EPW ranking member, introduced S. 1507 on Wednesday to increase available information about PFAS to the public.
Even though members on both sides of the aisle have trumpeted PFAS action, they may disagree over how hard to push EPA to crease strong standards against the chemical.
Schedule: The hearing is Wednesday, May 22, at 10 a.m. in 406 of Dirksen.
Witnesses: TBA.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/05/20/stories/1060363219
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Millions of Abandoned Wells Spark Climate, Safety Fears
May 20, 2019 | E&E Energywire
By Mike Lee
A couple of years ago, Charlie Brethauer started to smell gas in the backyard of his home.
Figuring it was a leak from the service line that heats his garage, he grabbed a shovel and started digging in a patch of blackened soil about 30 feet from the back door of his rural home in Richland Township, Pa., 15 miles north of Pittsburgh.
The shovel struck a plastic bucket covering the end of a vertical steel pipe. As he widened the hole, Brethauer said, chunks of dirt fell into the pipe and seemed to echo and rattle for a long time.
It turned out to be an abandoned natural gas well, 1,800 feet deep and probably drilled in the early 1900s. The company that owned it is long gone.
The well was plugged about a year ago, but Brethauer was unusually lucky. Pennsylvania, where the first American oil was drilled in 1859, is home to between 200,000 and 750,000 so-called orphan wells that have been abandoned and that have no apparent owner.
"It's pretty daunting to look down the road and say, as these things age, they're going to get worse," Brethauer said. "Where's that money going to come from?"
Nationwide, there are as many as 3 million orphan wells, with the biggest concentration in the Appalachian states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
As pressure builds to address greenhouse gas emissions from the energy industry, several researchers have delved into the climate change aspects of orphan wells. Pennsylvania's abandoned wells emit 40,000 to 70,000 metric tons of methane a year, between 5% and 8% of the state's human-caused methane emissions, according to a 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The bulk of those emissions comes from a relative handful of high-emitting wells, said Mary Kang, a professor at McGill University who was the paper's lead author.
"It's a story more positive than negative," she said. "You just have to remediate the top high emitters, and you can have a big impact."
The wells also can create a safety hazard by increasing the risk of explosions or oozing oil into buildings.
Plugging the wells often comes down to money. For the most part, the states are in charge of preventing pollution from those wells. Most of them don't have enough funds to clean up the legacy wells left from the oil industry's first century, and most aren't ready to clean up the tens of thousands of wells drilled during the first decades of the shale drilling boom. Pennsylvania, for example, only has enough money to plug a dozen or so each year.
The wells are an issue on public lands, as well. The Bureau of Land Management, which manages drilling on federal and Indian land across the West, doesn't have an effective system to track the number of orphan wells on its territory, according to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office.'Absolutely frustrating'
Unplugged wells are one of the highest-priority issues that state energy regulators are coping with, Ryan Hoffman, director of the Kansas Corporation Commission's oil and gas conservation division, said at a recent conference of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.
The IOGCC, which serves as a trade group for state energy regulators, has issued a string of reports about orphan wells for the last few years.
Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection has about $400,000 a year to spend on well plugging, and the state also has a small grant program funded by oil and gas impact fees. At the current rate of 10 to 12 wells a year, it would take 17,500 years to work through the state's backlog, said Scott Perry, the head of the DEP's oil and gas division.
"It is absolutely frustrating on a number of levels — that we have so many of these wells to address, that we have so little resources to do it, and that we are adding more wells to the list, newly abandoned wells," Perry said.
Given the lack of funding, state agencies tend to concentrate on the worst cases, which are usually a threat to human safety. The Pennsylvania DEP ordered three wells plugged in 2011 after a gas explosion destroyed a home in Bradford, Pa. No one was injured in that case.
In Ohio, the state Department of Natural Resources had to plug an abandoned well that was found under an elementary school gymnasium in 2014. And in West Virginia, state environmental officials set up a drilling rig inside an apartment complex to fix a leaky well that was causing oil to ooze through the ground floor.
In Texas, the state Railroad Commission spent $23.4 million to plug about 1,200 orphan wells in fiscal 2018. But that wasn't enough to keep up with the number of wells that were abandoned by their operators, so the state's orphan well population increased from 5,687 to 6,285 during the fiscal year.
"We're making progress, but we're treading water," Chairwoman Christi Craddick said during the commission's April 23 meeting.Pennsylvania roots
Like most oil- and gas-producing states, Pennsylvania's orphan well problem has a long history. There was little oversight of the drilling industry from its birth in 1859 until the 1950s. And the state didn't require drillers to post a cleanup bond until the 1980s.
Shortly after shale drilling began in 2012, the state Legislature raised the bond amounts for deep wells like those used for hydraulic fracturing. But the amounts aren't nearly enough to cover the cost.
Owners of new conventional wells have to put up a $2,500 bond per well or a $25,000 "blanket" bond that can cover an unlimited number of wells. Bonds for shale wells start at about $10,000, and the blanket bond amount is $600,000 for 150 or more wells.
The well at Brethauer's home was essentially grandfathered from bonding requirements because of its age.
With little chance of accessing the DEP's plugging funds, he opted to work with his local township and apply for a grant from the Commonwealth Financing Authority, which pays for well plugging with a share of the impact fees collected on shale gas wells.
The well seemed like a high priority because it was emitting fumes that could blow into Brethauer's home, said Dean Bastianini, the township manager in Richland, Pa. Even then, it took two years for the funding to come through.
A contractor spent three weeks cleaning out the well with a portable drilling rig — extracting a tangle of steel cables in the process — then perforated the steel casing with explosives and filled the hole with cement.
The total cost came to $126,000.
A year later, Brethauer said he was fortunate in a lot of ways. Also, his township is big enough to have a professional staff that could apply for the grant, and state politicians lined up to support the town's application.
"It's a shame there's just not more public funding available for this kind of thing," he said.
Pennsylvania's Legislature hasn't addressed the lack of funding, but the DEP has become more aggressive about overseeing transfers of old oil and gas wells, to prevent those wells from being handed off to companies that can't afford to plug them.
"A plugging liability in the hundreds of thousands of dollars could get handed off to a guy who doesn't have two nickels to rub together," Perry said.
Last year, the DEP reached a legal settlement with an Alabama company called Diversified Oil and Gas that had bought thousands of older wells from shale drilling giants including CNX Gas and Exxon Mobil's XTO Energy subsidiary.
Diversified agreed to put up a $7 million bond and plug 1,400 wells over 15 years, according to the DEP.Drones and steel casings
Other states are taking action, too.
In Colorado, lawmakers ordered the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to overhaul its bonding requirements as part of a broad rewrite of energy regulations (Energywire, April 17).
In Ohio, the Legislature voted last year to roughly double the amount of oil and gas production taxes the state spends on well plugging. That will give the state Department of Natural Resources $27 million to spend next year, and the amount is expected to rise.
The funding has allowed Ohio to try innovative approaches to finding abandoned wells, like using magnetometers mounted on drones. In tests last year, the DNR paid a contractor to fly the instruments over a field that records showed had 17 abandoned wells on it. The magnetometer found six more, along with three other possible sites.
Still, the state has challenges. Ohio has a list of about 925 high-priority wells, and most of them are leaking methane or oil, Rick Simmers, director of the DNR's oil and gas division, said at the IOGCC conference.
The DNR estimates there are about 19,000 orphan wells in Ohio, and the number could be far higher, given the industry's long history in the state. The DNR has plugged old gas wells that were drilled between home lots in Cleveland during the era of gas lighting, Simmers said.
Some older gas wells were lined with wood or not lined at all, making them difficult to locate, Simmers said. During World War II, people pulled steel casing out of old oil wells and contributed the metal to the war effort, making them harder to find and more prone to leak.
And while the Legislature increased the state's spending on well plugging, Ohio's tax on energy production is among the lowest in the country — 20 cents per barrel of oil and 3 cents per thousand cubic feet of gas (Energywire, June 17, 2015).
Kathy Wagner, who lives on 38 acres near Marietta, Ohio, has been waiting nearly 15 years for the state to plug an orphaned oil well on her land.
The well is about 50 yards away from her home, and it bubbles with oil when there's rain. The oily sheen washes into the nearby Muskingum River, which flows into the Ohio River.
When the Ohio DNR first investigated the well in 2004, it estimated the plugging cost at $31,900, Wagner said. In the last few months, the DNR has cleared trees around the site and staked out what appears to be an access route for the plugging equipment, she said.
"I hope I can get this done so I don't have to leave this to my children," she said.
https://www.eenews.net/energywire/2019/05/20/stories/1060364121
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Corrosion Led to Worst U.S. Gas Leak Ever, and There Were Others
May 17, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Mark Chediak
The worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, which broke out at a Sempra Energy storage field near Los Angeles almost four years ago, was caused by corrosion -- and there were others before it, according to a report commissioned by California regulators.
The rupture of a 7-inch (18-centimeter) well casing at Sempra Energy’s Aliso Canyon storage complex was due to “microbial corrosion’’ brought on by contact with groundwater, an independent analysis conducted by Blade Energy Partners and commissioned by two state agencies showed. The report also showed there had been more than 60 leaks in the field dating back to the 1970s and that Sempra didn’t carry out detailed inspections after they occurred, the California Public Utilities Commission and Department of Conservation said in a joint statement.
Sempra’s Southern California Gas lacked “any form of risk assessment’’ to manage the integrity of its wells and hadn’t established systematic practices to protect against corrosion and monitor well pressure, the agencies said.
Sempra has already reported more than $1 billion in costs associated with the October 2015 leak that forced thousands of residents to evacuate the area for months as the gas dissipated. California estimated that the ruptured well spewed the equivalent of a year’s worth of greenhouse-gas emissions from more than 500,000 cars. Regulators have restricted use of the field since the blowout, tightening fuel supplies in Southern California and contributing to frequent power and gas price spikes.
SoCalGas said it was still reviewing the report but that it shows the utility complied with gas storage regulations that existed at the time of the leak.
“In Blade’s opinion, there were measures, though not required by the gas storage regulations at the time, that could have been taken to aid in the early identification of corrosion and that, in their opinion, would have prevented or mitigated the leak,” the company said in a statement.
Blade also found that the flow of gas from the ruptured well had been underestimated, resulting in several failed attempts to kill the leak by pumping fluids into it.
State regulators have established new requirements, including real-time pressure monitoring, testing and well construction requirements, to prevent a similar leak from happening again.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/corrosion-led-to-worst-u-s-gas-leak-ever-and-there-were-others
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National Grid Halts New NYC Gas Customers Until Pipeline OK’d
May 20, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Keshia Clukey
National Grid Plc won’t take any new natural gas customers in the New York City area and on Long Island until New York State approves Williams Cos.’ $1 billion shale gas pipeline project, the company said May 17.
National Grid, the main customer for the Northeast Supply Enhancement project, which expands Williams’ existing system through New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and has said it needs the new segments to meet growing demand.
The utility company’s announcement comes after the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on May 15 denied a crucial permit for the Williams pipeline, saying the project would result in water quality violations. The denial was “without prejudice,” allowing the company to reapply.
Williams submitted a new application May 17, according to the DEC. The department said it is reviewing the new application. Williams didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
States, FedsThe application comes as Democratic-leaning states continue to battle with the Trump administration over pipeline projects aimed to bring natural gas to the Northeast from shale basins in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order making it more difficult for states to decline the necessary permits for companies to build oil and gas pipelines. Analysts have said the order may not have much effect on obstacles like the one facing the Williams pipeline.
National and local environmental advocacy groups have rallied against the expansion, saying New York should instead focus on clean energy sources such as wind and solar, and move away from fossil fuels.
Utility companies say they need the extension to meet the growing need in the metropolitan area and on Long Island.
National Grid said it continues to receive applications for new and expanded firm natural gas service from residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, but none will be processed until the Williams project is allowed to proceed, according to a May 17 statement.
“Only at that time National Grid will resume processing all requests for new and expanded firm gas service in the order that they have been received,” the company said.
Other HaltsConsolidated Edison Inc. has stop accepting applications for new gas service in most of Westchester County.
A spokeswoman for the company May 17 said they haven’t put a moratorium on new customers in New York City, but are “continuing to closely monitor the situation to ensure supply and demand remain balanced.”
The 17.4-mile stretch of 26-inch diameter pipeline would run underwater en route from New Jersey to Queens, going through the Raritan Bay and Lower New York Bay.
The state DEC said the project would result in the resuspension of sediments and other contaminants like mercury and copper. It also would disturb seabed resources and shellfish beds, the department said.
National Grid said it anticipates having more information on the status of the permitting process by the end of June for all approvals, including permits required from New Jersey.
“We remain cautiously optimistic that the project will proceed on schedule and be in service for Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island customers by the winter of 20/21,” the company said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/national-grid-halts-new-nyc-gas-customers-until-pipeline-okd
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New Jersey Chemical Plant Fire Sends Fumes over Pulaski Skyway
May 18, 2019 | New York Post
By Ben Feuerherd
A chemical plant fire in New Jersey sent noxious smoke billowing into the air near Newark — and officials urged residents to shut their windows to avoid the smoke.
The fire broke out at the plant directly underneath the Pulaski Skyway in South Kearny soon after 11 p.m., authorities said. It continued to burn into Saturday morning.
The smoke was so thick that the NYC Office of Emergency Management warned New Yorkers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island may see or smell the smoke.
The Skyway was closed in both directions into Saturday morning, with emergency responders helping stranded drivers on the bridge, ABC reported.
In Newark, officials urged residents to close their windows.
“[Newark Public Safety Director Anthony] Ambrose recommends that people in impacted areas keep windows and doors shut and stay inside,” the Newark Department of Public Safety wrote on Facebook.
“Newark firefighters are helping battle the blaze under the Pulaski Skyway near Newark’s Ironbound section,” they added.
Officials in Bayonne, New Jersey, also urged residents to stay inside with their windows shut.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/new-jersey-chemical-plant-fire-sends-fumes-over-pulaski-skyway/
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Trump to Talk Funding with Dems as Panels Weigh Reforms
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Maxine Joselow
Infrastructure Week has come and gone, but the issue remains in the spotlight.
The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will kick things off this week with a subcommittee hearing tomorrow on ensuring infrastructure resilience in the face of climate change.
Then, on Wednesday, President Trump is tentatively scheduled to meet with the Democratic leadership to discuss how to pay for a broad infrastructure package.
It's their second meeting in recent weeks. At the first gathering, both sides agreed to a $2 trillion price tag for the package, although they did not discuss the thorny issue of pay-fors (E&E News PM, April 30).
All eyes will be on Trump, who surprised lawmakers last year by privately backing a 25-cent increase in the federal gasoline tax (E&E News PM, Feb. 14, 2018). He has never publicly endorsed the idea, which would provide political cover for Republicans to lend their support.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) last week urged Trump to back a pay-for at the meeting, although he did not specifically mention a gas tax hike.
"If the president does not lead on how we're going to fund this infrastructure investment, it will not happen," Hoyer said. "Simple as that."
Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) last week threw cold water on the notion of a gas tax hike, saying it wouldn't account for trends in transportation.
"We have to be careful about that gas tax because the electric vehicles are increasing in use across this country," said McKinley, a co-chair of the Congressional Building Trades Caucus.Energy and Commerce plan
Also on Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the broad infrastructure package it released last week.
The package, dubbed the "Leading Infrastructure for Tomorrow's (LIFT) America Act," is aimed at addressing climate change, clean energy, broadband access and water infrastructure, among other things (E&E News PM, May 15).
The package would specifically provide $33 billion for clean energy, including $4 billion for the deployment of more solar, wind and other renewables.
"I think as we talk as a House about an infrastructure bill, we want to make certain that weaving a green strand, a green component, into that package is important," Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), chairman of the E&C Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, told reporters last week.
"You know, modernizing the electric grid [is] very important to the climate change response," Tonko said, adding that he also recognizes the importance of building more electric vehicle charging stations and retrofitting buildings to reduce their carbon emissions.$2 trillion?
It ultimately remains to be seen whether Republicans will get on board with spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure. Trump surprised many in the GOP caucus by suggesting the $2 trillion figure at his first meeting with Democratic leadership.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week that he doubts a $2 trillion package will be feasible. The lawmaker said he would prefer to focus on smaller reforms to the permitting process.
"I would like to see reforms so the roads get built faster," McCarthy said.
Asked about GOP resistance to spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure, Tonko was adamant. "I think there will be, probably, some concern expressed or pushback. But look, we have to establish priorities," he said.
If a broad infrastructure package doesn't end up materializing, Congress could simply pursue a surface transportation bill. That would happen through the reauthorization of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which is set to expire in October 2020.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) appeared open to both possibilities in an interview last week.
"I would like to tweak some of those policies [in the FAST Act] if we do a short-term bill," DeFazio told E&E News. "If we don't do a short-term bill, I'm writing a six-year bill. That's due Oct. 1, 2020, and that'll be a much more ambitious policy."
Schedule: The Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing is Tuesday, May 21, at 10 a.m. in 2318 Rayburn.
Witnesses:Susanne DesRoches, deputy director for infrastructure and energy, New York City Mayor's Office of Resiliency and Office of Sustainability.Gregory Winfree, director, Texas A&M Transportation Institute.Jason Averill, chief of the materials and structural systems division, National Institute of Standards and Technology.Scott Reeve, president, Composite Advantage LLC.
Schedule: The E&C Committee hearing is Wednesday, May 22, at 10 a.m. in 2123 Rayburn.
Witnesses: TBA.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/05/20/stories/1060351337
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(ACC Mentioned) States Crack Down on Environmental Activists
May 20, 2019 | Sierra Magazine
By Jacob Shea
On May 7th, Texas state legislators approved legislation that imposes harsh criminal penalties for protest around critical infrastructure projects. Under the rule, actual damage or intent to damage critical infrastructure now includes peaceful process, so long as the protest interrupts operations.
This legislation is among a raft of new and pending legislation that, environmental and civil liberties groups say, are designed to discourage people from opposing controversial infrastructure projects. In Oklahoma, individuals who protest pipelines and other infrastructure projects can now be smacked with a $100,000 fine and 10 years in prison. In Louisiana, activists who make “unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure” such as oil pipelines face a punishment of up to five years imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. And legislators in North Dakota this March passed a law under which interfering with pipeline construction becomes a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine; groups “conspiring” with such protest could be criminally liable for 10 times that fine.
Thirty five states have considered or enacted legislation restricting the right to protest. At least eight of those bills were introduced this year, with 12 laws now on the books in such states as Iowa, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Illinois, Indiana, Idaho, and Texas have pending legislation that would make protest near “crucial infrastructure” punishable by fines and prison time. (A full accounting of such laws can be found at Protest Law Tracker.)
While the severity of the new protest penalties ranges along a spectrum, one common thread in many ispunishment for interference into fossil fuel infrastructure. Two particularly far reaching rules signed into law in Oklahoma and South Dakota earlier this year make it illegal to engage in what’s called “riot boosting”—an amorphous term that includes not only protesters themselves but anyone who “directs, advises, encourages, or solicits other persons participating,” in the words of the Oklahoma law. Groups or individuals found to be breaking the law would be liable for three times the cost of any damages incurred to corporate or government property. In 2017, South Dakota leaders established a law that curtailed protests on public lands and restricted protests that obstruct traffic. In March of this year, state legislators went further, expanding punitive measures for “riot boosting.” Under the new law, organizations or persons not directly involved in protest but found to act “through any employee, agent, or subsidiary” can also be held liable. Proposed bills in North Carolina, North Dakota, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee would make it legal to hit protestors with a car, as long as the driver didn’t do so intentionally.
The new anti-protest bills have raised alarm among free speech advocates, who worry that such broad designations criminalize the First Amendment-protected campaigning or fundraising of peaceful protesters, advocacy groups, and environmental nonprofits. In South Dakota, the ACLU, Sierra Club, and other organizations have filed suit against the anti-protest measures. “These energy companies are working with friendly state government to try to chill free speech activity, and to try to shift the cost of over-policing from the state and themselves to peaceful protesters,” says Courtney Bowie, legal director for the ACLU South Dakota.
Officials in South Dakota seem to be arguing that there are limits to free speech when protest comes into conflict with economic interests. In a press release, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said, “I fully support the freedoms of speech and assembly, but we must also have clear expectations and the rule of law. My pipeline bills make clear that we will not let rioters control our economic development. These bills support constitutional rights while also protecting our people, our counties, our environment, and our state.” The governor added, “I believe this approach could serve as the next generation model of major energy infrastructure development,” Noem added. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment from Sierra.
The recent surge in legislation appears to be a response to the increase in energy-infrastructure-related protests as the grassroots “Keep it in the Ground” movement has gained momentum. In late 2016, Indigenous and environmental activists briefly derailed the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) during a five month standoff with law enforcement and, in the process, inspired new opposition to oil and gas projects nationwide. But the counterattack against environmental advocates has been forceful. In the wake of Standing Rock, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind DAPL, sued Greenpeace USA for $1 billion for an alleged a coordinated criminal conspiracy to undermine the pipeline. A federal court dismissed the lawsuit in February. Just over a week later, ETP brought a second lawsuit against Greenpeace in North Dakota state court. In a press release following the initial ruling, Tom Wetterer, general counsel for Greenpeace USA, responded: “Today’s decision to dismiss Energy Transfer’s baseless lawsuit against Greenpeace and others sends a clear message to companies trying to muzzle civil society that corporate overreach will not be tolerated. It is also a check on corporate efforts to silence dissent.”
The ACLU’s Bowie says that the South Dakota “riot boosting” legislation is a clear response to Standing Rock. But she emphasizes that the law threatens to impact anyone wanting to organize or participate in political protest, regardless of the issue they are concerned about or their political leanings. “I think everyone has something to lose,” Bowie says. “Because right now the way the governor rolled this out is aimed at pipeline protestors, but the law is neutral, in terms of who is targeted. … I think this is long term civil liberties and civil rights issue. The folks that are protesting these pipelines, whether you agree with them or not, they have a right to air their grievances, to raise these issues. I don’t think they see it as something that’s optional.”
The recent anti-protest legislation can be traced back, in large part, to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch brothers-funded “corporate bill mill” behind waves of pro-industry legislation. At ALEC’s States and Nation Policy Summit in 2017, a model bill titled the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act” laid out a path to raise criminal charges for trespassing or damaging “critical infrastructure” including oil refineries, chemical factories, power plants, and pipelines. With backing from trade associations like the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Gas Association, and the American Chemistry Council, among others, ALEC approved the model legislation in 2017 and 2018.
Jamie Cory, an investigator at Documented, explains how ALEC moves such model legislation to states. “After corporations and legislators vote as equal in task forces on model legislation, legislators take these templates and introduce them as law in their own states,” says Cory in an email. “After the bills are introduced, corporations, lobbyists and right-wing think tanks help gather support for the proposals.”
On the federal level, the Trump administration has fast-tracked oil and gas development while legislators have targeted protest in other ways. In late 2018, the National Park Service proposed rules to restrict public demonstrations in the capital. The Republican sponsored “Unmask Antifa” bill introduced in the House of Representatives during the last Congress never became law, but it would have put in place harsh penalties for wearing masks and protesting in “threatening” or “intimidating” ways. In August 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13809, which revived a policy that gives surplus military gear to local police departments around the country. (Though militarization of police stations took off under George W. Bush, Obama halted the policy in the wake of police crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests.) And as the ACLU revealedthrough public records requests (and later reported by The Guardian), a state-federal interagency task force was formed in 2017 preparation for Keystone XL protests, if the pipeline project should move forward.
Indigenous and frontline communities, who often stand to suffer the worst impacts of oil and gas developments, have responded with outrage. In South Dakota, the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s leadership voted to ban Governor Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation for her support of the protest laws. In an open letter to the governor, tribe president Julian Bear Runner faulted Noem for consulting with TransCanada, the company developing Keystone XL, while failing to speak with the tribe about the contested project. Calling climate change “a very real existential threat to humanity,” the letter went on: “In light of this, it is clear that the First Amendment--which trumps state law--was intended to protect speech of exactly the type your laws attempt to abrogate. The Keystone XL Pipeline was even deemed by a previous president to be so dangerous to our sacred lands and atmosphere that he shut it down. How can you presume to criminalize those who would agree with that previous presidential judgement and hence take vigorous action to resist dangerous infrastructure?”
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/states-crack-down-environmental-activists
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States Aren’t Waiting for the Trump Administration on Environmental Protections
May 19, 2019 | The Washington Post
By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin
More than a dozen states are moving to strengthen environmental protections to combat a range of issues from climate change to water pollution, opening a widening rift between stringent state policies and the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
In recent months, Hawaii, New York and California have moved to ban a widely used agricultural pesticide linked to neurological problems in children, even as the administration has resisted such restrictions. Michigan and New Jersey are pushing to restrict a ubiquitous class of chemical compounds that have turned up in drinking water, saying they can no longer wait for the Environmental Protection Agency to take action.
Colorado and New Mexico have adopted new policies targeting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel drilling and limiting where these operations can take place. And more than a dozen states have adopted policies that would force automakers to produce more fuel-efficient cars than required by federal standards.
The growing patchwork of regulations is creating uncertainty for American businesses as state lawmakers vie to change rules that, in past administrations, were more likely to be set at the federal level.
“At the end of the day, I think regulated entities want to know what the expectations are,” said Wendy Heiger-Bernays, an environmental health professor at Boston University. “They’d prefer not to have two different standards — one in one state and another in another state.”
Local officials say the jumble of policies also threatens to create disparities, not only in obligations placed on businesses but also in the level of protections guarding human health in different communities.
California is leading more than a dozen states to require higher gas mileage than the federal standard. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)“It is difficult to communicate to your customers that New Jersey or Minnesota or Vermont has evaluated the risk to their residents differently, and that one state places a lower value on protection of public health than another,” Brian Steglitz, the water treatment manager for Ann Arbor, Mich., said last week in testimony before a panel of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Since President Trump took office, his administration has scaled back numerous environmental rules enacted under President Barack Obama and declined to impose federal limits on some contaminants and pesticides. The Trump administration also has reversed course on climate change, refusing to embrace the limits on greenhouse gas emissions that the federal government previously had pledged to adopt under an international agreement.
In an interview, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the federal government regularly works hand-in-hand with the states, which often are the more appropriate forum for litigating such environmental matters. For example, he said, the Trump administration has allowed many states to shape their own strategies for meeting air quality standards, rather than imposing a federal plan.
“Overall, we try to defer to the states as much as possible,” Wheeler said — though he added that the administration would oppose state action that would “interfere with national commerce” or “create uncertainties for consumers or for businesses.”
At the Interior Department, which controls industry access to vast swaths of public lands, spokeswoman Molly Block said in an email that the administration views its more business-friendly approach as a key contributor to the nation’s vibrant economic growth under Trump.
“We will continue our work to advance President Trump’s deregulatory agenda, which has boosted the American economy,” she said.
In some states — especially those newly under Democratic control — the federal approach has created a vacuum that other officials have rushed to fill. For example, when New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) replaced a Republican in the governor’s mansion earlier this year, one of her first acts was to sign an executive order focused on climate change. It instructs regulators to develop statewide limits on greenhouse gas emissions and a more stringent renewable energy requirement for New Mexico’s power sector.
“A lot of what you see in that executive order reflects a lack of action on the federal level,” said Sarah Cottrell Propst, secretary of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. “The state is feeling like we need to fill the gap.”
In Orgeon, Gov. Kate Brown (D) is expected to sign a bill this week to codify federal clean air and clean water standards that were in place before Trump took office, making them enforceable under state law even if the White House rolls them back. The Trump administration is poised to replace at least three major policies this year, and has delayed or altered many others.
States also are taking the lead on chemical and pesticide regulation, as the EPA in some cases has held off on setting exposure limits or banning some substances outright.
At least a half-dozen states have pushed forward with their own plans to limit a class of compounds known as polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, saying ample evidence exists to regulate them. The lab-made compounds have long been used in consumer products such as nonstick pans, water-repellent fabrics and firefighting foams.
Long-term exposure has been associated with an array of health problems, including thyroid disease, weakened immunity, infertility and certain cancers, though researchers continue to study the human health implications. Because PFAS do not break down in the environment, they have become known as “forever chemicals.”
Catherine McCabe, an EPA veteran, is now the top environmental official in New Jersey, which has proposed one of the nation’s most stringent standards for PFAS in drinking water. The state also is trying to compel five chemical manufacturers, including 3M and Dupont, to fund tests for the chemicals and to clean up contamination.
McCabe said it would be better for the nation and for industry if the federal government set a single national limit for PFAS in drinking water. “It doesn’t serve anybody’s interest for us all to be coming up with different numbers,” she said.
Given the health threat, however, McCabe said the need for action is urgent. “I would love to wait if [federal officials] were moving quickly, but they are not,” she said. “We can’t wait any longer.”
Companies such as 3M, which faces significant regulatory and cleanup costs, also have pressed for a national standard. “We support regulation rooted in the best-available science and believe that this plan may help prevent a patchwork of state standards that could increase confusion and uncertainty for communities,” the company said in a statement.
Wheeler said the EPA is acting with urgency, pointing to a long-term PFAS “action plan” released earlier this year. But he said the agency must undertake a “rigorous” review before settling on national standards that are legally and scientifically defensible.
One of the most pressing splits is unfolding in the auto industry, as the EPA and the Transportation Department prepare to finalize a rollback of tighter tailpipe standards for cars and smaller pickup trucks. Last year, the Trump administration proposed freezing federal mileage requirements between model years 2020 and 2026, rather than boosting them to require that vehicles get more than 50 miles per gallon, as was required under Obama administration rules.
California, which has received federal waivers in the past to set its own rules, has pledged to press ahead with the tighter standards regardless of what the White House decides. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia are poised to adopt California’s standards if they diverge from the federal government’s.
Automakers, who pressed Trump to revisit the mileage targets as soon as he took office, are pressing the two sides to reach a compromise rather than fracture the nation’s car market. Two different standards could lead companies to market a small variety of more-efficient vehicles in some states while offering their entire fleet in others, said Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist.
“That’s why there could be a stampede to buy popular larger vehicles in a neighboring state that follows the federal standard,” Bergquist said. “This is all new territory, so no one really knows how it will unfold, but it will be a headache for everyone involved, including consumers.”
Colorado and New Mexico are in the midst of rewriting the rules for how the oil and gas industry operates, such as limits on greenhouse gas emissions from drilling operations.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) recently signed a bill transferring a large portion of the state’s authority over drilling to local governments, and changing the orientation of its Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to emphasize public health and safety over extraction.
Even as the Interior Department has relaxed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions from drilling operations, Colorado is tightening its methane standards.
New Mexico, too, is drafting a new methane rule. Meanwhile, its land commissioner last month put nearly 73,000 acres in the northwest part of the state off-limits to drilling on the grounds that the area, known as the Greater Chaco Region, is sacred to the Pueblo and the Navajo tribes.
Interior had planned to auction off more than 4,000 acres of leases in the Greater Chaco Region last year but abruptly canceled the sale in the face of public criticism.
Robert McEntyre, spokesman for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said in an interview that his members are used to dealing with both state and federal regulators, and are engaged in discussions about how to curb methane that leaks or is deliberately released and burned off.
“Across the board, every operator in New Mexico recognizes that limiting methane emissions while continuing growth is a top priority,” McEntyre said, adding that EPA data show overall methane emissions dropping by 4 percent in the Permian Basin, which straddles New Mexico and Texas, even as production doubled between 2011 and 2017.
Erik Milito, vice president of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, said the industry recognizes the role of the states as regulators. But he said some changes, such as Colorado’s new limits on drilling, go too far.
“The localities should not have the authority to ban oil and gas operations,” said Milito, whose group is now working with regulators to help shape how the new law is implemented. “They should have the zoning authority they already have.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/states-arent-waiting-for-the-trump-administration-on-environmental-protections/2019/05/19/5dc853fc-7722-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html?utm_term=.92e7e225b829
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E.P.A. Could Make Thousands of Pollution Deaths Vanish by Changing Its Math
May 20, 2019 | The New York Times
By Lisa Friedman
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to adopt a new method for projecting the future health risks of air pollution, one that experts said has never been peer-reviewed and is not scientifically sound, according to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans.
The immediate effect of the change would be to drastically lower an estimate last year by the Trump administration that projected as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths per year from a proposed new rule on emissions from coal plants. That, in turn, would make it easier to defend the new regulation, known as the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which is meant to replace former President Barack Obama’s signature climate change measure, the Clean Power Plan.
It is not uncommon for a presidential administration to use accounting changes to make its regulatory decisions look better than the rules of its predecessors. But the proposed new modeling is unusual because it discards more than a decade of peer-reviewed E.P.A. methods and relies on unfounded medical assumptions.
The five people familiar with the plan, who are all current or former E.P.A. officials, said the new modeling method would be used in the agency’s analysis of the final version of the ACE rule, which is expected to be made public in June. William L. Wehrum, the E.P.A. air quality chief, acknowledged in an interview the new method would be part of the agency’s final analysis of the rule.
The broader significance is that the new modeling method would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules. It has been a constant struggle for the E.P.A. to demonstrate, as it is normally expected to do, that society will see more benefits than costs from major regulatory changes.
The new methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. On paper, that would translate into far fewer deaths from heart attacks, strokes and respiratory disease, even if air pollution increased.
The problem is, scientists say, in the real world there are no safe levels of fine particulate matter in the air.
“Particulate matter is extremely harmful and it leads to a large number of premature deaths,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. He called the expected change a “monumental departure” from the approach both Republican and Democratic E.P.A. leaders have used over the past several decades and predicted that it would lay the groundwork for weakening more environmental regulations.
“It could be an enormously significant impact,” Mr. Revesz said.
The Obama administration had sought to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Power Plan by pushing utilities to switch away from coal and instead use natural gas or renewable energy to generate electricity. The Obama plan would also have what’s known as a co-benefit: levels of fine particulate matter, a byproduct of coal burning, would fall.
The Trump administration has moved to repeal the Obama-era planand replace it with the ACE rule, which would slightly improve the efficiency of coal plants. It would also allow older coal plants to remain in operation longer and result in an increase of particulate matter.
Particulate matter comes in various sizes. The greatest health risk comes from what is known as PM 2.5, the range of fine particles that are less than 2.5 microns in diameter. That is about one-thirtieth the width of a human hair.
The E.P.A. has set the safety threshold for PM 2.5 at a yearly average of 12 micrograms per cubic meter. While individual days vary, with some higher, an annual average at or below that level, known as the particulate matter standard, is considered safe. However, the agency still weighs health hazards that occur in the safe range when it analyzes new regulations.
Industry has long questioned that system. After all, fossil fuel advocates ask, why should the E.P.A. search for health dangers, and, ultimately, impose costs on industry, in situations where air is officially considered safe?
Mr. Wehrum, who worked as a lawyer and lobbyist for chemical manufacturers and fossil fuel businesses before moving to the E.P.A., echoed that position in the interview. He noted that, in some regulations, the benefits of reduced particulate matter have been estimated to total in the range of $40 billion.
“How in the world can you get $30 or $40 billion of benefit to public health when most of that is attributable to reductions in areas that already meet a health-based standard,” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Mr. Wehrum confirmed that he had asked his staff to study the issue and that the final version of the ACE rule would include a variety of analyses, including one that does not take into consideration health effects below the particulate matter standard. He acknowledged that doing so would reduce the 1,400 premature deaths the agency had initially predicted as a result of the measure.
He called the attention given to that initial forecast “unfortunate” and said the agency had included the figure in its analysis to show the varied results that can be achieved based on different assumptions.
Mr. Wehrum said the analyses the agency is conducting “illuminate the issue” of particulate matter and the question of what level is acceptable for the purposes of policymaking. He said new approaches would allow for public debate to move ahead and that any new methods would be subject to peer review if they became the agency’s primary tool for measuring health risks.
“This isn’t just something I’m cooking up here in my fifth-floor office in Washington,” Mr. Wehrum said.
Roger O. McClellan, who has served on E.P.A. advisory boards and as president of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, an industry-financed research center, said the data for health risks below the particulate matter standard was weak and that he did not accept the argument that agencies must calculate risk “down to the first molecule of exposure.”
“These kinds of approaches — that every molecule, every ionization, carries with it an associated calculable health risk — are just misleading,” Mr. McClellan said.
To put the matter in perspective, most scientists say particulate matter standards are like speed limits. On many highways, a limit of 65 miles per hour is considered reasonable to protect public safety. But that doesn’t mean the risk of an accident disappears at 55 m.p.h., or even 25.
Jonathan M. Samet, a pulmonary disease specialist who is dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, said the most recent studies showed negative health effects well below the 12-microgram standard. “It’s not a hard stop where we can say ‘below that, air is safe.’ That would not be supported by the scientific evidence,” Dr. Samet said. “It would be very nice for public health if things worked that way, but they don’t seem to.”
Daniel S. Greenbaum, president of the Health Effects Institute, a nonprofit research organization that is funded by the E.P.A. and industry groups, acknowledged there was uncertainty around the effects of fine particulate matter exposure below the standard.
He said it was reasonable of the Trump administration to study the issue, but he questioned moving ahead with a new system before those studies are in. “To move away from the way this has been done without the benefit of this full scientific peer review is unfortunate,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/climate/epa-air-pollution-deaths.html
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Trump’s EPA Shifts More Environmental Enforcement to States
May 20, 2019 | AP (In the Washington Post)
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Susan Holmes’ home, corner store and roadside beef jerky stand are right off Oklahoma Highway 31, putting them in the path of trucks hauling ash and waste from a power plant that burns the high-sulfur coal mined near this small town.
For years, when Bokoshe residents were outside, the powdery ash blowing from the trucks and the ash dump on the edge of town would “kind of engulf you,” Holmes said. “They drove by, and you just couldn’t breathe.”
Over three decades, the ash dump grew into a hill five stories high. Townspeople regard the Environmental Protection Agency as the only source of serious environmental enforcement. Whenever people took their worries about ash-contaminated air and water to state lawmakers and regulators, “none of them cared,” Holmes said.
So the residents of this 500-person town have nothing but bitter warnings for similarly situated communities now that President Donald Trump’s EPA has approved Oklahoma to be the first state to take over permitting and enforcement on coal-ash sites.
“They’re going to do absolutely nothing,” predicted Tim Tanksley, a rancher in Bokoshe, about 130 miles southeast of Tulsa in a Choctaw Nation coal patch that helped fuel the railroads.
Around the country, the EPA under Trump is delegating a widening range of public health and environmental enforcement to states, saying local officials know best how to deal with local problems. Critics contend federal regulators are making a dangerous retreat on enforcement that puts people and the environment at greater risk.
One administration initiative would give states more authority over emissions from coal-fired power plants. Another would remove federal protections for millions of miles of waterways and wetlands.
Some states and counties say the EPA is also failing to act against threats from industrial polluters, including growing water contamination from a widely used class of nonstick industrial compounds. Michigan, New Jersey and some other states say they are tackling EPA-size challenges — like setting limits for the contaminants in drinking water — while appealing to the real EPA to act.
In Houston’s oil and gas hub, local officials and residents say a lax EPA response to toxic spills during Hurricane Harvey left the public in the dark about health threats and handicapped efforts to hold companies responsible for cleaning up.
Nationwide, EPA inspections, evaluations and enforcement actions have fallen sharply over the past two years, some to the lowest points in decades, or in history.
The agency says environmental enforcers remain on the job despite the plunging enforcement numbers.
“There has been no retreat from working with states, communities and regulated entities to ensure compliance with our environmental laws,” said George Hull, the agency’s enforcement spokesman.
“Through our deregulatory actions, the Trump administration has proven that burdensome federal regulations are not necessary to drive environmental progress,” EPA Director Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, told lawmakers earlier this year.
Past EPA officials accuse the Trump administration of pulling back on enforcement of polluters and turning back the clock to a dirtier, more dangerous time.
“The reason that the ultimate authority to enforce the law was put into federal hands was because the states weren’t any good at it,” William Ruckelshaus said.
Now 86, Ruckelshaus served as the first administrator of the EPA in 1970, when President Richard Nixon created the agency amid a wave of public anger over contaminated air and water. The previous year, fire raged for hours on the pollutant-slicked surface of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, sending black smoke billowing over downtown Cleveland.
Then and now, some states lack the resources and legal authority to police big polluters. And crucially, Ruckelshaus said, some states just don’t want to. They see routine environmental enforcement as a threat to business and jobs.
“The idea that you’re going to delegate it to the states ... is completely fraudulent,” Ruckelshaus said in an interview.
Congressional Democrats allege Trump is selective in his passion for state sovereignty and has blocked states that want tighter environmental enforcement. They point to the president’s call to revoke California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set tougher mileage standards than those Trump wants, among other examples.
Oklahoma acquired permitting and oversight authority over a half-dozen coal-ash dumps and ponds last year under then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt left the agency amid ethics probes last year and now lobbies for coal.
Georgia has also applied to manage its coal-ash dumps and ponds. The EPA says it is talking with other interested states but declined to identify them.
Risks from coal-ash sites jumped to national attention in 2008, when a dike broke at a Tennessee coal ash pond, releasing 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge.
Coal ash — the gunk left after pollution equipment captures the worst of the toxic soot that once poured out of power plant smokestacks — contains heavy metals and carcinogens, including lead, mercury, arsenic and radium. The tiny particles can seep into the lungs and blood system.
U.S. coal plants generate about 100 million tons of ash annually. An Associated Press analysis of data released by utilities last year showed widespread evidence of groundwater contamination around coal plants nationwide.
In Oklahoma, groundwater testing at some of the ash sites shows contaminants at levels above what the government deems safe, according to Earthjustice and other environmental groups that are suing to reverse EPA’s transfer of permitting and oversight.
Patrick Riley, the state Department of Environmental Quality official in charge of Oklahoma’s coal-ash program, said the half-dozen sites will be brought up to federal standards. That includes moving some, Riley said.
The boom-and-bust cycles of the oil and gas fields govern Oklahoma’s economy. But state officials also try to support the state’s flagging coal industry, including giving what a state task force said are the highest subsidies in the U.S. to the few companies that mine and burn Oklahoma’s high-sulfur coal. The coal-fired power plant that produces the ash dumped at Bokoshe has been one of the main beneficiaries.
The Bokoshe coal-ash dump was opened at an unlined former coal mine pit by a local outfit that was initially called Making Money Having Fun LLC, until complaints from townspeople made the ash dump notorious.
Laws designed to encourage rehabilitation of old coal pits meant the Bokoshe site was classified as a reclamation project and not an ash dump. That’s even though the coal ash long ago filled the pit and now stands more than 50 feet high over several acres.
Fearing what the ash was doing to their air and water, the ranchers, teachers and shopkeepers of Bokoshe appealed for years for government action.
During Barack Obama’s first term as president, residents went to the state capital in Oklahoma City and to Washington, D.C. Holmes herself thrust a record of the town’s complaints into the hands of the EPA’s then-administrator. Television correspondent Diane Sawyer put the tiny eastern Oklahoma town on the network news. TV crews took photos of all the asthma inhalers stashed in the lockers of Bokoshe schoolkids.
Almost a decade later, the only time excitement enters Tanksley’s voice is when the cattle rancher recalls the day the EPA acted. Tanksley stood next to an EPA staffer that day as the man gathered beakers of runoff from the site for testing.
In 2010, the EPA cited the dump for toxic discharges in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. That led the state to stop the dump from accepting hazardous wastewater from oilfield operations. The dumping of ash continued, but state regulators required the operators to do more to contain the billowing ash.
Townspeople say they have little hope left for more state or federal help for Bokoshe. They have none to offer communities in similar fights.
“I did a lot,” Holmes said. “But it never did much good.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trumps-epa-shifts-more-environmental-enforcement-to-states/2019/05/20/f676d818-7ab4-11e9-b1f3-b233fe5811ef_story.html?utm_term=.272650b06fe7
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Republicans Aim to Counter Climate Criticism with New R&D Bills
May 20, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Eric Wolff
Stung by criticism that they've ignored climate change, Senate Republicans are planning to roll out a suite of bills designed to help develop technology to reduce carbon dioxide — but not requiring states or companies to cut their emissions.
The bills, which would funnel money into the Energy Department to push for advances in renewable energy and carbon capture, are designed to highlight the stark differences between the GOP focus on technology and the progressive Democrats' Green New Deal, which calls for an aggressive plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy in a decade to head off the worst impacts of climate change.
The new Republican bills are being developed by Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mitt Romney of Utah.
“We’re not packaging it as an alternative to the Green New Deal, just a smarter way to deal with people’s concerns about climate,” said Cornyn, who has derided the Green New Deal as a travesty. “We think this is a better way to address those concerns than a new government regulation or taxes.”
Democrats have pushed climate action into the spotlight since taking control of the House this year, and they've painted Republicans as obstructionists with no policy plan to address the issue. That pressure, coupled with the polling showing that voters increasingly favor government action, appears to be driving the shift.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell eagerly pushed a vote on the Green New Deal resolution in March, which prompted Democrats to vote "present" en masse and avoid what Minority Leader Chuck Schumer dismissed as a "sham" vote.
Alexander, who has called for a "Manhattan Project"-style push for clean energy and for doubling the budget of DOE’s Office of Science to $12 billion, said that Senate vote showed the need for plans that have broad appeal.
“I think there’s a growing awareness that climate change is a real problem and proposals like the Green New Deal are so off-base it couldn’t get one single Senate vote from Democrats or Republicans,” Alexander said. “So it’s incumbent on the rest of us to come up with proposals that can get bipartisan support.”
Green groups have long railed against Republicans who denied that human activity was altering the climate and blocked action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. And while environmentalists support developing technological solutions to help address the problem, they say far more aggressive action is needed because of years of inaction.
“It absolutely isn't sufficient for the job at all,” said John Coequyt, global climate policy director for the Sierra Club. “We see this as a pretty transparent effort to delay serious action while taking care of their corporate friends. So we're not fooled by this. I don't think anybody is.”
Still, some environmentalists said the GOP bills represent at least some movement from the party to addressing climate change.
“We see this as the beginning of the path. We’re encouraged the Republicans are joining us on the journey,” said Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president for government affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that has worked with companies to reduce emissions.
Democrats like Sen. Brian Schatz have said they do not oppose efforts to drive technology innovation, though any real effort to address climate change would need to address a myriad of issues like infrastructure, electrification of transportation, deforestation, fuel efficiency — and putting a price on carbon.
"If somebody’s going to hang their hat on one of the solutions, they misunderstand the problem. We literally have to do all of those things,” Schatz told reporters recently.
The GOP bills, which would fund research for renewable power, energy storage and carbon capture and increase funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, are still being drafted, so the funding levels have not been set. But a source familiar with conversations around all the bills said the level will be in the billions of dollars.
“We’re talking no small money with these thing,” the source said. “Score in the tens of billions as a collective package.”
Cassidy and Cornyn are taking the lead on a bill to push carbon capture and storage research. CCS legislation has been one of the few areas of carbon emission work that has been bipartisan, with Democrats and Republicans banding together to pass an expansion of carbon capture tax credits last year, and now trying to push a bill that would advance carbon capture infrastructure. The bill will focus on driving down costs for carbon capture on natural gas plants.
“I hope it’s a bipartisan answer” to emissions reductions, Cassidy said.
Several of the Republican senators involved in drafting the bills are up for reelection next year. Collins, who is leading the energy storage bill and could see greens who supported her in previous years turn against her, has tried to coordinate with Senate Democrats, but hasn’t found anyone to sign on yet.
Her bill aims to improve short term electricity storage technology that is currently moving toward lithium-ion batteries, and develop medium-term storage solutions that could supply power to the grid for 10 to 100 hours. And it will seek to develop seasonal storage that could potentially store excess electricity generated from sources like solar power during the summer and make it available in the winter.
Tillis, who faces a Republican primary challenger next year, is developing a bill on advanced renewables with an emphasis on improving solar efficiency.
“I think what we’re trying to do is prove that, No. 1, we think the climate is changing and, No. 2, we have viable solutions,” Tillis said.
An energy industry source working with all the senators told POLITICO to expect a bill increasing funding for the ARPA-E, which offers support for early stage technologies.
Graham, who has long prodded Republicans to develop a strategy on climate change, and Romney are also participating in the project to develop a group of bills, but neither appears to have a specific project.
“I’ll be their wingman. I’ll be there to help them,” Graham said.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2019/05/republicans-aim-to-counter-climate-criticism-with-new-r-d-bills-1432181
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Oil Majors Put $2M Behind Carbon Price Lobbying Push
May 20, 2019 | Politico Pro
By Zack Colman
Two of the world’s biggest oil companies are putting $2 million behind a lobbying effort to impose a price on carbon emissions in exchange for nixing federal greenhouse gas regulations and shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits.
Shell and BP announced their support on Monday for Americans for Carbon Dividends, the lobbying arm of the Climate Leadership Council. The group is pushing a plan developed by Republican elder statesmen that would assess a $40 per ton carbon emissions fees and return the revenues to taxpayers while ending carbon regulations and barring lawsuits on fossil fuel companies’ role in driving climate change.
Backers of a carbon fee in lieu of regulations have positioned the concept as a climate change grand bargain capable of winning bipartisan support in Congress and reducing emissions without closing the door on any particular energy sources. But the effort may be a tough sell with Democrats who are endorsing the Green New Deal as well as Republicans who have tended to resist any move to put a price on carbon.
“The goal is to solve the climate issue and to do so in a pro-growth, free-market way,” Greg Bertelsen, senior vice president with Climate Leadership Council, told POLITICO. “Our businesses understand the future for demand will be robust and there is a broad set of fuels and technologies that will serve that demand. But ultimately they want the marketplace and not government regulations to dictate that.”
With the new contributions, Americans for Carbon Dividends has raised a total of $7.6 million to fund its lobbying work through this and next year, including prior pledges from Exxon Mobil, Exelon Corp., the American Wind Energy Association, First Solar and ConocoPhillips. Shell and BP each committed $1 million across two years. EDF Renewables, a French power company, announced Monday it would contribute an additional $200,000 over that period, and the CLC said Ford Motor Co. was joining the organization as a founding member.
Still, those contributions are a fraction of total lobbying spending by fossil fuel firms that have pushed for more permissive environmental rules to bring down drilling costs and open access to more onshore and offshore land. BP, for example, spent $6.3 million on lobbying in 2018, while Shell spent $10.2 million.
Americans for Carbon Dividends spent $450,000 on lobbying in 2018 through firm Squire Patton Boggs. Former Sens. Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, represented the group.
While support is growing from the private sector, carbon pricing has struggled to gain support on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill and remains a nonstarter with the White House. Just one Republican lawmaker — Florida Rep. Francis Rooney — has signed onto any type of carbon pricing bill, while most of the party touts “innovation” as its preferred alternative. On the left, meanwhile, activists are coalescing around a Green New Deal that focuses primarily on calls for massive government spending and industrial policy to shift the economy away from carbon-emitting fuels.
The carbon dividend advocates also commissioned a new survey from GOP pollster Frank Luntz that found favorable views of their preferred policies.
Bertelsen said the results show the climate conversation is “past the tipping point." Sixty-nine percent of Republicans said they’re concerned on some level that their party’s position on climate will hurt them with younger voters, and 43 percent of GOP respondents said their concern about climate change has increased in the past year.
Prompted by a question that presented carbon pricing as "faster, less expensive and more business-friendly" than regulations, 53 percent of voters said they would support replacing regulations with a carbon price.
The poll results shared with POLITICO did not ask about shielding oil companies from lawsuits, another key element of the group's plan. A spate of court cases in recent years has accused the industry of misleading the public and investors about how much companies knew about the effect burning fossil fuels would have on the climate. Some environmentalists and politicians, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), want fossil fuel companies to pay for their role in boosting global temperatures, similar to how tobacco firms were penalized for lying about their product's cancer risks.
CLC has focused most of its energy on courting Republicans, and leading champions for the concept include former Republican secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz.
The still-developing Climate Leadership Council plan would reduce carbon dioxide emissions between 47 and 53 percent by 2035, according to modeling released Monday by nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future.
While that would exceed the U.S. pledge under the Paris climate agreement, it would fall short of what climate scientists say is needed to keep temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the expected threshold for avoiding catastrophic harm around the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a report last fall found that global emissions would have to fall 45 percent by 2030 to have a chance of hitting that target.
That some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies are backing the carbon fee effort has raised suspicions on the political left, which sees the mechanism as a means for ensuring a marketplace for natural gas and oil. Scientists have implored nations to quickly ditch fossil fuels, the primary driver of rising temperatures.
"I think here is where the question about what they actually support is very relevant," said Julian NoiseCat, Green New Deal strategic director with progressive think tank Data for Progress, of carbon taxes generally. "What Exxon, BP, the fossil fuel corporations have come out in favor of is a low price on carbon relative to what the economics now say we need to start at because we’ve waited for so damn long, that the science says we need because we’ve waited so damn long."
NoiseCat noted Data for Progress isn't opposed to the idea of a carbon tax, but he said relying on that method alone would require such a high starting price to address climate change that it would be politically unfeasible.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2019/05/oil-majors-put-2m-behind-carbon-price-lobbying-push-1452797
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Select Committee Looks to Build 'a Relationship'
May 20, 2019 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will cross its fingers and hope for bipartisanship this week as it takes up climate resilience, an area that both sides believe is ripe for compromise.
The panel's third meeting could be a reset button of sorts, after the two hearings often devolved into partisan scraps, despite a general agreement on the fact of climate change and its causes.
"I think this is an area where we probably should have started because I think it's an area where we have broad agreement," ranking member Garret Graves told E&E News last week. "There's a good reason for conservatives to be there, there's a good reason for liberals to be there, and this gives us an opportunity to build the foundation of a relationship."
The hearing will also be a chance for Graves to lend his expertise. The Louisiana Republican formerly directed his state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, and he's been deeply involved in disaster resilience and adaptation issues since he was elected in 2014.
A few of the committee's other members come from coastal districts, including Georgia GOP Rep. Buddy Carter and California Democratic Reps. Jared Huffman and Julia Brownley.
The committee will likely look at resilience from other angles, as well. It's set to hear testimony from Matt Russell, executive director of Iowa Interfaith Power and Light, a religious climate advocacy group, and Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who studies how climate change affects agriculture, water resources and human health.
"I think we'll look to be creative and outside the box, and Mr. Graves has a lot of knowledge in that," Chairwoman Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) told E&E News last week.
But the hearing comes with a special spotlight on coastal adaptation in Louisiana. A report last week from the state government found Louisiana will likely have to restructure parts of its economy and cede communities to the sea as it's expected to lose nearly 1% of its total landmass in the next 50 years (Climatewire, May 17).
It's not surprising, and as Graves noted Friday, Louisiana has been thinking about its retreating coast for a long time, since he was working on coastal resilience in the state government.
Graves said that when he was working with the state and started assigning projects to meet goals in Louisiana's previous coastal master plans, "it became clear: There wasn't enough sediment, there wasn't enough fresh water, and there wasn't enough money."
So when Louisiana updated the plan in 2012, it began looking more seriously at retreating from the coast. As Graves put it, "We stopped misleading people and telling them that we could save everybody because, based upon the current state of science and resource restrictions, we couldn't."
As that all applies to policy debates on the select committee, both Graves and Castor said they want to build off successes in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which became law last year as part of a disaster aid package.
Graves was a major proponent of the law, which, among other things, amends the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to ensure more post-disaster response cash goes toward resilient building and mitigation (E&E Daily, Oct. 4, 2018).
A House Transportation and Infrastructure panel will hold a separate hearing this week on implementation of the law, at Graves' request (see related story).
Castor said she wants to look for ways to make disaster aide distribution more efficient and possibly even consider more changes to the Stafford Act "to make sure that when these storms and wildfires hit a community, you can build back in a more resilient way, that you do not have to just put the infrastructure that existed before the storm."
Schedule: The hearing is Thursday, May 23, at 9 a.m. in 2247 Rayburn.
Witnesses:Rachel Cleetus, policy director, climate and energy program, Union of Concerned Scientists.Noah Diffenbaugh, senior fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.Matt Russell, executive director, Iowa Interfaith Power and Light.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2019/05/20/stories/1060361031
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