1. Times-Picayune “What Environmental Groups Are Saying About EPA’s Proposed Carbon Pollution Limits For Power Plants”
June 2, 2014
By Mark Schleifstein
National and state environmental groups Monday largely welcomed the EPA’s proposed guidelines requiring 30 percent cuts in carbon emissions below 2005 levels by power plants nationwide by the year 2030, in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
The proposal, however, drew quick opposition from Louisiana’s congressional delegation. (Read a story on the political reaction.)
The rules would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 500 million metric tons a year by 2030.
The proposed rules also would result in reductions in particle pollutions, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide by more than 25 percent, which EPA officials say would result in 6,600 fewer premature deaths and 150,000 asthma attacks by children a year, when fully implemented. The health improvements also would result in the avoidance of 490,000 missed work or school days, which EPA says represents savings of $93 billion a year.
EPA also says that because the rules will require increased use of energy efficiency and reduction of demand for electricity, nationwide, electric bills would shrink by 8 percent.
The rules have been criticized by electric utilities that predominantly use coal and the coal industry as too expensive. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity contends the rules will stress state-based power grids, increase electric bills and increase the risk of rolling blackouts.
Here’s what some environmental leaders are saying:
Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which includes more than 50 local environmental organizations among its members, said the new program is long overdue.
“We are at a time in the history of our country and our world where we must no longer talk about the impact of climate change, but take concrete actions to reduce greenhouse emissions to help the health and the economy of our state, nation and world,” Orr said.
“The Clean Power Plan is very important because it reduces carbon pollution from existing power plants,” she said. “There are four carbon/lignite powered plants in Louisiana. This plan will go along way to reduce greenhouse gasses and help public health. Natural gas powered plants will also reduce emissions.”
Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which tracks environmental issues involving oil refineries, said she expects Gov. Bobby Jindal and the state’s congressional delegation to oppose the proposed rules.
“Here in Louisiana we should celebrate these new rules, for our state is the state most vulnerable to climate change,” Rolfes said, pointing to the contribution that rising sea levels caused by global warming has on the loss of the state’s coastline and its increased vulnerability to hurricane storm surges.
“Our congressional delegation and senators will decry this rule, but they should be celebrating it and asking the EPA to do more,” she said. “Our leadership instead suffers from a lack of imagination and creativity regarding job creation. What about investing intensely in renewable energy? We don’t need any more dirty jobs.”
“The bottom line is that it’s unfortunate that our state will fight these rules when we should be a leader in implementing them, given our vulnerability to climate change,” she said. Instead, she said, it’s time for the state to set similar rules for other major carbon-producing industries in the state, including refineries and chemical plants.
“Many of the facilities in Louisiana are now producing chemicals and energy for export. Do we really want to ruin Louisiana so that people on the other side of the globe can consume more? We have become a colony. It is unacceptable,” Rolfes said.
“The first project that should be stopped because of this is the Sasol facility near Lake Charles,” she said. “It will add an unbelievable amount of greenhouse gases to the air. It is a devastating project for Louisiana, one that provides temporary jobs and long-term sickness.”
Sasol’s proposed $16 billion to $21 billion natural gas to liquids refinery would also produce 10.7 million tons of carbon gases a year, according to its permit requests.
America’s WETLAND Foundation sees the legislation’s “cap and trade” provisions, which allow industries to to pay for credits generated by carbon storage projects, including the creation of wetlands, as a potential benefit for the state.
“We view the President’s plan as having strong potential for coastal sustainability, if state plans along the Gulf Coast will allow restoration as one of the tools to meet their targets,” said a statement by the foundation’s managing director, Valsin Marmillion. “Particularly in Louisiana and Texas, where sea level rise adds to the loss of critical wetlands and coastal landscapes at alarming rates daily, our states can ensure that coastal restoration qualifies under any guidelines created.
“This action supports public sentiment from America’s WETLAND Foundation polling, where seventy-one percent of voters support building wetland as carbon sinks and 72 percent feel that sea level rise is a serious problem tied to climate change,” Marmillion said.
The American Lung Association focused on the proposal’s health benefits in a statement of support.
“Power plant pollution makes people sick and cuts short lives,” said Harold Wimmer, national president of the American Lung Association. He said that when completely adopted in 2030, the new rules will prevent up to 6,600 premature deaths and 150,000 asthma attacks a year.
“Cleaning up carbon pollution will have an immediate, positive impact on public health; particularly for those who suffer from chronic diseases like asthma, heart disease or diabetes,” Wimmer said. “Steps to clean up carbon pollution can reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, both poisonous emissions from coal-fired power plants that are also major precursors to lethal ozone and particulate matter pollution.”
The Sierra Club also supports the proposal.
“Climate disruption is the greatest challenge facing our generation,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club in a statement. “Until now, power plants have been allowed to dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into our air, driving dangerous climate disruption, and fueling severe drought, wildfires, heat waves and superstorms. Extreme weather, and the costs to Americans’ health and wallets, will only worsen unless we act.”
Also supportive was the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“The EPA’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from power plants for the first time ever is a giant leap forward in protecting the health of all Americans and future generations,” said Frances Beinecke, NRDC president, who also served on the President’s Commission on the BP Deepwater Oil Spill.
“It sets fair targets for each state and empowers the states with the flexibility to craft the best local solutions, using an array of compliance tools,” Beinecke said. “And if states embrace the huge energy efficiency opportunities, consumers will save on their electric bills and see hundreds of thousands of jobs created across the country.”
Earthjustice, a non-profit public interest law organization that has represented environmental groups in lawsuits attempting to strengthen EPA regulation of emissions, also praised the new rules.
“There is no graver challenge facing humanity right now than reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses,” said Earthjustice president Trip Van Noppen. “And there is no better place to start than the aging power plants currently pumping out 40 percent of the nation’s carbon pollution. The substantial reduction in greenhouse gasses achieved by these safeguards will help avert or mitigate the ongoing disaster of climate change and the widespread effects it will have on public health.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists praised the new policy and said its own recent study indicates that even larger, cost effective carbon emission reductions are possible beyond the 30 percent goal set by EPA.
“With the flexibility to include renewable energy and energy efficiency in state plans to meet these new standards, the proposal presents a significant opportunity for states to make meaningful reductions in their emissions,” said UCS President Ken Kimmell, former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and former Board Chair of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in a news release.
The new UCS analysis concluded that combining more aggressive power plant standards with strong renewable and efficiency policies could cut power sector carbon emissions by 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2020 and by more than 50 percent by 2030.
“While the power plant carbon standard is a tremendous step forward, ultimately we will need to make much deeper cuts in emissions to help limit worsening climate impacts, something the administration cannot do alone,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior climate economist with UCS and a co-author of the report. “Congress must step up and enact legislation that will lead to deep cuts in emissions throughout the economy.”
Meanwhile, two environmental organizations said the proposal doesn’t go far enough in regulating greenhouse gases.
“We applaud the President for using the tools he has available, with a Congress that refuses to act and for setting hard targets for emissions reductions,” said a joint statement by Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, and Janet Redman, program director for the Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program. “However, the targets don’t make the U.S. a leader in seeking emissions reduction.
“Because this rule applies to only one segment of our economy, existing coal-fired power plants, the reduction targets fall far short of the IPCC’s goals for developed countries of economy-wide reductions of 15 to 40 percent below 1990 emission by 2020,” Hauter and Redman said. “With these targets, U.S. economy-wide emissions would still be above 1990 levels in 2030.”
Opposing the legislation is American’s for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group supported by the energy industry’s Koch brothers that was formed to fight big government and spending.
“Once again the Obama Administration is putting its own global-warming ideology ahead of the interests of hardworking taxpayers,” said AFP president Tim Phillips. “These proposed EPA rules will lead to higher energy bills for families, lost jobs, and diminished economic growth. Even worse, this proposal comes just days after it was revealed that last quarter the U.S. economy actually shrank for the first time in three years.
“The tragedy is that while the new EPA regulations will hit taxpayers square in the pocketbook, even the administration admits they are ‘unlikely’ to have any meaningful impact on the environment,” Phillips said in a news release after McCarthy’s announcement.
2. WBUR, Here & Now, “EPA Sets New Rules On Power Plant Emissions”
June 2, 2014
[Listen to the Interview]
The U.S. Environmental Protect Agency today announced new regulations that will limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants by nearly a third over the next 15 years.
Power plants are the single largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and scientists say CO2 is the main cause of climate change.
Environmentalists are applauding the move, which is the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan. But the coal industry and members of Congress from coal-producing states say the measure will kill jobs and raise electricity costs.
Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Bill Bissett, president of the Kentucky Coal Association.
Guest
Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He tweets @p_lehner.
Bill Bissett, president of the Kentucky Coal Association.
3. Wall Street Journal, “Emissions Cap Is A Relief For Some Power Plants, Coal Firms”
June 2, 2014
June 2, 2014
By Alicia Mundy and John W. Miller
The coal industry quickly and loudly criticized proposed new U.S. emissions rules for power plants, saying that the proposal was tougher than expected and posed a threat to the industry.
But behind the scenes, some people in the industry said were relieved.
“This is a vast overreach,” said Vic Svec, director of investor relations for coal miner Peabody Energy Corp. BTU -0.31% “It’s being billed as a coal measure, but when you hit coal, you hit the American consumer hard.”
National Mining Association President Hal Quinn called the new Environmental Protection Agency draft “a major gamble that America cannot afford to make.”
The coal and utility industries had been hoping that the agency would apply emission-reduction standards from a baseline of 2005, since emissions from electric plants have dropped since then. Yet despite rounds of increasingly intense phone calls and meetings between energy lobbyists and the administration, the White House had taken 2005 “off the table,” a lawyer for coal interests said Friday. The coal industry feared that the EPA draft would use a more recent, and thus tougher-to-meet baseline, for example, 2012, he said.
By Sunday, though, word was spreading in Washington that the administration had decided on 2005, after all.
“We aren’t sure how that happened, but it’s a big relief,” a coal-industry lobbyist said Monday.
Scott Segal of law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLC in Washington, who works with coal-fired power plants expressed a similar view. “This rule could have been a whole lot worse. But as it is, it will still inflict considerable economic harm for little or no benefit,” said Mr. Segal, who is director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which lobbies for coal-fired utilities.
The EPA said 2005 is an international benchmark year in comparing pollution across countries.
David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental advocacy group said that states that already have developed strong programs to reduce power-plant emissions had wanted the White House and the EPA to include 2005 for state planning because after that, their emissions began to fall.
Coal-fired power plants won’t have much difficulty meeting the EPA’s mandate for a 30% reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2030, a lobbyist for the industry said; carbon emissions from coal plants have dropped 14% since 2005. Also, many coal-fueled electric plants already are scheduled to be retired over the next several years because of regulations involving mercury emissions and because a glut of lower-emission natural gas has lowered prices for that fuel.
Coal companies and electric plants still are concerned about an earlier deadline to reduce emissions 25% by 2020, since that means finding ways to cut 11% in relatively short order.
“People thought these would be watered down, and this is not watered down,” said Matt Preston, an analyst with consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. “This is pretty dramatic. The 2020 limits are pretty aggressive.”
Beyond electric plants, other big consumers of power said they, too, could have a tough time with the new rules.
The rules “could severely harm the international competitiveness of energy-intensive, trade-exposed U.S. industries like steel,” said the America Iron and Steel Institute trade group. “Energy—in particular electricity—is one of the most significant cost drivers for the production of steel,” said institute President Thomas Gibson. “This proposal may adversely impact the affordability and reliability of electricity supply to major industrial consumers, which will harm workers, jobs and further impede the postrecession growth of American manufacturing.”
4. Chicago Tribune, “With Carbon Rule, Illinois Power Struggle Begins”
June 3, 2014
By Julie Wernau
June 3, 2014
By Julie Wernau
President Barack Obama’s announcement Monday that it will be up to states to decide how to enforce his vision for a low-carbon future portends a battle among Illinois’ power giants, with Exelon in a great bargaining position.
“I expect a pretty big fight within all the competing interests,” said Jane Montgomery, a specialist in environmental law at Schiff Hardin LLP in Chicago.
With a power mix that’s split mostly between carbon-heavy coal-fired power plants and carbon-free nuclear power, Illinois is also home to the corporate headquarters of more than a dozen wind companies. Still, none is better positioned under the new rule than Chicago-based Exelon Corp., parent company of Commonwealth Edison. Exelon owns six nuclear plants in Illinois and has threatened to close plants if energy policies don’t go its way.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive goals of 30 percent greenhouse gas reductions from 2005 levels by 2030 give Exelon a strong hand if the company demands rules that reward its nuclear plants. Closing just one of those plants would set the state back in its goals because the formula that the EPA proposes to calculate state-by-state emissions rates gives the state credit for its nuclear plants.
On Thursday, Exelon Chief Executive Chris Crane said he was looking for a “clean energy standard that would compensate or have some clean energy credits for generation that is carbon free.” He called the market-based system a “probable path in some of the states, including Illinois.”
The company generates 175 million megawatt-hours nationally, on an annual basis, of carbon-free electricity, mostly from nuclear plants, Crane said. In Illinois, a $1-per-megawatt-hour price on carbon would add $100 million to the company’s gross margins, he said.
As a result of competition from lower-priced forms of power, Exelon’s earnings have suffered, and it has said at least three plants in the state could be forced to close.
According to the draft rule, the EPA believes that about 6 percent of nuclear generation in the United States is at risk for retirement absent the rule.
Robert McCullough, managing partner at McCullough Research in Portland, Ore., said a carbon rule won’t solve all of Exelon’s problems.
“The downward pressure on prices comes from inexpensive natural gas and zero marginal cost renewables,” McCullough said.
In what the White House is calling a “flexible” approach, states can choose from a menu of measures to reach targets.
Rebecca Stanfield, deputy director for policy in the Midwest for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Illinois already has energy-efficiency goals on the books, as well as goals for renewable energy that, if met, will get the state most of the way toward its targets.
“We know that Exelon would really like it if their nuclear fleet was part of the state standards as well; there’s going to be competition for that space,” she said. “We should compare the cost of keeping those plants open with the cost of replacing those plants with something that’s cleaner and cheaper like renewables.”
Exelon officials said they needed time to read the more than 600-page climate rule document.
Changes afoot for Illinois’ coal plants could also help the state meet carbon targets.
Even before the carbon rule was announced, Houston-based Dynegy, owner of nine Illinois coal plants, signaled that it might shut some of them.
New Jersey-based NRG Energy Inc., which recently bought four Illinois coal plants, has talked about converting coal plants to natural gas, a fuel that emits half the carbon of coal.
“If you repower with gas, you’re replacing half right there,” said Howard Learner, executive director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center. He called the flexibility of the draft rules a “pragmatic attempt to get us on a path to significant carbon reductions by 2030.”
NRG on Monday said it endorses a policy that gives it time to shift to a more clean, tech-focused business model. The company has been investing significantly in solar power but has said the market will continue to need coal plants in the near term.
NRG said it has concerns that the EPA’s “dramatically varying state emission targets” could adversely affect electricity reliability and create legal uncertainty.
Bob Flexon, chief executive of Dynegy Inc., said the devil will be in the details. For instance, the company has talked about ways it could sell fly ash to reduce carbon, but it’s not sure if that will count under the new rules.
“It’s safe to assume that we’re more impacted in the state of Illinois than any other generator,” Flexon said. “We would advocate for a number of things we would work on that create carbon offsets, and we want to make sure things of that nature are reflected in the state plan.”
Flexon said consumers can expect to pay more for electricity as a result of the rule as major power producers charge more as costs increase. He said the company has been preparing for a carbon rule for some time.
“I think if you sit there and do nothing or sit there and try to fight it, you could find yourself in a difficult place,” Flexon said.
Since 2005, Illinois has achieved 8 percent of the EPA goals, according to an analysis by Georgetown Law. But a glitch in the state’s renewable energy law has held up wind and solar build-outs. Attempts to fix the law haven’t passed muster in Springfield. Advocates of renewable energy are hoping that a carbon standard will force a legislative fix to move forward.
“If you’re looking for the easiest, most rapidly scalable, cheap forms of emissions reductions, we’ve got one,” said Kevin Borgia, public policy manager for Wind on the Wires in Illinois. “And that’s wind power. We can do it in communities in rural Illinois right now.”
But critics said it would take an area the size of Rhode Island to replace a nuclear plant with enough wind power to produce a similar amount of energy. Critics also said the wind power would not be dispatchable unless the wind was blowing.
5. KBIA, “New Carbon Dioxide Limits Could Bring Changes For Coal-Powered States Like Missouri”
June 3, 2014
By Véronique LaCapra
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed the first-ever rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.
The new regulations would set different emissions targets for each state, and would leave it up to the states to figure out how to meet them over the next 15 years. David Weiskopf is with the Midwest office of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He says Missouri’s target rate for 2030 is higher than what many states are emitting now. “I think what this rule is reflecting is an acknowledgement that Missouri is heavily reliant on power plants that are fueled by coal. And it’s not asking anybody to shut them all down and replace them with cleaner power plants immediately.” Weiskopf says Missouri should be able to meet its reduction targets by continuing to invest in renewable energy and increasing its energy efficiency. Ameren says it’s already making those investments. The company says the EPA’s proposed emission reductions are unrealistic and would result in higher electricity rates for consumers.
6. The Desert Sun, “California Is OK With Obama Climate Goal”
June 2, 2014
By Raju Chebium
California should have little trouble meeting the Obama administration’s new pollution-reduction goals for the nation’s existing power plants, officials said Monday.
California has long been cleaning up its air and increasing energy efficiency, well ahead of Uncle Sam, said Stanley Young, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board.
“We believe that the proposed regulation supports and confirms the programs that we already have in place. We feel that we are ahead of the curve as we usually are, and we will continue on our trajectory,” he said in a telephone interview. “We are very confident that we will be able to meet this.”
Environmentalists also weren’t worried about California doing its part to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed emissions reductions of 30 percent from existing power plants nationwide by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. It would be up to states to figure out how to meet the pollution targets.
“We are well on our way, but we’re going to have to continue to make the steady progress we already have,” said Ann Notthoff, California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “California’s program is a good example of how you can cut pollution and have strong economic growth at the same time.”
The EPA said California power plants in 2012 emitted 698 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour — a commonly used measurement in the electricity industry. If Monday’s regulations are finalized as written, power plants currently in use would have to cut that to 537 pounds per megawatt-hour.
Some steps the California State Legislature has taken in recent years:
• Capping emissions and lowering the caps every year through 2020.
• Requiring 33 percent of the electricity used statewide to come from wind, solar, geothermal or some other renewable resource, also by 2020.
• Enacting a tough “cap-and-trade” system to discourage utilities from buying power from polluted sources.
• Passing a law in 2006 barring utilities from signing long-term contracts with power plants that spew more pollution than a typical natural gas facility.
California also has no coal-burning power plants, which spew the most pollution. There are 895 power plants in the state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has long urged the EPA to regulate emissions from existing power plants. New power plants are already required to be cleaner.
On Monday, she praised the proposal, saying it would improve public health, save lives and create jobs.
“America will finally lead on a path to averting the most calamitous impacts of climate change — such as sea level rise, dangerous heat waves and economic disruption,” she said.
Read the first part of The Desert Sun’s three-part series about climate change in the Southwest, including Joshua Tree National Park
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., encouraged other states to follow California’s lead. Existing power plants, she said, “account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. emissions and need to be regulated.”
Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, welcomed the possibility for greater regional cooperation and noted that last year’s climate agreement between California, Oregon, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia would complement the federal effort. The Pacific Coast Climate and Energy agreement calls on the four jurisdictions to coordinate their climate and energy policies and come up with ways to increase the use of clean energy throughout the region.
Complying with the regulations would be harder for many Midwestern and Southern states, which have a number of coal-burning plants.
The rule, which will likely spark legal challenges, isn’t scheduled to take effect for at least two more years.
Republicans and powerful business groups such as the U.S. Chambers of Commerce blasted the proposal.
“The president’s plan is nuts,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “Americans are still asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’ and here he is proposing rules to ship jobs overseas for years to come. Americans are already paying more for everything, and here he is condemning them to higher bills and lower incomes long after he leaves office.”
USA Today contributed to this report.
Scorched Earth
Read the first part of The Desert Sun’s three-part series about climate change in the Southwest, including Joshua Tree National Park, at DesertSun.com/climatechange, where you’ll find an in-depth story, interactive maps, videos and photo galleries.
Learn more about the EPA’s new emission-cutting proposals in today’s USA Today section in The Desert Sun.
Carbon emission cuts could shift energy mix.
7. New York Times, “A Role For G-7 In Global Warming Battle”
June 2, 2014
By David Jolly
PARIS — When the leaders of the Group of 7 meet this week in Brussels, they will have plenty on their plates, not least the crisis in Ukraine and the energy security issues it raises. If history is any guide, they will pay little more than lip service to a subject where international leadership is needed: climate change.
Cooperation on halting rising global temperatures has been scant since the 2009 debacle at the Copenhagen climate conference, and time is short if the next big meeting, in the autumn of 2015 in Paris, is to have a chance for success. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, is so concerned that he has asked world leaders to a climate summit meeting this September.
“The G-7 should be in the lead,” said Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the main international body for addressing the problem.
“They should be familiarizing themselves with the long-term challenge that science is calling on us to face,” Ms. Figueres added, namely holding the rise in global temperatures below the benchmark target of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The fact that the United Nations climate conference has been making so little progress suggests that it makes sense to consider other institutions,” said Robert N. Stavins, director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.
The G-7 countries contribute a significant percentage of global emissions, Mr. Stavins noted, and it would be “a lot easier to work out a deal” with a handful of nations than with around 180 countries of the United Nations convention.
There have been steps at the level of individual nations. On Monday, the Obama administration was to announce it was going over the head of a reluctant Congress to require carbon emissions cuts from America’s 600 coal-fired power plants. China said last week that it would take more than five million of the worst polluting cars off its streets.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, said the best thing the leaders could do this week would be to cut emissions through a carbon tax or the cap-and-trade system, but that doing so was not politically feasible.
“There’s nothing the G-7 can do to affect the domestic U.S. climate deniers or the carbon-intensive industry lobby,” said Mr. Stiglitz, who served as a lead author for the International Panel for Climate Control’s 1995 report.
Congress, fearing a loss of competitiveness for American corporations, has been unwilling to back any agreement that doesn’t require all nations to shoulder an equal burden, he said. But China and many developing nations argue that the countries that have produced most of the man-made greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere should bear most of the cost.
Considering the stalemate, he said, it would be a major step forward if the G-7 could agree on the necessity of enforcement action for whatever deal is finally reached, through trade sanctions against countries that fail to meet the limits: “They’d be saying that this is a global problem and there won’t be any global free riders.”
Jo Leinen, a German member of the European Parliament’s climate committee, said the biggest priority for the G-7 should be to provide promised financing for the Green Climate Fund, agreed on at Copenhagen, to help poor countries embrace low-carbon energy and adapt to a warming climate. That fund was supposed to have gotten off to a quick start, with $10 billion annually to operate from 2010 to 2012. “It’s an empty box now,” Mr. Leinen, a Social Democrat, said. “There’s no money in it.”
Mohamed Adow, climate policy adviser for Christian Aid, a nonprofit development organization, said the G-7 could give the global climate negotiations “a dramatic boost by living up to the spirit of the climate convention.”
The group combines most of the countries “with the greatest emissions and the greatest wealth,” he said. “If they raised their pledges for emissions cuts and finance for helping the poor who desperately need it to survive, that would provide a huge injection of trust into the negotiations.”
Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the most important thing the G-7 could do would be “to give a clear signal” that they planned to put serious emissions cuts on the table next year in Paris.
“If the G-7 don’t do it, how can you ask China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Korea to come forward with targets for the next round?” he asked.
Scott Barrett, a professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, said another approach would be to act on a relatively modest objective to demonstrate that global leaders actually can cooperate on global warming.
One candidate, he said, would be to strongly back a proposal, championed by the United States and others, to assign a type of refrigerant known as hydrofluorocarbons — among the most potent of the man-made greenhouse gases — to the Montreal Protocol, the agreement that was created to end the use of gases that deplete the ozone layer.
In contrast to the failed Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change, the Montreal treaty includes an enforcement mechanism, in the form of trade sanctions, and has been used to phase out nearly 100 dangerous gases.
“The Montreal Protocol didn’t set out to protect the climate, but it has been very successful,” Mr. Barrett said.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said by e-mail that for the G-7 to help galvanize action, it needed ultimately to embrace a positive message. “It is critical to emphasize the hope of taking action, not the despair of doing nothing,” he said.
“We have the technology to transition to a low-carbon economy,” Mr. Pachauri said, “and the pathways along which we can move toward that goal. We can make that transition without imposing an unacceptable burden on the global economy.”
8. Wall Street Journal, “N.Y., N.J. To Receive Nearly $1 Billion To Protect Against Future Storms”
June 2, 2014
June 2, 2014
By Laura Kusisto
The federal government plans to spend nearly a billion dollars to build earthen levees, add a system of water pumps and construct partially submerged barriers that will double as marine habitat to guard New York and New Jersey against future storms, officials said Monday.
The money represents a down payment on the daunting task of protecting one of the most densely populated coastal areas in the U.S., one expert said.
“You’ve got to start somewhere and this can best be seen as a creative beginning to a long-term challenge,” said Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization.
Appearing together at a news conference, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, promised the region wouldn’t be as vulnerable if it were rocked by another storm on the scale of superstorm Sandy.
“Sandy was devastating, and frankly as a nation and as a region, we were unprepared. That won’t happen again, plain and simple, because of what we have done here today,” said Mr. Schumer, who spoke at the event held at a public-housing complex on the far east side of Manhattan.
The $920 million will be distributed among six projects in New York and New Jersey. The largest share—$335 million—will go toward building a portion of the first phase of a 10-mile protective barrier on Manhattan’s east side. The first step will be creating an earthen berm 10 to 20 feet tall that will run along the middle of East River Park and FDR Drive and will connect residents to the river by sloping bridges over the highway.
The project represents one element of a larger vision presented by BIG, an architecture firm, to protect the lower half of Manhattan with structures that also serve as recreation sites. The entire first phase of the project would cost about $1.2 billion, according to the team.
In another winning proposal, interconnected pumps and drainage routes would capture and store excess rainwater and prevent flash flooding in Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken. The initial $230 million would be focused in Hoboken. HUD officials said that award could help attract additional public and private investment through a “Flood Development Corporation” or “Resilience District” model.
Another idea, which received $60 million, would create partly submerged barriers known as breakwaters off the south shore of Staten Island to dampen the impact of storms while promoting habitat for marine life, including lobster and oysters.
The federal competition, called Rebuild by Design, offered a way for HUD to distribute some of the money allocated as part of a $60 billion aid package to help the region recover from superstorm Sandy, which blasted the area in October 2012.
Mr. Donovan, a former New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development commissioner, is said to have been inspired to hold the competition by his work in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, which launched such programs to tackle public projects while also creating an atmosphere of excitement.
The federal housing department is trying to distribute about $1 billion of the remaining money through a national resiliency competition. Mr. Goldstein said some of those funds could instead be used to pay for needed infrastructure.
Projects will need to seek additional money from federal, city and state governments, as well as private sources, HUD officials said.
Mr. Bloomberg’s administration issued a report outlining billions of dollars of initiatives to help protect the city, though those initiatives remain largely unfunded.
Henk Ovink, a senior adviser to Mr. Donovan who ran the competition and is a deputy director at the Dutch ministry for infrastructure and the environment, said it was intended to spark a greater recognition of the need for large-scale resiliency projects in the U.S.
“A cultural change always starts small,” he said. “It will take a long time. With Rebuild by Design, we set some steps in this cultural change.”
1. Thomson Reuters, “U.S. industry gears up to fight Obama’s climate rules”
May 28, 2014
May 28, 2014
By Roberta Rampton
WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – A U.S. plan to curb carbon emissions from power plants is likely to come under attack this summer by industry opponents in a bid to stir voter anger ahead of elections in November, when voters in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia could decide whether Democrats keep control of the Senate.
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose on Monday new rules to crack down on power plant emissions as part of President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat climate change.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report on Wednesday that predicted the regulations would cost consumers $289 billion more for electricity through 2030 and crimp the economy by $50 billion a year.
The EPA called the report “nothing more than irresponsible speculation” and said it was based on unfounded assumptions about future requirements for natural gas plants.
“The chamber is using the same tired play from the same special interest playbook that is engineered to continue polluting and stall progress,” EPA spokesman Tom Reynolds said in a statement.
White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said there is a “moral obligation” for the new climate change rule.
“Every time America has taken common sense steps to protect air quality and the health of our children, polluters have made doomsday predictions – and every time they’ve been wrong,” Lehrich said.
BOTH SIDES ARMED WITH NUMBERS
Industry lobbyists plan to say the new rules will probably raise household electricity costs, prompt power brown-outs during heat waves and cold snaps and destroy jobs at coal mines and manufacturing plants.
“We fully expect that whatever comes out will be overly stringent, and will be something that is not good for American consumers or businesses,” said Laura Sheehan, spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
In March, Sheehan’s group, which represents coal mining companies as well as owners of coal-fired plants like American Electric Power and Southern Co, released a report warning that the EPA plan may kill more than 2.85 million jobs.
The National Mining Association, which represents large coal mining companies including Peabody Coal Co, Arch Coal Inc , Alpha Natural Resources and Cloud Peak Energy Inc has spent $1 million on advertising in five states depicting shocked consumers opening expensive electricity bills.
Environmental groups plan to fight back with their own projections. On Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council is expected to release a report concluding the EPA rule would create “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and save consumers “tens of billions of dollars” on electricity.
“The chamber’s so-called study is the latest in a long series of ‘sky-is-falling’ claims that cleaning up harmful air pollution will cost jobs,” said David Hawkins, director of NRDC’s climate programs.
Because the new U.S. rules would take years to implement, perception matters more than facts, particularly ahead of November elections, said Andrew Holland, a former Republican legislative aide who is now an energy analyst at the American Security Project, a nonpartisan think tank.
The industry’s arguments have “the virtue of not being testable” before the midterm elections, he said, noting previous EPA rules have ended up being cheaper than industry feared.
“It turns out that engineers are better at this than the lawyers expect them to be,” said Holland.
COST CONCERN
Industry groups made their concerns clear to regulators. For example, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association sent three of its experts to a White House meeting to show how not-for-profit co-ops that rely on coal for fuel and provide power to some of the nation’s poorest regions could be pinched by the new EPA proposal.
And some industry coalitions have said they will try to work with the EPA and state officials to craft practical rules.
After the EPA first said in 2008 that it would treat carbon as a pollutant, power companies including AES and NRG and manufacturers including Boeing and 3M formed the National Climate Coalition.
It wants the EPA to phase in standards, and eventually develop rules for companies and states to trade credits for carbon-reducing actions, said Robert Wyman, a partner with law firm Latham & Watkins, who represents the coalition.
The coalition will take at least a week to read and understand the EPA rule before responding, Wyman said.
“Obviously the more politicized the issue becomes, the more likely it is that rhetoric will overshadow some of the technical issues,” he said.
2. Fox News, “Looming EPA power plant rules fuel industry concerns”
May 29, 2014
By Doug McKelway
May 29, 2014
By Doug McKelway
Lawmakers and Washington interest groups are engaged in a battle over whether looming EPA rules will help or hurt as President Obama prepares to announce a highly anticipated performance standard for power plants June 2.
The proposed standard will require existing natural gas and coal-fired power plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity – easily done with natural gas but unobtainable by present day coal plants.
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Although coal still provides almost 40 percent of U.S. electricity, the White House’s new point man on energy, John Podesta, said Wednesday that climate change necessitates coal’s demise. “President Obama believes we have a moral obligation to act now to curb climate change,” he said.
While Podesta affirmed the president’s commitment to address climate change, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was releasing a study that found the new standard will result in the loss of 224,000 jobs every year through 2030 and impose $50 billion in annual costs.
“The American household will lose $586 billion of disposable income. That means a household losing over $3,400 of income they’d otherwise be spending on something else,” said Karen Harbert of the Chamber of Commerce.
The White House dismissed the Chamber of Commerce study. In an email, spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote that while the White House was still reviewing the study’s methodology, “Polluters have made doomsday predictions, and every time they’ve been wrong.”
Environmental groups believe the transition to cleaner energy will stimulate the economy. Bob Deans, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Fox News, “We think this plan is going to drive American innovation and investment and jobs, hundreds of thousands of them, in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, all over the country.”
He added, “These are good paying jobs, doing good work that are going to help save money for our families and are going to protect future generations from the greatest threat of our time, which is global climate change.”
Under the new standard, states will have broad flexibility in how to comply. But most are expected to use a cap and trade type of system. Electric plants that don’t meet the standard may be able to trade carbon credits with other businesses that do. The details have yet to be worked out.
Even so, seven energy state Democratic Senators, Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., Mary Landrieu, D-La., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Mark Warner, D-Va., who are all facing tough re-election battles, wrote the president last week expressing “deep concerns” about the plan. Among other concerns, they fear it will kill incentive for ongoing research into clean coal combustion.
After the president announces the new standard next week, a one-year public comment follows. States will have to notify the EPA as to how they’ll implement it the following year, but lawsuits and the potential for Republican control of Congress or the White House could undo it all.
3. Bloomberg News, “Lobbies debate climate rules’ effect on jobs”
May 28, 2014
By Mark Drajem
WASHINGTON — The nation’s biggest business lobby says President Barack Obama’s plan to tackle climate change could cost the U.S. economy $50 billion a year. Supporters predict that it will create jobs and lower power bills.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Natural Resources Defense Council are both releasing economic impact studies this week, signaling that the political battle over the president’s plan will be fought over dollars and cents. For Mr. Obama, the risk is the plan gets labeled a job-killer just as campaigns heat up for an election that could determine Senate control.
In an analysis released Wednesday — days before the Environmental Protection Agency unveils a proposal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — the Chamber said an ambitious pollution-control effort could force more than a third of the coal-fired power capacity to close by 2030, resulting in economic losses of $50 billion a year and the elimination of 224,000 jobs.
“This raises serious questions that need to be answered,” Karen Harbert, president of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said in an interview. “Utilities will be faced with some very unappealing choices.”
While the Chamber isn’t taking a position on the proposal before its release, the dire economic warnings in its analysis shows that the lobbying powerhouse is unlikely to back off opposition to the Obama administration’s efforts to fight climate change. Environmental groups such as the NRDC say the EPA’s pledge to give states wide leeway will limit the costs, which could be offset by lower electric bills for consumers as utilities become more efficient.
The administration is focusing on an approach that would let states set up their own systems to achieve mandated cuts, including linking into existing cap-and-trade networks, or expanding use of renewable energy, according to people familiar with the plan.
And the EPA, which said any details about the rule are speculation at this point, says the economic risks of not dealing with the threat of climate change are real as well.
“The cost of inaction on climate is the real drain on our economy,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said in an email. “In 2012, we saw the second-costliest year in U.S. history for natural disasters. Even the strongest sectors can’t escape the pressures of a changing climate, so it is time for us to lead.”
NRDC is set to release a report today showing that the rules could create hundreds of thousands of jobs and cut health care costs and power bills.
“The costs are certainly quite modest,” said NRDC fellow Starla Yeh, who helped develop and analyze its proposal. With efficiency programs, she said, “the savings in fuel and maintenance you forgo balances out the costs.”
In fact, while the Chamber study predicts that electricity costs will increase, especially in the coal-heavy states of the Midwest and South, the NRDC says efficiency gains will mean a drop in wholesale electricity prices, which has led some utilities to complain about “demand destruction,” Ms. Yeh said.
Mr. Obama has pledged to use his regulatory powers to cut U.S. greenhouse gases about 17 percent by 2020 over 2005 levels, with deeper cuts to follow. Groups such as Resources for the Future say achieving those reductions requires the EPA to order cuts deeper than 17 percent in power-plant emissions. Power plants are the top source of carbon dioxide, and the rules aimed at electricity generators could be followed by similar efforts for refineries, steelmakers and cement plants.
The Chamber hired the independent research firm IHS Energy to analyze a plan produced by the NRDC that people familiar with the deliberations say was considered by the Obama administration in developing its approach. The NRDC proposal, released in late 2012, calls for using a broad approach to achieve emissions cuts of as much as 30 percent by 2020 compared with 2005. For its analysis, the Chamber extended those cuts out for another decade, to achieve reductions of 40 percent by 2030.
Under those assumptions, coal’s share of the generating mix would fall to 14 percent from about 40 percent now, while 114 gigawatts of coal-fired generating plants would shutter, it said. The compliance costs over that period would be $28 billion a year, with $17 billion of that passed on to consumers as higher electricity costs, the study said. Those higher rates are “an issue of competitiveness with the rest of the world.” Ms. Harbert said.
The Chamber’s analysis differs from that of NRDC because it forecasts a steady increase in demand for electricity and predicts that the energy-efficiency savings the NRDC forecasts aren’t possible.
And the costs come on top of the billions of dollars utilities are now spending to comply with the EPA’s mercury rule, which phases in by 2016. To be sure, a $50 billion cost represents 0.31 percent of the overall U.S. gross domestic product, and critics say business groups have a long history of overstating their predictions of what EPA rules will cost.
“Critics have tried for years to convince people that more pollution equals more jobs and a better economy, but history has proved them wrong over and over again,” the EPA’s Ms. Purchia said. “Climate action sharpens America’s competitive edge and spurs innovation.”
And not all of what it counts as costs are universal negatives for companies. Nuclear-reliant power producers such as Exelon Corp. and Entergy Corp. say the EPA rules could help their struggling plants get a leg up in the competitive power markets.
Under the Chamber’s analysis, use of natural gas would increase to 46 percent of total generation by 2030 from about 27 percent now, which could be a boon for gas producers such as Exxon Mobil Corp., and power generators with gas plants.
Also this week, companies such as OPOWER Inc., which helps consumers monitor and cut electricity bills, will showcase ways that their technology could prosper under the EPA rules.
“We see EPA’s carbon rules as a huge opportunity to modernize our grid, and that will help the economy overall,” said Malcolm Woolf, senior vice president for government affairs at Advanced Energy Economy, a business group that represents lower-carbon power suppliers and efficiency companies. “We see this as a real opportunity.”
4. KTVU, “More illnesses linked to Foster Farms chicken”
May 28, 2014
May 28, 2014
[Click Here to view the segment]
5. The Oregonian, “Foster Farms salmonella cases slow but chicken outbreak one of biggest, longest”
May 28, 2014
By Lynne Terry
The Foster Farms outbreak is one of the biggest and longest in recent history, with no end in sight. But federal officials said Wednesday that fewer cases are popping up each week, indicating the company is making progress in tackling its salmonella problem.
“People are still getting sick,” said Ian Williams, who oversees multistate outbreaks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But we’re heading in the right direction.
The outbreak started in March 2013. At its height later that year, the CDC received reports of 20 cases a week. Those have slowed in the past few weeks to about six, Williams said.
The CDC announced on Tuesday that 50 new cases had popped up since March, bringing the total to 574 in 27 states, including Oregon, and Puerto Rico. Williams said that freshly purchased chicken – not long-stored items retrieved from a freezer – was still making people sick.
He said most of the patients have reported eating a range of Foster Farms products produced on different days. The U.S. Department of Agriculture pinpointed the outbreak to three Foster Farms plants in central California, including one that it shut in January over a cockroach infestation. The plant reopened three weeks later.
Foster Farms said in a statement Tuesday that tests of processed chicken had a 10 percent rate of salmonella contamination compared with 25 percent before. But test results do not guarantee food safety.
“You can’t test your way to safety,” Williams said. “It indicates if the process is in control or not.”
Clearly, Foster Farms continues to have a production issue, Williams said.
This is not the first time. Another salmonella outbreak that started in June 2012 was also traced to Foster Farms chicken. It ended in April last year, with 134 sickened, mainly in Oregon and Washington. That outbreak was traced to the company’s plant in Kelso, Wash.
Foster Farms said it stepped up food safety controls at the plant to end the outbreak. It’s done the same thing this time around while also stepping up measures in poultry houses. It’s not clear why this outbreak is more persistent.
But both have involved antibiotic strains of Salmonella Heidelberg, which can cause a higher hospitalization rates and pose problems for treatment. Williams said in the latest outbreak that of 61 patients tested, 38 showed resistance to at least one antibiotic and 19 were resistant to several drugs. Seven antibiotic resistant strains have been detected.
Though none was resistant to drugs used to treat severe salmonella infections, antibiotic resistance in general poses a huge public health threat, with the specter that in the future that infections now easily treatable could be fatal.
Federal and world health authorities have warned against misuse of antibiotics, including on the farm. Foster Farms has acknowledged using antibiotics, according to Jonathan Kaplan, head of food and agriculture at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Scientists know that when chicken producers use antibiotics routinely, some bacteria become resistant and escape into the environment,” Kaplan wrote in a statement. “Is this happening at Foster Farms?”
The family owned company has declined to disclose details about its antibiotic use, Kaplan said. It also has not released specifics about measures taken to fight salmonella contamination.
6. The Kansas City Star, “KCP&L’s energy efficiency plans again plugged in”
May 28, 2014
May 28, 2014
By Steve Everly
In 2012, the utility dropped energy efficiency plans that would have, among other steps, given customers rebates for more efficient air conditioners and provided programmable thermostats.
At the time, the move was harshly criticized by environmental groups. But a settlement Wednesday among the utility, environmental groups and state regulatory staffers would allow the programs to finally become a reality as early as July.
“KCP&L has taken a huge step in improving Missouri’s stature as an energy efficient state,” P.J. Wilson, director of the clean energy group Renew Missouri, said in a statement.
The Missouri Public Service Commission still has to give its approval, but such settlements like the one reached Wednesday usually smooth the way for that to happen.
For the last year and a half KCP&L has been offering energy efficiency programs, including the rebates for cooling equipment, to customers in western Missouri who were once served by Aquila Inc. in suburbs like Raytown. Those programs will continue and the settlement will for the first time offer them instant rebates when purchasing more efficient lighting.
But the big change is bringing those programs, which were once offered as a pilot, to KCP&L’s traditional service territory, including most of Kansas City. The utility in 2012 said it wouldn’t proceed with its energy efficiency plans in that area because there was more than enough power to serve those customers and spending money on energy efficiency was not cost effective.
The utility now wants to proceed, believing that eventually demand will outrun supply and it will take a while for energy efficiency to grow and displace enough demand to start making a difference.
“We believe now is the time,”’ said Katie McDonald, a spokeswoman for KCP&L. “We’re excited about making the Kansas City region a leader in the state.”
KCP&L doesn’t offer energy efficiency programs in Kansas, but the state recently approved legislation that will make them possible in the future.
The environmental groups involved in the settlement said that even with the utility’s energy efficiency programs, Missouri will continues to lag behind the rest of the country.
But their relationship with KCP&L has clearly improved with the settlements and an announcement in January that the utility will use more wind power.
“For the second time in less than six months, KCP&L has demonstrated that clean energy can deliver significant savings to its customers,” said Holly Bender, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
The settlement reached Wednesday sets a goal to save enough electricity through 2015 to power more than 5,000 homes. That will be enough to eliminate 101,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired plant, or eliminate the same amount of emissions produced by 21,000 cars on the road for a year.
“Programs like these represent exactly the kind of win-win solutions we’re hopeful Missouri will place at the center of its energy policy and emissions reduction plans under the carbon standards for power plants we expect EPA to unveil next week,” said David Weiskopf, sustainable energy fellow for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
7. Crain’s Detroit Business, “Michigan drops in state rankings of renewable-energy jobs”
May 22, 2014
By Jay Greene
By Jay Greene
For several years, Michigan’s job creation numbers in the renewable energy industry had been growing, but that streak came to a halt in 2013 and in the first quarter of 2014, according to Environmental Entrepreneurs.
In 2013, businesses in Michigan announced more than 1,700 clean energy jobs, including 910 in energy efficiency positions, 277 in wind energy, 205 in solar and 380 in clean vehicle manufacturing, according to an E2 report.
But those numbers are down from 2012, when E2 said Michigan announced 2,262 renewable energy and vehicle manufacturing jobs.
During the first quarter of this year, Michigan also didn’t rank in the top 10 for clean energy jobs as it had several times in the past. Top states include Idaho, Texas, California, Missouri, New York, Kansas, Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico and Louisiana.
E2 said congressional inaction on key clean energy tax policies and political attacks on state renewable energy programs led to a dramatic decline this year in clean energy job announcements.
Some 5,600 clean energy and clean transportation jobs were announced in the first three months of this year, down from 12,000 such jobs reported in the comparable period in 2013, E2 said.
“Congress pulled the plug on smart clean energy tax policies at the end of last year, while in the states, lawmakers are getting bullied by special interests that don’t want our country to produce more clean, renewable energy,” said E2 executive director Bob Keefe in a statement.
Keefe said Congress should act this year to reinstate federal tax incentives, including the Production Tax Credit for wind. The American Wind Energy Association estimated loss of tax incentives have led to the loss of about 30,000 jobs nationally.
Next month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue new standards for existing power plants that will for the first time limit carbon pollution.
Keefe said the new carbon limits pave the way for manufacturing and power-generation companies in clean energy and energy efficiency sectors to invest in operations and add jobs.
8. FuelFix, “Texas ranks high for green job growth”
May 22, 2014
By Jennifer A. Dlouhy
WASHINGTON — Texas added nearly 800 clean energy jobs during the first three months of the year, putting the Lone Star State second in the nation just behind Idaho and well above California, according to an analysis released Thursday.
But that’s where the good news ends, according to Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), the non-partisan business group that put out the figures.
Although E2 counted 5,600 new clean energy and clean transportation jobs announced nationwide during the first quarter, that’s fewer than half the 12,000 reported in the same time frame last year, and it marks a steep drop from the past two quarters.
E2 Executive Director Bob Keefe suggests more declines could be on the horizon, amid uncertainty about the future of state mandates and federal tax incentives driving renewable energy investments around the country.
“Congress pulled the plug on smart clean energy tax policies at the end of last year, while in the states, lawmakers are getting bullied by special interests that don’t want our country to produce more clean, renewable energy,” Keefe said in a statement.
Texas success: Renewable energy production up 12 percent
The biggest hit at the federal level is the disappearance of the renewable energy production tax credit which allows project owners to reduce tax bills by 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced over 10 years.
Prospects for quickly reauthorizing the credit are slim, with the Senate stalemated over a measure to extend it and a slew of other expired tax breaks, and House leaders committed to tackling the provisions individually.
Wind industry leaders who have championed the PTC also are up against significant opposition in the House from lawmakers who say it is no longer needed.
An investment tax credit that has been used to finance solar projects with long lead times is also set to expire in 2016.
Tax credits for investing in efficiency improvements and constructing efficient homes also are in limbo.
Outside of Washington, D.C., in statehouses across the country, lawmakers also are weighing measures that would scale back or repeal existing mandates that utilities derive some of their electricity from renewable sources such as the wind and sun.
New customers: Transmission line could expand Texas wind market outside state
So far, renewable energy advocates have been prevailing in most of those fights, most notably when the Kansas House voted to retain the state’s requirement that utilities draw 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. But a similar battle is under way in Ohio, where the state Senate has passed legislation to freeze efficiency and renewable energy targets for 2014.
E2′s assessment, updated quarterly, tracks announcements of new jobs tied to renewable energy sources, including solar, wind and biomass, as well as initiatives involving recycling, public transportation infrastructure, smart meters, transmission improvements and building efficiency.
Nationwide, the group documented a shift in the solar sector, from larger, utility-scale projects to residential initiatives and distributed solar generation. Some sun-drenched states, such as California, have exceeded state quotas for renewable energy, which may be one reason for the shift.
In Texas, the group counted four big new projects: the Barilla Solar project in Pecos County, the Plainview Orchard Wind project in Plainview, the First Wind project in Armstrong and Carson counties and Austin-based Thomas Biodiesel’s plans to locate a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Temple. The wind and solar projects announced in Texas during the first quarter have a combined capacity of 249 megawatts.
Texas narrowly lost the top spot by 11 jobs to Idaho, where a single project — a 25-megawatt geothermal project — is responsible for 800 planned jobs.
Other top-ranking states:
3: California, with four projects tied to 660 jobs.
4: Missouri, with three projects tied to 449 jobs.
5: New York, with three projects tied to 435 jobs.
6: Kansas, with two projects worth 355 jobs.
7: Arizona, with two projects tied to 342 jobs.
8: Hawaii, with two projects tied to 340 jobs.
9: New Mexico, with two projects tied to 328 jobs.
10: Louisiana, with 1 project tied to 300 jobs.
1. CNN en Español, “Adrianna Quintero on CNN en Español for Earth Day 2014”
April 23, 2014
[Click here to view the segment]
2. MTV.com, “5 Ways You Can Make A Difference On Earth Day (Or Better Yet, Every Day).”
April 22, 2014
By Danica Davidson
By Danica Davidson
Happy Earth Day 2014! Today’s a day to celebrate how much we love the earth, but it’s also a great time to really rev up the ways we take care of the planet. Check out below for some easy and impactful ways to take action.
+ Recycle and Buy Recycled Products
Recycling is a big key to things. You can even earn money for recycling things like cans and bottles! Some things might seem a little harder to recycle, but there are often opportunities if you check it out — like how DoSomething.org has a campaign going on now to recycle clothes.
+ Cut Back
Try to cut back on things where you can. For instance, try to walk, carpool or use public transportation instead of driving everywhere. Turn lights off when you’re done with them. Instead of getting plastic bags each time you go to the store, buy cloth bags and take them along each time.
+ Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline
The Keystone XL Pipeline would be a SERIOUS threat to the environment and all of our well-being by pumping tons of dirty tar sands for 900 miles. One of the biggest environmental goals right now is to make sure it doesn’t happen, and you can join Jared Leto, Sierra Club and millions of others in the campaign against the pipeline.
+ Get Political
Politics matter! Some politicians are ignoring climate change because they’re getting money from oil companies who want to cover up the damage being done to the earth. Write or tweet your elected officials to let them know you care about the earth. When it’s election time, research who’s running. And if you’re 18 or up, make sure you VOOOOTE!
+ Support Orgs
There are a number of orgs just as passionate about the earth as you are. Check out places like 350.org, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy and the Ian Somerhalder Foundation. Feel free to get involved with one or more, because they’d love to have you!.
3. Chicago Sun-Times, “Clean Energy: A Very Chicago Enterprise”
April 22, 2014
By Henry Henderson
Earlier this month I attended the Clean Energy Trust’s Clean Energy Challenge, where teams of entrepreneurial students pitched a series of ideas that could set the world on a better path by using the free market to attack serious problems looming before us: water scarcity, air pollution and climate change.
It was a very Chicago event. This city’s history is dominated by audacious, radical and profitable attacks on the status quo.
Everyone knows Burnham’s plan to re-shape the city into a livable cosmopolis grew from his brilliant vision for the Columbian Exposition. Less commonly understood is that the scheme was hatched in part to demonstrate the practicality of urban planning, clean water and sanitation that had been rejected by City Hall at the time. Rather than take “no” for an answer, Burnham invited the world to see a better way. That same spirit guided Samuel Insull to use cutting-edge technology and innovative energy policy to create the modern electric grid in Chicago.
Today, we again find ourselves with an unbearable status quo in need of quick innovation. Last weekend international scientists released an updated synopsis of the looming reality of climate change. It’s not pretty. And the inaction on this issue can already be seen taking a toll.
Bold action is expected from the Whitehouse this summer addressing our biggest carbon emitters to help slow climate change’s onslaught; but the broader transformation must come from a new generation of innovators. Illinois stands as one of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet, but a state well-positioned to thrive in the shift to a clean, diversified energy economy. Embracing strong in-state and national energy and climate policies will empower young entrepreneurs to continue Chicago’s rich legacy of seizing upon technology to improve conditions—bringing jobs, prosperity and a safer world too.
NRDC is an environmental action group, combining the grassroots power of 1.4 million members and online activists with the courtroom clout and expertise of more than 450 lawyers, scientists and other professionals. Jasculca Terman, an independent strategic communications firm specializing in public affairs, event management, crisis communications and digital strategies, is the sponsor of this article.
4. Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, “Energy Future Holdings deserves credit”
April 20, 2014
By Ralph Cavanagh and Jim Marston
Lyndon Johnson, president, Texan and committed environmentalist, famously said, “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’ ”
Credit is not always given where credit is due.
Such is the case when it comes to the energy debate in Texas. It’s basic: For Texas to maintain its status as an economic growth engine, it must reinforce to the world an ability to accommodate future growth without sacrificing the environment.
This need not — and should not — be a zero-sum game. Economic vitality and responsible environmental stewardship should go hand-in-hand.
And while no one we know has walked across the Brazos or the Trinity, Energy Future Holdings, which includes Texas’ largest power producer, Luminant, and largest electricity provider, TXU Energy, has fully met the ambitious commitments that led us to support its ownership change more than six years ago. That’s despite significant financial challenges.
We have been closely following the company’s environmental results since then as members of the EFH Sustainable Energy Advisory Board, a group of independent advisers on topics ranging from labor to the environment to consumer issues to reliability and economic development.
It is no secret that outside of the more than two dozen specific commitments made initially by its new owners, we have disagreed with some of the company’s positions on public policy issues and some of its environmental practices.
But we can report now that EFH has met each of the commitments that it made back in 2007, despite all the financial headwinds (none of which have anything to do with the company’s environmental performance).
We have seen EFH excel at balancing investments in energy infrastructure to meet this rapid growth profile without compromising environmental responsibility and sustainability.
The company scrapped plans to add eight new coal-fired power plants and focused successfully on measures to reduce nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions from its coal fleet by more than 20 percent from 2005 levels.
The company’s Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant has maintained top decile industry performance at a time when several major nuclear generation owners have stumbled painfully.
As it promised, EFH has also invested more than $400 million in energy efficiency, technology and conservation programs over the past five years, including $100 million from TXU Energy, to empower customers to better manage their energy use.
The company’s track record with respect to reclamation and land stewardship is no less impressive. Since EFH commenced mining activities more than 40 years ago, the company has reclaimed more than 75,000 acres and secured reclamation bond liability release on more than 36,000 acres through 2013.
The company has also planted more than 34 million trees as part of its reclamation program, including 1.5 million in 2013.
All of this capital investment and innovation has yielded another real and tangible benefit: EFH added 1,900 jobs in Texas — an increase of 25 percent — since 2007.
Our aim is not to report that EFH’s work is done — far from it. As Texas continues to grow, so too does the challenge of balancing that growth with continued environmental stewardship.
The industry must continue to do its part to maintain vigilance on clean energy and combating climate change.
However, we have seen firsthand how the EFH model — continuous improvement in power generation’s environmental performance, capital investment, efficiency incentives for energy consumers and a deep commitment to land conservation — is several steps in the right direction. Even if those steps aren’t walking on water.
Ralph Cavanagh is energy program co-director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Jim Marston is senior attorney and director of the Texas regional office for the Environmental Defense Fund.
5. New York Times, “Ceasar’s Making Bid for Casino in Upstate New York”
April 22, 2014
By Charles V. Bagli
For more than two years, the major Las Vegas gambling companies have resisted Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s call to consider building a casino resort in New York to help him revive an upstate economy wracked by unemployment and declining opportunities.
But with applicants required to post a $1 million application fee for one of the four available licenses by Wednesday night, Caesars Entertainment has entered the contest, with plans for an entertainment complex worth more than $750 million, about 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
Caesars, which operates 53 casinos worldwide, including four in Atlantic City, is proposing a hotel and casino complex with shops, restaurants and an entertainment hall on a 120-acre parcel in the town of Woodbury, N.Y., near the New York Thruway and a Metro-North Railroad train station.
The site, in Orange County, is a short distance from Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, a mall that attracts more than 11 million visitors a year, and offers critical highway and public transit connections to New York City and millions of potential customers.
“It’ll be an integrated resort,” Jan Jones Blackhurst, an executive vice president at Caesars, said. “It’s all about creating an entertainment venue where gaming is a piece but not the only piece.”
Ms. Blackhurst is still working out the details of the proposal, since the company signed a letter of intent with the developer who controls the property, David Flaum, just three days ago. Mr. Flaum would lease the property to Caesars and participate in developing the complex.
Caesars, which submitted its $1 million application fee on Tuesday, is one of at least four companies vying for a casino license in Orange County. A total of 16 groups are expected to compete for the four licenses.
The casinos will be allowed in three regions: the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, which includes Orange, Sullivan and Ulster Counties; the Saratoga-Albany region; and a narrow strip in western New York, running from Binghamton north to the Canadian border.
Mr. Flaum and James D. Featherstonhaugh, who owns a racetrack and slot parlor in Saratoga Springs, are submitting proposals for casinos in the Albany area. Three other proposals are expected in western New York. But nowhere is the competition as intense as in the Catskills.
Mr. Cuomo, who led the effort to expand gambling in the state as a way to generate jobs, economic development and tax revenue, had sought to entice Las Vegas casino operators to compete for a New York license and legitimize his initiative.
Las Vegas Sands, MGM and Boyd Gaming all hired New York consultants to explore the idea, but only Caesars was interested in an upstate casino.
“Most of the national casino companies want to be where the money is — downstate,” said John Sabini, the former chairman of the State Racing and Wagering Board, and a casino in Orange County would put Caesars in proximity to the biggest prize for gambling operators: densely populated New York City.
But casino developers in Sullivan and Ulster Counties, where local officials have long hoped that gambling would revive their flagging economies, are dismayed by the idea of casinos on their southern flank.
They say an Orange County casino would take business away from existing slot parlors in Monticello in Sullivan County and in Yonkers and Queens, while undermining chances to build a full-scale casino in their counties, which are roughly 90 miles from New York City. Charles Jacobs, senior vice president of the Cordish companies, which is proposing a $750 million casino-resort in Orange County, near Woodbury, seems to agree. Last week, he told local officials that building a casino in the Catskills was a “recipe for disaster,” according to The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y.
He said Orange County’s proximity to New York City would trump any potential casinos in Ulster or Sullivan Counties.
But State Senator John J. Bonacic, a Republican who represents the Catskills, said the casino legislation was meant to create jobs and economic activity at the north end of the region, not in more prosperous Orange County.
State tax revenues from gambling would also decline if there is an Orange County casino, said Emanuel R. Pearlman, chairman of Empire Resorts, which operates the racetrack and slot parlor in Monticello and, together with EPR Properties, is proposing to build a $750 million casino-resort in Monticello. “A casino in Orange County would dramatically dilute revenue to the state,” Mr. Pearlman said. “It won’t add to state revenues like a casino in Sullivan or Ulster counties.
The state’s newly inaugurated Gaming Commission and its siting board will determine this fall who will get the licenses. All the applicants are required to show they would be able to open their casinos in 2016, and demonstrate local support for their projects.
That timeline could prove difficult for projects in Orange County that do not already have environmental approvals. Mark A. Izeman, a lawyer for the National Resources Defense Council, has said he is prepared to battle in court against any casino project that could do harm in the Catskills.
The Orange County executive, Steven M. Neuhaus, has embraced the notion of a casino setting down roots in the county. But not everyone agrees.
“There certainly is a mixed feeling on the street out there,” John Burke, supervisor for the town of Woodbury, said. “There are those who would enjoy it, mainly because of the tax revenues.
“But there may be just as many people who say, ‘I didn’t move here to have a casino in my backyard.’ ”
6. KCRW – Southern California Public Radio, Which Way, LA?, “California’s Worst Air Pollutant Might Catch a Break”
April 22, 2014
By Barbara Bogaev
[Click here to hear the full program]
It’s Earth Day, when we rededicate ourselves to protecting the environment, to taking shorter showers, and to using public transportation. But sometimes the fixes aren’t so cut and dried. This week, California air quality officials are considering relaxing emission regulations on diesel trucks, the worst air pollution offenders left in the state. Guest hosts Barbara Bogaev hears the pros and cons. Also, Los Angeles magazine has picked the 75 best restaurants in the city and you’ve just got to try them.
Should Truckers Get a Break on Air Quality Rules? (7:00PM)
Here in LA, we love to gripe about how bad the smog is. It’s a national cliché. But if you’re old enough to have taken a deep breath in Los Angeles back in the 1970’s, you know just how bad air quality can get. Thanks to passing the strictest emissions regulations in the country, California now has relatively decent air. So, at least to environmentalists, rolling back tough regulations for diesel trucks — the worst air pollution offenders left in the state — seems to set a bad precedent. But truckers say they need more time to retrofit their rigs and to update to cleaner models. In response the California Air Resources Board has proposed relaxing rulesfor aging diesel rigs… They’re expected to decide this on Thursday.
Guests:
Joe Rajkovacz: California Construction Trucking Association
Diane Bailey: Natural Resources Defense Council, @nrdc
Wayne Miller: UC Riverside
7. Sacramento Bee, “Obama Administration delays Keystone Pipeline decision”
April 18, 2014
By Sean Cockerham
WASHINGTON — The Obama Administration is again delaying a decision on approving the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, likely putting off any action until after the November midterm elections.
The State Department said Friday it would give federal agencies more time to comment on the project. The postponement is needed because a Nebraska judge in February struck down a law allowing the governor of that state to approve the pipeline’s route and bypass the Nebraska Public Service Commission, according to the State Department.
“Agencies need additional time based on the uncertainty created by the on-going litigation in the Nebraska Supreme Court which could ultimately affect the pipeline route in that state,” the State Department said in a brief statement Friday afternoon.
Congressional Republicans attacked the decision, saying Obama is delaying jobs in favor of political gain.
“It is crystal clear that the Obama administration is simply not serious about American energy and American jobs,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.
Keystone would bring crude oil from the Canadian oil sands to American refineries on the Gulf Coast. Plans for the pipelines are so controversial because tapping the thick Alberta crude would result in more planet-warming gases than would conventional sources of oil.
Environmental groups on Friday applauded the delay.
“The State Department is taking the most prudent course of action possible. It is already clear that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline fails the climate test and will damage our climate, our lands and our waters,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
8. Daily Democrat, “Court ruling may change water contracts approved a decade ago”
April 21, 2014
By Heather Hacking
San Francisco >> The Natural Resources Defense Council won a victory in court last week that may send water users along the Sacramento River back to the negotiating table for contracts approved a decade ago.
All this time the case has been working its way through the court system, with appeals. The recent news is that the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed the process to renew the 40-year contracts should have gone through an Endangered Species Act review. Specifically, the case was concerned about delta smelt.
“It’s a step toward potential changes in the contracts,” explained Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Water districts in this area with senior water rights that could potentially be affected include Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, Anderson Cottonwood, Maxwell Irrigation District, Sutter Mutual Water Company, the city of Redding, Conaway Preservation Group, Reclamation District 108, Princeton-Codora-Glenn Irrigation District and numerous others throughout the state.
At the root of the issue is promises of delivering more water than is available, Obegi said Friday. “It highlights the need to make sure we have contracts that don’t overpromise,” water supply.
“Water rights are subject to the public trust and other limitations that sometimes agencies ignore.
“In the really dry years, there are times when we can’t deliver as much water and senior water rights holders may have to be shorted,” the attorney said.
At this point there are a lot more questions than answers, he added.
Also last week, many of these same water users had successfully negotiated a drought-year plan that included waiting for water deliveries to hold cold water during winter-run chinook salmon season.
“There are ways to change the contracts — pricing or water conservation, how much each contractor gets to take and when. Are there ways to be more flexible to better meet everyone’s needs? If this proves it work out, that would be a great thing,” Obegi said of this year’s water delivery changes.
After the court decision, the case will go back to lower courts to reconsider the contracts.
“I do see ground for optimism … We have increased water efficiency over 40 percent, and really increased urban water efficiency,” Obegi said. “We are doing better. We can do better.”
Thad Bettner, manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District along the Sacramento River, one of the named defendants, said its likely a judge would ask for the case to be resolved out of court. Or, the defendants could challenge the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Or, it could be that the Bureau of Reclamation consults again with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the water contracts are changed.
“It could be we all get in the room and find ways to reoperate and help the smelt,” Bettner said.
To read the legal decision from the court: http://goo.gl/GmQnoJ
Contact reporter Heather Hacking at 896-7758.
1. Washington Post, “Two Environmental Groups to Create Political Alliance”
April 14, 2014
By Juliet Eilperin
Two major environmental groups will announce Monday that they are creating an alliance between their two political action arms, in an effort to expand their influence on national policymakers.
The League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund are starting LeadingGreen, a collaboration that will steer donations to federal candidates and enlist the help of major donors in lobbying elected officials. Although it was not prompted by the Supreme Court’s decision this month to strike down the overall limit on how much individuals can give candidates and political parties, LCV President Gene Karpinski said the ruling highlights what has motivated the two groups.
“It underscores the fact we need more environmental money in politics, and we need more environmental donors doing advocacy to make sure politicians understand they feel strongly about these issues, and that’s what the new alliance is all about,” Karpinski said in an interview.
LCV’s political action committee raised and contributed $2 million to candidates during the last election cycle; NRDC Action Fund primarily operated by encouraging its donors to donate directly to candidates or environmental advocacy groups, and it established a political action committee just last year. The new initiative aims to raise and contribute $5 million directly to candidates this year, according to officials, separate from its independent expenditure spending activities.
That sum is more modest than what many conservative groups will spend on the election, as well as below the $100 million that billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer has pledged to mobilize between now and 2016. NRDC Action Fund President Frances Beinecke described the two ventures — both of which will highlight climate change — as “parallel efforts.”
“We certainly welcome what Tom’s doing. He’s able to go to a scale that we’ll hopefully get to one day,” she said, adding the new coalition will be “principally focused on the Senate, the president’s climate action plan and in particular, the power plants rule. That’s the number one priority in this cycle.”
NRDC has traditionally focused mostly on policy and legal advocacy; LCV has concentrated on federal and state elections. Democrats and their environmental allies lack the votes in Congress to pass the kind of broad climate bill that the House adopted in 2009, but they are working to ensure Republicans do not make such major gains this fall that they could block the president from using his executive authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Business groups already started a multimillion-dollar campaign in January criticizing the Obama administration for its climate rules, including those that would limit carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. That coalition includes the American Farm Bureau, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 75 other groups.
Americans for Prosperity spokesman Levi Russell, whose group is chaired by David Koch, wrote in an e-mail he was skeptical that environmentalists will be able to persuade lawmakers to take a more aggressive stance on carbon regulation.
“There’s a good reason why any legislation based on environmental ideology has come to a grinding halt in Congress. Most Americans are far more concerned about jobs, the economy and the impact of Obamacare,” wrote Russell, whose group has focused mainly on the health-care law this year but recently ran an ad attacking Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for his position on carbon pricing. “Policies based on shaky data that result in higher energy prices will be a pretty tough sell.”
However, Carol Browner, who served as Obama’s special assistant on energy and climate change during his first term and now chairs LCV’s Board of Directors, wrote in an e-mail, “LeadingGreen is uniquely situated to help shift the politics of climate change in Congress in order to make the progress we so desperately need.”
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who received support for his 2013 Senate bid from LCV and Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action committee, said in a phone interview Sunday that he and other elected officials will need environmentalists to become more politically active in order to stay in office.
“The polluters are sparing no expense to defeat supporters of clean energy, climate change and environmental protection,” he said. “There’s no way to compete against these polluted dollars without significant help from environmentalists.”
2. Associated Press, “Cost of Fighting Warming ‘Modest’ says UN Panel”
April 14, 2014
By Karl Ritter
BERLIN (AP) — The cost of keeping global warming in check is “relatively modest,” but only if the world acts quickly to reverse the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the head of the U.N.’s expert panel on climate change said Sunday.
Such gases, mainly CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, rose on average by 2.2 percent a year in 2000-2010, driven by the use of coal in the power sector, officials said as they launched the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s report on measures to fight global warming.
Without additional measures to contain emissions, global temperatures will rise about 3 degrees to 4 degrees Celsius (5 degrees to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared to current levels, the panel said.
“The longer we delay the higher would be the cost,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told The Associated Press after the panel’s weeklong session in Berlin. “But despite that, the point I’m making is that even now, the cost is not something that’s going to bring about a major disruption of economic systems. It’s well within our reach.”
The IPCC, an international body assessing climate science, projected that shifting the energy system from fossil fuels to zero- or low-carbon sources including wind and solar power would reduce consumption growth by about 0.06 percentage points per year, adding that that didn’t take into account the economic benefits of reduced climate change. “The loss in consumption is relatively modest,” Pachauri said.
The IPCC said the shift would entail a near-quadrupling of low-carbon energy — which in the panel’s projections included renewable sources as well as nuclear power and fossil fuel-fired plants equipped with technologies to capture some of the emissions.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called it a global economic opportunity.
“So many of the technologies that will help us fight climate change are far cheaper, more readily available, and better performing than they were when the last IPCC assessment was released less than a decade ago,” Kerry said.
The IPCC said large changes in investments would be required. Fossil fuel investments in the power sector would drop by about $30 billion annually while investments in low-carbon sources would grow by $147 billion. Meanwhile, annual investments in energy efficiency in transport, buildings and industry sectors would grow by $336 billion.
The message contrasted with oil and gas company Exxon Mobil’s projection two weeks ago that the world’s climate policies are “highly unlikely” to stop it from selling fossil fuels far into the future, saying they are critical to global development and economic growth.
Coal emissions have declined in the U.S. as some power plants have switched to lower-priced natural gas but they are fueling economic growth in China and India.
The IPCC avoided singling out any countries or recommending how to share the costs of climate action in the report, the third of a four-part assessment on climate change.
Though it is a scientific body, its summaries outlining the main findings of the underlying reports need to be approved by governments. This brings a political dimension to the process.
In Berlin, a dispute erupted over whether to include charts that showed emissions from large developing countries are rising the fastest as they expand their economies. Developing countries said linking emissions to income growth would divert attention from the fact that historically, most emissions have come from the developed nations, which industrialized earlier.
“This is the first step for developed countries of avoiding responsibilities and saying all countries have to assume the responsibility for climate change,” said Diego Pacheco, the head of Bolivia’s delegation in Berlin.
In the end the charts were taken out of the summary, but would remain in the underlying report, which was to be published later in the week, officials said.
Counting all emissions since the industrial revolution in the 18th century, the U.S. is the top carbon polluter. China’s current emissions are greater than those of the U.S. and rising quickly. China’s historical emissions are expected to overtake those of the U.S. in the next decade.
The IPCC summary also refrained from detailed discussions on what level of financial transfers are needed to help developing countries shift to cleaner energy and adapt to climate change.
Another IPCC report, released last month, warned that flooding, droughts and other climate impacts could have devastating effects on economies, agriculture and human health, particularly in developing countries.
“The world’s poorest nations are in need of economic development. But they need to be helped to leapfrog dirty energy and develop in a way which won’t entrench their poverty by making climate change worse,” said Mohamed Adow of charity group Christian Aid.
The IPCC reports provide the scientific basis for U.N. climate negotiations. Governments are supposed to adopt a new climate agreement next year that would rein in emissions after 2020.
The ambition of that process is to keep warming below 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) compared to today’s levels. Global temperatures have already gone up 0.8 Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit) since the start of record-keeping in the 19th century.
The IPCC, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007, said the U.N. goal is still possible but would require emissions cuts of 40 percent to 70 percent by 2050 and possibly the large-scale deployment of new technologies to suck CO2 out of the air and bury it deep underground.
“The IPCC is telling us in no uncertain terms that we are running out of time — but not out of solutions — if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental group. “That requires decisive actions to curb carbon pollution — and an all-out race to embrace renewable sources of energy. History is calling.”
3. Fast Company, “Here’s How You Get a 9-Hour Documentary Series About Climate Change on TV”
April 11, 2014
By Christine Champagne
The media is failing to give climate change the amount of coverage it should be getting, according to David Gelber, who spent 25 years of his career as a producer at 60 Minutes. “In the 2012 presidential debates, not one question was asked about climate change. Not one question,” he says. “How could that be?”
Eager to put climate change back on the national agenda, Gelber and Joel Bach, also a former 60 Minutes producer, co-created and co-executive produced Years of Living Dangerously. The doc series premieres on Showtime April 13 at 10 p.m. EST, and you can also watch the first episode online for free at YearsOfLivingDangerously.com.
Combining science with star power, the series finds celebrities including Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, and America Ferrera acting as correspondents, traveling the globe to learn why our weather has gotten so extreme and what kind of effect it is having on us and our planet. Veteran journalists like Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes and the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman also report on the subject.
Among the stories examined are the effects of deforestation in Indonesia, the role drought plays in political conflicts in the Middle East, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Here, Gelber talks to Co.Create about how he and Bach managed to get the comprehensive doc series–we’re talking nine hours of programming–on television and how they plan to inspire social action on the issue.
It Began With A Willingness To Change Course
Gelber and Bach wanted to spread the word about climate change, and while they were still working at 60 Minutes, they would go out for lunch at a Greek joint on 10th Avenue near their Manhattan office and brainstorm potential projects.
Initially, they thought a feature film was the best way to go, and they were intent on fictionalizing the real-life story of coal baron Jim Rodgers, the former CEO of Duke Energy who came to believe that climate change was real and lobbied for a federal bill to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Then reality hit. “We realized we don’t know how to make feature films,” Gelber says.
Undeterred, they decided to produce a theatrical documentary on climate change. The pair got a meeting with movie producer Jerry Weintraub because Bach knew his niece and shared their grand plan hoping he could help them get Hollywood people involved so that the documentary would have a bigger reach. But Weintraub didn’t think a theatrical documentary was a good move. “Jerry looked at us, and he said, ‘Listen, if you want eyeballs, nobody goes to theatrical documentaries. You want eyeballs? You do television,'” Gelber recounts.
Gelber and Bach definitely wanted eyeballs–as many as possible given that this was a passion project. “So we morphed it overnight into a television series,” Gelber says.
They Went Hollywood In A Big Way
The pair knew they had the newsgathering and reporting chops to produce the series. They would ultimately spend a year researching climate change and finding the stories they most wanted to tell. They brought in Dr. Heidi Cullen, chief climatologist for Climate Central, which researches and reports news on climate change, and physicist Joe Romm, a fellow at American Progress and founding editor of the blog Climate Progress, to serve as chief science advisors, and they created an advisory board including the likes of Frances Beinecke, president of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, and primatologist Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute.
But they also wanted to ensure that Years of Living Dangerously was entertaining and would reach an audience beyond science geeks. They wanted to produce “a blockbuster,” according to Gelber, so they sought help from Weintraub, James Cameron, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who all came on board as executive producers. (Schwarzenegger also served as a correspondent, reporting on the causes and effects of the now year-round forest fires in the western part of the United States.) “On the one hand, we wanted to do something to help save the planet,” Gelber says of the ambitions he and Bach had for the series. “On the other hand, or in addition to that, we thought we would do something to help save the television news show format. We wanted to try and inject some life into it, so we had this idea of putting a lot more emphasis on production values, on cinematography, than you see in most of the television news magazine shows.”
The Search Was On For A Daring Television Network
Gelber and Bach shopped the idea for their doc series around to a few networks and got some “tepid offers,” Gelber says. “They were clearly nervous about how advertisers were going to react. This is such a partisan political issue. We thought, ‘A thermometer is neither Republican nor Democrat,'” he says. By the time they took their pitch to Showtime’s president of entertainment David Nevins, Cameron was involved as an executive producer and had helped them make a sizzle reel, which he narrated. Nevins, who greenlit the impactful but hard-to-watch Time of Death doc series, liked what he saw. “Nevins was amazing. I’m not kissing ass here. The guy has been fantastic. He said, ‘This is the kind of stuff I want to do,'” Gelber recalls of their first meeting. “He has been totally supportive.”
The True Potential Of Celebrity Talent Was Tapped
The celebrities featured in Years of Living Dangerously aren’t simply window-dressing. Not one of them stands atop a mountain lecturing the world on the effects of climate range, Gelber points out. Rather, they are out in the field reporting stories. Gelber says care was taken to find celebrities who were seriously interested about climate change and had a grasp of the subject even if they weren’t experts. Ian Somerhalder was chosen, for example, because he runs the Ian Somerhalder Foundation, which is all about getting young people involved in environmental issues; Don Cheadle is a global ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program; Harrison Ford is a board member of Conservation International; and Matt Damon works to bring clean drinking water to people around the world as co-founder of Water.org. “When you talk to somebody like Matt Damon, I mean, I can’t teach Damon anything about this issue,” Gelber says. “He’s an incredibly smart, decent guy, and he could be a 60 Minutes correspondent tomorrow if that was something he wanted to do.”
That said, all of the talent needed prep like any broadcast journalist would. “I did what I did at 60 Minutes. I worked with Ed Bradley for 20 years. Ed was doing 25 stories a year. I was doing four or five stories a year, and I knew more about them than he did, but he was a quick study. We did preparation and got him up to speed. The same thing happened here, and I would say in every case they really did get it,” Gelber says. “We wanted to make sure they understood it well enough to be able to follow up and ask tough, critical questions, which they did.”
The Message Will Extend Beyond Television
The doc series has birthed a social action campaign via YearsOfLivingDangerously.com. “We are really hoping to have a role in generating a grassroots movement and popular action on climate issues,” Gelber says. “We are hoping that we can encourage people to not just simply change a light bulb but to join with others and demand decisive policies from our leaders.”
Currently, visitors to the site are asked to help Beyond Coal by writing to the EPA to lobby for limitation on the amount of carbon pollution emitted from coal plants.
On the education front, YearsOfLivingDangerously.com has partnered with the National Wildlife Federation to provide learning resources for students of all ages designed to extend the experience of Years of Living Dangerously beyond the screen.
4. Midwest Energy News, “To Improve Efficiency, Cities Collaborate – and Compete”
April 14, 2014
By Kari Lydersen
Advocates in Chicago want their city to be the most energy efficient in the nation. But they’ll need a little help to get there.
The city is part of a national effort to cut energy bills by as much as $1 billion nationwide and achieve emissions reductions equivalent to taking a million cars off the road.
The City Energy Project, launched in January, brings together ten U.S. cities in reducing emissions by increasing efficiency at large buildings. A joint effort of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Institute for Market Transformation, it is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.
(The NRDC is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News.)
The new project builds on energy efficiency programs that each city already has underway or in the works, by funding a full-time consultant in each city, supporting outreach and education and also facilitating interaction between the cities to share best practices and ideas. As part of the project each city will draft a comprehensive energy efficiency strategy and plan.
The other participating cities are Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. Laurie Kerr, director of the City Energy Project for the NRDC, said that in the future it could be expanded to involve more participants.
“There are a lot of models out there – we’ll be helping walk some of the cities through the options,” said Kerr. “There are a mixture of options cities are looking at – some are ordinances, some are policies or programs, ways of providing financing, working with a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program or creating an energy efficiency financing entity.
“The idea is that in order to make large-scale change in how buildings use energy, there’s not a silver bullet,” Kerr added. “You need financing, help with leasing, some sort of information about how buildings use energy.”
Kerr said the project aims to create ongoing dialogue between cities, so city experts can ask each questions about what’s working and what isn’t.
The consultant in each city is subsidized for a relatively lengthy three-year period since, Kerr said, “these policies take a long time to implement well. We’re not just there when they adopt it.”
Most cities are still in the process of hiring the consultants, which would typically be local experts already working in the field.
The project will also provide funding for city officials to work with local non-profits – like U.S. Green Building Council chapters or chambers of commerce – to do outreach and education about energy efficiency in buildings.
Large buildings – including private businesses or residential high rises, government offices, hospitals, universities and museums — are considered major contributors to climate change. They use vast amounts of energy and are often highly inefficient, both in terms of structural components and practices like unnecessary use of heat, air or lights.
A press release from the City Energy Project notes:
“Buildings are the largest single source of U.S. carbon emissions, representing 40 percent nationwide – more than either the transportation or industrial sectors. That number is even more dramatic at the city level, with more than half of carbon emissions in most U.S. cities coming from buildings – and in some cities as much as 75 percent. Much of the energy these buildings use, however, is wasted.”
Chicago sets a high bar
Rebecca Stanfield, policy deputy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Midwest program, said Chicago aims to lead the nation in energy efficiency of buildings.
The City Energy Project will dovetail with Retrofit Chicago, a public-private energy efficiency program launched in 2012 with commercial, residential and municipal building components.
Stanfield said a few other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and New York, are “a little bit ahead of Chicago” in energy efficiency at the moment, but Chicago leaders aim to “leapfrog over other cities.”
“Our goal is to be the most efficient in the nation, to have New York and Seattle asking, ‘How do you do that?’” said Stanfield, adding that the City Energy Project could “put Chicago head and shoulders above other cities” on building efficiency.
Kerr noted that getting information on how much energy buildings are using is critical, and Chicago’s benchmarking ordinance is a good model in doing that.
Adopted in September 2013, the ordinance requires all buildings over 50,000 square feet to track and report their energy use, with verification by a third party. New York – where buildings account for about 80 percent of the carbon footprint — instituted an ambitious energy efficiency and benchmarking plan for buildings in 2009.
“Chicago is one of the earlier ones out of the gate,” said Kerr. “Chicago has passed its [benchmarking] ordinance and is working to implement it; most of these cities have not done anything like that yet. Other cities might have done more with, say, energy code compliance or improving the efficiency of their municipal building stock. There are different strategies. No city is the complete leader on everything.”
Stanfield noted that while some buildings will “never be in that top leadership class,” increased awareness and transparency about efficiency will push even the laggards to a higher level.
“With policies like benchmarking you have the potential to bring all the rest of the buildings up to a minimum standard,” she said. “For the first time ever, people will be able to make decisions about which building to lease office space in based on energy efficiency.”
Stanfield said Chicago leaders hope the City Energy Project can help them expand the Retrofit program and also increase the number of building operators seeking energy efficiency certification – another city initiative.
“Most building operators are not trained to manage energy use, and they’re not rewarded financially or otherwise on the basis of how well they manage building energy use,” Stanfield said. “Having someone in the building continuously looking for opportunities to make it more efficient can be a huge driver of improvement.”
Stanfield said data showing Retrofit’s progress should be available soon, and that the program is on track to make 20 percent energy use reductions in five years.
A ‘hub’ for other cities
Dennis Murphey, chief environmental officer of Kansas City, Missouri, doesn’t mind admitting that Chicago is ahead on the energy efficiency front. But he said the City Energy Project is helping local leaders learn from Chicago and otherwise step up their game, augmenting efficiency initiatives that are already ongoing.
“We have very high expectations of what we’re going to be able to do over the next three years that will affect us for decades to come,” said Murphey, noting that local efficiency advocates also look to Philadelphia as an example. “It will have a huge impact if we make this as successful as we hope in ten cities. It will be a hub to push it out to other cities in the region, like Tulsa, Des Moines, Oklahoma City.”
Murphey noted that reducing energy use is especially important in a place like Kansas City that gets most of its energy – about 75 percent – from coal-fired power. That means cutting energy use more directly drives carbon emissions reductions than in cities that get more power from hydro, wind or natural gas.
Buildings account for about 50 percent of energy use in Kansas City, according to officials, who say that by 2030 the ripple effects of the City Energy Project will save ratepayers $55 million. Murphey said Kansas City’s 550 largest buildings, which are the focus of the City Energy Project, make up about half the city’s floor space.
City Energy Project funding has already been used to hire a part-time staffer who had been working on efficiency issues through the Chamber of Commerce, Murphey noted, and they are in the process of hiring a full-time efficiency expert. The city is tracking project progress on a blog.
Among other things, Murphey said Kansas City leaders will leverage the City Energy Project to push for state legislation that gives utilities more motivation to increase energy efficiency, “to make it possible for a utility to be a real partner with us.”
Kansas City already has important successes to point to. The city council passed an ordinance giving developers access to PACE funding. And they’ve renovated City Hall — a 29-story, World War II-era building — to obtain a top efficiency rating. City leaders are also working with the Missouri Clean Energy District, an entity authorized by 2010 state legislation that works with counties and municipalities on PACE and other clean energy initiatives.
“We intend to do a lot of education and outreach to make the business case to building owners who have not already made improvements,” Murphey said. “We’ll help them identify financial resources and service providers…And we’re having early adopters make the case so it’s not just the city or the NRDC telling the story.”
5. Associated Press, “California to See Surge in Oil Brought in by Rail”
April 13, 2014
VENTURA, Calif. (AP) — California is preparing for an oil boom — brought in on rail cars.
There are no pipelines that bring crude oil into California. For decades, the fuel that powers the state’s 32 million vehicles has come from tanker ships or in-state production.
But government regulators predict a surge in U.S. oil production will means a steep increase in the number of trains carrying it to California refineries.
The Ventura County Star reported (http://bit.ly/1jCCGBR ) Sunday that the increase in rail traffic will happen quickly, jumping from 9,000 carloads in 2011 to more than 200,000 carloads by 2016, according to California Energy Commission estimates.
Within a few years, analysts predict 25 percent of oil consumed in California will arrive at state refineries by rail.
According to the California Public Utilities Commission, five California refineries have facilities either about to come online or in the planning stages that will let them receive crude-oil deliveries by rail.
The newspaper said state and local agencies are reviewing plans for responding to possible spills and derailments, with more trains carrying oil through mountain passes, over bridges that cross nearly every major waterway and through the neighborhoods of millions of Californians.
Gov. Jerry Brown has asked lawmakers for an additional $6.7 million for oil-spill response. In its request, the administration noted the increased rail shipments will consist mostly of North Dakota Bakken shale crude oil.
“This type of oil is extremely flammable, and its transport increases the risk of serious accidents,” it says.
Because it contains more natural gas than heavier crude, Bakken oil can have a lower ignition point.
To date, the increased traffic has been mostly in Northern California, involving trains bound for refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Diane Bailey, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the newspaper that statistics from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration show there were more rail accidents involving oil spills last year than over the previous 30 years combined.
6. Columbia Chronicle, “Petcoke Stockpiles Face Stricter Rules”
April 14, 2014
By Maria Castellucci
After months of fielding complaints from Southeast Side residents, legislation to regulate petroleum coke, or petcoke—a harmful waste product of oil refineries that is stored along the banks of the Calumet River—finally began to gain traction among city officials. However, a proposed exemption has caused the ordinance to be stalled in a City Council committee.
The Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards met April 1 to review the ordinance proposal, at which Alderman John Pope (10th Ward) presented the committee with a revised version that imposes looser restrictions than those outlined in the original draft. The initial proposal—which Pope wrote with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Edward Burke (14th Ward)—sought to require KCBX Terminals Co., the company managing the stockpiles, to store petcoke in an enclosed area and prohibit new companies that produce petcoke from opening. Pope’s amended proposal, however, would still allow for these facilities to be established.
The 18-member committee voted to defer the bill until its April 29 meeting, when it will reconsider the proposal. Advocates for the original draft are outraged by the potential revision.
“Rather than preventing an expansion and creating an environment that pushes these piles out, it actually lays out a welcome mat for more petcoke,” said Josh Mogerman, a Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman who was present at the committee meeting. “It really is counter to what this ordinance is supposed to do.”
Pope’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the exemption as of press time.
The ordinance is a response to community complaints that KCBX stores petroleum stockpiles on the Southeast Side along the bank of the Calumet River. Petcoke is a carbon particle derived as a byproduct of the oil refining process. It is normally used as a fuel source in power plants. The open piles emit dust particles that are dangerous to inhale, which discourages residents from venturing outside their homes, as reported Nov. 25, 2013 by The Chronicle.
Mogerman said he thinks Pope included the exemption to allow gasification plants, which produce petroleum coke as byproduct, to set up shop in the city. Gasification plants generate energy by applying steam to organic materials to create a gas substitute known as syngas, said Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs at the Respiratory Health Association. This gas alternative is appealing because it is inexpensive, but the byproducts are toxic.
“[Residents are] looking at a longer-term goal: getting the clean sustainability industry in their neighborhood to provide good jobs and economic development,” Urbaszewski said. “I don’t think they view petcoke and petroleum refinery leftovers as fitting into their vision of what their neighborhood should be.”
Emanuel announced March 13 that KCBX has two years to enclose all of its petcoke stockpiles.
Facilities must report their enclosure plans to the city within 90 days and will be monitored. They will also be required to enclose petcoke during transportation, install monitors that detect toxic petcoke dust and sweep nearby streets daily.
Southeast Side resident Tom Shepherd said he thinks Emanuel’s regulations will be helpful because piles are currently exposed and admit toxic dust particles, causing health concerns. Shepherd said he spoke with Pope about the exemption and he will not pursue it further.
Inhaling petcoke dust particles can cause asthma attacks, stroke, lung cancer and premature death, Urbaszewski said, adding that these health risks make legal regulations necessary.
Urbaszewski said Chicago is one of the many Midwest cities dealing with excess petcoke. Massive amounts of petcoke are generated when tarzan oil, the thick oil transported from Canada, is converted to gasoline, he said. The oil is becoming more common in the U.S.
“The petcoke amount coming out has tripled,” Urbaszewski said. “A lot more stuff is coming in and the piles are getting higher on the Southeast Side.”
Although Emanuel has imposed regulations, Mogerman said they are not strict enough.
“We’re going to call on the mayor to use his considerable power and influence in the City Council to help make sure we get this thing right,” Mogerman said. “He can do a lot more.”
7. Earth Island Journal, “Is the Sofa Toxic? Bill Introduced in California to Label Flame Retardants in Furniture”
April 12, 2014
By Zoe Loftus-Farren
Ever wondered if your couch was filled with toxic flame retardants? If you have, chances are you weren’t able to find out because the manufacturer wasn’t required to inform you.
Flame retardant use expanded in California under Technical Bulletin 117 (TB 117), which was implemented in 1975 and required furniture filling to be resistant to an open flame, encouraging the use of flame retardants among furniture manufacturers. (Yes, even furniture gets it’s own regulations.) Fortunately, that may be changing. Last month, California State Senator Mark Leno introduced SB 1019, a bill that would require furniture manufacturers to label furniture that has been treated with flame retardants and to inform consumers of such use at the point of sale. If passed, the proposed bill will be implemented in January 2015, and would contribute to a broad effort in California to reduce the use of toxic flame retardants.
Over the past few years, however, research has called into question the fire safety benefits of flame retardants, while also pointing to the serious health and environmental risks associated with exposure to flame retardant chemicals.
With respect to fire safety, recent studies have shown that fireproofing furniture filling doesn’t do a whole lot of good. “It turns out, on the fire safety side, [TB-117] actually wasn’t a very good regulation,” said Veena Singla, staff scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “What they found was that adding flame retardants to the inside [of furniture] doesn’t provide any meaningful fire safety benefits.” In other words, once the outside fabric of a couch goes up in flames, it doesn’t matter how much flame retardant has been doused on the fillings. The couch is going to burn.
In addition to their questionable fire-safety benefits, flame retardants have been linked to a variety of environmental and health ills. “They produce health and environmental concerns,” said Singla. “The chemicals are added to the filling, but they aren’t chemically attached or bound to it, so they continuously migrate out of the filling into the air and dust, and that is how people get exposed to these chemicals.”
Once released into the air and dust, these chemicals persist in the environment and have been shown to negatively impact wildlife. The have also been linked to health problems in humans, including cancer, hyperactivity, decreased fertility, hormone disruption, and lower IQ. Children are particularly vulnerable, because they often play on the ground and are more likely to ingest chemical-laden dust.
Low-income communities and communities of color also face elevated exposure levels, possibly due to the use of second-hand furniture, more time spent indoors, or inadequate home ventilation systems. Firefighters represent another highly exposed group and have been on the frontlines of toxics advocacy in California.
In 2012, following repeated legislative failures for regulatory reform (and a $23 million lobbying effort in California by the flame retardant industry), Governor Brown directed the Bureau of Home Furnishings to change the regulation in an attempt to reduce the use of these harmful chemicals. The new standards ( TB 117-2013), which became effective in January 2014, now focuses on the outer fabric of couches and chairs, rather than furniture fillings. That means furniture manufacturers can comply with the regulation by choosing flame-resistant outer fabrics rather than treating furniture filling with highly toxic flame retardants.
TB 117-2013 doesn’t prohibit flame retardants, and neither would SB 1019. Because of lax testing requirements, flat-out bans are hard to come by. “Certainly some flame retardants have been restricted or banned,” said Singla. “But what happens then is that other chemicals are brought in to replace the banned chemicals. There is no minimum safety testing required in terms of possible long-term health effects, so when new chemicals come in, we just don’t have the information we need in order to try to restrict them or ban them one by one.”
8. Natural News, “If You Compute, You Pollute: The Dark Legacy of E-Waste and a National of Consumers in Denial”
April 14, 2014
By J.D. Heyes
Chances are excellent that, if you are reading this, you are using some sort of electronic device to do so. Natural News is, after all, an online publication.
And if you are, then you are also most likely one of the billions of people contributing to the ecological, Earth-damaging disaster that is electronic waste — “e-waste,” for short — because sooner or later, the device you are using, be it a personal computer, tablet, laptop, cell phone or other piece of technology, will end up in a landfill or dump somewhere or, worse, in an open-air burn pit in some developing country.
As Natural News reported previously, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that about 30 million computers are tossed in the U.S. each year; in Europe, about 100 million cell phones are discarded.
Developing world becomes dumping ground for toxic e-waste
In the coming years, as the “Internet of Everything” becomes reality, the amount of e-waste is set to explode. Societies will become even more dependent on electronic, Internet-connected devices, and as they do, millions more tons of this kind of waste will be generated each and every year. The UN’s Environment Program estimates, for instance, that by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500 percent in India.
By that same year in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher.
But only about one-quarter of e-waste is recycled. Most of e-waste winds up in an incinerator, and that’s a big problem for the environment and your health. That’s because of the hazardous heavy metals — many of them rare earth metals — that are contained in every device.
“Electronic waste isn’t just waste — it contains some very toxic substances, such as mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, beryllium and brominated flame retardants,” says the group e-Stewards, on its website. “When the latter are burned at low temperatures, they create additional toxins, such as halogenated dioxins and furans — some of the most toxic substances known to humankind. The toxic materials in electronics can cause cancer, reproductive disorders, endocrine disruption, and many other health problems if this waste stream is not properly managed. Many of the toxic constituents are elements, which means they never disappear, even though they may change form.”
Ruining Asia
The most fertile e-waste dumping grounds are in Asia; China, India and Pakistan are the leading nations where e-waste is routed to burn pits, contaminating the soil, the air, the water and the people with which these toxins come into contact. Ghana, located along the West African coast, is also a major e-waste destination.
Off-loading the toxins
The biggest complaint from groups working to curb the amount of environmental damaged created by e-waste is not so much that wealthier societies are using technology as it was intended, but that, when it comes time to discard it, they are off-loading the worst effects to poorer countries without laws that protect soil, air and water.
In 2008, the CBS program 60 Minutes reported on the trail of e-waste to poorer countries, where workers — including many children — disassemble discarded electronic products to mine for valuable, reusable materials. These materials, even when they are not burned, can be toxic over time.
For the report, correspondent Scott Pelley traveled to “one of the most toxic places on Earth — a place that government officials and gangsters don’t want you to see.” The location: Guiyu, a dingy town in China where you cannot breathe the air or drink the water. The blood of many children is laced with too much lead (7 out of 10). Pregnancies are six times more likely to end in miscarriage. In essence, the town is a nightmare of toxicity.
‘Dirty little secret’
What’s more, the e-waste “disposal” that is taking place there is a result of the violation of law — both in the United States and in Europe, where much of the e-waste comes from, as well as in China.
“This is really the dirty little secret of the electronic age,” Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a watchdog group named for the treaty that is supposed to stop rich countries from dumping toxic waste on poor ones, told Pelley.
Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the activities in Guiyu: “The situation in Guiyu is actually pre-capitalist. It’s mercantile. It reverts back to a time when people lived where they worked, lived at their shop. Open, uncontrolled burning of plastics. Chlorinated and brominated plastics is known worldwide to cause the emission of polychlorinated and polybrominated dioxins. These are among the most toxic compounds known on earth. We have a situation where we have 21st century toxics being managed in a 17th century environment.”
Recycling the proper way
What’s the answer? The U.S. — indeed, the world — is not simply going to stop using electronics. They have been integral to our societies; our daily lives incorporate so many of them. We need them to do our jobs, even.
Responsible recycling programs that don’t engage in the kind of offshore outsourcing of e-waste, but instead disposes of such toxic waste in a responsible, environmentally sustainable way, is the only answer.
But how to create them? In the 60 Minutes story, one “responsible” e-recycler, Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., portrayed itself as a company that advertised itself thusly: “Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. – not simply dumped on somebody else.”
But the program’s investigation found that a shipping container filled with computer monitors, which are especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. They can only be exported with special permission from the U.S. government. Only, the Executive Recycling container did get sent to China; 60 Minutes tracked it to Hong Kong, where it was sent illegally.
Here are some ways to do the right thing when it comes to getting rid of your old electronics products:
–Donate for reuse, if possible. Some reputable reuse firms that have vowed not to export e-waste include the National Christina Foundation and World Computer Exchange.
— Look for responsible e-recyclers in your local area. The most reputable are members of the “e-Steward” network. Find a local one here.
–Take it to a responsible retailer. There are some retailers, like Staples, that have agreed to do the right thing and ensure that products they take in for recycling are not merely dumped on a third-world country. So does Best Buy.
–Mail it. Cell phone recycling can be much easier, because you can actually mail them to responsible e-waste recyclers. Consider contacting Capstone Wireless or Call2Recycle.org.
1. MSNBC, All In with Chris Hayes, “25 Years After Exxon Valdez: Fossil Fuels And Accountability”
March 24, 2014
Watch the interview here
Chris Hayes talks to his panel about the U.S. becoming the world’s top oil producer.
2. Marketplace, “25 Years After The Exxon Valdez Crisis, We’ve Learned…?”
March 24, 2014
By Adriene Hill
Listen to the Interview here
It’s been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez hit a reef and spilled millions of gallons of oil, polluting hundreds of miles of Alaska’s shoreline.
If you were alive during the spill, you can probably still recall the video footage: black shorelines, dead sea otters, oil soaked birds.
“It was vivid,” said Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College who worked on the Alaska Oil Spill Commission after Valdez. “It pointed to the problems of the oil mega-system.” Along every step of the process, he said, “there was repeated cost cutting to increase risk. Our commission concluded that this mega-system was dominated by complacency, collusion and neglect.”
Those are words heard after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, nearly 20 years later.
Valdez also showed us just how vulnerable the environment can be, in a way that previous oil spills, including the Santa Barbara spill in 1969, had not.
“It underscored the enormous risk that we place natural resources at when we produce and distribute oil,” said Bob Deans, a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The risk was something we hadn’t quite come to terms with, he said. “There was this perception that it was safe to do this,” Deans said, “and that if the oil got in the water, surely industry had a way to clean it up. Surely there was a way to save the oceans and marine life from the consequence of a spill like this, and we found out that none of that was true.”
After the Exxon Valdez and again, after the BP oil spill, regulations were tightened.
But spills are not things of the past.
Over the weekend, about 170,000 gallons of oil gushed out into Galveston Bay when an oil barge and cargo ship collided.
3. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Christie Greenhouse Changes Violate N.J. Law, Court Says”
March 25, 2014
By David Voreacos and Justin Doom
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s administration violated state law in the way it withdrew from a regional program to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, a state appellate court ruled.
New Jersey must begin amending or repealing the state’s climate-change regulations within 60 days, according to a three-judge panel in Trenton. Christie’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative drew a lawsuit in 2012 from environmental groups, who cheered today’s ruling.
“Neither Governor Christie nor the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection can simply repeal state laws by fiat,” Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, said in a statement.
Christie decided to withdraw by the end of 2011 from RGGI, which set a cap on carbon-dioxide emissions and created a trading program. Christie said RGGI, which then included the six New England states, New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Maryland, failed because the low auction prices it drew didn’t motivate companies to change business practices.
New Jersey’s withdrawal meant emissions producers no longer had to comply with the program and DEP didn’t make emissions allowances available for purchase or give emissions offsets to companies.
Web Posting
Environment New Jersey and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued, claiming DEP improperly posted its withdrawal from the trading program on the department’s website rather than follow the Administrative Procedure Act. DEP argued that by withdrawing from RGGI, its trading program regulations are defunct, according to the ruling.
The judges found “little doubt” that lawmakers meant for trading-program regulations to “enable New Jersey’s participation in RGGI, rather than to establish a stand-alone carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program in New Jersey.”
The regulations are broadly worded and “can be read to require action by the department absent participation in a regional greenhouse program,” according to the ruling.
“The department should have taken action to repeal the regulations or amend them to clarify that they do not create a stand-alone trading program,” the judges ruled.
Governor
The governor’s spokesmen, Michael Drewniak, Kevin Roberts and Colin Reed, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment on the decision.
“You can’t just say, ‘Oh, state law? We’re not doing this anymore,’” Dale Bryk, a director and attorney at New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said today in a phone interview. “The same way you pass a law you have to unravel a law. And that’s what they didn’t do.”
The case is In Re Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), A-4878-11T4, Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division (Trenton).
4. Country Weekly, “Willie Nelson Joins The Fight Against Mountaintop Removal”
March 24, 2014
By Jon Freeman
Word to the wise, people: Willie Nelson prefers his rivers to flow with whiskey, not the pollutants caused by the mining operation of mountaintop removal.
Willie has now joined up with the Natural Resources Defense Council in the fight against mountaintop removal to help protect Appalachian communities from its effects. In a new video (watch below), Willie sings “America the Beautiful” while mountain after mountain is blasted away and toxic sludge encroaches on residential communities.
On Tuesday, March 25, the House of Representatives will vote on a bill (HR 2824) that would lock into place the ability for mining companies to continue current practices and prevent the Obama administration from making any changes to mining regulations.
5. E&E Daily, “Enviros Mobilize Against Johnson Stream Rule Bill”
March 25, 2014
By Manuel Quiñones
Environmental groups are mobilizing against House passage of legislation to block an Obama administration rulemaking meant to protect waterways from coal mining.
The House could vote as soon as this afternoon on Ohio Republican Rep. Bill Johnson’s H.R. 2824 to block the Office of Surface Mining’s forthcoming Stream Protection Rule and instead task the agency with implementing the 2008 Stream Buffer Zone Rule.
Earlier this month, President Obama threatened to veto the bill, and yesterday League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski called it “a destructive bill that would nullify sensible safeguards that prevent the dumping of dangerous mining waste into our waterways.”
Mining companies think the 2008 rule provides waterways with enough protection from strip mining. Environmentalists, however, say it includes too many exceptions from a strong buffer.
“This legislation would clear the way for more destruction and more pollution. It must be stopped,” said Natural Resources Defense Council senior water attorney Jon Devine in a statement.
NRDC yesterday released a video of iconic performer Willie Nelson singing “America the Beautiful” to images of mountaintop-removal coal mining to coincide with the debate.
It’s no surprise the Republican-controlled House will almost certainly approve the legislation. What environmentalists fear is the bill gaining momentum in the Senate or in upcoming negotiations on a broader measure. A vote for the legislation will count against lawmakers in LCV’s annual score card, the group said.
6. Greenwire, “Advocates Weigh In As White House Work On Methane Guidance Hits Home Stretch”
March 24, 2014
By Jean Chemnick
With U.S. EPA curbs on greenhouse gases dominating debates on Capitol Hill, federal agencies have been quietly writing a white paper that outlines plans to limit heat-trapping methane emissions.
Officials from six agencies have been working since summer on the interagency methane strategy that President Obama ordered up in his Climate Action Plan last year.
White House energy and climate adviser Dan Utech has spearheaded the group, which includes staff from EPA and the departments of Agriculture, Energy, the Interior, Labor and Transportation. White House counselor John Podesta told reporters last week the interagency group is “in the final throes” of work on the document.
Few details about the effort have been made public. Obama’s plan calls on agencies to assess data on methane, consider “best practices” for reducing emissions and identify “existing authorities and incentive-based opportunities” to reduce methane releases.
EPA has already included methane emissions in its annual inventories of greenhouse gas emissions and sinks, though some academic institutions have faulted the methodology used in that analysis.
The charge to identify “existing authorities” suggests the group may look at some new regulatory actions to draw down emissions, which are up to 30 times as climate-forcing as carbon dioxide in the short term and contribute more to human-induced global warming than any gas except CO2.
Environmentalists have urged EPA to use the Clean Air Act to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector as it has done for power plants’ carbon emissions.
David Doniger, policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview last week that he hopes the interagency document would include specific timelines for methane rules, as the president did last year for rules governing power sector carbon.
“We’d like to see commitments to schedules for action that would make sure that there is a plan and a schedule to get things done during this term,” he said.
The administration should commit to expand EPA’s 2012 New Source Performance Standard requiring the capture of natural gas from new gas wells, mandating that gas-producing oil wells use the same green completion technology, he said. And EPA should publish rules to reduce methane leakage throughout oil and gas systems, including from the production, transportation, processing and distribution of gas.
The document should also set a long-term goal of tackling methane leakage from aging distribution pipes under cities, he said.
Elgie Holstein of the Environmental Defense Fund, which has done substantial work on analyzing the methane footprint of natural gas systems, said he was happy to see the White House highlight methane’s role in climate change. Policies to address short-lived climate pollutants were once seen as a distraction from efforts to curb CO2, he said.
“Going back let’s say a year ago, methane was basically not discussed in these circles,” he said. “So we’ve come a long way.”
Holstein said that the administration has unquestioned legal authority to promulgate Clean Air Act regulations for methane. But while he said he expected the interagency working group to keep those options on the table, other nonregulatory activities also exist that can pay dividends in reducing emissions and boosting the capture and sale of natural gas. Those options should be reflected in the document too, he said, including the role the Department of Energy can play in developing technologies that can minimize leakage.
“There are multiple benefits of addressing methane,” Holstein said. Besides its environmental benefits, repairing leaky natural gas infrastructure can help protect the public. This month’s lethal East Harlem gas explosion drives home the dangers of allowing aging infrastructure to deteriorate, he said (EnergyWire, March 14).
The petroleum industry, meanwhile, said it was already taking steps to ensure that its practices leak as little methane as possible.
“Through voluntary and regulatory measures already in place, our emissions have dropped substantially,” Frank Macchiarola, executive vice president of America’s Natural Gas Alliance, said in an email. “We look forward to working with the administration and other stakeholders to ensure that we continue the significant progress we have made through ongoing innovation.”
Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of the Western Energy Alliance, noted that EPA’s own inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, released last month, showed a 14 percent improvement in methane emissions from petroleum production between 2008 and 2012.
“That is companies reducing emissions on their own without an EPA rule,” she said, adding, “I don’t think that a new rule is necessary.”
Regulations burden companies with a rigid set of obligations that may yield little environmental result, she said. Gas producers already have an incentive to ensure that they are not leaking valuable product into the atmosphere, and the administration should trust their practices, she said.
7. Midwest Energy News, “Compromise May Help Preserve Net Metering In Kansas”
March 21, 2014
By Karen Uhlenhuth
Clean-energy advocates and Kansas’ largest utility have agreed to maintain net metering in the state – but in a somewhat diminished form.
Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced bills that would have hobbled net metering, if not kill it outright, according to supporters of the policy. The bills would have drastically reduced – or eliminated – what utilities pay to small generators for their excess power.
Last weekend, however, advocates met with a negotiator for Westar Energy and developed a compromise that is predicted to pass the legislature.
The middle ground, which was introduced on the Senate floor on Wednesday, would reduce the maximum size of solar arrays eligible for net metering. In addition, it would change the “true-up” period from the current standard of once a year to once a month. Any excess power at the end of the month would be credited to the customer at the utilities avoided cost rate.
The changes would apply only to installations installed after July 1 of this year.
Aron Cromwell, CEO of a solar design and installation firm in Lawrence, Kansas, spent long hours over the past weekend negotiating with the Westar representative.
“This is the best we could have gotten,” he said. “We avoided a lot of harm. The first iteration of this killed net metering.”
One bill moving through the legislature earlier this year would have eliminated any payment to owners of small solar or wind installations. Current law requires that utilities pay net metering customers the retail rate that the utility charges for power, approximately 10 cents per kWh. Another bill that surfaced this session would have cut that to 150 percent of what’s known as the utility’s “avoided cost,” amounting to about 3.5 cents per kWh.
The compromise puts tighter limits on the permitted size of solar installations to be connected to the grid. Kansas law currently allows installations of up to 25 kW at a residence and 200 kW at a commercial site. The agreement reduces those to 15 and 100 kW, respectively. It also provides a 150-kW threshold for schools.
It also reduces payment to generators to 100 percent of “avoided cost,” a substantial cut from the retail rate.
The compromise “really isn’t too much of a loss,” said Pierre Bull, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s disconcerting to see how utilities have responded to applicants getting on the system.”
He said that net metering has been challenged in several other states recently, mostly through regulatory channels. Last summer, the Arizona utility regulator decided to allow utilities to impose a fee on small-scale solar generators.
In Colorado, he said, it appears that the public service commission is going to honor a request by Xcel Energy to do a cost-benefit analysis of net metering.
Regulators in North Carolina this spring will begin a similar study.
The campaign against net metering has by far been most energized and vociferous in Kansas, according to Bull.
“It really spoke to the political power that utilities have in Kansas,” he said.
Cromwell said he thinks the compromise will cause only limited damage to renewables and net metering. He doesn’t foresee a 15-kW limit actually interfering much with solar installations at homes.
“I don’t think this will affect our customers. Our average is about 7.5 kW. We’ve done larger residential [installations], but maybe one or two. With 7.5, we’re meeting most of their needs.”
The true-up policy is important because it determines how much time is available to a customer to equal out the energy produced with the energy consumed. With a once-a-year true-up, a customer is more likely to use up credit for excess power generated during peak production time.
Although the compromise makes net metering overall somewhat less attractive, Cromwell said net metering supporters had to act.
“Something was going to happen,” he said. “Our ultimate win would have been to avoid any change at all. But that was not going to happen. We had to do something to mitigate the damage.”
“The Senate bill could have moved on,” said Zack Pistora, who lobbies for the Kansas Sierra Club. “We were asking ourselves, ‘Do we want to go head-to-head on a bill that is significantly worse than the House bill?’ It was a tough call.”
As Cromwell sees it, “We got a win, and they (the utilities) got a win.”
There may be one more gain for the utilities in this dispute. The bill allows them to seek from the Kansas Corporation Commission some sort of monthly fee to be imposed on solar generators.
“We have the ability to challenge that,” Cromwell said, “and we will do so.”
One more benefit for net meterers: if the substitute bill passes the legislature – and Cromwell believes it will – it is likely to discourage further bills designed to weaken or kill net metering.
“It would be a difficult case for them to make after agreeing to this,” Cromwell said. “This should give us stability for the next couple years.”
The NRDC is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News.
An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that customers would lose credit for excess energy at the end of the monthly true-up period under the proposed plan.
8. KPCC, Pacific Swell, “When It Comes To ‘Gray Water,’ Australia And Arizona Set The Bar”
March 21, 2014
By Molly Peterson
My dad is a very law-abiding man, but since yesterday’s gray water story, I discovered that in the mid 1970s, he ran “a hose or tubing or something” out the bathroom drain into a tank in the back yard of our Menlo Park home, so he could water plants. He was breaking the law.
“I don’t know whose idea it was,” he said. “Everybody was rigging things up. If someone had told me it was illegal, I would have told them I thought it was illegal to waste water.”
At the time, it was illegal to reuse water that flowed through bathroom sinks, showers and washing machines because of health concerns. That prohibition has since been lifted (though it’s still illegal to use gray water from a kitchen sink).
The point of this story is: it’s really hard to know how much water we’ve been saving through methods like gray water, because what people do in their yards, they don’t always discuss with others. It’s also really hard to know who’s doing well at saving gray water, as long as what people do is so different from what the code provides.
Some people are trying to change that. Tracy Quinn, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, is researching what the rules are all around the country. And around the world. Australia apparently puts us to shame. Over 50% of homes there use gray water and rainwater for flushing toilets or watering lawns.
Even if we can’t be Australian, Quinn told me some amazing stuff about water recycling opportunities generally in the United States.
“Over 50% of the water we use indoors can be considered gray water. And fifty percent of total household use in a single family home is landscaping,” she said. “So gray water, which is more than half of the water that we are flushing away and sending to our sewers, can be used for two of our biggest demands.”
But if you want to model your gray water rules on something, sounds like Arizona is the place. There, the state has updated its general permit for reclaimed water, so that Arizonans don’t have to apply for permits for simple gray water systems as long as they follow a list of 13 best practices.
And in Tucson, they’re actually requiring that newly-constructed single family homes be dually plumbed to capture gray water. (There’s a fat rebate too.)
I’m guessing we haven’t seen the end of changes to the California Plumbing Code yet.
1. CBS News, “NRDC Letter to Marshall: From the Office of the NRDC President”
March 20, 2014
By Frances Beinecke
March 20, 2014
By Frances Beinecke
March 14th, 2014
Dear Mr. Eriksen:
Congratulations on your court win against Gruber Pharmaceuticals! I have such fond memories of summer vacations at Frog Lake. What a shame the court ordered so small a settlement. But I cannot thank you enough for your efforts to protect this wonderful place.
I respect that you’ve chosen to temporarily postpone your dreams of saving the planet to move with your family to Rome. However, I hope this proves only a minor detour on your path to becoming a judge. We desperately need more defenders of the environment in our legal system. With any luck, you’ll one day decide cases that help save our forests and wildlands, which might also help you achieve one of your other dreams: finding and befriending Bigfoot.
However, if banging the gavel is not in the cards, please know that NRDC is always on the lookout for brilliant and passionate legal advocates such as yourself; our door is always open. Not literally open of course, because that wouldn’t be energy efficient. But you know what I mean.
I hope that NRDC continues to hold a special place in your heart. Good luck in all your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Frances Beinecke
President, Natural Resources Defense Council
The Earth’s Best Defense
President, Natural Resources Defense Council
The Earth’s Best Defense
2. PoliticoPro, “NRDC: Power plant rules could make deeper CO2 cuts than past estimates”
March 20, 2014
By Erica Martinson
March 20, 2014
By Erica Martinson
EPA’s upcoming greenhouse gas regulations for the nation’s existing power plants can achieve deeper cuts to carbon emissions than previously imagined, the Natural Resources Defense Council says in a new analysis.
The report, released Thursday, says the U.S. could get more than twice the carbon dioxide reductions from EPA’s regulations compared with a proposal NRDC put forth in 2012, without additional costs.
EPA is due to propose its rules in June, and is expected to send a draft to the White House Office of Management and Budget any day now.
Agency officials have been tight-lipped about what the regulations will look like, but some indications have emerged that EPA is crafting a rule that would treat power plants as a “system” rather than requiring plant-by-plant cuts. That would allow for more flexibility in how utilities cut their carbon, including using methods such as cross-state trading programs.
A broader program like that is just what NRDC has proposed.
And now, after adjusting its models to reflect trends in the electric industry such as low demand and lower cost wind turbines and natural gas, the program could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 470 million to 700 million tons a year in 2020 compared with 2012 levels, NRDC’s report says. In 2012, NRDC estimated cuts of 270 million tons a year.
NRDC’s newly estimated cuts would amount to 21 percent to 31 percent of power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.
The group offered EPA a possible legal path to regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act in its 2012 report, which suggested imposing an average fleet standard of 1,500 pounds per megawatt hour for coal and 1,000 pounds per megawatt hour for oil and gas units in 2020. Wind, solar, nuclear and other low-emitting power options would generate credits to make those fleet averages possible, and credits would be available for making energy efficiency upgrades.
At the time, EPA had grown quiet about plans to set greenhouse gas rules for existing power plants, but that changed last year with President Barack Obama’s Georgetown University climate change speech and an executive order pushing EPA to get moving on the rule.
The Obama administration is likely to lean heavily on the EPA regulations as proof that the United States is acting on climate change as it heads into international negotiations in 2015. There’s little chance the Senate would ratify any treaty on climate change, so the White House needs to bring something to the table if it wants to lead other countries into acting, particularly fast-growing, coal-dependent China.
If EPA and the White House pick up on NRDC’s analysis, it could help counter concerns that EPA regulations wouldn’t be able to drive deep enough emissions cuts.
So far, the administration’s enacted carbon-cutting efforts have largely been limited to its greenhouse gas standards for cars, which require the auto industry to boost fuel economy.
NRDC says the 470 million to 700 million tons of CO2 emissions EPA could get from power plant regulations would be like lifting 95 million to 130 million cars off the road. Power plants make up at least a third of the nation’s CO2 emissions.
The group estimates the cost of the regulations would be around $10 billion, with benefits in health benefits and avoided damages up to $63 billion in 2020.
“NRDC’s new analysis demonstrates that there are cheaper, cleaner and more routes to substantially reduce this dangerous pollution,” Executive Director Peter Lehner said.
The scenarios NRDC considered in its new report that it didn’t in 2012 include less energy efficiency at state levels, more stringent emissions targets, use of carbon capture and storage, and extension of the languishing federal wind production tax credit to 2020.
NRDC’s plan may not entirely align with the administration’s ongoing courting of the natural gas industry.
“Not only is it possible to use the Clean Air Act to reduce power plant carbon pollution significantly and cost-effectively, there are many pathways to do so that do not require increasing our reliance on natural gas,” said Daniel Lashof, director of NRDC’s Climate and Clean Air Program.
But the report addresses key concerns of the rule’s opponents: that utility customers could pay dearly for the cost of cutting carbon, and that requirements could cause reliability problems leading to blackouts.
Under NRDC’s approach, wholesale power prices would be 4 percent lower than without the regulations, the report says. And energy efficiency improvements in homes and businesses could lower customers’ electricity bills.
Some of those same “demand side” energy efficiency efforts could also cut “strain on the electric power grid during peak hours,” the report says. That would “add flexibility and efficiency to energy consumption patterns, diversify the resource mix, reduce emissions, and lower energy costs,” the report says.
3. Bloomberg, “Shuttered Coal Plants Seen Cutting Cost of Carbon Rules”
March 20, 2014
By Mark Drajem
March 20, 2014
By Mark Drajem
The cost of limiting power-plant emissions has fallen because cheap natural gas is already shuttering some coal-powered facilities that would be at risk, an environmental group said today in a study.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to impose strict limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, released an updated analysis of what rules would accomplish and the impact on coal plants and lower-carbon energy sources. The EPA says it will issue its proposed rules in June.
“We could eliminate hundreds of millions of tons of carbon pollution, save thousands of lives and stimulate a surge in clean energy and energy efficiency investments, and all at a lower cost than many would imagine,” said Dan Lashof, director of climate and clean air at the New York-based group.
President Barack Obama has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gases about 17 percent by 2020 over 2005 levels, a goal that groups such as Resources for the Future say requires the EPA to order deep cuts in power-plant emissions. Power plants are the top source of carbon-dioxide emissions.
Just after Obama was re-elected, NRDC issued the most detailed proposal for how the EPA could use regulations under the Clean Air Act to limit emissions from power plants. Because coal plants emit twice as much carbon dioxide as a natural-gas plant of the same size, much of the discussion about those rules has focused on how or whether coal could survive.
Ideas Embraced
Obama embraced the NRDC’s ideas in his climate announcement in June, and the EPA is preparing rules for existing power plants.
Lashof said that the group in its report today took account of revised baseline projections showing lower emissions as electricity demand stagnates, coal plants close and solar and wind power use accelerates. It also took into account criticism of earlier projections that energy efficiency would ramp up to meet cuts in coal generation.
If efficiency gains are constrained, more coal plants may install carbon-capture technology, and then sell that carbon-dioxide to oil producers who use it to stimulate production in old oil fields, Lashof said. The sale of the carbon dioxide makes the investment worthwhile, he said.
Overall, the most ambitious plan, which would achieve a cut of 30 percent in power plant emissions by 2020, would cost $14.6 billion, according to the NRDC. Less restrictive plans would cost from nothing to achieve a 24 percent reduction, to $11.1 billion to reach a 31 percent cut, assuming that energy efficiency can ramp up.
“We found we could make deeper reductions at a cheaper cost,” Lashof said in an interview.
4. Scientific American, “The Danger in Your Antibacterial Soap”
March 21, 2014
By Maricel V. Maffini
March 21, 2014
By Maricel V. Maffini
In 1978 the Bee Gees ruled the airwaves,Grease topped the box office and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first proposed a rule on antibacterial hand soaps—a rule that would have eliminated an unnecessary and unsafe ingredient called triclosan. Thirty-five years later many things have changed, but the FDA has not. Just recently it proposed rules on antibacterial soaps that would remove triclosan-containing soap from the shelves—for the third time. Yet because the FDA has failed to finalize any of these proposals, triclosan has proliferated in the marketplace. It is now the most common active ingredient found in antibacterial consumer hand soaps.
It’s also common in our bodies. Triclosan has been measured in amniotic fluid, breast milk, human blood and the urine of 75 percent of Americans sampled over the age of six. Although it does not discriminate by gender or racial/ethnic group, it appears to increase in concentration as income increases. Despite little evidence of their effectiveness to reduce illness, triclosan-containing antibacterial soaps have dominated the market. Soap aside, triclosan can also be found in consumer products as diverse as cutting boards, shoes, lipstick and toothpaste.
In other words, we are continually exposed to triclosan. The problem is that triclosan is not safe. In animal studies it has been shown to interfere with the regulation of thyroid hormones (affecting metabolism and brain development), testosterone synthesis (decreasing sperm counts) and estrogen action (causing early onset of puberty). Exposure to triclosan has been shown to weaken heart muscle, impairing contractions and reducing heart function, and to weaken skeletal muscle, reducing grip strength. In aquatic environments fish exposed to triclosan were unable to swim properly.
Higher urinary levels of triclosan are associated with hay fever, allergies to airborne triggers (like ragweed and cats) and food (peanut, shrimp, dairy) allergies. Triclosan has even been associated with elevated body mass index in adults. Although the mechanism driving this association is not clear, researchers suggest that it could be due to changes in the gut flora or hormones.
There are also concerns about the potential impact of triclosan use on development of antibiotic resistance. Laboratory studies on bacteria exposed to triclosan demonstrate evidence of cross-resistance to critically important antibiotics including erythromycin, ciprofloxacin, ampicillin and gentamicin. Further, there is evidence that resistance to triclosan itself exists in Salmonella enterica, Staphylococcus aureus, streptococcus, Escherichia coli and other species of bacteria. Strains ofMycobacterium tuberculosis tolerant to triclosan have also showed resistance to the drug isoniazid (INH), which is used to treat tuberculosis. Although the overuse of antibiotics in humans and livestock is a greater contributor to the public health crisis of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the potential increased risk of antibiotic resistance from the use of antimicrobial chemicals is unnecessary.
To add insult to injury, there is no added benefit to using triclosan (or any antibacterial) soaps. Triclosan is intrinsically ineffective against some bacteria likePseudomonas aeruginosa and fungal infections. The FDA requires that to be considered effective these soaps must do more than remove bacteria; they must “provide a clinical benefit by reducing infections.” But studies show that using soap containing triclosan does not reduce human illnesses or infections any more than using regular soap. There have even been occasional reports of fatal bacterial outbreaks in hospitals using triclosan, including bacterial contamination of triclosan soap containers in a surgical intensive care unit.
Which brings us back to the FDA. In the rule it proposed in 1978 (and again in 1994 and 2013) the FDA said it does not have sufficient information to determine whether triclosan is safe or effective. In the absence of such a determination triclosan cannot be sold in the U.S.—but the FDA’s failure to finalize these proposals allowed the products to remain on the market. Therefore, in 2010 the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the FDA to compel it to finalize its rules. As a result of the settlement, the FDA now has to finish its rules on antibacterial soaps by September 2016. If at that time the FDA still cannot say triclosan is safe and effective, then antibacterial hand soaps can no longer contain triclosan. Until then, antibacterial soaps remain on the market and consumers are left to protect themselves from this harmful chemical.
5. ThinkProgress, “China’s Plan to Develop Totally New Nuclear Fuel Speeds Up”
March 20, 2014
By Ari.Phillips
March 20, 2014
By Ari.Phillips
China needs energy just about any way they can get it — coal, gas, solar, wind, biomass, nuclear — they’ll take it. However the country’s heavy reliance on coal is is becoming a heavy liability. Coal-fired power plants and other industrial outlets that ring China’s growing urban hubs are creating near-permanent smog centers that choke out the sun and leave residents and visitors alike engulfed in a debilitating hazy mess. China’s top-down government is addressing this issue ever more urgently, extending influence into pollution monitoring, new regulations and most of all, new power sources. Renewables and natural gas are at the top of the list, but nuclear is also a cornerstone of China’s energy future.
With only 20 nuclear plants currently operating, China already has 28 under construction, according to the World Nuclear Association — about 40 percent of the total global number being built. Last year China expected to add nearly 9 gigawatts to nuclear capability to its grid. Even with that additional amount, nuclear still provides less than two percent of the country’s electricity (with around 70 percent still coming from coal). However, in China, plans matter. And China has big plans for nuclear, hoping to generate almost 60 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2020 and 150 gigawatts by 2050. By 2020, Hong Kong plans to get half of its power from mainland nuclear plants.
Nuclear power comes with well-known risks. Japan had similar nuclear ambitions before the Fukushima nuclear meltdown threw the country’s energy ambitions out of orbit. Aside from being highly radioactive, uranium, which fuels traditional nuclear power plants, is also expensive and in limited supply. China is currently an importer of the uranium it uses for its nuclear power plants.
China has big plans for this too, as authorities recently set a 10-year deadline to develop a totally different kind of nuclear power plant not dependent on uranium. In January, Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, launched China’s push to develop thorium nuclear energy, which uses the radioactive element thorium instead of uranium as the primary element of production. The Chinese National Academy of Sciences has a start-up budget of $350 million, according to The Telegraph, with 140 scientists at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics already working on the project — and a plan to staff-up to 750 by next year.
The scientists had a 25-year timeline to build their first fully-functioning thorium reactor until this week when it got moved up 15 years.
“In the past the government was interested in nuclear power because of the energy shortage,” Professor Li Zhong, a leading scientist working on the project, told the South China Morning Post. “Now they are more interested because of smog:”
“The problem of coal has become clear. If the average energy consumption per person doubles, this country will be choked to death by polluted air. Nuclear power provides the only solution for massive coal replacement and thorium carries much hope.”
Research into thorium reactors is not new, and the U.S. actually developed an eight-megawatt prototype at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1960s. However interest and funding waned in the ensuing 40 years as engineering challenges remained and uranium reactors took precedence. Plutonium associated with uranium reactors was also needed for nuclear weapons development. However, as the environmental costs — both to acquire uranium and over potential meltdowns — build and the ambition to develop fossil fuel alternatives heats up, programs in the U.S., the U.K., and Japan are also looking into thorium reactors. With a 10-year deadline, China has set the bar extremely high, as much of the technology remains unproven and major challenges are yet to be resolved.
“This is definitely a race,” Li said. “China faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task.” He added that the conditions they are working under are war-like. This is befitting, since earlier in March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared a “war on pollution.”
With so much research going into thorium, some are hopeful that technical and engineering challenges can be overcome in a short timeframe. Scientists are pushing a similar timeframe in which address climate change before “abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes occur” — as bluntly stated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week in a new report.
“There is a fair bit of research going on at the moment into the use of thorium,” Jonathan Cobb, of the World Nuclear Association told The Guardian. “And technology-wise, using thorium would not be too much of a leap. It is certainly something that is well under way in terms of research.”
Thorium is a plentiful chemical element, and while acquiring it is not the challenge, it would still create significant radioactive waste and still presents significant safety challenges for any large-scale plant. It would likely be harder to create nuclear weapons from thorium than traditional uranium enrichment processes, so it would be beneficial to efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation. Then there’s also the issue of overcoming the power of the existing nuclear industry, which is deeply enmeshed in the global energy infrastructure and most likely resistant to any significant changes that could add costs or new safety or oversight concerns.
“I wouldn’t read a whole lot into it,” Tom Cochran, senior scientist in the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Nuclear Program and a member of the Energy Department’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, told ThinkProgress. “China has been looking into everything when it comes to nuclear power. They have a broad civil nuclear R&D program and interest. It remains to be seen whether anything will come of this thorium effort.”
Cochran mentioned that some companies in the U.S. are looking into thorium reactors and that India has had a longstanding program to develop the technology, but he doesn’t think it’s going anywhere. And even if China did come up with a working thorium reactor in a decade, “so what? Meanwhile they will have dozens of traditional nuclear reactors using low-enriched uranium,” Cochran said.
6. Greenwire, “2 Pet Supply Companies Agree to Remove Pesticide From Flea Collars”
March 20, 2014
By Sam Pearson
March 20, 2014
By Sam Pearson
U.S. EPA has reached a voluntary agreement with two companies to remove a potent chemical used in pet flea products from the marketplace, although environmental groups aren’t happy the agency is giving manufacturers more than two years to fully do so.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has targeted propoxur and another chemical, tetrachlorvinphos, or TCVP, for years. The group petitioned EPA in 2010, urging the agency to cancel all manufacturer registrations for pet products using both chemicals, which would effectively remove them from the pet retail market. After years with no response from the agency, NRDC sued EPA in February, seeking to force the agency to take action over the petition (E&ENews PM, Feb. 7).
“This action is another example of EPA’s efforts to protect children from pesticide risks,” said Jim Jones, the assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, in a statement. “This voluntary move will get to an expedient result that protects people’s health.”
EPA’s announcement last week that it had reached an agreement with Omaha, Neb.-based Sergeant’s Pet Care Products Inc. and another company, Wellmark International, to remove pet products containing propoxur, was met with praise by NRDC — though the group remained concerned about the way EPA conducted the process.
Under the terms of the agreement, the two manufacturers may continue to produce the collars until April 1, 2015, and distribute them until April 1, 2016. Collars may linger on store shelves for up to five years until reaching their expiration dates, according to NRDC.
EPA said in a fact sheet posted online that while “the products do not meet the current safety standard, they do not pose a public health risk if label directions are followed.” NRDC has argued propoxur can have a harmful effect on children’s nervous systems — similar to lead — and that children often are exposed to the chemical through contact with pets at levels above what EPA considers safe.
The action will allow the products to continue circulating for years and doesn’t apply to other companies that may be active in the pet market. EPA also did not take regulatory action on TCVP, as NRDC had sought.
“EPA found a risk to kids that deserves immediate action, not a slow retreat,” Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a senior scientist at NRDC, said in a statement. “Families shouldn’t have to wait years for dangerous products to leave the store shelves.”
The companies agreed to withdraw their products after they determined they could not eliminate the risk that children may be exposed to propoxur when they come into contact with animals treated with the chemical.
“We are pleased to be able to work with the EPA to resolve this matter amicably and ensure that our customers can continue to benefit from uninterrupted access to Sergeant’s products,” said Caryn Stichler, vice president of marketing for Sergeant’s, in a statement. “Sergeant’s remains committed to compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements.”
A Wellmark representative couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication.
7. Associated Press, “Environmental Coalition Names 3 NC Senators in Ad”
March 20, 2014
March 20, 2014
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Several groups are banding together to fight what they view as threats to North Carolina’s environment, starting by calling out three state Republican senators for their votes on fracking in a television commercial.
The groups announced Thursday the formation of the North Carolina Environmental Partnership. It includes the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council and local environmental and citizens group in North Carolina.
The new partnership’s campaign will initially focus on fracking, the process of injecting chemicals and water into the ground to extract oil and gas.
Its first ad, now running on major television stations and on cable channels in the Triangle and Fayetteville, name Sens. Chad Barefoot of Wake Forest, Ron Rabin of Spring Lake and Wesley Meredith of Fayetteville as part of the “fracking crew.”
The commercial says the three all voted to “fast track” fracking and “put our families at risk.” It asks viewers to tell the legislators to stop “reckless” fracking.
The Senate approved legislation last year that would have allowed permits to be issued starting in March 2015. The permit date was ultimately removed from final legislation. GOP legislators say the state Mining and Energy Commission is creating state-of-the-art fracking regulations that will protect the health of citizens.
The partnership said the ad campaign will be augmented by direct mail and other public outreach.
“When legislators vote to threaten North Carolina’s drinking water, we’re going to make sure folks back home know about it,” Mary Maclean Asbill, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a release. Roughshod
8. Daily Kos, “New White house climate.data.gov Site Unveiled”
March 20, 2014
By Meteor Blades
March 20, 2014
By Meteor Blades
The White House rolled out a new project Wednesday designed to help local communities use existing federal and other data to cope with climate change. The Climate Data Initiative is, as several commentators have pointed out, a geeky response designed to show, among other things, which locales are most vulnerable to coastal flooding. The announcement came in a post on the White House blog from Obama’s special adviser John Podesta and science adviser John P. Holdren:
Data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other Federal agencies will be featured on climate.data.gov, a new section within data.gov that opens for business today. The first batch of climate data being made available will focus on coastal flooding and sea level rise. NOAA and NASA will also be announcing an innovation challenge calling on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events.
These and other Federal efforts will be amplified by a number of ambitious private commitments. For example, Esri, the company that produces the ArcGIS software used by thousands of city and regional planning experts, will be partnering with 12 cities across the country to create free and open “maps and apps” to help state and local governments plan for climate change impacts.
Google, Intel and Microsoft are all on board to contribute their expertise as well as vast amounts of computing time and storage to the project. Google alone will provide a petabyte of cloud storage for climate data. Rebecca Moore, the engineering manager of Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach, said the company plans to help people prepare for extreme heat, drought, sea level rise and flooding “as easily as they use Google maps to get driving directions.”
A fact sheet on specifics of who will be doing what in this seminal public-private partnership can be read here.
As Coral Davenport at the New York Times points out, until the climate science, mapping and other capabilities are transformed into easy-to-use applications, “the site will remain very much in its testing phase. … Average users will not be able to do much yet on their own. Instead, NASA and the NOAA will call on researchers and private companies to create software simulations illustrating the impact of sea level rise.”
Senior Policy Analyst Rob Moore at the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that one federal agency that won’t be included at the site is the Federal Emergency Management Agency even though it probably does more mapping than any other U.S. government operation. FEMA maps are drafted for purposes of federal flood insurance, but they don’t yet take into account future sea-level rise.
What the White House might ponder while climate.data.gov gets honed is establishing another site, a twin, if you will. This would be sort of a reverse website of climate.data.gov to provide information from municipalities, states and—dare I suggest—foreign nations that have already adopted measures to deal with climate change. Many of those policies, such as requirements for efficiency standards and for how much future electricity should be provided from renewable sources, are the sort of farsighted moves that would be of interest to communities just getting started on passing measures related to global warming.
Many of those local and state policies ought to become elements of national policy. As such, the twin website ought to be required reading for every member of Congress, especially the ones who still believe that climate change is a hoax or those who don’t think so but still can’t get their butts in gear to do anything about it.
1. USA Today, “Shale Could Be Long-Term Home for Nuclear Waste”
March 17, 2014
By Wendy Koch
March 17, 2014
By Wendy Koch
Could shale rock spur another energy bonanza? It’s already helped create a surge in U.S. oil and natural gas production, and research today suggests it could do something else: store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.
These rock formations are ideal for storing potentially dangerous spent fuel for millennia, because they are nearly impermeable, a U.S. geologist told a scientific meeting. One of the biggest risks of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years is water contamination.
The development of new U.S. nuclear power plants, all of which are now decades old, has been partly hobbled by the lack of a long-term repository for their waste. In 2009, the U.S. government abandoned plans for a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, so plants currently store about 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel onsite in above-ground facilities.
“Shale has a lot of nice properties. … We really should consider whether this is something we should look into,” says Chris Neuzil of the U.S. Geological Survey, who presented his findings Monday in Dallas to the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. He says experiments show how incredibly watertight shale can be — 100 to 10,000 times less permeable than cement grout.
“Not all shales have the low permeabilities at the scale we desire,” but plenty is available in tectonically stable areas that won’t be used for oil and natural gas production, Neuzil says. In recent years, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is being used to break apart these rock deposits and extract the the gas or oil trapped within.
Neuzil says current U.S. storage of nuclear waste is problematic because the spent fuel continues to produce heat and harmful radiation long after a power plant uses it to produce electricity. Plants typically store the waste in steel-lined, concrete pools filled with water or in massive, airtight steel casks.
Neuzil says safe maintenance of above-ground storage depends on stable societies for thousands of years. He also notes the risks of natural disasters, including Japan’s 2011 tsunami that knocked cooling pumps offline at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Several countries, including France, Switzerland and Belgium, have plans to develop long-term nuclear waste repositories hundreds of yards underground in layers of shale and other clay-rich rock. Neuzil is investigating a site using limestone in Ontario with the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization.
“He’s bringing up a very sensible idea, but this isn’t particularly new,” says Mick Apted, a geochemist at Austin-based INTERA, an environmental consulting firm. “The Europeans have taught us this.”
Apted, who’s working with Switzerland and Belgium on their programs, says France is furthest along in pursuing an underground repository in clay-rich rock, which isn’t as hard as shale. He says France, which gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, has identified a site. In Finland and Sweden, he says, companies have submitted a construction license to build a repository in granite-like rock and are waiting on government approval.
“It’s far too soon to know” whether shale is a viable long-term storage option, says Geoff Fettus, an attorney in the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. He says prior research has looked at the feasibility of various geologic formations, but “NRDC is not aware of a significant number of studies on this particular medium (shale).”
In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama received standing applause from both sides of the political aisle when he called for a “new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants.” In February, his administration finalized $6.5 billion in loan guarantees for the nation’s first two new nuclear reactors in three decades — at Southern Co.’s Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.
The expansion of nuclear power, welcomed by the nuclear industry and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, remains controversial in the environmental community. Many environmentalists oppose it, citing potential Fukushima-type meltdown risks as well as the lack of a long-term repository for nuclear waste.
Yet in recent years, it’s drawn the support of leading climate scientists, such as James Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who say solar and wind energy will not be able to deliver enough carbon-free energy to avoid catastrophic global warming. Nuclear power plants emit no heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Chicago Tribune, “MillerCoors Lifts a Glass to Saving Water”
March 18, 2014
By Julie Wernau
March 18, 2014
By Julie Wernau
It can take up to 20 gallons of water to make a single pint of beer and, with water in scarce supply, more than one-quarter of beverage production is in jeopardy.
In response, major brewers such as Chicago-based MillerCoors have been squeezing water out of the beer-making process because of concerns that their most important ingredient could soon dry up. That includes helping farmers who grow hops and barley or tap the same water sources as the breweries — to better manage water use.
Smaller craft breweries also have joined the effort, working hand in hand with environmental groups to ensure that water quality, key to the flavor of their brews, remains high.
“If there’s no water, there’s no beer,” said Kim Marotta, director of sustainability at MillerCoors.
In the past three years, the company says, its eight breweries have saved 1 billion gallons of water, equivalent to the amount of water 10 million Americans use daily for everything from drinking and bathing to brushing teeth.
In the past three years, the company says, its eight breweries have saved 1 billion gallons of water, equivalent to the amount of water 10 million Americans use daily for everything from drinking and bathing to brushing teeth.
MillerCoors says it’s using 3 1/2 barrels of water for every barrel of beer it produces, half the water some other beer-makers use. That’s ahead of its goal for in-house water reduction.
Now the company is focused on improving water-management practices at farms, especially in parts of the country that don’t have adequate water supplies.
“It can cause serious disruptions to your business if water is severely limited,” said Tod Christenson, director of the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable.
MillerCoors has several breweries in areas with water limitations.
Its Fort Worth, Texas, brewery, for example, sits on the Trinity River watershed, which provides the state with 40 percent of its drinking water. The demands of people, agriculture and industry, combined with a drought during the past three years, have threatened the brewery’s source of water.
The company has launched a massive initiative to spread best practices for water management at farms in the region. Those farms don’t supply MillerCoors, but they compete with the breweries’ water needs.
“It’s not unusual for a brewery to focus on conservation within their four walls. It is very unusual for a company to go outside those walls and engage with landowners,” said Ken Klaveness, executive director at Trinity Waters, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the watershed.
MillerCoors breweries in Irwindale, Calif., and Golden, Colo., also depend on at-risk watersheds. And recent changes in weather patterns have threatened the water supply in the San Luis Valley in Colorado where the company relies on about 150 barley growers.
“Their aquifers are really depressed, and many are depleted,” Marotta said.
In Silver Creek Valley, Idaho, MillerCoors teamed with The Nature Conservancy and, during three growing seasons, helped a barley farmer save 430 million gallons of water, the equivalent of the amount its brewery would use for three months.
The fixes were relatively simple. Pivots on the water sprinkling system were lowered so more water hit crops and less was lost to evaporation. The system also was retrofitted with a device to alert the farmer when it rained, so the system could be turned off with a smartphone.
MillerCoors, which contracts directly with 850 barley growers, hopes to duplicate that success at other farms that tap into water sources that also supply breweries and drinking water.
Reducing water use globally is crucial.
“As the population booms, they’re consuming more food. Agriculture continues to grow to serve their needs. Also, living standards are rising around the world, and they are desiring more Western diets, which means more consumption of dairy and meat, which is water-intensive,” said Richard Rosengren, senior adviser at The Nature Conservancy in Minneapolis.
Some of the measures MillerCoors has taken to cut water use might seem small, but they add up because of the immense volume of beer the company makes; last year it produced 63.3 million barrels of beer. At its Fort Worth brewery, for example, the same water used to warm beer bottles for labeling is also used during labeling.
At MillerCoors’ Milwaukee brewery, which sprawls over 82 acres, a machine pumps ionized air into cans to remove dust, a process that once used water. The company also determined that its massive kettles got just as clean with one rinse using a better cleaning mixture instead of multiple times with water.
Since 2009 the company has cut about a half-barrel of water use from each barrel of beer it produces. The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable said 84 percent of breweries cut water use from 2010 to 2012.
St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch is also taking part. The company has reduced water use in its breweries 32 percent during the past five years, according to Pete Kraemer, vice president of supply.
Recently, drought conditions in the West led the company to lower its water usage at its Los Angeles brewery by 12.6 percent, he said, and the company also reduced water at its Fairfield, Calif., brewery by 4.4 percent.
But smaller craft brewers, Christenson said, don’t have the economy of scale to sharply curtail water needs. It isn’t uncommon, he said, for smaller brewers to use twice the amount of water or more per can of beer compared with the largest breweries, because their runs are smaller and their kettles need to be rinsed more frequently.
Revolution Brewing, a craft brewery in Chicago, pumps out 220 cans per minute compared with the 6,700 cans per minute produced at MillerCoors’ brewery in Milwaukee.
“At our size, we can’t hope to have an impact standing alone, but when we interact with other brewers, we can see some result,” says Josh Deth, managing partner at Revolution.
Revolution is among 40 craft brewers that have signed on to an initiative with the Natural Resources Defense Council that would grant smaller water bodies and tributaries certain protections under the Clean Water Act.
In spite of water-saving measures the company has taken, it takes about seven barrels of water to produce one barrel of Revolution beer, Deth said.
“There’s a lot of things the bigger brewers can do because they have more volume, more space,” he said.
The company taps into Lake Michigan and wants to make sure the quality remains up to snuff.
Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said working with brewers was a natural fit because it is an industry that thinks about water quality as much as they do.
“Bad water is bad beer,” he said.
3. WNYC News, “New Sanitation Commissioner Faces Challenges”
March 17, 2014
By Tracie Hunte
March 17, 2014
By Tracie Hunte
Listen here to Eric Goldstein’s radio interview.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has a new Sanitation Commissioner. Over the weekend, he appointed Kathryn Garcia, the former Chief Operating Officer for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. She’ll take over the sanitation job from John Doherty, who’s retiring after 16 years.
Garcia is well known in city government and among environmental groups, but her only experience in the Sanitation Department comes from an internship there more than 20 years ago.
Garcia will have a number of challenges ahead of her, including implementing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Solid Waste Management Plan from 2006. Then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio voted for the plan.
“The fact that she has this extensive experience in working in a New York City government agency; that she has a commitment to implementing environmentally-sustainable disposal programs and that she has the personal confidence of the mayor. Those are the essential qualities one needs in a commissioner these days,” said Eric Goldstein, New York City Environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has a new Sanitation Commissioner. Over the weekend, he appointed Kathryn Garcia, the former Chief Operating Officer for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. She’ll take over the sanitation job from John Doherty, who’s retiring after 16 years.
Garcia is well known in city government and among environmental groups, but her only experience in the Sanitation Department comes from an internship there more than 20 years ago.
Garcia will have a number of challenges ahead of her, including implementing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Solid Waste Management Plan from 2006. Then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio voted for the plan.
“The fact that she has this extensive experience in working in a New York City government agency; that she has a commitment to implementing environmentally-sustainable disposal programs and that she has the personal confidence of the mayor. Those are the essential qualities one needs in a commissioner these days,” said Eric Goldstein, New York City Environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
He spoke to WNYC’s Amy Eddings.
4. New York Times – “Well” Blog, “Sorting Out the Risks of Fish”
March 17, 2014
By Roni Caryn Rabin
March 17, 2014
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Fish is often called “brain food.” It’s an excellent source of lean protein, rich in nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins and iodine, and pregnant women are encouraged to eat it. There’s just one, ah, catch: Fish also may have mercury, which can harm the developing brain.
Two advocacy organizations sued the Food and Drug Administration last week, demanding that the agency require canned and packaged fish to carry labels informing consumers of the mercury content, and that federal officials force grocery stores and fish markets to display information if they sell fish high in mercury.
The F.D.A. long ago put out information about mercury in seafood, but the groups say it should be at consumers’ fingertips when they’re shopping for dinner.
“People shouldn’t have to do detective work to get this information,” said Michael Bender, executive director of the Mercury Policy Project, one of the groups. Agency officials said they could not comment because of the continuing litigation.
But will labels on a can of tuna do more harm than good — scaring people away from eating fish altogether?
That’s the concern of fishing industry representatives, who note that consumption of fish and seafood dropped the last time the F.D.A. issued warnings about mercury. They argue that the benefits of eating fish are much greater than the possible harmful effects of mercury.
“When environmental activists suggest that consumers not eat a healthy protein like seafood, they’re doing more harm than good,” said Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institutes, a nonprofit organization backed by the fishing and seafood industry. “The benefits outweigh the risks.”
Many health experts are also cautious about the way they word their advice on the matter because they don’t want Americans to forgo the benefits of fish and seafood in favor of, say, bacon cheeseburgers.
Worries over mercury in seafood stretch back decades, confounding consumers who are told that fish and seafood are healthy, especially for the developing fetus, but hazardous in great amounts. New research has helped tease out the benefits and the harms.
Edward Groth III, an independent food safety consultant who prepared a report on the effects of mercury on fetal brain development for the Mercury Pilot Project, agreed that women of childbearing age shouldn’t just quit eating fish.
“If women are eating less fish because they’re confused, and there’s some evidence that’s the case, then we’re not getting the result we want,” he said. “The secret is to get women to eat more low-mercury fish.”
The debate has taken on added urgency because of new studies suggesting that mercury may cause subtle adverse effects at levels lower than those now considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, even as they reaffirm the cognitive benefits to children whose mothers ate fish while pregnant.
Dr. Emily Oken and her colleagues at Harvard looked at the association between mothers’ fish intake and their infants’ cognitive scores at six months. The researchers found that the babies’ performance on visual recognition memory tests increased a significant four points with each additional weekly serving of fish that the mother ate while pregnant.
But the researchers also measured mercury levels in the mothers’ hair, and found that infants whose mothers had very high levels of mercury scored lower than the others, for a drop of 7.5 points for every one part per million increase in mercury.
The bottom line: The babies who scored highest were those whose mothers were among the top fish and seafood consumers, eating it at least twice a week, but who also had lower mercury levels.
Dr. Oken’s study included only 135 pairs of mothers and infants, but several other epidemiological studies in recent years have reported similar associations. Another Harvard study found that children whose mothers ate fish and seafood during pregnancy were at a lower risk for impulsive and hyperactive behaviors, but that prenatal exposure to low levels of mercury increased the risk for those behaviors.
“It’s a paradox, but it highlights an important public health message: that eating fish is really important for development, but eating fish high in mercury — swordfish, king mackerel, fresh tuna — does pose a risk to neurodevelopment,” said Sharon Sagiv, lead author of that study, now an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Though most studies have examined the effects of prenatal exposure to mercury, the brain continues to develop through childhood, and one study has suggested middle-age adults could also be vulnerable to mercury’s effects. In that research, adults who ate a high-fish diet performed well on cognitive tasks, but performance was impaired among those with higher blood mercury levels.
So, what’s a health-conscious fish eater to do?
For starters, avoid eating large predatory fish that are high on the food chain. The F.D.A. lists only four fish in this category: swordfish, king mackerel, shark and tilefish. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a more comprehensive list that includes orange roughy, marlin, and both ahi and bigeye tuna.
When it comes to canned tuna, “light” tuna usually is the smaller skipjack, with significantly less mercury than “white” albacore; still, the F.D.A. recommends no more than 12 ounces of light tuna a week and no more than six ounces of white tuna for women — even less for children.
The good news: Many fish and shellfish are low in mercury, including salmon, shrimp and catfish, as well as tilapia, scallops, oysters, herring, sardines and trout.
5. ClimateWire, “U.S. Wood Pellets Could Help U.K. Coal Plants Cut Greenhouse Gases by Half — Study
March 17, 2014
By Tiffany Stecker
March 17, 2014
By Tiffany Stecker
Replacing coal with wood pellets in the United Kingdom could lead to a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent study, giving environmental points to a booming industry in the Southeast.
The paper, published last month in Environmental Research Letters, says burning wood pellets reduces carbon emissions between 50 percent and 68 percent per unit of fossil fuel electricity — roughly in the midrange of recent studies. The range depends on the size of the power plant, as large, 100-megawatt facilities have a better conversion efficiency than smaller, 20 MW ones per unit of electricity. It also depends on the cycle of tree harvests; a 25-year cycle is more climate-friendly than a 12-year one.
Overall emissions from biomass, or plant-based, energy are widely debated. One study placed the benefits as high as 80 percent over coal, while some environmental groups have said burning wood is worse than coal from a climate perspective.
“The truth lies somewhere in the middle,” said Madhu Khanna, a professor at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
This study examined 930 scenarios for bringing wood pellets from slash pines at plantations in the southern United States to an electric generator in Selby, England. One important consideration was the distance traveled between the woody material used to make pellets and the pellet-making facility.
“Most studies assume that transportation is like a fixed distance, 50 kilometers,” Khanna said. “It doesn’t take into account that the forest is a spatially distributed resource, and everything isn’t going to be exactly 50 kilometers.”
Overall greenhouse gas emissions are higher in intensive wood-growing practices, in which large amounts of herbicides and fertilizers are used. Nitrogen fertilizers lead to the release of nitrous oxide, a gas more than 300 times as powerful as CO2 in warming the planet.
Business expected to triple
Pellets are usually made from small trees and leftovers of another industry, like paper or lumber. The facility then grinds the woods, dries it and reforms it into small cylinders of processed wood resembling rabbit feed. Unlike most of the pellets for domestic use, which are used to fire small residential stoves, these pellets travel across the Atlantic to fire European power plants, typically in northern countries like England, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Wood pellet production for export, driven by Europe’s renewable energy mandates, has exploded in recent years and is expected to grow three times its size between 2012 and 2015. Proponents of biomass energy consider it carbon-neutral, as trees absorb carbon from photosynthesis, and the forest products industry promotes the growth of trees.
But environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Clean Air Task Force and Friends of the Earth reject this notion. They say emissions from the smokestack of a biomass power plant cannot go unaccounted, as it can take decades for that CO2 to be reabsorbed in forests. This results in a carbon “debt,” in which more carbon is emitted than there are trees to sequester it.
Khanna sat on U.S. EPA’s scientific advisory board in 2012 to explore the issue of biomass emissions. The board published a report recommending that the agency formulate different approaches for different feedstocks — wood waste from the logging industry should be measured differently from whole trees, for example. It also rejected a blanket assumption that all biomass energy is carbon-neutral (ClimateWire, July 15, 2013).
EPA is mulling a proposal to properly account for carbon emissions from biomass power plants, which are currently exempt from greenhouse gas permitting requirements.
“It shows that it is not zero percent, completely carbon-neutral, nor that it should be treated equivalent to coal,” Khanna said of the study. “It depends really on … what one is assuming on how forests will be managed, and then what is the impact with bioenergy.”
Wrestling over the carbon ‘debt’
A carbon debt would be achieved only in certain cases, like if a forester changed his or her schedule from cutting trees every 25 years to every 15 years to accommodate pellet production. In this case, there would be 10 years lost of potential carbon sequestration in trees.
But Sami Wassa, senior scientist for NRDC’s Our Forests Aren’t Fuel campaign, disagrees, based on a single sentence in the methods section of the paper: “Biogenic [greenhouse gas] emissions related to burning of bark and wood pellets were not considered under the assumption that harvested tracts were immediately planted after harvest.”
This assumption is false, he said.
“It may be carbon-neutral after 50 years, but you need to say that upfront,” he said. “This study’s results would be entirely different if you consider the factor of time.”
It is unclear how future demand for pellets will affect prices for other products, Khanna said.
“How far can we go on increasing production of pellets without having a negative impact on the price of pulpwood and traditional markets of pulpwood remains to be seen,” she said. As for an environmental impact, she believes increasing demand will lead to a shift from wood pellets to pellets made from energy grasses, like miscanthus.
The U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, the trade group for manufacturers of Europe-bound pellets, said it “applauds the basic supposition of the study, which is that burning biomass for energy offers significant carbon benefits as a replacement fuel in place of coal.”
6. The Greenville News, “Antibiotics Overuse Making it Harder to Fight Superbugs”
March 16, 2014
By Liv Osby
March 16, 2014
By Liv Osby
Kimberly Shivell was giving her baby girl a bath before church one Sunday morning when she noticed a strange, red, nickel-sized bump on her skin that wasn’t there the day before.
By the next day, it was the size of a silver dollar. And terrifyingly, it was the size of her palm by the third day.
Doctors sent the otherwise healthy 15-month-old to the hospital where she wound up having surgery and getting intravenous drugs for what turned out to be an antibiotic-resistant superbug.
“The time in the hospital was horrible,” Shivell told The Greenville News. “You just pray your child doesn’t die from this crazy infection that’s spread in such a small period of time.”
More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs that have been used to treat them, leaving few treatments for some infections.
At least 2 million Americans contract an antibiotic-resistant infection every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 of them die, the CDC reports, though other groups set that number much higher.
And experts say it has become a public health crisis that could claim many more lives unless something is done.
“I don’t remember a time when antibiotics weren’t easily accessible, inexpensive and worked,” said Dr. Ryan Hoffman, director of emergency services at Bon Secours St. Francis Health System.
“And I don’t want to go back to a time when people died from scraping their knee or a sore throat,” he added. “That would be my concern.”
Overused and misused
Antibiotics are commonly prescribed for strep throat, tuberculosis and staph infections, among other bacterial conditions. But they don’t work for viruses like those that cause colds, even though they are prescribed for those ailments.
In fact, the CDC estimates that about half of all antibiotics aren’t needed or effective as prescribed. And the bacteria that survive develop resistance to the drugs.
In a report last fall, the CDC sounded the alarm about three “urgent” threats — Clostridium difficile, a severe intestinal infection; a drug-resistant gonorrhea; and Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, like E. coli, which is resistant to most, and in some cases, all, antibiotics.
The report also cited 12 “serious” threats, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA; Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus; multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa; drug-resistant Salmonella; and drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae. Three more are “concerning threats.”
MRSA caused about 80,461 severe infections and 11,285 deaths in 2011, according to CDC, while an unknown “but much higher number” of less severe infections occurred as well. And resistant S. pneumoniae causes about 1.2 million infections and 7,000 deaths a year, CDC reports.
What’s more, these infections cost the health system more than $20 billion annually and there are few new antibiotics in development.
“The loss of effective antibiotic treatments will not only cripple the ability to fight routine infectious diseases, but will also undermine treatment of infectious complications in patients with other diseases,” the CDC researchers said.
“Many of the advances in medical treatment — diseases such as diabetes, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis — are dependent on the ability to fight infections with antibiotics,” they continued. “If that ability is lost, the ability to safely offer people many life-saving and life-improving modern medical advantages will be lost with it.”
In the food
The medical community has been trying to reduce the amount of inappropriately prescribed antibiotics for several years, issuing guidelines for their use in common childhood ear infections, for example.
But these drugs are also in much of the food that winds up in Americans’ diets. Cattle, hogs and chickens are routinely given antibiotics, not just to treat illnesses, but to promote growth or to prevent disease, according to the CDC.
“Unless you are eating grass-fed, organic beef, you are ingesting antibiotics every time you have a burger,” said Tim Reihm, spokesman for the Alliance for Natural Health – USA, adding that the food chain is “saturated” with antibiotics.
The CDC says the practice of giving antibiotics to food animals is dangerous, unnecessary and should be phased out. And in December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a plan to do just that.
But critics say it will do little to change the status quo because it’s voluntary, takes three years to implement and allows agribusinesses to continue using the drugs for disease prevention with veterinary oversight.
“It’s useful that the (FDA) is now clearly on record that this is a health threat, that we should be reducing antibiotic use,” Jonathan Kaplan, food and agriculture director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The News.
“But … we have very little reason to believe it’s going to reduce a lot of antibiotic use,” he said. “It’s voluntary and relies on industry to stop a production practice it has insisted on for the last four decades.”
The NRDC, which says the drugs are given to prevent disease because the animals are kept in unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions, sued the FDA in 2012 to act on its own 1977 findings that antibiotics in livestock can lead to resistance. A federal judge ordered the agency to begin cancellation proceedings for two classes of antibiotics, Kaplan said, but FDA appealed and the matter is pending.
Phasing out
This month, the Animal Health Institute, a trade group representing the drug companies that make pharmaceuticals for animals, committed to adopting the FDA policy over the next three years.
The National Chicken Council has too, even though “several studies show the threat from antibiotic use in livestock and poultry production is negligible, if it exists at all,” said spokesman Thomas Super.
Raising healthy birds is the top priority for the industry and antibiotics are just one tool used, he said, adding that the drugs are administered judiciously and only when needed to prevent and treat disease. Most of the antibiotics used in raising chickens aren’t used in human medicine, he said.
“Still, chicken producers are phasing out subtherapeutic or ‘growth uses’ of antibiotics important to treating humans,” he said. “We agree there needs to be dialogue about the use of antibiotics in farm animals, but we stand firm that antibiotics, when used properly and under veterinary oversight, are critical to keeping birds healthy and food safe.”
Liz Wagstrom, chief veterinarian for the National Pork Producers Council, said that hog farmers have for years followed good production practices that include the responsible use of antibiotics to minimize the risk of resistance.
The industry also has spent millions of dollars trying to understand resistance, she said, adding that, from the farmer’s point of view, the FDA guidance will significantly limit the antibiotics and uses available.
“Once those labels are gone, we will no longer have those products to use,” she said. “And we fully expect our producers and feed mills they buy from will comply and will make a real difference in the types of antibiotics that are available and how they may be used.”
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association president Scott George said in a statement the association will review the FDA guidance to ensure it is based on sound science and address producers’ concerns. Producers work with experts on health management plans, including the appropriate use of antibiotics “to prevent, control and treat diseases in their animals,” he said.
“Only by carefully evaluating antimicrobial resistance in a comprehensive manner that evaluates all of the peer-reviewed science related to all animal and human use will we effectively address this important issue,” he added.
First step
But Ami Gadhia, senior policy counsel with Consumers Union, said that while the new guidance is a good first step, the disease prevention use still permitted could leave a loophole for continued inappropriate use of the drugs. And, she said, FDA needs to be moving faster.
“Alarm bells have been ringing on this problem for a very long time,” she said. “Clearly more needs to be done right away on this issue. We would like to see use of antibiotics in food animals limited to treating only sick animals.”
The Infectious Diseases Society of America agrees, saying in a 2011 letter to Congress that “the evidence is so strong of a link between misuse of antibiotics in food animals and human antibiotic resistance that FDA and Congress should be acting much more boldly and urgently to protect these vital drugs for human illness.”
Both Consumers Union and the NRDC have urged Congress to pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, or PAMTA, introduced by U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-NY, to ban eight classes of drugs for non-therapeutic uses.
“If we continue along the path we’re going, there is significant worry that people are going to get sicker with antibiotic-resistant bugs,” Gadhia said. “And once they get sick, the treatments we have now just aren’t going to work. That could potentially affect all of us and is something every consumer should be concerned about.”
But Slaughter spokesman Eric Walker said the bill has been stalled by industry lobbying and political contributions.
“In the 112th Congress, there were 225 lobbying reports filed on that bill,” he said, “and 87.5 percent were filed from groups hostile to regulation.”
Harmful bacteria
Meat is routinely contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of health, consumer and other groups that works to end the inappropriate use of antibiotics in food animals.
More than half the chicken tested by FDA in 2010 was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant E. coli, according to NRDC, which reports that 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S., or about 29 million pounds, are used on livestock, and most on animals that aren’t sick.
And Consumer Reports says that almost all the chicken breasts it recently tested from 26 states were contaminated by potentially harmful bacteria, and about half had at least one bug resistant to three or more common antibiotics.
Gadhia points to the ongoing outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella in Foster Farms chicken, which has sickened nearly 500 people in 25 states.
“The science community has known for four decades that when you give herds and flocks of animals antibiotics day after day, you end up breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Kaplan. “They escape by colonizing workers, going into the environment, riding through the food system on fresh meat products, and can go straight to your kitchen from the grocery store.”
And children are at greater risk of getting many of these infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Fifty years ago, we were able to keep up with the antibiotic resistance that would occur,” said Dr. Joe Maurer of Greenville Health System’s The Children’s Clinic.
“But in recent years, we are losing. The antibiotics we use orally don’t work any more and so we’re having kids coming into the hospital. And these bacteria are not only resistant to antibiotics, they tend to cause more severe infections too,” he said.
“Our concern is that we seem to be further and further limiting our ability to treat (bacterial infections) because of potential overuse of antibiotics, and from the other end the antibiotics given to animals and that get into the environment.”
The good news is that parents increasingly understand that overuse of antibiotics can harm their children, and society as a whole, Maurer said. That’s important because 70 percent of ear infections, upper respiratory infections and sore throats are viral at onset, he said.
So instead of prescribing antibiotics and stronger ones than needed as they often did in the past, he said, doctors don’t give the drugs, wait two or three days to see if the condition improves, or use more selective antibiotics.
Good antibiotic stewardship, said Hoffman, is vital to trying to solve the problem.
Tipping point
One of Maurer’s major concerns is day care centers that require a sick child to be on antibiotics and fever-free for 24 hours before returning even though the drugs won’t help viruses.
“It’s a tough balance,” he said. “We don’t want kids in day care that are sick and spreading disease, but families need their children in day care.”
Still, he said, in the past 10 or 15 years, there’s been a decrease in antibiotics being prescribed, though it seems to have hit a plateau.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” Maurer said. “But from my perspective, more needs to be done.”
Kaplan believes the country is at a tipping point on the issue. More and more people are becoming aware of the problem and consumers are increasingly opting for antibiotic-free foods, he said.
“For the last several decades, the industry side has been to challenge the notion that there’s a credible health threat here. They can’t do that any longer,” he said. “It’s hard to argue with the CDC on whether this issue is a public health threat.”
Kimberly Shivell said she has no idea how Mary Claire was infected.
She took the toddler to the doctor as soon as she noticed the bump and got antibiotics. But when her daughter developed a fever and began vomiting two days later, they were sent to the hospital. After another couple of days, Shivell and her husband, Andy, took their little girl home.
“It was a huge relief,” said the Greenville woman. “She was in such pain and seeing a small child with the IV hooked up all the time was rough.”
Before it happened, Shivell had no idea how common these infections are.
“They said it’s almost as common as a cold,” she said. “All it takes is an open sore to get infected.”
And with two small, rough and tumble girls, the self-described neat freak has been even more meticulous about cleaning, washing hands and making sure any cuts and bruises are treated properly.
“Every night, I spray the tub down and take all the toys and put in the dishwasher to sanitize them,” she said. “And I go straight to the doctor’s office when they get sick now because of what we’ve experienced.”
7. Brooklyn Heritage Radio Network, “What Doesn’t Kill You” – Big Pork with Ted Genoways
March 17, 2014
March 17, 2014
What does Hormel have to do with the water supply in Nebraska? What are the issues facing workers in the pork industry? Find out on a pork-themed episode of What Doesn’t Kill You as Katy Keiffer chats with expert Ted Genoways.
Ted Genoways is editor-at-large at OnEarth, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Fund. He has also contributed to a number of other magazines such as The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and Outside. His book, The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in October.
This program was sponsored by Cain Vineyard & Winery.
8. China Radio International, “Achievements on China’s Wildlife Protection”
March 18, 2014
By Catherine Xu
March 18, 2014
By Catherine Xu
Listen here to Andrew Wetzler’s interview.
As part of the recently-concluded “two sessions,” members of the CPPCC, including former basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan have issued calls for the better protection of wildlife both here in China and beyond.
As part of the recently-concluded “two sessions,” members of the CPPCC, including former basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan have issued calls for the better protection of wildlife both here in China and beyond.
For the past few years, more and more celebrity advocates have been coming forward to try to further the cause of wildlife protection here in China.
For more on the achievements being made, CRI’s Catherine Xu spoke earlier with Andrew Wetzler, Director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
1. Politico, “House Panel Prods EPA on Carbon Storage Worries”
March 12, 2014
By Erica Martinson
Opponents of a key EPA greenhouse gas regulation launched a fresh attack on EPA’s proposed rules for new power plants on Wednesday, questioning whether the agency had adequately considered the environmental threats from pumping carbon underground.
The new issue emerged as Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday also opened an investigation into the EPA’s determination that carbon capture technology is viable for new coal-fired power plants.
At a hearing with the House Science committee’s panel on the environment, Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) questioned the EPA claims that carbon capture and storage is really ready to be rolled out. “My fear is … the law of unintended consequences,” he said.
The opponents of EPA’s rule pushed the agency to revisit a myriad of environmental problems that they contend could arise after the carbon is stripped out, from the safety of drinking water to endangered species.
EPA has proposed a greenhouse gas limit for future coal-fired power plants that would essentially require them to capture 30 to 60 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions. The agency has argued its regulation is the driver needed to push the technology into commercial use, but its opponents say the technology is too expensive, too new and unproven.
For now, the most likely endpoint for all that carbon dioxide is in the oil fields, where it can be used in enhanced oil recovery to squeeze more crude oil out of aging wells.
But alternately, the carbon pollution from one type of fossil fuel doesn’t have to be used to help produce another. Several years ago EPA set up a permitting program for long-term underground storage of carbon dioxide, setting environmental standards for power producers to capture their carbon and inject it far underground in certain types of geologic structures.
“We transport coal thousands of miles” to burn, said Natural Resources Defense Council attorney David Hawkins. Surely the carbon dioxide from that coal can be transported hundreds of miles to be injected underground or used in oil fields, he said, defending the prospects for long-term carbon sequestration.
EPA’s proposed rule doesn’t delve into carbon storage issues — it just provides an emissions limit the companies will need to hit using whatever technology they decide is the most cost effective.
“The regulatory approach to the sequestration and storage is not within the four corners of this rule — it is addressed in other regulatory programs,” EPA’s acting air chief Janet McCabe told the panel.
For opponents of EPA’s effort to curb the greenhouse gases from power plants, the carbon dioxide storage issues are the newest point of contention around the rules that President Barack Obama has asked the agency to roll out.
Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) pressed McCabe on the carbon dioxide storage, charging that “it is misleading and dangerous for the EPA to quietly dismiss inconvenient facts,” and he pointed to concerns about the programmatic separation of carbon capture and sequestration processes that has been previously raised by EPA’s science advisers.
“Staying silent on the last step of the process proves the lack of demonstrated commercial viability,” said Rep. Cynthia Lummis, (R-Wy.).
“The EPA is ignoring the consequences of their rulemaking to instead set legal precedent for mandating unproven technologies. They need to go back and assess the impacts of this rule on non-air issues. There is no science behind the de facto mandated storage requirement,” she added.
Some Republicans on the committee questioned whether EPA had adequately tested whether injecting carbon dioxide underground would harm drinking water aquifers. And several members of the Texas delegation on Wednesday suggested that EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act regulations for storing carbon dioxide could add unnecessary burdens for industry.
Bridenstine also pressed McCabe on whether the agency has asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to consult on Endangered Species Act concerns — echoing a previous request from some Senate Republicans.
Republicans on the committee have previously complained the plants EPA had cited to show that carbon capture is viable at a commercial scale have all received government funding. That makes them ineligible to be the basis in the rulemaking under a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, they argue.
EPA has countered that with a notice of data availability to support its contention that the proposed rule doesn’t run afoul of the 2005 law.
“We do believe that the proposal we put forward meets the requirements of the Clean Air Act for determining technology that’s appropriate,” McCabe said Wednesday.
The agency doesn’t set the technology — just the limit, she added.
“That’s one of the beauties of how the Clean Air Act has worked over the years … it provides room for innovation and flexibility and smart people … finding better and less costly ways to do things,” she said.
2. Huffington Post, “The Climate Crisis is Here”
March 13, 2014
By Peter Morton
Los Angeles — Here in California, we have been experiencing the worst drought on record. More than a meteorological curiosity, this has been a calamity for many people and a hardship on the economy, the world’s 8th largest if we were an independent country.
Crops are dying in California’s once lush fields, source of half the country’s fruits and vegetables, wildfires have been raging throughout the state, ranchers have sold cows they can’t feed, wells are running dry and towns are running out of water, salmon fisheries are threatened as streams dwindle to a trickle. The governor of the state has declared a drought emergency, and the cost of the drought has soared past $5 billion, by some estimates.
This is what climate change looks like.
We’ve been hit by droughts before, and we would face more in the future even if we weren’t loading up our atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon pollution. But the scientific models are also clear that climate change will make droughts like this more frequent and more severe. It is causing sea levels to rise, worsening the impact of coastal storms and allowing diseases and pests to spread more widely, among other consequences.
Yet the truth is that in Los Angeles, where I live, we don’t grow food and our taps have not run dry, so we’re feeling less of the impact from this drought. And that is part of the real problem with America’s struggle to address the climate crisis, the gravest environmental threat of our time.
Too many folks still don’t get it.
Because they are not directly affected, too many people remain oblivious to the reality that climate change is already here and that we are already paying a huge price for it. Too many are unaware of the far, far greater expenses we will incur in the future from climate disruption, caused by humans pumping 90 million of tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere every day. Too many politicians, backed by the oil, natural gas and coal industries, point only to the costs of cleaning up this pollution.
They always exaggerate these costs. Worse, they refuse to admit that we are already suffering the consequences of our inaction, and they deny that any more calamities are to come. Yet the facts tell a different story:
— Across the U.S. in the first six months of 2012, 24,000 heat records were broken, and 2013 was one of the 10 hottest years on record. Drought affected about two-thirds of the continental United States in 2012 and was blamed for $30 billion in agricultural losses and another $1 billion in destruction from wildfires.
— The flow of the Colorado River, which winds across the western third of the U.S. to northern Mexico and provides water for 30 million people, is at its lowest levels since measurements in Arizona began more than 90 years ago. The most recent draft of the government’s National Climate Assessment warns that with a changing climate, in the Colorado River Basin, “…drought is projected to become more frequent, intense, and longer lasting than in the historical record.”
— The Rocky Mountains in Canada and the U.S. have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest die since 2000 due to outbreaks of tree-killing insects that are now able to survive in the warmer winters.
— Water scarcity already affects every continent. Around 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the world’s population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation.
— Ocean acidification, caused by the massive carbon pollution in the air, has contributed to the death of 40 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Half the corals in the U.S. and its territories, and as many as 70 percent worldwide, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, are severely degraded or at risk of extinction. Coral reefs are home to one-fourth of all marine species and provide habitat to fish and shellfish that feed half a billion people.
— After nearly 2,000 years with relatively little change, sea levels rose an average of seven inches just during the 20th century. In this century, if current warming patterns continue, sea levels could rise 10 to 23 inches, according to the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change. In the U.S., roughly 100 million people live in coastal areas within three feet of mean sea level.
— By 2050, we can expect up to 1 billion additional “climate refugees” who will be driven from their homes by drought, famine, flooding, coastal erosion and monster storms. This unprecedented scale of refugee movement threatens to destabilize entire regions.
But we are not powerless to slow and eventually reverse the accumulation of atmospheric carbon pollution that is driving climate chaos. As individuals, as consumers and as citizens, we can all play a role in eliminating waste, living more efficiently, getting more of our energy from clean sources and demanding action from our elected officials.
We can waste less food (40 percent of the food in the U.S. goes uneaten) to lower the demands on our fossil fuel-intensive agricultural system. We can choose a climate-friendly diet, high in locally produced, organic foods, especially fruits, vegetables and grains, and low in meat. (Particularly beef, which, largely due to methane emissions from cows, has a carbon footprint at least 10 times larger than chicken).
We can drive less, buy more fuel-efficient cars, and insulate our houses. Increased efficiency, in fact, is the unsung hero in the climate battle. Over the past 40 years, according to a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group, “efficiency’s contribution to meeting the nation’s overall energy needs exceeded that of all fossil and nuclear resources combined.” Using the best technology, factories and businesses can produce more with less dirty energy.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can demand that our leaders acknowledge the real threats of climate change, ignore the fear-mongering from the fossil fuel industry, and take the steps necessary to cut the carbon pollution that is choking the planet. The NRDC and other conservation groups have outlined a number of steps that the government should take, but one stands out: cut the carbon pollution from fossil-fueled electric power plants.
These plants are the source of 40 percent of America’s carbon pollution, and the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority and the obligation under the law to take action. The polluters, predictably, cry this will devastate the American economy, but NRDC has conducted an exhaustive study that shows a flexible, state-by-state approach can cut carbon pollution sharply at a reasonable cost.
Solving the climate crisis is not a technical problem, it is a political one. Politicians will take steps to restore the environment and protect human health if, and only if, citizens and voters demand it. The public generally favors clean air and water and limits on carbon pollution. But the fossil energy industry, powerful and wealthy, has mobilized its forces to block progress.
That means citizens who want to move climate to the top of the political agenda will have to mobilize as well, by supporting, with determination, persistence and funding, organizations that are dedicated to averting climate chaos.
Apathy is not an option. We have a moral obligation to future generations to act on climate change now.
3. Huffington Post, “’Social Cost of Carbon’ Too Low, Report Says”
March 13, 2014
By Kate Sheppard
WASHINGTON -– The U.S. government uses $37 as its estimate of how much a ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere costs, including decreased agricultural productivity, damage from rising sea levels and harm to human health related to climate change. The Obama administration updated that figure, known as the “social cost of carbon,” in November.
But a report released Thursday argues that $37 is far too low. It doesn’t include costs of other major climate impacts, such as increased respiratory illness from higher pollen or ozone, or the spread of insect-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, or the toll that ocean acidification will take on fisheries.
The report comes from the environmental groups Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, and the Institute for Policy Integrity, based at New York University’s School of Law. Policy Integrity economic fellow Peter Howard authored the report, posted on the group’s website, Cost of Carbon.
The $37 figure, said Gernot Wagner, a senior economist at Environmental Defense Fund, is the “most scientifically sound estimate coming out of climate economic models right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s complete.”
The report argues the current social cost of carbon estimate is “biased downwards.” The estimate doesn’t consider climate impacts well-established in scientific literature, but not easily quantifiable as a cost.
“What we know is bad,” said Wagner. “What we don’t know makes it worse.”
An interagency working group of scientists and economists from the National Economic Council, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Council on Environmental Quality, as well as the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, and Treasury, determines the social cost of carbon. The figure is created using integrated assessment models, which combine climate and economic modeling. The working group periodically reviews the cost. The update in November was the first since 2010, when it was set at $24 a ton.
The figure is used in cost-benefit analyses for proposed regulations, allowing agencies to evaluate the economic benefits of new rules. For example, when considering regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the dollar figure allows the agencies to quantify future benefits of avoiding additional emissions. The higher the number, the more benefits are derived from a new rule limiting those emissions.
The report highlights areas the current cost estimate for carbon is missing, including loss of labor productivity due to extreme heat, potential climate change impact on crop-destroying pests, and climate-fueled wildfires.
Impacts on fisheries are also largely omitted from government models, including problems caused by ocean acidification, warmer ocean temperatures and algae blooms. Because the fishing industry is a major part of the economy in many parts of the world, with many people relying on it for jobs and for food, climate change is likely to bring significant costs.
Industry groups, and Republicans in Congress, won’t like the suggestion that the government’s carbon cost should be higher. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute have criticized the federal government’s $37 figure, arguing that the models haven’t been adequately reviewed by scientists and economists. Republicans slammed last year’s increase to the figure.
The report does not suggest an alternate figure. Instead, it highlights areas where there is increasing scientific and economic research that could be used in future estimates.
“What we are doing with this report is pointing the light, guiding scientists toward the kinds of missing damages that ought to be included in the next iteration,” said Wagner.
4. The Nation, “The Pesticide Industry Vs. Consumers: Not a Fair Fight”
March 11, 2014
By Lee Fang
In a small regulatory office in Sacramento, California, in 2007, a handful of farmworkers and scientists gathered to explain to state officials why chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide, should be considered a toxicant under Proposition 65, a state law that prohibits businesses from discharging substances known to cause birth defects and reproductive harm into the drinking water.
Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate insecticide, was first developed as a cousin to the nerve agents stockpiled during World War II. The chemical has been banned for household use for more than a decade, and studies have shown that infants born to mothers with high levels of chlorpyrifos in their bodies have significantly higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders, problems with in utero development, brain impairments, low birth weights and endocrine disruption.
Workers who handle produce, though less at risk, are also endangered by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a chemical sprayed to kill worms and other pests. Many have been found to experience headaches, seizures and bouts of vomiting.
But in the agricultural fields of America, where mostly migrant laborers and their families work to produce almonds, corn, peaches, grapes, alfalfa and other crops, chlorpyrifos is still applied with regularity. The chemical is known to stay on the bodies and clothing of workers when they return home to their families, and it easily drifts with the wind into local community
buildings—from daycare centers and hospitals to churches and playgrounds. California farmers use about
1.3 million pounds of it every year.
Remembering that meeting in Sacramento, Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), recalls that people critical of chlorpyrifos “each got one to two minutes to speak.” Then came the scientists working for Dow Chemical, the principal manufacturer of the chemical in the United States.
“There were five Dow scientists, and they each got five to ten minutes. It was mind-boggling, the preference for their input over the victims and the consumer rights advocates and the farmworker advocates,” says Dr. Reeves.
The advocates have also been overpowered financially by the industry. Over the last decade, PAN has spent about $21,000 on lobbying in Sacramento. Dow, meanwhile, has spent more than $1.2 million on lobbying in the California capital during the same period.
In the end, chlorpyrifos was not deemed by the state to be a toxic substance subject to regulation under California’s Prop 65.
This imbalance of power in favor of industry also prevails at the national level, stalling progress in Washington on protecting farmworkers from dangerous chemicals used in agriculture.
In 1996, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act, which required the EPA to create standards for protecting children from pesticide use by 2006. That deadline has long since passed, and critics argue there has not been enough regulatory action. The EPA has also refused a request from PAN North America and the Natural Resources Defense Council for a ban on chlorpyrifos.
Finally, in January of this year, the EPA opened for public comment a rule on evaluating the environmental and human health risks caused by pesticide drift from farms into nearby areas, including homes and schools. And last month, the agency released a long-awaited proposal to update safety laws regarding the handling of pesticides by farmworkers.
But pesticide manufacturers are poised to beat back the EPA’s efforts. CropLife America—a trade group for companies including Dow, Bayer and DuPont that spends more than $14 million a year on research and advocacy—is not only in close communication with the EPA; it has worked with congressional allies to block the agency’s attempts at regulation. The organization called on Representative Darrell Issa of California, chair of the House Oversight Committee, to investigate the administration for pursuing agricultural regulations, including the so-called “spray-drift” rules. According to CropLife officials, these reforms “unnecessarily cost farmers time, money and liability, and significantly impact U.S. agriculture and the economy.” In response, Issa has held multiple hearings to undermine the EPA—under the guise of protecting “Job Creators Still Buried by Red Tape,” as one session relating to the EPA regulations on pesticides was titled.
Dow Chemical and other companies are relying on close ties forged with other legislators, particularly those in the Republican Party. In addition to Issa’s committee, a number of GOP legislators have sponsored amendments to appropriation bills that would block EPA action on pesticide rules. The recently passed farm bill included a bipartisan amendment exempting certain forms of pesticide pollution from enforcement under the Clean Water Act.
Farmworker advocates can bring few political resources to the table, but the pesticide industry extends the promise of re-election to its allies. After the
Supreme Court enabled unlimited corporate spending
in politics with its Citizens United decision, Dow Chemical increased its contributions to politically active nonprofits. The company hiked donations to the US Chamber of Commerce from $1.7 million in 2009 to more than $2.9 million in 2012. These funds augmented the $644,143 in direct contributions made by Dow’s political action committee to largely Republican federal candidates in the last election.
In a troubling display of post–Citizens United politics, the American Chemistry Council, another trade group funded by Dow and other pesticide producers, began airing campaign-style advertisements in favor of industry-friendly politicians, even those in safe seats. In many cases, the ads have aired well more than a year before the election, a visible reminder that allegiance to chemical companies comes with political rewards.
Although studies in California suggest that a shift from chlorpyrifos to less toxic pesticides would come at minimal cost to farmers, the transition has been slow. And for Dow, which manufactures two chlorpyrifos-based products, Dursban and Lorsban, the status quo is quite lucrative: the company, which produces a range of chemical products, generated over $4.8 billion in profits last year.
Dow has not only emerged as a powerhouse
of traditional lobbying; it has also kept up the pressure on regulators in other ways. The company maintains a website, Chlorpyrifos Protects (chlorpyrifos.com), that gives the public an accessible platform for sending letters to the EPA opposing regulation.
Meanwhile, informational fact sheets distributed by Dow attempt to sow doubt about the potential health risks. “Since any substance can cause harm given sufficient exposure, nothing can be called ‘safe’ in absolute terms,” reads one chlorpyrifos white paper sponsored by the company. “A couple tablets of aspirin, for example, can relieve a headache. But an overdose of aspirin can be fatal.”
These efforts, however extensive, are only the more aboveground forms of advocacy. If the battle over atrazine, another controversial pesticide, is any indication, more subterranean lobbying is probably afoot.
As recent court documents reveal, Syngenta, the producer of atrazine, doled out grants to a wide array of public relations firms, political pundits and think tanks to discredit Berkeley professor Tyrone Hayes, whose research found that atrazine causes reproductive deformities in frogs. (A recent article in The New Yorker by Rachel Aviv chronicled the company’s years-long campaign against Hayes.) Some tactics used by Syngenta were reminiscent of the ’90s-era tobacco wars, or the more recent attempts by the fossil-fuel industry to block action on climate change. Right-leaning think tanks—including the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise—were listed in Syngenta’s internal “third party stakeholder” database. Officials from some of the organizations on that list received contributions from Syngenta to place opinion pieces in local media defending atrazine. To win over journalists and scientists, Syngenta offered expense-paid trips to Switzerland, where the company is based.
But there were also some innovations in building influence. A Syngenta public relations document instructs company officials to purchase “Tyrone Hayes” as a search term on the Internet, “so that anytime someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material, not his,” according to filings with the Madison County Circuit Court in Illinois.
Syngenta officials also debated whether to encourage CropLife America, the pesticide trade association now fighting the spray-drift rule, to lead a pro-pesticide campaign to shift public opinion. Citing recent industry efforts to reshape the perception of biotechnology and the plastics industry, Syngenta concluded that “the public image of Syngenta would improve if the public image of pesticides/pesticide companies
improved overall.”
Dow, meanwhile, is accused of conducting an underhanded campaign against critics of chemicals like chlorpyrifos and di-
oxin. “Dow hired a private security firm to obtain confidential information about Greenpeace,” charges Charlie Cray, a research specialist with the environmental group. “The firm hired former intelligence and off-duty police officers to steal documents from Greenpeace’s offices and plant paid informants inside allied organizations.” Last year, after Greenpeace filed a lawsuit against Dow and other defendants, a Superior Court judge in Washington, DC, dismissed four of its claims—a decision the group is appealing—but allowed part of the suit to move forward. (Dow officials did not respond to requests for comment.)
In the current battle over pesticide regulation, Dow has given presentations to agricultural officials portraying groups like PAN as outside the mainstream. Last year, a Dow lobbyist in New Zealand attempted to downplay PAN’s arguments about chlori-
pyrifos. In one slide, he argued that the pesticide must be safe because it is not listed as a toxicant under Prop 65 in
California—a state in which Dow dominates the political process.
While the larger efforts to control and
regulate chlorpyrifos may have stalled, the EPA in February released a long-awaited rule to at least inform farmworkers of better safety standards for handling harmful pesticides. The original safety rule was created in the mid-1990s. Advocacy groups criticized it as weak and poorly enforced. An updated version was supposed to be released in 2008; why the EPA took another five-plus years to act remains a mystery.
The newly released rule builds on the existing regulations to ensure that all workers handling pesticides are at least 16 years old (except in cases of family farms). The rule also updates the law to ensure that workers will undergo training every year (rather than the previous standard of every five years) to learn about the health risks associated with pesticide use and how to handle these chemicals safely during application.
But along with that step forward, there has also been a step back. The EPA’s new standard removes a requirement that farms provide a central posting of information about pesticides. Under the new proposal, workers may obtain pesticide information if they ask for it, but the requirement that such information must be posted in an area where workers congregate has been eliminated.
So why the delays, and the arguably weakened pesticide safety rules? “Our best guess is that there has been very strong industry pushback,” says Dr. Reeves.
She might be on to something. White House logs show that just weeks before the EPA released the new worker-protection standard, there was at least one major meeting between administration officials and four senior officers from CropLife America.
5. Bloomberg BNA, “Florida Sen. Nelson Calls Sea-Level Rise, Climate Change ‘Compelling Story,’ Announces Hearing”
March 12, 2014
By Anthony Adragna
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Bloomberg BNA he plans to hold a field hearing April 22 in Miami Beach with members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the effects of climate change and sea level rise.
It is not clear whether the hearing will be a full committee or subcommittee hearing. Nelson chairs the Subcommittee on Science and Space.
“South Florida is the area that is most threatened by sea level rise in the continental U.S.,” Nelson told Bloomberg BNA.
Nelson said the hearing also will examine how local governments in the area are adjusting to the impacts of both climate change and sea level rise and how shifts in the climate are affecting budgetary decisions in local communities.
A day earlier, during the Senate’s all-night session on climate change, Nelson took to the floor to call South Florida “ground zero for sea level rise.”
“What is threatened the most in the continental United States is the Miami area,” Nelson said March 10. “We have a compelling story to tell.”
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has identified South Florida as one of the vulnerable regions in the world to property damage as a result of sea level rise.
A city official told Bloomberg BNA in December 2012 that Miami modified building codes to require new buildings to be more resilient to hurricanes and has increased its number of stormwater pumps from four to 11 over the past 10 years .
South Florida ‘Highly Vulnerable.’
Projections for sea level rise in South Florida are 1.5 feet to 2.3 feet by mid-century and three feet to five feet by 2100, leaving the region “highly vulnerable to the effects of global sea level rise,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Infrastructure in highly-developed areas that are at risk include power plants, power generating facilities, airports, solid waste disposal sites, schools, prisons and hospitals,” according to the 2011 NRDC fact sheet.
6. Reno Gazette-Journal, “Nevada Near Top on ‘Clean’ Jobs List”
March 12, 2014
By Yvonne Beasley
A new report lists Nevada as No. 7 on a list of states with the most clean-energy jobs announced in 2013.
The Silver State generated more than 3,300 jobs last year in sectors tracked by the report’s sponsor, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2).
Other states in the report’s top 10 are California, Texas, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, New York and Missouri.
Most of the state’s new jobs were in the solar industry, said Bob Keefe, communications director for E2.
On the Northern Nevada side of the E2 map are:
A solar project at the Desert Research Institute in Reno.
Solar arrays at the Apple data center east of Sparks.
A geothermal project at TGP Dixie in Pershing County.
A geothermal project headed by Ormat, near the Nevada border in Mono County, Calif.
Statewide solar projects by Solar City.
To see all the report’s renewable projects in Nevada, visit www.cleanenergyworksforus.org.
Nevada is on track to get 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. That means more jobs in the future, according to Keefe.
“We’ll see job growth from people manufacturing, installing and making these solar projects work,” he said.
The E2 report, released Wednesday, tracked 78,600 jobs from about 260 projects around the country.
“Obviously, you’ve got a lot of sun out there, but you’ve also got great renewable portfolio standard policies in Nevada,” Keefe said. Renewable portfolio standards are designed to increase generation of electricity from renewable resources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
E2 is a business-policy group affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental action group.
7. Al Jazeera America, “Agent Orange from Farm to Table”
March 12, 2014
By Anna Lappé
While my sister-in-law put the finishing touches on Thanksgiving dinner, I listened to her friend recount the losing battle her husband, a Vietnam veteran, fought with lung cancer. She explained her husband’s illness was caused by his wartime exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, produced primarily by two companies, Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Named for the colored band on its transport tanks, Agent Orange was a cocktail of chemicals, including an herbicide called 2,4-D. Shortly after the spraying — conducted to deprive guerrilla fighters of cover and a food supply — started in 1962, reports began to emerge of serious health effects, from birth defects to other illnesses. To this day, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs offers an Agent Orange registry health exam for the possible long-term problems caused by exposure, and more than 40,000 veterans have submitted disability claims. The Red Cross estimates that 1 million Vietnamese were affected, including third-generation children born with severe birth defects.
In January the U.S. Department of Agriculture opened a public comment period on the environmental and health impacts of a new suite of crops engineered to be resistant to 2,4-D. These corn and soybean plants, produced by Dow AgroSciences, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, would be the first developed to be resistant to the herbicide.
According to experts, the introduction of these new crops could cause 2,4-D use to jump, big time. Chuck Benbrook, a pesticide policy expert with the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, has estimated that if it’s approved, the engineered corn could cause applications of 2,4-D to jump 20-fold by 2019.
That’s particularly concerning because experts have long shown that 2,4-D causes serious harm to humans, especially when used over vast swaths of farmland and lawns. Largely because of such concern, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the chemical’s approval, first granted in 1948.
NRDC researchers and other critics of 2,4-D point to studies showing the chemical is a neurotoxin and that exposure to it can cause hormone disruption, certain forms of cancer and genetic mutations. The chemical has also been linked to lowered sperm counts, liver disease and Parkinson’s disease as well as adverse effects on reproductive and immune systems. What’s further worrisome is that 2,4-D is known to drift, affecting areas near farms, including streams, rivers and wildlife.
In April 2012 the EPA rejected the NRDC’s petition, stating that the group did not prove that the chemical was unsafe in the manner it is used. Despite the EPA’s actions, public health advocates have maintained that there are serious human health impacts, based on compelling evidence from peer-reviewed studies around the world. A University of Minnesota study found a greater frequency of genetic mutations in pesticide applicators who had higher rates of 2,4-D in their urine. A National Cancer Institute study found farmers exposed to 2,4-D upward of 20 days a year had a higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma than nonfarmers did, by a factor of six. The EPA’s fact sheet notes that the chemical has shown toxic effects on the thyroid and gonads and expresses concern about potential “endocrine-disrupting effects.”
With all these risks, why are chemical companies like Dow and Monsanto formulating seeds to be resistant to this decades-old chemical with a terrible health track record? The USDA said these new crops are intended to “help address the problem of weeds that have developed resistance to other herbicides.”
But what’s driving the weed resistance in the first place? In part, the widespread use of another genetically engineered technology by the same chemical companies: Roundup Ready corn and soybeans developed by Monsanto. Introduced in the 1990s, Roundup Ready corn and soybeans account for 70 and 90 percent of those crops, respectively. Since then, farmers have sprayed so much of the relatively inexpensive Roundup herbicide that weeds have been developing resistance. Roundup-resistant weeds now pose such a problem for farmers that the head of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts told The New York Times these superweeds are “the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen.”
But, 2,4-D-resistant genetically engineered corn and soybean seeds will lead to more weed resistance. In 2012 the trade journal Weed Science reported on new, previously undocumented 2,4-D-resistant weeds. As the new plants encourage more spraying of 2,4-D, this weed resistance will expand. This is particularly worrisome because 2,4-D is much more toxic than Roundup; it is the seventh-largest source of dioxins (PDF) in our environment, and it bioaccumulates, meaning it builds up in our bodies and in the environment over time. “If Dow Chemical’s 2,4-D-tolerant corn and soy crops are approved by the USDA, hundreds of millions more pounds (PDF) of this toxic chemical will be used on crops, with ever-increasing residues on our food,” the Center for Food Safety’s Rebecca Spector told me. And because 2,4-D can drift, even organic crops, grown by farmers who by definition do not use herbicides, are at risk from neighbors using those genetically engineered seeds.
The real motivation behind the introduction of those products is Monsanto’s and Dow’s bottom lines. Simply put, producing new herbicide-resistant seeds is one of the best ways to boost sales of chemicals. “[Genetically engineered] seeds are the growth engine of pesticide companies,” said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, a coalition that seeks to replace harmful pesticides with ecologically sound alternatives. “This is the primary reason that pesticide companies began buying up seed companies in the 1980s and then engineering seeds to be used with proprietary pesticides. The profitable trend for chemical companies continues today and has kept American farmers on this pesticide treadmill.
Decades after Agent Orange was sprayed over South Vietnam, we have borne witness to the human toll of exposure to its cocktail of chemicals, including 2,4-D. It would be wise to approach with extreme caution any regulatory action that would encourage more — not less — use of 2,4-D. What’s more, herbicide use on American farmland simply perpetuates a vicious cycle: Spraying leads to weed resistance, which leads to more spraying. The solution is to break the cycle by investing in a different kind of innovation, one that promotes ecological solutions to weed control.
On March 11, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service closed its public comment period on the question of regulating these new crops. If the USDA approves the seeds, the EPA still has to assess whether and how 2,4-D should be sprayed. Until then, environmental and health advocates, such as the Center for Food Safety, are urging Americans to air their concerns about this new use of genetic engineering. It’s time we pivot from a corrosive cycle and support the kind of innovations that get decades-old, toxic chemicals off our farms, fields and lawns.
8. ClimateWire, “Calif.’s Pioneering Low-Carbon Fuels Rule Could See Multiple Changes”
March 12, 2014
By Anne C. Mulkern
California’s landmark law requiring lower-carbon fuels is poised for a rewrite.
Advisers to the state’s Air Resources Board yesterday detailed proposed revisions to the low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS), a first-in-the-nation regulation. Potential changes include allowing oil companies to earn program credits for making refinery upgrades that shrink greenhouse gas pollution.
That amendment would give businesses more options while still meeting goals of the program, ARB staff said. The projects also could lower the cost of complying with the state’s cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, said Mike Waugh, chief of ARB’s transportation fuels branch.
“If you can reduce your GHG emissions at the refinery itself, you reduce your obligation under cap and trade, but legitimately, you reduce your emissions and your life cycle for the LCFS,” Waugh said. “So you can do something that benefits both programs.”
Representatives from oil companies, alternative fuels manufacturers, environmental groups and health associations crowded into a meeting room in Sacramento to hear about the changes. It became so packed that it violated a fire code limit of 90 people, forcing many to relocate to another site where they watched remotely.
Revisions to LCFS would go before the board for a vote later this year. Agency staff is recommending that ARB readopt the regulation, which was first approved in 2009. It’s one of several rules rolled out after passage of the states’ 2006 climate law, A.B. 32. Transportation accounts for about 40 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The proposed LCFS rewrite follows a 5th District Court of Appeal ruling that ARB when it approved the fuels law violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the state Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The court last summer said that the agency could continue to enforce LCFS while it worked to rectify the issues (ClimateWire, July 16, 2013).
The LCFS aims to cut the carbon content of fuels sold in California 10 percent by 2020. To meet that goal, a fuel blender must keep the average carbon intensity (or CI) in its total volume produced below an annual limit set by ARB. The mandate is frozen at 1 percent reduction because of the court ruling.
ARB staff said there are signs that the LCFS is working with regulated companies reporting 5.4 million metric tons of credits and 3.3 million metric tons of deficits through 2012.
But agency aides also are analyzing what low-carbon-intensity fuels are likely to be available for compliance by 2020 as well as the 2030 time frame “based on industry, academic, and government sources,” it said in a concept paper. “Staff is also in the process of identifying which of these fuels are likely to come to California to be used for compliance with the LCFS.”
Oil companies want changes
Many oil companies see the LCFS as unworkable. They repeated their concerns yesterday as ARB staff detailed the proposed changes.
“A limit on sufficient volumes of low enough CI fuels will occur prior to 2020, which will impact longer-term compliance,” said Gina Grey, the Western States Petroleum Association’s vice president for strategic policy for fuels. “The development of commercial-scale, ultra-low CI fuel, such as cellulosic ethanol, has been much slower than originally envisioned.”
Although there will be some transition to lower-carbon fuels, she said, “staying the course with the current program design could result in disruptions in the marketplace. Our conclusion is that a program revision is needed.”
Miles Heller, director of California fuels and regulatory issues at Tesoro, asked whether ARB would be allowing credit for improvement projects done since 2010, the base-line year for the LCFS.
Waugh said no firm decision has been made but that his initial response was that credits would only be given “henceforth.”
Environmental groups said they wanted to prevent any revisions that would dilute the strength of the program. The 10 percent reduction by 2020 is “tremendously important,” said Tim O’Connor, attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. “I don’t think that the court would have wanted ARB to back away from that.”
“The uncertainty that’s created when you do that sort of can become the self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “You create the uncertainty, and then you don’t get the fuels that can come and be online to meet the standard, so maintaining that commitment” to the 2020 goal is vital.
Simon Mui, director of the California vehicles and fuels program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said that there is room for oil companies to help meet their LCFS obligations through emissions reductions along the petroleum development chain.
An NRDC report last year found that improvements at refineries and at the crude oil production level could go toward 17 to 33 percent of the low-carbon fuel standard by 2020. Those could be done through refinery improvements that include energy efficiency, adding renewable power, and carbon capture and sequestration.
But if projects are allowed for credits, he said, green groups want assurances that the state is not “inadvertently creating anything that would create a backsliding mechanism for the other parts of the refinery. We really want to see a strong counting mechanism here.”
Other revisions proposed
The ARB staff also is suggesting other revisions to the LCFS. Those include looking at different carbon intensity levels for 2015 through 2020. That’s needed because the current level of 1 percent by 2015 would have been in place three years.
“Staff currently has no proposal to change the average carbon intensity target of 10 percent by 2020,” the concept paper said. “However, staff believes that some post-2015 ‘curve-smoothing’ will be appropriate.” The study on projected fuel availability “will inform the 2016-2020 compliance targets.”
ARB also will be looking at post-2020 targets that call for carbon intensity reductions above 10 percent.
In addition, staff is looking at adding a “cost-containment” provision. There are two possible options. One would be a “Credit Clearance Option,” under which regulated parties would be allowed to carry over carbon cut deficits to the next compliance period. They would need to purchase their required share of credits, which would be made available during a “credit clearance” period.
“Deficits that are carried over would become part of that regulated party’s cumulative compliance obligation and incur interest, to be repaid in subsequent compliance years,” the concept paper said.
The other alternative would be a “Credit Window Option.” Under that, if regulated parties were unable to obtain sufficient credits on the open market, they could buy compliance-only credits from ARB at a predetermined price. Proceeds would go into the Air Pollution Control Fund, unless directed differently by the Legislature.
One oil company executive questioned whether many of the proposed revisions would damage the LCFS and its market-driven promise.
“It actually circumvents the whole purpose of the LCFS,” said David Stern, senior adviser on advanced fuels at Exxon Mobil Corp. The credit window and credits for emissions reductions at refineries are “off-ramps” from the program, he said.
“All options divert from the intended purpose of the LCFS, which is to try to encourage investment and development of low-carbon-intensity fuels,” Stern said. Exxon Mobil has invested $600 million in algae biofuel technologies.
Waugh with ARB responded that the program is market-driven and that “having a healthy credit market — and healthy means reasonable credit prices — will drive investment.”
1. New York Times, “Exploiting California’s Drought”
March 11, 2014
By Mark Bittman
The San Joaquin Valley in California can be stunningly beautiful: On a visit two weeks ago, I saw billions of pink almond blossoms peaking, with the Sierra Nevada towering over all. It can also be a hideous place, the air choked with microparticles of unpleasant origins (dried cow dung, sprayed chemicals, blowing over-fertilized soil), its cities like Fresno and Bakersfield sprawling incoherently and its small towns suffering from poverty, populated by immigrants from places as near as Baja, Mexico, and as far as Punjab, India.
This year, much of its land is a dull, dusty brown rather than the bright green that’s “normal” here, even if “normal” is more desire than reality. With water, this is the best agricultural land in the world. Without it, not so much.
If you have a good well you can pump groundwater at will; atypically, that’s not managed by the state, so you pay only for drilling and electricity. Until, of course, you draw down the water table (or your neighbor does, by drilling a deeper well). This race to the bottom is not sustainable, and wells are going dry as a result. You may have a large or small water supply contract from one of hundreds of water districts, granted when population was small, water was plentiful and environmental concerns ignored. These contracts have boosted the economy at great cost to the environment, and they’re ludicrously unfair: Some pay $7 per acre-foot (roughly 326,000 gallons), others $200; some have to buy on the open market, and cities generally pay over $1,000. Even then, supply may be inconsistent.
This is an issue that falls to the state government, which has begun to slowly do its work, passing a package of water policy bills in 2009 that mandate a start to measuring water use and a pricing system based in part on the amount of water used. “The regs don’t say that you have to use less water, but that you have to use it more efficiently,” Doug Obegi, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained to me.
Efficiency is imperative: The amount of water available is not going to increase. This drought may or may not be a result of climate change, but the area is likely to become warmer and drier as the effects of global warming increase.
But there is enough water to farm here while providing water for 40 million people (with more coming) to drink, bathe and wash. Some of that will be “gray” (recycled) water, especially for lawns, the single biggest use of residential water. And, according to Obegi, it could be that not every one of the current eight million irrigated acres will be planted.
This year, about 500,000 of those acres will lay fallow, and although that may not have a national impact — mass-produced food is a global commodity, and California’s drought is not a global tragedy — it’s a crisis locally. Many farmers are receiving 0 percent (as in none) of their federal water allocation, and some are pulling out their trees or crops or not bothering to plant at all. The more squarely the state faces the necessary changes now, the more drought-resistant California can be in the years to come.
For a consistently reliable water supply, one of two things must happen: Crop selection must be modified or water delivery and use must be more rational. But trying to persuade politicians, farmers and even water conservation advocates to think about determining what’s grown may be nearly impossible.
Still: The most water-thirsty “crops” are industrially produced meat and dairy and the food needed to sustain them. Livestock guzzle water and produce a double-digit percentage of our greenhouse gases. Other crops, like almonds (California grows 82 percent of the world’s supply), are mostly exported.
But the state can’t dictate what landowners grow. (We can help by eating fewer animal products.) It can, however, price water more fairly and make profligate water use unprofitable.
Some argue that more dams would solve the problem, but as the Sierra’s snowpack shrinks, this might be a recipe for expensive and dry reservoirs. Less expensive and more effective solutions would essentially overhaul the water delivery system to provide metered water on demand (now it’s often “use it or lose it”), which in turn would encourage more farmers to install drip irrigation, which quickly pays for itself. The state should not just monitor but also manage groundwater usage, and mandate treatment and recycling plants; these may be expensive, but they’re far less so than building new dams and shipping water hundreds of miles. Furthermore, if farmers were encouraged to build soil health by rotating crops, planting cover crops and integrating more organic matter, the land itself would become more drought-resistant.
The current drought is a crisis worth exploiting. Because rainfall cannot be relied upon but California agriculture is of critical importance nationally (the state provides around 50 percent of our fruits, vegetables and nuts), these kinds of changes are needed to begin to shift an arcane and antiquated system.
2. Forbes, “Clean Energy Job Growth In US Starts To Slip”
March 12, 2014
By Aaron Tilley
Clean energy investments had it rough in 2013, and US job growth in that sector is having a bit of trouble too.
That’s at least according to evidence in a new report out today from Environmental Entrepreneurs(E2),an environmental advocacy organization for businesses. While the clean energy industry made plans to add an additional 78,000 new jobs at 260 projects in 2013, that’s a 30% dip from the 110,000 job announcements in the previous year. (E2 has only been tracking clean energy job growth for the past two years.)
The solar industry was the biggest contributor in 2013 with more than 21,600 jobs announced, and California unsurprisingly was the leading state with 15,400 new clean tech jobs. Texas came in second with around a dozen wind energy projects planning to create more than 6,300 new jobs. Projects dedicated to improving building efficiency brought in 12,500 jobs and public transportation brought in another 11,400.
The biggest reason for the 30% drop in job growth over last year is due to ongoing regulatory uncertainty around federal tax credits and state renewable energy mandates, says E2 communications director Bob Keefe. Congress let the generous tax credits the wind energy industry had enjoyed for more than two decades expire in December–and it looks unlikely they’ll be reinstated in 2014. And four major energy efficiency tax credits and initiatives expired at the end of last year too. On top of that, several states, including North Carolina and Kansas, have attempted to roll back mandates on renewable energy requirements for their utility grids.
“That did a lot to damper hiring in 2013,” Keefe said.
“Ongoing regulatory uncertainty takes a serious toll,” Geoff Chapin, CEO of energy efficiency company Next Step Living, said in a statement. ”Elected officials shouldn’t be holding back economic growth–they should be encouraging it.”
It’s also hard to ignore the continued natural gas boom in the US with its cheap, plentiful energy. 2014 may not look much better for clean energy job growth with the natural gas boom projected to maintain its surge in 2014.
Let’s just hope Elon Musk gets that $5 billion Gigafactory up and running sometime soon.
3. LiveScience, “New NYC Flood Maps Will Soon Be Out-of-Date”
March 10, 2014
By Rob Moore
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is tasked with helping evaluate the nation’s vulnerability to flooding and storm surges, and providing maps that reflect the best scientific understanding of where flooding is most likely to occur.
FEMA maps guide people out of harm’s way, helping homeowners make informed choices about where they live; aiding cities as they decide where where to build critical infrastructure, schools and hospitals; and assisting business owners as they decide where to set-up shop.
But FEMA’s flood maps have never accounted for the future impacts of climate change on flood risk.
Hurricane Sandy served as a wake-up call for New York and New Jersey — and the nation — to become better prepared for flooding and the other impacts of climate change. As Sandy illustrated with fearsome efficiency, flooding is among the biggest risks the nation faces from climate change — as the climate warms, sea levels rise while extreme weather and storm surges raise the likelihood of floods.
Given that it can take two decades or longer for FEMA to update flood maps for an area, it’s important that those maps start providing a more realistic look at both present and future risk.
In fact, doing so is now required by law. In 2012, Congress passed legislation that required FEMA to factor in future climate risks, as part of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act.
Given the impact of Hurricane Sandy it was hoped that new maps for New York City might be the test case for how to account for sea-level rise and climate-related impacts. But when FEMA released updated maps recently, these risks were still not accounted for.
NRDC filed formal comments on the new maps with FEMA today, raising the fact that FEMA did not factor-in future sea-level rise and other climate factors, as it is now required to do. Our analysis also shows that the past decade, or so, of sea-level rise (about 2-3 inches) was not accounted for in the maps, nor were the computer models calibrated against data from Sandy. Instead they were calibrated to earlier, less extensive floods. While the new maps are a big improvement over the previous ones, there are areas inundated by Sandy that still lie outside the newly mapped 100- or 500-year flood plains — and the impact of sea-level rise on future flood risk isn’t accounted for, at all.
When Hurricane Sandy flooded parts of New York City many residents never expected to be underwater because flood maps did not show their neighbored as being in the danger zone. In the aftermath, it became all too clear how out of date FEMA’s maps of flood zones were, having left communities in the dark about the risks they actually faced, as illustrated in the image below.
Residents of New York will likely find that FEMA’s newly proposed maps are similarly obsolete in coming years. As sea levels continue to rise , the areas susceptible to flooding will also increase. The New York Department of State, using data from FEMA’s new flood maps and storm-modeling data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, assembled an interesting set of Risk Assessment Maps that show how flood risks change in response to sea level rise. Below is a comparison between those maps and FEMA’s.
As you can see, the area at risk in the future is far more extensive than FEMA’s new maps indicate. New Yorkers may not feel the impacts of this in the short-term, but the last maps were not updated for 30 years. If New York has to wait another 30 years, FEMA’s proposed maps seriously underestimate the risk of flooding for the city.
New York is not alone. All across the country, river- and coastal-flood maps are woefully out of date. New Yorkers know firsthand the importance of making sure FEMA’s updated maps reflect real flooding risks. We are counting on the agency to revisit their updated maps and give New Yorkers — and ultimately the entire nation — a real assessment of what’s at stake, and how to better prepare for the future.
4. Sky News (Australia), “Coal still China’s economic necessity”
March 6, 2014
March 6, 2014
Forty years of digging for coal have left the miner with tuberculosis and drained his village water supply. But he, like China, clings to the resource as his economic mother lode.
‘If I did farming, it would take me a year to get what I make in a month,’ said the 55-year-old, surnamed Di and sporting the blackened fingernails of someone who has spent most of his days beneath the hills of China’s poverty-stricken Guizhou province.
His lungs ‘don’t hurt much’, he said, although in any case he cannot afford treatment.
China too has embraced the economic benefits of coal despite the threats it poses to health and the environment.
But anger has mounted over the stubborn smog that regularly cloaks Chinese cities, and authorities have repeatedly promised action since President Xi Jinping took office a year ago.
Premier Li Keqiang vowed to ‘declare war against pollution’, speaking on Wednesday at the opening of the Communist-controlled National People’s Congress legislature’s annual session.
The government will cap total energy consumption, shut 50,000 small coal-fired furnaces, clean up major coal-burning power plants and take six million high-emission vehicles off the roads, he promised.
Yet in practice, changing course will be tough in the face of swelling energy demand and pressure to sustain economic growth, already at its lowest levels since 1999.
‘Since environmental issues have become so public – everybody is talking about them, the international community is talking about them – the government feels the need to deal with environmental issues more seriously,’ said Xiaomin Liu, a Beijing-based coal expert with the consultancy IHS CERA.
‘They will do a lot of things, but I don’t think that will change things fundamentally,’ he said. ‘The first priority is still to keep up economic growth.’
China uses more energy than any other country and is responsible for about half the world’s coal consumption, relying on the fossil fuel for two-thirds of its energy supply.
Public pressure over pollution erupted in January 2013 when an ‘airpocalypse’ of smog choked Beijing, with particulate matter shooting 40 times past UN standards and horrifying images spreading worldwide.
The scandal prompted authorities to stop burying the problem – cities and state-controlled media began reporting on air quality, and this year 15,000 factories were required to regularly publicise emissions data.
Over the past year Beijing has already allocated 1.7 trillion yuan ($A312.57 billion) to improve air quality, and pledged to evaluate officials not only by their economic but also environmental record.
Last September it announced tough air pollution limits, called for coal-use cuts in three densely populated areas, including the capital, and promised to shave nationwide coal consumption to 65 per cent of total energy by 2017.
Some of the targets were ‘ambitious’, sending an important message, said Alvin Lin, the Beijing-based China climate and energy policy director at the Natural Resources Defence Council.
‘Once you send that signal, then everybody has to try to meet it.’
But implementation is another matter and even stricter quotas were still needed, he warned.
Another concern is that wealthier coastal cities, which have complained about pollution the loudest, will simply shift their coal-fired power-stations and factories to the country’s poorer interior.
‘Maybe the push is going to be just to push the dirty coal further west,’ said Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Wilson Center in Washington. ‘It’s the whole NIMBY (not in my backyard) movement.’
Guizhou, in southwestern China, has pledged to close half its mines – about 800 – by mid-2014, but this follows a broader trend of shutting small struggling operators without necessarily cutting overall production.
Villagers around Anshun have long reaped the benefits of coal, earning as much as 6000 yuan a month from mining, double what they could make as labourers and 10 times more than farming.
Nonetheless, some see the advantages of ending the fatal explosions, blackened lungs, water shortages and the threat of collapsing homes.
Opposite a mine in Anshun, along a picturesque valley lined with gentle terraces of yellow rapeseed amid a cascade of smoky blue hills, Zhang Yan tearfully recalled searching for her husband after he failed to return from work one evening last year.
He had been killed on the job, and their teenage son said his father had urged him to find another trade.
‘He had talked with me about this, ‘Don’t do this work, stay above ground, it’s safer’,’ he said, huddling around a stove for warmth.
Up the road, a longtime miner surnamed Yan said he quit last year for fear of the ‘hidden danger’.
‘Closing the mines is a good thing, first off because of the environmental damage to homes and water,’ said the 45-year-old father of two, who is debating whether to leave his family in Guizhou to find work elsewhere.
‘The benefits are only temporary,’ he said. ‘In the long term there are no benefits.’
5. Greenwire, “Ads take aim at N.C. governor over spill”
March 11, 2014
By Manuel Quinones
Environmentalists are going on the air with television ads against North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s handling of more than a dozen coal ash impoundments in his state.
Two new ads, sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, accuse McCrory, a former Duke Energy Corp. executive, of lax oversight of the dumps. Last month a leak sent more than 30,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River.
“It didn’t have to happen,” said one of the 30-second spots. “The massive coal ash spill in the Dan River. But Governor Pat McCrory didn’t do his job.”
The ads, airing on both cable and broadcast stations in the Greensboro and Raleigh markets, go after McCrory and lawmakers signing off on legislation last year to fast-track certain permits and change groundwater compliance boundaries. Backers called it a way to ease regulatory burdens.
One of the spots is also critical of a proposed settlement with Duke over pollution concerns from pits at the Asheville coal plant in Buncombe County and the Riverbend coal plant in Gaston County (Greenwire, Feb. 11). State regulators are reconsidering the deal.
“Instead of protecting our air and water, Pat McCrory’s administration worked to block safeguards,” said one spot. “Then cut a sweetheart deal to let industry off the hook.”
The two new ads — one began airing last week, and the other goes on the air today — were cut by Mark Longabaugh of the Democratic media firm Devine Mulvey Longabaugh. Longabaugh, working with several environmental groups, led the media assault on then-House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) in 2006, leading to his defeat.
At least some progressive groups are looking to use McCrory’s environmental record against him and to roll back recent Republican gains in North Carolina. NRDC has also aired ads against hydraulic fracturing featuring singer James Taylor, who grew up in North Carolina.
McCrory, who is not up for re-election until 2016, has lackluster approval ratings. A Public Policy Polling survey released last month found that 43 percent of respondents would vote to re-elect McCrory and 44 percent gave him negative ratings.
PPP surveyed 708 registered voters Feb. 6-9, right as Duke was trying to contain the spill. The poll had a 3.7-point margin of error.
Democrats are hoping to lure state Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) into the race two years from now.
McCrory and members of his administration are fighting back against claims of lax enforcement. “We did what we were supposed to do,” said North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary John Skvarla during a news conference last month.
Yesterday, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, McCrory said, “What’s discouraging about this Dan River situation, and several others that are coming up now, is the responsibility wasn’t taken care of somewhere within that organization.”
NCDENR is inspecting all of Duke’s coal ash impoundments and is mulling whether to ask the company to relocate at least some of them. Executives have said such a move could cost ratepayers.
Regulators have in recent weeks issued Duke several notices of violation from its coal ash dumps. Last week they also cited the company for dam deficiencies at ponds connected to the Cliffside power plant.
The state also released water samples from late last month, which showed that levels of iron and aluminum upstream from the spill exceeded state standards.
Advocates at NRDC say McCrory and his Cabinet should have done more earlier. “Pat McCrory has coal ash on his hands,” the NRDC ads also say. “It’s time for him to clean it up.”
6. E&E News, “Science panels revive CCS technology debate”
March 10, 2014
By Jean Chemnick
Two House Science, Space and Technology subcommittees will continue the chamber’s scrutiny of carbon capture and storage this week, hearing differing views about the technological basis of U.S. EPA’s proposed rule for new power plant carbon emissions.
The Wednesday morning joint hearing of the Environment and Energy subpanels will examine whether CCS has reached a level of development that will allow future coal-fired power plants to hold their emissions to a maximum of 1,100 pounds per megawatt-hour of CO2. The average conventional coal plant releases 2,000 pounds per MWh or more. It will feature one of the key architects of the rule: EPA acting air chief Janet McCabe.
It is a debate House members have come to know very well.
The chamber spent much of Wednesday afternoon trading shots on whether EPA’s September proposal will encourage deployment of a new and promising emissions-reduction technology, or whether it is a main front in the Obama administration’s so-called war on coal.
The debate breaks down increasingly along party lines. Only 10 Democrats crossed the aisle to vote Thursday for the measure, H.R. 3826 by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), that would kill the proposal, compared with 19 who backed an outright ban on EPA carbon rules in 2011. And three Republicans voted against the measure, although Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) said later that she voted “no” by accident (Greenwire, March 6).
The bill now heads to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.
The two panels will hear from technological and policy experts who will express different views about the state of CCS’s development.
Highlighting the hearing will be McCabe, who will seek to defend her agency’s justification for the proposed rule.
Among the witnesses will be Scott Miller, general manager and CEO of City Utilities of Springfield, Mo., who has argued that EPA’s proposed mandate that all new coal-fired power plants use CCS will stifle American coal-fired generation.
He will share the dais with David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has argued that the technology is ready and lacks only a regulatory trigger to help it gain a stronger foothold.
“Clearly, if you don’t have a requirement to control CO2 from power plants, and it costs something to control CO2 from power plants, you’re not going to see it used commercially,” he said just before EPA unveiled its new power plant proposal in September (E&E Daily, Sept. 18, 2013). “That is not the test that EPA has to show in order to adopt the standard, and it’s not the test of good policy.”
Steering a middle course will be Robert Hilton, a vice president of government affairs at Alstom Power Inc., who told an Energy and Commerce subcommittee in 2012 that while CCS is technologically sound, it has yet to develop to the point where equipment manufacturers like his company can provide customers with the kinds of guarantees made for commercial technology (E&E Daily, Sept. 21, 2012).
Robert Trautz, senior project manager of the industry research center Electric Power Research Institute, will round out the hearing.
Schedule: The hearing is Wednesday, March 12, at 10 a.m. in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building.
Witnesses: Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation; Robert Hilton, vice president of power technologies for government affairs at Alstom Power Inc.; Robert Trautz, senior project manager of the Electric Power Research Institute; Scott Miller, general manager and CEO of City Utilities of Springfield, Mo., American Public Power Association; and David Hawkins, director of climate change programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
7. Nature World News, “Safety of US Nuclear Reactors Called into Question in New Report”
March 8, 2014
By James A. Foley
A new report by the influential non-profit group National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) suggests that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still not adequately protecting American nuclear reactors from the risk of hydrogen explosions such as the ones that crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear campus three years ago.
In a severe loss-of-coolant scenario such as the one that triggered the meltdown at Fukushima after a March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, uranium-filled fuel rods, made of zirconium, react with steam, producing tons of combustible hydrogen.
At the Fukushima campus, hydrogen accumulated and then detonated, breaching the reactor’s containment structures and spewing radioactive material into the air, forcing evacuations and creating a nuclear incident that is still being dealt with to this day. Japanese authorities day it will take decades to fully decommission the Fukushima power station.
The NRDC reports that that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is relying on outdated computer models that do not account for the sort of rapid gas build-up that triggered the Fukushima meltdown.
The NRDC contends that that the only safety measures in place are merely “token steps to address the problem” and that safety systems in place are just as likely to trigger an explosion as they are to prevent one.
“US reactors remain vulnerable to the threat of runaway hydrogen production and leakage in a severe nuclear accident, with little or no capacity to safely reduce or vent potentially explosive concentrations of this gas before it explodes and contaminates the surrounding region,” said Christopher Paine, senior policy adviser in NRDC’s nuclear program and contributing editor to the report.
Paine says that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has only designated the risk of hydrogen explosions as a third tier threat in their post-Fukushima response plan.
“It is clear from this report that it will be costly to maintain the safety of the aging reactors in the current US nuclear fleet, which will increasingly operate beyond their 40-year initial license terms,” said Paine. “Nuclear power faces significant competition from lower-cost electricity sources, creating an unsettling tradeoff between economic viability and public safety.”
To read more from the NRDC, visit their webpage.
Earlier this week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said that 80 of the 100 nuclear reactors in the US met their annual safety and security performance objectives.
Nine reactors were said to need to resolve one or two problems of “low safety significance.” Another nine were “operating at a degraded level of performance.”
Two other reactors rounded out the 20 that did most meet their objectives. Browns Ferry-1 in Alabama required “increased oversight due to a safety finding of high significance, which will include additional inspections to confirm the plant’s performance issues are being addressed,” NRC said.
According to the NRC, Fort Calhoun reactor in Nebraska “is currently under a special NRC oversight program distinct from the normal performance levels because of an extended shutdown with significant performance issues. The oversight panel cleared the unit to restart in December, but the plant will remain under special oversight until the panel returns it to the regular program. Therefore, the plant will not receive an annual assessment letter.”
8. Fox 54 (Huntsville), “Cash in on spring cleaning”
March 10, 2014
By Andrew Housser
Something about the arrival of spring and the promise of sunshine often encourages people want to organize and tidy up their lives. This year, do not focus your spring cleaning efforts solely on chores like cleaning window screens and wiping down baseboards. Here are six ways that purging and organizing clutter can boost both your mood and your finances
Make money. In any room in your home, you are bound to find belongings that you rarely (if ever) use, whether it’s a lamp you don’t like, books collecting dust or racks of barely worn clothing. Determine which items are sellable at a yard sale, a consignment shop, or online at a site such as eBay or Craigslist. Donate the rest. While you will not make money from a donation, you can earn a tax deduction. Use an online guide such as the one provided by Goodwill to determine the estimated fair market value of your donations. Remember to write down the value immediately and save the receipt for tax-filing purposes.
Save on late fees. Nearly a quarter of people pay bills late because they misplace the bill, according to a Harris Interactive poll. Signing up for electronic statements and online automatic payments is the best way to keep this from happening. You also can sign up for payment reminders via sites like WhatBills?. To keep track of bills that arrive in the mail, open all mail immediately. Then set up an accordion folder with slots for “to pay” and “for taxes.” Make it a practice to go through these documents weekly, review your finances and pay bills.
Organize receipts. It can be more than frustrating to be stuck with a purchase you do not want because you cannot find the receipt to return it and get your money back. Try a smartphone application like Shoeboxed to photograph your receipts and then store and categorize them digitally. You can even tag the receipts as reimbursable or deductible for tax purposes. If you prefer to hang onto paper, designate another slot in the above-mentioned accordion folder for receipts.
Cut food costs. Americans waste 25 percent of the food they buy, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. For a family of four, that amounts to an average of somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275 a year. While cleaning out your kitchen pantry, take stock of items you have on hand and write these down so you can use up food on hand and avoid buying unneeded multiples. Group similar items together so they are easy to see. Check expiration dates, and try to use up foods before they go bad.
Stop splurging. Paring down to only the things that you truly want, need and use can provide insight into frivolous ways. Perhaps you do not really need 50 pairs of shoes or five pairs of black pants. Or maybe your obsession with certain collectibles has gotten out of hand. The next time you are tempted by a purchase, stop and think about the bags of clothing and housewares that you gave away. Before you buy, ask yourself if you really need the item and whether you will put it to good use – or if you would rather have the feeling of freedom from debt or the ability to save for retirement or a paid-off vacation.
Protect your home. When you begin decluttering, start an inventory of your valuables that you would want to have replaced or be reimbursed for in the event of a theft, fire or other home damage. (It is a good idea to take photos of items as well.) This will make things easier should you ever need to file an insurance claim. Store this list outside of your home, such as in a safe deposit box, or use a smartphone application to link photos and descriptions. Update the list any time you make a big purchase.
It might be called spring cleaning, but to stay on top of things, it’s a great idea to do a clean sweep of your home each season. Letting things slide for too long can cost more than you might think.
1. NPR, “FEMA Flood Insurance Law Faces Partial Repeal Over Premiums”
February 27, 2014
By Ailsa Chang
Click here to listen to the segment
The House is expected to vote as early as next week to partially repeal a 2012 law that overhauled the National Flood Insurance Program, which is tens of billions of dollars in debt.
The law was meant to make people living in flood-prone areas foot more of the insurance bill. But lawmakers didn’t realize how many homeowners would be affected — or how hard they’d be hit.
You can find some of those homeowners in Bayou Gauche, about 30 miles west of New Orleans.
Like other parts of South Louisiana, this small community is below sea level. Pumping stations — as well as 6-foot levees — keep the land here dry during storms. But the levees are nowhere to be found on the most recent flood map proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA decided it will no longer recognize levees that aren’t certified by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, so now Bayou Gauche shows up as a high-risk flood zone. Resident Gordon Matherne says that’s ridiculous.
“The levees have been here for about 60 years, and we’ve never had a flood since the levees were built,” says Matherne, 64, whose house is a five-minute drive from the levees.
Being deemed a higher risk as a flood zone has some financial consequences under the federal law passed in 2012: It has made flood insurance rates skyrocket for many longtime homeowners.
Living ‘Check To Check’
The idea behind the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act was to shift the financial risk of insuring flood-zone properties from the government to homeowners. What lawmakers didn’t foresee at the time was that new FEMA flood maps would bring staggering premium hikes for many of the 5.5 million people covered by the National Flood Insurance Program.
“We live check to check. And if you walk around this neighborhood, you’ll find that most of the people around here live check to check,” says Ward Aucoin, another resident of Bayou Gauche.
Right now, Aucoin is paying $370 per year for flood insurance. But in a few years, under Biggert-Waters, he’s supposed to pay more than $17,000 annually.
“You know, a meteor could hit my house, but I don’t go spend $20,000 for just in case it hits my house,” says Aucoin. “No one’s flooding around here, so it’s kind of hard for me to justify — and everybody to justify — $18,000, or whatever it’s gonna be, for something that’s never happened that may happen.”
Because Aucoin still has a mortgage on his red-brick, ranch-style home, he’s required to purchase flood insurance. And he says he can’t move away because he’s tethered to the petrochemical industry that’s based here. Those companies need to be near water to transport their products up and down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Most of Aucoin’s neighborhood is in the same boat.
“Neighbor across the street works at a local chemical plant. This one just retired from a chemical plant,” says Aucoin, pointing to various houses down his street. “That’s my brother next door, works at a chemical plant. I work at a chemical plant.”
An Environmental Concern
Stories like Aucoin’s have been flooding into congressional offices, so now lawmakers are trying to delay or repeal parts of Biggert-Waters.
But that worries environmentalists like Rob Moore, policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“We need to turn the conversation from ‘How do we keep insurance cheap?’ to ‘How do we make insurance work as a way of managing the nation’s flood risk?’ ” says Moore.
Moore argues that when flood insurance rates are kept artificially low, people remain and rebuild in flood zones, and then there’s more political pressure to erect levees and seawalls that disrupt natural water systems.
“Those things have major environmental consequences for water quality, for fish, for wildlife habitat,” Moore says.
Who Can Leave?
There’s a financial argument, too. Payouts from massive hurricanes, like Katrina and Sandy, have left the National Flood Insurance Program about $24 billion in the hole. That’s why Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania says the government shouldn’t continue paying for people’s desire to live in flood-prone areas.
“We’d be going back to a system where, literally, Warren Buffet can buy a home and as long as he makes it his primary residence, he can continue to have taxpayers subsidize his cost of flood insurance,” Toomey said on the Senate floor last month.
But to assume communities can just pick up and leave strikes Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana as unrealistic.
“New Orleans is 8 feet below sea level. It’s one of the great cities of the world. We’re not going to move the entire city. We’re not going to move St. Augustine, Fla. We’re not going to move Miami Beach,” Landrieu says in an interview in her Senate office.
Landrieu helped push a bill through the Senate that would delay most insurance rate increases for four years. House leaders are trying to drum up enough votes to go a step further and outright repeal the biggest hikes.
2. The Hill, “Divided Republicans turn to Rep. Waters”
February 26, 2014
By Russell Berman
A politically fraught fight over flood insurance has prompted a split between the House Republican leadership and a top committee chairman, forcing senior GOP lawmakers to bargain for votes instead with liberal Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the panel’s top Democrat.
GOP leaders have struggled to gain enough support to pass a House alternative to flood insurance legislation the Senate approved last month, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told members in a closed-door conference meeting he was delaying a floor vote until next week, as he works with Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, to finalize the measure.
In the same meeting, the Republican chairman of that committee, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), told lawmakers he could not support the leadership’s approach and would vote against the bill when it makes it to the floor. A leading conservative, Hensarling served through 2012 as chairman of the Republican Conference, the fourth-ranking position in leadership, and his move to stand up in opposition to the leadership on a matter within his committee’s jurisdiction was described as “an awkward moment” by a fellow House Republican in the meeting.
Lawmakers from New York and coastal states like Florida and Louisiana have pushed for a fix to legislation enacted in 2012, after its implementation caused insurance premiums to spike for thousands of residents in their districts, threatening their ability to keep their homes.
“We’ve got a flood insurance bill that’s having some unintended consequences that need to be resolved, so we expect to have a bill on the floor next week,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters Wednesday, citing the issue as an example of legislation that stands a good chance of making it to President Obama’s desk in the election year.
Unlike issues like immigration reform that have been slowed by the looming midterm elections, campaign politics has spurred action on flood insurance. It is a major topic in the high-profile Senate race in Louisiana between incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) and Rep. Bill Cassidy (R), and it also has been championed by Rep. Michael Grimm (N.Y.), a vulnerable Republican with many constituents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Superstorm Sandy.
The Senate last month passed legislation authored by Landrieu to delay the premium increases for up to four years, but Cantor dismissed it as “a nonstarter” in the House because it guts reforms in the 2012 law and adds to the deficit.
Cantor and a group of Republicans from coastal states have instead sought a middle ground that would cap rate hikes to an average of 15 percent without adding to the deficit. They are working with Waters, who, along with former Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), was the chief author of the 2012 law that sought to address the $24 billion debt of The National Flood Insurance Program.
Leadership aides downplayed the delay, saying the details that needed to be worked out with Waters were technical in nature. In a statement to The Hill, Waters said the bill remained “a work in progress.”
“We continue to work in good faith with Republican leadership to address a number of technical and substantive issues related to the legislation, with the ultimate goal of correcting the unintended consequences of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act,” she said. “This could not be done overnight.”
Yet the House attempt at a compromise has not won over Hensarling, and it has drawn criticism from an unusual coalition of conservative and environmental groups who say it erodes important fiscal reforms to The National Flood Insurance Program and subsidizes the purchase of homes in dangerous flood zones.
“This is just not good policy,” said Rob Moore, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is not going to help us bring the flood insurance program back into fiscal solvency.”
Jimi Grande, a senior vice president at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, said the House proposal would continue to subsidize people who knowingly purchase homes in areas that are increasingly unsafe.
“We have to make sure that the rate people are charged matches the risk they face,” Grande said.
Lawmakers who supported the 2012 law complained the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in drawing updated flood maps and setting new rates based on the measure, misinterpreted Congress’s intent. But the rush to fix the law so soon after its enactment underscores the difficulty Washington has had in delivering on promises to rein in federal spending.
The GOP leadership’s decision to sideline Hensarling has rankled some members who are wary of dealing with Waters, a fiery liberal who became a Republican target when she was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. The panel cleared her of any violations in 2012.
Conservative groups have rallied around the former Republican Study Committee (RSC) chairman, who has been mentioned as someone who could return to the House leadership after Boehner retires.
“Congressman Jeb Hensarling’s leadership on flood insurance deserves recognition,” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola said in a statement. “House Republican leadership wants to stick taxpayers with the bill for higher subsidies to beach-front properties, but Congressman Hensarling took a principled stand.”
Chocola criticized the leadership for skirting the committee process and bringing the bill directly to the House floor, despite Boehner’s repeated commitments to follow “regular order.”
Hensarling declined to comment through a spokesman, David Popp, who said he does not discuss “what happens at internal member meetings.” Aides said he stressed his respect for the leadership while voicing his disagreement with its approach.
Unlike most spending issues, the flood insurance debate has not fallen completely along ideological lines. Current RSC Chairman Steve Scalise (La.), represents southern Louisiana and supports the House bill, spokesman Stephen Bell said. Thousands of Scalise’s constituents could face premiums as high as $20,000, Bell said, and Scalise supports a delay “but thinks we should work for real reform.”
Yet, despite Scalise’s backing, Republican leaders found themselves in a familiar position of lacking enough party unity to pass a bill without turning to Democrats for help.
“There was an opportunity to craft a Republican proposal, and it didn’t get done,” a GOP leadership aide said.
The aide said Republicans remained confident they would have a comfortable majority of their conference supporting the bill when it comes to the floor next week.
3. The Christian Science Monitor, “California drought: With big rains coming, calls to soak up every drop”
February 26, 2014
By Daniel B. Wood
Not one but two major rainstorms are expected to hit this drought-parched state beginning Wednesday night – dumping more water than fell in the last 8 months combined. But it won’t dent the overall drought, researchers hasten to add.
The first storm could bring a quarter inch of rain and the second, arriving Friday, is expected to douse the coast and valleys with 1 to 2 inches of rain, and deposit as much as four inches in the mountains.
For perspective, the state has received just 1.2 inches since last July while the average is 10.45 inches by this date each year.
“The combination of the two storms have the potential to bring the biggest rains to Southern California since March of 2011,” says Marc Mancuso, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com in a statement. And meteorologist Jordan Root, adds: “Folks who may be disappointed by rain totals from the first event should not worry.”
But that is not enough solace for Los Banos farmer Joe Del Bosque, who has farmed in the San Joaquin Valleyhis entire life. He is fallowing 200 of his 2,000 acres – putting 100 seasonal harvesters out of work – and worrying about whether his 1,200 acres of almond trees might not survive at all.
“There’s too many people ahead of me that will get this water,” says Mr. Del Bosque, noting that livestock ranchers higher on the state’s priority list have herds with no grass at all. A colleague in the Mendota area is already pulling out 1,000 acres of almond trees, he says, and other farmers are getting no water at all.
Del Bosque says he hopes the storm’s water can be captured and stored so that the region doesn’t start out next year with no water. “It will help to start out with some water in the bank,” he says.
Some environmentalists are hoping the back-to-back storms can remind city residents how bad things are for their rural counterparts.
“While every little bit helps, the storms this week will not be enough to bring our rainfall and snowpack up to normal levels. Our reservoirs are so deep in deficit, that these storms are unlikely to boost delivery allocations to cities and farms from the big state and federal projects,” says Kate Poole, senior water attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental advocacy group. “But at least everyone can turn off their sprinklers and let the yard, parks, and hillsides soak up some moisture – and, hopefully, capture some of it in backyard rain barrels for use down the line.”
The rains will be a selective – if minor – blessing, and could prove more useful if officials do the right thing, says Dave Puglia, senior vice president at the Western Growers Association. “The bigger benefit – potentially – is for the runoff that pulses into the [Bay Area] Delta to be captured for storage before it runs out to sea,” he says.
What needs to happen, he says, is for governmental agencies to be primed to maximize the pumping of water from the environmentally sensitive Delta area while the storms’ runoff is at its height, and keep the pumping level as high as possible for as long as possible, something that didn’t happen with the last big storm to pass through.
“While the agencies did ramp up pumping to the max allowable, they took their sweet time getting there and we lost significant water,” says Puglia.
4. Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, “Investing in green spaces can pay off for property owners”
February 27, 2014
By Paul Davis
Nestled between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, Seattle’s unique beauty and quality of life are intimately tied to its local waterways.
Unfortunately, the water bodies that define the region are threatened by urban runoff, which flushes heavy metals, toxic chemicals, sediments — and sometimes raw sewage — into the city’s waterways when it rains.
However, adoption of greener approaches to stormwater management on commercial properties could help improve regional water quality while also generating significant value for private property owners.
Leading pollution source
Stormwater runoff is a common concern in cities and suburbs, where natural landscapes capable of infiltrating and filtering rainwater are transformed into impervious surfaces such as streets, rooftops and parking lots.
These hard surfaces prevent water from soaking into surrounding soil, producing large volumes of runoff that flow into local waterways untreated. In Seattle, polluted runoff is the leading source of pollution in urban rivers and creeks as well as the primary source of many contaminants in Puget Sound.
A new initiative
The impacts of urban runoff on local water quality have encouraged the city of Seattle and Seattle Public Utilities to develop innovative policies and programs aimed at reducing stormwater pollution.
One of the prominent solutions that Seattle has adopted is a commitment to rebuilding the city’s natural capacity to absorb rainwater through the use of green stormwater infrastructure. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) — such as urban trees, rain gardens and green roofs — help absorb, store and filter water, and are proven methods to help solve local stormwater runoff and pollution issues.
GSI projects, which have been increasingly adopted by municipalities across the U.S., can prove to be more cost-effective for cities than traditional “gray” stormwater systems (pipes and vaults), while also producing additional public benefits including increased open space, reductions in the urban heat-island effect, and cleaner air.
In 2013, Seattle continued its leadership in GSI implementation, when the City Council passed a resolution setting an ambitious goal to manage 700 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually using GSI by 2025. The city’s new GSI initiative brings together city departments, including the Office of Sustainability and Environment, Seattle Public Utilities, the Department of Transportation, Planning and Development, and Parks and Recreation to develop a coordinated approach to significantly increase the use of natural drainage systems on public lands.
Private investments
While restoring the “sponge” capacity of the city’s public property to absorb rainwater is essential, nearly two-thirds of Seattle’s land is private property. With so much land privately held, the active participation of these property owners is critical to helping the city meet its GSI development targets in a manner that is both financially efficient and timely.
Although the primary benefit produced by private property investments in GSI is the health and protection of public waters, a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council illustrates how investing in GSI can also produce a wide-range of financial benefits to private property owners.
A first-of-its-kind report, NRDC’s “The Green Edge: How Commercial Property Investment in Green Infrastructure Creates Value,” promotes a holistic benefits accounting methodology that considers all of the monetizable benefits that accrue to property owners who invest in GSI practices.
The report is available online athttp://go.nrdc.org/greenedge.
Drawing on much of the recent academic and practitioner literature on the value created by urban green spaces, the Green Edge’s findings suggest that investing in natural landscapes produces more attractive properties that can draw higher rents (5-7 percent), increase customer retail spending and reduce crime. Additionally, these green assets can also result in energy savings, as trees provide shading and windbreak services, and green roofs can enhance insulation.
Finally, the Green Edge report notes that one of the key factors impacting the financial attractiveness of GSI projects is the incentives offered by the local municipality for the public services provided. As a result of the proven stormwater benefits produced by GSI, cities across the U.S. have begun to create incentives for private property owners to invest in green landscapes.
Seattle is no exception. The city’s Rainwise program helps subsidize the cost of GSI installation on private property, while the Stormwater Credit program provides permanent water bill rebates to those who install GSI practices on their property. Together these two programs are some of the more generous incentives in the nation — and send a strong signal to property owners that their active participation in GSI development is an important part of reducing the region’s stormwater pollution.
A healthier future
As Seattle grapples with how to accommodate additional development and population growth while also protecting Puget Sound, Lake Washington, Lake Union and other waterways that make Seattle unique, investments in natural solutions like GSI put us on a path toward a healthier and more attractive future.
Because watersheds are regional assets whose health depends on the collective action of all landowners, the engagement of both public and private property owners is essential to protecting local water quality. Fortunately, by applying the full-benefits accounting approach laid out in NRDC’s Green Edge report, an increasing number of property owners may find that investing in GSI not only helps make for a better Seattle, but is also a savvy financial decision.
5. Washington Post, “IG: State Department did not break rules when hiring consultant for Keystone report”
February 26, 2014
By Steven Mufson
The State Department’s inspector general cleared the department on Wednesday of allegations that it improperly hired an outside consultant with industry ties to evaluate the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The inspector general’s report said that the department’s process for selecting the contractor, a global firm called ERM, “substantially followed its prescribed guidance and at times was more rigorous than that guidance.”
The report said that the inspector general found two instances of “reasonable deviations from prescribed guidance,” but added that these “did not adversely affect the selection process.” It concluded that the department’s conflict-of-interest procedures were “effective,” though it faulted the department’s “partial disclosures” for contributing to “misperceptions” about the choice of ERM.
The State Department hired ERM to write the final environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL pipeline. That report, a key factor in the ultimate permit decision by President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, said that blocking the pipeline would not stop or slow down the development of Canadian oil sands. Environmental groups say the oil sands, whose exploitation emits more greenhouse gases than conventional oil development, undermine efforts to prevent or slow climate change.
Environmental groups have argued that ERM’s past work for a variety of oil and pipeline companies, including TransCanada, meant that the firm had conflicts of interest that discredited its environmental assessment of TransCanada’s Keystone XL project. But the State Department and many energy experts say that any environmental consulting firm able to undertake a report of the magnitude of the State Department environmental assessment would have worked for the industry at some point or another.
The inspector general’s report also said that the IG’s own office of investigations conducted a preliminary inquiry into allegations by environmental groups that ERM and the department concealed past work by the consulting firm and decided that “the matter did not warrant opening a criminal investigation.”
State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said “we welcome the findings” and added that the department will “continue to work to improve and strengthen the procedures for selecting third-party contractors and assessing potential conflicts of interest.”
Environmental groups criticized the report. The inspector general “was looking at a very narrow question of whether the process was followed,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. “It wasn’t looking at the overall question. The American people need to know whether there was a real or perceived conflict of interest.” He asserted that there was a “real conflict and no amount of process can disguise that from the American people.”
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said that “the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline fails President Obama’s climate test, and today’s inspector general report does nothing to change that.”
However, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said the Obama administration is “guilty of foot-dragging” and called on Obama to make a decision.
An earlier State Department contractor for the Keystone environmental study also came under criticism for its previous work for oil and gas companies.
TransCanada spokesman Davis Sheremata said in an e-mail Wednesday that “this is the second time groups opposed to the project have gone to the well with conflict of interest allegations and, once again, they have proven to be false.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Kerry cut off questions about Keystone during an interview with The Washington Post and other news organizations.
“I have no comments at all on any aspects of Keystone,” Kerry said. “Really right now I’m doing my due diligence. And I want to do it in a complete tabula rasa approach.”
He added, “I just want to look at the arguments, I want to read all that’s been done. I haven’t done it yet, purposefully. I’ve stayed away from it, which is what I was supposed to do. And now I’m entering a very intensive evaluation.”
Also on Wednesday, before the inspector general report was released, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a report complaining that the State Department had not given enough consideration to the effect the Keystone XL would have on local communities as well as the global climate. The NRDC said that State should have given greater emphasis to air and water pollution at the oil sands sites, cancer rates among indigenous First Nation groups in Canada, and pipeline spills.
6. The Guardian, “Supreme court gives qualified support for EPA to set emissions limits”
February 24, 2014
By Dan Roberts
Environmental campaigners drew solace from a supreme court hearing on greenhouse gas controls on Monday that left justices appearing to support the US government’s broad role in setting emissions limits for power stations.
The case, brought by power companies and 13 states including Texas, argued that the Environmental Protection Agency was overstepping its powers by using air quality rules to tackle climate change.
But a majority of court justices who spoke during Monday’s 90 minute oral arguments did not appear willing to re-open a 2007 Massachusetts case upholding the broad power of the EPA, according to experts following the case.
David Doniger, the Climate and Clean Air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “Chief Justice Roberts made that clear early on, saying that even though he was a dissenter in 2007, the court isn’t going to reconsider Massachusetts, or the follow-on decision in American Electric Power v Connecticut, which establish EPA’s authority to set Clean Air Act standards for both vehicles and factories that emit carbon pollution that drives dangerous climate change.”
Doniger added: “Now more than ever, it’s clear that EPA’s authority to set standards for carbon pollution – the basis of Obama’s Climate Action Plan – is firmly settled on solid ground.”
The results of the latest and narrower challenge to EPA powers may not be known for several months and industry lawyers argued the agency should not be able to use permits to tackle climate change.
“Greenhouse gases are not included within the (permitting) program at all,” said Peter Keisler, representing the American Chemistry Council, which is among two dozen manufacturing and industry groups that want the court to throw out the rule.
But solicitor general Donald Verrilli, arguing for the administration, urged the court to leave the permitting program in place. “This is an urgent problem. Every year that passes, the problem gets worse and the problem for future generations gets worse,” Verrilli said.
The supreme court justices also appeared unwilling to hear challenges to basic science of linking carbon pollution and climate change.
“None of the petitioners tried to pick a fight there,” said Doniger. “Justice Antonin Scalia asked sarcastically if sea level rise was occurring anywhere but in Massachusetts, but no one seriously challenged EPA on scientific issues this time.”
Supreme court experts expect a decision in the case, called Utility Air Regulatory Group v Environmental Protection Agency, may narrowly come down in favour of the EPA based on Monday’s arguments.
“As is so often the case when the Court is closely divided, the vote of Justice Anthony M Kennedy loomed as the critical one, and that vote seemed inclined toward the EPA,” said Lyle Denniston of the legal website Scotusblog.
7. United Press International, “Conservationists call for weed killer reduction to protect butterflies”
February 25, 2014
February 25, 2014
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) — Conservationists say they want tougher rules limiting the use of a common weed killer to save America’s dwindling population of monarch butterflies.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, in a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency, said current levels of use of glyphosate — first marketed under the brand name Roundup — are wiping out milkweed, the only plant upon which monarch caterpillars feed.
That’s having a significant negative effect on the life cycle of the beloved orange-and-black butterflies, which migrate back and forth across the United States, Canada and Mexico, it said.
Because each monarch lives only a few weeks in the summer, it takes several generations to make the long migratory round trip, making the availability of milkweed all the more important, council senior scientist Sylvia Fallon said.
“The tenfold increase in the amount of glyphosate being used corresponds with huge losses of milkweed and the staggering decline of the monarch,” Fallon told the Los Angeles Times. “We are seeking new safeguards desperately needed to allow enough milkweed to grow.”
The EPA is scheduled to complete a new review of glyphosate rules in 2015, but “given the rapid decline in monarch numbers, the EPA should take immediate steps to review and restrict glyphosate’s uses,” the council’s petition says.
8. KCET ReWild blog, “Monarch Butterfly Die-Off: Is Monsanto’s Roundup Really the Issue?
February 25, 2014
By Chris Clarke
A large environmental group is charging that a dramatic increase in the use of a popular weed-killer is the culprit in the last decade’s plunge in monarch butterfly numbers, and the group is asking the EPA to clamp down on the chemical spray to save the butterfly. But are they blaming a symptom rather than the real cause?
On Monday, the Natural Resources Defense Council announced it had petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to start an urgent review of its rules for use of the weed-killer glyphosate, trade-named Roundup, which it says is behind the die-off in monarch butterfly numbers.
The EPA’s last Roundup rules were released in 1993, and since then use of the pesticide has multiplied by a factor of 10. And that’s the same factor by which numbers of monarch butterflies have fallen in the last decade or so. Many scientists agree that there’s a direct link between Roundup use and the die-off of the popular butterfly. But focusing exclusively on Roundup runs the risk of missing the big picture.
Roundup is a popular villain these days, and that’s for one reason: it’s closely tied to the issue of genetic engineering. The chemical itself has been in widespread use in both agricultural and household settings since the 1970s as a broad-spectrum herbicide. “Broad spectrum,” in this context, means that unlike some herbicides that kill only broad-leaved plants and leave grasses alone, Roundup can potentially kill any green plant that comes into contact with it. When it was introduced, it became extremely popular with homeowners and gardener for its relatively non-toxic constituents.
That’s not to say it was safe: concerns have been expressed since the 1980s that commercial formulations of the weedkiller affect frogs and other amphibians, and it is possible to be exposed to enough Roundup to make you sick. But despite recent descriptions of Roundup as “highly toxic,” it isn’t really, at least not when you compare it to other highly toxic weedkillers that are still used very widely. Back in the 1970s and 1980s Roundup seemed like a magic bullet, and it became the spray of choice for weed control uses ranging from cleaning out dandelions in sidewalk cracks to removing invasive plants in wildlands.
As popular as it was in the 1980s, Roundup’s prominence has skyrocketed in the last two decades. That’s because Roundup’s developer, the Monsanto Corporation, has spent those last two decades developing genetically modified crop plants such as corn and soya that can resist Roundup. That means, in theory, that a farmer could spray her crops with this broad-spectrum plant killer and kill only the weeds between them. That’s appealing to many farmers, who would otherwise be spraying weedkillers like atrazine and 2,4-D, which are far more damaging to human and wildlife health.
Since Monsanto released its so-called “Roundup-Ready” soy and corn onto the market in 1995 and 1996, respectively, sales of Roundup have skyrocketed.
And that’s what NRDC points to as a main cause of the monarch’s die-off. In 2013, farmers planted 259,511 square miles of corn and soy fields, an area just a sliver smaller than the state of Texas. The vast majority of that acreage is planted in Roundup Ready crops: 97 percent of the soy grown in the U.S in 2012 was Roundup-Ready, and about 70 percent of the corn is likewise.
Which means that at least that much acreage in the Great Plains and Midwest has been sprayed repeatedly with Roundup, killing off many of the plants that aren’t corn or soy across hundreds of thousands of square miles.
Among the plants being killed is milkweed, which monarch butterflies rely on as a larval food plant. Migrating adults lay eggs on milkweed plants. Those eggs hatch out into jade-green caterpillars that feed on the milkweed stems and leaves until they’re ready to metamorphose into the monarch’s jewel-like chrysalis, and thence into adults.
No milkweed, no monarchs. But is Roundup really the issue?
There’s no doubt that tying Roundup to a certain set of crop plants is a huge problem, and it’s a problem from which Monsanto benefits hugely for the time being. Easily one of the five least popular corporations in the world at the moment, Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops are the company’s main profit center, allowing the range of Roundup products to bring in half the company’s revenue 14 years after the company’s patent on the herbicide itself expired in 2000.
NRDC is correct in urging the EPA to assess the environmental effect of the massive increase in Roundup use. But Roundup is a tool being used for a purpose: to convert more and more of the North American plains to agricultural use. It may be a favored tool at the moment, but take that tool away and you don’t necessarily end the eradication of milkweed.
What’s pushing that eradication? Lots of factors. The U.S. agricultural sector is huge, and it’s complex. But part of the answer is in your gas tank.
Since 2007, when the federal government started requiring that oil companies mix billions of gallons of corn ethanol into gasoline nationwide, there’s been a boom in corn country. Monsanto stands fully behind this boom: along with other genetech and pesticide companies like DuPont, Monsanto’s been one of the ethanol mandate’s biggest backers. No wonder: the company stands to make billions. Since 2007, Monsanto has been pushing its Roundup Ready corn as a way to make the notoriously inefficient process of making fuel out of corn a little bit more efficient.
Since 2007, while the amount of corn grown for food for humans and livestock in the U.S. has stayed flat, the acreage devoted to growing corn has increased sharply, by about 29,680 square miles. That’s a land area the size of West Virginia and Connecticut combined. Much of that land had previously been taken up with more mixed vegetation: hayfields, soil conservation lands, verges and ditches, and the edges of woodlots.
In other words, milkweed fields. Monarch butterfly habitat.
To its credit, NRDC readily agrees that there are things other than Roundup use involved in the monarch butterfly die-off. “Although other factors like temperature and drought also affect the monarchs,” said the NRDC’s Sylvia Fallon in a blog post Monday, “…the widespread use of glyphosate in association with genetically modified Roundup Ready crops has been a major contributor to the decline of the monarch population. With glyphosate, says leading monarch expert Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota, ‘We have this smoking gun.'”
NRDC is also encouraging the EPA to assess the effect of other herbicides on milkweed and monarchs. That’s a very good thing, though those other, more environmentally toxic herbicides aren’t getting nearly as much press. It may well be that taking a hard look at Roundup use will be a short-term solution to the monarchs’ disappearance. But it may not matter to the monarchs whether we kill off their offspring’s food plants with Roundup, atrazine, 2,4-D, or a million underpaid laborers with sharp hoes.
If we clamp down on Roundup use without addressing the counterproductive ethanol mandate that’s driven much of the decrease in monarch habitat, we may be taking away that “smoking gun” and ignoring the chemical weaponry remaining in the arsenal.
Let’s not let Monsanto’s late unpopularity distract us from the bigger picture.