1. ClimateWire, “Major Cities Launch Plan to Cut Emissions from Buildings”

January 30, 2014

By Daniel Lippman

Ten major cities across the country announced yesterday they were banding together to save energy and cut greenhouse gas pollutants from a top metropolitan energy user: buildings.

Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia are among the cities that are pledging to cut carbon emissions by up to 7 million tons annually and boost energy efficiency in their buildings, which is estimated to save nearly $1 billion annually in lower energy bills.

“By investing in building energy efficiency, these cities will help combat the pollution that is turbocharging climate change and the extreme weather across the country that’s impacting all of us,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which along with the Institute for Market Transformation is bringing the cities together.

Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Kresge Foundation are supporting the project and will provide funding to help cities develop their buildings’ efficiency plans.

She said the efficiency efforts will also create jobs in a range of professions, such as electricians, construction workers, engineers and architects.

Other participating cities are Atlanta; Orlando, Fla.; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Denver; and Salt Lake City.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made fighting climate change a top priority in office, said in a conference call that he hopes cities, which will design their own building energy efficiency plans, will spread their ideas to other cities across the U.S. and the world. He added that cities account for about 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the global population is rising as well.

More people every day move to cities, and countries like China and India are becoming more urbanized as people find better job opportunities there. Many of these people also eventually join the middle class, and with that, they consume more goods and live in bigger residences, all of which create more emissions.

Educating landlords, tenants and architects

Bloomberg pointed to one example from his efforts in New York to make buildings more efficient. “What we’ve been able to do is to get roughly half of all of the landlords, about 2,500 of them, who were using No. 6 heavy oil and got them to convert to natural gas,” a much cleaner fuel, he said.

Making buildings more efficient is tough for many reasons: Owners of buildings didn’t always make energy efficiency a priority when the buildings were constructed; to look more modern, architects put more windows in buildings than needed; and the heating and water systems in buildings often waste energy if they don’t run at peak efficiency (ClimateWire, Feb. 6, 2012).

Cities, which are often situated next to the ocean, also face profound risks from climate change, particularly flooding from severe storms, heat waves and dangers to their public transportation systems (ClimateWire, Jan. 23). Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said his city is already experiencing adverse effects.

“We’re experiencing a drought which is a direct response and direct outcome from what’s happening with the shifting temperature in the oceans off the Pacific Northwest, and we see many more years where this turns into not just a problem with greenhouse emissions but an impact on the livability of Los Angeles,” he said.

Garcetti said it was time for government to step in to “correct what is really a classic market failure” in that buildings sometimes can’t get the capital to invest in energy efficiency retrofit projects.

Cities have come together in the past for similar efforts, and some cities in this new plan, called the City Energy Project, will likely use legislation to have enforceable goals to cut emissions from buildings, said Laurie Kerr, the project’s director.

2. NPR, “Mayors of ten major cities have joined forces to fight climate change

January 30, 2014

By Elizabeth Shogren

The mayors of ten major cities have joined forces to fight climate change.

NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren reports they plan to do it by reducing the energy the buildings use.

The cities involved include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. Each will come up with a plan to help big buildings reduce greenhouse gas emissions for instance they could follow New York City’s example and get landlords to switch out oil furnace is with natural gas ones. The project is funded by three charities.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti told his fellow mayors that there are clear benefits to working together.

“We look forward to stealing your best ideas, and having our best ones stolen from you.”

3. Philadelphia Inquirer, “Nutter Launches Energy Efficiency Mission for Philly Buildings”

January 29, 2014

By Sandy Bauers

Philadelphia will join nine other major American cities in a coordinated effort to boost energy efficiency in large commercial buildings, Mayor Nutter announced today.

Details on how the efficiency gains would be achieved were slim — first, a plan has to be developed — but officials said that the potential exists for savings of $77 million in energy costs a year. If that were to happen, it would be the equivalent of reducing the amount of climate change pollution generated by 23,000 households, they said.

“Improving energy performance in Philadelphia’s buildings is not just good for the environment, it puts money back in the pockets of building owners, operators, and tenants – and ultimately back into the local economy,” Nutter said in a press release about the announcement.

The national effort, dubbed the City Energy Project, is an initiative shepherded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Institute for Market Transformation.

The largest source of energy use and climate pollution in cities comes not from transportation, officials said, but from their stationary assets: Their buildings.

According to a Philadelphia analysis, buildings are responsible for 62 percent of the city’s carbon emissions, more than either the transportation or industrial sectors. As much as 30 percent of the energy these buildings use, however, is wasted, the analysis found.

Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Orlando, and Salt Lake City also will be part of the project.

Funds are coming from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and The Kresge Foundation. The money will go toward helping each of the cities develop plans and policies to boost energy efficiency.

Philadelphia already has a building “benchmarking” program, where building owners measure and compare the energy performance of their buildings. Think of it as miles per gallon in a car.

“By having more access to data, building owners and managers will be able to compare their building’s performance with other like-sized and –aged buildings, and see how much they could be saving on energy costs,” the city notes on the program website.

I was talking to a realty trust official about it not long ago, and he felt that energy efficient buildings will be more appealing to tenants, although they might cost more per square foot, too, at the outset. Consider a city block where all the big office buildings basically have the same amenities. “Yet, if I said to you, one building is a D, one is a C, one is a B, one is an A. Where would you rent?” he asked.

Laurie Kerr, Director of the City Energy Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in the press release that the ten mayors “are showing there is the political will to put people to work to build a healthier, more prosperous future for America’s cities. In the face of a changing climate and increasingly extreme weather, these city leaders know they cannot wait for the state or federal government to make them more resilient and sustainable – they are taking action now.”

The skills and technology are there, said Cliff Majersik, Executive Director of the Institute for Market Transformation, also in the press release. “But we need a coordinated effort by major cities and the private sector to make it happen.”

4. Houston Chronicle, “Long Path Ahead for Keystone XL Pipeline”

January 31, 2014

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy

WASHINGTON — Even after the State Department releases a major environmental study of Keystone XL, it will be months before the Obama administration issues a final verdict on the proposed pipeline.

Foes of the TransCanada Corp. project, which would link Alberta’s oil sands with Gulf Coast refineries, stressed that while the final environmental impact statement likely to be released today is an important milestone, it is only one step in a long path to a final decision.

“This is far from over,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, international program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Next, we must address whether the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would be in America’s national interest. To that question, there is only one answer: No.”

Once the State Department releases the final environmental study, the public will have a chance to weigh in during a 30-day public comment period.

After that, officials will begin deciding whether Keystone XL is in the “national interest” — a bar established by the same 2004 executive order that put border-crossing pipeline reviews in the State Department’s hands. State officials will consult with the Department of Energy, EPA and other agencies as it weighs security, economic and other concerns. The public will have a chance to comment in writing on the question, and environmentalists have asked for hearings, too.

When the national interest determination comes out, the public will have at least 45 days to comment on it. The EPA and other agencies also can appeal that determination, ultimately putting the final decision in President Barack Obama’s hands.

Climate change: Obama signals Keystone XL decision hinges on its carbon footprint

Separately, the State Department’s inspector general is probing whether the company contracted to perform the analysis, Environmental Resource Management, misrepresented its past work on other projects for TransCanada. That probe isn’t on track to be released before the environmental study — and lawmakers want it resolved before a final decision.

Ross Hammond, a senior campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said it’s unclear how the State Department can “issue a credible environmental assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline when its own investigator general is investigating whether the consultant hired to write the review lied about its ties to TransCanada and the oil companies.”

5. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Who Runs Freedom Industries? West Virginia’s Chemical Spill Mystery”

January 30, 2014

By Paul M. Barrett

Before the lawsuits and the retreat into federal bankruptcy court, before the change in ownership in a veiled roll-up by an out-of-state coal baron, before the Justice Department’s environmental-crimes investigation, the presidentially declared emergency, and the National Guard’s arrival—nine years before all of that—the co-founder of Freedom Industries, the company at the center of the Jan. 9 chemical spill that cut off tap water for 300,000 West Virginians, was convicted of siphoning payroll tax withholdings to splurge on sports cars, a private plane, and real estate in the Bahamas. And 18 years before that, in 1987, before he started Freedom Industries, Carl Kennedy II was convicted of conspiring to sell cocaine in a scandal that brought down the mayor of Charleston.

Little known, even locally, Freedom was born and operated in a felonious milieu populated by old friends who seemed better suited to bartending at the Charleston-area saloons they also owned. “These people who were running Freedom Industries weren’t the sort you’d put in charge of something like chemical storage that could affect the whole community,” Danny Jones, Charleston’s current mayor, says. “Who are these guys, anyway?”

Good question. Kennedy kept the books for bars and restaurants, including a rib house Mayor Jones used to own, although he hadn’t gotten to know him well. “He was pleasant enough,” Jones says. Until the spill, the mayor had no idea his former accountant had been enmeshed with Freedom. That really seems troubling, Jones says, “especially with the cocaine stuff in his history.”

Kennedy’s main partner was a college buddy named Dennis Farrell, who had some technical background and took over Freedom after Kennedy went to prison in 2006. By Farrell’s own account, the company, founded in 1992, nearly ran aground on his watch. Only a rescue in 2009 funded by the federal antirecession stimulus program kept the company going.

The third member of the company’s leadership triad, Gary Southern, has served as Freedom’s public face since the spill. He lives in Marco Island, Fla., and says he’d been advising the company for several years before becoming full-time president in 2013. Not blessed with a talent for public expression, Southern didn’t mention in the first days after the leak of 10,000 gallons of coal-processing compounds that Freedom had been acquired, only 10 days earlier, by Cliff Forrest.

A different sort of character from Kennedy, Farrell, and Southern, Forrest founded and heads Rosebud Mining, the third-largest coal producer in Pennsylvania and the 21st-largest in the country. He’s a prominent figure in his industry and an opponent of what he calls the Obama administration’s “war on coal.” Why he wanted Freedom’s decrepit facilities for blending and distributing chemicals remains a mystery. Publicly, Forrest hasn’t said a word. His connection to Freedom wasn’t confirmed until Jan. 17, when his lawyers put the company into bankruptcy. The Chapter 11 filing in Charleston required disclosure of a financial paper trail that led to Forrest’s coal company headquarters near Pittsburgh via another entity called Chemstream Holdings.

So while the spill revealed once again that porous legislation and murky assumptions about industry self-policing hinder oversight of dangerous chemicals, it also highlighted a peculiar and deeply troubling element of American commerce, one where holding companies and roll-ups make it difficult to determine who’s accountable.

Kennedy grew up in Montgomery, W. Va., a small city on the Kanawha River. He went to college there at West Virginia University Institute of Technology. It was later, in Charleston, that he attained a measure of notoriety.

West Virginia’s rugged mountains and forested hollows are home to struggling coal-mining communities. Locals call the Kanawha region Chemical Valley because of the network of foul-smelling refining plants spread across it. The state ranks among the nation’s poorest. Charleston, with its office towers and expensive eateries, is a place apart: Home to a social and business elite of lawyers, lobbyists, and coal executives, the capital enjoys a wealth and élan alien to the state’s rural and industrial precincts.

In the mid-1980s, Kennedy moved easily in a narcotic-fueled night scene associated with Charleston’s Republican mayor at the time, James “Mad Dog” Roark. Targeted by a federal investigation, Roark pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in 1987, resigned as mayor, and went to jail. The same year, Kennedy, then 30 years old, was charged with distributing the not-trivial amount of 10 ounces to 12 ounces of coke. In a plea deal, he admitted to one distribution count and was sentenced to five years’ probation. In all, federal prosecutors notched some 30 convictions.

A forgiving town, Charleston didn’t ostracize Kennedy. Despite his criminal record, he and Farrell became prolific business partners. Farrell had earned a master’s degree from West Virginia University and for a time was employed by a company called Sherex Chemical. Together they invested in commercial real estate and a saloon in Montgomery called the Bank Bar & Grill. In a laudatory 2002 article, the Charleston Gazette marveled at the pair’s “far-flung array of business ventures,” which included a manufacturer of a synthetic fuel additive, a trucking company, and a plant in the town of Nitro, W. Va., that mixed chemicals. Kennedy’s portfolio also contained Freedom Industries, which he incorporated in 1992, according to filings with the West Virginia secretary of state. (Kennedy, Farrell, and lawyers who have represented them over the years all failed to respond to telephone and e-mail messages.)

Kennedy’s work with the tax ledgers at Freedom is what got him back into serious trouble. When armed IRS agents showed up at his office in Charleston in 2004, he knew why they’d come. “He quickly admitted everything he [had] done,” his criminal defense lawyer, John Kessler, later told U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver Jr., according to the Gazette. Kennedy pleaded guilty to pocketing more than $1 million withheld from Freedom employees’ paychecks that he was supposed to have passed along to the federal government. He admitted, as well, that he’d evaded personal taxes of $510,040.96. “These are large sums,” Copenhaver observed in court. He’d been the judge for Kennedy’s earlier cocaine conviction. “It seems to me,” Copenhaver said during a hearing in January 2006, “you would have learned from past experience.” Since Kennedy apparently hadn’t, the judge sentenced him to 40 months behind bars.

Kennedy’s lifestyle had been expensive, court records showed. Among his possessions were a Hummer H2, two MGB sports cars, five Ford trucks, a pair of excavator vehicles, a private plane, and three two-acre plots on Rum Cay, an island in the Bahamas. His wife, Kathy, had filed for divorce.

In 2005 a prison-bound Kennedy filed for personal bankruptcy. He left Freedom and began to sell his business investments. Freedom, for its part, failed to file an annual report that year and had its state business license revoked. It later reorganized and got its paperwork in order. Freedom sued Kennedy in 2005, seeking to get back money he allegedly misappropriated. Not in a conciliatory mood, perhaps because of his date with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Kennedy filed a counterclaim against Freedom for the value of his 45 percent ownership stake. That dispute resulted, strangely, in the company paying him $800,000 in a settlement.

Nothing if not enterprising, Kennedy eventually struck a deal to get his prison sentence reduced. In exchange for his help with a drug investigation, federal prosecutors persuaded Judge Copenhaver to release Kennedy after only 22 months. An assistant U.S attorney named Monica Schwartz told the judge that Kennedy “was anxious to cooperate.” Under the supervision of federal agents, he made “controlled buys” of cocaine that led to the convictions of two longtime business associates.

Freedom survived Kennedy’s cooking the books, with Farrell replacing his college classmate as president. The compounds the company wholesales control road dust, keep coal from freezing, and help prepare the fuel for burning. One Freedom facility, a tank farm along the Elk River formerly used by Pennzoil (RDS/A) to store gasoline, has 17 huge steel vats capable of holding 35,000 gallons each. Known as the Etowah River Terminal, the tank farm “processes large volumes of chemicals rapidly and cost effectively,” Freedom’s website says. The riverside location allows the plant to do business by barge as well as truck.

Much of Freedom’s commerce comes from distributing products made by larger companies, including a chemicals unit of Georgia-Pacific owned by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. In May 2008, Georgia-Pacific Chemicals announced that Freedom would serve as a distributor of its Talon mining reagents—compounds that reduce ash content and prevent the loss of combustible coal—in eight states: West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Michigan. (Four years later, Georgia-Pacific ended Freedom’s distribution role, the manufacturer said in a written statement. Georgia-Pacific didn’t explain the change and said the West Virginia company is “still a customer of ours.”)

In 2009, Farrell told the Charleston Daily Mail, Freedom faced having to shut down its main Elk River location because silt buildup made it difficult for barges to travel from the terminal to the confluence with the Kanawha River. “At some point, we wouldn’t have been economically fit to run the facility,” Farrell said. “That’s our claim to fame—the barges.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to the rescue. With $400,000 in federal stimulus money, the Army Corps dredged the Elk River and kept the Freedom plant viable.

Freedom and a constellation of affiliated companies were dissolved and reformulated several times in the 2000s, state records show. The purpose of this paper shuffling wasn’t disclosed. Freedom’s operations along the Elk River did not receive much government oversight, according to records and local officials. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leaves regulation of such chemical facilities primarily to the states. West Virginia doesn’t view that delegation of authority as reason to regulate aggressively, however. To the contrary, the state prides itself on being industry-friendly, and Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, routinely castigates what he calls federal overreaching. West Virginia doesn’t require inspection of storage tanks containing potentially dangerous coal-processing chemicals, according to Larry Zuspan, who runs the local emergency planning committee in Charleston. What made the Freedom tank farm on the city’s outskirts unusual, even for West Virginia, is that the regional utility operates the sole intake for the area’s public water system only a mile and a half downriver.

Also surprisingly close to the Freedom site is a cluster of working-class homes. From time to time over the years, Mayor Jones says, people have complained to state authorities about unpleasant odors wafting from the facility. State inspectors have looked around but never reported anything amiss, according to available records. In particular, they didn’t notice that a concrete containment wall meant to prevent any tank leakage from reaching the river was visibly cracked, Jones says. Only after the Jan. 9 spill did Freedom disclose that sometime in 2013 it had set aside $1 million to fix the wall and make other improvements; for reasons that haven’t been clarified, the repairs hadn’t started. On Jan. 25, Governor Tomblin’s office announced that the state had ordered Freedom to shut down and dismantle the entire tank farm because all 17 tanks lack adequate containment walls to prevent leaks from spreading.

At some point recently, Forrest, the man in charge of Rosebud Mining in Kittanning, Pa., decided that Freedom Industries was worth owning. Named for the flower, not the enigmatic line from Citizen Kane, Rosebud calls itself “a great employer—and a great neighbor.” Forrest, a plainspoken executive, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but then turned bitterly against the president because of what Forrest perceived as the White House’s hostility to coal. In an interview with Bloomberg TV in October 2012, he warned that if Obama was reelected, the industry might not survive.

Despite that grim assessment, Forrest last year went ahead with his acquisition of Freedom, which relies heavily on coal company clients for its $30 million in annual revenue. On Dec. 6, Forrest, operating via Chemstream, agreed to pay $20 million to Freedom’s three owners—Farrell and two other men. Then, on Dec. 31, Forrest merged Freedom with three smaller companies. Neither transaction received any publicity. Nine days later, the water supplies were shut down.

Residents began reporting a licorice-like smell coming from the Freedom tank farm a little after 8 a.m. on Jan. 9, a Thursday. State inspectors drove to the facility and by 11:15 a.m. located a 4-foot-wide stream of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, seeping through the cracked containment wall and into the Elk River. By noon, the West Virginia unit of American Water Works (AWK), a large publicly traded utility company, had been informed of the contamination. The water company added carbon filters in an attempt to keep the MCHM out of its treatment plant but decided not to shut the intake.

Not until 12:05 p.m. did Freedom officials finally call a West Virginia hotline to report the leak—a step state officials say they were supposed to have taken immediately. By late afternoon, MCHM was found in tests of filtered water. Shortly before 6 p.m., Governor Tomblin announced a ban on water use for drinking, cooking, and bathing. President Obama declared a federal emergency the next morning, authorizing the National Guard to truck water into Charleston and eight surrounding counties.

Harmful if swallowed or inhaled, MCHM can cause skin irritation, nausea, and vomiting, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Apart from that, relatively little is known about MCHM’s effect on humans. It’s one of the thousands of chemicals that weren’t tested when they were grandfathered in for commercial use under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, says Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. More than 500 West Virginians have reported symptoms possibly related to exposure to MCHM. While more than 30 were admitted to hospitals, there haven’t been any deaths or serious illnesses reported.

On Friday evening, Jan. 10, Southern, the man listed in state records as Freedom’s president, called a press conference. (Confusingly, the company’s website still says Farrell is the president.) No mention was made of the company’s sale to Forrest. Southern, who has close-cropped white hair and a British accent, is affiliated with a number of companies in addition to Freedom, according to public records. These include Blackwater Consulting Group in Marco Island, the Florida resort where he lives; Ecodrill, also located in Marco Island; and HVC, a chemical company in Cincinnati.

At the press conference, Southern initially apologized. “This incident,” he said, “is extremely unfortunate, unanticipated, and we are very, very sorry for the disruption of everyone’s daily life.” His explanation, however, was vague. He said Freedom employees became “aware” of a leak “around 10:30 a.m.,” more than two hours after residents first complained of the licorice odor. He conceded that the company had “occasionally” had “reports of an odor previously,” but he didn’t elaborate on what preventive steps, if any, had been taken. “It has been an extremely long day,” he continued, looking exasperated. “I would appreciate it if we could wrap this thing up.” A local reporter interjected that it had “been an extremely long day for a lot of people” without water. Sipping from a plastic bottle of water, Southern answered several more queries before abruptly walking away.

Two days later, Charles Ryan Associates, a prominent Charleston public-relations firm, dropped Freedom as a client, refusing to explain why. A woman who answered my call to Freedom’s corporate office said executives weren’t available. She referred me to what she said was a public-relations firm; the Florida phone number connected to an answering machine where messages left over several days went unanswered.

In the hours after the spill, additional insight into the mood within Freedom came from Kathy Stover-Kennedy, Carl Kennedy’s ex-wife. Now Farrell’s girlfriend, Stover-Kennedy took to her Facebook page (since deleted) to defend her ex-husband’s ex-partner. “I’m not asking for anyone’s sympathy but a little empathy wouldn’t hurt,” she wrote. “And just so you know, the boys at the plant made and drank coffee this morning! I showered and brushed my teeth this morning and I am just fine!” Noting “criticism from many about how Freedom Industries is handling this,” Stover-Kennedy continued: “Denny is not a spokesman and has no desire to be. His expertise was much needed elsewhere.” She didn’t respond to phone messages.

Meanwhile, Randy Huffman, cabinet secretary of West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, was also on the defensive. Since the spill, Huffman has tried to explain why his agency didn’t show more skepticism earlier about Freedom. One point he’s stressed to journalists is that as far as state and federal chemical classifications go, MCHM isn’t considered “hazardous.” Freedom thus didn’t need a special state permit to store the compound, he said. Records released in the wake of the spill show that West Virginia inspectors had visited the Elk River tank farm at least five times since 2001 but focused primarily on air quality.

The company that made the MCHM, Eastman Chemical (EMN), based in Kingsport, Tenn., discloses in publicly available information that MCHM has a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration rating of “hazardous.” Rosenberg of the Natural Resources Defense Council explains that the apparent contradiction over MCHM’s danger level isn’t unusual. “We rely on manufacturers to test the vast majority of chemicals used in commerce,” he says, “so there just isn’t much consistency or certainty.”

Within 24 hours of the announcement of the contamination, plaintiffs’ attorneys were heading to Charleston’s state and federal courthouses to sue Freedom, West Virginia-American Water, and Eastman. More than two dozen suits have been filed so far, some seeking class-action status. All three companies have denied wrongdoing. Although she forcefully rejected the accusation that Eastman failed to provide adequate warnings about MCHM, a company spokeswoman pointedly told me the manufacturer couldn’t vouch for the conduct of Freedom or the water utility.

On Jan. 17, Freedom filed for Chapter 11 protection. That had the effect of freezing the liability suits against the company while U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald Pearson sorts out creditors’ claims. During a preliminary hearing on Jan. 21, Pearson called the situation “one of the most unusual Chapter 11 cases I’ve seen.”

Freedom’s bankruptcy attorneys, led by Mark Freedlander of the Pittsburgh office of McGuireWoods, immediately floated a theory designed to ease Freedom’s liability. “It is presently hypothesized,” they wrote in one filing, “that a local water line break [caused] the ground beneath a storage tank at the Charleston facility to freeze in the extraordinary frigid temperatures in the days immediately preceding” what Freedlander delicately termed “the incident.” He further hypothesized that “the hole in the affected storage tank” was caused by “an object piercing upwards through the base” of the tank.

The implication is that water expanded as it froze, pushing the mystery “object” up through the floor of the tank. It’s difficult to say whether the court will buy this explanation. Certainly plaintiffs’ attorneys are going to argue that steel tanks containing dangerous chemicals ought to be able to withstand winter weather.

Testifying at the preliminary hearing, Southern continued in the obtuse vein of his prior appearance. “The unfortunate incident of the 9th, which resulted in material leaving the facility,” he said, “caused an otherwise profitable and successful company to endure the tragedy of consequence relating to that which we’ve dealt with since the 9th.” A company lawyer hastened to clarify that Southern, who said he’d worked in the chemicals industry for 30 years, didn’t mean to imply that Freedom had been negligent. “Absolutely not. No sir,” Southern said.

Mayor Jones wasn’t impressed. “I don’t think any of these people at the company seems honest,” he says. And he worries that Charleston’s woe isn’t over. Many residents, he says, are still scared to drink from the tap. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has warned pregnant women that they ought to play it safe and stick to bottled water.

In response to orders from state officials, Freedom moved its MCHM supply from the Elk River facility to its location in Nitro. After the MCHM had been transferred, though, state environmental authorities cited the Nitro operation for five fresh violations. The most urgent related to the absence of a secondary containment wall—an ominous reminder of the apparent failure of the aging cement wall on the Elk River. “Given what we’ve been through, it would be very hard for me to convince anybody that there’s not something to be nervous about,” Huffman, the state environmental chief, told reporters. Freedom is now looking for another place to store the chemical.

6. Crain’s Chicago Business, “Do More to Cut Power Usage, ICC Directs ComEd”

January 29, 2014

By Steve Daniels

Commonwealth Edison Co. must overhaul its three-year plan to reduce electricity consumption to make it more ambitious, the Illinois Commerce Commission ruled yesterday.

ComEd’s blueprint, submitted in August, will fall well short of meeting energy efficiency goals mandated in state law, due mainly to a state-imposed cap on how much ComEd ratepayers can be charged on their electric bills to pay for the programs. But despite the cost constraints, the ICC sided with environmental groups that said ComEd could do more, if not reach the law’s goals.

Specifically, the commission directed ComEd to boost its power-savings goal by 25,000 megawatt-hours annually, a 4 percent increase from ComEd’s current plan. Even with that increase, ComEd won’t come close to the 2 percent power-use reduction the law requires by mid-2015. Its submitted plan envisioned a 0.7 percent cut.

Environmental groups applauded the commission.

“We’re very pleased that the commission is insisting that ComEd do a better job of maximizing the efficiency it can achieve,” emailed Rebecca Stanfield, deputy director for policy in the Midwest at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Chicago. “This moves the state in the right direction — toward a cleaner, more affordable and more reliable electric system.”

NRDC said that ICC-backed steps it’s urging ComEd to take could save another 90,000 megawatt-hours rather than the 25,000 explicitly endorsed by the commission. That would be a 14 percent boost to ComEd’s proposed goals.

In a statement, Chicago-based ComEd said it couldn’t yet respond in detail to the order. But the utility said: “We applaud the commission’s leadership on this important issue. We look forward to engaging stakeholders in the development of additional programs that will enable us to continue helping our customers become more energy efficient and provide them with tools to reduce their energy consumption and costs.”

First enacted in 2007, Illinois’ energy efficiency law is one of the country’s most aggressive. To date, ComEd’s program has met the statute’s gradually more ambitious goals for power savings. But this latest three-year plan bumped up against a limit on how much funding ratepayers will provide — currently about $1.24 a month for the average single-family household.

In addition, ComEd says it’s already implemented many of the simplest efficiency measures — making high-efficiency light bulbs available at a subsidized cost, for example — leaving programs that are more complicated to implement and at higher risk of not meeting goals.

The commission, though, agreed with environmental groups and consumer advocates that ComEd was proposing to spend too much on educating consumers and could divert some of those funds to concrete efficiency programs.

The ICC also agreed with the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center that ComEd should begin to tap the efficiency promise of its $2.6 billion, 10-year “smart grid” project, under which it will install digital “smart meters” in every home and business in its service territory.

Specifically, ComEd must put together a plan involving manufacturers and retailers of smart devices like new-generation thermostats to allow ComEd’s meters to interact with those devices. That will enable consumers to program or adjust their appliances remotely as future programs are developed to allow them to cut usage during high-demand periods.

“As of now, there’s very little efficiency benefit from the smart grid program,” said Rob Kelter, senior attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago.

7. Midwest Energy News, “Eagle Permits: A Way Forward for Wind, or a License to Kill?”

January 31, 2014

By Kari Lydersen

New federal rules that offer 30-year “take” permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act have been described by wind energy opponents and some prominent conservationists as a license to “slaughter” the very symbol of America.

Wind energy advocates, on the other hand, say the rules provide necessary certainty for developers, who were made uneasy by a recent $1 million settlement between the federal government and Duke Energy Renewables over violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), which also protects bald and golden eagles.

In that case, Duke pleaded guilty to charges that 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds were killed at two Wyoming wind farms, and that developers should have known the wind farms were built in a way that endangered birds.

Meanwhile, wildlife groups that support wind power are in a tight spot. Audubon, the nation’s premier bird conservation group, is firmly against the 30-year permits.

“It’s a blank check for the industry, it’s an eagle-killing rule,” said Audubon director of national programs Mike Daulton. “They put in place a new rule that really does nothing for conservation. It just gives the industry 30 years of protection from prosecution under the law. We think it was a weak law done secretively and we think it will lead to more dead eagles.”

The rules, which went into effect January 8 and are administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), create a voluntary system wherein wind developers can get permits allowing them a certain amount of unintentional harm to eagles for up to 30 years. As part of the process they also must create a conservation plan. The rules are similar to a program offering five-year voluntary permits that was launched in 2009.

Few wind developers have sought the five-year permits — meaning they risked facing fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and prison time — but presumably felt comfortable enough that they would not be prosecuted. Prosecutions under the Eagle Act and MBTA have been very rare, and unlike the Endangered Species Act (ESA) or Clean Air Act, there is no “citizen suit” provision allowing organizations or individuals to file lawsuits that can spark government enforcement.

But the Duke settlement, the new rules and other developments indicate that the government plans to be more aggressive in enforcing the Eagle Act, experts say. Companies can be prosecuted for past violations, and they can also apply for permits retroactively.

“Even though the permit is voluntary I think it will be standard,” said Barbara Craig, a Portland-based partner with Stoel Rives LLP, in a recent webinar hosted by the firm. “A few years ago people in the Midwest wouldn’t be as worried because bald eagle populations are stable and building…The Fish and Wildlife Service is more concerned about golden eagles because of their populations. But the new norm applies equally.”

The Midwest situation

Wind developers in the west have generally had more reason to worry about eagle take than Midwestern developers, since western states are home to more golden eagles, which are scarcer than the bald eagles that proliferate in the Midwest.

Mark Martell, director of bird conservation for Audubon Minnesota, said eagle mortality from wind farms is not a serious problem in the Midwest.

“I’m sure there are the occasional eagle collisions, but in the overall scheme of things it’s probably not having an effect at the population level,” he said. “Minnesota alone probably loses more eagles to lead poisoning than the entire region does to collisions with wind [turbines] over many years.”

Martell noted that the growth of wind power helps reduce the amount of mercury from coal plants in the atmosphere, creating a benefit for eagles.

Nevertheless, he opposes the 30-year permit, in part because he fears it could set a precedent for long-term permits to be given to other types of eagle takes. The 30-year permits are not specific for wind projects but are for “programmatic” ongoing activities. Permits are also required for individual potential “takes,” including biological research, Native Americans’ collection of feathers, or construction of power lines near nesting areas.

“The concern is the 30-year permit does not give us a whole lot of information or reaction time if something does go wrong,” he said. “That’s several generations of eagles. A lot of damage can be done in that time.”

Demanding more study

The Natural Resources Defense Council, generally a strong advocate of clean energy, is among the environmental groups that has opposed the new rules. NRDC attorney Katie Umekubo said the agency rushed to push the change through.

“We must improve our renewable energy resources while protecting our wildlife,” she said. “But what the Fish and Wildlife Service has done with their new rulemaking is going in the wrong direction.”

“The reason we don’t agree with the change in duration [of permits] comes down to the science,” she continued. “There’s a lot of ongoing research, but we have a lot of unanswered questions as well – like how do we deal with impacts to eagles, and how are eagles interacting with wind farms now. Our attention should be focused on trying to answer those questions before we make sweeping changes to the rule.”

She added that the NRDC has worked with the FWS to analyze research on eagles, but that much more needs to be done, including the compilation of “basic baseline information about our eagle population that we don’t have right now.”

The NRDC is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News.

Five-year evaluations

Both detractors and supporters of the new rules point to uncertainty over how a key provision will play out: evaluation periods every five years wherein the FWS looks at a wind farm’s effect on eagles and may revise the permit based on what they find.

The provision undercuts the certainty that the industry had sought, since the 30-year permit – meant to cover the life of a typical wind project – can actually be changed mid-stream. But Craig said she thinks that the five-year permit evaluations will not create additional burdens for wind projects.

“I’ve worked a lot on habitat conservation plans – to get long-term certainty you end up committing to a lot of monitoring, adaptive management and mitigation measures up front,” said Craig. “But the benefit in my view of revolving five-year (evaluations) is that you don’t have to put all that investment up front… It’s intended to be more iterative and more adaptive.”

She explained that the original permits will be based on FWS models that may overestimate a given project’s effect on eagles. So the five-year reviews should not give reasons for any additional burdens on wind developers.

“I’m optimistic that if the developer follows the guidelines and has done good site selection and micro-siting, that the take estimate [in the permit] will be overly conservative,” she said. “I wouldn’t assume [the permit conditions] will get more onerous.”

Critics of the new rules point out that there are no promises about how the agency will carry out and respond to the five-year evaluations, nor are there guarantees that the information obtained in the evaluations will be made public.

“We could be completely shut out of the process and not have access to what’s going on, or not be able to engage in the decision-making process,” said Umekubo. “That’s a huge issue.”

“I think they have a lot to prove to show they could do meaningful five-year reviews,” said Daulton. “On the one hand they’re understaffed, they don’t have enough staff to monitor the process, so it’s good for them to do every 30 years. But then they want to turn around and say we’re doing five-year reviews. You can’t have it both ways. What we’ve heard is they don’t have the resources to monitor this process adequately.”

A backlash against wind

Per Ramfjord, another partner at Stoel Rives, noted during their webinar that there are no permits offered under the MBTA, hence wind farms that take eagles could theoretically be prosecuted under that statute even if they have a permit under the Eagle Act. And the MBTA involves “strict liability,” Craig and Ramfjord noted, meaning unlike under the Eagle Act it doesn’t matter if the take is intentional or involves “wanton disregard” — or not.

How the new Eagle Act rules affect implementation of the MBTA is among the issues that remain to be seen, the lawyers said during their webinar.

But Ramfjord said companies should feel confident after working with the FWS to obtain a permit under the Eagle Act. The agency has “made clear that where developers have followed that guidance, they will be shielded,” he said.

The lawyers also said that pressure to enforce the bird protection acts seems to be coming from “one single prosecutor,” as Ramfjord put it – Robert S. Anderson, senior counsel of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. Ramfjord said he thinks Anderson’s approach “is not specific to wind” and that prosecutions may also be aimed at solar or other renewable energy projects hurting wildlife.

Wind advocates see the increased scrutiny as in response to backlash against the wind industry from critics who say it has gotten a free pass from the government while the oil and gas industry faces prosecution.

But Ron Sisson, head of the Republican conservation group ConservAmerica which has done outreach to constituents around eagles and wind, called the new rules a “common sense solution” in promoting both wind power and eagle protection. In a December article for The Hill, Sisson wrote:

“Every human activity has some form of environmental impact, which means we will always need to balance protecting the environment with responsibly taking advantage of our natural resources. American wind power helps curb the biggest threat to wildlife. Today, installed U.S. wind power avoids 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually – the equivalent of taking more than 17 million cars off the road…Developing energy from America’s abundant renewable natural resources must be our priority, not only for the tremendous economic benefits it yields but because it’s one of the best tools available to help conserve wildlife, including eagles.”

8. Greenwire, “Advocates Criticize DOE’s Long-Delayed Standards for Flood Lights Released Today”

January 30, 2014

By Katherine Ling

The Energy Department today unveiled new energy efficiency standards for metal halide lamps that DOE says will make it cheaper to turn on the lights for high school football games and shrink the nation’s carbon footprint.

The much-delayed finalized rule for bright floodlights will also reduce carbon emissions by 28 million metric tons and save more than $1.1 billion on energy bills over the next 30 years, according to DOE. The original deadline for the rule was January 2012.

The announcement comes two days after Obama highlighted energy efficiency efforts as part of his “go it alone” approach to fighting climate change during his State of the Union speech.

But some environmental groups are disappointed with the final standard. Meg Waltner, manager of Building Energy Policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the standards were not as stringent as originally proposed and what NRDC and other efficiency advocacy groups had supported.

“DOE backtracked on its proposal in the draft rule to set levels based on electronic ballasts for 150 watt lamps, despite the fact that its own analysis showed that these levels would have provided cost-effective savings to consumers,” she said in a statement. “Additionally, while DOE originally proposed standards for fixtures up to 2000 watts, today’s standards only cover those up to 1000 watts. While we’re pleased to see DOE moving forward on schedule, these lost potential savings are a missed opportunity and it’s a disappointment to see DOE step back from the proposed rule, despite analysis supporting it.”

“Building on President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, the Energy Department continues to make good progress to help communities and businesses save on their utility bills and build a more sustainable energy future,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement.

“Under the Obama Administration, the Energy Department has finalized new efficiency standards for more than 30 household and commercial products, including dishwashers, refrigerators and water heaters, which are estimated to save consumers more than $400 billion and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 1.8 billion metric tons through 2030.”

Since Moniz took the agency’s reins last summer, DOE has published four other proposed appliance efficiency regulations for furnace fans, walk-in coolers and freezers, commercial refrigeration equipment and electric motors.

The White House has set a goal that efficiency standards for appliances and federal buildings that are finalized in the first and second terms will reduce carbon pollution by at least 3 billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030 — equivalent to nearly half the carbon pollution from the entire U.S. energy sector for one year, DOE said.

1. New York Times, “Antibiotics in Animals Tied to Risk of Human Infection”

January 27, 2014

By Sabrina Tavernise

A federal analysis of 30 antibiotics used in animal feed found that the majority of them were likely to be contributing to the growing problem of bacterial infections that are resistant to treatment in people, according to documents released Monday by a health advocacy group.

The analysis, conducted by the Food and Drug Administration and covering the years 2001 to 2010, was detailed in internal records that the nonprofit group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent litigation.

In the documents, some of which were reviewed by The New York Times, scientists from the F.D.A. studied 30 penicillin and tetracycline additives in animal feed. They found that 18 of them posed a high risk of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through food.

Resistant bacteria make it difficult and sometimes impossible to treat infections with ordinary antibiotics. The scientists did not have enough data to judge the other 12 drugs.

At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Representatives of the food industry largely blame hospitals and treatments given to people for the rise of deadly superbugs. But many scientists believe that indiscriminate use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor.

Farmers and ranchers feed small amounts of the drugs to animals over their lifetimes to keep them healthy in crowded conditions, causing bacteria to develop a resistance passed on to people through the environment and eating meat from the animals.

In a statement, the F.D.A. said the drugs under review had been “older, approved penicillin and tetracycline products,” and that the agency had issued letters to their producers asking for additional safety data. It said those efforts had been part of a broader assessment of antibiotics, also called antimicrobials, given to animals raised for food, and that it has since made major policy changes to address them.

The F.D.A. has tried repeatedly to rein in the use of the drugs in animals. It adopted regulations in 1973 that required companies to submit studies showing that a drug’s use in animal feed did not promote resistance in people.

In 1977, the agency proposed withdrawing approvals for animal feed additives containing penicillin and most tetracyclines, but it never followed through, said Avinash Kar, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The group sued the agency in 2012 to try to force it to carry out the 1977 proposal.

“This is an agency that has repeatedly found, since the 1970s, that these drugs pose a risk to human health, but it has not done anything meaningful with those conclusions,” Mr. Kar said.

But the agency has taken some steps in recent years. In 2012, it restricted the use of cephalosporins in animals. They are drugs that are also prescribed to treat pneumonia and strep throat in people.

Last year, the F.D.A. moved to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens, though it continued to allow them for the treatment of illness, a policy decision that consumer health advocates said weakened the new rule.

“In December 2013, the F.D.A. began formal implementation of a strategy to phase out the use of all medically important antimicrobials,” the agency said. “The F.D.A. is confident that its current strategy to protect the effectiveness of medically important antimicrobials, including penicillins and tetracyclines, is the most efficient and effective way to change the use of these products in animal agriculture.”

Mr. Kar said that only one of the 30 drugs studied ever met the government’s safety criteria. And it only satisfied the 1973 regulations that required companies to submit studies showing that a drug’s use in animal feed did not lead to drug resistance in bacteria that can affect human health.

In 2003, the agency issued guidelines that divided drugs into three categories according to how risky they were for human health. Under the guidelines, a high-risk drug should be used for no longer than 21 days at a time, and only for individual animals, not entire herds or flocks.

High-risk drugs are often allowed to be used much more broadly, said Carmen Cordova, a microbiologist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The 2003 guidelines apply only to drugs that were approved after 2003, and the consumer group said none of the 30 drugs fell into that category. Mr. Kar said the F.D.A. analysis was still relevant.

2. Reuters, “Drug critic slams FDA over antibiotic oversight in meat production”

January 27, 2014

By P.J. Huffstutter and Brian Grow

Jan 27 (Reuters) – The Food and Drug Administration allowed 18 animal drugs to stay on the market even after an agency review found the drugs posed a “high risk” of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food supply, according to a study released Monday by the Natural <a href=”http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-27/news/sns-rt-usa-fdaanimaldrugs-20140127_1_meat-production-growth-promotion-nrdc” target=”_blank”>Resources</a> Defense Council.

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The study by the NRDC, a non-governmental group that criticizes the widespread use of drugs in the meat industry, is the latest salvo in the national debate over the long-standing practice of antibiotic use in meat production. Agribusinesses say animal drugs help increase production and keep prices low for U.S. consumers, while consumer advocates and some scientists raise concerns over antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The FDA stirred the debate late last year when it unveiled guidelines for drug makers and agricultural companies to voluntarily phase out antibiotic use as a growth enhancer in livestock. The agency said those guidelines were an effort to stem the surge in human resistance to certain antibiotics.

But the NRDC’s study found the FDA took no action to remove 30 antibiotic-based livestock feed products from the market even after federal investigators determined many of those antibiotics fell short of current regulatory standards for protecting human health.

NRDC focused on a review conducted by the FDA from 2001 to 2010 that focused on 30 penicillin and tetracycline-based antibiotic feed additives. The drugs had been approved by regulators to be used specifically for growth promotion of livestock and poultry – essentially to produce more meat to sell.

The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Some academics specializing in antibiotic resistance criticized the NRDC’s study, saying that the findings do not reflect current regulatory standards because some of the drugs have been withdrawn from the market.

They also say that the study assessed FDA safety guidelines that have been replaced with more stringent standards. Dr. Randall Singer, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, told Reuters that drug makers and the U.S. livestock industry are phasing out antibiotics used principally for growth promotion.

“We have been telling (both of) them for years to be prepared for the elimination of growth promotion and feed efficiency labeling because you cannot make that change overnight,” said Singer, who reviewed the NRDC report for Reuters.

The NRDC, which reviewed more than 3,000 pages of documents through a federal Freedom of Information Act request, said it found evidence to suggest nine of the drugs are still on the market and used by livestock producers. Reuters was not able to independently verify that detail immediately.

One of the drugs still on the market is animal health company Zoetis Inc’s Penicillin G Procaine 50/100, which is fed to poultry in part to aid in weight gain.

The NRDC says the FDA twice laid out its concerns to that drug maker that the product failed to meet safety regulations. The unnamed original sponsor of the drug apparently disputed the regulators’ findings, according to excerpts from a 1997 letter sent to the FDA and included in documents obtained by the NRDC.

A spokeswoman for Zoetis, a unit of Pfizer that owns the drug today, said the company already is working to phase out use of the drug for growth promotion as part of the new FDA guidelines and is planning to relabel the drug for more limited purposes.

Once companies remove farm-production uses of their antibiotics from drug labels, it would become illegal for those drugs to be used for those purposes, Deputy FDA Commissioner Michael Taylor told reporters recently. Although the program is meant to be voluntary, Taylor said the FDA would be able to take regulatory action against companies that fail to comply.

NRDC attorney Avinash Kar, one of the study’s authors, said the group’s findings raise questions about whether regulators will be effective in enforcing the new guidelines

“The FDA’s failure to act on its own findings about the 30 reviewed antibiotic feed additives is part of a larger pattern of delay and inaction in tackling livestock drug use that goes back four decades,” Kar told Reuters.

3. USA Today, “USA TODAY poll: Slight majority backs Keystone pipeline”

January 28, 2014

By Wendy Koch

A slight majority of Americans favor the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline that President Obama is expected to approve or reject this year, finds a poll conducted for USA TODAY.

About 56% say they favor the northern leg of the billion-dollar, Canada-to-U.S. project and 41% oppose it, according to the poll of 801 U.S. adults completed last month by Stanford University and Resources for the Future (RFF), a non-partisan research group.

More men (60%) than women (53%) support the 1,179-mile pipeline extension, which would carry heavy tar sands from Alberta through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Neb. Support was consistent regardless of education level but much stronger among self-described conservatives than liberals, a slight majority of whom oppose it.

“These findings are suggestive but not conclusive,” says Phil Sharp, president of RFF, which funded the Nov. 20-Dec. 5. poll. “We simply don’t know how firm people’s attitudes are about this.”

The pipeline, proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada, has become one of the most contentious issues of Obama’s presidency. Environmentalists have waged a grass-roots war against it, saying tar sands’ development would worsen global warming and its delivery could risk oil spills. The oil industry and other backers say it would increase jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil.

“It has tremendous symbolic value to a lot of people,” says Sharp, a former Democratic member of Congress, noting how critics see the pipeline as a litmus test of Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change and backers view it as a test of his support for economic growth.

So far, Obama hasn’t shown his hand, at least not publicly. In June, while unveiling his plan to cut U.S. carbon emissions, he said he could only back the pipeline if it does not “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” Both sides see his opaque comment as bolstering their arguments.

The project has dangled in Washington for years, mired in lengthy environmental impact studies. The State Department is overseeing the review, because the pipeline crosses an international border. Its draft last March irked environmentalists by saying Keystone won’t matter much, because Canada’s tar sands will likely be extracted with or without it.

Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters earlier this month that the final review would be out “before long.” That review will trigger a 90-day federal process for determining if the project is in the nation’s interest. The ultimate decision isn’t expected until late spring at the earliest.

All 45 Senate Republicans urged Obama earlier this month to end the delays. “We are well into 2014 and you still have not made a decision,” they said in a letter. House Republicans have repeatedly tried to tie Keystone’s approval to key pieces of legislation.

On Tuesday, before Obama’s State of the Union address, Keystone critics paraded a 100-yard inflatable pipeline around the Capitol, emblazoned with the words “Climate Champion or Pipeline President.” Billionaire activist Tom Steyer planned a minute-long, anti-pipeline TV ad to air before and after Obama’s speech.

In January 2012, Obama rejected the initial 1,700-mile version from Alberta to Port Arthur, Texas, saying he needed more time for environmental review. So TransCanada split the project into two and revised the route of the northern leg to avoid environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska. The 485-mile southern leg, from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf Coast, became operational last week.

“It’s terribly complicated, because you know there are jobs at stake but also environmental issues,” says Richard Kedward, a Seattle resident queried in the USA TODAY poll. “Being an independent person, it’s very conflicting.”

Julianna Puskas of Techachapi, Calif., says the pipeline “would be good for us.” She adds: “I’d rather support Canada selling us oil than other countries.”

Others demur. “I don’t know enough about it to answer either way,” says Ernesteen Collvins of DeKalb, Texas.

“The more Americans learn about the pipeline, the less they like it,” says Danielle Droitsch of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. She says tar sands oil is more corrosive and its extraction emits more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil. She says the USA TODAY poll shows support for Keystone is eroding while opposition is growing.

Polls earlier last year by Pew Research Center found consistently higher support — two-thirds in favor — of the pipeline, but they found opposition rising from 23% in March to 30% in September. A Bloomberg National Poll, taken Dec. 6-9, found 56% in favor and 35% opposed.

Findings can vary because of differences, however slight, in how a question is phrased. The USA TODAY poll, conducted by Abt SRBI, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
4. Grist, “Energy state of Obama’s union: Drill? Frack? Cut carbon? “All the above””
January 29, 2014

By Ben Adler

President Obama received a <a href=”http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/All_of_the_Above_letter_Jan_16_FINAL_corrected.pdf?docID=14881″ target=”_blank”>letter</a> 10 days ago from the nation’s leading environmental organizations, urging him to stop opening American lands and waters to fossil fuel extraction. Tuesday’s State of the Union address shows that he was unmoved by their plea.

Instead, the president doubled down on both his energy policy goals: taking a series of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while ramping up domestic dirty energy production. Obama’s speech was framed around creating economic opportunity. And from the short-term perspective of generating jobs in as many sectors as possible — from building solar panels to operating gas drilling machinery — his approach makes a certain sense. But if you’re trying to resolve the climate crisis, it’s a step forward on one hand and a step back on the other.

Obama, as his administration usually does, most recently in the White House’s <a href=”http://grist.org/climate-energy/oil-drilling-and-climate-action-dont-mix/” target=”_blank”>response</a> to the environmental letter, talks a good game on climate change. Here is the key State of the Union paragraph on climate and energy, inspiring as always:

Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet. Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth. But we have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming Western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities, and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air. The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.

Tightening CO2 emission standards for power plants is the biggest and most important thing a president can do without congressional action to move the arc of climate change. Environmental organizations released statements applauding Obama’s reiteration of his commitment to such standards. Some also expressed pleasure at his growing confidence in speaking forcefully for climate action on its own terms. “I didn’t see anything big and new in the climate area, except the focus,” said David Doniger, policy director for the NRDC’s climate and clean air program. “If [State of the Union speeches] were talking about clean energy, it used to be for other reasons. Now, they’re unabashedly promoting it as something you’ve got to do to protect the climate and the planet.”

But Obama has not shifted away from his “all of the above” energy policy. In another section of his speech, he touted the virtues of natural gas: “The all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working, and today, America is closer to energy independence than we’ve been in decades. One of the reasons why is natural gas – if extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.”

The “bridge fuel” rhetoric is troubling. Building the infrastructure for a natural gas power economy, as Obama proposes, could mean embedding a reliance that won’t quietly go away one day when our bridge to a clean energy future has been built. Obama also bragged about the growth of U.S. domestic oil production.

Some environmental groups criticized Obama for his fossil-fuel focus. “We can’t drill or frack our way out of this problem,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, in a statement. “Make no mistake — natural gas is a bridge to nowhere. If we are truly serious about fighting the climate crisis, we must look beyond an ‘all of the above’ energy policy and replace dirty fuels with clean energy. We can’t effectively act on climate and expand drilling and fracking for oil and gas at the same time.”

The contradiction between these commitments — reducing emissions while boosting domestic oil and gas production — was on full display throughout the speech and in the policy bullet points the White House sent to reporters. Obama did not actually offer new ideas so much as boast about actions he has already taken or reiterate proposals he has already made.

Here are some highlights from the policy announcements — all small-bore, since Obama cannot plan on any help from Congress on major changes that require legislation:

The Good: New energy efficiency standards

“As part of the Climate Action Plan, since August, the Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed five energy conservation standards and finalized one standard for appliances and equipment.”

When a company builds an appliance like a refrigerator, it’s not going to spend extra money to improve energy efficiency on its own — it’s not the party paying the electric bill. So the Energy Department is imposing efficiency standards that will cut greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers money. This, however, like the power plant regulations, is a policy that’s already in place — the president is just bragging about it now.

The devil’s-in-the-details: “Promoting Safe and Responsible Production of Natural Gas”

The key development here is that the administration is working on rules to reduce methane leaks in fracking. That’s necessary, especially if you want even more natural gas drilling. But how strong will the rules actually be? No one yet knows.

“We’ve been pushing really hard for EPA and [the Bureau of Land Management] regulations to cut the leakage of natural gas,” says Doniger. “We’re looking for a plan that will bottle up those leaks. The best operations don’t leak, because they have the best equipment and practices, but lots of operations are sloppy. We want to see a detailed plan with air, water, and climate safeguards that we’ve been promised on natural gas infrastructure.”

The Inscrutable: “Increasing fuel efficiency for trucks”

Here’s the good part, which we already know because Obama announced it last summer: he is going to impose new fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy weight trucks.

Here’s the confusing part: “The President will propose new incentives for medium- and heavy-duty trucks to run on natural gas or other alternative fuels and the infrastructure needed to run them.”

Obama — going back to his days in the Senate — has been curiously fond of biofuels, such as ethanol, that often don’t live up to their promised environmental benefits. This particular proposal was floated by Obama last summer as a way of investing money currently going to oil industry tax subsidies.

While virtually anything would be a better use of the money than the status quo, the Republican Congress won’t agree to it. Anyway, getting trucks to run on natural gas is an odd choice of how to use those savings, if we could even get them. One upside: natural gas, whatever its limitations as a tool for fighting climate change, produces less particulate pollution than oil. So reducing the number of trucks roaming the streets spitting smog out of their tailpipes might help alleviate some environment and public health problems, such as high inner-city asthma rates. But, as with so many of Obama’s energy proposals tonight, these improvements would only be marginal.

Overall, Obama’s speech was reminiscent of President Clinton’s famously minimalist, centrist second term proposals, like school uniforms. “Everything on this list was proposed in previous [State of the Union] speeches by Obama,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, in an email. “Are they good? Except for the <a href=”http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=3838″ target=”_blank”>Energy Security Trust</a>, which is clean energy funded by a fee on oil and gas development, sure. Are they game changers? Absolutely not.”

Environmentalists are of two minds about Obama’s promotion of natural gas as a bridge fuel. It’s true that natural gas emits less carbon than coal when burned for electricity. But methane leakage means natural gas <a href=”http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/25/2988801/study-methane-emissions-natural-gas-production/” target=”_blank”>may not actually be any better</a> when one looks at its full life cycle. As David Hawkins, the director of climate programs at NRDC, recently told me, “With natural gas, there’s good news and bad news: the good news is it has half the carbon of coal; the bad news is it has half the carbon of coal. It’s not carbon-free.”

When it comes to dirty energy projects that supposedly will generate construction jobs, Obama was silent on the one environmentalists have been waiting with bated breath for his decision on: Keystone XL. Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist, <a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/keystone-xl-state-of-the-union_n_4680948.html?1390928366″ target=”_blank”>bought an ad</a> to run on MSNBC around the speech, that encourages rejection of the proposed pipeline for Canadian crude oil. Borrowing a page from Obama’s own rhetorical handbook, Steyer’s ad attacks Keystone in nationalist terms — more oil for China, not American consumers — rather than for its greenhouse gas emissions.

Ultimately, Obama’s policies are less than perfect because he is dealing with a Republican House of Representatives. But, as Bill McKibben recently <a href=”http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-and-climate-change-the-real-story-20131217″ target=”_blank”>noted</a> in Rolling Stone, the GOP House isn’t making the president roll out a red carpet for oil and gas companies looking to drill on public land.

One of the most forceful notes in Obama’s lengthy speech was his declaration that climate change is real. The president says he wants to do everything he can to avert climate catastrophe. Whether he will is still an open question.

5. E&E News, “Greens see Obama using SOTU to promote global warming plan to wider audience”

January 28, 2014

By Jean Chemnick

Environmentalists are likely to remember 2013 as the year when President Obama started addressing climate change again.

After the issue all but disappeared from White House rhetoric after the sinking of cap-and-trade legislation in Obama’s first term, it reappeared in dramatic fashion in Obama’s second inaugural address last January and in his State of the Union speech the following month (<a href=”http://www.eenews.net/login?r=%2Feedaily%2Fstories%2F1059976273″ target=”_blank”>E&E Daily</a>, Feb. 13, 2013).

Then in June, the president made good on his State of the Union vow to use his executive power to address climate change if Congress failed to act. In a high-profile speech on a sweltering day at Georgetown University, Obama laid out a wide-ranging plan to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, prepare the country for the effects of warming and engage abroad on mitigation.

With Obama’s Climate Action Plan now in full swing, the president’s allies say they don’t expect him to offer many new climate initiatives during his fifth State of the Union address tonight (<a href=”http://www.eenews.net/login?r=%2Feedaily%2Fstories%2F1059993472″ target=”_blank”>E&E</a> Daily, Jan. 27).

But they say he should use the speech to sell the plan to a broader, nighttime television audience and maybe make a pitch for curbing methane emissions.

“I think it’s important that he reiterate his commitment to implementing the climate plan from June, and that it receive attention,” said Dan Lashof, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I don’t know that I’m going to count the words, but it would be disappointing if they didn’t have some concrete discussion of the steps that they are planning to implement, even if they are not new.”

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said environmentalists had been assured that Obama would use the speech to explain what his administration is doing on climate — such as new Clean Air Act rules for utilities and greater engagement with states on climate adaptation.

“I think it’s more giving the context for and explaining why this makes sense for the country,” said Meyer. Environmentalists, he said, have urged the White House to play up the costs associated with inaction on heat-trapping emissions, including the rising toll warming will take on local communities.

Josh Freed, vice president for clean energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said Obama should focus on the economic advantages to be gained by embracing more natural gas production, renewable energy and new nuclear power.

“There’s a real compelling story to tell that American energy is affordable, that it is getting cleaner, and it is abundant,” he said.

Obama need not devote as much time to climate change this year as he did last year, Freed said.

“An administration’s actions,” he said, “are more important than its words in any one speech.”

By linking the climate message to abundant domestic energy and economic growth — the speech’s primary theme — Obama can undercut the Republican message that climate action is bad for the economy, Freed said.

If the president does say something new, environmentalists say it might have to do with methane.

The Climate Action Plan called for the development of an interagency strategy to combat methane leakage from oil and gas development, transportation and use — a product that is due out this spring.

Methane from petroleum production has become a priority for environmentalists, too. The Environmental Defense Fund, NRDC and other groups have asked U.S. EPA to consider promulgating a new rule targeting wellhead methane emissions — a request they have often ranked above a rule governing CO2 from the refinery sector.

“If he wanted to unveil something new tomorrow night, that’s an area where there might be enough consensus within the administration that he might be able to say something new,” Meyer said.

Obama appears to be weighing action on methane emissions. In an interview with The New Yorker editor David Remnick, posted on the magazine’s website last week, the president said the recent natural gas boom would benefit the environment only if production is performed “correctly.”

“If it’s not done correctly, the methane emissions are profound,” he said, adding that chemicals used in production could also contaminate groundwater supply.

“But, if we can get that right,” he said, “then for us to see natural gas supplant coal around the world the same way it’s happening here in the United States, that’s a net plus.”

Pitch for international engagement?

Obama might also use the speech to lay the groundwork for future international engagement on climate change, Meyer said.

The State Department is evaluating what the United States should offer this September at U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s leaders summit on climate change in New York. And the administration must propose a new post-2020 emissions-reduction commitment the following March in the run-up to talks in Paris later that year that many hope will produce an international climate agreement.

“I would expect him to say something about the global context of this and the need for joined action and the leadership they’ve already taken under [Secretary of State John] Kerry with the dialogues with China, India and other countries,” he said. In his first year at State, Kerry has made climate change a topic of discussion at numerous bilateral meetings with other countries.

Obama’s new senior adviser John Podesta is likely to take a leading role in shaping the United States’ climate change pledge.

Mike McKenna, a GOP strategist on energy issues, said Podesta — the former president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress — would be unlikely to approve a speech that gave short shrift to climate change. While at CAP, Podesta has taken an active interest in opposing everything from short-lived climate forcers to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, he noted.

“The last guy who is going to make edits to this thing is John Podesta,” McKenna said. “It’s impossible for me to imagine that the administration is going to have a great, big, giant speech on all their domestic and international policy priorities and John is not going to insert a bunch of stuff about climate change.”

6. San Diego Union Tribune, “2nd lawsuit over Navy, marine mammals”

January 27, 2014

By Jeanette Steele

A second lawsuit was filed Monday against the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Navy over a five-year plan for military training off Southern California and Hawaii.

The Natural Resources Defense Council argues that the federal agency illegally granted the Navy permission to harm more than 35 species of whales and dolphins.

In December, the National Marine Fisheries Service granted a permit that allows the Navy to use sonar and explosive charges to provide realistic training.

Over five years, the Navy estimates that work with ships, explosives and sonar will kill up to 155 marine mammals off Southern California and Hawaii. Projections also anticipate 2,000 serious injuries and 9.6 million lower-level harassments, such as prompting whales or dolphins to leave an area or stop feeding.

“The science proving the link between sonar exposure and population decline is mounting. And so are the solutions that could prevent thousands of needless injuries and hundreds of deaths,” said the NRDC’s Michael Jasny.

A Navy spokesman on Monday said that the service is committed to meeting the national security mission and protecting marine life by taking precautionary steps.

But, “If the Navy cannot realistically train at sea and test our equipment, sailors’ lives and our ability to defend against serious threats will be at risk,” said Cmdr. Steve Curry at the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu.

Environmental group Earthjustice has already sued the federal fisheries agency and the Navy in Hawaii federal court.

The new lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for Northern California, challenges the agency’s authorization of mammal deaths and injuries under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, as well as its finding under the Endangered Species Act that the Navy’s activities will not jeopardize endangered blue whales.

The suit also challenges the Navy’s determination that its activities are consistent with California’s Coastal Management Program, despite the California Coastal Commission’s unanimous rejection of the plan in San Diego in March.

7. Greenwire, “L.A. asks Supreme Court to take up stormwater discharge case”

January 27, 2014

By Jeremy P. Jacobs

Los Angeles County on Friday asked the Supreme Court to hear a long-running dispute with environmentalists over stormwater discharges that run through the county’s drainage system and into Southern California rivers.

The county wants the high court to reverse an August decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said it is liable for discharges into its massive system that exceed its federal Clean Water Act permit.

If justices hear the case, it will mark the second time the case has made its way to the high court. A year ago, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit, siding with Los Angeles’ flood control district on a different issue presented in the case.

After that ruling, the 9th Circuit took up the case again and ruled in favor of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper. The San Francisco-based panel unanimously held that data from the water district’s monitors that showed pollution levels exceeding what was allowed under its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit made the county and district liable for violating the Clean Water Act (<a href=”http://www.eenews.net/login?r=%2Feenewspm%2Fstories%2F1059985807″ target=”_blank”>E&E</a> News PM, Aug. 8, 2013).

In its court filing, the county argues that the 9th Circuit fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of the water pollution permit for Los Angeles’ huge system of gutters, catch basins and stormwater drains.

That system contains about 500 miles of open channels and 2,800 miles of storm drains. The county says the permit was issued to the county, the flood control district and 84 cities whose runoff contributes to the system. Under the 9th Circuit’s ruling, the county would be liable for discharges from those other entities, not the county’s.

“The permit was issued to the 86 separate entities as co-permittees, and under its terms, each permittee was responsible only for its own discharge,” the county wrote.

Environmentalists brought the lawsuit in 2008, claiming that the water district’s downstream monitoring from 2002 to 2008 showed more than 100 instances of pollution exceeding limits allowed by the 2001 permit.

When the case reached the Supreme Court last year, justices focused only on whether water flowing from one portion of a river through a concrete channel to another point of the same river constitutes a discharge under the Clean Water Act. The court held that it did not (<a href=”http://www.eenews.net/login?r=%2Fgreenwire%2Fstories%2F1059974471″ target=”_blank”>Greenwire</a>, Jan. 8, 2013).

The county notes that the Supreme Court declined to address the monitoring issue after the 9th Circuit had addressed it in previous proceedings. Consequently, it also argues in its recent filing that the 9th Circuit should not have revisited the issue.

NRDC said the county’s request was an attempt to “shirk responsibility” for cleaning up the pollution.

“We won’t solve the problem of urban slobber by continuing to fight over it,” said NRDC attorney Steve Fleischli. “It’s time for the county to get to work and fix it.”

It takes the votes of four justices to grant review of a case. The court will likely consider whether to take up the county’s request later this year.

8. ClimateProgress, “Pollution From Koch-Funded Petcoke Piles Not An ‘Emergency,’ Illinois Regulators Rule”

January 24, 2014

By Emily Atkin

The large mountains of petroleum coke, or petcoke, that line Chicago’s Calumet River won’t be going anywhere soon, despite residents’ concerns that the piles are blowing toxic dust into the air and negatively affecting their health.

In a 4-0 vote, the Illinois Pollution Control Board ruled on Thursday that there is no imminent threat to public health and safety from petcoke — a byproduct of refining heavy tar sands oil that is generally sold overseas — on Chicago’s southeast side, rejecting state Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed emergency rules to control the piles.

“The Board is not convinced an “emergency” exists,” the ruling read. “The Board is convinced that improperly controlled emissions could be a nuisance … However, this record provides evidence petcoke dust poses low risk to human health.”

Many residents disagree, citing dark, smelly clouds containing petcoke dust that have swirled over their heads during storms. Since the piles appeared, community members have complained of respiratory problems.

Chicago’s Department of Public Health has found that the piles have violated dust and debris provisions of municipal environmental ordinances. City officials also claimed the issue was of “special concern,” the ruling said, “because the facilities are located in a densely populated area of the city.”

“Anyone who has seen the dust storm photos or tasted the air next to the piles on the Chicago’s Southeast Side knows that petcoke in our neighborhoods is indeed an emergency,” Josh Mogerman at the Natural Resources Defense Council said, adding the decision represented “a failure to recognize the imminent danger of particulate matter sweeping over Illinois communities.”

Gov. Quinn’s proposed emergency rules would have required immediate measures including road paving, dust suppression systems, containment of stormwater to prevent groundwater pollution, and disposal of petcoke that had been on site for more than one year.

Though residents exposed to pollution from petcoke piles across the country have complained of health problems, the industry that produces it has worked hard to debunk the claims. Type “petcoke” into Google, and the first result that comes up is sponsored site called www.aboutpetcoke.com, headlined with the words “Why Petcoke Is Safe” and underscored by the statement that “petcoke is highly stable and not considered hazardous to people.” The site is run by KCBX Terminals Inc., a company owned by the wealthy ultra-conservative Koch Brothers, high-profile funders of climate denial.

Indeed, the Chicago piles of petcoke are part of the business empire of the Koch brothers, earning the nickname “PetKoch.” The Koch Brothers were also responsible for a large black cloud that floated above the Detroit River last summer, which was caught on camera by residents across the border in Windsor.

Though petcoke is not a coal product, the Illinois Pollution Control Board nonetheless took into consideration comments from Arch Coal, Inc., the second largest U.S. coal producer, which has coal mining operations in Illinois. The company told the Board that the emergency rules would “have severe, adverse consequences for our operations in Illinois” by “constraining” operations at shipping terminals.

“While Arch Coal acknowledges that the proposed emergency rule making may not apply directly to coal mining operations, it objects to the emergent nature of the rule making, arguing that there is no emergency, severe public health emergency, or threat to the public interest,” the board wrote.

The Board also received comments from Kinder Morgan Inc., which owns three bulk coal terminals in Illinois, and ArcelorMittal USA, a supplier and customer of coal and coke and the largest integrated iron and steel company in the world. Both companies argued that the piles did not need more regulation.

“ArcelorMittal objects to the emergency rulemaking on the basis that there is no emergency,” the ruling said.

1. Washington Post, “FDA Has Allowed Antibiotics In Animal Feed Despite Risk To Human Health, Report Says”

January 27, 2014

By Brady Dennis

The Food and Drug Administration has continued to allow dozens of antibiotics to be used in livestock feed, despite findings from its researchers that the drugs could expose humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food supply, an environmental advocacy group said in a report Monday.

FDA officials reviewed about 30 animal-feed additives between 2001 and 2010, rating 18 of them “high risk” in terms of contributing to health problems in humans, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The remaining drugs the agency examined did not have adequate data to determine whether they were safe, the report said.

According to the NRDC, at least 26 of the feed additives that FDA researchers reviewed — some of which have been in use since the 1950s — did not meet standards set by the agency in 1973 that required companies to submit scientific studies proving that the drugs were safe.

The report comes amid increasing worries in the public health world about the problem of antibiotic-resistant infections, which sicken millions of Americans each year and kill an estimated 23,000. Public health officials across the globe have warned that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics are causing more and more of the drugs to lose their effectiveness, meaning that even routine infections could become untreatable.

Carmen Cordova, an NRDC microbiologist and lead author of the analysis, called the FDA’s failure to act on its own findings “a breach of their responsibility and the public trust.”

Avinash Kar, an NRDC lawyer, said it underscores a larger pattern of FDA inaction in combating the overuse of antibiotics in animals, something scientists and doctors widely believe is contributing to the proliferation of hard-to-treat infections.

“They are not meeting their responsibility to protect public health,” Kar said. “They need to be doing better.”

The penicillin- and tetracycline-based antibiotics at the center of the NRDC’s analysis were approved for “non-therapeutic” or “subtherapeutic” uses, such as bolstering growth in animals.

In a statement Monday, the FDA said the review highlighted in the NRDC report was “part of the agency’s overall effort to assess available, current information regarding antimicrobial resistance concerns associated with the use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals.”

Rather than focus on specific drugs, the agency said, it decided to pursue a broader strategy of trying to phase out non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics over time.

It is unclear how many of the drugs the agency examined continue to be sold by manufacturers. NRDC researchers said they found evidence suggesting that at least nine of the feed additives continue to be marketed; aside from two that companies voluntarily withdrew, all others remain approved for use.

Although the FDA did send letters to some companies seeking more information about concerns that the drugs might promote antibiotic resistance, the documents obtained by the NRDC did not show that the agency took further action or that the companies submitted additional safety studies, the report states.

The vast majority of antibiotics sold each year in the United States — by some estimates as much as 80 percent — are used in agriculture rather than in human medicine. Consumer and environmental groups have pressed lawmakers and regulators to do more to limit the amount of antibiotics given to animals, particularly those classes of drugs also used to treat humans.

Last fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an alarming report detailing the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant infections. Although most such infections arise in hospitals and nursing homes, officials underscored the widespread use of antibiotics in animals as a looming concern.

“Resistant bacteria can contaminate the foods that come from those animals, and people who consume these foods can develop antibiotic-resistant infections,” the CDC report stated. “The use of antibiotics for promoting growth is not necessary, and the practice should be phased out.”

The FDA seems to agree. In 1977, the agency said it planned to withdraw approval for some animal antibiotics, especially those used for nonmedical reasons. But for decades, the agency took no action, even as the NRDC sued in recent years, trying to force it to follow through.

In December, the FDA took long-awaited steps aimed at scaling back the use of antibiotics in livestock. The agency asked animal-drug manufacturers to alter their labels so that farmers would no longer be allowed to use antibiotics merely to promote growth. It also wants farmers to get approval from a veterinarian before administering the drugs to livestock.

The agricultural industry largely welcomed the move, saying it would lead to meaningful changes in how antibiotics are used on farms. Consumer advocates and some public health officials were less than impressed, saying the FDA didn’t go far enough and complaining that its recommendations were voluntary.

The FDA said Monday it remains confident that its current approach, which will give animal-drug companies and the agricultural industry several years to adapt, “is the most efficient and effective way to change the use of these products in animal agriculture.”

2. Bloomberg Businessweek, “The FDA Allows Sale Of ‘High Risk’ Antibiotics For Livestock, Report Says”

January 27, 2014

By Andrew Martin

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration review of 30 antibiotics used in livestock found that more than half posed a significant risk of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Despite the review, which occurred from 2001 to 2010, the federal agency allowed the drugs—used as additives in animal feed and water—to remain on the market, according to a report released on Monday by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that based its findings on internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

“This discovery is disturbing but not surprising given FDA’s poor track record on dealing with this issue,” Carmen Cordova, an NRDC microbiologist and the lead author of the study, said in a press release. “It’s just more overwhelming evidence that FDA—in the face of a mounting antibiotic resistance health crisis—is turning a blind eye to industry’s misuse of these miracle drugs.”

According to the report, the FDA reviewed the safety of 30 penicillin and tetracycline antibiotic feed additives that were approved for “non-therapeutic” use in farm animals—meaning drugs used for preventing disease or promoting growth of the animals, rather than treating an illness.

Eighteen of the 30 feed additives were deemed “high risk” for exposing people to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the food supply, according to the report. There wasn’t enough data for FDA researchers to determine whether the other antibiotics were safe, the report found. The NRDC said all but two of the drugs remain approved for use. (Those two drugs were withdrawn by the manufacturers.)

The report is likely to add fuel to an already intense debate over the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock, particularly for reasons other than treating sick animals. In December the FDA released guidelines that are supposed to stop the practice of feeding antibiotics to farm animals only for the purposes of promoting growth. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported, critics including the NRDC have complained that the guidelines were voluntary and too tepid because they still allowed farmers to give antibiotics to healthy animals for disease prevention.

“The FDA has repeatedly found shortcomings with the safety of these drugs,” says Avinash Kar, an NRDC attorney. “It should be moving to take binding action. The voluntary guidance doesn’t get there.”

Asked to respond to the allegations, the FDA late Monday issued a statement saying that the review cited by the NRDC ultimately led them to choose a broader strategy. Rather than vet hundreds of different antibiotics, the agency decided to provide broader guidance for all medically important antibiotics. “The FDA is confident that its current strategy to protect the effectiveness of medically important antimicrobials, including penicillins and tetracyclines, is the most efficient and effective way to change the use of these products in animal agriculture,” the statement said.

The FDA has warned about the dangers of giving low doses of antibiotics to livestock since at least 1972. But efforts to clamp down on their use on the farm were mostly blocked by the livestock and pharmaceutical industries. Experts say that routinely feeding medically important antibiotics to livestock plays some role in antibiotic infections in humans, though its significance is widely debated.

In 2011 (PDF), penicillin and tetracycline accounted for 14.3 million pounds of the 29.9 million pounds of antimicrobial drugs sold for use in livestock. Antimicrobials include antibiotics but also such things as antifungals and antivirals.

The NRDC and other environmental groups maintain that increased use of antibiotics in agriculture is due to modern agricultural practices that raise animals in unsanitary and crowded conditions that breed disease. Farm groups characterize such facilities as more efficient, environmentally sustainable, and necessary to meet the demands of a growing world.

3. Time Magazine, Ecocentric, “New Report Says FDA Allowed “High Risk” Antibiotics To Be Used on Farm Animals”
January 28, 2014

By Bryan Walsh

A stark fact: around 80% of the antibiotics by weight used in the U.S. are given not to sick human beings, but to farm animals. And for the most part, these drugs aren’t prescribed by veterinarians to save ill pigs or chickens, but instead are administered to animals in low doses in their food and water, for the purpose of growth promotion—the drugs seem to help livestock pack on weight—and prophylactially, to help them survive the packed conditions of a modern factory farm.

That the heavy use of antibiotics on farm animals in the U.S. can pose a real health threat to human beings—by inadvertently promoting the growth and spread of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria—is something that nearly every expert outside the food and drug industries agrees on. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more than 2 million Americans are sickened and 23,000 die each year thanks to antibiotic-resistant infections, and while some of that is due to the overprescription of antibiotics to human beings, use and abuse of the drugs in meat production plays a significant role as well, but it’s one that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has long been reluctant to crack down on.

Now a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) underscores just how lacking the FDA’s regulation of antibiotics in farm animals has been. Using FDA documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the NRDC found that the agency allowed 30 potentially harmful antibiotics—18 rated as “high risk” by the FDA itself—to remain on the market for use as additives in livestock feed and water. Despite internal FDA reviews that raised questions about the risks posed by the drugs, the additives still remain approved and many of the drugs are still on the market for food production. “The FDA knew the risks, but they still haven’t done anything to revoke the approval of these drugs,” says Avinash Kar, an attorney for the NRDC and the co-author of the new report.

The FDA has been looking at antibiotics in farm animals since 1970, when the agency convened a joint task force of experts that eventually found that the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock—meaning for growth promotion or for prophylactic use on healthy animals—could lead to resistant strains of bacteria that could threaten human health. In 1973, the FDA adopted regulations that required drug manufacturers to prove the safety of antibiotics used in animal feed and water. In 1977 the FDA found that the use penicillin and tetracyclines—two classes of antibiotics that are widely used to treat humans—in animal feed was unsafe, and proposed to withdraw approval of the drug classes. But according to NRDC’s findings, the agency never followed through.

In 2001, prompted by legislation that set aside money for the agency to look at antibiotics, FDA experts began reviewing livestock feed additives already in use that contained penicillin or tetracyclines. The additives—30 altogether—were reviewed according to two sets of criteria: the 1973 safety regulations, and 2003 guidelines meant to evaluate the safety of any new animal antibiotic drugs. (The 2003 guidelines gauged the risk of antibiotics in feed leading to resistant strains of bacteria, as well as the chance those strains can reach people and damage human health. The antibiotics would then be classified as low, medium or high risk.) The internal FDA documents unearthed by the NRDC show that agency experts found that 26 of the 30 additives had never even met the initial 1973 safety criteria. The agency also found that 18 of the 30 additives posed a “high risk” of exposing human beings to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food chain, according to the criteria set out by the 2003 guidelines.

For the 12 remaining additives, manufacturers hadn’t even supplied the FDA with sufficient evidence for the agency to determine the health risk they might pose to human beings. According to the NRDC, none of the 30 antibiotic feed additives in question could be approved today under the current guidelines. Because the FDA does not disclose sales of specific animal drugs, it’s impossible to know how widely those additives are still being used in animal feed. But the NRDC found evidence that at least nine of the additives are still being marketed today, and 28 of the drugs apparently still remain approved for use. The remaining two were withdrawn voluntarily from the market.

While the food industry says that restricting antibiotics in livestock would lead to sicker animals and more expensive meat, it is possible to have a major meat producing industry without the dangerous use of antibiotics for growth promotion. The European Union has banned all antibiotic growth promoters in animal feed, and Denmark—which produces about as many hogs as Iowa even though the Scandinavian country is more than three times smaller than the Hawkeye State—has banned all prophylactic uses of antibiotics in animals. But while a few food companies in the U.S. like Chipotle have touted their drug-free meat, millions of pounds of antibiotics are still being used on farms. There are a pair of bills in Congress that would curb antibiotic use in animals—the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) in the House and the Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act (PARA)—but neither are likely to pass.

That leaves the FDA, which has in recent years begun to move gently on antibiotics in animal feed. Last month the agency released guidelines that ask drug manufacturers to change their labels voluntarily so that farmers would no longer be able to use the drugs for growth promotion, and instead would need a veterinarian’s prescription to use the drugs for therapeutic purposes, rather than simply allowing them to be bought over the counter. The FDA has said that voluntary guidelines will lead to faster changes in antibiotic use, largely because tougher rules could face time-consuming legal challenges from the food industry. And the agency says that once the labels on drugs have been changed, it would be illegal for the additives to be used for growth promotion—and the FDA has claimed it would take action against companies that failed to comply.

In response to the NRDC report, Siobhan DeLancey of the FDA’s Veterinary Medicine team noted that two major drug companies have expressed support for the agency’s new guidelines, which she said are informed by the FDA’s earlier scientific review of those 30 additives. She added that the FDA expects to fully implement its strategy to phase out all medically important antimicrobials—including the penicillins and tetracyclines called out by the NRDC—within three years:

The FDA is confident that its current strategy to protect the effectiveness of medically important antimicrobials, including penicillins and tetracyclines, is the most efficient and effective way to change the use of these products in animal agriculture. We note that our strategy also does not limit our authority to take future regulatory action.

But consumer and environmental groups are doubtful that much will change without a legal mandate. “The FDA has the authority to move independently on this,” says Kar. “It seems to me the FDA is using the specter of time and resources to justify a voluntary approach.” Until that changes, neither will our other drug problem.

4. Los Angeles Times, “Suit Alleges U.S. Ignored ‘Best Available Science’ In Sonar Ruling”

January 27, 2014

By Louis Sahagun

The National Marine Fisheries Service violated federal law when it authorized the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises off Hawaii and California through 2018, an environmental group said in a lawsuit filed Monday.

The agency’s own analysis had determined the war games would result in 155 marine mammal deaths, more than 2,000 permanent injuries and about 9.6 million instances of temporary hearing loss and disruptions of vital behaviors — an 1,100% increase over the previous five-year period, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Beaked whales, a little understood deep-diving species, and endangered blue whales would be particularly harmed by the amphibious and anti-submarine warfare exercises that are scheduled to include nearly 60,000 hours of sonar broadcasts and detonation of more than 250,000 explosives, the lawsuit said.

The fisheries service authorized up to 10 beaked whale and 13 blue whale deaths as a result of vessel strikes during the exercises.

“This is an unprecedented level of harm,” Zak Smith, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “In order to authorize these impacts on marine mammals, the service had to turn its back on the best available science.”

The lawsuit accuses the service of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act when it determined that the exercises would have a “negligible impact” on marine mammals. It also challenged the Navy’s determination that the exercises were consistent with California’s Coastal Management Program, despite a unanimous rejection of that conclusion by the California Coastal Commission.

In response to criticism, the Navy and fisheries service said they have established “practical and reasonably effective” safety measures to protect marine mammals — including posting lookouts on the bridges of ships and reducing the power of sonar or shutting it down when whales are spotted nearby.

The Navy began operating under the rules of the fisheries service’s new authorization Dec. 26.

The Natural Resources Defense Council filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of five environmental organizations. A similar suit was filed last week in Hawaii by Earthjustice on a behalf of five other groups.

The lawsuits are the latest attempts to limit Navy exercises. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled the nation’s security outweighed the need to protect marine mammals from high-powered sonar and lifted limits on exercises being conducted at the time off the Southern California coast.

“The Supreme Court case involved 170,000 harms to marine mammals over the course of two years,” Smith said. “What’s changed is the far greater scale of harms during upcoming exercises, and new studies proving the link between exposure to sonar and injury to marine mammals.”

Abundant in Southern California coastal waters, marine mammals are sensitive to acoustic disturbances because they rely on hearing to communicate, find food and avoid predators.

Exposure to sonar can cause blue whales — Earth’s largest creature, averaging 80 feet in length and about 200,000 pounds — and beaked whales to flee foraging grounds, negatively affecting fitness and population health, according to a recent study published in the online Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The lawsuit asks that the fisheries service authorization be voided and reconsidered, that the Navy be made to comply with state and federal environmental laws, and that training be restricted in specific areas and at specific times of biological importance to marine mammals.

5. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Keystone Opponents Use Rail Constraints To Urge Rejection”

January 28, 2014

By Jim Snyder and Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Environmentalists are making an unusual argument in their attempt to stop the Keystone XL pipeline: that trains can’t move all the oil out of Canada.

Keystone supporters say Canada could just as easily transport the additional oil to the U.S. on trains — meaning building the pipeline won’t contribute to climate change because the oil’s coming out, pipeline or no.

Opponents have worked furiously to knock down that argument ahead of the U.S. State Department’s release of a key environmental impact statement in coming weeks, pointing to recent oil-train crashes to show railroads aren’t a good alternative.

“The environmental guys are making that argument to State and to the White House,” Michael McKenna, a Keystone supporter and president of MWR Strategies Inc., a Midlothian, Virginia-based lobbying firm, said in an interview. “They’re getting a favorable response. It’s probably a legitimate argument. Maybe all this stuff doesn’t come to market and that affects the profile of greenhouse-gas emissions.”

A draft of the report in March said new railroad cars and pipelines will be developed to get the oil out even without the proposed U.S.-Canada link. It concluded that Keystone, in and of itself, wouldn’t add to the heat-trapping greenhouse gases produced because the carbon-heavy oil sands in Alberta would be developed even if Keystone were never built.

TransCanada’s Application

If the final report alters or reverses that conclusion, it would be bad for TransCanada Corp. (TRP:US)’s application to build the $5.4 billion line to link the oil sands of Alberta with refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President Barack Obama has said he won’t approve Keystone if it were found to substantially boost carbon-dioxide emissions, which scientists say are raising the Earth’s temperature.

Story: Are The Techno Riche Really Ruining San Francisco? Yes, Says Rebecca Solnit

In a flurry of lobbying, groups such as the Sierra Club have been pressing for the final report to account for limits on rail. If it’s not feasible to move large quantities of additional oil by rail, the pipeline would be the culprit in worsening climate change, they argued in a meeting last month with State Department officials.

“It has become increasingly clear that Keystone XL is the linchpin for tar sands expansion,” Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. “New concerns about the safety of rail are likely to result in more regulated practices. That likely further decreases the feasibility of moving tar sands by rail.”

Central Argument

The question of whether rail can replace pipelines has been central to the debate over Keystone XL since the March release of the draft environmental analysis. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency filed a response saying the State Department should do a more complete market analysis of pipelines and rail.

New regulations proposed in the U.S. and Canada last week after a spate of oil-train accidents could restrict the ability of trains to carry more oil.

Environmentalists say the March analysis overestimates rail’s ability to make up for Keystone’s 830,000 barrels per day capacity. About 200,000 barrels a day of oil currently leaves Western Canada by rail, and daily volumes could reach more than 500,000 barrels by the end of the year, according to an estimate this month by Peters & Co., a Calgary-based investment bank.

Rail Capacity

TransCanada says delays in building Keystone XL have resulted in more crude shipments by rail, which creates higher carbon emissions.

“The reality is that increasing volumes are moving by rail as new pipeline infrastructure is delayed,” Shawn Howard, a spokesman for Calgary-based TransCanada, said in an e-mail.

Higher volumes of crude on trains has coincided with accidents, such as the July derailment of rail cars filled with oil in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The accident ignited an inferno that killed 47 people in the town’s center.

The relative safety of pipelines will be a part of the State Department review, said Michael Whatley, executive vice president for Consumer Energy Alliance, a pro-Keystone group whose members include Exxon Mobil Corp.

“At the end of the day, all these trains are safe; pipelines are safer,” Whatley said. He said the industry will continue to use rail and pipelines to transport fuel regardless of what happens with Keystone.

Expanded Production

With pipeline capacity limited, Canadian oil producers must rely on trains to deliver oil to the U.S., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in an October report. Even with an increase in rail terminals that can handle crude, “we remain concerned about the availability of rail cars in 2014,” according to the report.

Growth in Canada’s oil sands could be temporarily deferred if Keystone XL is rejected, RBC Capital Markets said in a September report. It added however that increases in moving crude by rail “should significantly bridge the export capacity gap.”

That was before the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Canadian Transportation Safety Board said last week that oil hauled by rail needs to be shipped in stronger tank cars and on safer routes. The recommendations came as part of the probe into the Lac-Megantic disaster.

Modifying the tank cars identified by the boards may cost leasing companies and shippers about $5.2 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg Government.

Accidents Debated

The rail accidents may add another variable to the debate. The U.S. and Canada safety boards made their proposals after a BNSF Railway Co. train carrying Bakken formation crude crashed in North Dakota last month, forcing the evacuation of a nearby town, and a CSX Corp. (CSX:US) train hauling crude derailed Jan. 20 near the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.

“Rail costs more than pipeline,” said McKenna, a Republican strategist. “That’s going to have a material impact on how much of this stuff gets bought up and how much of it gets sold. That’s a pretty solid argument and it’s getting some traction.”

Peter Howard, chief executive officer of the Canadian Energy Research Institute in Calgary, said it costs about $9 to ship diluted bitumen, as the crude is known, from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico by pipeline and about $20 to do so by rail.

Higher Costs

The higher costs aren’t deterring rail projects. Shipments by rail will increase “quite significantly” in the next few years as pipelines reach their carrying capacity, he said.

The costs of moving it by train could increase with regulations, he said.

After a final environmental assessment is released, federal agencies including the EPA have 90 days to advise the State Department on why Keystone is or isn’t in the national interest.

“There is no way, no how that the tar sands gets out of the ground as fast — or at all — without this pipeline,” Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, told reporters. “We’re cautiously optimistic and remain that way.”

“If State conducts a defensible environmental review of Keystone XL — and we expect it to — it will have to recognize the mounting evidence showing the project’s critical importance to the tar sands industry’s expansion plans,” Swift said.

6. USA Today, “Fatal Chemical Accidents Expose Weak Federal Laws”

January 28, 2014

By Wendy Koch

Tammy Miser and Katherine Rodriguez share a heartbreaking bond. They’ve each lost a loved one — a brother, a father — to chemical accidents a decade ago that burned at least 80% of the men’s bodies.

The U.S. government, after investigating the tragedies in Indiana and Texas, recommended changes in federal rules so more such industrial explosions wouldn’t happen.

But more have happened, and the two women are still waiting for Washington to deliver.

“I’m extremely frustrated. Almost all the families (of victims) are,” says Miser, whose brother Shawn Boone was killed at age 33 in an aluminum dust explosion at the former Hayes Lemmerz factory in Huntington, Ind., in October 2003.

Their stories reveal glaring gaps in the nation’s web of laws that govern the use of hazardous chemicals — a cautionary tale as West Virginia tries to clean up a massive chemical spill begun earlier this month.

Federal officials know little about the health risks of the two potentially toxic chemicals that Freedom Industries’ storage tank leaked into the Elk River near Charleston, W.V., contaminating the local water supply of 300,000 residents.

That’s not unusual. The primary U.S. law on chemical use, the 38-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act, doesn’t require manufacturers to test for toxicity. It barely covers most chemicals on the market, because their use preceded the law and is largely exempt. The legislation can’t be fixed without action by Congress.

At the same time, the independent federal agency that’s investigating the West Virginia spill — along with the explosions that killed Boone and Rodriguez’s father, Ray Gonzalez — has no enforcement power. So the Chemical Safety Board’s probes, which sometimes take years, lead to recommendations that too often are ignored.

The CSB has more than 160 pending recommendations, including some a decade old and 12 from three prior accidents in West Virginia since 2007. It says companies and government officials have given “unacceptable” responses to 31, and it’s closed the book on 18 of them.

“At some point, you have to deal with reality,” says the CSB’s managing director, Daniel Horowitz,adding his tiny staff tracks 700 recommendations and needs to weed out those least likely to be carried out. It has stopped pushing, for example, for Indiana to train fire inspectors about aluminum dust explosion hazards — which killed Boone — or for Houston to adopt new safety rules for storage containers holding pressurized gases after a tank exploded at a Marcus Oil facility in the city in 2004.

“There’s a lot that’s not covered,” Horowitz says of the “patchwork” of U.S. laws on chemical use. He says Congress had “big intentions” when it created his agency and passed environmental laws including the Clear Air Act and the Clean Water Act in the early 1990s. But major gaps remain. Many worker-safety rules date from the 1960s.

“It’s just a mess. … The whole process has been a total failure, and we’re facing the consequences now,” says Noah Sachs, director of the University of Richmond School of Law’s Center for Environmental Studies. He published a report this month that finds Virginia has more than 65 companies storing more than a million pounds of chemicals — many near rivers. He says it faces many of the same risks as its neighbor to the west.

No one knows how often chemical accidents occur, because there’s no reliable and robust database. The National Response Center, a hotline run by the Coast Guard, takes reports of such accidents but doesn’t verify the details. So its data is wrong 90% of the time, according to an analysis of 750,000 federal records last year by the Dallas Morning News.

Horowitz says chemical accidents are “certainly not showing a downward trend,” based on his agency’s limited count — 334 fatal incidents causing $500,000-plus in property damage in 2012, up from 282 in 2011. For one investigation, it looked at 167 accidents involving uncontrolled chemical reactions that caused 108 deaths and hundreds of millions in property damages over a 22-year period. It’s studied multiple fatal explosions caused by combustible dust.

“My father had burns to 80% of his body and endured multiple skin graft surgeries and painful daily cleaning of his skin,” Rodriguez told the CSB in July, saying he suffered in the hospital more than two months before dying at age 54 in Nov. 2004. Six months later at the same BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, another blast killed 15 other workers and injured 180.

Miser’s brother lost his eyesight from the Indiana blast, and doctors said the third- and fourth-degree burns that covered at least 90% of his body destroyed his internal organs. The hospital’s pastor told Miser he hadn’t seen anything that bad since wartime. She says her brother’s last words haunt her: “I’m in a world of hurt.”

Multiple weak spots

“The West Virginia spill shows our policies have failed,” says Andy Igrejas, national campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition advocating for tougher rules.

The coal-cleaning chemical that was spilled — 4-methyl-cyclohexane-methanol (MCHM) — has a material safety data sheet that lists “no data available” on carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity and more than 100 other items. The manufacturer, Eastman Chemical Company, says it’s “harmful if swallowed.” Federal officials largely based their decision on its likely safe level in drinking water on a single, non-peer-reviewed study on rats.

Several federal laws address the use of chemicals, including separate ones for pesticides and cosmetics. Together, though, they cover only a small share of the total.

The main law, TSCA, grandfathered in about 62,000 of the 80,000-plus chemicals now in use — including MCHM — when it was passed in 1976. Unlike the European Union’s approach, it doesn’t require companies to prove their chemicals are safe, instead putting the onus on government to prove they’re not. In essence, Igrejas says, chemicals are “innocent until proven guilty.”

The law allows the Environmental Protection Agency to require safety data or testing of newer chemicals only if it can justify the requirement. Problem is: EPA is rarely given the data to make its case.

“It’s a circular problem. … It puts EPA in a tight spot,” says Jennifer Sass, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “The entire system is rigged to favor the chemical companies and the users of these chemicals,” she says, adding many spills and explosions are really not “accidents” but preventable “incidents.”

The chemical industry says TSCA has provided protections but needs to be updated. “The regulatory laws do need to be enhanced,” says Anne Kolton, spokeswoman of the American Chemistry Council, saying scientists have learned a lot since 1976 about how chemicals can affect human health.

Her group welcomes a bipartisan update proposed in May by Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and the late Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. She says it would allow EPA to identify priority chemicals for additional safety information. She says not all chemicals need to tested, because many have similar properties and the EPA has “sophisticated tools” to assess those with potential hazards.

But David Rosenberg, a chemical safety expert at the NRDC, says the measure isn’t strong enough: “It’s a deeply flawed bill and should not move forward without extensive revisions,” he says.

“I understand what they’re saying, but you have to start somewhere,” says Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. He says Lautenberg, who passed away in early June after spending years trying to update TSCA, asked him to help craft a b-partisan bill.

Manchin, a governor for six years before arriving in Congress in 2010, says some people accuse the industry of writing the bill and others accuse the environmentalists of doing so. “They’re all good people,” he says, “but I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

“We continue to work toward finding consensus,” Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said in a statement. She said the proposed update needs to be “stronger than current law” so “negotiations are continuing.”

Manchin and Boxer teamed up on a new spill-prevention bill, introduced on Monday, to strengthen the Safe Water Drinking Act. The legislation wouldn’t update TSCA but would require emergency response plans and regular state inspections of above-ground chemical storage facilities. Manchin says he expects GOP support.

Not everyone agrees Congress needs to act. “I am entirely confident that there are ample regulations already on the books to protect the health and safety of the American people,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said at a press conference after the West Virginia spill. He added: “Someone needs to be held accountable here.”

The EPA is partly to blame, according to several reports by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO says the EPA has been too slow in updating or completing safety reviews of chemicals in its limited database — the Integrated Risk Information System. Sass and other environmentalists say the EPA lacks sufficient resources.

The Chemical Safety Board, hailed by victims’ families for its thorough investigations, has also received criticism. Its number of accident reports, case studies and safety bulletins have dropped considerably since 2006, according to an analysis last year by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research group. Of its 13 ongoing investigations, three are of accidents that happened in 2009.

“The CSB is drastically overburdened,” Horowitz says, noting it has a $10 million annual budget and only 20 investigators He says it had a 22-case backlog when Congress asked it to investigate the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is not yet complete. “We don’t have the manpower to finish everything as quickly as we’d like.”

Changes sought

For nearly a decade, the CSB has repeatedly recommended that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issue new rules to prevent explosions from metal and other types of dust, which can combust when they are left on surfaces and exposed to other chemicals.

OSHA has yet to do so. The House passed a bill in 2008 that would have required the agency to issue a final standard within 18 months, but the legislation died in the Senate. In a 2012 report, the GAO said it takes an average of nearly 8 years for OSHA to finalize safety standards.

“Writing a combustible dust standard continues to be a priority,” Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of Labor for OSHA, said in a statement. “The realities of the regulatory process don’t allow that to happen overnight, but we continue to work toward that end.”

The United States is “further behind much of the world, and not just the developed world” in tackling chemical safety, says Richard Denison, senior scientist at the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund. In recent years, he says China has adopted rules that are stricter than U.S. ones, the European Union consolidated about 40 laws into one and Canada finished a systematic review of 20,000-plus chemicals in use.

President Obama is pushing for progress. He issued an executive order in August that tasks federal agencies with improving the security and safety of facilities that make, store or use chemicals. A “working group” has held “listening sessions” across the country to solicit ideas for modernizing rules, developing best practices and bolstering coordination with state and local officials.

“The federal government is examining the need to improve safety,” says Mathy Stanislaus, who heads EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. By the end of May, he says officials will submit a plan to fill the gaps in U.S. laws that deal with preventing and responding to chemical incidents.

Families of workers killed by them say progress isn’t coming fast enough.

“There’s so much more that can be done,” says Rodriguez, a Houston-area certified public accountant who has become an advocate for chemical safety. She says OSHA’s $102,500 fine on BP for the explosion that killed her father is “not a very persuasive motivator” for large corporations.

“He was a great dad. He always made sure his family was taken care of,” she says, noting he quit his job as a butcher when she was a toddler so he could earn more money as a BP worker and better support his wife and four daughters. She says her three young children will never know him — the man who never failed to ask how she was doing. “I just miss sitting and talking to him and hearing him say, ‘I’m proud of you.’ ”

7. New York Times, “From Warheads To Cheap Energy”

January 27, 2014

By William J. Broad

As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a new fear arose amid the rejoicing and relief: that atomic security might fail in the disintegrating Soviet Union, allowing its huge stockpile of nuclear warheads to fall into unfriendly hands.

The jitters intensified in late 1991, as Moscow announced plans to store thousands of weapons from missiles and bombers in what experts viewed as decrepit bunkers, policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability.

Many officials and scientists worried. Few knew what to do.

That is when Thomas L. Neff, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hit on his improbable idea: Why not let Moscow sell the uranium from its retired weapons and dilute it into fuel for electric utilities in the United States, giving Russians desperately needed cash and Americans a cheap source of power?

Last month, Dr. Neff’s idea came to a happy conclusion as the last shipment of uranium from Russia arrived in the United States. In all, over two decades, the program known as Megatons to Megawatts turned 20,000 Russian warheads into electricity that has illuminated one in 10 American light bulbs.

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Dr. Neff fathered the atomic recycling program in spite (or perhaps because) of his lack of name recognition, his inexperience on the world stage and his modest credentials in arms control. Moreover, he not only came up with the original plan but shepherded it for decades.

“I was naïve,” Dr. Neff, 70, recalled in a recent interview. “I thought the idea would take care of itself.”

In fact, it required sheer doggedness and considerable skill in applying nuclear science to a global deal freighted with technical complexities and political uncertainties. Yet in the end, Dr. Neff noted, the mission was accomplished: Uranium once meant to obliterate American cities ended up endowing them with energy.

Nuclear experts hail it as a remarkable if poorly known chapter of atomic history. The two decades of bomb recycling, they say, not only reduced the threat of atomic terrorism and helped stabilize the former Soviet Union but achieved a major feat of nuclear disarmament — a popular goal that is seldom achieved.

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches at Princeton. The wave of arms destruction, he said, eliminated up to a third of the planet’s atomic bomb fuel, making it “the biggest single step” in the history of nuclear arms reduction.

He called Dr. Neff an underappreciated hero, adding that in a time of governmental muddle and paralysis, his success was a striking example “of what one person can do.”

Thomas Lee Neff was born in 1943 in Oregon, the older of two boys; his family raised chickens and grew most of its own food. He studied math and physics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, graduating with highest honors, and received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford. As a senior M.I.T. researcher, he specialized in energy studies, writing books on nuclear power, solar energy and, in 1984, the global uranium market. His timing was propitious.

In the nuclear age, the rare isotope uranium 235 has played starring roles in war and peace. When highly purified, to a level of 90 percent, it fuels atom bombs; at 5 percent, it powers nuclear reactors for electric utilities.

As the Cold War ended, Dr. Neff wondered whether these disparate worlds might be able to do business together. When Washington and Moscow announced major unilateral arms reductions in late 1991, he recalled, “I said: ‘Wow. What’s going to happen to all these weapons?’ ”

Dr. Neff, like many experts of the day, worried that the Soviet Union was ill equipped to deal with thousands of discarded bombs. The treaties and independent actions of the Cold War allowed nuclear arms taken from bombers and missiles to be kept in storage, raising the possibility of reuse, diversion and theft.

The beleaguered communist state, he feared, was already cutting back on nuclear upkeep, workers’ pay and dozens of measures meant to keep weapons safe. He also suspected that newly impoverished Russian nuclear scientists, once a pampered elite, might seek work elsewhere.

“It all sounded dangerous,” he said.

His solution was atomic recycling. The question was how to float the idea.

On Oct. 19, 1991, nuclear experts filed into the Diplomat Room of the State Plaza Hotel in Washington. The agenda of the nongovernmental meeting was demilitarization. A Soviet delegation attended, as did Dr. Neff.

Outside the conference room during a break, he approached a leader of the Soviet bomb complex, Viktor N. Mikhailov, a canny apparatchik known for his love of Western cigarettes.

Dr. Neff asked whether he would consider selling the uranium in Soviet weapons.

“Interesting,” he said Dr. Mikhailov replied, puffing away. “How much?”

Five hundred metric tons, Dr. Neff said, giving what he considered a high estimate for the quantity of Soviet bomb fuel soon to become surplus. “If I had known how much they really had,” he recalled, “I would have said 700 tons.”

Even so, 500 metric tons was a lot: 1.1 million pounds, heavier than a fully loaded 747 jetliner.

Five days later, Dr. Neff made his idea public in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, “A Grand Uranium Bargain.” The illustration showed a kitchen pot and spoon floating eerily above a countertop and — just behind — an open window. Outside was a bomber.

“If we do not obtain the material,” he warned, shadowy agents in the former Soviet Union, perhaps uncontrolled by central authority, might seek to “sell weapons-grade materials to the highest bidders.”

The idea gained support in both Washington and Moscow. Carrying it out, through a tangle of conflicting state and commercial interests, was another matter. Dr. Neff was there to prod it along at almost every turn. In late December 1991, he was among the last Westerners to see the Soviet hammer and sickle flying over the Kremlin.

The first shipment of uranium arrived in 1995; 250 more followed over the next 18 years. Last month, a freighter sailing from St. Petersburg to Baltimore delivered the last shipment. Strapped into transport pallets were giant steel drums, each holding about two bombs’ worth of diluted uranium.

Colorful signs on the drums showed fluttering Russian and United States flags, with a message in large type: “20,000 Nuclear Warheads Eliminated.”

Dr. Neff estimates that he flew 20 times to Russia and other former Soviet states to work on the original deal and its amendments. He says a book he is writing draws on thousands of documents.

Thomas B. Cochran — a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington who helped organize East-West interactions at the Cold War’s end, including the gathering where Dr. Neff met the Soviet official — said the American physicist deserved “99 percent of the credit” for the uranium deal. Its most important result, he added, was simply improving the relationship between the United States and Russia at a critical moment in history.

Last month, the Russian Embassy in Washington held a reception to mark the end of the Megatons to Megawatts program. Dr. Neff was an honored guest.

A brochure handed out at the reception reprinted his Op-Ed article, praising the commercial deal as a first for nuclear disarmament. It put the overall cost of the transaction at $17 billion.

Uranium from the dismantled weapons, it said, was diluted into 15,432 tons of low enriched uranium. The resulting reactor fuel supplied half of all American nuclear power plants.

The total electric power, it said, could illuminate the whole of the United States (roughly 20,000 cities and 115 million households) for about two years — or Washington, D.C., for 185 years.

The atomic sale, the brochure said, “is widely held to symbolize the end of the era of confrontation between the two major nuclear powers.”

In an interview, Ernest Moniz, the federal secretary of energy and a former colleague of Dr. Neff’s at M.I.T., praised him for not only proposing the plan but helping guide it for more than two decades.

“If he hadn’t stuck with it,” Dr. Moniz said, “it could have very easily been one of these great ideas that ends up just spinning its wheels.”

Millions of idealists, from President Obama on down, have sought a world without nuclear weapons. Dr. Neff, despite doing more than almost anyone to advance that goal, is circumspect about what he accomplished.

He made no mention of energy windfalls, geopolitical realignments or the biblical injunction to turn swords into plowshares.

The lesson of the story, he remarked in an interview, “is that private citizens can actually do something.”

8. National Journal, “John Cruden’s Ready To Ride A White Horse To Justice”

January 27, 2014

By Mike Magner

Still mired in the massive case against BP for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Justice Department is turning to an old hand to help revitalize environmental enforcement for the Obama administration.

Just before Christmas, President Obama nominated John Cruden as assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources. Cruden was a top career attorney in the DOJ division for more than 20 years before stepping down in 2011 to become president of the Environmental Law Institute, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization.

“John Cruden’s lifetime commitment to public service, his decades devoted to environmental law, and his outstanding record at the Justice Department make him an unparalleled choice to lead the Environment and Natural Resources Division,” said ELI Chairman Edward Strohbehn Jr. after the appointment was announced Dec. 23. “We at ELI can attest to the great qualities he will bring to the work—his knowledge and judgment to make good decisions and his spirit and energy to bring others together and get the job done.”

Jason Hutt, a partner at Bracewell & Giuliani focused on environmental litigation, said Cruden “commanded great respect” during his two decades at Justice. “I think he has a very fair-minded and disciplinary approach to these issues,” Hutt said. “I don’t view him as a political appointment at all.”

David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, had a similar view. “He is very well qualified for this,” Doniger said. “They have a good team and they do good work…. He will fit in very well.”

Cruden was unable to do an interview with his confirmation pending in the Senate, but when he left the Justice Department in 2011 he told National Journal he was not looking to leave, but was attracted by ELI’s “vision statement,” which calls for “a healthy environment, prosperous economies, and vibrant communities founded on the rule of law.”

Now Cruden, if confirmed, will face the challenge of reinvigorating a division at Justice with more than 500 full-time employees, many of them attorneys who have been wrapped up in the Gulf spill litigation for more than three years. The previous assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources, Ignacia Moreno, resigned last June to return to private life. Moreno had been with the division during the Clinton administration and worked for two Washington law firms and as a corporate environmental counsel for General Electric before Obama tapped her for the Justice position in 2009.

Cruden was a government attorney for 35 years, including 14 with the military, before joining ELI. After graduating from West Point, he was an Army Ranger in Germany and Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, then went to Santa Clara Law School and the Woodrow Wilson School at the University of Virginia before becoming an Army litigator in 1976. He moved to the Justice Department in 1991 as chief of environmental enforcement, then rose to deputy assistant attorney general in the environment division in 1995.

During his more than 20 years at Justice, Cruden played a leading role in almost every major environmental case, including the government’s prosecution for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska; toxic-waste dumping at Love Canal, N.Y.; dioxin contamination in Times Beach, Mo.; and finally the BP oil spill.

The Justice Department’s civil case against BP and eight other parties involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster was filed in December 2010, about six months before Cruden left the environmental division. The trial began last February and is still underway in federal court in New Orleans.

“The discovery requirements involved in the Deepwater litigation are unprecedented,” says the fiscal 2014 budget summary for the Environment and Natural Resources Division. “The outcome of the department’s civil Deepwater litigation is likely to be historic in terms of the scale and scope of monetary penalties and redress imposed.”

1. Bloomberg BNA, “EPA Defends Three Fracking Investigations, Will Work With States to Prevent Pollution”

January 24, 2014

By Alan Kovski

Bloomberg BNA — The Environmental Protection Agency is working with states and will continue to do so to prevent or investigate groundwater contamination from shale gas drilling, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told a prominent environmental advocate.

McCarthy in a letter Jan. 10 was responding to a September letter from Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who accused the EPA of “a troubling trend of abandoning investigations of hydraulic fracturing before they are completed.”

Beinecke’s letter to the EPA cited three high-profile investigations of well water contamination, all near natural gas wells where hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, had been used to stimulate underground gas flow. The investigations were in Parker County, Texas, near a Range Resources Inc. gas well; at Pavillion, Wyo., near Encana Corp. gas wells; and at Dimock, Pa., near Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. gas wells.

McCarthy responded that the EPA in its investigations worked closely with individual states, “which have key capacity and regulatory authority relevant to unconventional oil and natural gas extraction.”

That didn’t sit well with NRDC. Kate Sinding, a senior attorney with the group, posted a blog commentary Jan. 15 saying the letter from McCarthy “reiterates the, frankly, lame non-explanations that EPA has previously proffered.”

State Regulation Addressed

Beinecke’s letter said state oil and gas regulators “ignored citizen complaints.” When the EPA withdrew from the cases, “the public lost confidence that EPA was truly dedicated to investigating the risks of hydraulic fracturing and ensuring full enforcement of federal environmental statutes,” Beinecke said.

McCarthy’s responding letter didn’t fault state regulators or suggest they had ignored problems, nor did she attempt to address the question of what confidence the public may or may not have in the EPA.

The Parker County and Pavillion cases remain in the hands of state oil and gas regulators, and McCarthy said the EPA is ready to contribute as needed to those cases. The EPA ended its work in Dimock after concluding that there was no threat to public health and no further EPA action was needed.

McCarthy’s reference to state capacity and authority reflected something state agencies have been saying not only in those cases but in questioning the need of enhanced federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing.

State oil and gas agencies have been regulating and investigating oil and gas drilling and production for many decades, and that work routinely includes investigations of contamination complaints.

McCarthy’s letter pointed out that the EPA has several regulatory initiatives involving unconventional oil and gas, including a pending guidance on fracking with diesel fuels, working with the Bureau of Land

Management on a BLM update of oil and gas regulations involving fracking on federal lands, a rulemaking on reporting of toxic chemicals in fracking fluids and a study of the risks posed to drinking water from fracking.

2. PBS Newshour, “Compost Sites Clamor for Table Scraps”

January 26, 2014

By Barbara Hartman

Watch the clip here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june14/foodwaste_01-26.html

Transcript

BARBARA HARTMAN: These are food scraps. Rather than putting them in the trash, I’d rather put them in my compost area.

MONA ISKANDER: Barbara Hartman is a registered dietician who lives in rural West Virginia. She grew up appreciating the value of food.

BARBARA HARTMAN: I don’t like to waste food. It’s been ingrained in me since I was a little child. My grandfather lived through the Depression. And he would always bug us about cleaning our plates. And then my parents would echo that.

MONA ISKANDER: Hartman is part of a growing number of people trying different methods to reduce food waste at home.

BARBARA HARTMAN: A lot of people will throw the greens on the beets away, but they are actually delicious, so I save them, put them in the pan. There’s less waste that way.

I like to freeze things instead of throwing them out. This is a piece of turkey pot pie from the holiday meal that I just stuck into the freezer, otherwise it would have gone into the compost.

MONA ISKANDER: But Hartman’s not only trying to reduce waste at home… she’s taken her philosophy to work. She is the chief of nutrition and food service at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where she’s in charge of serving 15 hundred meals a day.

MONA ISKANDER: What was this food situation like here when you first came to work here?

BARBARA HARTMAN: When I first became the chief of the service, we were throwing all of the food waste into the trash. Which was then going to the landfill.

MONA ISKANDER: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 36 million tons of food waste goes to landfills every year. And the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation’s most powerful environmental groups, says that’s harmful to the environment.

MONA ISKANDER: According to the NRDC, food now represents the biggest component of solid municipal waste that makes its way to landfills. Food waste converts to methane, a greenhouse gas that’s at least 25 times more powerful in global warming than carbon dioxide.

MONA ISKANDER: It’s environmental concerns like this that encouraged Barbara Hartman and her team to take action. Six years ago they started to implement what they call, “a green kitchen” initiative.

BARBARA HARTMAN: Our goal these days is to be as environmentally responsible as we can be. And to also have great food.

MONA ISKANDER: So Hartman turned to technology, investing $22,000 of the VA medical center’s money in a food waste tracking system called LeanPath. It paid for itself in just 6 months.

MONA ISKANDER: Here’s how it works: every day, Hartman’s staff weighs and records the amount of food that’s wasted when preparing meals… they also measure the waste from untouched leftover meals

RUSSELL: So I’m actually weighing our waste trim that’s coming from the vegetable prep department.

MONA ISKANDER: LeanPath generates data on what specific food is being wasted.

BARBARA HARTMAN: This shows the top 10 food items that we’ve wasted by category and I can see that cooked vegetables were up quite a bit in our waste. So… It does help me to determine that OK next week we do need to order less of certain items.
ANDREW SHAKMAN: Food is money. So it’s really critical that we record data about it and we know what we’re wasting.

MONA ISKANDER: Andrew Shakman is the president and co-founder of LeanPath. A graduate of Stanford University, he has a background in technology.

ANDREW SHAKMAN: I’m passionate about the food waste problem because I came to it initially as a very rational business thinker, approaching this as– an economic problem. There’s a financial opportunity where it made no sense to be inefficient.

MONA ISKANDER: Shakman is one of a growing number of social entrepreneurs who are trying to make money and do the right thing to reduce food waste.

ANDREW SHAKMAN: And I found that I got out of bed every day with a purpose and a mission that was driven by impacting those things. Yes, we want to build a great business, but what’s exciting to us is about making a change.

MONA ISKANDER: So far he’s sold his system to more than 150 large institutions, like colleges, hospitals and hotels around the country.

In an effort to attract smaller businesses, like restaurants, LeanPath now charges about $150 to $1,000 a month, depending on the level of service provided.

ANDREW SHAKMAN: So what LeanPath does is we help people understand what they’re putting in the garbage, so that they can then make changes to production, to purchasing and to menus so that in the future, they don’t have that waste again.

MONA ISKANDER: Shakman’s company is making a profit. And its clients are saving money.

BARBARA HARTMAN: I conservatively estimate that we save $40,000 to $50,000 a year in food waste.

MONA ISKANDER: In the last few years, other companies have sprung up to tackle the food waste problem while also trying to make a profit. Start-ups like Food Cowboy and Crop Mobster connect food suppliers who have excess fresh produce to organizations that feed people in need… cutting waste and charging a small commission on the transaction. Another company, Daily Table, wants to make money on the fact that most grocery stores can only sell perfect looking fruits and vegetables. The company wants to sell bruised and oversized produce at discounted prices.

Back in West Virginia, just 15 miles from the VA medical center, a local farmer, Cam Tabb, has also found a way to make money and reduce the amount of food going into landfills. On his 1800-acre farm, he grows a variety of crops and raises livestock. But Tabb has also built a thriving composting business. The VA medical center pays Tabb to pick up their leftover food scraps every two weeks. He trucks this to his compost heap where it supplements other organic waste that will decompose over time.

CAM TABB: We’re converting a waste into a usable product that grows another crop. In other words, what you saw put in there was some sort of crop and now, once it’s processed into finished compost then we’ll grow other crops.

MONA ISKANDER: Tabb uses the nutrient rich compost in place of commercial fertilizer, saving him $50,000 a year.

CAM TABB: It’s part of the diversification that we’ve done which makes us more profitable.

MONA ISKANDER: Thanks to this unique partnership and other efforts the VA medical center has made to reduce food waste, Hartman and her team received an award from the White House in 2010.

BARBARA HARTMAN: Before we started our Waste Watchers program, our green kitchen, all of our food waste was going into the landfill. And now we’ve reduced it to where there’s about 5 percent to 10 percent.

MONA ISKANDER: But advocates say there is much work that needs to be done around the country to address what is an enormous problem.

PETER LEHNER: In the United States, there’s food wasted at every step of the chain.

MONA ISKANDER: Peter Lehner is the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He says the government is starting to pay attention.

PETER LEHNER: EPA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture have all started programs to try to address food waste, to try to begin to educate people about that.

MONA ISKANDER: One area his organization would like the government to focus on is regulating food date labeling. Those dates stamped on products you buy often provide information for when food is at its best quality. Not the date that a product has gone bad and is supposed to be tossed out.

PETER LEHNER: When people are encouraged to use their nose rather than just look at the date, actually taste– take a taste and see whether it is still good, that can make a big difference.

MONA ISKANDER: And Lehner says curtailing food waste may be easier than it seems. He says that’s because almost half of the food in this country goes through six major retailers, Walmart, Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Target and Supervalu.

PETER LEHNER: And so it’s a half a dozen companies who have a tremendous opportunity if they change some of their policies, including pressure they put about expiration dates, how they display food, what they do with food they’re throwing out, putting it into composting or feeding it to animals instead of putting it in a landfill. It’s a relatively small number of actors who could make a big, big difference. And so NRDC and others are working with them because they can also save money at it.

MONA ISKANDER: As for Barbara Hartman, she has plans to expand her initiatives and hopes to tell others in the community about how they can put these types of programs into place.

BARBARA HARTMAN: When it’s all said and done, when I’m in my senior golden years, I’ll be able to feel like I did the best I could. And that my contributions add up.

3. NBC Nightly News, “Store to Sell Only Expired Food”

January 26, 2014

By Nightly News

[Watch video here: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/54186865#54186865]

NRDC and Dana Gunders @ 1:30.

4. NBC Politics, “Frustrated Obama’s Message: I’ll Go it Alone.”

January 26, 2014

By Tom Curry

When he stands before lawmakers Tuesday night for his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama will have a message for the divided Congress that has largely stymied his agenda for the past three years: Fine, I’ll go it alone.

“I’ve got a pen,” Obama has said in the weeks leading up to the speech, “and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”

Many of Obama’s big policy goals have ended up stranded in limbo between the Democratic-controlled Senate trying to advance his agenda and the Republican-led House bent on stopping him.

And, heading into a midterm election year, he faces lame-duck status unless his party can regain control of the House this November.

Frustrated with the Capitol Hill quagmire, the president is increasingly turning toward the power of the presidency to try to solidify his legacy. Obama has pledged to act, saying, “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need.”

“The president sees this as a year of action, to work with Congress where he can and to bypass Congress where necessary,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told ABC News Sunday.

This rhetoric is not new for Obama. He said last June that climate change is “a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now.”

The president has also warned that he “has a phone,” to rally the county around his ideas and entice businesses and non-profit organizations to help shift the political winds.

Here are three areas where President Obama can act on his own or at least can operate with a great degree of leeway

Appointments

Now that Senate Democrats have eliminated filibusters for nominations other than to the Supreme Court, the way is clear for Obama to fill vacancies in executive branch agencies and especially to life-tenured posts on the federal appeals courts.

Nominees can now be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Democrats have 55 votes in the Senate, which allows Democrats in conservative states or who face tough re-election races in 2014 to not vote with Obama on his contentious nominees.

Last month, three red-state Democrats, including Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas who’s up for re-election this fall, voted against Obama appeals court nominee Nina Pillard, who’d made controversial comments critical of anti-abortion protesters.

There are now 16 vacancies on the federal appeals courts around the country. So far Obama has sent nine

nominees to the Senate for these open posts.

Thanks to the abolition of the filibuster in the case of most nominees, Democratic-appointed judges now dominate the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit which handles many EPA and other regulatory cases. Obama and Bill Clinton have appointed seven of that court’s 11 active judges.

Executive orders and directives

Based on what Obama and his aides have said in the run-up to the State of the Union, it’s likely that he will seek to test the limits of what he can do through executive orders and directives to federal agencies.

An example of one Obama directive done by presidential memorandum: last June he directed the Interior

Department to approve enough renewable energy capacity on federal lands to power more than 6 million homes by 2020.

But congressional Republicans are on a high state of alert for what they see as Obama intrusions on congressional law-making power.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., warned Sunday that “when the executive branch tries to assume the legislative

powers, that that’s a form of tyranny.”

And in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last month, Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, who served in the Justice Department during the Bush administration, criticized “the president’s decision to enforce the immigration laws as though the DREAM Act had been enacted when in fact, it has not.”

He said that even though Obama favors the DREAM Act, “Congress repeatedly declined to pass it. So the president simply announced that he would enforce the Immigration Nationality Act as though the DREAM Act had been enacted.”

Regulations

The coming year will be crucial for the climate change agenda which Obama announced last June.

Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group, told reporters last month the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been developing new rules for fracking — hydraulic fracturing to increase natural gas and oil output — under federal leases for areas that “serve as major sources of drinking water for metropolitan areas like Washington, D.C. and the Denver metro area.”

The NRDC, she said, thinks BLM’s fracking policy “is much too weak,” so environmentalists will be closely watching Obama’s nominee to head the BLM, Neil Kornze, who is a former advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The BLM may not be well known to most Americans, even though it administers 245 million acres, an area larger than New York, Florida, Minnesota and California combined. And Kornze, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, isn’t a household name. But the decisions that he and other regulators make will have enormous real-world consequences, even though the debate over these policies won’t usually be taking place on the Senate floor and certainly won’t be broadcast in primetime as will Obama’s speech Tuesday night.

5. LA Times, “Most Latinos Want Government Action on Climate Change, Poll Finds”

January 24, 2014

By Tony Barboza

Latinos overwhelmingly favor government action to fight climate change, voicing a level of support exceeded only in their views on immigration reform, according to a new poll commissioned by an environmental group.

Nine in 10 Latino voters surveyed said it was important for the U.S. government to address global warming and climate change; 80% favored presidential action to fight carbon pollution that causes it, according to the nationwide survey funded by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Other polling has shown that Latinos by wide margins back action to curb pollution, climate change and other environmental problems. The latest poll found even more intense support for policies to counter global warming.

“Almost any way you sliced it, Latinos were saying yes, we think there’s a role for government to regulate and limit carbon pollution,” said Matt Barreto, a professor of political science at the University of Washington and co-founder of Latino Decisions, the political opinion research firm that conducted the poll.

Those views cut across age, income and party affiliation, according to the survey. The poll, however, found somewhat lower support for government action on climate change among Latino Republicans and higher support for environmental protections among Democrats and young Latinos.

The results echo other surveys conducted in recent years for groups like the Sierra Club and National Council of La Raza that have found that a higher percentage of Latinos believe climate change is happening than do Americans as a whole.

The latest poll, conducted in November and December 2013 by Latino Decisions, interviewed 805 registered Latino voters across the country in English or Spanish. The Natural Resources Defense Council said it worked with the polling firm to design the questions.

A comparison to similar polls showed support for climate change action among the Latino electorate was higher and more consistent than on many other issues, including healthcare, education and the economy, and surpassed only by their attitudes on immigration policy, Barreto said.

He said the findings also showed that climate change and environmental protection resonate strongly with Latinos on a cultural level. Many respondents indicated they see global warming and air pollution as global rather than local issues. They also told interviewers they were motivated by beliefs that addressing environmental problems could build a better life for their families and for future generations.

Those findings indicate to Barreto that going forward, “we should be thinking of climate and the environment as a core Latino issue.”

The results also suggest that ignoring Latinos’ views could be a wasted opportunity when it comes to building support for policies to reduce carbon emissions, said Adrianna Quintero, an attorney and director of Latino engagement for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We need to really get out there and engage with Latinos to speak up and help us solve the climate crisis,” she said.

6. Inside Climate News, “FEMA: Caught Between Climate Change and Congress”

January 27, 2014

By Katherine Bagley

Thanks to climate change, extreme weather disasters have hammered the United States with increasing frequency in recent years—from drought and wildfires to coastal storms and flooding.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that the U.S. agency in charge of preparing for and responding to these disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), doesn’t account for climate change in most of its budget planning and resource allocation or in the National Flood Insurance Program it administers.

“Climate change is affecting everything the agency does, and yet it isn’t given much consideration,” said Michael Crimmins, an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona who is leading a project to try to improve FEMA’s use of climate science data. “FEMA has to be climate literate in a way that many other agencies don’t have to be.”

A main problem, he and other experts say, is that FEMA doesn’t use short- or long-term climate science projections to determine how worsening global warming may affect its current operations and the communities it serves. Instead, FEMA continues to base its yearly budget and activities almost entirely on historical natural disaster records. That practice is exacerbated by the fact that the agency is at the mercy of economic and political pressures. In addition to having to deal with years of recession that ate into its budget, FEMA has repeatedly been caught in the crosshairs of partisan politics that forced funding cuts and blocked proposed increases.

And so while the number of billion-dollar-plus weather disasters in the United States has increased five percent a year since 1980, FEMA’s annual budget has stayed roughly the same, straining its ability to function.

“Recent events have been so big that they’ve swept through the agency, affecting every corner of funding,” Crimmins said. “It is hugely problematic. FEMA is reeling and saying, ‘Wait, we have to become more efficient at every timescale because this isn’t sustainable from a budget stand point.'”

In 2011, 14 natural disasters with price tags of $1 billion or more struck the United States. As a result, FEMA was forced to divert funds from long-term rebuilding projects to cover the immediate response needs—things like food, water and shelter—for victims of Hurricane Irene. It faced a similar budget crunch following Superstorm Sandy in 2012, a year that saw 11 billion-dollar-plus disasters. In fact, FEMA has needed Congress to approve additional disaster relief funds nearly every year over roughly the past decade to handle the mounting climate-related damage.

FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, which provides coverage for more than 5.5 million Americans, faces particular risks from warming. It’s already $18 billion in debt from Hurricanes Katrina and Irene, Superstorm Sandy and other disasters. And that deficit will only increase. According to a FEMA-commissioned study, released last year, flood zones could grow 55 percent in size by 2100 from mainly climate change, but also population growth along coastlines—doubling enrollment in the program and straining the entire insurance system. The report, recommended by the Government Accountability Office back in 2007, could eventually influence recommendations about how to reform the flood insurance program.

The 35-year-old emergency response agency has about 7,500 employees scattered across the country and operates on an approximately $10 billion annual budget.

FEMA spokesman Dan Watson denied claims that the agency is dragging its feet on including climate threats in its current budgets and plans.

“FEMA is working within its existing statutes and authorities to incorporate climate change adaptation into ongoing plans, policies and procedures,” he wrote in an email. Watson pointed to the agency’s recent announcement that it developed a way for states and regions to incorporate sea level rise projections into grant applications for disaster mitigation projects. The move was made in response to President Obama’s mandate last November that federal agencies help states adapt to climate change.

With the trend of extreme weather intensifying, critics say that reports and suggestions are not enough, and they are urging FEMA to take a more proactive and aggressive approach. Two leading environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation, have petitioned FEMA for more than a year to overhaul its disaster mitigation program, asking to require—not just suggest—that communities include climate impacts in their grant requests and strategic plans.

According to the groups, FEMA officials agreed earlier this month in a private meeting to meet that request and update the process by the end of the year.

“It is encouraging news … a great example of the direction FEMA needs to be heading in more,” said Rob Moore, head of the water and climate team at the NRDC.

“We can’t afford to simply respond as disasters happen and muddle through,” he said. “The time has come to look forward 20, 30 years.”

Even if FEMA made global warming a top priority, however, experts agree that the agency needs a major increase in funds to deal with the coming threats.

That means approval from Congress—a difficult prospect. Republicans have threatened several times in recent years to reject additional relief funds following disasters, such as Sandy, without first slashing money from other government programs. Democrats have refused to deplete other programs for the sake of FEMA.

“It is very clear that FEMA isn’t being given the resources to tackle the scope of the problem in front of us,” Moore said.

Between fiscal year 2012 and 2013, the agency’s overall budget lost $364.2 million. Between fiscal year 2013 and 2014, FEMA will lose another $500 million overall.

“Should FEMA’s budget be increased? Absolutely,” said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and

Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, who believes that Congress has chronically underfunded FEMA and that the agency needs a funding boost that is consistent and across the board, not necessarily a deeper focus on climate science.

“But where does the money come from? Which other agency loses out? No one wants to makes that political move.”

In Arizona, an Experiment

As FEMA faces growing challenges from global warming, a team of climate and social scientists at the University of Arizona is trying to inspire change at the regional level by helping local FEMA staffers better use climate information to try to anticipate where disaster may strike months in advance.

The aim of the two-year project is to improve communication between scientists at the National Weather Service and “watch teams” in FEMA’s region nine, an area that includes Arizona, Nevada, California and the Pacific Islands. It started in late 2012 and is funded by a $166,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If all goes smoothly, the researchers hope it could be a model for other regions.

The National Weather Service (NWS), a division of NOAA, runs a climate prediction center that puts out seasonal forecasts projecting precipitation and temperature trends, which can provide clues on coming droughts, wildfires, floods and other natural disaster risks. To date, FEMA hasn’t done a good job using the data to track where the next disaster might be brewing, according to Crimmins, the University of Arizona scientist who is leading the project.

“The weather service was throwing information at FEMA, but no one was sure whether FEMA actually understood what they were getting,” he said. “It meant missed opportunities to take early action. With climate change, this disconnect was becoming an even bigger problem.”

Crimmins and his colleagues are currently building an online dashboard for FEMA staffers that has the latest information from NWS in a more approachable format. It will include the weather service’s most recent seasonal forecasts, as well as historical trends so that FEMA can easily understand the scope and scale of any looming threats.

“The hope is that in six months, an analyst in a particular region can very quickly look and say, ‘Oh, it is going to be mellow for the next month,’ or ‘oh, there’s a drought in this area, so there’s going to be an increased fire risk,’ or ‘there’s an El Nino developing, so this winter we’re going to need to focus on the southwestern states and not northern California,'” Crimmins said.

The information could help FEMA foresee its short-term staffing and resource needs—two things that could help the agency better address weather extremes under its existing budget, he said.

Although FEMA has said it is interested in the online dashboard, it’s still uncertain the extent to which the agency will actually use it, Crimmins said.

Cutter, the disaster expert from the University of South Carolina, who was a co-author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about managing the risks of climate change, is skeptical about whether using climate projections could help the agency better budget for climate threats.

Seasonal projections don’t provide exact dates for when a disaster will strike and can sometimes be wrong. And while climate models are good at showing long-term trends—decades to centuries—the projections aren’t specific enough to be really useful on a year-to-year basis, the timescale on which the agency sets its budget, she said.

“There’s a lot of variability from year to year,” Cutter said. “This last year was a quiet year. I don’t think FEMA was strained that much at all.” With seven billion-dollar-plus disasters in 2013, FEMA was able to make its budget last the year. This doesn’t diminish the need to boost FEMA’s funding, she said, acknowledging that its budget has been strained because of more frequent climate-related disasters.

But it makes the matter trickier.

“FEMA is very different than NOAA or the Environmental Protection Agency, which have a primary focus on understanding climate change and science. FEMA thinks about these things, but it doesn’t have any immediate responsibility to respond,” Cutter said.
7. The Outdoor Wire, “EPA to Review Pollution Regs for Mississippi River Basin, Gulf of Mexico”

January 27, 2014

The U.S. District Court in Eastern Louisiana in September ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine within six months whether to set new limits on the pollution that is fueling the dangerous algae growth choking the waters throughout the Mississippi River basin, the Gulf of Mexico and waters across the country. That deadline is approaching this spring.

“For too long, the EPA has stood on the sidelines while our nation’s waters slowly choke on algae,” said Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Senior Attorney Ann Alexander. “They have acknowledged the problem for years, but could not muster the gumption to address it. The court is telling the Agency that it is time to stop hiding from the issue and make a decision already.”

Attorneys at the NRDC led the suit, filed on behalf of several conservation groups and based on longstanding efforts by the Mississippi River Collaborative to break decades of inaction from the federal government on the issue of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. These chemicals fuel the formation of the Gulf Dead Zone and toxic algae blooms and cause damage to drinking water supplies.

“The Army Corps of Engineers monitored Kentucky’s recreational lakes for Harmful Algae Blooms for the first time this past summer and recorded excessive numbers throughout much of the summer at several lakes,” said Judy Petersen, executive director at Kentucky Waterways Alliance. “Nutrient pollution is clearly just as much of a problem in Kentucky as it is in other Mississippi River Basin states and down in the Gulf, and the EPA must address it.”

Nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage plants, urban stormwater systems and agricultural operations fuels the growth of algae in waterways around the country. Algae, in turn, chokes out other aquatic life and can rob water of the oxygen that fish and shellfish need to survive. One of the most devastating consequences of this pollution has been the emergence of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico-an area the size of Connecticut where algal growth has driven levels of oxygen at the sea floor so low that virtually nothing can live there. Similar issues are driving the dramatic collapse of Lake Erie and threatening other portions of the Great Lakes.

“It should be apparent that pollution limits are essential to controlling pollution” said Kelly Foster, senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance, “With this decision, we are hopeful that the EPA will finally do what it has long known is necessary to address the Gulf Dead Zone and the staggering number of other fisheries, water supplies and recreational waters decimated by nitrogen and phosphorus pollution across the nation.”

The suit, filed a year and a half ago, challenged the EPA’s denial of the Mississippi River Collaborative’s 2008 petition to the EPA asking it to establish quantifiable standards and cleanup plans for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. The suit charged that the EPA had unlawfully refused to respond to the question posed to it, which is whether such federal action is necessary to comply with the Clean Water Act. The court agreed with plaintiffs, holding that the EPA’s refusal to provide a direct answer was unlawful.

“This isn’t just about the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Bradley Klein, senior staff attorney for the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “Algae blooms threaten the Great Lakes-and smaller waterways across the nation are being impacted by this huge problem. Hopefully the EPA will move in the right direction on this because until we deal with the sources, which are sometimes thousands of miles away, we cannot get to the problem.”

The decision does not tell the EPA how to address the problem, only to make a decision on the issue. However, the EPA has repeatedly acknowledged the severity of the problem and stated that federal intervention is appropriate because states are not doing enough to solve it.

“We are gratified that the EPA cannot duck this important decision, and hope that the EPA takes quick and decisive action to control widespread nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River,” said Kris Sigford, water quality director at Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. “In Minnesota, over one-quarter of our streams and rivers are polluted by nitrogen in excess of safe drinking water standards, and the trend is increasing rapidly.”

Plaintiffs in the suit included Gulf Restoration Network, Waterkeeper Alliance, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Iowa Environmental Council, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Prairie Rivers Network, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Tennessee Clean Water Network, Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, Sierra Club and NRDC. Attorneys at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, NRDC and the Environmental Law and Policy Center brought the case.

8. Voices of San Diego, “Fix the City’s Mucked-Up Storm Strategy”

January 24, 2014

By Noah Garrison

Complying with a federal law Scott Lewis mentioned in his recent post — a law designed to protect public health and water resources — shouldn’t be rocket science.

Stormwater pollution sickens thousands of San Diegans and visitors to the region every year when they go to the beach or are exposed to untreated runoff. Common sense solutions exist today that can dramatically reduce the potential for people to come into contact with polluted waters, and can provide multiple benefits to the community.

Building green infrastructure —water quality management techniques like green roofs, tree plantings, rain gardens and permeable pavement that mimic a site’s natural hydrology — into our urban areas is a cost-effective way to capture rainwater on-site (and to add a needed, sustainable local supply of water during periods of drought), instead of allowing it to funnel pollution to creeks and rivers or the ocean.

Not only does building with green infrastructure often cost less than using traditional systems of gutters, drains, and pipes to manage stormwater runoff, but there is ample evidence that private developments with well-designed green infrastructure can see substantial economic gains — higher property values, increased retail sales, energy and water savings, reduced infrastructure costs, and even increased mental health and worker productivity for office workers.

But the city’s questionable cost estimates largely ignore opportunities to engage commercial and other properties that green infrastructure practices would benefit. Instead, the estimates focus heavily, if not exclusively, on making use of public lands to install stormwater controls.

For example, to clean up Chollas Creek, rather than encouraging or assisting private developments to invest in green infrastructure, which could help beautify surrounding communities and stimulate economic revitalization, the city’s estimate relies on spending upwards of $900 million to buy private land for stormwater projects. The city fails to point out that a potential alternative scheme, which would use green streets to improve water quality instead of private land acquisition, could save it more than $880 million.

1. New York Times, “New Forces Join Lawsuit Fighting Palisades Tower”

January 22, 2014

By Robin Pogrebin

Two months after work began on LG Electronics USA’s new headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., new opponents have jumped in the battle to scale back the project, which they see as a blight on the Hudson River landscape.

The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Natural Resources Defense Council and a New Jersey conservation group said they planned to join a legal challenge on Thursday, and the National Park Service has registered its objections to the project’s scope.

The Defense Council — for which Mr. Kennedy is senior lawyer — together with the New Jersey Conservation Foundation planned to file a motion on Thursday to join a lawsuit challenging the company’s plan to build a tower on the Palisades cliffs north of the George Washington Bridge.

“This is like if somebody tried to build a high-rise next to Yellowstone,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. “It’s a national issue.”

By rising above the tree line, the council argues, the proposed building would spoil parkland and views from both sides of the Hudson. The site is almost directly across the river from the Cloisters, the medieval outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Fort Tryon Park, which was built in the 1930s using architectural elements from European cloisters from the Middle Ages.

LG, which is based in South Korea, plans to construct eight stories, 143 feet total, in an area previously zoned for a maximum of 35 feet. The height restriction was first lifted through a variance, which has been challenged in State Superior Court in one of two lawsuits filed to protect the view. Subsequently the land was rezoned to allow for a taller building. The council seeks to join the variance challenge. A separate case contesting an overall rezoning for the town is still in the lower court.

Demolition of the old Prentice-Hall building at the site began in November. Construction on the LG headquarters is to begin this year and should be completed by 2017. Several local officials support the development, which LG has said will be environmentally sensitive and produce jobs.

“We understand the position of the handful of folks who are opposed to this, but the project enjoys significant support among those in New Jersey who understand the economic impact,” said John I. Taylor, a spokesman for LG. “We’re enthusiastic about moving ahead.”

Although the National Park Service does not have any formal review authority regarding the project, the agency nevertheless made its opposition known in two recent letters. “We hope that you will reconsider the plan,” Park Service officials wrote in letters sent Jan. 7 and Dec. 23 to Edwin Fehre, the chairman of Englewood Cliff’s planning board.

The current proposal “threatens the integrity of the scene in a startling and major way,” the letter added. “If built, this tower will introduce a massive incompatible feature that will be visible for miles along the river and from vantage points along the west side of Manhattan as well as from the bridge.”

In October, the World Monuments Fund featured the Cloisters and the Palisades on its annual list of endangered cultural sites, saying LG’s construction “would seriously affect one of the most unspoiled areas of the Hudson River, including treasured views from the Cloisters museum and gardens, and also have a negative environmental impact on the region.”

Mr. Kennedy said, “It is so important to maintain landscapes in cities, so people who can’t afford to go out to the national parks will be able to experience the majestic beauty of the American wilderness in their backyards.”

2. Agence France Presse, “New York seeks to double recycling by 2017”

January 23, 2014

By Mariano Andrade

More than 40,000 tonnes of waste a day, 7,000 employees and a fleet of more than 2,500 trucks: New York faces an uphill task in trashing its garbage and doubling recycling by 2017.

It is the US city that generates the most garbage: a dizzying 2.5 kilos (5.5 pounds) per person per day compared to two kilos in the rest of the country, according to the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“Sanitation is the most important uniformed force on the street,” writes Robin Nagle, anthropologist at New York University in her book “Picking Up”.

“If sanitation workers aren’t there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”

But New York, in so many other respects a municipal policy trailblazer for the United States, lags woefully behind its West Coast and European rivals on the issue of recycling.

Ron Gonen, New York recycling czar, says the amount of waste rises each year and that the city spends $330 million on trucking off its refuse to places like Ohio or North Carolina.

But in the last two years the city of 8.4 million, where businesses organize their own separate waste collection, has made serious if belated efforts to improve recycling.

Of the 11,200 tonnes of daily rubbish collected by the city, it is committed to increasing the rate of recycling from 15 to 30 percent by 2017, organic waste not included.

Private companies discard another 29,000 tonnes a day.

The city has partnered with private investors to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art recycling plant in Brooklyn.

The city has extended a pilot program to collect organic waste from 300 schools this year, up from 90 in the last.

From July 2015 restaurants, delis and grocers will also have to separate out organic waste and recycling.

“In the last two years there was phenomenal dedication. There is a lot of potential,” Gonen told AFP.

‘Catching up quickly”

Eric Goldstein, an expert from the Natural Resources Defense Council also working with the city, agrees.

“We are in an early stage of transformation,” he told AFP.

“We had a slow start, we are still not one of the leading cities, as Seattle or San Francisco. But we are catching up quickly by good steps forward.”

He blamed the delay on being too focused on the short-term and shying away from long-term investments.

“The biggest challenge is that the progress of the Bloomberg administration continues with the new mayor,” Goldstein told AFP, referring to the just-finished reign of billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg.

In December, an ultra-modern recycling plant for metals, glass and plastics opened in Brooklyn, operated by Sims Municipal Recycling, a world leader in the sector.

It took 10 years and $110 million from private and state investors to build the 44,515 square meter Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility along the East River.

“This is the largest sorting system of this type, to my knowledge, in the world, certainly in the United States,” said Tom Outerbridge, general manager of the Sims plant.

The machinery is mostly Dutch and German. There is an educational center for students but at the moment it functions only eight hours a day with the plan to go 24-seven by spring.

Of the approximately 800 tonnes of plastic, glass and metal that the city collects each day, the plant currently treats about 272.

The rest goes to another plant in neighboring New Jersey. The two plants combined can recycle 1,180 tonnes a day according to Outerbridge, who has 25 years experience in the sector.

Recycling is not just good for the environment. It also generates revenue: an aluminum cube produced by Sunset Park weighing around 680 kilos can be resold for $1,000.

3. FoxNews.com, “Trader Joe’s ex-president to open store selling expired food”

January 22, 2014

We’ve all heard about the massive food waste Americans incur every year.

‘Sell-by’, ‘best-by’ and ‘use-by’ dates are mostly unregulated and confusing for consumers when it comes to throwing items out –a factor that contributes to $165 billion of food wasted every year.

But the former president of Trader Joe’s Doug Rauch says he’s got a solution.

In May, he’s launching The Daily Table, a grocery store and restaurant in Dorchester, Mass., that will offer inexpensive food considered ‘unsellable’ by regular grocery stores.

Food available will include fruits and vegetables that are expired and repurposed food that will be incorporated into hot meals. Other items for sale will be products that are fine to eat but may have damaged packaging.

“Most families know that they’re not giving their kids the nutrition they need. But they just can’t afford it, they don’t have an option,” Rauch recently told Salon.

His big idea: Make healthy food available for the working poor at the same price as fast food by using expired food.

A recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic says Americans are prematurely throwing out food, largely because of confusion over what expiration dates actually mean.

Dana Gunders with the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-author of the study, said that as much as 40 percent of food in the U.S. –or the equivalent of $165 billion– is wasted, thrown away to fill our landfills after spoiling in the refrigerator or pantry.

Although Daily Table will be setup as a non-profit, it is a retail store, not a food bank or a soup kitchen.

Rauch is hardly the first to sell expired food or slightly damaged items deemed unsellable for cosmetic reasons. Discount supermarkets already offer many of the same items, but don’t sell prepared food.

Yet, critics have accused Rauch of taking rich people’s food, repurposing it, and selling it to the poor, something he just shrugs off.

“I might say, without naming the names, one of the leading, best regarded brands in the large, national, food industry — they basically recover the food within their stores, cook it up and put it out on their hot trays the next day,” Rauch said in an 2013 interview with NPR. “That’s the stuff that we’re going to be talking about. We’re talking about taking and recovering food. Most of what we offer will be fruits and vegetables that have a use-by date on it that’ll be several days out.”

So would you go shopping at The Daily Table or think it’s a good idea? Let us know what you think.

4. Bloomberg News, “Enbridge beats TransCanada on Keystone XL delay”

January 22, 2014

By Rebecca Penty and Jeremy van Loon

Canadian pipeline rivals Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp. are earmarking billions for new pipelines to capture a larger slice of North America’s crude oil market. Some investors say Enbridge is the better bet.

Headquartered on the same downtown Calgary street, the two companies plan to spend a combined $74-billion through 2018 on projects including pipelines and power generation. Enbridge, already Canada’s largest transporter of crude, stands to profit more from increased demand as TransCanada struggles to win U.S. approval for the Keystone XL project.

An energy renaissance from Alberta’s oil sands to the shale fields of Texas has heightened the urgency of building new pipelines to carry surging supplies of crude. Enbridge, whose $2.45-billion in revenue from oil pipelines last year was more than twice that of TransCanada for the segment, faces fewer hurdles for its expansion plans while Keystone has become a target for environmentalists’ protests.

“Our favorite between the two right now would be Enbridge,” said Michael Formuziewich, a portfolio manager at Leon Frazer & Associates Inc. in Toronto who owns shares in both. “We think TransCanada will grow slower.”

Enbridge has a number of oil pipeline projects scheduled to come online between now and 2017 that face fewer threats, according to Formuziewich. This year, it’s targeting startup of a 600,000 barrel-a-day line that crosses the U.S. Midwest, called Flanagan South. The company also plans to double capacity to 850,000 barrels a day on the Seaway conduit that connects a Midwest oil hub with the Gulf Coast, which it owns with Enterprise Products Partners LP, according to Enbridge’s website.

Higher Returns

Among analysts that follow Enbridge, 80% have buy recommendations, compared with 71% for TransCanada. Enbridge stock has returned 133% in the past five years, compared with a 45% gain for TransCanada. The S&P/TSX Energy Index is up 42% in the same period.

Enbridge is winning favour partly because the U.S. may further delay or reject TransCanada’s US$5.4 billion Keystone XL pipeline, designed to link oil-sands output to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, according to FirstEnergy Capital Corp. The U.S. State Department is completing a final environmental review.

While TransCanada says President Barack Obama may make a decision by the end of March, FirstEnergy doesn’t expect a ruling until early next year.

Political Risk

“It’s largely about the political risk of XL weighing on TransCanada,” said Steven Paget, an analyst at FirstEnergy in Calgary who advises investors to buy Enbridge shares and hold TransCanada.

Both companies are seeking oil conduits as crude output surges and because they offer higher returns than natural gas lines. Shale oil discoveries are forecast to propel the U.S. to the top spot among the world’s biggest crude producers in 2015, the International Energy Agency predicts. Canada’s oil sands will more than double output by 2022 from a decade earlier, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Enbridge is best positioned to take advantage as the rise in U.S. shale gas output reduces demand for the heating fuel from Western Canada, hurting TransCanada more, according to Moody’s Investors Service. TransCanada faces risks with Keystone XL and its C$12 billion Energy East proposal to pipe oil to the Atlantic Coast, which would together more than quadruple the company’s crude-transport capacity, the credit rating company forecasts.

Pipeline Risks

“The long wait to get a presidential permit brings into question whether Keystone XL will get built and highlights the pitfalls of undertaking a pipeline project,” Mihoko Manabe and Gavin Macfarlane, analysts at Moody’s, wrote in a November research note.

Keystone XL, proposed by TransCanada in 2008, is supported by U.S. trade organizations touting job creation and Canadian producers seeking new markets for heavy oil on the Gulf Coast, where imports from Mexico and Venezuela have fallen. Environmental opponents say the project would boost carbon output. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called it a “carbon bomb.”

TransCanada says the pipeline doesn’t create emissions because it runs on electricity. An interim environmental report from the State Department said it wouldn’t boost greenhouse gas emissions because the oil sands would be developed regardless.

Bigger Margins

TransCanada is seeking to build more oil pipelines to lift its stock and boost earnings and dividends as it shrinks the share of contributions from gas pipelines and power plants, Russ Girling, chief executive officer, said last month in an interview at his Calgary office.

“Investors historically have paid more for liquid- infrastructure investments that they have for gas,” Girling said. TransCanada can make returns of 8 to 9 percent on oil pipelines, compared with 6 to 7 percent for gas conduits. “You get another couple hundred basis points for fundamentally the same kinds of risks.”

TransCanada, which reported a 14 percent decline in net income for 2012, the most recent year available, has boosted revenue from oil pipelines from zero in 2010 to 13 percent of the total two years later. Enbridge had more than double the oil pipeline revenue of TransCanada in 2012, a year in which it, too, reported a 14 percent drop in earnings.

Regulatory Obstacles

TransCanada has diversified away from Keystone XL as it focuses on other new oil pipelines including within Alberta, Girling said. The biggest challenges facing construction of new lines are financing and labor and TransCanada has both those pieces solved, Girling said. The company hired 700 people in both 2012 and 2013 and has 40 engineers in training.

The company is in a “strong position” to develop new oil pipeline infrastructure partly because its projects are backed by long-term commitments from customers, Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Lifting oil pipeline revenue for both Enbridge and TransCanada is becoming harder. Projects are being delayed and risk rejection as regulatory processes become protracted against a backdrop of environmental and political opposition.

Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway conduit that would connect the oil sands with Pacific Rim markets faces the threat of lawsuits from aboriginal opponents. Canadian regulators recommended approving the C$6.5 billion project last month, starting a 180-day period in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet must make a ruling.

Future Diversification

“It’s a lot more difficult to go through the regulatory process,” Al Monaco, Enbridge’s chief executive officer, said last month in an interview at his Calgary office. He committed to remain focused on oil pipelines for at least the next five years. “Further diversification down the road may make some sense,” he said.

After more than five years of regulatory scrutiny of Keystone XL, TransCanada is better equipped “than anybody in the marketplace” at getting pipelines approved, Girling said. “I’m comfortable we can get there.”

5. Grist, “Oil (Drilling) and Climate Action Don’t Mix”

January 21, 2014

By Ben Adler

The environmental community and the White House have beef, and it just escalated.

On Thursday, a coalition of 18 environmental advocacy organizations — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the League of Conservative Voters — sent President Obama a letter expressing their opposition to his “all of the above” energy policy, which embraces oil and gas in addition to cleaner energy sources. Although they were careful to note that they “applaud the actions you have taken to reduce economy-wide carbon pollution,” they conclude that “continued reliance on an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy would be fundamentally at odds with your goal of cutting carbon pollution.”

It’s not clear why the green groups have chosen now to go public with their frustration over Obama’s enthusiasm for domestic dirty energy production. Obama finally put forth a comprehensive climate action plan in June. Just last month, he brought former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, a strong proponent of climate action, into the White House as an adviser. Podesta reportedly accepted the job on the condition that he would oversee Obama’s plans to reduce carbon emissions. (Disclosure: From 2005 to 2007, I worked at the Center for American Progress, which Podesta founded in 2003 and ran until 2011.)

One day after the green groups sent their letter, Podesta responded with a letter of his own. In his response, Podesta reiterates Obama’s commitment to addressing climate change and lists some of the steps the president has already taken to reduce emissions, and others his administration is currently working on. From fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks to the first-ever regulation of CO2 emissions from power plants, there is no doubt that Obama has done a lot for a president facing an obstinately unhelpful Congress.

But Podesta’s letter does not actually address the specific complaint the environmentalists put forth: that Obama has opened up federal lands and waters to oil, gas, and coal exploration, and that this is at odds with efforts to fight climate change. Here’s Obama himself on the subject during the 2012 campaign: “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some.”

As Bill McKibben detailed in a recent Rolling Stone feature, Obama has eagerly pursued natural resource extraction. He has opened the way for oil drilling offshore in areas such as Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. Last year, the Bureau of Land Management put up for auction the mining rights to 316 million tons of coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, drawing consternation from none other than the Center for American Progress. CAP calculated — using the BLM’s own metrics — that this would produce more than 523 million tons of CO2, which is equivalent to the annual emissions from roughly 109 million cars.

And so here is what Podesta wrote on Friday: “The President has been leading the transition to low-carbon energy sources, and understands the need to consider a balanced approach to all forms of energy development, including oil and gas production.” And then, in the very next sentence: “With respect to meeting the threats posed by a rapidly changing climate, implementation of the Climate Action Plan must and will remain the focus of our efforts.” As if these two sentiments were not at odds with one another.

One could theoretically argue that reducing CO2 emissions and opening areas for drilling and mining are not mutually exclusive. What matters is total emissions, not whether they come from coal-fired power plants or cow burps, or the U.S. or China. But such an argument would only be persuasive if there were firm economy-wide carbon caps both domestically and internationally. If we had a cap-and-trade regime in domestic and international markets, the price of burning coal and oil would increase dramatically, to such a point that most American fossil fuels would not be worth extracting. If it were still economical, because U.S. sources of dirty energy were cheaper than foreign sources, then you might be able to make a case that opening new areas to exploration would not actually affect climate change.

Of course, there would still be plenty of other reasons not to pursue increased domestic fossil fuel production. As demonstrated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the frequent explosions of trains hauling crude oil from North Dakota, and pervasive air pollution in coal-burning regions, there are deadly, devastating consequences to dirty energy production well beyond climate change. Even with carbon caps or pricing, the environmental groups would surely still oppose Obama’s energy policy and advocate clean renewable sources instead.

But the more important point is that we don’t have a price on carbon. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate, thanks in part to Obama’s undermining of Senate negotiations. Until we do, saying that we are reducing CO2 emissions in other ways cannot justify giving public land to private producers of dirty energy.

6. Vermont Public Radio, “Group Warns Of Surge in Polluting Tar Sands Gas”

January 23, 2014

By Taylor Dobbs

An environmental group forecasts a massive spike in the amount of tar sands fuel coming to Vermont gas pumps in coming years.

According to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, gasoline derived from oil extracted from tar sands made up less than 1 percent of the fuel supply in 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states in 2012. By 2020, the report said, that will be up to 11.5 percent if states don’t increase regulation.

The problem with that, NRDC said, is that gasoline derived from tar sands oil “emits 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventional gasoline when measured on a life-cycle basis.”

The Vermont Natural Resources Council, in a press release about the study, warned that use of the gasoline could severely undermine the state’s efforts to reduce carbon pollution to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2028.

The state fell short of one of the benchmarks of that goal in 2012, by which time the state was supposed to have achieved a 25 percent reduction from 1990 levels. Instead, Vermont’s 2012 greenhouse gas emissions were almost equal to 1990 levels.

7. Everyday Health, “Tap vs. Bottled Water: Which Is Less Contaminated?”

January 17, 2014

By Susan Matthews

On January 9, hundreds of thousands of West Virginia residents were told their drinking water had been contaminated by 7,000 gallons of the chemical MCHM. The tap water was only safe for flushing toilets with, so the affected residents adopted a new norm of relying on bottled water as a safer, chemical-free substitute.

Not so fast. While bottled water may have been necessary in this scenario, don’t let sterile appearances fool you into thinking it’s always preferable to tap. In fact, researchers were able to pinpoint 24,520 chemicals in various samples of bottled water, according to a recent study published in PLoS One. Not all of them may be harmful to the body, but some disrupted the body’s hormones.

“An equivalent of 3.75 mL bottled water inhibited estrogen and androgen receptor by up to 60 and 90%, respectively,” the researchers wrote in the study. The researchers attempted to pinpoint exactly which chemical was having this precise effect on the body’s hormones, but though they could find the receptor of the chemical, they could not pinpoint the chemical itself.

The research, conducted by German researchers from the Goethe University Frankfurt, also noted that bottled water samples from six different countries were found to contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals (chemicals that affect the hormones, called EDCs), including estrogenic, antiestrogenic, androgenic, antiandrogenic, progestagenic, and glucocorticoid-like chemicals.

“This demonstrates that a popular beverage is contaminated with diverse-acting EDCs,” they wrote.

For comparison sake, the researchers also tested tap water, and found none of the hormone-affected chemicals that bottled water had.

“People have this misconception that if you can buy something in the store that means someone has looked at it and said its safe, and that’s just not the case with bottled water,” Mae Wu, health attorney at the National Resources Defense Council said. While tap water is tested a dozen times a day, bottled water is usually only tested once a week, she said.

This is one of the first studies to investigate these hormone-disrupting chemicals’ presence in bottled water, so it’s still unclear how harmful they are, Wu said. However, Wu emphasized that the hormonal system is delicate. “You don’t really want to mess around with it,” she said.

It might be harder to suggest a recommendation of how much bottled water is too much, Wu said. “When you’ve messed with the endocrine system, it could manifest in so many ways,” she said.

How the chemicals could affect people is dependent on their developmental life stage, Susan Nagel, PhD, a spokeswoman for the Endocrine Society and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at the University of Missouri, said. “If you’re talking about a grown woman who is trying to get pregnant,” inhibiting estrogen production might have an effect, she said.

Consumer advocacy about Bisphenol A (BPA) in reusable water bottles and containers, caused the Food and Drug Administration to ban the chemical in some products and alert consumers to its presence. But Wu said that it’s harder to create regulations like that for bottled water, which is hotly contested due to the burden it places on the environment.

Of course, in circumstances like the West Virginia situation, it may be necessary. It’s still unclear which part of the bottling process causes the chemicals to end up in the water, Wu said, but she offered tips to make drinking bottled water safer.

Don’t let it sit in the car all day, she said, because when water is hot, it’s more likely chemicals in the plastic will leach out into the water. The same goes for using a bottle multiple times — you may think you’re helping the Earth by reusing, but you’re likely just making it easier for the chemicals to leach.

In most cases, you’re better off drinking from the tap.

8. Intelligent Utility Magazine, “Capturing the Benefits of Green Infrastructure”

January 22, 2014

By Alisa Valderrama and Paula Connolly

The past few decades have presented numerous challenges for municipal stormwater utilities. Utilities must safeguard water quality and service despite constrained municipal budgets, sharply declining federal funding, more extreme and frequent weather events, and astronomical costs of addressing and maintaining antiquated water infrastructure.

In the face of these challenges, many localities are harnessing untapped opportunities to leverage “green” solutions to stormwater and wastewater management. Each year, more municipalities are integrating large-scale green infrastructure (GI) practices—such as tree planting, bio-swales, rain gardens, and porous pavement—into their water quality strategies. They are discovering that green practices are not only cost-effective relative to their “gray” cement cousins, but also that the green practices provide public benefits such as cleaning the air, creating green jobs, providing shade and recreation, restoring urban biodiversity and reducing municipal energy costs. Most existing green infrastructure projects have focused on improvements to public land, which has proven beneficial in many contexts.

But as helpful as greening public land can be, most municipalities seeking to leverage large-scale green infrastructure will also need to look beyond public dollars and projects on public owned land in order to meet their green infrastructure goals. Research and analysis by the Natural Infrastructure Finance Laboratory, in which the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a partner, illustrates that cities have good reason to encourage private parcel owners to green on their own property. While cost data can range widely across cities, there may be substantial low-cost green infrastructure opportunities on private parcels.

Indeed, cities such as Philadelphia, Seattle, Milwaukee, and many others have generated creative public policies that reward, subsidize, and otherwise facilitate installation of green infrastructure on private property.

A new report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council this month provides another tool for stormwater utilities looking to leverage the potential for green infrastructure on private parcels. The Green Edge: How Commercial Property Investment in Green Infrastructure Creates Value, draws from nearly all existing research on the topic to detail the benefits that green infrastructure can bring to commercial real estate owners:

Increased rents and property values

Increased retail sales

Energy savings

Local financial incentives (such as tax credits, rebates, and stormwater fee credits)

Reduced infrastructure costs

Reduced flood damage

Reduced water bills

Increased health and job satisfaction for office employees

Reduced crime

Having a command of these benefits and which ones are most pertinent to a local community can help a stormwater utility mobilize the private sector and leverage the massive potential that exists to create lower-cost green stormwater practices on private parcels.

In Philadelphia for example, being able to cite green infrastructure benefits to private property owners has sparked efforts by major shopping malls, professional sports facilities and other commercial property owners to green hard surfaces, such as under-used parking areas. Efforts like these help the City to meet water infrastructure needs, transform unappealing spaces into attractive amenities, and help private property owners to enhance their financial bottom line.

Despite its growing use and acceptance in many parts of the country, green infrastructure is still relatively new to many people. In the absence of knowing the benefits that green infrastructure can bring to their property, the real estate community will be indifferent or, at worst, opposed to new policies and regulations that promote green infrastructure on private parcels.

With the well-documented data in the new NRDC report, utilities can help build capacity for the commercial real estate sector to support new green infrastructure plans. This is not only a helpful constituency, but a necessary constituency in helping support green infrastructure policies nationwide.

1. MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry Show, “Is W. Va. ‘On Sale To The Highest Bidder’?”

January 19, 2014

Watch the Interview: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/mhp/54118228#54118228

Josh Fox, Frances Beinecke and Bob Kincaid join the MHP panel to talk about the chemical spill in West Virginia and if corporate interests are affecting the water supply in the state.

2. Bloomberg News, “Water Utilities Review Plans After West Virginia Spill”
January 18, 2014

By Mark Drajem

Water utilities are reviewing safety plans after a chemical spill tainted a West Virginia treatment plant that hadn’t updated its assessment in 12 years, before a company began storing coal-cleansing chemicals nearby.

The 2002 Source Water Assessment Report for the West Virginia American Water Co. plant in Charleston listed the risk as high from industrial sites along the Elk River. There’s no sign it was updated to account for Freedom Industries Inc., which bought and converted a facility that had stored gasoline into a site for storing the coal-cleaning chemical that leaked Jan. 9, forcing 300,000 people to stop using their water.

Critics said the document shows the limits of laws meant to keep U.S. drinking water safe. The American Water Works Association, which represents the industry, said utilities will take a new look at their plans after the spill in West Virginia.

“Utilities across the country are looking again at their water assessment,” Tom Curtis, head of government affairs at the Denver-based association, said in an interview. They’re asking, “What’s in the watershed and what do I need to be aware of?”

In addition, regulators and lawmakers may learn more about the regulation for factories, storage facilities or farmers, said Curtis, whose group represents water utilities and manufacturers.

Senate Bill

West Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Joe Manchin and Jay Rockefeller, yesterday proposed legislation to boost inspections of above-ground chemical storage facilities and require companies to develop state-approved emergency-response plans. Their bill won backing from Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin also said that he will push for a state measure to require that public water systems have “proper contingency plans in place.” His office will propose that in a bill to the legislature next week, he said in a statement yesterday.

Environmental groups cite the leak of 7,500 gallons of a coal-processing chemical from a Freedom Industries tank on the banks of the Elk River, less than 2 miles miles upstream from a water intake serving the state capital, to show that protections are lacking for drinking water.

The leak of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol caused the largest do-not-use order ever by the West Virginia water utility, covering 300,000 people in the capital and nine nearby counties.

System Flushed

After days of flushing the system, the entire area was cleared yesterday to resume use of the water, with an exemption for a few towns and an advisory that pregnant women avoid drinking it.

Rockefeller yesterday asked West Virginia American Water for information on tests that led to the lifting of the ban.

“While there are a number of questions I have about the spill and your company’s response to it, many of my constituents have expressed concern that the levels of” the chemical “have spiked in certain areas despite the ‘do not use’ order being lifted,” Rockefeller said in a letter to the company’s president, Jeffrey McIntyre.

The senator asked McIntyre whether the company’s tests show levels of the chemical are rising, what steps are being taken to protect the public and the actions to further eliminate the chemical.

Freedom Industries separately filed for bankruptcy protection, after more than two dozen lawsuits were filed against the company. Lawyers have also been filed against West Virginia American Water, part of American Water Works Co. (AWK), the nation’s biggest publicly traded water utility.

Assess Risks

American Water, based in Voorhees, New Jersey, works with local, state and federal agencies to assess risks to water quality, said Denise Free, a company spokeswoman.

“American Water continuously coordinates with responsible state and federal agencies and participates or leads many joint industry and government research projects and working groups to review and recommend ongoing improvements to the water sector,” she said in an e-mail when asked about the West Virginia report.

The assessment for the Elk River, required by a 1996 drinking water law, was prepared by the West Virginia health department. It says the risk of contamination in the river is high, and recommends that efforts be made to collect information about possible pollution risks.

“Source water protection efforts should be directed toward the establishment of an effective and efficient emergency response plan if one does not currently exist,” according to the assessment.

Current Rules

The West Virginia case shows limits of current rules, which mandate that utilities or localities assess their risks without giving them the power or requiring the deficiencies be remedied, said Erik Olson, a lawyer focusing on drinking water at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the New York-based environmental advocacy group.

“It’s pretty clear that a lot of problems were identified, but it’s not clear that anything was done about it,” he said in an interview. “We’re hoping this is a wake-up call to regulators and Congress.”

3. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Beijing, Shanghai Step Up Rules Battle Against Pollution”

January 19, 2014

China’s capital city and the nation’s financial hub are stepping up measures to curb pollution as the meteorological agency warned of hazardous smog levels for a fourth day.

In Beijing, companies, construction sites, street vendors and vehicle owners who exceed stipulated emission limits will face fines and other penalties, according to a draft plan released by the city government on Jan. 18. Shanghai will phase out 500 polluting, hazardous and energy-intensive facilities, the city’s Mayor Yang Xiong said yesterday.

President Xi Jinping has pledged to tackle pollution amid rising public concern that smog and environmental degradation are affecting the nation’s health and the economy. The Ministry of Environmental Protection this month told all provinces and municipalities to cut air pollutants by as much as one quarter.

“This pollution is leading to much public worry,” Liu Jigang, deputy director of the standing committee of the Beijing People’s Congress, said in comments posted on the city government’s website. Beijing’s average reading of PM2.5, fine airborne particulates that pose the largest health risks, were more than 1.5 times higher than the national target of 35 last year, he said.

The city published a draft of a pollution prevention plan on Jan. 18 with new penalties, according to a Beijing Morning Post report yesterday. They include fines of 10,000 yuan ($1,653) to 100,000 yuan and possible closures for companies exceeding national or city emission limits. Owners of vehicles who exceed emission rules will face penalties of as much as 3,000 yuan, the newspaper said.

The National Meteorological Center issued a yellow alert for smog yesterday, the fourth straight day, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The warning covered areas in 10 provinces and municipalities including Shanghai and Tianjin, a coastal city neighboring Beijing.

Shanghai Warning

At a meeting of the municipal people’s congress yesterday, Shanghai’s mayor said the city will retrofit power plants with anti-dust and denitration equipment, and accelerate the replacement of coal-fired boilers and furnaces.

The city will also implement its clean air action plan, and pay more attention to the treatment of PM2.5 particulate matter, Yang said.

Shanghai’s government yesterday warned children and the elderly to avoid prolonged or heavy outdoor activities as PM2.5 readings hit six times the World Health Organization’s recommended level of daily exposure.

The order was made as the city’s environmental monitoring center said air quality readings signaled “heavy pollution.” The level of PM2.5 pollutants was 157.2 micrograms per cubic meter, compared with WHO guidelines of exposure of no more than 25 over a 24-hour period.

Exceeding Standards

Beijing and Shanghai have been told by the environmental protection ministry to cut PM2.5 average readings by 25 percent and 15 percent respectively by 2017.

Steel factories and thermal power plants in eastern China that provide real-time emissions data frequently exceed national standards, according to a study led by Beijing-based environmental group Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs released on Jan. 14.

China’s smog will be tough to eradicate without addressing industrial coal pollution, according to Barbara Finamore, Asia director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental organization.

“In the past year China has announced significant plans to cut pollution and increase transparency,” Finamore said in e-mailed comments on Jan. 16. “Their challenge now is to put those plans into action fast because the public’s patience is running out.”

Xi said solving China’s environmental issues needs “bigger steps and patience,” Xinhua reported on Dec. 28, citing comments the president made during a visit to a power plant in Beijing. PM2.5 has generated heated discussion, Xinhua cited him as saying.

4. China Daily USA, “Pollution-Reporting Measures Seen Aiding Battle Against Smog”

January 21, 2014

By Jack Freifelder

China’s air pollution data- reporting initiatives mark a “turning point” in the country’s battle against choking smog and other environmental challenges, an official with the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) said.

Linda Greer, the director of the NRDC’s health program, said the initiatives which took effect at the start of this year “have more potential than anything else the government has done because it will really enable local officials and concerned citizens to target their concerns and focus attention on the big problems”.

Although it’s early, “it could be a watershed moment,” Greer told China Daily in an interview.

To be more transparent about the pollutants in the nation’s environment, the Chinese government has begun requiring some major cities to release hourly statistical updates on air quality and wastewater discharge. By 2015, the aim is to have every major city in China release pollution data to the public.

Seven of the 10 Chinese cities with the worst air pollution in the third quarter of 2013 were located in Hebei province, which surrounds the Chinese capital of Beijing.

Liu Jigang, deputy director of the standing committee of the Beijing People’s Congress, said public discontent with the pollution issue is on the rise. “This pollution is leading to much public worry,” Liu said in comments posted on the city government’s website.

President Xi Jinping has pledged to tackle pollution amid increasing public concern that environmental issues threaten the health of both citizens and the national economy.

Xi has said solving China’s environmental issues calls for “bigger steps and patience,” drawing on comments he made during a trip to a power plant in Beijing, Bloomberg News reported.

Barbara Finamore, Asia director of the NRDC, a New York-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group, said air pollution problems are tough to eradicate without tackling these issues head-on.

“China’s toxic air is not going to go away until the root cause is addressed – uncontrolled industrial coal pollution,” Finamore said in an e-mail to China Daily. “There are signals that the country is recognizing this. In the past year China has announced significant plans to cut pollution and increase transparency. Their challenge now is to put those plans into action fast because the public’s patience is running out,” she said.

In another initiative targeting air pollution, China recently began requiring 15,000 of the nation’s biggest factories to monitor air emissions and wastewater discharge continuously. More than 150 cities have been called on to report emissions data to the public, according to the NRDC.

Greer, who has a doctorate in environmental toxicology, said the increased availability of information is a pragmatic step toward further traction on this key environmental issue in China.

“Making information available on the sources of the pollution is the next logical step in this campaign,” Greer said. “It’s that kind of public pressure that in other countries around the world really inspires the sources to do a much better job of controlling their pollution.”

China “is doing this environmental reporting in 2013, so they really have all the electronic communication technology at their fingertips,” Greer said. “It’s a different ballgame now than when we were first doing our reporting. We hope that the NRDC’s experience could be useful to the Chinese government and other NGOs who are staffed there to help them fast-track activity, learn from our mistakes and make faster progress on this than they would make otherwise.”

5. National Public Radio, “Jerry Brown Declares A Drought Emergency In California”

January 17, 2014

By Richard Gonzales

Listen to the Interview: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/17/263494972/jerry-brown-declares-a-drought-emergency-in-california

California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency on Friday, amid growing concerns about future water supplies for residents and for farmers. Brown called for a 20 percent voluntary reduction in water use and eased water transfer rights between farmers. However, mandatory measures will still be left to local communities to impose, for now.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed an emergency drought declaration, saying his state is seeing the driest weather in about a century. This is California’s third consecutive dry year with no appreciable rain in sight. As NPR’s Richard Gonzales reports, cities and counties across the state are taking drastic measures.

RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: January is usually a wet month in California but there’s hardly been a hint of rain. Throughout the state, from the coast to the inland valleys to the mountains, residents are beginning to see what those parched conditions really mean.

GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN: Today, I’m declaring a drought emergency in the state of California because we’re facing perhaps the worst drought that California has ever seen since records began being kept about a hundred years ago.

GONZALES: With that declaration, Brown urged state residents to voluntarily reduce their water consumption by 20 percent.

BROWN: This takes a coming together of all the people of California to deal with this serious and prolonged event of nature.

GONZALES: Brown has been under growing pressure to respond to reports of bone-dry reservoirs and an alarmingly low snow pack. Today’s announcement stopped short of imposing any mandatory conservation measures. For now, mandatory water restrictions are being left to individual cities. The Sacramento City Council, this week, voted to require residents to reduce consumption by between 20 to 30 percent. The city plans to dispatch a team of monitors to enforce rules restricting outdoor irrigation and car washing. Repeat offenders could face fines of up to $1,000.

In the Central Valley, the state’s ag industry praised the governor’s declaration. Gayle Holman is a spokeswoman for the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural water district in the country. She says, the declaration will ease some environmental rules governing water allocations.

GAYLE HOLMAN: With this drought declaration, it provides flexibility and easing of some of the regulations that prohibit water flowing south of the delta to ag districts like Westlands.

GONZALES: Environmentalists are also hailing the governor’s action. Kate Poole is an attorney with the Natural Resource Defense Council’s water program. She says today’s declaration could be a boost for long-term conservation and water storage efforts.

KATE POOLE: The governor, for one, has a big bully pulpit. And so making sure that everybody in the state is aware that we’re in tough situation in terms of our water supplies and does what they can to cut back on water use is very important.

GONZALES: California isn’t the only state grappling with drought. Federal officials are designating portions of 11 western and central states as primary natural disaster areas due to the lack of rain. The move means that farmers in those areas can qualify for low-interest emergency loans.

6. Reuters, “Nuclear Power Is Set To Disappoint, Again”

January 21, 2014

By John Kemp

Nuclear power is the energy dream that refuses to die, despite serious accidents at Windscale (1957), Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011).

Many of the arguments that were employed in favour of nuclear in the 1950s and 1960s as a solution to oil supplies running out are now being resurrected in favour of nuclear as a solution to climate change.

But the promise of safe, clean and reasonably priced nuclear power seems as far away now as it was 60 years ago. We are still waiting for the safe, cheap and reliable reactor designs that were promised in 1956.

PEAKING OIL

Back in the 1950s, plentiful and cheap energy from fissioning uranium and thorium was seen as the only alternative to fast-depleting fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

Shell geologist M. King Hubbert is best known as the grandfather of “peak oil” for his theories about the imminent exhaustion of oil resources in the United States and around the world.

But he was also a strong advocate for nuclear power. The 1956 paper that made him famous explicitly linked it to peaking oil production (“Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels”).

“It appears that there exist within minable depths in the United States rocks with uranium contents equivalent to 1,000 barrels of oil or more per metric tonne, whose total energy content is probably several hundred times that of all the fossil fuels combined,” Hubbert wrote.

“The world appears to be on the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by fossil fuels.”

On a time-scale spanning millennia, “the discovery, exploitation and exhaustion of the fossil fuels will be seen to be but an ephemeral event”.

By contrast, nuclear offered an energy supply adequate to meet the planet’s needs for thousands of years.

Writing in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to build ever-bigger nuclear weapons, Hubbert could not be unaware of the perils associated with splitting the atom.

Nuclear scientists were still learning to master the peaceful uses of atomic energy to build utility-scale civilian power reactors.

However, provided the superpowers did not wipe each other out in the meantime with a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons, Hubbert thought civilian nuclear power would become a viable alternative to oil and gas by the 1970s.

“It will probably require the better part of another 10 or 15 years of research and development before stabilized designs of reactors … are achieved,” Hubbert predicted, but after that “we may expect the usual exponential rate of growth”.

Hubbert would probably have been surprised and disappointed about how little progress has been made in the intervening years.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate scientists are now revisiting many of the same arguments in favour of nuclear as a way to avert global warming.

In November 2013, James Hansen, formerly head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the doyen of the climate science movement, published an open letter, with three colleagues, addressed “to those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power”.

“As climate and energy scientists concerned with global climate change, we are writing to urge you to advocate the development and deployment of safer nuclear energy systems,” Hansen and his colleagues said in the letter.

“In the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power,” they wrote.

“Continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.”

While acknowledging the risks associated with nuclear power, including accidents and the possibility of weapons proliferation, the scientists said these are dwarfed by the risks associated with pumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels.

Echoing Hubbert, they insisted: “We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem.”

Hansen and his colleagues argued that wind, solar and biomass simply cannot scale up fast enough to provide cheap and reliable energy on the scale required, so anyone concerned about global warming cannot afford to rule out nuclear as a way to displace substantial amounts of fossil fuel combustion.

HOSTILE REACTION

Nuclear power arouses strong emotions. Hansen’s letter was immediately blasted by climate specialists at the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and other environmental groups, many of which have campaigned against nuclear power for more than three decades on safety grounds.

“The authors of this letter (and other nuclear energy proponents) are on the wrong track,” the NRDC wrote in a withering response.

“Given its massive capital costs, technical complexity, and international security concerns, nuclear power is clearly not a practical alternative,” they added (“Response to an Open Letter on the Future of Nuclear Power”, Nov. 5, 2013).

The NRDC wants policymakers to focus on energy efficiency and renewables such as wind and solar, and not become distracted by dreams of cheap, plentiful and clean nuclear energy.

“The open letter suggests that it is the environmental community that is somehow holding back a nuclear power surge. Nothing could be further from the truth,” the NRDC complained.

“No one can or should close the door to the prospect of improved nuclear power technology. But in a world with constrained capital resources and an urgent need to find the lowest-cost ways to cut carbon pollution, nuclear power ranks far down the list of promising or likely solutions,” according to the council.

“A U.S. nuclear renaissance has failed to materialize, despite targeted federal subsidies, because of nuclear power’s high capital cost, long construction times, the lower demand for electricity due largely to improvements in energy efficiency, and competition from renewables,” the NRDC said.

TROUBLED TECHNOLOGY

The NRDC’s critique is not the whole story, however. The industry’s hoped-for “nuclear renaissance” has been thwarted by three developments: cheap natural gas from the shale revolution; regulatory delays due to environmental activism; and the disaster at Fukushima.

Like renewables such as solar and wind, nuclear power plants have very high capital costs but low fuel and other operating costs. In contrast, gas and coal-fired power plants are cheap to build but relatively expensive to run.

In the United States, the economics of nuclear power have been fatally disrupted by cheap gas, and in Western Europe as a result of cheap coal.

The shale revolution also imperils renewables. But unlike wind and solar, nuclear has not benefited from the same level of subsidies and renewable portfolio standards to help it compete (except in Britain, where the government has guaranteed special high electricity prices for nuclear power producers, as it has for wind power).

A big part of nuclear’s high capital costs has been caused by regulatory and construction delays, most of which stem from a dogged campaign waged by environmentalists to tie up projects in administrative and legal delays to make them uneconomic and force their sponsors to abandon them.

So, it is not entirely true to say the environmental community has failed to hold back nuclear power.

However, the industry is not blameless. For 60 years, nuclear engineers and operators have been promising safer and cheaper designs. By the early 2000s, the industry had recovered from memories of Chernobyl and was promising a fourth generation of standardised reactor designs with more passive safety features. Then Fukushima revealed a host of design flaws and unsafe operating practices, damaging public confidence.

It is possible that large-scale nuclear power could offer part of the solution to global warming, just as it promised to avert Hubbert’s fears about peak oil. But the industry appears no nearer than it was then to building a favourable consensus or solving its cost and safety problems.

Hansen, like Hubbert, looks set to be disappointed.

7. USA Today, “Light Bulb Attack Sheds More Heat Than Light: Our View”

January 20, 2014

By The Editorial Board, USA Today

There are two ways to look at the great debate over light bulbs.

One is that government regulations meant to save energy by filling the nation’s roughly 4 billion light sockets with vastly more efficient light bulbs are an outrageous offense to personal freedom.

The other is summed up by a funny Internet spot last year for Cree’s superefficient light emitting diode (LED) bulbs: “The light bulbs in your house were invented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Now think about that with your 2013 brain. Do you still do your wash down at the creek while your eldest son stands lookout for wolves?”

REP. BURGESS: Let consumers decide watt’s up

The trillion dollar spending bill enacted into law last week makes a nod toward the first viewpoint. It bans the federal government from spending money to enforce the phaseout of the familiar incandescent bulb.

This makes Tea Party activists happy. Getting the government out of Americans’ lighting fixtures has been one of their persistent demands. But it might have come too late to make much difference. A bipartisan 2007 law, signed by President George W. Bush, has been pushing up energy efficiency standards and pushing out the old-style light bulbs for the past two years.

Traditional bulbs convert only one-tenth of the electricity they use into light; the rest is wasted. Energy-saving rules made the old 100-watt bulb obsolete in January 2012, followed by the 75-watt last year and the 40-watt and 60-watt bulbs this month.

You can still find the old-style bulbs, but inventory is dwindling. Bulb makers and retailers have largely moved on. So have most consumers, according to polls.

True, affection for traditional bulbs is strong, and the first replacements were hard to love. They were expensive and slow to warm up. Some produced light that people found unpleasant. Competition and innovation have fixed most problems, including the price. Squiggly compact fluorescents, or CFLs, that once cost as much as $35 a bulb now commonly sell for about $2 or less.

LEDs are still more expensive but even more efficient, and those who want their old-style bulbs can buy modified incandescents virtually indistinguishable — except that they use about a quarter less electricity.

And that’s the point. The new bulbs may cost more, but they use so much less power and last so much longer that they pay for themselves. Over all, switching to new bulbs could save the electricity produced by 30 power plants — enough to power every home in Texas, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Critics complain that the government is “picking winners,” but the bill Bush signed did this the right way: It set efficiency standards that manufacturers could meet any way they liked, and the result is visible at any hardware store — a huge selection of competing bulbs.

Not every government-mandated standard works well or justifies its existence, but the light bulb rule has spurred remarkable innovation and is already saving significant amounts of electricity. A time when a boom in oil and natural gas production has brought the nation tantalizingly close to energy independence is no time to backtrack on bulbs.

USA TODAY’s editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

8. National Geographic, “4 Ways Green Groups Say Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Hurt Environment”

January 17, 2014

By Brian Clark Howard

A leaked draft of a major free trade agreement among the United States, Canada, Mexico, and nations on the Pacific Rim raises alarming questions about environmental protections, several leading green groups say.

“If the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse than George W. Bush’s,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement after a draft of the agreement was published Wednesday on WikiLeaks.

“This draft chapter falls flat on every single one of our issues—oceans, fish, wildlife, and forest protections—and in fact, rolls back on the progress made in past free trade pacts,” he said.

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership is a huge pact that would govern about 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and one-third of world trade, said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The agreement involves a sprawling cast of countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.

The NRDC joined with the Sierra Club and WWF in criticizing the leaked draft of the environment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said proved the chapter was “a toothless public relations exercise with no enforcement mechanism.”

The White House has pushed back against such criticisms. In a blog post responding to the leak this week, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) wrote that “stewardship is a core American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter in the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) or we will not come to agreement.”

Here are four grievances voiced by environmental groups over the leaked chapter:

1. They say the pact lacks basic environmental provisions.

This is all about what’s not in the proposed pact.

The NRDC’s Schmidt says that environmental groups are asking for “some pretty basic environmental provisions.

“We’re saying don’t subsidize unsustainable fisheries and don’t do illegal things,” he said.

Environmentalists say that the Obama White House has hinted that it will not support an agreement without enforceable environmental provisions, in recent remarks by some of the administration’s key environmental players.

But the “overarching” problem with the leaked draft, Schmidt says, is that “there’s no enforcement.”

The leaked document mentions that trade partners should take steps to protect the environment, but Schmidt says that “there are many caveats that effectively allow countries to not make these enforceable.

“References to the word ‘shall’ are very rarely used,” he says, “and are often paired with ‘seek to’ or ‘attempt,’ which are not legally enforceable.”

2. Green groups say the draft agreement does not discourage overfishing.

The nations considering the Trans-Pacific Partnership have a “responsibility” to provide adequate protection against overfishing, but the draft agreement fails to provide that, said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF.

The countries negotiating the agreement account for about a third of global fisheries production, Roberts notes, so the stakes are high.

Those countries have a range of direct and indirect subsidies for their fishing fleets, including payments, discounted loans, reduced prices on fuel, and so on.

Photo of shark fins drying in the sun cover the roof of a factory building in Hong Kong.

Shark fins, which are overharvested for soup, dry on the roof of a factory in Hong Kong.

“What we have been pushing for is for countries to phase out harmful subsidies … that lead to greater harvest of fishing stocks than can be sustained,” said Schmidt. “We’re not saying end all fishing programs and support, but you need to make sure that any support is targeted at programs that don’t lead to overconsumption of fish stocks.”

For its part, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office responded that the U.S. is “proposing that the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] include, for the first time in any trade or environment agreement, groundbreaking prohibitions on fish subsidies that set a new and higher baseline for fisheries protections.”

3. The pact does not take a strong enough stance against illegal wildlife products, activists say.

Green groups would like to see stronger enforcement of international laws on products made from endangered species, such as elephant ivory or tiger pelts, as part of a new trade agreement.

“The lack of fully-enforceable environmental safeguards means negotiators are allowing a unique opportunity to protect wildlife and support legal sustainable trade of renewable resources to slip through their fingers,” WWF’s Roberts said in a statement.

The negotiating countries are already party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which prohibits overseas trade of endangered species, “but we know that enforcement is not 100 percent,” Schmidt said.

4. Green groups say the agreement doesn’t go far enough in preventing illegal logging.

Many endangered trees are cut down around the world, often through logging in restricted areas such as parks, sometimes under the cover of darkness. The U.S. has a law, known as the amended Lacey Act, that prohibits import of illegally logged timber products. Australia has a similar law, and Japan is considering one.

The NRDC and allied groups want each country that signs onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership to enact an equivalent law.

1. National Journal, “EPA Versus Greens, Fracking Edition”

January 15, 2014

By Amy Harder, Clare Foran and Ben Geman

The brewing battle between environmentalists and President Obama over fracking is ramping up.

In a letter to Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is seeking to address concerns about the agency’s policies and actions around the controversial drilling technology called fracking. Beinecke wasn’t happy with that letter, according to EnergyWire.

Grassroots environmentalists first launched the war against fracking a few years ago, and it’s taken hold in many parts of the country. Now, major environmental groups with big Washington footprints are getting more critical of the process.

This is a troubling trend for the natural-gas industry, which once considered many of these groups its allies.

It may not bode well for the Democratic Party either, whose policymakers risk alienating a key constituent group and triggering divisions within the party if they mishandle—politically and policy-wise—this issue of fracking.

Meanwhile, it is a testament to the power of grassroots environmentalism.

2. Washington Post, “EPA: Mining would destroy fishery, villages, part of watershed in Alaska’s Bristol Bay”

January 15, 2013

By Darryl Fears

A large-scale mining operation in Alaska’s Bristol Bay would destroy a significant portion of the watershed, a pristine fishery that supports nearly half the world’s sockeye salmon and dozens of Native villages that have relied on fishing for thousands of years, according to a report released Wednesday by the Obama administration.

The long-awaited final assessment on potential impacts of mining in the western Alaska region, compiled over three years by the Environmental Protection Agency at the request of area tribes, dealt a serious blow to a Canadian company’s ambitions to dig one of the world’s largest pit mines to extract resources from the mineral-rich land.

The company, Northern Dynasty Mining, has yet to file a permit for its Pebble Mine, but the EPA estimated that up to 94 miles “of salmon-supporting streams and 1,300 to 5,350 acres of wetlands, ponds, and lakes” would be erased by the footprint of a mining pit, depending on its size.

Based on the recent records of similar mines in the United States, the EPA projected that polluted water from the site could enter streams from dredged solid waste and wastewater runoff. “Under routine operations, EPA estimates adverse direct and indirect effects on fish in 13 to 51 miles of streams,” the agency said in a statement released in combination with the report.

Northern Dynasty and its Republican supporters criticized the report as biased, premature and bad for business. Environmental groups and Democrats hailed the assessment as a first step to protecting fish, wildlife and Alaska Natives whose way of life rely on them.

“Publication of the final watershed assessment is really the final chapter in a very sad story,” said Ron Thiessen, Northern Dynasty’s president and chief executive, who hadn’t read the document. “We believe EPA set out to do a flawed analysis of the Pebble Project, and they certainly succeeded with both their first and second drafts” of the Bristol Bay watershed assessment. “We have every expectation that the final report released today is more of the same.”

The EPA began the assessment in 2010, when tribes asked the agency to intervene after Northern Dynasty expressed interest in a major dig for copper and gold worth an estimated $500 billion.

EPA officials said granting such a request is unusual, but scientists thought a peer­reviewed study was crucial, given Bristol Bay’s historical importance to the tribes, which have fished there for thousands of years, and its distinction as one of the world’s last great, undisturbed salmon fisheries.

Thiessen noted that the assessment does not include recommendations or regulations that might affect the future development of the Pebble Project. He said Northern Dynasty would submit a proposal that can be reviewed by federal and state officials in the coming months.

“We have every expectation that the Environmental Impact Statement process . . . to be administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will ultimately provide a much more rigorous, fair and transparent review of the science surrounding this important project,” he said.

A coalition of opponents made up of Alaska Native leaders, commercial fishermen, jewelers and environmental groups had a different view. They called on the EPA to end any chance that the project can move forward.

“It’s time for the EPA to take immediate steps to protect the fishery, the Alaska Native communities who rely on it as their primary source of food and the 14,000 jobs that depend on it,” said Luki Akelkok, a sport-fishing lodge owner who is chairman of Nunamta Aulukestai, an association of 10 Bristol Bay Native tribes and Native village corporations.

“EPA’s assessment is objective, clear and grounded in sound science,” said Taryn Kiekow, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Now . . . it is time for the agency to take regulatory action to stop the Pebble Mine.”

Dennis McLerran, administrator for the regional EPA office that oversees the watershed, said the agency is unwilling to take that step.

“We have not yet made any decisions with respect to regulatory actions,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

Still, in its analysis, based on documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission by Northern Dynasty, the EPA painted a picture of potential devastation.

An 86-mile transportation corridor with the site would cross 54 streams and rivers where about 35 million adult salmon return from the ocean to spawn and young salmon migrate to the ocean to swim.

If a storage dam were to fail, it “would have a catastrophic impact on fish for decades,” said Jeff Frithsen, a senior scientist at the EPA.

3. The Cordova Times, “EPA says impact of Bristol Bay mine could be devastating”

January 15, 2014

By Margaret Bauman

A long-waiting final federal report on the Bristol Bay watershed says large-scale mining there could have potentially catastrophic effects on fishery resources.

The report, online at http://www.epa.gov/bristolbay, outlines a number of potential adverse results that could occur if the mine was developed and operated, including catastrophic damage to fishery habitat due to development, operation and accidents at such a large scale mine.

The report does not specifically mention the Pebble mine, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes that the assessment does not recommend policy or regulatory decisions.

“Thousands of hardworking commercial fishermen rely on the Bristol Bay fishery, and we’re proud to provide a sustainable and healthy source of food for the nation,” said Bob Waldrop, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association. “Our industry is the economic engine for the region, and we’re calling on the Obama Administration to take immediate steps to protect it from all large-scale mining in the Bristol Bay drainages.”

The report was praised as objective, clear and grounded in sound science by environmental organizations including Trout Unlimited and the Natural Resources Defense Council, who called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to protect fisheries habitat from adverse impacts.

Northern Dynasty Minerals, the Vancouver, British Columbia junior mining company that has spent millions of dollars already gathering data on the project, issued a statement saying the EPA’ final Bristol Bay watershed report “does not include any recommendations or regulatory actions that will affect future development of the Pebble project.

“Publication of the final watershed assessment is really the final chapter in a very sad story,” said Ron Thiessen, president of Northern Dynasty, a subsidiary of Hunter Dickinson Inc. “We believe EPA set out to do a flawed analysis of the Pebble project, and they certainly succeeded with both their first and second drafts of the BBWA. We have every expectation that the final report released today is more of the same.”

Thiessen’s commentary was echoed by John Shively, chief executive officer of the Pebble Partnership in Anchorage, who called the draft and final documents flawed.

Shively said the report does not assess effects of the Pebble project, for which the Pebble Partnership has not yet submitted a project for regulatory evaluation.

“Clearly”, said Shively, “this report should not be used as the basis for any type of agency decision regarding Pebble.”

Joel Reynolds, western director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the document objective, clear and grounded in sound science, and said it’s time for the EPA to take regulatory action to stop the Pebble mine.

The document makes it clear that the mine would deal a huge blow to the sportsmen’s paradise we have in Bristol Bay,” said Tim Bristol, director of Trout Unlimited’s Alaska program. “Bristol Bay is the last place you should put a mike like this,” he said.

A group of commercial fishermen, investors, jewelers, conservation organizations and Alaska Native leaders meanwhile applauded the EPA’s final assessment.

“The study documents the global significance of the Bristol Bay wild salmon fishery – the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world – and highlights the severe impact and risks of large-scale mining, including the proposed Pebble mine, in the Bristol Bay watershed,” the group said, in a statement issued by Earthworks, a national conservation group.

Jennifer Krill, executive director of Earthworks, said the fate of the nation’s greatest salmon fishery and jobs that depend on it now rests with the EPA.

“There are some places where mining cannot be done without forever damaging landscapes, wildlife, businesses, and communities,” said Michael J. Kowalski, chairman and chief executive officer of Tifffany & Co., the New York based jewelry firm. “Bristol Bay is one such place. We, along with many of our fellow jewelers, urge the EPA to use its authority under the Clean Water Act to safeguard Bristol Bay and the communities and fishery it supports.”

Trillium Assets Management, also supported the EPA report. “Anglo American’s withdrawal from the project highlights significant business and investment risks,” said Jonas Kron, senior vice president of Trillium.”We urge the EPA to take immediate steps to initiate the 404 © process to protect he fishery and provide regulatory clarity.”

Section 404 © of the Clean Water Act established a program to regulate the discharge of dredged or fill material into the waters of the United States.

It authorizes the EPA administrator to deny or restrict the use of defined areas as disposal sites, after determining that the discharge of such materials into that area would have an unacceptable adverse effect on fisheries, wildlife, municipal water supplies or recreational use.

Jason Metrokin, president and chief executive officer of the Bristol Bay Native Corp., also applauded the EPA’s assessment.

“From the very beginning, EPA was in Bristol Bay because our federally recognized tribes and Native organizations, including BBNC, asked them to be,” Metrokin said.

“With today’s release, science has weighted in. Bristol Bay, its existing jobs and way of life could be irreparably damaged by a large-scale mine that is the size and scope of the Pebble project- and therefore, our fish, our people and our cultures must be protected.”

Metrokin said BBNC reports responsible development where it can be done without causing unacceptable risks to the people, cultures and fishing economy of the region.

The proposed Pebble mine is not such a project,” he said. “It’s time for the agency to initiate a 404 © action to protect Bristol Bay.”

4. Bloomberg, “Canada Ambassador and Former Allies at Odds on Keystone XL”

January 16, 2014

By Jim Snyder

With his country’s foreign minister in tow, Canadian Ambassador Gary Doer walked the marble corridors of the U.S. Capitol yesterday pitching the prize his nation is seeking: the Keystone XL pipeline.

“It always makes more sense in our view to get energy from middle North American than the Middle East,” Doer said after a session with Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, a Keystone supporter.

Backing a project bitterly opposed by environmentalists is something of a shift for Doer. During his three terms as premier of Manitoba, he built a reputation as a champion of combating global warming. He backed the Kyoto Protocol to cut global carbon emissions, pushed to shut coal-fired power plants and promoted renewable energy such as wind and hydropower. He was named by Businessweek in 2005 as one of 20 people leading the fight against climate change.

Now Doer is on the other side of an issue that has inflamed his one-time climate allies.

“I’m just trying to put the puck in the net,” Doer said in an interview last month at the expansive Canadian embassy in Washington, a little more than a slapshot from the Capitol and decorated with drawings of Niagara Falls, a walrus and a polar bear.

Double Production

While environmentalists consider Keystone an assault on the climate, Canada is counting on TransCanada Corp.’s $5.4 billion project to connect its vast reserves of crude oil to the world’s largest refining center along the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline would help oil-sands developers reach their goal of doubling production by 2025, and raise the prices they are paid for the fossil fuel — putting pressure on Doer and his colleagues to make a case in Washington.

Visitor logs show Doer has been a frequent visitor to the White House. He also meets regularly with U.S. and Canadian media outlets as well as labor groups and government agencies, highlighting the benefits of Keystone to both countries.

In October, the embassy co-hosted an event with an oil- industry group whose members include Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Dow Chemical Co. Yesterday, Doer took Foreign Minister John Baird to Capitol Hill where he met with both Democrats and Republicans. Baird is scheduled to meet with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tomorrow.

“He is an immensely pragmatic politician,” Keith Stewart, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, which opposes the pipeline, said of Doer. “As premier of Manitoba, being good on climate is good politics. It’s not part of the job description to be Canada’s ambassador to Washington.”

‘Environmental Industry’

In the interview at the embassy, Doer dismissed opposition to Keystone as uninformed and driven by an “environmental industry” in Washington that has turned the controversy into a tool for fundraising. He said he promoted oil and gas development when he was premier, too.

“My view is the oil is coming from Canada now,” he said. “It’s just a question of how it gets there.”

Trains that fill a gap in transport capacity release more greenhouse gases and aren’t as safe as pipelines, Doer said. Canada is a reliable U.S. ally, and its oil will displace imports from Venezuela, which isn’t, Doer said.

With graying hair and a slightly grizzled voice, Doer, 65, has built his career, from president of the Manitoba Government Employees’ Association to chief of his nation’s most important embassy, by nurturing relationships. He employs humor, energy and a deft personal touch.

Hockey Match

He’s already planning a celebration of the U.S.-Canada gold medal hockey match he is betting will take place at the Winter Olympics in Sochi next month. If it does, it will be a replay of the game in Vancouver in 2010, which Canada won 3-2.

“Ovechkin won’t be happy,” he said. The Washington Capitals’s National Hockey League star, Alexander Ovechkin, is playing for Russia.

Paul Thomas, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, said Doer’s political skill gave Manitoba, with less than 4 percent of Canada’s total population, a national profile befitting a larger province for the 10 years he represented the liberal New Democratic Party.

“He has contextual intelligence,” Thomas said in a phone interview. “He can read situations in a very insightful way.”

When he held office, he was a member of a liberal party. Doer is now the face of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative government in Washington.

“I like to think that I tried to focus on results rather than process,” Doer said.

Built Schools

As premier, he balanced budgets as he also expanded educational opportunities by building new schools in the north and inner city of Winnipeg, Doer’s hometown, said Paul Vogt, a former top aide who is now a visiting scholar at the University of Manitoba.

Education was a priority for Doer, who left college to work as a counselor at a youth corrections facility, Vogt said. Post- secondary enrollment increased by a third during his three terms in office, he said.

“He’s a person of principle,” Vogt said. “He had a very strong sense of what brought him into politics and what he’s there to achieve.”

Doer also racked up victories on energy and environment policy. He pushed for the first wind farms and the construction of a transmission lines to sell electricity to U.S. states in the northern plains, and promoted ethanol and stricter emissions standards for automobiles.

Keystone Test

Keystone is testing his salesmanship skills.

Critics — including supporters of President Barack Obama – – say it would deepen climate risks by promoting development of Alberta’s carbon-heavy oil sands. Obama said in a June speech on climate change that he wouldn’t back the project if it would significantly increase carbon-dioxide emissions.

A draft environmental analysis prepared for the State Department said it wouldn’t, because Alberta’s oil sands would be developed even if the pipeline didn’t go forward. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency called for a fuller review. Environmental groups also challenged the finding.

The fact that it has become a symbol by which to measure Obama’s commitment to climate change may not bode well for the project.

Oil sands development is Canada’s fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

“You have to be an incredibly good advocate to make the case that Canada is doing the right thing on climate,” said Clare Demerse, director of federal policy at the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and advocacy group. “Clearly, Canada is not.”

Canada’s Carbon

Canada has “some work to do to get to our target,” Doer acknowledged, as he defended his country’s policies, noting that it had put in place rules that would lead to the end of coal- fired power generation.

Danielle Droitsch, director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s Canada Project, said the regulations will allow coal plants to operate for decades. Canada is also much less reliant on coal than the U.S., where it generates about 40 percent of electricity. In Canada, coal’s total is around 15 percent.

“Coal is the U.S.’s problem,” Droitsch said. “Tar sands is Canada’s problem.”

In his push for Keystone, Doer has counted on relationships he developed as premier. The embassy held a reception on Feb. 23 for governors attending a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Pointing to Alberta Premier Alison Redford, personable and unassuming, Vogt said Doer asked the group whether they wanted to get their fuel from her or Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president at the time who once called the U.S. an assassin. Chavez died in May.

“The Harper government has staked a lot of its reputation on getting the pipeline through,” Thomas, at the University of Manitoba, said. “I can’t think of anybody among our recent ambassadors who would be better equipped to make this happen, if it’s possible.”

5. Forbes, “More Professional Sports Teams are Thinking Green, to Please Fans and Make Money”

January 15, 2014

By Heather Clancy

The requisite press releases have been issued proclaiming the uber green-ness of the upcoming Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium in my home state of New Jersey.

Indeed, back in 2009, the venue was dubbed the “Greenest Stadium in the NFL” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It even uses solar power (about 1,350 panels) to generate the electricity for the programmable LED light display across the top of the stadium.

For the big game in early February, the big focus has been on the green business practices embraced by the concession organization, which is converting all kitchen waste oil to biodiesel fuel, composting the kitchen scraps, donating leftover food and recycling the mounds of cardboard, plastic, glass and other materials that remain after fans leave the stands.

But if you really interested in innovative green technology applications in the professional sports world, you’ll need to look a bit farther west to Cleveland, where the Browns football team is testing an anaerobic digester from InSinkErator (yes, the garbage disposal company) as a means of diverting food waste at FirstEnergy Stadium.

It’s the first professional sports installation for the new technology, called Grind2Energy, although it isn’t actually on site. The system uses food scraps from the concessions – an estimated 35 tons per season — which is ground into a slurry and transported to the quasar energy group at Ohio State University. (It’s part of the school’s research and development organization for the agricultural department). There, the material is used as a feedstock. The end result is biogas and other fuels, along with nutrients that can be used for fertilizer (enough for three football fields full of crops).

This particular installation is a collaboration between the Browns, FirstEnergy Stadium, and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. That’s because an important ingredient in the process is cow manure, which produces methane.

Anaerobic digesters aren’t exactly new. They are traditionally used by forward-thinking dairy farms (like Stonyfield Farms) to offset electricity needs and reuse waste rather than carting it away and dumping it other places.

“Digester systems are something this country’s dairy farmers have used for years,” said Tom Gallagher, CEO of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, said in a statement about the deal. “But we have just begun to tap what is possible. Through new partnerships – whether it’s with a stadium, or a hospital or a chain of supermarkets – dairy farms in all 50 states are able to house this type of system and turn food waste into value for local communities.”

The system hosted by the Browns will produce enough electricity to power one home for about 1.5 years, and enough natural gas for 32 homes. So, it’s not huge, but it represents an example of projects that might matter at a local level.

Consider how many homes have built-in garbage disposals for grinding up food waste. Now, imagine if municipal governments got involved to put that substance to a revenue-producing use.

From a business perspective, the interest in finding better ways to handle food waste is become more pronounced: driven in large part by the United Nations revelation in 2011 that up to 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted annually, about one-third of everything produced for human consumption.

From a marketing standpoint, professional sports teams could play an important role in making technologies for dealing with this problem – as well as other nagging natural resource concerns such as wasted water — more visible. There’s even a four-year-old organization dedicated to this, the Green Sports Alliance (GSA), which now has 212 members. (The group was founded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan and the Natural Resources Defense Council.)

“Cities and local communities really identify with their professional teams, so when we see franchises make these partnerships and these commitments, we think there’s a potential multiplier effect for every fan that’s going to walk through those turnstiles,” said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the Sports Greening Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

There’s even brand-new money to be made in thinking green, at least in the minds of the auto-racing world. The FIA Formula E organization (not a GSA member) is planning a Grand Prix series starting in September in Beijing specifically for all-electric vehicles. Pictured below is the Spark-Renault SRT_01E, which is capable of speeds in excess of 150 miles per hour. The car got its first public debut in early January during the International CES show in Las Vegas.

“We expect this Championship to become the framework for research and development around the electric car, a key element for the future of our cities,” said Alejandro Agag, CEO of Formula E Holdings

At the very least, it’s clearly a great way to break down many of the performance myths associated with electric vehicles.

6. KALW- San Francisco Public Radio, “Today on Your Call: How should we adapt to a drier California?”

January 15, 2014

By Ali Budner

Listen Here

7. Washington Examiner, “Light bulb provision will do little to bring back popular, inexpensive incandescents”

January 15, 2014

By Susan Ferrechio and Sean Lengell

Tucked into a 1,500-page budget bill now moving through Congress is a Republican provision that would restore the incandescent light bulbs that were phased out in favor of greener lighting technology.

But the legislation is likely to disappoint hopeful light-bulb hoarders and other haters of the new energy-efficient, squiggly tailed compact fluorescent and LED lights that replaced the iconic bulbs.

“The light bulb [provision] is mainly political theater at this point,” said Kit Kennedy, a lawyer for the energy and transportation program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

“The efficiency standards for lighting are in effect,” Kennedy said. “The majority of U.S. manufacturers are committed to these standards, which they support, and are going to be complying with them, rider or no rider.”

Since Jan. 1, it has been illegal to produce 40- or 60-watt incandescent light bulbs in the United States. The 75-watt and 100-watt bulbs were banned earlier.

Incandescent bulbs that have been in use in America since the 1800s were banned in 2007 by green-energy legislation approved by Democratic lawmakers and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush.

Supporters of the ban say the incandescent bulbs wasted energy and that a more environmentally friendly alternative was needed.

Defenders of the traditional bulb say the government is again overreaching, that the marketplace should decide what kind of bulbs are manufactured here.

While compact fluorescent bulbs have largely replaced the traditional bulbs, consumers also can opt for LED lights, which last longer than incandescent or fluorescent but cost much more — up to 20 times more than the bulbs they replace.

The iconic incandescent bulb has become a rallying point for Republicans and when the GOP recaptured control of the House in a 2010 wave election, lawmakers made several attempts to revive it.

Led in the House by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, Republicans tried unsuccessfully to repeal the 2007 ban and, failing that, to cut off funding for Department of Energy enforcement of the bulb ban. Burgess finally got the funding cutoff provision inserted into an energy and water spending bill that President Obama signed into law.

The provision lawmakers inserted into the 2014 bill would extend that funding cutoff for enforcement, but would do nothing to revive the production of incandescent bulbs. Burgess acknowledged the provision’s limitations in an interview with the Washington Examiner, but said he’s hopes the measure revives interest in the traditional bulb.

Democrats dismissed the Republican effort to revive the bulb as political grandstanding that did nothing to alter the 2007 law.

“This is just a messaging amendment for [Republicans in the] House to say they made the Senate take this thing,” said a senior Democratic congressional aide. “It practically, at least in the short term, really doesn’t make any difference, because everyone’s following these rules anyway.”

8. Merced Sun-Star, “Citing health risks, California lawmakers push to limit antibiotic use on livestock”

January 16, 2014

By Jeremy B. White

The salmonella outbreak that rippled out from California chicken processing facilities last year, sickening more than 400 and hospitalizing at least 134, came with a troubling footnote: Several bacteria samples taken from victims resisted multiple types of antibiotics.

They weren’t impervious to salmonella drugs, officials from Foster Farms are quick to point out, and no one has died. Officials conducting an investigation have yet to discern the precise causes of the outbreak.

But the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria underscored concerns about new mutations of bacteria arising and afflicting humans. One of the medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, antibiotics have been victims of their own success, losing effectiveness as they have become ubiquitous medical tools.

“Any time you use an antibiotic, either in an animal or in a human, you are going to put pressure on those bacteria and you are going to create a resistance,” said Dr. Tom Chiller, a medical epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We know resistance is occurring across the food chain, really from farm to fork, and we know humans can become sick from those bacteria.”

Now California legislators are invoking public health as they seek limits on feeding antibiotics to livestock. They cite science that links overuse of antimicrobial drugs on farm animals to the prevalence of hardier bacteria.

“It’s a problem that I think we’re seeing more effects of,” said Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo.

Hill and Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, have introduced bills that would restrict the use of antibiotics on livestock. Both lawmakers point to a growing body of evidence indicating that overuse of livestock antibiotics – often to help animals gain weight – has allowed drug-resistant bacteria to prosper and spread.

“There’s clearly a public health concern with the overuse of antibiotics,” Mullin said in an interview, and “we need to take a bold step now.”

Food producers have access to a range of different antibiotics, but the drugs can be divided into three broad categories: antibiotics used to treat an existing health issue; antibiotics used to guard against outbreaks, introduced before animals have fallen sick; and antibiotics used for “production purposes,” to help animals bulk up more quickly or with less food.

Representatives for California’s agriculture sector and its $2.8 billion cattle industry question the charge that farmers and ranchers habitually use antibiotics to fatten up their animals. While they support using antibiotics judiciously, they say food producers need the ability to swiftly treat ill animals.

“We really don’t want to use antibiotics, because that means we’ve got sick animals,” said Dave Daley, second vice president of the California Cattlemen’s Association. But “we want to make sure antibiotics, as needed, can be used by small farmers and ranchers to care for cattle that are truly sick.”

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria represent a serious issue: the Centers for Disease Control estimates they infect more than 2 million Americans a year, killing at least 23,000 of them. A recent CDC report warning of the perils of overuse noted that the amount of antibiotics given to livestock “contributes to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food-producing animals.”

Consequences of the drug-defying bacteria can include lengthened hospital stays and treatment methods that carry higher costs and more potential side effects, according to Avinash Kar, a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The antibiotic-resistant bacteria, once they’re generated and thrive on these facilities, can get out in a variety of ways,” including by permeating soil and water or migrating to workers, said Kar, whose organization is actively backing Mullin’s bill.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has spotlighted antibiotic resistance as a significant public health risk. In December, the agency released voluntary guidelines that would have pharmaceutical companies change how they label drugs, effectively prohibiting farmers from using antibiotics to promote growth.

Both bills before the Legislature would go further. Hill’s approach would build on the FDA advisory but make its recommendations mandatory, taking a tougher approach to banning over-the-counter weight-gain antibiotics.

“I think the FDA did not go far enough in their voluntary requirements,” Hill said. “You make them voluntary, there’s not a real incentive to focus on curtailing the use of antibiotics.”

Drug companies have said they will comply with the FDA’s framework, and the new guidelines are subject to a public comment period that ends in mid-March.

Assemblyman Frank Bigelow, R-O’Neals, said his colleagues should wait for the FDA process to play out before advancing additional regulations.

“There’s a hysteria that starts to occur, and people jump on bandwagons without knowing all the facts or looking at all the facts,” said Bigelow, a cattleman identifiable on the Assembly floor by his distinctive white rancher’s hat. “We already have an agency, the FDA, who has the oversight powers,” he added, “and we need to let them use those powers.”

Even more stringent than Hill’s proposal is Mullin’s bill, which would ban weight-gain antibiotics and sharply restrict access to the preventive kind.

Under the current system farmers and ranchers can obtain preventive antibiotics, intended to pre-emptively stem the spread of diseases like pneumonia, over the counter. The FDA has proposed having veterinarians sign off.

But making that oversight optional, as the FDA framework does, is not enough, according to Mullin. His bill would bar preventive use of antibiotics except in limited cases where there is documented risk of a sick animal infecting other animals.

To Mullin and allies, keeping those preventive antibiotics widely available would preserve a loophole.

“I’m concerned that, essentially, we’re not getting at the core problem and would still have a high volume of antibiotics in the food supply” if preventive use isn’t scaled back, Mullin said.

Beyond that, Kar said, some large producers use preventive drugs to compensate for cramped or unclean conditions that help incubate disease.

“It would really limit the circumstances when antibiotics are used to what we think are the appropriate uses: when the animal is sick or when there’s an outbreak on the premises that needs to be contained,” Kar said of Mullin’s bill. “It shouldn’t be because you’re raising the animals in crowded, unsanitary conditions.”

Building a barrier to obtaining preventive medicine is short-sighted, according to Noelle Cremers of the California Farm Bureau Federation. Cremers said the tightened standards Mullin proposes will delay treatment, comparing it to forcing a family to wait for a doctor to make house calls.

“Farmers and ranchers want to make sure that antibiotics remain effective for human health and animal health,” Cremers said, but “there’s a recognition that we need to prevent disease, and antibiotics applied through feed can do a really good job of preventing disease.”

California is in the midst of another withering drought, with dry grass leaving cattle more susceptible to respiratory issues and other problems, according to Daley of the California Cattlemen’s Association. Policymakers must give food producers the autonomy they need to keep their animals healthy, Daley said.

“Frankly, most cattlemen don’t want to see indiscriminate use of antibiotics, either,” Daley said, but “we need the flexibility to be able to use them when we need them.”

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