1. E&E TV, “NRDC’s Reynolds discusses lobbying battle following release of EPA’s watershed assessment”

February 26, 2014

Watch the segment here

With U.S. EPA completing its final assessment of large-scale mining’s impacts on the Bristol Bay watershed, lobbying efforts surrounding the Pebble mine’s future are intensifying in Washington. During today’s OnPoint, Joel Reynolds, Western director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, discusses the likelihood EPA will pre-emptively veto the mine and the role of politics in the final decision.

2. The Christian Science Monitor, “California drought: Why state’s big cities aren’t in crisis mode”

February 25, 2014

By Daniel B. Wood

Conventional water wisdom in California boils down to this: Eighty percent of the water is allocated to farmers, 20 percent to cities. But 36 months into the state’s worst-ever drought – 12 months of the driest on record, following 24 below normal – cattle are going without food on mud-cracked rangelands yet fountains flow freely in Los Angeles water parks.

Meteorologist Darren Peck talks live with Michael Gunson at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about NASA teaming up with the California Department of Water Resources to manage water resources during our drought crisis.

Ten rural communities have fewer than 60 days’ supply of water, water deliveries to 750,000 acres of farmland and 25 million people have been halted, and homeowners are drilling thousands of wells to pump water from aquifers that are historically depleted. Forest fires are reported almost daily.

But here in L.A., tourists pose by splashing fountains – from Universal Studios, where buses empty foreigners in front of the just-outside-the-gate pool to downtown’s recently christened Great Park, where kids can wade in up to their ankles. Sprinklers feed emerald lawns from Beverly Hills to Watts, and people freely wash their cars in driveways.

Why do the cities look better than the farms? In brief, they’re living off stored water, while farmers live off current allocations, which have all but disappeared.

A major drought from 1987 to ’92 frightened metropolitan officials into designing all kinds of water purchasing, storing, and delivery options that have set up their cities for the long run, says Ed Osan, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). That included making use of new ways to catch and retain storm water and recycle waste water (which means removing particulates for all uses but drinking).

In addition, cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego benefit from water-sharing agreements with water districts in the Imperial Valley, which all share Colorado River water. In 2003, California signed onto a new water-sharing agreement that included “the largest transfer of water from agricultural use to urban use in US history,” according to the Association of California Water Agencies.

“California cities really got their act together and began coming up with formal drought plans two decades ago,” says Timothy Quinn, ACWA executive director. “Now, they’re reaping the benefits of that planning.”

Finally, voluntary conservation programs have raised consciousness and altered behavior to the point that per capita water use is lower now than in the 1970s.

“California cities are now coping with the results of policies put into place 10 to 15 years ago,” says NRDC’s Mr. Osan. Coastal cities are better off than inland ones, with those in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Fresno counties very close to doing water rationing, while San Francisco and Oakland, which learned from lessons past and developed storage facilities, are in much better shape, he adds.

But on Friday, federal officials announced that the state’s largest water delivery system, Central Valley Project (CVP), will provide no water at all to farmers in the Central Valley, which produces half the nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables. As a result, farmers will leave 500,000 acres of land unplanted this year, according to the California Farm Water Coalition.

At the same time, the CVP will provide only 50 percent of contracted amounts to urban areas, which are better prepared to bear the cuts.

San Francisco invested in the Los Vaqueros Reservoir in 1998 as a way of improving access to drinking water for some 660,000 residents. The city expanded the size of the reservoir from 100,000 acre-foot of water to 160,000 acre-foot of water, enough to meet the needs of 160,000 families for a year.

Los Angeles now has Diamond Valley Lake, which is currently holding enough water to get Los Angeles through two more years without much trouble. Diverted months ago from the Colorado River near the California-Arizona border or several hundred miles north from the Bay-Delta, the water is held in check by the Metropolitan Water District’s Diamond Valley Reservoir.

“While California’s political leaders argue in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., over whether the state should build new dams and reservoirs to store water in wet years for use in dry years, MWD’s reservoir is all that stands between full water supplies this year and mandatory water rationing for nearly 15 million people in the greater Los Angeles area,” says Rich Golb, former president of the Northern California Water Association, now a Vancouver-based water-policy consultant.

“It’s an example of how contemporary storage is saving L.A., while everyone else argues over whether we need more of it,” he adds.

One city that is not doing well is Sacramento, the capital, which depends for its supply largely on two river systems from the north. The mountains that feed those systems are 15 to 20 percent below normal snowpacks this year, and half of Sacramento’s 500,000 residents have no meters on their water use. Instead, users pay a flat rate – and the result is higher per capita usage.

“There’s a new law passed that requires all residents to have meters by 2024, but it’s expensive and that’s a long way off,” says Ellen Hanak, senior fellow in natural resource management for the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) in San Francisco.

Still, urban users can much more easily cut back 20 percent than an agricultural user, she adds.

Noting that California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency weeks ago and called for 20 percent voluntary cutbacks, she says: “A city dweller can meet that by not watering the lawn or washing their car as much, but a farmer has to fallow fields, dismiss workers, forgo income, and struggle with maintaining stable contracts over time.”

Moreover, the idea that Los Angeles could help farmers in the San Joaquin Valley now is incorrect, says Ms. Hanak. “If water is already coming from the north, agreements can be made to divert it to farmers, but there is currently no way to get the water already in L.A. back to where those farmers can use it,” she says.

In an extended drought like this one, perceptions of how others use water becomes more important, experts say, because one underlying issue concerns belt-tightening and self-control, and can affect dialogue over what will be done. Statehouse legislators, Congress, and President Obama all have proposals on the table, as local officials scramble to cope with the competing claims of angry residents, distraught farmers, and environmentalists.

“California hasn’t come very far at all from the shenanigans chronicled in the movie ‘Chinatown,’ ” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. That movie chronicled what is considered the biggest water grab in the history of the American West – the backroom deals that gave rise to America’s second-largest city and turned a mountain-ringed valley into a desert.

“The water wars here have been going on for decades and pit urban versus rural, north versus south, and farmers versus environmentalists,” she says. “It’s got everything, and both parties are trying to be the ones to solve it.”

The state did get some good news this week. A storm is expected to hit the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday afternoon, bringing as many as four days of steady rain, according to the National Weather Service in Monterey. Rainfall should vary from 2 to 5 inches across much of the Bay Area and the rest of the state, they said, with two to three feet of new snow in the Sierra Nevada.

It won’t be enough to reverse the ravages of the worst drought since California became a state in 1850, experts say, but it helps.

Meanwhile, a new poll signals that the drought is the top concern of California voters, and that an overwhelming majority favors strategies to stretch local water supplies, including recycling, rainwater harvesting, and efficiency measures. The poll was conducted by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates (FM3) on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“Californians are united in their desire for concrete long-term solutions to our water needs,” said Ann Notthoff, NRDC California advocacy director. “It’s time to embrace and implement water-smart strategies that ensure we make the most of every drop.”

3. Forbes, “EEI and NRDC Closer To Getting It Right On Net Metering”

February 23, 2014

By Peter Kelly-Detwiler

This month, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) made common cause and issued a joint statement to state utility regulators on the topic of technology (mostly distributed generation such as solar) and utility cost recovery. This is really boring stuff for most people. But it’s also critical, because how this gets resolved will have a critical impact on the American power grid of the future.

The gist of NRDC/EEI statement is this: technology is changing how we use the power grid.

As we move into a new age of innovation, the use of the grid is evolving, facilitating power flows in two directions, so that customers can engage in both purchases and sales of energy, and provide other services such as balancing, voltage support, and voluntary load management.

However, the fact that customers are generating their own power means that they consume fewer electrons from the utility. At the same time, with net metering, consumers can sell the excess power they generate onto the grid, effectively spinning their meter backwards. In theory, individuals with solar arrays on their roofs can use the grid for back-up when the sun doesn’t shine, as if it were a giant battery. The utility would earn little or no revenue while still being required to maintain the wires and poles.

On the face of it, that doesn’t sound fair does it? EEI and NRDC don’t think so, and state that, policy makers should rethink how utility costs are recovered, with consideration needed for new rate designs and new approaches that balance the desire to promote innovation while still enabling recovery of the capital investment that recognizes the value of the grid to all customers and their new uses of the grid.

The parties comment that utilities can adapt to the evolving technologies and customer requirements, but only if utility regulatory and business models change, and shift their focus away from a traditional model dependent on increasing growth in sales of kilowatt-hours to a service model. Such an approach is similar to the ‘decoupling’ model used in a number of states, including California and Massachusetts, where utility cost recovery is no longer tied to volumetric sales but rather to services. This approach incentivizes utilities, for example, to develop energy efficiency programs.

The EEI and NRDC also recommend that if regulators do break the link between recovery of costs and kilowatt-hour sales, they should ‘provide for reasonable and predictable annual adjustments in utilities’ authorized non-fuel revenue requirements’ and they should assure utilities that non-fuel (largely infrastructure) cost recovery remains the same irrespective of changes in electricity consumption.

In addressing the contentious issue of net metering for solar customers (or others with distributed generation that remain tied to the grid), the two parties state that those with on-site generation ‘must provide reasonable cost-based compensation for the utility services they use, while also being compensated fairly for the services they provide.’

At the same time, they comment that costs should be allocated appropriately and ‘not be shifted unreasonably to them from other customers.’

EEI and NRDC also advise state regulators to expand ‘earnings opportunities’ and performance-based incentives for services such as integration of clean energy generation and grid improvements.’

All of this looks like common sense, and utilities certainly deserve to be paid for maintaining infrastructure that is necessary for owners of distributed generation to move power in both directions. They also should be incentivized to provide a service and not for just selling more kilowatt-hours. The latter encourages waste, which harms our economic competitiveness, costs jobs, and, given the nature of our generation mix, harms the environment.

As Frederick Weston, a former Vermont Public Service Board economist and long-term director of the Regulatory Assistance Project comments, the arguments for non-volumetric compensation ‘are, on their face, an argument for revenue-based regulation, what we now call “decoupling,” and I am a proponent of it.’

However, Weston cautions,

There are lots of ways to decouple, and some of them are pretty bad. The worst is something called “straight-fixed-variable” pricing… Very simply, it’s a retail pricing scheme that separates commodity costs, which are recovered on a unit-of-consumption basis, from network costs, which are covered on a non-volumetric, fixed, recurring fee basis (read monthly charge).

Weston notes that this is problematic. ‘The objections to it are obvious: it discriminates against low-volume users and it distorts (dilutes) the economic signal that prices should send.’

He comments further that thinking of the grid as a ‘fixed cost’ is misleading and unhelpful,

All factors of production are, by definition, variable in the long run, and it is certainly the long run of which we must be thinking when confronting questions of investment, cost recovery, and pricing in the electric sector…Wires and poles and transformers have to be replaced sometime, which is proof enough that they are variable costs, and it is important as matters of economic efficiency and equity that prices reflect the ultimately avoidable nature of our consumption decisions. There are alternatives, after all.

Weston argues for adopting a more refined approach to decoupling ‘one in which most or all costs are recovered in consumption (kWh and non-ratcheted kW) charges, but allowed revenues, which reflect the “fixed” nature of non-fuel costs in the short run, are determined according to a non-sales-influenced formula.’ In this way, he notes,

Customers still see the economic costs of their consumption, but utilities are no longer worried about the integrity of their revenue stream. They lose both the threat of revenue erosion from any and all causes—energy efficiency, customer-sited generation, conservation, economic downturns, weather—and the bottom line benefits of higher-than-expected sales… Moreover, revenue true-ups under decoupling needn’t wait for annual reviews, nor semi-annual or even quarterly, but rather can be handled in “real time,” that is, month to month, so that there’s never a true-up out of time. Baltimore Gas & Electric does it in this fashion.

Karl R. Rábago, a former Texas PUC Commissioner and federal DOE executive, who works on solar rate cases around the country, argues for a slightly different approach to the issue of net metering and the valuation of distributed resources. He argues for what he calls “Net Metering 2.0,” a net billing arrangement in which charges for consumption and use of the grid appear along side a credit for energy generated by the solar or other distributed generation technology.

In a rate he designed for Austin Energy, Rábago set up a system where customers are credited at one “value of solar” rate for every unit of solar electricity generated, whether it offsets use or not. In exchange, solar customers are charged for their use of electricity and the grid as if they had no solar power or other distributed generation. This arrangement offers the benefit of eliminating any argument about cross subsidies or revenue shortfalls and establishes a fair compensation rate for the valuable distributed energy customers provide for the benefit of the grid and all customers.

How would this work? Assume a customer uses 500 kWh in a given month, at 15 cents per kWh. Meanwhile, the customer’s rooftop solar array produces 300 kWh of electricity. Since the electricity is produced during periods of higher demand and costs, and since it produces other values to the grid (such as avoided capacity costs, lines losses, and reduced emissions), let’s assume it’s worth 20 cents per kWh. The net bill to that customer would be $15 ($75 for electricity consumed minus $60 for the value of solar energy produced).

Minnesota adopted a Value of Solar tariff option for utilities in a law passed in 2013. Under that law, ‘investor-owned utilities may apply to the PUC for a Value of Solar Tariff that compensates customers through a credit (i.e., moving the netting from the meter to the bill) for the value to the utility, its customers, and the environment for operating distributed solar PV systems interconnected to the utility and operated by the customer primarily for meeting their own energy needs.’

In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate, a Commissioner with the Minnesota Department of Commerce stated that this approach includes “the value of energy and its delivery, generation capacity, transmission capacity, transmission and distribution line losses, and environmental value.” He opined that “We expect Value of Solar to provide an innovative alternative to net metering by providing fair compensation to solar customers while also allowing utilities to recover the reasonable costs of grid services.”

Rábago also commented on the apparent fairness of the approach espoused by EEI and NRDC, but cautions that he wants to see action follow the rhetoric. ‘A good first step would be an immediate end to utility anti-solar efforts, especially those against customer and third-party solar, in rate cases, IRP dockets, stand-by charge applications, avoided cost dockets, etc.’

He notes that if such actions do not follow, the tension may increase rather than decrease.

It will look like this is just cover for a redoubled ‘war on solar’ campaign currently underway. The way it works is this – what matters is what utilities, not their trade associations, say to regulators in private and public state hearing rooms, not in the press. I look forward to what the individual utilities do.”

4. Associated Press, “James Taylor appears in anti-fracking TV ad”
February 20, 2014

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) – James Taylor still has Carolina in his mind these days.

The singer-songwriter is starring in a television ad for an environmental group urging North Carolinians to challenge efforts to allow natural gas exploration through hydraulic fracturing in the state where he grew up.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said the ad began running Thursday. A group spokesman would not give a price on the ad buyDescription: Description: http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png but said it would run for at least two weeks.

The General Assembly told a state regulatory panel to create rules the industry must follow to participate in the exploration, better known as fracking. Lawmakers still must take further action to allow drilling permits.

Taylor grew up in Chapel Hill and now lives in Massachusetts. He wrote the 1970s hit “Carolina In My Mind” about his state.

5. Associated Press, “FDA looks to reboot nonprescription drug system”

February 24, 2014

By Matthew Perrone

WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration is seeking to revamp its system for regulating hundreds of over-the-counter drugs, saying the decades-old process is not flexible enough to keep pace with modern medical developments.

In a federal posting Friday, the agency announced a two-day meeting next month to discuss overhauling the system known as the over-the-counter monograph.

But regulators acknowledged that the process has proved extremely time-consuming, requiring multiple rounds of scientific review, public hearings and comments before a final monograph can be published. As a result, many common pain relievers and cough medicines are still technically under review.

In its announcement, FDA regulators detail the numerous flaws of the current cumbersome system, including the inability to quickly add warning labels about emerging safety risks.

“This process for changing a monograph is not well-adapted to address new safety issues with the speed and agility that are necessary to serve the public health,” states the FDA announcement.

The monograph process was originally set in place by Congress in 1972 as a way for the FDA to review hundreds of nonprescription drugs that predated modern drug safety regulations. Initially a panel of FDA experts went through the entire list of medications and determined whether they were “generally recognized as safe.” These findings were published as “tentative” rules for various drug classes, though many have never moved beyond that phase.

The decade-spanning review process has increasingly come under fire from scientists, consumer groups and members of Congress.

Last year the FDA said for the first time that there was no evidence that common anti-bacterial soap cleansers, including triclosan, were more effective than regular soap. The agency issued that statement only after a three-year court battle with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that sued the FDA to jump-start its stalled review of the cleansers, which had been in regulatory limbo since 1978.

The FDA said Thursday that it wants to design a new system that will “allow for innovative changes to drug products” and “provide FDA with the ability to respond promptly to emerging safety or effectiveness concerns.”

But the leading industry group for nonprescription drugmakers says it supports the current monograph system.

“The system ensures consumers have access to a wide variety of safe and effective medicines, while at the same time providing FDA with access to important information on safety and quality,” said Elizabeth Funderburk, spokeswoman for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.

The group represents companies like Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Procter & Gamble and many others.

ABOUT THE SYSTEM

The over-the-counter monograph was put in place in 1972 as a way to set dosing, labeling and other standards for hundreds of nonprescription drug ingredients, everything from aspirin to anti-bacterial hand scrubs.

6. KPFA, “Up Front”

February 25, 2014

[Click here to hear Diane Bailey’s appearance]

7. Sea Change Radio, “A Sporting Chance For the Environment”

February 25, 2014

By Alex Wise

[Click here to listen to Allen’s radio appearance]

This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Allen Hershkowitz, is a pioneer in the greening of the sports industry and a senior scientist at the NRDC. Dr. Hershkowitz is working to help decrease the carbon footprint of our nation’s sports teams while engaging sports industry leaders to speak up about environmental problems like climate change. He and host Alex Wise delve into the various ways that sports leagues and teams are starting to become leaders for change.

8. ScienceBlogs, “Stopping chemical catastrophes: Can we do better than calling for stronger storage tanks?”

February 25, 2014

By Elizabeth Grossman

On January 9, 2014 a leak was reported at Freedom Industries’ storage tanks on the banks of the Elk River just upstream of a water treatment plant that services tap water for about 300,000 residents in and around Charleston, West Virginia. The resulting release of at least 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals used to clean coal contaminated the community’s water supply, making it unfit for use. More than a month later, it remains unclear if this water is truly safe to drink and what the health consequences of exposure to these chemicals may be.

But this is far from the only disastrous toxic chemical leak that has occurred since the beginning of this year. In addition to two well-publicized leaks of coal slurry into West Virginia rivers this month and the massive Duke Energy coal slurry spill into the Dan River in North Carolina, there have been more than a half dozen releases of hazardous materials in February 2014 alone. In less than three weeks there have been leaks of hazardous materials in California, Connecticut, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas, some of which resulted in explosions and fires and injuries requiring hospitalization.

Lawsuits have been filed against Freedom Industries, and a US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) investigation of the incident is underway. West Virginia legislators have introduced a bill (SB 373) to strengthen oversight and safety of above-ground chemical storage tanks – a measure that has, so far, received the support of more than 100 West Virginia business owners. At the federal level, the “Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act of 2014,” has been introduced in the US Senate (S. 1961) by Senators Joe Manchin III (D-WV), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who also chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It would address emergency response as well as storage-tank integrity.

The Manchin-Boxer-Rockefeller bill would require regular state inspections (at least once every three years) of above-ground chemical storage facilities, require industry to develop state-approved emergency response plans, allow states to recoup costs incurred for responding to emergencies involving such tanks and ensure that local drinking water system authorities have the information and tools needed to respond to these emergencies – including information about the “potential toxicity of the stored chemicals to humans and the environment.”

The bigger picture

The measures these bills propose are worthwhile but would do little to address the source of these problems. Paul Anastas, Director of Yale University’s Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering and former US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator and science advisor, aptly summarized this issue when I interviewed him in 2008, saying: “We currently deal with chemical security through guns, guards and gates rather than by redesigning materials. Protective measures against hazards can and will fail. And when they fail, risk goes to the maximum.”

When considering the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act of 2014 in the context of the past six weeks’ catastrophic hazardous materials incidents, it seems important to ask why such legislation does not include any requirements for preventive measures – measures that would address these problems further upstream than the storage tank wall – through inherently safer technology, including the use of safer chemicals. When I asked Anastas about this during a Yale University broadcast talk on February 19th he said:

“We’ve had between 40 and 50 years of environmental policies that tried to control exposure, set standards about, quite frankly, how bad you can be; how much you can pollute and still not be breaking the law. That’s an important step, to set a floor of how egregious you can be but it’s half a strategy. The other strategy has to be about a race to the top. That’s what green chemistry has been showing over the past 20 years, that…you can have exceptional performance and still make sure that it’s inherently safer and inherently less polluting. There a lack of awareness of what’s possible but those possibilities for inherently safer technologies need to be built into our policies and need to be built into our laws.”

Speaking at a field hearing in Charleston, WV on February 10th, CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso said, “the most effective accident prevention measures typically involve what is called inherent safety.” He went on to say, “For chemical storage tanks like this, the first question that should always be asked is, do they need to be near the water supply for some reason? Unfortunately in the case of Freedom Industries, the answer would have been “no.”… The facility just did not need to be where it was. And although relocating it would have had some costs, those pale beside the costs that thousands of West Virginia residents and businesses are now paying for this disaster.”

Another salient fact in this disaster is how little is known about the toxicity of MCHM, the chemical released into the Elk River – and the fact that the US chemical regulatory system allows a chemical like this to be used at high volume and stored where it could potentially contaminate drinking water without anything approaching full knowledge of its health effects. The Material Safety Data Sheet for MCHM shows very incomplete data about the chemical’s toxicity and that information pertains to the pure form of the chemical rather than the mixture that contaminated Charleston’s water supply. The upshot was potentially harmful exposure – including to pregnant women, infants and children – and mixed and confusing messages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health authorities. And beyond the problems with available toxicity information about this particular chemical, there is the larger question: Given that toxic chemical leaks occur so frequently, shouldn’t more emphasis be placed on using fewer toxic chemicals?

Programs like those established by Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Act, which require businesses to report their use of hazardous chemicals and explore safer alternatives, don’t guarantee any accident prevention, but they do “increase the likelihood of detecting a problem before it happens,” explains University of Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) Senior Associate Director and Policy Program Manager Rachel Massey. Massey and TURI Deputy Director Liz Harriman note that the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory – the program that requires industry to report on certain chemical manufacture, use and emissions – has failed to keep pace with the number of toxic chemicals in use. EPA currently requires TRI reporting on fewer than 700 chemicals, while most of the 80,000 chemicals registered for commerce in the US have not – like MCHM – been fully tested, if they are tested at all.

In addition to omitting any requirements for safer chemical technology, the US Senate bill also does not include any direction to the EPA to exercise its existing authority under the Clean Water Act to require safety measures that “establish procedures, methods, and equipment…to prevent discharges of oil and hazardous substances…and to contain such discharges,” as Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior attorney Jon Devine wrote last month, and Greenpeace USA legislative director Rick Hind and University of Maryland law professor and Center for Progressive Reform president Rena Steinzor pointed out to me last week. As Devine explained, the EPA has implemented these requirements only for oil products, and some 42 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, it has not updated these requirements to extend to other hazardous substances. “These technologies exist and are effective,” said Steinzor.

Also lacking in the Manchin-Boxer-Rockefeller bill is any authorization for funds to implement what the legislation would require, Steinzor noted. The bill, she explained, asks the EPA or the states to increase inspection of above-ground chemical storage tanks and develop emergency response plans for these facilities without allocating any money for these programs. This comes at a time when states are strapped for funds and EPA’s current budget and strategic plan calls for significant reductions in enforcement and inspections. “They are making a very un-ambitious effort,” said Steinzor of the legislation.

So why not get ambitious? More inspections, better tank construction, overflow containment and emergency response, yes – but why not go beyond and also call for safer chemistry? It makes for safer workplaces and safer communities while reducing liability costs. And the business of designing safe new materials and better understanding of chemicals currently in use would also create jobs.