1. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Obama Sets Timetable For New Truck Fuel Efficiency Rules”

February 18, 2014

By Margaret Talev and Jeff Plungis

President Barack Obama will direct his administration to issue the next round of fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by March 2016, the White House said.

Obama will announce the action and prod Congress to expand fuel alternatives when he visits a Safeway Inc (SWY:US). distribution center today in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, to highlight the grocery chain’s efforts to improve truck efficiency.

The higher mileage standards are part of Obama’s strategy for energy security and dealing with climate change, the White House said in a statement. The administration previously set a standard requiring automakers to double average fuel economy of their fleets to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Safeway participates in a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency that includes investing in trucks that get better mileage, in part through improved aerodynamics, tires with low rolling resistance and larger capacity trailers, according to the White House.

As part of today’s action, the EPA and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are being directed to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by March of next year.

Heavy-duty vehicles account for about a quarter of U.S. on-road fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, according to the administration.

Earlier Standards

Today’s announcement follows the first-ever fuel-economy rules for U.S. truck makers three years ago, which sought to improve efficiency by about 20 percent by 2018, saving $50 billion in fuel costs over five years and decreasing carbon-dioxide emissions.

The administration’s plan, which also covered city buses and garbage trucks, was projected to save 530 million barrels of oil. The first round of regulations was intended to take off-the-shelf technologies already employed on real-world trucks.

The next round of regulations, for the 2018 model year and beyond, is expected to force the industry to deploy technology more aggressively. Besides engine and transmission improvements, trucking firms may have to adopt more aerodynamic trailers, adding skirts at the bottom or tails on the end to reduce wind resistance.

Like the first truck-efficiency rules, the next rules are supposed to be negotiated in close consultation with trucking firms, engine manufacturers, environmental groups and other stakeholders, according to a White House fact sheet. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department will consult with California regulators so there’s a single national standard, the fact sheet said.

Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who is scheduled to be at the event with Obama this morning, said the stricter standards will cut carbon pollution and reduce costs for consumers and truck owners.

“Setting the bar higher for trucks will further encourage innovation in the industry,” Beinecke said in a statement. “This is a win-win for the environment and the economy.”

2. MSNBC, The Ed Show, “Welcoming Debate Over The Keystone Pipeline”

February 14, 2014

[Watch the Interview]

The issues surrounding the controversial Keystone Pipeline has ignited a heated debate across the country. Ed Schultz and environmentalists discuss both sides.

3. FuelFix, “Environmentalists Debate Substance Of Keystone XL Fight”

February 17, 2014

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy

WASHINGTON – In their long crusade against the Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists have marched in the streets, lit candles in nationwide vigils and chained themselves to the White House fence.

Leaders of the fight, including writer Bill McKibben and California billionaire Tom Steyer, have marshaled an army of activists worried about climate change and raised the political stakes on the issue.

They lured dollars and enthusiastic recruits to their cause, inspiring a new generation of environmental activism.

But over the past three years, as they have devoted tremendous resources to the fight against Trans­Canada Corp.’s proposed oil pipeline, they potentially have diverted vast resources from other goals many environmentalists consider more important, such as limiting power plant pollution and taxing carbon emissions.

Alex Trembath, a policy analyst with the Breakthrough Institute, calls the Keystone XL fight “a sideshow” that distracts from more meaningful climate solutions such as spurring new technologies to drive down the use of oil.

“Opposing one pipeline — or even opposing a bunch of pipelines — is going to have a very marginal effect compared to what we should really be focusing on,” Trembath said. “The idea that we’re really going to transition off petroleum by blocking one pipeline from Canada to the United States is just ludicrous.”

‘A litmus test’

Opponents say the proposed $5.4 billion pipeline would be a catalyst to unlocking oil sands development in Alberta, Canada, where a dense, sticky hydrocarbon called bitumen is harvested by strip-mining and energy-intense steam-based techniques.

Environmentalists view the decision on whether to permit the border-crossing pipeline as a test of President Barack Obama’s green credentials and a symbol representing much deeper, more complicated climate-change questions. Sarah Ladislaw, energy program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Keystone XL has become “a litmus test for where the country stands on a low-carbon pathway.”

“But my question is, what do you do after Keystone?” Ladislaw said. “Yes or no, it is not the last pipeline that will get permitted.”

As the Obama administration moves closer to a final decision on the pipeline, possibly this year, more environmentalists are publicly questioning the single-minded Keystone focus.

Four members of Rising Tide North America, a network of advocates for reducing carbon emissions linked to climate change, warned last fall that a final verdict will remove the one element sustaining the U.S. climate movement.

“Once Barack Obama makes his decision on the pipeline, be it approval or rejection, the keystone (in the U.S. climate movement) will disappear,” they wrote in an opinion piece published online. “Without this piece, we could see the weight of the rage tumble down, potentially losing throngs of newly inspired climate activists. To build the climate justice movement we need, we can have no keystone, no singular solution, campaign, project or decision maker.”

Many leading environmentalists, however, insist the fight is more substantive than symbolic.

“There’s more and more evidence that climate emissions are going up, and these are the dirtiest fuels on the planet,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There has to be a strategic decision whether we’re going to go down a clean-energy path or continually go ahead with fossil-fuel development that is destructive to the environment.”

Unifying mission

The anti-Keystone movement can be traced to former NASA climate scientist James Hansen’s dire warning in June 2011 that if the pipeline were built it would be “exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster” and would be “game over” in the fight against climate change.

Although the math behind Hansen’s prediction has been questioned, Ryan Lizza described in the September issue of The New Yorker how the warning became a rallying cry for environmental leaders desperate to find some unifying mission after breakdowns in international climate negotiations and a failed bid to enact a cap-and-trade system that would have put a price on carbon emissions.

The pipeline issue involves few of the nuances and policy conflicts that marked the cap-and-trade debate in 2010.

Fundamentally, the future of Keystone XL doesn’t depend on 535 lawmakers in Congress or an agreement from world leaders. It boils down to just one man: Obama.

“Keystone has reinvigorated the environmental spirit on the streets in a way we haven’t seen in two decades,” said Bill Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity.

McKibben, who co-founded the activist group 350.org, takes pride in the emails Keystone opponents have sent to lawmakers in Washington and widespread acts of civil disobedience, including protests during construction of the southern leg of the pipeline in Texas, which was not subject to a presidential permit.

“The fight to shut down the pipeline sparked a grass-roots movement that has changed the culture of environmentalism,” he wrote in a December Rolling Stone piece.

McKibben admits, though, that the focus on Keystone has had limitations.

“The reason for fighting Keystone all along was not just to block further expansion of the tar sands; we also hoped that doing the right thing would jump-start Washington in the direction of real climate action,” McKibben wrote. “Instead, the effort necessary to hold off this one pipeline has kept environmentalists distracted as Obama has opened the Arctic and sold off the Powder River Basin, as he’s fracked and drilled.”

What’s next?

Others wonder what will happen to all of the passion directed at Keystone XL once the issue is settled, whether the pipeline is permitted or not.

“There’s been no signal of what the long-term or the ultimate policy goal is,” Trembath said. “I see a very motivated and very satisfied activist core who have been successful in delaying the decision on the pipeline, but that hasn’t given me any comfort or sense of what the bridge to a long-term organizing or policy solution is.”

Proposed Environmental Protection Agency limits on carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants could do far more to constrain heat-trapping greenhouse gases than blocking Keystone XL.

According to a State Department analysis last month, burning the oil unlocked by Keystone XL could add an extra 1.3 million to 27.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, if it displaced more conventional crudes that emit less.

That represents just 0.02 percent to 0.4 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which were 6.7 billion metric tons in 2011. By contrast, power plants represent a third of U.S. emissions and about 60 percent of those tied to stationary sources.

Reining those in “is going to have a much bigger emissions effect in the long run than one pipeline,” Trembath said.

Beinecke, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, insisted the environmental movement isn’t giving short shrift to the power plant policies.

“People are galvanized in every state across this country to address this issue,” she said, noting that 3 million comments were filed supporting the EPA’s proposed rules on power plant emissions.

“The environmental community is bringing a huge amount of resources into ensuring we get strong regulations for existing power plants,” said Anthony Swift, an attorney with the council’s international program.

“But at the same time,” Swift added, “Keystone has really opened up a public debate about the direction we’re moving in our energy future. And I think that’s an important discussion to be having at a national level.”

4. New York Times, “New York Tries To Rid Its Sewers Of FOG (Fat, Oil and Grease)”

February 14, 2014

By Kia Gregory

Out of sight of most New Yorkers is a sprawling underground labyrinth of about 7,500 miles of sewers, part of the city’s vast and, in many cases, aging subterranean infrastructure. Besides old age, the sewers, which are essential to the health of the city, are under assault from a nemesis above ground: grease.

Across the city, the remains of deep-fried this or pan-fried that are being carelessly and improperly poured down kitchen drains and other plumbing outlets. The grease often ends up sticking to other debris in the sewer system, until it hardens and blocks pipes, like clogged arteries.

Carter Strickland, the city’s environmental commissioner, said the cardiovascular analogy was overused — but accurate. “Grease clings to the surface and it builds on itself over time,” Mr. Strickland said. “The sewage cannot get through, and bad things happen.”

Bad things like sewage backing up into sinks and bathtubs, or onto city streets.

“At any one time, it’s such a big network,” Mr. Strickland said, “you’re going to have an issue.”

In fact, 62 percent of the 15,000 sewer backup complaints the city’s Environmental Protection Department logged last year were caused by buildups of fat, oil and grease, a combination known in the waste industry as FOG.

That percentage is comparable to the grease scourge faced by sewer systems elsewhere, but the challenge in New York is unique because of the sheer size of the system and the approximately 24,000 food establishments in the city that rely on grease.

“One thing these eateries have in common,” said Eric A. Goldstein, New York City environmental director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “is that they use a large amount of grease and food oils. If we don’t find ways to recycle these food oils, it’s not surprising that we still have these problems.”

The city has now gone on the offensive, embarking on an aggressive multipronged campaign to make residents and businesses aware of the threat posed by grease, not only in creating foul messes, but also in requiring expenditures: Clearing backups caused by grease cost the city an estimated $4.65 million last year.

The Environmental Protection Department has increased regular sewer cleaning in grease hot spots in Queens, using trucks equipped with high-power vacuums or water hoses and a supply of degreasing agents.

The agency also uses cameras lowered into sewers to look for clogs. It has tripled the number of remote sewer-monitoring devices, which are placed inside manholes and send an alert if they detect rising wastewater.

And it has started an outreach program, Cease the Grease, to educate residents about the dos and don’ts of discarding food oils.

Queens has the dubious distinction of being the leader when it comes to the share of backups caused by grease — grease accounted for 74 percent of backups there last year. Staten Island was next at 55 percent, with Manhattan and the Bronx tied at 49 percent and Brooklyn at 46 percent.

Mr. Strickland said he had no definitive answer as to why Queens had such a big grease problem, “other than its neighborhoods are more settled, and it has a lot of single-family homes where people may be pouring grease down the drain.”

Buried below Queens is nearly 40 percent of the city’s sewer infrastructure, and the borough has historically been prone to sewer problems, particularly in flat and low-lying areas. Some neighborhoods have smaller mains, sometimes limiting capacity.

In the city, every business that generates fat, oil and grease must have grease interceptors to block the substances from reaching sewer lines, according to city sewer regulations. A trap is connected to a sink by pipes and separates grease from wastewater. In the interceptor, fat, oil and grease float to the top, where they build up until they can be removed, while the grease-free wastewater continues through the interceptor and into the sewer system.

City environmental inspectors check the equipment, making sure it is properly sized, installed, maintained and operated. Business owners can be fined up to $10,000 a day for each violation.

Despite the agency’s efforts, grease clogs remain a recurring issue.

“It’s prolific. It’s a really big problem,” said Ted Vitanza, who owns a Mr. Rooter plumbing service franchise in Queens and has been a licensed plumber for more than 30 years. He said he had seen wedges of grease reduce an eight-inch pipe to, in effect, a four-inch pipe. “There are far too many people who don’t understand it’s not a good thing to take a frying pan, after you’re done making chicken cutlets, and pour the grease down the drain,” Mr. Vitanza said. “It’s mostly innocent people, people who aren’t educated to these facts.”

The Environmental Protection Department has held more than 30 grease awareness workshops in over different neighborhoods and mounted a yearlong campaign at the Baruch Houses in Lower Manhattan.

The development, with more than 2,100 families in 17 buildings, is one of the New York City Housing Authority’s largest projects, and it has had repeated sewer backups over the years. Those sewer lines empty into a main under nearby Delancey Street, which also has recurring backups. Grease buildup has been the main cause.

The surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood has shifted over the years, with small dry goods shops and clothing stores giving way to bars, restaurants and hotels, the kind of commercial tenants that steadily produce grease.

Disposing of grease properly is simple, city officials said. Pour the hot liquid into a coffee can, tuna can or any other sealed container that will not burn or melt. Once the liquid has cooled, the container can be discarded with the rest of the garbage. Dishes should be cleared of oil, grease and food scraps with paper towels before they are washed.

Like many residents who came to a sparsely attended grease workshop at the Baruch Houses, Valerie Morgan, 46, has her own way of getting rid of grease. Ms. Morgan, a mother of five, pours her used grease into a coffee can. After she reuses the oil a few times, she lets it cool, then stuffs the can with paper towels, puts the can in a plastic bag, and tosses it in the incinerator.

But she said she had never considered how interconnected all the city’s pipes were. She recalled a clog in her kitchen sink that resulted in rust-colored water, dirt and clumps of hair spitting into her bathtub.

“It’s something that we have to think about,” Ms. Morgan said, “so we don’t have complications.”

“And,” she added, “having to go through the headache of having to wait for people to come fix it.”

5. Politico Magazine, “Can Anybody Save California?”

February 14, 2014

By David Dayen

In a journey befitting our increasingly biblical climate, President Obama traveled on Friday from storm-wracked Washington to bone-dry Fresno, California, a city torched by three years of drought. The lack of rainfall has emptied the Sierra Mountain snowpack responsible for a majority of the state’s water, and the dire consequences demand high-profile attention. But someone might want to tell the president what they told the last guy who snooped around water politics in California.

Forget it Jake. It’s… well, it’s not Chinatown, but it’s just as complicated.

The mega-drought is pitting farmers against fishermen, north against south and, of course, Democrats against Republicans. But that’s frequently the case in California, which has battled for more than a century over how to allocate too little water for too many people. The dry landscape adds another layer of rancor, and with the planet heating up and fueling bigger, longer and more severe droughts, that’s likely to be a permanent fixture. How state and federal lawmakers respond to the crisis could offer a window into how the United States writ large will react to climate events in real time—and so far, the politics appear too small for the task.

The immediate impacts of this drought herald a disaster. The past year has been the driest in California’s recorded history, perhaps the worst since 1580, hearkening back to the mega-droughts of an earlier age. A series of recent storms in the northern part of the state doubled the available snowpack, but with three straight years of drought, that snowpack remains around one-fourth of the normal amount (you would need rain or snow every other day until May to catch up). The California Drought Monitor shows “severe drought” conditions in 90 percent of the state, particularly in the agriculturally rich Central Valley, sometimes nicknamed the nation’s salad bowl.

The conditions have created impossible, Sophie’s Choice-type dilemmas. The State Water Project, which supplies water to agencies serving 25 million residents, announced they would make no deliveries this month for the first time in history. Seventeen California communities and water districts, primarily in the Central Valley, may not have drinking water in the next 60-90 days. Residents in these cities are being asked to cut their water usage by as much as 30 percent. Farmers may have to leave half a million acres fallow this planting season, a record loss that could cost more than $2 billion. They must choose between watering perennially thirsty almond and cherry trees and planting annual crops like tomatoes and lettuce. Any choice will result in lower yields and increased food prices across the country. Migrant workers won’t get hired to cultivate crops, leading to unemployment that could top 50 percent in some Central Valley towns. The state has banned fishing in several rivers to protect thinning populations. The dry conditions create breeding grounds for wildfires, which started this year as early as January. Ranchers have been forced to sell off their calves at half their usual sale weight because of a lack of grass, a predicament that has even faced rancher and Congressman John Garamendi, who has sold one-third of his herd. “It’s going to affect everything that goes on in the state,” Garamendi said.

The crisis has belatedly caught the attention of Washington. House Republicans, led by Central Valley congressmen like Devin Nunes, David Valadao and Kevin McCarthy, have labeled the drought man-made, arguing that too much water gets diverted to protect the endangered Delta smelt, depriving farmers of needed resources. Demanding to “put families before fish,” House Republicans passed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, which would effectively countermand the Endangered Species Act and the California Constitution, halt restoration of the San Joaquin River and transfer the water south to Central Valley farmers. Rep. Garamendi, a Democrat, described it on the House floor as “essentially a theft of water from someone to give to somebody else,” arguing that moving water from fisheries to farms would also damage the state’s sizable salmon industry. The White House has promised a veto, and Governor Jerry Brown called it “unwelcome and divisive.”

Senate Democrats responded with their own bill, which would allocate $300 million to drought relief projects and provide more flexibility to move water around the state without waiving state or federal laws. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a number of band-aid remedies on Thursday, including sped-up assistance for livestock producers and $60 million to stock food banks in economically depressed parts of the state. Further to the left, activists have taken this opportunity to try to stop the development of fracking, which uses massive amounts of water that then gets polluted through mixing with chemicals.

The political battle over the drought ignores some basic data: Under current conditions, there is no way to satisfy normal demand with scarce water resources. Large regions of the state exist in semiarid areas, and the huge agricultural demands strain creaky systems. “California’s current water situation is not sustainable,” says Peter Gleick, a water expert and President of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research and analysis organization. “We don’t use water well, we don’t manage it well and demand exceeds supply.”

The scramble for water in California leads competing interests to maneuver to capture as much of the stuff as possible. Groundwater is almost entirely unregulated—“anyone who wants water can pump it,” Gleick says—which disrupts supply and reduces more efficient underground storage. Agriculture needs are so intense—farming comprises 3 percent of the state’s economy but uses 80 percent of the water—that short-term power grabs abound, like the “Monterey Amendments,” which ensure permanent supply to Paramount Farms, the largest grower of pistachios and almonds in the world. Water districts constantly bicker over water rights, and lawsuits to overturn deals proliferate. A slew of mandates, allocations and promises make shortages almost impossible to contend with, let alone years-long droughts.

And that’s where the great unmentionable aspect of 21st-century water wars comes in: climate change. Scientists have basically predicted this type of extreme weather shift for the past two decades. “Weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change,” said White House science advisor Dr. John Holdren on a conference call Thursday. While droughts in California are commonplace, their frequency, length and severity have increased with a warming planet, Holdren explained, noting that higher temperatures lead to more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow, running off into rivers more quickly and evaporating faster. “The whole water season shifts earlier, and for communities relying on snowpack, in late summer you really find yourself in a bind,” adds Steve Fleischli, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water program. Studies from the journal Nature and surveys of leading climatologists reinforce these fears.

It was hard enough to achieve an uneasy balance on water without climate change. Now that the consequences of a warmer planet are here, our politics simply haven’t caught up, experts say. “Politicians are still looking at the drought as a political issue and not as the environmental and economic nightmare that it could be,” says Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California. “The ultimate question is, how do you get water into the state for the next 500 years?”

Some are heartened by the rare sight of President Obama connecting the drought conditions in California to climate change in his Friday speech in Fresno. But when it comes to a policy response, it’s all about the here and now. “During early phases of a drought, everyone walks around talking about short-term responses,” says Gleick. “Democrats, Republicans, everyone. They have different priorities, but they always look at the immediate crisis. It would be nice if we looked at long-term solutions to our problems.” The Obama administration does plan to include a $1 billion “climate resilience fund” in the next budget, to fund that kind of long-term planning. But the fund has about as much chance of making it past House Republicans as a run on snow-chains in Palm Springs.

The irony is that California has actually led on fighting global warming, with a statewide cap-and-trade system that is succeeding in bringing 2020 carbon emissions down to 1990 levels. But one state cannot do it alone. In fact, the drought shows that even the most responsible steward of the environment will suffer without a global effort. So while continuing to demand climate solutions, Californians of all stripes will have to figure out how to manage with less water, perhaps forever.

Paradoxically, Southern California, traditionally a villain in the state’s water wars (Los Angeles infamously grabbed water from the Owens Valley 100 years ago) offers a model for how to adapt to drought conditions over the long term. Twenty years ago, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California built new reservoirs to capture precious rain and increased water recycling programs. It also aggressively promoted conservation, both through changes to building codes and $333 million in rebates for water-efficient products. Ninety percent of Southern California residents now use low-flow toilets and shower heads, keeping demand steady since 1990, despite 14 million additional residents. The region will not need mandated rationing this year, because of available reserves. Governor Brown, taking his cues from the Southland, has called for a voluntary statewide 20 percent cutback in water usage, and experts like the NRDC’s Fleischli say Californians can probably squeeze out another few percentage points of conservation, as parched Australians and Israelis have.

Political debates over the drought, however, appear stuck in the past. In this election year, California Republicans believe they can score points essentially blaming incumbent Democrats for the weather. Governor Brown’s re-election opponents argue that the state does not have the infrastructure in place to deal with prolonged drought, urging construction of additional dams, canals and reservoirs. Holdren, the White House science adviser, rejects this, saying “the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough reservoirs, the problem is there isn’t enough water in them.”

The $24.7 billion Bay Delta tunnel project, which would funnel water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to public water agencies more efficiently, could prove part of a long-term solution. But state lawmakers have savaged the idea, pointing to potential cost overruns. Water agencies that supply farmers have doubted whether enough benefits would emerge to justify the funding. A water bond measure readied for the 2014 ballot could offset costs, but it would have to survive skeptical voters.

The next few weeks will determine the scope of the crisis—as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes, California gets more than half of its annual rainfall between December and February. A continued dry spell would make the water wars even more desperate over the summer, but also may offer the only opportunity to change the paradigm. Gleick sighs: “If the drought ends next month we’ll go back to doing the things we’ve always done.”

If all else fails, California can bring out the big gun. Lady Gaga, as payment for an upcoming video shoot at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, will donate $275,000 to repair the castle pool and support water projects in the surrounding area, and is shooting a public service announcement asking residents to conserve water. A celebrity-donation model of drought survival seems hopelessly inadequate to the scale of the task, but compared with the political class, Gaga’s being the constructive one.

6. National Geographic, “Water In America: Is It Safe To Drink?”

February 17, 2014

By Tim Friend

A chemical spill that left 300,000 residents of Charleston, West Virginia, without tap water last month is raising new concerns about the ability of the United States to maintain its high quality of drinking water.

While the U.S. has one of the safest water supplies in the world, experts say the Charleston contamination with a coal-washing chemical shows how quickly the trust that most Americans place in their drinking water can be shattered.

“We often don’t think about where our water comes from,” said Steve Fleischli, director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Water Program in Los Angeles. “Does it come from a nearby river or a lake, intermittent streams, isolated wetlands, or an aquifer? Yes, you may have a water treatment plant, but if your water source is not protected, people face a real risk.”

In Charleston on January 9, about 10,000 gallons of a little-known and unregulated chemical called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) leaked from an aboveground storage tank into the Elk River. The amount of the chemical overwhelmed the carbon filtration system in the West Virginia American Water treatment plant about a mile downstream. Within a week, more than 400 people were treated at hospitals for rashes, nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms.

West Virginia American Water decided by January 13 that the water was again safe to drink, because the concentration of MCHM had fallen below one part per million. But it soon emerged that there was little scientific information backing up that safety threshold, and this past week many West Virginians were still not drinking tap water. “I wouldn’t drink it if you paid me,” West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller told National Public Radio last Monday.

Leaky Ponds of Coal Ash

While Congress was holding hearings on the West Virginia incident, the next one happened. On February 2, up to 82,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into the Dan River, near the border of North Carolina and Virginia, from a pond at a closed Duke Energy power plant. This week state health officials warned people not to swim in the river or eat fish from it.

The Associated Press reported February 13 that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh has launched a criminal investigation into the spill, seeking records from Duke Energy and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources—which had sued Duke last August for unpermitted discharges at Dan River and five other power plants.

“When you burn coal you leave behind metals and radioactivity,” said Robert B. Jackson, an environmental scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “The ash is quite toxic. The waste products we create to produce energy, the waste we generate every day, are a threat to drinking water quality.”

Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium, and other dangerous contaminants. At power plants it is mixed with water, forming a slurry that is stored in large ponds. According to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, 40 percent of the country’s coal ash ponds are located in the southeast and contain 118 billion gallons of toxic material. Most of these impoundments, like the one on the Dan River, are located near major waterways.

In 2008, the dike at an impoundment in eastern Tennessee failed at the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant. More than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled from the site and spread across more than 300 acres of land and water. Tests of nearby river water showed levels of lead and thallium exceeded safety limits for drinking water, but the TVA said at the time that the toxic metals were filtered out by water treatment processes. The TVA spent a year and a half cleaning up the sludge.

In 2000, the bottom of a coal ash pond in Kentucky crumbled and released an estimated 306 million gallons of slurry. Water supplies for 27,000 people were contaminated.

Following the Tennessee spill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified 676 coal ash impoundments at 240 facilities, assigning a “high hazard” rating to 45 ponds. The rating indicates that a failure would probably cause loss of human life.

Droughts, Floods, and Hogs

Another threat, Jackson said, is severe weather. Research suggests that dry regions will become drier and wet regions wetter as a result of climate change. Both extremes pose significant challenges for maintaining safe drinking water.

Jackson pointed to a 1999 hurricane that flooded hog farms in North Carolina. “Hurricane Floyd came through and flushed the contents of the hog waste lagoons out into the streams and rivers,” he said. The result was widespread fecal contamination of drinking water. More than decade after Floyd, North Carolina still has more than 4,000 hog waste lagoons.

At the other extreme of the weather spectrum is drought. Laurel Firestone, founder of the Community Water Center, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Visalia, California, said the most severe drought in California history may have a dramatic effect on water quality.

In a 2012 report prepared for the California State Water Control Board, scientists from the University of California at Davis found that about 254,000 people in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley are currently at risk for nitrate contamination of their drinking water. In one of the nation’s most productive farming regions, nitrates from heavily fertilized fields leach into the groundwater. “Many small communities cannot afford safe drinking water treatment,” the report said.

As a result of the current drought, farmers are having to rely on groundwater to irrigate their fields—which inevitably raises the concentration of nitrates in the water left in the ground. “The California drought is exacerbating problems that already existed,” Firestone said. “Those being affected first are people who depend on the shallow wells. They are canaries in the coal mine.” Exposures to high levels of nitrates can cause death, miscarriages, and blue baby syndrome, she said.

In general, Jackson said, and not just in California, “the most vulnerable group of people are those who get their water from a private water source. People who have private drinking water wells are far less protected than anyone else in the country. No one tests your water unless you pay for a test.”

Polluters ‘R Us

What worries Jackson and some other experts more than headline-making spills and weather is chronic pollution of a more insidious kind—from pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs. Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals, especially antibiotics and steroids, are widely present in the nation’s water supply. We excrete them in our urine; our livestock do as well. Other chemicals from soaps, shampoos, and lotions get washed down the drains of our tubs and showers. Sewage treatment plants are not equipped to remove them. Some have been shown to disrupt the hormone system in fish.

The EPA states there are no known human health effects from low-level exposure to PPCPs in drinking water, “but special scenarios (one example being fetal exposure to low levels of medications that a mother would ordinarily be avoiding) require more investigation.”

“What we don’t know are the interactions of thousands of different compounds that are taking place in our lakes, streams, and aquifers,” said Jackson, who is studying the effects of some of the compounds on fish and mice. “When you have a spill like in West Virginia it’s terrible, but at least you know about it. The cases that may be more dangerous are the slow and steady spills and chemical reactions that we don’t know about.”

For municipal utilities, such new worries come at a very bad time. In the American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, the nation’s drinking water infrastructure was given a D grade for aging pipes, some of which date back to the Civil War. “At the dawn of the 21st century, much of our drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life,” the report stated. The American Water Works Association estimates there are 240,000 water-main breaks per year in the U.S. The investment needed to bring the nation’s waterworks up to speed has been estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Money that might be devoted to such investments is instead being spent by a worried public on buying the stuff in plastic bottles. It made sense in West Virginia in recent weeks, but in general, according to Jackson, in spite of all the good reasons to be concerned about drinking water safety, resorting to bottles is not a sensible reflex. “People think bottled water is safer, but there is zero evidence that is true,” he said. “The quality of water in city tap water is regulated far more closely than bottled water.”
7. Politico, “Icy Blast Heats Up Coal Debate”

February 13, 2014

By Darius Dixon and Erica Martinson

As another snowstorm socks the East Coast, the coal industry has a message for the nation’s electricity customers: We told you so.

Signs of growing pains have abounded in the past few weeks of frigid weather, which struck a U.S. electrical grid that’s in the early stages of a long-term shift away from coal-fired power to natural gas. Wholesale electricity prices have spiked in regions such as New England, natural gas costs have surged with demand in Boston and Chicago, and power companies in Texas and Eastern states have had to urge residents to cut back. Some utilities have even been shifting, yes, back to coal.

The price spikes in the wholesale markets will take a year or two to affect people’s electric bills, and for the most part, the lights have stayed on. The outages that struck a half-million people across the South this week were caused by typical winter hazards like ice-coated tree branches.

But the coal industry and its supporters in Congress are sounding the alarm. They note that many of the older coal-fired power plants that have helped fill the gap this winter are due to shut down next year because of the Obama administration’s environmental rules.

“What happens … when that capacity is gone?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) asked this week at a gathering of utility regulators in Washington. “Maybe we won’t have cold periods like we’re seeing next year [and] we’ll be OK. But what kind of a policy is that? A hope and a prayer?”

Supporters of the environmental rules call the warnings of blackouts overblown, saying the nation is simply shedding dirty coal plants that can’t compete in the marketplace. They point out that regional groups in charge of ensuring reliable electric service can order plants to stay open if power delivery would suffer, while many states and utilities are carrying out programs to reduce how much electricity their customers need.

The debate points to a larger issue: The nation’s electric grid is set to change dramatically in the next decade, in part for reasons that have little to do with President Barack Obama’s policies. And some lawmakers, regulators and utility executives are increasingly anxious about how the the U.S. will handle the transition.

“The country is going through the most amazing transformation of its power grid in the shortest amount of time in its history — and we better do it right, or else we’re all going to look bad if there are supply disruptions,” said Philip Moeller, a board member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The grid’s growing embrace of gas in place of coal is just part of a broader set of changes that have also made it harder for nuclear power to compete.

In one of the most significant changes, much of the country has moved since the late 1990s away from a tightly regulated power supply toward a free-market approach in which plant operators bid to sell wholesale electricity in a region. Operators of coal and nuclear plants say those markets don’t place enough value on stability and reliability, and instead base decisions on the lowest price, giving the advantage to natural gas.

At the same time, renewable power sources like wind and solar are increasing their share of the nation’s energy mix, aided by federal tax credits and Energy Department project financing.

Coal is feeling the markets’ squeeze. While traditionally the country’s cheapest major power source, coal plants are seeing their costs rise because of stricter environmental rules. That’s one reason hundreds of older coal-fired power plant units are expected to shut down for good in the next several years. Meanwhile, increasingly energy-efficient homes, office buildings and factories have depressed the country’s average power demand, dimming the incentive to build new power plants.

But this winter has been anything but average. Weather is by far the largest factor driving electricity demand, and the cold spells are putting the changing grid to the test.

Natural gas, for example, is plentiful nationally, but some regions such as New England don’t yet have enough pipeline capacity when the demand soars, creating price spikes in the wholesale markets. And as the coal industry likes to point out, gas’s price has historically taken big upswings and downswings.

Natural gas prices shot up as much as sixfold overnight in some East Coast markets during early January’s “polar vortex,” according to one FERC staff report, and wholesale electricity prices spiked along with them. Earlier this week, the commission agreed to let a major grid operator called PJM — whose territory includes Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. — temporarily waive its usual wholesale price cap of $1,000 per megawatt-hour because of high gas costs.

The wholesale spikes won’t trickle down to residents and small-business owners right away because most of their power supply is covered by long-term contracts, said Bob Howatt, executive director of the Delaware Public Service Commission. Even if customers see their bills rise slightly in future years’ contracts, state regulators generally have systems in place to moderate price fluctuations for homes and businesses.

This year’s troubles aren’t necessarily the start of a trend, Howatt said. “The fact that PJM has asked for this waiver this one particular time doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to see these prices next winter or the winter after that,” he said.

But many people have been affected this winter by a nationwide shortage of propane, a natural gas byproduct that millions of Americans use for heating. One power industry group, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, has blamed the shortage on the high demand for gas for electricity production. (Others have pointed out that much of the nation’s propane supply is being exported.)

Although prices for natural gas on the spot markets spiked several times over the past few weeks, the natural gas industry argues that observers are walking away with the wrong lessons.

“Experience over the last month shows us just the opposite,” America’s Natural Gas Alliance chief Marty Durbin said in an email Thursday. He noted that “despite record cold temperatures and record demand for natural gas,” gas prices on the futures markets have stayed around $5 per million BTUs — what would have been considered a low price before the fracking boom began several years ago.

“To put that in perspective, a similarly cold winter in 2000-2001 saw prices climb to $10, and a hurricane in 2008 saw spikes to $13,” Durbin wrote. “While there are customers without firm contracts that have to pay higher rates on the spot market, they are a small part of the overall equation.”

Some of those spot prices shot up to nearly $100 on the East Coast at one point last month, FERC’s staff report said.

Durbin also acknowledged that bottlenecks in the pipeline network, such as in the Northeast, need some work.

Coal supporters and some utility executives say the lesson of the harsh winter is “fuel diversity” — in other words, not shutting the door on coal or other sources.

“This year’s historically cold winter has served as a crystal ball into our future, revealing the energy cost and electric reliability threats posed by the Obama administration’s overreliance on a more narrow fuel source portfolio that excludes the use of coal,” said Laura Sheehan, senior vice president of communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

The CEO of one major coal-using electricity producer, American Electric Power, told investors last month that January’s cold spell had his company running 89 percent of the coal-fired capacity that it’s set to retire in 2015.

Nuclear power is also struggling in the competitive markets for electricity. Nuclear plants supply steady power and aren’t affected by climate regulations, since they produce no greenhouse gases. But cheap gas and government-subsidized wind power have made it hard for small nuclear plants to compete.

“Right now, competitive markets are not working efficiently,” said Nuclear Energy Institute chief Marv Fertel, who says the markets need to place some value on benefits such as reliability and price stability.

“You want to value low price, but if that’s all you value, you’re just going to have short-term decisions,” he said.

Fertel said between six and 10 nuclear plants in the U.S. are vulnerable to shutting down because they aren’t making money. And without nuclear power, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the nation’s emissions-free electricity, Obama’s climate goals get increasingly difficult to achieve.

Edison Electric Institute Vice President David Owens added to the cries for a diverse fuel mix.

“We can just look at the recent cold spell seen all across the nation,” he said. “It is very, very clear to me that if we did not have coal and nuclear facilities available, we would have substantial disruption in electric service to electric consumers.”

Others say the cries of doom aren’t new.

“In the late [1970s], there were whole dystopian novels written about the inevitable collapse of reliable electricity service in the face of the unreasonable demands of environmental regulators,” said Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, during a conference this week of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. “And we have gloriously proved all of that ludicrously wrong. The question is: Does the progress now have to stop?”

As one solution, the utility industry is turning to energy efficiency both to cut costs and ease times of high demand. Southern Co., for example, has instituted a $1 billion investment to shave off 1,000 megawatts of peak power demand by 2020 by investing in home upgrades and other programs for homeowners. The company has similar programs that already can meet 10 percent of its annual peak demand, said Jeff Burleson, Southern’s vice president of system planning.

But most parties — those optimistic or not — say we simply won’t know how the U.S. will manage the transition until it comes.

FERC’s Moeller, for instance, has long expressed wariness about the spate of new environmental regulations bearing down on the utility industry in the next few years. On the other hand, he says he sees little use in fighting gas’s rising role.

“I like diversity, but the market forces for gas are just so powerful that I’d rather accept its growing dominance and then deal with how to moderate price spikes,” Moeller said. “And the way to do that is to increase the storage capacity and deliverability through pipelines.”

Accelerating the development of several energy technology options simultaneously — in the hopes of driving their costs down — is one way to help avoid becoming overly dependent on a single fuel source over the long term, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said. The Energy Department has been pouring millions of research dollars into several areas, including nuclear, solar and fossil fuel technologies.

“I must say, I think that fuel diversity is important. I think most utilities feel that way as well, but right now, the economic proposition obviously is driving to gas,” he said earlier this month.

8. Wall Street Journal, “E. Donald Elliott: Obama’s Shale Gas Trojan Horse”

February 17, 2014

By E. Donald Elliott

President Obama has floated a curious but potentially far-reaching proposal that has not attracted the attention it deserves.

On Jan. 28, the White House website posted a fact sheet accompanying the State of the Union address, “Opportunity for All: Key Executive Actions the President Will Take in 2014.” Mr. Obama called for Congress to join with him and with state and local governments to create “Sustainable Shale Gas Growth Zones.” The goal is to “make sure shale gas is developed in a safe, responsible way that helps build diverse and resilient regional economies that can withstand boom-and-bust cycles and can be leaders in building and deploying clean energy technologies.”

The language in the fact sheet—and in the speech when he referred to natural gas as a “bridge fuel”—is upbeat and seems to support shale gas development. But Congress and the energy industry should be wary.

Shale gas doesn’t seem to be in need of federal help. New techniques for extracting oil and natural gas, such as fracking and horizontal drilling, have been pioneered by industry and deployed successfully under state regulation. Nor is there evidence of lax state oversight injuring the environment.

While some environmentalists and citizens groups are concerned about fracking, more than a million wells have been “fracked” since the late 1940s. There are no confirmed cases of groundwater contamination from these wells, despite a few dozen unconfirmed anecdotes, some of which have been investigated and shown to be bogus.

What then is the problem that these “sustainable shale gas growth zones” are supposed to solve? The key may be the fact sheet’s reference to “building and deploying clean energy technologies” in tandem with shale gas. It strongly suggests that the administration has in mind cross-subsidies from shale gas to renewables—an approach that’s sometimes called a “feebate” by environmentalist supporters. The subsidies would have two effects: raising the price of natural gas and propping up the competitive position of wind and solar energy, the most likely recipients.

Subsidies extracted from shale gas would help to replace tax credits for wind and other renewables that are due to expire at the end of this calendar year. Environmentalists who favor renewables understand the problems of asking Congress for new subsidies in the current political climate. Instead, the idea is to force the fossil fuel industry to subsidize renewables—by buying its way out of onerous environmental rules that the executive branch can promulgate.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, for example, have suggested that existing fossil fuel-fired power plants might get credits against the upcoming EPA standard for greenhouse gases from existing power plants by funding renewable energy projects. “Lower emitting sources such as gas, wind and solar,” a NRDC press release explained in December 2012, “would earn credits that other plants could use, to reduce average emissions rates.”

Meanwhile the EPA is quietly developing a new computer program, AVERT (the “AVoided Emissions and geneRation Tool”), whose only function would be to quantify the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions attributable to energy efficiency and new renewables.

While the White House fact sheet states the president “is calling on Congress” to help create these zones, the Republican-controlled House has already made clear its opposition to expanding federal involvement in regulating fracking. But as Mr. Obama said in his weekly address on Feb. 8, if Congress refuses to act, he will “take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families.”

The administration did just that last June in an executive memorandum creating energy right of way corridors on federal lands. Under its terms, local governments would be told in advance where electricity transmission lines would be permitted to cross federal lands—thus influencing local siting decisions.

For natural gas, the administration appears poised to offer inducements and federal technical assistance to local governments to encourage them to create Sustainable Shale Gas Growth Zones that tie shale gas development to developing renewables at the same time. All without legislation.

The White House’s shale gas growth zones proposal is still vague and unformed. Gas companies, as well as others with an interest in low-cost energy, might be able to shape it into something acceptable. But the president’s benign words about fracking in his State of the Union should not put anyone’s concerns to rest about what may come next. The administration has many ways to nudge state and local governments to implement federal policies that Congress refuses to pass.

Mr. Elliott was general counsel of the EPA under George H.W. Bush. He is currently senior of counsel to Covington & Burling LLP, and an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, where he teaches energy policy and environmental law.

1. ABC 7 San Francisco, “Group in SF fights against pet collars containing pesticides”

February 12, 2014

By Michael Finney

[<a href=”http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/7_on_your_side&id=9429852″ target=”_blank”>Watch the segment here</a>]

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — A national environmental group in San Francisco is suing federal regulators to get two pesticides used on flea collars off the market. 7 On Your Side found out their concern is for both pets and children.

We love our pets. We love our children. The Natural Resources Defense Council fears certain flea collars contain pesticides that are putting both pets and children at risk.

“We shouldn’t see pets getting sick. We shouldn’t see exposures that could harm kids. The Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to prevent these types of exposures,” said Miriam Rotkin Ellman from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Ellman says the collars contain either the pesticides Propoxur or Tetrachlorvinphos. She says both pesticides can delay motor development and cause learning problems. Both, she fears, can easily get onto the hands and inside the mouths of children.

“They’re hugging and loving their pet and they can get this pesticide on their hands, on their skin. Once it gets on their hand, it can get in their mouths,” said Ellman.

Hartz which makes a product containing Tetrachlorvinphos told us by email that the product is “Registered with the EPA, meets current safety requirements and have been on the market safely for decades. We have confidence in the products and believe they are safe for their pets and family members.”

Sergeants manufactures a flea collar containing Propoxur. It told us it products are “formulated to effectively control fleas and ticks by releasing active ingredients through a sustained-release mechanism. Sergeant’s does provide a line of natural flea and tick control products under the sentry natural defense brand that are ideal for consumers seeking a natural alternative.”

Former dog owner and retired pharmacist Randy Boris of San Francisco sympathizes with the NRDC lawsuit. He blames a different pesticide in a flea medication for the death of his dog Pierre. Boris told ABC7 News, “I had to wrap him up in a blanket and take him down to the veterinarian that prescribed the flea medication. He was in a blanket and convulsing and then he took him in for emergency work, but he died within 10 minutes.”

The NRDC originally petitioned the environmental protection agency in 2007 and 2009 to ban the pesticides. The EPA has yet to respond to the petition and the NRDC wants the court to force the EPA to act. A spokesperson for the agency would only say the lawsuit is being reviewed. Most pet owners we talked with had no opinion on the matter. Others told us they didn’t use flea collars, but one said he avoided pesticides altogether.

“My opinion is I think it’s totally unnecessary. You don’t need all these chemicals,” said Stefan Lefco from San Francisco.

We also reached out to Wellmark, which manufactures a flea collar containing Propoxur. We were unsuccessful in reach them for comment.

2. EnergyWire, “Stakeholders see a ‘sea change’ in attitudes over business model”

February 13, 2014

By Rod Kuckro

The midwinter meeting of the nation’s utility czars ended yesterday with a surprising kumbaya moment when the lobby for investor-owned electric utilities and the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a joint statement in support of new state-level rate regimes that allow continuing expansion of solar power while keeping utilities financially whole and able to maintain the grid.

The agreement by the Edison Electric Institute and NRDC reflects a consensus that seemed to be jelling in real time over the course of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ five-day meeting.

In practical terms, the agreement may reflect two realities: resignation that the drive for cleaner energy technologies is here to stay, and that consumers are in the lead as they exploit technologies they can afford to put themselves in more control of their energy use.

“The old way of doing business, the centralized generator, the distribution company and the customer — that’s just not where the future’s going to be,” said David Cash, a commissioner with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, just one day before the EEI-NRDC agreement.

“The utilities and regulators need to figure out what’s the business model that can make the utilities economically healthy players in this field at the same time that it gives the consumers all of the kind of benefits that we’re going to get from all of these new technologies,” Cash said in an interview.

At session after NARUC session, despite each one’s advertised focus on topics such as an integrated grid, energy efficiency or new business models, the conversation among the regulated, the regulators and stakeholders evolved into an emphasis on the need for détente.

“Rate design is where it’s at,” said Rob Caldwell, vice president for renewable generation development at Duke Energy Corp. “The key is to get a handle on what are utilities’ fixed costs and variable costs and design rates that reflect fixed revenue and variable revenue,” he said at one session.

Time-varying rates for customers could be one solution, said Janet Besser, vice president of the New England Clean Energy Council and a former regulator. “We have to do the analysis and know where the costs and benefits are,” especially when it comes to valuing energy efficiency and demand response, she said.

“There are ways that we can improve [utilities’] risk profile in terms of the mechanism of rate recovery. In our state, we have trackers [that collect from ratepayers a charge for specific utility spending], and that’s one way to reduce risk,” Cash said.

EEI softens its approach

“The electric power industry’s mission is to provide safe, reliable, affordable and increasingly clean electricity,” said EEI Executive Vice President David Owens. “Today utilities are partnering with customers, regulators and all stakeholders to transform the way they generate and deliver electricity. This agreement helps chart a path to success.”

It was just a year ago, in a landmark report on “disruptive challenges” facing the retail electric business, that EEI identified the “falling costs of distributed generation” such as solar panels and “political interest in demand-side management technologies” such as energy efficiency as threats to the long-established utility business model.

Within the year, to drive home its point, EEI was sponsoring television ads critical of state net-metering programs by raising the fact that under most net-metering designs, customers with rooftop solar panels get to sell their surplus electricity back to the utility, cutting their electric bills and as a result not paying as much for the upkeep of the grid as a nonsolar customer.

The campaign was widely criticized for pitting those who could afford solar against the majority of customers who cannot. That became an often-repeated argument by executives who fear an inexorable decline in power sales would erode their ability to serve what former Great Plains Energy CEO Michael Chesser described recently as the “higher purpose” to society inherent in a utility’s monopoly franchise to provide reliable electric service.

Time will tell if it’s really a ‘sea change’

“It’s been an effort of months done in anticipation of the NARUC meeting,” Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of NRDC’s energy program, said in an interview.

“I think it marks a sea change in the attitude in particular of the leadership of the utility industry regarding the promise of the technology revolution that energy efficiency and [distributed generation] represents.

“It is a very welcome expression of optimism about the role of the utility sector as a partner in making this happen, and that there’s a way forward that will work for everyone involved.”

Cash agreed. “It does feel to me like there is a big sea change happening, and that sea change is that [public utility commissions] and utilities are realizing this huge change in how energy is delivered, how it’s stored, how it’s priced [with] all of these new technologies that allow for information to be used and shared and pricing signals to be done correctly,” he said.

The agreement, which EEI and NRDC describe as following a 2008 joint campaign to encourage efficiency, calls for state regulators to “rethink how utility costs are recovered” and view retail distribution as a business that delivers energy services, not just electricity.

Among its eight recommendations are that “customers deserve the opportunity to interconnect distributed generation to the grid quickly and easily” through net-metering programs, and that “utilities deserve assurances that recovery of their authorized non-fuel costs will not vary with fluctuations” in electricity use.

“Obviously, this is not a mission accomplished moment — there’s a great deal to do at the state level to realize this promise,” Cavanagh said. “But I emerged from this process heartened at the likelihood that we’ll find a way forward together. It has to happen on a state-by-state basis, a lot more people have to be involved.”

3. ClimateWire, “It’s lonely in the trenches for a carbon tax, but a warrior digs in”

February 12, 2014

By Evan Lehmann

Go ahead and tell Charles Komanoff that taxing carbon doesn’t have a chance.

Odds are, he’ll point to all the reasons you’re right. But that probably won’t include resistance by House Republicans. He dives deeper into the past than that, beginning perhaps with environmentalists, whom he describes as being skeptical about the simplest and cheapest climate policy there is.

Komanoff is a creamy-voiced New Yorker who, at 66, is trying to engineer a carbon tax comeback. It’s the newest effort in his 40-year career of advocacy fighting to free Manhattan of cars, trying to expose the unbridled costs of nuclear power before they became obvious, and pushing for bicycling policies. The last battle won him his wife.

Now he just wants a hearing. Komanoff submitted a 22-page analysis to the Senate Finance Committee last week stating that a carbon tax could reduce more than twice as many emissions more cheaply than a pair of clean energy tax credits proposed by former Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) in December.

The plan by Baucus is considered a creative way to persuade power providers to pump up their production of clean energy. It would award producers for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by offering carbon-light sources of electricity and transportation fuels. Komanoff calls it “enlightened.”

But he also says it’s “so suboptimal” to a carbon tax. It’s a subsidy, he says, that will require the public to pay for a relatively narrow suite of power sources. Komanoff wants to flip that strategy upside down. Instead of knocking down the price of some sources of cleaner energy, he wants the cost of all fossil fuels to rise.

“You know, what is the energy problem and what is the climate problem? It’s not that there isn’t enough wind power, and it’s not that there aren’t enough solar collectors,” Komanoff said. “It’s that there’s too much carbon being emitted.

“And solar and wind are alternatives to carbon. But there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of alternatives. And all of those alternatives need to be made more cost-effective, and they need to be valorized culturally and economically. If we can do that … then I think our planet has a chance. If we can’t, things don’t look very good.”

He doesn’t get all moral about whether tax credits are right or wrong. Instead, he describes it as a sort of wasted effort: Why go through the political process of passing something that is so far inferior to a carbon tax?

Black Panthers vs. Pete Seeger

Baucus’ plan would provide 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour under a new production tax credit, or up to 20 percent of a project under an investment tax credit, both of which aim to cut carbon by 25 percent. But Komanoff says that will leave a huge number of carbon-reducing practices untapped. The credits, for example, wouldn’t spur people to save electricity, drive less or build a smaller home, he says.

The analysis by Komanoff’s Carbon Tax Center — composed of two part-time employees, Komanoff and James Handley, a former EPA lawyer — finds that a carbon tax would cut emissions by 959 million metric tons annually by 2024, compared with 399 million metric tons for both of Baucus’ tax credits.

Both plans value carbon at $61 per metric ton in the electricity sector and at $113 per metric ton in the transportation sector. But while the tax credits would cost taxpayers roughly $39 billion a year, according to Komanoff’s analysis, the carbon tax would generate about $450 billion annually.

Tom Stokes first met Komanoff in the late 1960s, when Stokes was organizing a march in New York City “against the automobile.”

This was before climate change had risen to the surface, but other threats to the natural world led Stokes to launch Environment! The grass-roots group had a brief but dazzling existence that reached its zenith in April 1969, when Stokes mustered 10,000 people to protest an international car show in the city.

It was nearly derailed when a group of Black Panthers occupied the stage to protest the protest, saying the problems of pollution didn’t match those of oppression. They faded away after Pete Seeger crept onto the stage with his banjo to rally the crowd.

A year earlier, Komanoff had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University. He described the period as being “fraught” with environmental reckonings. It led him to approach Stokes, who had appeared on local television to promote the march.

Stokes, who’s now active with the Climate Crisis Coalition, recalls that Komanoff was quick on his feet, a good writer and, perhaps above all else, “He was committed to the cause.”

Threading a small needle

Forty-five years later, Komanoff still is. But it’s questionable how committed the wider environmental community is to taxing carbon, he says. He expressed disappointment that big green groups endorsed cap and trade in the late 2000s (Komanoff’s against it) and that now they’re warm to U.S. EPA regulations and cool to a carbon tax.

“We never believed you could cut a deal behind the backs of the American people that was going to raise the price of energy, which is what you have to do,” Komanoff said of cap and trade. “You can’t solve the climate crisis without making fossil fuels much more expensive.”

He concedes that his response to Baucus’ solicitation for comments on carbon has a subtext: Komanoff sees it as a stage to again pitch a carbon tax to green groups. As for the unlikelihood of political support for broad climate legislation, let alone one involving a new tax, he believes that a concerted effort by advocates could help thread that very small needle.

Ralph Cavanagh, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says Komanoff is a gifted analyst. They met more than 30 years ago when Komanoff was an in-demand expert on the cost of nuclear power. His 1981 book, “Power Plant Cost Escalation,” predicted how the price of building nuclear power plants would soar in comparison with their coal-fired counterparts, even as nuclear safety seemed to wane.

Now, Cavanagh says he and his old friend, who unsuccessfully tried years ago to include Cavanagh in a bike ride over the George Washington Bridge, agree on their climate objectives, if not the tactics.

Who is this guy?

The cap-and-trade legislation sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and then-Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that passed the House in 2009, Cavanagh said, is “functionally indistinguishable” from the carbon tax coveted by Komanoff. The price of carbon allowances can’t fall below a floor or rise above a ceiling. A tax would assign a dollar amount to emissions that also would fluctuate between a floor and ceiling, he said.

“There were these enormous theological arguments, which I think in practice were somewhat beside the point because in real life … you end up in the same place,” Cavanagh said.

To his friends, it might be predictable that Komanoff disagrees with that assessment. He’s known as uncompromising, above all perhaps with himself. He shuts off his computer screen when leaving his office even for 10 minutes, and it’s likely that on occasion Komanoff rides in a gasoline-powered car, but not if he doesn’t have to, Cavanagh said.

So, Komanoff describes cap and trade this way: cumbersome, complex, regressive and “undemocratic.” And a carbon tax? He calls it “elegant.”

For all of his passion, he seems to lack distinction, at least among Washington climate advocates. In New York, he’s considered the top bicycle advocate and a leading analyst on congestion taxes, or fees on motorists. But in the nation’s capital, five people working on carbon taxes or other climate policies said they didn’t know him.

“I don’t know who that is,” said one official with an environmental group.

“Is this a new group?” another asked about the Carbon Tax Center.

Perhaps that shows how out of favor taxing carbon is. Or maybe it emphasizes the importance that Komanoff is putting on his findings and the need he sees to get the attention of potential supporters.

“If there isn’t support for a carbon tax [among greens], then you’re not going to be able to enact one,” Komanoff said. “We think that our comments really demonstrate and document that even the best and most enlightened subsidies program can’t hold a candle to an equivalent carbon tax.”
4. Greenwire, “Utilities, enviros team up on future grid challenges”
February 12, 2014

By Hannah Northey and Peter Behr

A leading environmental organization and the utility industry’s largest trade group have joined forces to push for new rate-making approaches that can continue expansion of rooftop solar and other distributed energy while maintaining the viability of electricity providers.

The agreement between the Edison Electric Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, announced today during the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ winter meeting, urges regulators to employ new rate designs that balance innovation with fair and adequate cost recovery for maintaining an evolving and reliable power grid.

“The electric power industry’s mission is to provide safe, reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean electricity,” EEI Executive Vice President David Owens said in a statement.

The utility industry has appeared headed for a collision with developers and customers of distributed energy resources including rooftop solar with the industry protesting that existing utility rates don’t give them fair compensation for the networks that distributed energy users rely on for much of the day.

In particular, EEI has protested that the net metering rate plans used in more than 40 states don’t pay grid operators fairly for infrastructure. NRDC and EEI, in today’s agreement, propose to move beyond that standoff to seek new rate-making approaches that encourage innovation and clean energy without penalizing utilities.

“This is not a campaign to repeal net metering,” Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of NRDC’s energy program, said at the conference.

Owens said the central role of utilities in managing reliable electricity service amid unprecedented change has to be recognized and secured. “If we’re evolving in that direction, the pricing has to be done a little differently,” he said. “Ralph and I, and all of you, need to engage in that … because right now we’re stuck in the mud.”

Utilities can become partners in developing distributed energy, or financiers or advisers on that front, Owens said. “There are a whole array of responses that utilities can take on,” he said.

Owens said the industry and its regulators must step up consideration of rate-making models that cover the fixed costs that utilities bear for the infrastructure that delivers electricity — and infrastructure that faces many evolving and unpredictable changes and substantial investment risk.

Cavanagh in a statement said the agreement “steers us toward new and innovative ways to increase and speed the deployment of clean energy resources.”

Owens said he and Cavanagh will continue to look at specific models for utility cost recovery that could include some fixed charges for infrastructure or minimum rate percentages for wires and distribution technology.

Cavanagh said he looks to a number of states that have already begun work on new rate strategies as models for the rest of the country, including Hawaii, California and Minnesota. Ultimately, the state officials and regulators will have to put such plans into effect.

5. InsideClimateNews, “China’s Plan to Clean Up Air in Cities Will Doom the Climate, Scientists Say”

February 13, 2014

By William J. Kelly

China is erecting huge industrial complexes in remote areas to convert coal to synthetic fuel that could make the air in its megacities cleaner. But the complexes use so much energy that the carbon footprint of the fuel is almost double that of conventional coal and oil, spelling disaster for earth’s climate, a growing chorus of scientists is warning.

Efforts by China to develop so-called “coal bases” in its far-flung regions have received scant attention beyond the trade press, but scientists watching the effort say it could cause climate damage that eclipses worldwide climate protection efforts.

The facilities, which resemble oil refineries, use coal to make liquid fuels, chemicals, power and “syngas,” which is like natural gas but extracted from coal. The fuels and electricity are then transported to China’s big cities to be burned in power plants, factories and cars.

Currently 16 coal base sites are being built and many are operational. One being constructed in Inner Mongolia will eventually occupy nearly 400 square miles—almost the size of the sprawling city of Los Angeles.

Driving China’s desire to create coal bases are its soaring energy demand, abundant coal resources, lack of inexpensive alternatives and the need to move coal power production out of its cities—which are already drowning in smog from dirty coal plants. Meanwhile, its energy-hungry economy is booming to meet insatiable demands of consumers in America and Europe for cheaply manufactured products.

By any measure, China’s coal base plan is the single largest fossil fuel development project in the world. So while more coal bases could mean cleaner air for many urban Chinese, scientists fear a nightmare scenario for global climate change.

By 2011, humans had added 531 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global body for assessing climate science. That figure means countries have already blown through more than half of the world’s “carbon budget”—or the maximum amount of carbon humans can spew into the air to keep warming below 2-degrees Celsius, the threshold that would trigger runaway warming.

Experts estimate that if China’s planned coal bases are built, the country’s emissions would likely hit 10 billion tons a year—putting it on track to consume the world’s remaining 349 billion tons by 2050.

“This is a major change in China,” said Robert Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change, of the coal bases. “If they proceed, both water use and greenhouse gases would skyrocket.”

China’s Dirty Air: A First-Hand Look

Speeding 200 miles per hour on a bullet train over the crest of a hill toward Beijing, China’s air pollution dilemma becomes clear—as trees, farm buildings and power poles fade into a grey haze.

It’s as if a heavy fog has filled the air. A young Chinese student riding the train on that August afternoon explains that it’s air pollution.

Particle-laden smog has been enveloping wide areas of China more often and reaching ever-higher levels due to growing use of energy as hundreds of millions of its citizens moved out of poverty. The smog kills 1.2 million Chinese prematurely each year, according to a World Bank estimate in 2013.

Indeed, a two-week trip in China—traveling in a big circle from Beijing south toward Shanghai, west to Xi’an and then north through Linfen and Shanxi Province, the heart of China’s coal country—becomes a smog travelogue. Even in August, a time of year that’s normally clean compared to winter and early spring when pollution peaks, the air is thick with haze, although it is nothing like the pollution sieges of the past two winters. Then, young and old alike had to stay indoors. Working adults wore masks when they commuted to work. Emergency rooms were flooded with respiratory patients.

On the surface, the source is readily identifiable.

“Too much coal,” exclaimed Natural Resources Defense Council scientist Fuqiang Yang, waving his hand across his face. Fuqiang, senior adviser on energy, environment and climate change in NRDC’s Beijing Office, said China needs to move to cleaner forms of energy and greater energy efficiency to clean up its air and address climate change, rather than depending upon coal.

But that’s easier said than done.

China produces 70 percent of its electricity from coal, using it to make steel and concrete as it builds whole cities, and burns 47 percent of all the coal that’s mined each year in the world.

“It’s hard to see that changing anytime soon,” said Barry Jones, general manager of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute in Australia, an energy industry-funded organization that promotes CCS technology. He thinks that cleaning up coal by capturing and sequestering the carbon emissions ultimately is needed, yet admits efforts are nascent. If all goes well, by some estimates, by 2020, China will be able to sequester about 10-20 million of the more than 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide it emits annually today.

The Worldwatch Institute estimates at least a third of those emissions stem from producing exports for the U.S. and other nations as China increasingly serves as the world’s workshop. “Outsourcing has led to tremendous pollution in China,” said Steven J. Davis, University of California at Irvine professor of earth sciences. He’s been studying the amount of emissions attributed to exports produced in China since 2010.

CCS won’t put a dent in those greenhouse gas emissions, either, particularly now that China is moving to clean up its air in novel ways by using even more of the mineral Marco Polo marveled at when visiting ancient Cathay in 1292.

A Coal Base Almost as Big as L.A.

Far from its major population centers along the coastal plain, state-owned companies like Shenhua, the world’s largest coal company, are busy building huge coal bases to make the most of China’s most abundant energy resource. Several complexes, at varying stages of completion in Shanxi Province, Inner Mongolia and other inland areas, already are turning coal into more power, synthetic natural gas, gasoline, chemicals and fertilizer.

The process extracts these materials by heating up coal in the absence of oxygen so it turns into gases instead of burning. Those gases then are captured and used as chemical building blocks to make the other products. The problem is that it takes a lot of energy in the form of electricity or other means to heat up the coal. This combustion releases carbon dioxide to the air. Burning the products from the process—be it syngas, or liquid fuels—releases yet more of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Researchers estimate the complete cycle releases almost twice the carbon to the air as burning the coal alone in a power plant.

The biggest coal base is Shenhua’s Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base in Ningxia, about 700 miles west of Beijing. Conceived in 2003, Shenhua said it broke ground in 2008 on the 386-square-mile coal base. That’s an area about three-quarters the size of Los Angeles that’s being covered bit by bit over a period of some 17 years with coal mines, power plants, power lines, pipelines, roads, rail tracks and all manner of chemical processing plants with their towers, smokestacks and tanks.

Since beginning its planning in 2003, Shenhua says it’s brought on line “a large number of coal mines, coal chemicals, electric power, railway, and coal deep processing projects,” as well as a coal-to-methanol production plant.

In 2012, Shenhua broke ground on a plant to turn coal into liquids that can be used for a wide variety of products, including fuel and plastics. The project is so huge that engineers used the world’s largest crane to set in place the unit that’s to serve as the heart of the plant, a 2,155-ton Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor that’s as high as a 17-story building.

By 2020, Shenhua hopes to complete the base, which by then is planned to produce 30,000 MW of power, along with a constellation of products ranging from gasoline to chemicals. It’s to consume 100 million tons a year of coal from surrounding mines.

Ironically, the bases stand a decent chance of cleaning up dirty air in China’s coastal cities by moving coal-fired power production to remote inland areas, not to mention yielding synthetic gas to pipe to cities.

Unstoppable, with Major Climate Implications

About the only thing that may stop the bases from being fully built is that they need large amounts of water in a water-tight land, according to Greenpeace activist Lifeng Fang in Beijing. He thinks that water represents the upper limit on further use of coal.

But Jackson, the director of Duke’s Center on Global Change, differs. He maintains China will merely move herders and farmers off already dry land in its interior and transfer their water rights to the coal industry, which produces more economic value than agriculture with the water.

Already, the government is moving herders off their grazing land into cities in Inner Mongolia where conflicts have arisen around Shenhua’s coal base in Ordos, according to Enbhebatu Togochog, director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.

“It’s increasingly tense,” he said, noting that violence has flared numerous times in the past three years as herders trying to stay on their land engage in confrontations with coal company employees charged with building the Ordos coal base.

Meanwhile, while water and ethnic conflicts may have slowed the coal bases, China’s National Development and Reform Commission last year approved China National Coal Company to begin working on a coal-to-chemicals plant at the Yulin coal base in Shanxi Province.

Also last year, the first major syngas plant in Datang, Inner Mongolia, began operating. It’s capable of producing 4 billion cubic meters of gas each year and is linked to Beijing through a new 267-mile-long pipeline. Like natural gas, syngas is much cleaner at the burner tip than coal.

For comparison, the bases already being built will emit more than three times as much carbon dioxide by 2020 when completed than fully developing the Canadian tar sands will loft into the atmosphere. The tar sands will add 420 million tons of carbon dioxide a year by then, according to the environmental organization, while China’s coal bases in development will boost that nation’s emissions 1.4 billion tons annually by 2020.

Jackson believes Greenpeace’s assessment is right because of all the energy it takes to turn coal into syngas or liquid fuels. On a lifecycle basis, Jackson points out syngas emits up to 82 percent more greenhouse gases than mining and burning coal in conventional power plants.

China has approved nine syngas plants, according to Chi-Jen Yang, a research scientist at the Duke center, who’s been tracking developments. Ultimately, 40 syngas plants are being planned, including five already approved at Ordos. If all are completed, they will release 110 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere over 40 years, according to Chi-Jen, and they represent just a portion of the various coal processing facilities being planned and built on the coal bases and other scattered locations. That amount alone—110 billion tons—would represent almost a third of the carbon budget that’s remaining to all nations between now and 2050 if humanity is to avoid irreversible global warming.

Meanwhile, coal-to-liquid technology is advancing, as evidenced by approvals for facilities in Ningdong, already under construction, and Yulin. Coal-to-liquids almost doubles emissions compared with using oil-based gasoline, according to Chi-Jen.

That’s why building out the coal bases will put China on the road to emitting 10 billion tons a year of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030 and that’s even if the nation succeeds in meeting its goal of becoming 20 percent more energy efficient per unit of economic output, explains David Fridley, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who’s been studying Chinese energy use since the early 1980s.

Modeling studies that Fridley has worked on at LBNL show that under the most aggressive cleanup scenario, China’s carbon dioxide emissions will not peak until early in the 2020s. His projections don’t count the impact of the coal bases, but assume China instead will make a radical turn toward renewable energy. Currently, China is the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, pumping out 8.7 billion tons in 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration, compared to 5.5 billion tons by the U.S., the No. 2 emitter. It’s adding up.

“There’s no scenario we can conceive of that’s rational where coal gets backed out,”said Fridley of LBNL’s modeling projections for China’s energy future. “Coal is the foundation of their energy system.”

China as World’s Workshop: America’s Role

The U.S. played a major role in turning China into the coal-fired workshop of the world.

At the heart of that story are figures both familiar and beloved by American environmentalists, former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. It was Clinton who greased the skids through trade deals in the 1990s for the whole U.S. economy to become dependent upon goods made in China with rock bottom wages for labor and cheap, dirty energy. Walk through a big box retail store today and read where products are made and most likely it’s in China.

Ironically, Clinton championed free trade while doing much to clean up the air in America. Clinton’s former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, who helped broker free trade deals with China, today admits that the U.S. should have worked harder to include environmental conditions in the agreements. Meanwhile, while Clinton, Kantor and others worked to stoke up trade with China, Gore lectured the central government in Beijing on the need to control greenhouse gases. In 1997, he showed China’s leaders the hockey stick graph he later made famous in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

6. Science Magazine, “U.S. Plan to Lift Wolf Protections in Doubt After Experts Question Science”

February 8, 2014

By Virginia Morell

The ongoing battle over a proposal to lift U.S. government protections for the gray wolf (Canis lupus) across the lower 48 states isn’t likely to end quickly. An independent, peer-review panel yesterday gave a thumbs-down to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS’s) plan to delist the wolf. Although not required to reach a consensus, the four researchers on the panel were unanimous in their opinion that the proposal “does not currently represent the ‘best available science.’ ”

“It’s stunning to see a pronouncement like this—that the proposal is not scientifically sound,” says Michael Nelson, an ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not one of the reviewers. Many commentators regard it as a major setback for USFWS, which stumbled last year in a previous attempt to get the science behind its proposal reviewed.

USFWS first released its plan for removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list in June 2013. The plan also called for adding the Mexican gray wolf, a subspecies that inhabits the southwest, to the protected list. At the time, there were approximately 6000 wolves in some Western and upper midwestern states; federal protections were removed from the gray wolf in six of those states in 2011. More than 1 million people have commented on the plan. But regulations also require that the agency invite researchers outside of the agency to assess the proposal’s scientific merit.

At its core, the USFWS proposal relies on a monograph written by its own scientists. They asserted that a different (and controversial) species, the eastern wolf (Canis lupus lycaon) and not the gray wolf, had inhabited the Midwest and Northeast. If correct, then the agency would not need to restore the gray wolf population in 22 eastern states, where gray wolves are no longer found.

But the four reviewers, which included specialists on wolf genetics, disagreed with USFWS’s idea of a separate eastern wolf, stating that the notion “was not universally accepted and that the issue was ‘not settled’ ”—an opinion shared by other researchers. “The designation of an ‘eastern wolf’ is not well-supported,” says Carlos Carroll, a conservation biologist at the Klamath Center for Conservation Research in Orleans, California, who was not a member of the review panel.

Overall, the agency’s “driving goal seemed to be to identify the eastern wolf as a separate species, and to use that taxonomic revision to delist the gray wolf,” says Robert Wayne, a conservationist geneticist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, and one of the reviewers. If that were to happen, he says, it would be the first time that a species was removed from the federal endangered species list via taxonomy. “It should happen when a species is fully recovered,” Wayne says, “and the gray wolf is not. It’s not in any of those 22 eastern states—that’s why it’s endangered there.”

The panel’s statements will make it difficult, outside observers say, for USFWS to move forward with its proposal. The Endangered Species Act requires that decisions to remove a species from federal protection be based on the “best available science.” And because the reviewers have concluded this is not the case, “you’ve got to think that the [service] must go back to the drawing board,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of land and wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Chicago, Illinois, an organization that advocates for continued federal protections for the wolf.

Gray wolves were exterminated across most of the lower 48 states in the last century. They were placed on the endangered species list in 1975, and successfully reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and Idaho in 1995. Gray wolves also made a comeback in the Great Lakes region, where they now can be legally hunted. Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana also have wolf hunting and trapping seasons. Smaller gray wolf populations that aren’t legally hunted are found in Washington and Oregon.

The agency’s reaction to the peer-review comments has been somewhat muted. In a press statement, it thanked the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara for conducting the review. USFWS Director Dan Ashe noted that “[p]eer review is an important step in our efforts to assure that the final decision on our proposal to delist the wolf is based on the best available scientific and technical information,” and that the panel’s comments will be incorporated in the ongoing process of reaching a decision on the fate of the gray wolves.

The peer-review report is now available online. USFWS will reopen the public comment period on its delisting proporal on 10 February, and will accept comments through 27 March.

7. E&E News, “Green group requests federal protections for West Coast puffins”

February 12, 2014

By Jessica Estepa

The Natural Resources Defense Council today asked the federal government to protect West Coast populations of the tufted puffin.

The seabird’s range extends from Northern California to Alaska. Other populations are found in Russia and Japan.

NRDC’s petition asks that the Fish and Wildlife Service protect the puffins found in California, Oregon and Washington as a distinct population segment. The population in that region is estimated to be no more than 4,000, a number that the environmental group contends is less than 10 to 15 percent of its size three decades ago.

The breeding populations found in each state have fewer than 300 individuals, the group said.

Climate change is one of the main threats to the puffin, according to NRDC. The changing temperatures and circulation patterns of the Pacific Ocean have affected the food chain, making it harder for the bird to find food.

“If you can’t find food to eat, your days are numbered, and that is where the tufted puffin in these states finds itself,” NRDC’s Brad Sewell said in a statement. “Climate change is doing a number on the iconic seabird’s population by making fish scarce.”

Oil pollution, habitat loss and bycatch have also affected the population, the group said.

The petition also asked that critical habitat off the West Coast be designated for puffins that are breeding.

The tufted puffin is the largest of the puffin species, growing up to 15 inches tall. It’s known for its distinctive facial features: white feathers and a bright red-orange beak and feet that contrast with its black body. The bird feeds on small fish, such as herring, sardines and anchovies.

8. Orange County Register, “Navy plan to step up offshore sonar, bomb training brings legal fight from sea-life advocates”

February 11, 2014

By Erika I. Ritchie

Training’s role

The Navy says its Hawaii-Southern California training is crucial to its mission because:

• The proximity to naval home ports San Diego and Pearl Harbor means more time spent training rather than traveling to training areas, and reduced fuel use and cost.

• Southern California contains the most capable and heavily used concentration of Navy ranges in the eastern Pacific.

• Hawaii is an ideal training location for units deploying from the West Coast to the western Pacific or the Middle East.

• The transit areas linking the two range complexes provide ample opportunity for ships and aircraft to conduct training and testing.

• The underwater areas of the Southern California range are essential to Navy training in antisubmarine warfare. The training environment also is important for air, surface, subsurface and amphibious activities.

• For forces based in the continental United States, the Hawaii range provides an opportunity to train in an unfamiliar environment and to make real-time adjustments. There also are large remote areas that provide an ideal setting for long-distance tests and multinational exercises.

It isn’t easy being a whale these days, cruising the channel between San Clemente and its namesake island 60 miles offshore.

Whales, dolphins, sea lions and seals that live within the Navy’s Southern California training range will hear and feel even more effects of explosions and sonar used in naval war exercises.

The Navy plans to step up its underwater explosions, torpedo tests, ship-sinking and bomb training in three ranges off Southern California and Hawaii this year. Sailors and Marines are expected to detonate 52,000 explosives, 250 of which will have a net explosive weight greater than 500 pounds. The Navy has trained in the Southern California range since 2009, the first time it received a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The exercises off Southern California will affect at least 39 marine-mammal species, including the endangered blue whale, that live in the training area. The Navy acknowledges this could result in at least 155 deaths, more than 2,000 permanent injuries and millions of cases of temporary hearing loss among marine mammals. The explosions and other noise have been shown by marine biologists to disrupt migrations, nursing, feeding and other sea-life behavior.

A group of environmentalists and conservationists is accusing the fisheries service, an agency mandated to protect marine life, of allowing the Navy to violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.

TWO LAWSUITS

In a lawsuit, the Natural Resources Defense Council says National Marine Fisheries, a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Navy know the adverse effects the training has on mammals but are moving forward anyway. The lawsuit claims NOAA fisheries was wrong to approve the Navy’s plan for expanded training, which will last until 2019. Officials from the Navy are reviewing the complaint. NOAA fisheries is not commenting, citing the continuing litigation.

The lawsuit, filed Jan. 27 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims that a December agreement with the fisheries service giving the Navy five more years of torpedo, sonar and explosives use violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act by failing to prescribe adequate mitigation for the exercises. Instead, the fisheries service has allowed the Navy to step up training to levels the Natural Resources Defense Council says will kill, injure and maim more animals.

“We think the Navy’s numbers are underestimates,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Defense Council’s marine-mammal protection project. He said damage to marine animals might be a 1,300 percent increase over anything the Navy has done before. He said whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions will be killed or harmed 9.6 million times in the five-year period.

Another lawsuit, filed by the Conservation Council for Hawaii within hours of the December agreement, challenges the extension of the amped-up sonar training permit. The Justice Department is expected to submit an answer to the claim Friday on behalf of the Navy and NOAA fisheries.

SONAR’S EFFECTS

Experts say whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions use sound to mate and forage. Studies show marine-mammal behavior is affected by sonar, and environmentalists want more protections. They accuse the Navy of rushing to obtain five-year permits under the Marine Mammal Protection Act from the National Marine Fisheries Service to increase its sonar testing in U.S. waters without considering the latest science.

Environmentalists and others in the group, including marine biologists, say the fisheries service should not ignore the negative effects of sonar training and should require greater restrictions on where and when the Navy can train. They point to Navy-funded research that shows marine mammals have been negatively affected by sonar training. Three areas off California used as feeding grounds by blue whales especially need protection, the group says.

“Science has caught up with the Navy on this issue and we’re now seeing strandings and widespread disturbances in foraging and breeding,” Jasny said. “We’re finding links between Navy operations and population decline.”

In an environmental survey submitted to the fisheries service in August, the Navy acknowledged that sonar use, underwater detonations, pile-driving and removal, and collisions with ships adversely affect marine mammals. The Navy and the fisheries service agree that sonar used during training has contributed to mass strandings.

In March 2011, four dolphins swam into a zone of explosives testing off San Diego and were killed. The incident resulted in a review of Navy procedures and development of mitigation measures tailored to that type of event.

1. New York Times, “Cut Carbon Pollution”

February 5, 2014

By Frances Beinecke

To the Editor:

“E.P.A. Staff Struggling to Create Pollution Rule” (news article, Feb. 5) highlights coal-state concerns about a Natural Resources Defense Council plan for cutting carbon pollution from the nation’s existing power plants, the biggest source of the pollution driving dangerous climate change.

Our approach takes into account the different mix of power generation sources in each state, allows each state broad flexibility to design its own plan to cut carbon pollution in the cheapest possible way, and achieves big reductions on a national scale. We need to act now to combat climate change, and that means putting limits on power plant carbon pollution — as we do now for sulfur, mercury and arsenic.

We owe nothing less to our children and future generations. Our health, and the health of our planet, depend on it.

FRANCES BEINECKE
President
Natural Resources Defense Council
Washington, Feb. 5, 2014

2. Reuters, “U.S. Republicans seek Keystone approval; foes vow to risk arrest”

February 12, 2014

By Patrick Rucker

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dozens of Republican senators on Tuesday called on the White House to approve the Keystone XL pipeline as foes vowed to risk arrest at protests against the controversial project.

President Barack Obama will have the final say on whether to allow the pipeline that could deliver as much as 830,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil sands crude to U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, a decision not expected for many months.

Lawmakers who favor the plan are pushing the White House to approve the project without further delay.

Keystone’s backers argue that blocking pipelines will discourage development of a region where oil is abundant, but is carbon-intensive to produce.

But opponents argue that advanced drilling methods will inevitably put vast reserves of oil sands crude within easy reach, no matter whether the Keystone project is approved or not.

“There is no question that Canada will develop these resources,” reads the letter signed by all 45 Republican senators, echoing a State Department finding from late January.

“Rejecting the Keystone pipeline will cost thousands of American jobs and prevent our country from accessing a large supply of North American energy,” said the letter authored by North Dakota Republican John Hoeven.

The State Department concluded that the $5.4 billion, TransCanada Corp pipeline will not unduly worsen climate change. But eight different U.S. federal agencies will have a chance to weigh in on the pipeline over the next three months.

Environmentalist foes of the project have challenged the State Department findings that the pipeline would not spur oil sands development or weigh on global warming.

The next several months should see a publicity blitz from opponents and backers of the pipeline to shape public opinion ahead of any decision, said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters.

“For an issue like climate change that can feel abstract to some people, the Keystone XL pipeline is something tangible,” she said.

On Tuesday, the League published a guide to lawmakers’ votes on environmental legislation as well as other conservation matters.

Establishment environmental groups will continue to push the Keystone issue in Washington, but other activists will make their arguments on the street, according to Danielle Droitsch of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We’ve been surprised by the number of spontaneous protests that popped up after the State Department report,” she said, describing about 280 “vigils” against the pipeline that were organized in recent days.

Early next month, college students from across the country are planning a march on the White House in a protest to discourage Obama on the pipeline decision.

More than 75,000 Keystone foes have promised to face arrest if called upon to protest the pipeline, according to activist group CREDO Action.

“Senator Hoeven can send a letter to the White House every day, but that is not going to be what sways this decision,” said Sittenfeld.

3. Los Angeles Times, “Drought brings flood of business for irrigation equipment firms”

February 11, 2014

By David Pierson

TULARE, Calif. — California’s drought could prove devastating to the state’s farmers and ranchers. But the dry spell has brought a gusher of new business to companies that provide them with water.

That much was clear at this year’s World Ag Expo, which kicked off Tuesday in Tulare, a town of 60,000 about 45 miles south of Fresno.

At one booth was a well repair company that had to add extra shifts to meet all the agricultural demand for groundwater. Nearby, a firm that provides turbine pumps for wells said orders were coming in so furiously it was running out of parts.

And several feet away, a drip irrigation maker said it was taking orders from farmers months ahead of schedule as the prospect of enough rain over the winter appeared remote.

The World Ag Expo is the largest farm equipment show in the world — a three-day extravaganza of high-tech tractors, automated dairy milkers and mechanized tree harvesters on 2.6 million square feet of fertile Central California soil.

But this year, the annual event is also a window into the frantic struggle taking place to keep the world supplied with fruit, nuts and vegetables from the Golden State.

Amid what could be one of the worst droughts in California’s recorded history, growers are relying on a host of companies to help them deliver what water remains to their fields.

“They’re not just helping farmers adapt, they’re helping them survive,” said Mark Watte, a past president of the expo, which ends Thursday. “There’s going to be a lot of talk here about drought.”

Rain for Rent, a Bakersfield water management firm, has been working in overdrive to mitigate the effects of the dry weather on farmers across California.

Founded in 1934 as an oil field supplier, the company now helps irrigation districts move vast quantities of water to parched areas. It installs new pumps for groundwater wells and lays down temporary irrigation systems on fields that typically get by on rainwater.

Company officials said demand for pumps is so strong that they can’t keep up with orders. And the farmers they rent temporary irrigation systems to are now looking to keep them in place longer than the typical one to three months, they said.

Though business is booming, Rain for Rent is in no mood to celebrate. It knows it’ll suffer too if the customers it relies on go out of business.

“It’s a nasty type of situation,” said Mike Grundvig, a senior engineer for the firm. “We’ve got a six- to eight-week [backlog]. You just can’t respond. None of it is good for business in the long run. It’s not sustainable.”

Workers at Advanced Water Well Services are now servicing customers six days a week rather than the customary five to accommodate demand.

Richard Berry, a representative for the Madera, Calif.-based company at the expo, said some farmers have been scrambling to restore groundwater wells they had long neglected because there was ordinarily sufficient rain.

“A lot of people are turning on pumps for the first time in 20 years and finding they’re not working,” Berry said.

Part of the problem involves cave-ins, cracks in the piping and a phenomenon called subsidence, in which massive groundwater withdrawals are causing the ground to sink in areas of the Central Valley.

Berry’s company is able to thread equipment down a well to patch holes. The service, which includes a new pump, can cost between $20,000 and $30,000.

Berry said that’s more cost-effective than drilling a new well, which can exceed $100,000 — and that’s if you can secure a driller. Waiting lists are said to have stretched to six months in some areas. And as more competition for groundwater forces growers to drill deeper, power companies are being asked to perform upgrades to deliver more energy to operate stronger pumps. That, too, has a long waiting list.

“It’s just a mess,” Berry said. “Sometimes a farmer will need a loan to fix their well but the banks won’t lend to a farmer with no water.”

With water looking ever more precious, more growers are turning to efficient irrigation practices to minimize waste and boost yields.

California’s $45-billion agricultural sector consumes 80% of the state’s water supply. An educational exhibit for children at the expo grounds drilled home that point with a plush cheeseburger toy. Stitched onto each ingredient was the amount of water it required to grow — from 1.5 gallons for the piece of lettuce to 616 gallons for the beef patty.

The need to use available water more efficiently has driven interest in the drip-tape irrigation on display at a booth run by Toro, an outdoor maintenance company whose micro irrigation division is based in El Cajon, Calif.

Claude Corcos, a marketing manager, said California leads the nation in drip and micro irrigation, which includes tubes with small incisions that deliver predetermined amounts of water directly to crops when they need it.

Tomato growers embraced the technology years ago because they could bury the tubes under the soil. The vines soaked up the water, keeping the fruit plump, while the ground remained dry enough for mechanical harvesters.

“You get higher yields, better quality and water efficiency,” Corcos said.

California still has much room to improve, said Claire O’Connor, policy analyst for the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

The most recent Census data show more than half of the state’s 7.3 million irrigated acres rely on water-intensive flood irrigation, which uses 35% more water than basic sprinkler irrigation. Among other major agricultural states, Nebraska relies on flood irrigation for 20% of its irrigated land, Texas about 19% and Kansas only 7%.

“We don’t know whether this drought will last one year or multiple years, but we can be pretty sure it’s not the last dry period California farmers will face,” O’Connor said. “They should be thinking long term about what kinds of investments into irrigation infrastructure they’ll need so it won’t be so rough the next time around.”

O’Connor said many irrigation districts also need to consider upgrading infrastructure because they can influence what types of irrigation farmers use.

Tape irrigation works best when farmers have access to small amounts of water at a time to slowly drip. But some districts can’t do that because they deliver predetermined water allowances on a fixed schedule, she said.

Watte, the expo’s former president and a Tulare farmer, is dubious and believes the state’s agriculture industry has already made great improvements in water efficiency.

“All the low-hanging fruit is gone,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s just not a lot of water to divvy up.”
4. San Jose Mercury News, “Senate drought bill offers $300 million, no waiving of environmental laws”
February 12, 2014

By Josh Richman

California’s and Oregon’s Democratic senators offered a drought relief bill Tuesday that stands in stark contrast to the Republican bill the House approved last week, setting up a tough battle when lawmakers eventually try to merge the two.

The Senate bill would grant $300 million in emergency aid and require federal agencies to do all they can to boost water supplies, while the GOP bill had focused more on lifting environmental restrictions to allow more water to be pumped from the Delta south to San Joaquin Valley farms.

The stakes grow higher as water levels recede. Recent rains made no significant dent in California’s huge water deficit, leaving the state still looking at its worst drought in more than half a century. The Golden State’s $45 billion agricultural sector is at risk of devastation, some smaller water districts might run dry in the next few months, and delicate ecosystems hang in the balance.

President Barack Obama will speak about drought relief Friday in Fresno, most likely with this new bill as rhetorical fodder. Obama, like California leaders and House Democrats, had blasted the House GOP bill as a water grab for agriculture at the environment’s expense and a political power play that would undermine years of difficult negotiations. Agricultural and environmental groups alike praised the senators’ bill Tuesday, if only as a first step.

“This bill provides operational flexibility to increase water supplies and primes federal agencies to make the best use of any additional rain,” U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a news release. “With so little water available, we must focus on streamlining federal programs and provide what assistance we can to those farmers and communities being hit the hardest.”

But House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, issued a statement saying the Senate bill “disappointingly focuses mainly on treating the symptoms of fallowed fields and dry spigots instead of taking steps toward curing the root of the problem so that our communities can receive more water.

“The problem that must be solved is our communities’ ability to capture and store the water that they have contracted and paid for,” McCarthy said. “Californians are interested in a serious conversation to end the madness of our man-made water crisis.”

In a joint statement, six Northern California House Democrats said the Senate measure was a huge improvement but still threatened the north state environment, economy and protections for endangered fish.

The Senate bill includes $100 million in emergency funds for Interior Department projects to rapidly increase water supplies and $100 million in emergency aid for farmers to fund water conservation measures protecting lands and sensitive watersheds.

There’s also $25 million for conservation projects and to protect and upgrade water systems; $25 million for community anti-drought projects; $25 million for public and nonprofit institutions to aid low-income migrant and seasonal farmworkers directly harmed by the drought; and $25 million for private forest landowners to carry out conservation measures.

Spending aside, the bill would require the Interior and Commerce departments to work with California to maximize water supplies by keeping a key Delta facility open as long as possible without harming salmon fisheries; allowing as much Delta pumping as possible without harming the Delta smelt; and letting water districts sell or trade surplus supply to drier districts through the Delta.

It also would amend federal law to give more individual emergency aid for major droughts when the president declares an emergency; require a federal ruling within 10 days of a state’s request on projects and operations that can provide additional water supply; and more.

The Democrats’ bill will require agencies to help relieve communities “hardest hit by this unprecedented drought and make investments to move and conserve water to help our entire state,” said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “The goal of this bill is to bring us together to address this crisis, rather than divide us.”

That was a dig at the House Republican bill, which critics said benefits agriculture at the expense of the environment and ordinary Californians.

Western Growers President and CEO Tom Nassif said the Senate should take up and pass the bill as soon as possible “so it can move quickly to a conference with the House bill passed last week.”

“If reasonable accommodation can be made between the two and merged into a single bill in a bipartisan effort, benefits can be realized by all California water users,” Nassif said.

Environmentalists want to see as little of the House bill as possible included in the final legislation. One key environmental attorney praised the senators’ recognition that “it is lack of rain, and not environmental protections, that is the cause of the current situation.”

Complying with existing state and federal law is the right approach, said Kate Poole, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, but her group wants to make sure “there are no unintended consequences that might unfairly shift the burdens of the drought onto one set of water users at the expense of another.”

Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, which had lambasted the House GOP bill as undermining the state’s right to address its water needs and years of bipartisan collaboration, also praised the senators’ bill Tuesday. California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird said it offers “common sense solutions to our drought crisis that don’t pit Californians against each other.”

“It’s clear that the senators respect our state laws and regulations, and this bill reinforces actions the state is taking with our federal partners,” he said.

Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him atTwitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.

what they’re saying

About the Senate Democrats’ water bill

“This bill provides operational flexibility to increase water supplies and primes federal agencies to make the best use of any additional rain. With so little water available, we must focus on streamlining federal programs and provide what assistance we can to those farmers and communities being hit the hardest.”
— U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

“Unfortunately, this proposal disappointingly focuses mainly on treating the symptoms of fallowed fields and dry spigots instead of taking steps toward curing the root of the problem so that our communities can receive more water. The problem that must be solved is our communities’ ability to capture and store the water that they have contracted and paid for. … Californians are interested in a serious conversation to end the madness of our man-made water crisis”
— House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield

“Our bill will require all agencies to use their existing authority to help provide relief to communities hardest hit by this unprecedented drought and make investments to move and conserve water to help our entire state. The goal of this bill is to bring us together to address this crisis, rather than divide us.”
— U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

“California, especially the San Joaquin Valley has been suffering from drought conditions severely exacerbated by erroneous federal regulations for several years. … ”
— Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, author of last week’s House bill

5. E&E News, “Senators introduce bill to ease water crunch in parched Calif.”

February 11, 2014

By Debra Kahn

Senators from California and Oregon introduced legislation today aimed at providing emergency funding and improving the flexibility of water infrastructure in drought-stricken California.

The “California Emergency Drought Relief Act” would direct federal agencies to manage water flows in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to benefit the Central Valley Project, the water supplier for millions of Californians.

The measure also includes $300 million in emergency funding for conservation projects, building wells, maintaining and establishing cover and permanent crops, water exchanges and other activities.

The bill comes as the Obama administration is increasing its attention to the drought. President Obama is scheduled Friday to visit Fresno, and the administration’s task force on climate preparedness is meeting Thursday in Los Angeles.

“With so little water available, we must focus on streamlining federal programs and provide what assistance we can to those farmers and communities being hit the hardest,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the drought bill’s primary sponsor.

The House passed a bill last week by California’s Republican delegation, after Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) visited Bakersfield and endorsed the language. H.R. 3964, by Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), would reverse environmental restrictions for fish and send more water to farmers in the Central Valley. Obama issued a veto threat ahead of its passage (E&E Daily, Feb. 6).

The Senate bill also targets environmental protections for fish. The bill includes a provision that would keep the Delta Cross Channel Gates open as long as possible to allow more water to be delivered to people and farms south of the delta.

The gates at this time of year are usually closed to protect fish migrating up the Sacramento River from getting pulled into the central delta. The bill would also direct federal agencies to maximize the water they can pump out of the delta while complying with Endangered Species Act protections for the delta smelt, a threatened species.

The senators stressed in a statement that their bill “does not waive any federal or state law.”

“We’re pleased to see the approach, but in the haste of crafting the kind of emergency bill like this, we’re concerned that the language may not fully meet that intent, so we’ll be looking at it carefully to make sure that’s what it does,” said Kate Poole, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

California officials praised the bill, saying it would help ease the drought’s impacts while avoiding a fight over scarce water supplies.

Feinstein and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) “are proposing common sense solutions to our drought crisis that don’t pit Californians against each other,” California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird said in a statement. “It’s clear that the senators respect our state laws and regulations, and this bill reinforces actions the state is taking with our federal partners.”

One of the largest water contractors that receives supplies from the Central Valley Project, the Westlands Water District, called the bill “encouraging.” The district supplies water to 600,000 acres of farmland in the Central Valley.

“Through its work with Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer, Westlands knows that they are genuinely interested in working with their colleagues in the House of Representatives to find a legislative solution to the chronic water supply shortages that have devastated the San Joaquin Valley and other regions of the state,” the district said in a statement. “The District looks forward to working with them and members of the House of Representatives to find common sense solutions that serve the interests of all Californians.”

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), who represents the Northern California coast, said in an interview ahead of the bill’s release that he liked some aspects of a draft version of the bill but was concerned about environmental protections.

“I’d like to see everybody get behind one bill, and I hope it can be Senator Feinstein’s bill,” he said. “There are some provisions in her bill that we’re still hoping to improve,” he added, saying that he was “very leery about making permanent changes to address a temporary crisis when it comes to water quality and environmental protections in a complex system like the delta.”

6. Los Angeles Times, “Conservationists seek federal protection for tufted puffins”

February 12, 2014

By Louis Sahagun

Oil spills, fishing nets and collapsing forage fish populations due to warming sea surface temperatures are decimating tufted puffins and could lead to the disappearance of one of the most photogenic seabirds in the United States south of Alaska.

The situation has become dire enough for the Natural Resources Defense Council on Wednesday to file a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have tufted puffins listed as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act in California, Oregon and Washington, where only about 4,000 remain in scattered colonies.

“The tufted puffin populations in these three states are roughly 10% to 15% of what they were just three decades ago,” Brad Sewell, a senior attorney with the NRDC, said in an interview. “In California alone, there are just a few hundred of them left, mostly on islands near San Francisco and north to Oregon.

“The most significant cause is a reduction in small prey fish – sardines, herring, anchovies — around their nesting colonies,” he said, “which has been linked with reproduction success.”

With white faces, red eye rings, bright orange bills, red feet, pale yellow plumes that curve backward and a low, sonorous growling call, tufted puffins are known as clowns of the sea. The gregarious and long-lived birds breed on rocky islands and coastal mainlands. About 15 inches in length, they belong to the auk family, which includes penguins, and lay their eggs in earthen burrows two to seven feet long.

Tufted puffins breed in the United States, Canada, Russia and Japan. The vast majority now breed in the northern portions of that range, with drastic declines seen in the U.S. south of Alaska, a region which hosts a distinct population segment, the petition says.

“Puffins demonstrate natal fidelity in that they return to same place they were born, and use the same nests,” Sewell said. “As a result, they end up being genetically distinct” in breeding grounds throughout their range.

The loss of this southernmost population would result in a significant gap in the species’ range and genetic diversity, the petition says, and could “lead to considerably higher vulnerability to extinction for the species as a whole.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service has 90 days to issue a preliminary finding on whether or not the petition provides enough information to demonstrate that a listing may be warranted. If so, the agency has 12 months to issue a final determination on the issue.

Two breeding pairs of tufted puffins at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach have been attracting adoring crowds since the facility opened in 1998. They are part of a nationwide captive breeding program.

“Visitors love them because they are so big, colorful and kind of comical,” Rob Mortensen, assistant curator at the aquarium, said. “They have fascinating head movements, and use their wings to ‘fly’ under water. They also seem to like porpoising in and out of their swimming area.”

Added Mortensen, “It’s hard to say whether or not they are playing, but it certainly looks that way.”

7. Bloomberg, “NRDC and U.S. Utilities Urge Grid Payments for Solar”

February 12, 2014

By Christopher Martin

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the U.S. utility industry’s trade group are jointly calling for a new rate structure to account for customers that generate their own power with rooftop solar systems.

Solar panels typically don’t meet a home’s entire power needs, and these customers continue to use the grid operated by utilities, the NRDC and the Edison Electric Institute said today in a statement. Utilities collect less revenue to maintain and improve infrastructure as consumers improve efficiency and generate more electricity, an increasingly untenable arrangement, the groups said.

The agreements in principle come as more utilities seek regulatory permission to charge solar homes and businesses fixed fees for their use of the grid, most recently in Arizona and Colorado. Solar advocates have said such policies will discourage development, said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the NRDC in New York.

“We need the grid and need to improve it in ways that support clean energy and distributed resources,” Greene said today in an interview. “We’re trying to bring EEI and utilities into the regulatory process in a more positive way.”

Owners of rooftop solar panels “must provide reasonable cost-based compensation for the utility services they use,” the groups said in the statement. In exchange, utilities must simplify the process of connecting systems to the grid and compensate owners “fairly for the services they provide.”

Under the current policy, known as net metering, utilities must purchase excess electricity generated by customers’ solar panels. Both groups want that policy to continue, with a new mechanism that would cover utilities’ fixed costs.

Environmental Policy

The two groups often oppose each other over environmental policy and NRDC will continue to “hold the utilities’ feet to the fire,” Greene said.

Still, they agree that changes to utility rate structures would improve energy-efficiency programs and expand rooftop solar. They recommend allowing utilities to recover the costs of maintaining and improving the grid in a way that’s not tied to the amount of electricity they deliver to consumers.

“We want regulators to decouple grid charges from volumetric consumption,” Greene said. “Then the utilities can’t use net metering as an excuse for the high fixed-cost charges they want.”

8. WNYC, “Goodbye Styrofoam. City Schools to Serve Lunch on ‘Green’ Trays”

February 12, 2014

By Topher Forhecz

[Click here to listen to the audio]

New York City and five other large school districts have banded together to bring environmentally friendly changes to their schools, starting with trays students can throw in the trash without worry.

The round plates made of a sugar cane byproduct are due to appear in all New York City schools this fall.

They are the first result of the Urban School Food Alliance –- comprised of Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando, Chicago and New York City — which formed in 2012 to boost the schools’ purchasing power in the private sector.

Eric Goldstein, chief executive for school support services at New York City’s Department of Education, said the alliance agreed to start with polystyrene foam trays because they not only end up in landfills but also styrene is listed as a “possible” human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The alliance found green alternatives, but they were expensive. Manufacturers said it would cost 15 cents to make one tray as opposed to three-and-a-half cents for a foam tray.

“We couldn’t afford this on our own with New York City. Even though we’re quite a large school district,” Goldstein said. “We really had to grow out of this problem.”

This fall, when the alliance submitted a bid for 271 million trays, the cost had come down to four cents a tray. Next on the agenda: recyclable forks, knives and spoons.

1. The Chicago Tribune, “New Smog Limits Could Squeeze Chicago”

February 9, 2014

By Michael Hawthorne and Alex Richards

Decades of efforts to curb air pollution have cut lung-damaging smog to levels far below the hazy days of the 1970s and ’80s in Chicago and most other big urban areas.

New cars emit dramatically less pollution than older models, gasoline and diesel fuels contain fewer smog-forming chemicals, and scores of the oldest, dirtiest coal-fired power plants have been replaced by cleaner sources of energy. Local initiatives have helped, too, including tailpipe emissions checks, vapor controls on gasoline pumps and reductions in fumes from paint shops and printers.

But a growing body of scientific research suggests that smog can trigger health problems and contribute to early deaths even at these lower levels. Citing the latest studies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking a more stringent smog standard as part of a review required every five years under the Clean Air Act.

Though the EPA isn’t expected to issue a formal proposal until the end of the year, an agency staff report released last week already is renewing a fierce political battle that led President Barack Obama to scuttle an overhaul of the standard before his 2012 re-election campaign.

Any changes would have widespread impact. Nearly 214 million people nationwide and 10 million in Illinois live in counties where average smog levels exceed the strictest standard under consideration by the EPA, according to a Tribune analysis of the last three years of federal monitoring data.

Chicago and other big cities that fail to meet the current standard would need to clamp down harder on polluters. Dozens of smaller cities, mostly in the Midwest, Northeast and Southeast, would be forced to adopt smog-fighting measures for the first time.

In Illinois, the list of communities with unhealthy air would expand to include Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal and Mount Vernon, the Tribune analysis showed. The number of monitored counties in violation nationwide would more than quadruple.

Girding for another fight, business groups contend that a tougher standard would impose substantial new costs on industry. The EPA and advocacy groups say it also would save billions in health care costs by preventing asthma attacks, emergency room visits and early deaths.

“We’ve made tremendous progress during the past 40 years,” said Dr. Jonathan Samet, a pulmonologist and epidemiologist at the University of Southern California and former chair of an EPA scientific advisory panel. “But we’re facing new policy decisions that need to balance health effects with our ability to control them.”

Smog, also known as ground-level ozone, is formed by a reaction between sunlight and pollutants from car tailpipes, power plants and factories, fumes from volatile solvents and gasoline vapors. Breathing even low levels can inflame the lining of the lungs and aggravate asthma and other respiratory diseases; long-term exposure can permanently scar lung tissue.

The Chicago area and about three dozen other metropolitan areas with “marginal” smog problems have until the end of next year to meet the current standard of 75 parts per billion, set by the Bush administration in 2008 and reaffirmed by Obama in 2011 over the objections of Samet and other EPA advisers. Ten other areas with more severe air quality problems, most in California, have up to 18 years to comply.

Communities that fail to meet the EPA’s deadlines face fines, a loss of federal highway money and restrictions on environmental permits for polluters.

During the past eight years, Samet said, the evidence has grown stronger that smog poses a significant public health threat. The new EPA staff report says “the available health evidence and exposure/risk information call into question the adequacy of the public health protection provided by the current standard.”

The EPA concluded that the standard should be no higher than 70 ppb and as low as 60. Studies have found that even healthy people can suffer lung problems when breathing smog at the low end of that range, according to the agency report. Health risks are greater for people with asthma, and are particularly worrisome for children whose lungs are still developing.

Some health advocates say a 70 ppb standard is too high to be worth considering. Business groups contend that lowering it to 60 ppb would hurt the economy and drive manufacturing overseas.

“We’re not against protecting the environment, and we believe there is a place for regulation,” said Ross Eisenberg, vice president of energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. “But there needs to be a balance that allows manufacturers to thrive.”

More than 780,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide could be affected by a new smog rule, according to state-by-state maps compiled by the association. Business groups also question whether a tougher standard can be met in areas where topography and weather prevent smog from dissipating, or in places far away from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Health groups note that most of the country met earlier smog standards far more quickly and at lower costs than expected. Some state regulators, meanwhile, think smog-fighting efforts can be more effective without big changes in Americans’ day-to-day lives.

“Back in the 1980s it wasn’t unusual to see smog levels in the Chicago area as high as 200 parts per billion,” said Rob Kaleel, executive director of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium, a group of state officials from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “Now the average is below 80 ppb, which shows our control measures are working.”

Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to update the more lenient Bush-era smog standard. But he blocked the EPA’s efforts to follow through on that promise in 2011 as the White House shifted its focus to the president’s re-election campaign.

Similar to the current debate, business groups enlisted local and state officials to lobby against a tougher smog standard by highlighting the dramatic increase in counties that would violate it. Many were electoral battlegrounds where the air had been considered relatively clean.

After announcing he was abandoning the administration’s plans, Obama cited rules requiring cleaner cars and power plants as examples of his administration’s commitment “to protect our environment and the health of our families from air pollution.”

“At the same time,” the president said, “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.”

The battle over environmental regulations has intensified since then. Last month, business groups announced a new multimillion-dollar effort to block or delay the administration’s proposed rules, including a potential new smog standard and an already announced proposal to reduce greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants.

Unlike the greenhouse gas rule, the government’s authority to set a smog standard already has withstood court challenges. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the EPA’s authority to base air-quality standards on public health, without considering economic concerns.

The high court’s decision allowed the government to enforce a smog standard of 84 ppb set by the Clinton administration in 1997. Just 17 counties nationwide still exceed that level, according to the Tribune analysis. The only one in the Midwest is Michigan’s Allegan County, a sharp drop from a decade ago when 60 counties across the region violated the Clinton-era standard.

John Walke, a high-ranking air quality official in the Clinton administration who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said business groups are following a well-worn playbook by arguing that a tougher standard would cripple the economy. History has shown that the benefits of cleaner air far outweigh the costs, Walke said.

“We are going to improve air quality significantly in the next few years,” Walke said. “Cost-effective solutions already are there and businesses can adapt.”

Several state officials said that although more areas might need to adopt local smog-fighting measures, the biggest improvements will come from national regulations already on the books or in the works requiring cleaner gasoline and diesel fuel and less pollution from cars, power plants and factories.

“This issue gets short shrift compared to all the attention given to global warming,” said Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of local and state regulators. “But it’s a big deal when a third to half of the population is breathing unhealthy air. Any reputable study shows we aren’t doing enough to prevent that.”

2. Men’s Journal, “Flea Collars May Be Killing Your Pet”

February 7, 2014

By Melaina Juntti

Toxins in flea collars

You may want to stop using flea collars to protect your pets from pests. Most collars contain the toxic pesticides propoxur and tetrachlorvinphos (TCVP), which can hinder brain development and even cause cancer. These pesticides pose the biggest threat to babies and children, whose brains and bodies are still developing, but they’re also hazardous for adults and, very likely, dogs and cats. “Propoxur and TCVP are both way too dangerous to be on the market,” says Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, senior health scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

NRDC has been pleading for the Environmental Protection Agency to ban propoxur and TCVP for nearly a decade. Just this week, NRDC filed a lawsuit against EPA, hoping a judge can force the government agency’s hand. Since the EPA has already outlawed or restricted use of most other, similar neurotoxic pesticides, Rotkin-Ellman sees no reason why propoxur and TCVP shouldn’t also get the axe.

Flea collars leave a pesticide residue on dogs’ and cats’ fur, which then gets all over carpet, furniture, and us, when we hug and pet them. These chemicals get absorbed through our skin or go directly into our nose and mouths when we grab food or use our smartphones. Little kids, who play on the floor and stick their hands in their mouths, are especially at risk.

“You don’t need to douse your home in toxins in order to control fleas,” Rotkin-Ellman says. “Instead, give them regular baths, keep them groomed, keeping areas where they sleep and eat clean. In the event chemicals are needed, find a product that’s less toxic, and use as little of it as possible.”

To find safer flea control, check out the NRDC’s Green Paws product guide. This online tool also ranks more than 125 flea and tick products based on ingredients and assesses each one’s safety for people and animals.

3. Yahoo! Shine, “Harmful Household Chemicals to Ditch Now”

February 7, 2014

By Sarah B. Weir

As consumers, we often assume that the products we buy are safe and healthy for our families, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. On Thursday afternoon, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a federal lawsuit against the EPA related to two hazardous pesticides. Propoxur and tetrachlorvinphos (TCVP) are banned for use in most household products because of their danger to children, but they are still used in flea collars for dogs and cats. These neurotoxins can have a similar impact on kids’ brains as exposure to lead and might also cause cancer. “We’ve been putting pressure on EPA for almost a decade on this,” Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a senior public health scientist at NRDC, tells Yahoo Shine.

Children are particularly susceptible to household toxins. “Pound for pound, they eat more, drink more, and breathe in more air than adults,” Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician and expert in environmental medicine explains to Yahoo Shine. He adds that their developing organs are vulnerable and can be permanently damaged from exposure to certain chemicals. Children also play close to the ground where toxins settle and often put their hands into their mouths.

Pets are mammals and their nervous systems are also susceptible to these pesticides, explains Rotkin-Ellman. She says low-level toxicity can be hard to spot in pets; it might manifest in lowered energy and cognitive function. In high doses, these chemicals can be deadly. And having these chemicals on pets can also expose the humans around them. “It’s a good issue that the NRDC has brought forward,” Sonya Lunder, senior analyst at Environmental Working Group (EWG), tells Yahoo Shine. “We want to lower kids’ exposure to organophosphates,” the class of chemicals that include propoxur and TCVP. She points to three studies released in 2012 that linked organophosphates to lower IQ.

The NRDC recommends avoiding flea collar brands that use them, including Sergeant’s Pet Care Products, Wellmark International, and Hartz Mountain. It has also published an updated Green Paws product guide, listing safer alternatives.

Exposure to harmful chemicals in household products is an issue that goes way beyond flea collars. “Consumers get a lot of distracting advice from manufacturers,” says Rotkin-Ellman. Lower our health risks takes a combination of demanding regulating agencies, such as the EPA, phase out the most harmful chemicals and using common sense at the store. It’s usually not difficult to find healthier substitutes. Here are potentially harmful products that you can readily eliminate from your shopping list now:

Antibacterial soap. Soaps that contain triclosoan and triclorcarbon don’t clean any more effectively than conventional soap and water, but can disrupt hormonal function and might be linked to the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They don’t get completely broken down during sewage treatment, and they pollute rivers and streams, which further harms plant and animal life. Just use plain soap or alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Fertilizer combined with weed killer. Avoid products labeled “weed and feed,” which contain a carcinogenic Agent Orange chemical called 2,4-D. You’ll end up spreading the dangerous herbicide far more widely than necessary in this formulation. Instead, pull up weeds by hand and spot-apply weed killer sparingly.

Bisphenol A (BPA). This chemical is used in the linings of canned food and beverage containers, and over 90 percent of Americans carry its residue in their bodies. According to the NRDC, BPA is a hormone-disruptor that has also been linked to impaired development of the brain and nervous system, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and metabolic diseases including obesity and heart disease. While it’s been banned for use in baby bottles and baby-formula containers, children and adults can be exposed in other ways. Trasande recommends reducing the use of aluminum cans and avoiding microwaving food and beverages in plastic. “Don’t wash plastics in the dishwasher and if plastics become etched or scratched, throw them away,” he adds.

Harsh cleaning products. “This is an area where alternatives are readily available,” says Rotkin-Ellman. “If you look at the ingredients label and understand what they mean, that’s a good sign. Always start with [the] least toxic options before you reach for a heavy-duty cleaning product.” As a rule of thumb, if a product carries the label “dangerous,” “toxic,” “poison,” “may cause burns,” or “fatal if swallowed or inhaled,” don’t bring it in the house. EWG has a guide, Healthy Home Tips, which covers the basics of what chemicals to avoid in home and personal care products.

Flame retardants. Fire-retardant chemicals are commonly found in foam furniture like couches, mattresses, carpet padding, and some children’s products, especially those manufactured before 2005. They have been linked to a range of health problems such as cancer, male infertility, and lower IQ. The toxins flake off and settle into dust. Children are particularly vulnerable, Lunder says. “Because of the way they play, a recent study found that 19 out of 20 kids had more fire-retardant chemicals in their blood than their moms.” Obviously, you aren’t going to get rid of all your furniture, but you can reduce your risk. A new standard is set to go into effect next year, but to limit exposure now, vacuum frequently with a HEPA filter or damp mop to avoid spreading the dust.

Lunder says people, especially parents, can feel overwhelmed by a “laundry list” of what they should do when it comes to avoiding chemicals in everyday products. Both the NRDC and EWG websites offer a wealth of information on how to be a thoughtful consumer in a realistic way.

4. National Geographic, “Keystone XL: Is it the Right Fight for Environmentalists?”

February 9, 2014

By Laura Parker

Last Monday night, when environmentalist activists staged 280 candlelight vigils in 49 states to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline—in Washington, D.C., demonstrators inflated a giant black tube in front of the White House—many no doubt wondered if their long campaign to halt the project had reached a turning point.

“When I saw the photos coming in from the vigils happening all over the country, I looked at my husband and said, ‘We have a real movement here,'” said Jane Klebb, who runs Bold Nebraska, a local group opposing the project.

The previous Friday, the State Department had released its final environmental impact assessment of Keystone XL, which would carry heavy oil from Canada’s tar sands across Nebraska and five other states to refineries in Texas. The State Department concluded that, though the tar sands have a somewhat larger carbon footprint than other sources of oil, the pipeline was unlikely to affect the rate at which the oil is extracted—one way or another, it would find its way to market.

That conclusion seemed to satisfy President Obama’s criterion for approving the project: that it not “significantly exacerbate” the climate problem.

The State Department report stretched over 11 volumes. The group that has spearheaded opposition to the pipeline, 350.org, released a two-word rebuttal: “Game on.”

Hence the vigils.

Over the past several years 350.org, co-founded by global warming activist and author Bill McKibben, has reenergized the environmental movement with a campaign of grassroots mobilization and civil disobedience inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Now, as the Obama Administration weighs the decision on whether to grant final approval, the moment seems ripe with promise for environmentalists—yet fraught with peril. Have they picked the right fight?

“We have a lot riding on this,” Klebb says. “If after five years of fighting and mobilizing people we can’t stop this with the amount of resources we’ve put forward, then what project can we stop?”

Clash of the Symbols

In the hopes of rallying the public to the fight against climate change, the activists have made TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline a symbolic test of President Obama’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gases. In the process they’ve sometimes exaggerated the pipeline’s intrinsic importance—labeling it, in McKibben’s memorable phrase, a “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.”

In terms of carbon emissions, if you don’t buy the argument that the oil from the tar sands is going to get to market somehow, stopping the Keystone XL would be equivalent, according to the State Department’s numbers, to stopping the construction of somewhere between half a coal-fired power plant and half a dozen, at a time when China has been building dozens a year. In other words, the pipeline would exacerbate the climate problem incrementally—and perhaps “significantly,” depending on your point of view—but it would not (to quote another slogan) be “game over” for the planet.

Proponents of the project wield exaggerated symbolic arguments of their own—that it would promote “energy independence,” for instance, and create jobs. The State Department report found it would create 42,000 temporary construction jobs and 50 permanent jobs.

For President Obama, the dilemma is that it is politically difficult to forbid a commercial enterprise for symbolic reasons. A PEW Research Center poll taken last fall found 65 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, support the pipeline.

The effort to block the pipeline is already complicating midterm election politics for Democrats in ways that jeopardize the broader environmental agenda. Four of eight Senate Democrats who have expressed support for the pipeline face difficult reelection campaigns; Democrats could lose control of the Senate, and with it the kind of leverage needed to make gains on a host of other environmental issues.

Amy Myers Jaffe, an expert on global energy policy at the University of California at Davis, cautions that the effort to defeat the pipeline may be misplaced. “The environmental movement has made this a litmus test,” she says. “It’s always dangerous to draw a line in the sand, because then you’re stuck with the line.”

She says the pipeline battle has overshadowed other achievements on climate change, such as the Obama Administration’s new fuel efficiency standards. “There is demand for oil. It’s going to move, and rail is more dangerous—we all just saw a town disappear,” she says, alluding to the July explosion of an oil train in Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. “If you want to keep oil in the ground, we have to address what kind of cars we want to drive.”

The focus should be on regulating carbon emissions nationally, Jaffe says, “instead of trying to block infrastructure.” Later this year, the Obama Administration has promised to propose regulations limiting the emissions from existing coal-fired power plants—a policy move whose effect on climate would potentially dwarf that of the Keystone XL.

Water, Land, and Grassroots

Carbon emissions are not the only environmental objection to the pipeline. Opposition to it gained a foothold first in Nebraska, where farmers raised concerns that a pipeline leak could seep into the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to the Great Plains and irrigation for a third of the nation’s farmlands. Klebb’s group joined forces with farmers, and TransCanada was eventually forced to redraw the route around the aquifer and the fragile Sand Hills.

That has not been enough to convince all Nebraskans. “The pipeline has brought together a whole group of new voices, in particular rural voices and voices from the agricultural community,” Klebb says. “That is hugely significant. This is not just an East Coast—West Coast environmental issue.”

Even in oil-friendly Texas, pipeline opposition bloomed. The pipeline route would cross through Julia Trigg Crawford’s farm in Lamar County, 120 miles northeast of Dallas. Crawford is now in the third year of a court fight to prevent TransCanada from taking her land.

“When our little fight started off, it wasn’t purely environmental, it was property rights—and it grew,” she says. “Now it’s Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Libertarians, white, black, gay, straight, city dwellers, country dwellers. I symbolize someone who is going to stand up against mammoth odds.”

Mainstream environmental groups have since thrown themselves into the battle as well. “When we’re able to focus on distinct, concrete projects, we tend to win,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, told the New York Times. “And when we tend to focus on more obscure policies or places where we need action from Congress, we tend to stall.” If Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline, Brune said, it will be “the Vietnam of his presidency.”

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, who directs the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program, cautions against overemphasizing the pipeline. “The battle is climate change,” she says. “Keystone XL is one piece of that fight, one marker on that path.”

But she also dismisses the idea that the Keystone skirmish will backfire against the environmental movement.

“This is not something that the big environmental organizations got together on in a room,” she says. “It’s something the people decided was important. That kind of passion is what helps lift the boat in all of the climate fight—in getting a price on carbon, in getting changes on power plants. You have to have that kind of heart to win.”

5. NBC News, “No Water, No Beer: Brewers Race to Save the Ales”

February 3, 2014

By John Roach

As water becomes increasingly scarce on our ever more crowded and warming planet, brewers of beer are racing to secure a steady supply of their most prized ingredient by using less of it.

“Without water, there is no beer,” Kim Marotta, the sustainability director for MillerCoors, the Chicago-based joint venture of international brewing giants SABMiller and Molson Coors, told NBC News.

Like many in the brewing industry, MillerCoors understands that access to water of the quantity and quality it needs to grow barley and hops and brew beer is no longer a guarantee as population growth, water pollution and climate change threaten water resources.

The United Nations projects that by 2030 nearly half of the world’s population could face a scarcity of water, with demand outstripping supply by 40 percent.

MillerCoors is one of several dozen corporate heavyweights that endorse the United Nations’ CEO Water Mandate, a public-private initiative to assist companies in the development, implementation and disclosure of water sustainability practices.

“We need to make sure that in the places where we have breweries or the places that we are growing our barley, that water is available so that we can have a sustainable business well into the future,” Marotta said.

Similar water conservation efforts are underway at other breweries that endorse the United Nations’ mandate, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer by volume whose brands include Budweiser and Stella Artois, and Diageo, the brewer of Guinness.

Saving suds by saving water

In 2008, MillerCoors set a goal of reducing by 15 percent the amount of water it uses to brew a barrel of beer. At the time, the ratio was 4.1 to 1. That number has dropped to 3.82 to 1, according to figures the company released Tuesday in its annual sustainability report, which covers 2012.

“We continue to make a lot of progress in that area,” Marotta said. In fact, 2013 year-to-date, MillerCoors’ water-to-beer ratio is 3.51 to 1 across its eight U.S. breweries; two in July were below 3 to 1, she noted.

Image of water reclaiming system

A system that reclaims water used in the brewing process for other non-brewing related activities, such as cleaning equipment, has helped MillerCoors’ Milwaukee brewery reduce water consumption.

While comparing water use per barrel of beer produced among different breweries is difficult given the differences in equipment, brewing styles, and non-brewing uses of water, the average is somewhere between 5 and 7 to 1, according to industry experts.

The bulk of MillerCoors’ water savings has come from changes in human behavior, such as brewery workers turning off hoses that were previously constantly running and carefully managing the flow of water through the brewery to optimize its usage, Marotta explained.

The company also invests in technology such as water reclaiming systems to reuse water for non-brewing purposes.

Crafty conservation agenda

Meanwhile, nearly two dozen craft brewers in the U.S. are signatories to an initiative spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, to toughen enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

The push is required, the council said, because protections for headwater streams and wetlands, which are deemed critical for providing reliable and clean water supplies, are in legal limbo awaiting clarification on enforcement guidelines from the administration of President Obama, who is a home brewer.

“As local business owners who happen to produce beers with a rabid following, craft brewers bring a strong voice and an unmatched understanding of water to these debates,” Karen Hobbs, a senior policy analyst for the council and manager of the Brewers for Clean Water campaign, told NBC News via email.

Among those who signed on to the clean water initiative is Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., a Chico, Calif., based brewery that is a pioneer in sustainability initiatives, including water conservation.

“Without access to clean and abundant water, you can’t make beer,” Cheri Chastain, the sustainability coordinator at Sierra Nevada, told NBC News. “I think the whole brewing industry realizes that.”

Similar to MillerCoors, the California craft brewer has ambitious water conservation goals, aiming to hit a water-used-to-beer-produced ratio of 4-to-1 by the end of 2013. Among steps taken there include switching out soapy water for a silicon-based lubricant on the bottling line.

“There used to just be this stream of soapy liquid coming off the conveyors and there is probably at least a mile of conveyor in there,” Chastain explained. “That is water we are not using and it saves a couple million gallons a year.”

Water on the farm

Saving water inside the brewery pales in comparison to what’s possible on the farm, which previous analyses have indicated account for about 90 percent of beer’s total water footprint.

With farmland included, for example, MillerCoors’ parent SABMiller found in a 2009 analysis that 115 liters of water are required for every liter of beer produced in South Africa. In the Czech Republic, where the company’s Pilsner Urquell is brewed, the ratio was 45 to 1.

While figures for U.S. operations are unavailable, Marotta said agriculture in this country too accounts for about 90 percent of beer’s total water footprint. To that end, in 2011 the company established an experimental barley farm in southern Idaho to explore water-saving techniques.

For example, so-called end guns at the tip of two circular irrigation pivots that aim water towards the hard-to-reach corners of square plots were turned off, saving 5 million gallons of water in a year. Most of the barley from the corners when the end guns were on was unsuitable for beer, Marotta noted.

Other on-the-farm measures include replacing damaged sprinklers on the pivots, lowering the pivots closer to the ground and installing GPS and other sensors that allow farmers to moderate the flow of water to match the needs of the underlying soils.

“All told, we saved 270 million gallons of water (in 2011 and 2012), which, to bring it back to the breweries, is what we use in one brewery in two months,” Marotta said.

MillerCoors is now expanding the water conservation practices to its barley growers in water-stressed regions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.

In the San Luis valley of Colorado, for example, the aquifer that MillerCoors’ barley growers depend on “is depleted” due to a five-year drought in the area, Marotta said. “We are looking at really immediate concerns there.”

Keeping the water pressure on

The Natural Resources Defense Council aims to keep pushing a clean water agenda for brewers long after the dust settles from the current political battle surrounding the Clean Water Act.

“We are all in it for the long haul,” Hobbs, the Brewers for Clean Water campaign manager, said. “We have to be given the scary stuff on the horizon if we don’t keep vigilant on water issues in the face of climate change and pollution fights.”

That commitment appears reflected in the hiring plans at craft breweries, according to Sierra Nevada’s Chastain, who noted that sustainability coordinator positions such as hers are popping up around the country. The jobs, she said, reflect acknowledgement that sustainability can save brewers money.

But water conservation, she added, is “a tough nut because, as a country, we don’t pay enough for our water. It is relatively cheap compared to other natural resources … But it is the No. 1 ingredient in our beer, in all beer, so using it respectfully and responsibly is a subtle but underlying motivator.”

6. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Bulk of $15 Billion Plan Not Directly Tied to Stopping Asian Carp”

February 8, 2014

By Dan Egan

Chicago — It might be back to the drawing board for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ sweeping proposal to spend billions of dollars and 25 years to block an Asian carp invasion of the Great Lakes.

Buried within the Army Corps’ 10,000-page study, and teased out in interviews with agency staff and legal experts, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that some controversial — if not inaccurate — interpretations of federal and state water laws are driving much of the project’s astronomical costs and epic timeline.

The bulk of the Army Corps’ $15 billion-plus estimate to restore the natural separation between the Lake Michigan and Mississippi River watersheds is yoked to projects that critics contend have little to do with directly stopping invasive species. They include some $12 billion to build things like new reservoirs, sewer tunnels and water treatment plants, as well as remove contaminated river sediments.

“The media has fixated on the $15 to $18 billion figure, and a number of politicians equate that with the price tag for (watershed) separation,” said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, a body appointed by the region’s governors and legislatures. “We don’t accept that. We think that’s based on flawed assumptions.”

Chicago dug its canals more than a century ago to reverse the flow of its namesake river — and all the sewage discharged into it — so it flowed away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River basin.

Governors and regional political leaders have grown increasingly concerned about these canals as global trade has made the waterways a man-made conduit for things like the jumbo carp from China, a fish-killing virus from the Atlantic and pipe-clogging mussels from the Caspian Sea to migrate between two of America’s grandest watersheds.

This is how zebra and quagga mussels made their way out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi basin, which sprawls across 40% of the continental United States, from Montana to New York to Texas.

This is why 17 attorneys general — from such far-flung states as Arizona and West Virginia — demanded in 2011 that the Army Corps expedite the study on how to re-separate the watersheds.

And this is the reason all 16 U.S. senators from the eight Great Lakes states wrote the Army Corps in November urging it to move quickly to somehow close what’s been dubbed an “invasive species super-highway.”

The Army Corps originally planned to complete the $25 million study in 2015, but with Asian carp knocking on the door to the lakes, Congress demanded it be finished by the end of 2013.

The study contains eight scenarios to block the rapacious Asian carp species that threaten the lakes’ ecology and multibillion dollar fishery.

The two options that have drawn the most attention call for restoring the natural divide between the two watersheds, because this would be the most effective way to halt the transfer of unwanted species — and because those options call for so much money and time.

“The assumptions used in the report create the impression that the corps thinks this situation is not urgent. Well it is,” Eder said. “We need action and we don’t have 25 years to wait.”

‘Inept’ or ‘biased’

Problems with the plan start with the Army Corps’ definition of pollution.

First, the agency assumes that if Chicago’s sanitary canals are dammed so that some portion of their flows enters Lake Michigan, the water leaving Chicago’s sewage plants in that direction must be clean enough, essentially, to drink.

“The anti-degradation regulations under the Clean Water Act restrict the addition of significant pollutant loads” to Lake Michigan, explained Army Corps study leader Dave Wethington.

Then, because it would be wildly expensive — if not impossible — to use a sterilization process such as reverse osmosis to clean those sewer plant discharges to virtual drinking water quality, the agency is proposing a costly labyrinth of tunnels to continue whooshing the discharges away from the lake and into the Mississippi basin. Other tunnels would carry away from the lake the city’s sewer overflows that currently go straight into the Mississippi-bound canals.

But if Chicago were allowed to discharge a portion of its highly treated, if not Perrier-pure, effluent into the lake — as do Milwaukee, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and every other major Great Lakes city — the project’s cost would plummet.

Critics say what the Army Corps has ignored is that Asian carp are also an added pollution load, one that could be far worse for the lake than highly treated effluent. The Army Corps didn’t factor the carp into any future pollution load equation, because the carp cannot be considered a type of pollution, Wethington said.

“The definition of ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Water Act does not include living organisms,” he noted.

Nonsense, says Great Lakes water law expert and Wayne State University law professor Noah Hall.

“The corps’ statement is flat-out wrong. The Clean Water Act definitely includes biological pollutants, and courts have consistently interpreted living and dead biota as pollutants,” Hall said. “It really worries me that if the corps got a simple legal fact like this wrong in this process, they are either inept or so biased that it’s very hard to trust their work.”

The idea of invasive species as a pollutant is, in fact, the essence of a landmark lawsuit brought against the navigation industry more than a decade ago. A federal judge ruled in 2005 that ship owners must treat their invasive species-contaminated ballast water discharges like other pollutants under the Clean Water Act.

Critics say that in choosing not to view Asian carp as a pollutant, the Army Corps backed itself into a corner when considering a range of potential solutions to the canal problem.

“The assumption of ‘no return flow’ to the Great Lakes — no matter how clean and well treated — and the assumption that invasive species are not serious pollutants — no matter how dangerous — skews the analysis and limits the solutions to impractical and exorbitantly expensive proposals,” said Henry Henderson, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who previously served as Chicago’s commissioner of environment.

“It’s a deeply ironic — if not cynical — use of environmental principles to block an environmental solution.”

David Ullrich is a former deputy regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who now leads a group representing Great Lakes mayors. His group partnered with the Great Lakes Commission in 2012 to fund their own study exploring how to repair the divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi basin that the Chicago canals destroyed more than a century ago.

That study concluded the project could be done for as little as $4.25 billion and that canal dams could be in place in a matter of years, not decades.

Ullrich said this separate study was ordered to ensure that the Army Corps, an agency whose focus is to keep cargo flowing and manage floodwaters, would give the concept of plugging the canals “fair consideration” in its own study.

Now that he has seen the Army Corps’ conclusions, does Ullrich believe his own study got things wrong in estimating that the work could be done much quicker and cheaper than the Army Corps has stated?

“No,” he said. “There is nothing here that convinces me of that.”

Sewage treatment, Chicago-style

Every other Great Lakes city cleans its sewage in a multistage process that screens and settles out the solids, unleashes microbes to digest the leftover waste and then disinfects the water.

What comes out the end of those sewage treatment plant pipes is, under normal operating conditions, water clean enough to not harm Great Lakes beachgoers. It’s also clean enough, with dilution, for the lakes to remain a drinking water source for Great Lakes cities from Toronto to Milwaukee to Duluth.

Chicago does things differently.

Chicago’s canals have long allowed the city to get away with something that distinguishes it from major American cities. It does not disinfect its sewage.

It removes the big stuff, but sends bacteria-laden discharges back into the canals to let nature bake it out on its way toward New Orleans. (Under pressure from the federal government, Chicago has agreed to install disinfection equipment at two of its smaller treatment plants, but not at its largest plant, billed as the biggest in the world.)

Jim Ridgway is an environmental engineer and board chairman for the Alliance for the Great Lakes who worked on Ullrich’s earlier study.

He said the Army Corps’ plan to stop the carp would not just subsidize an upgrade of Chicago’s wastewater system to catch up with the rest of America, it would build a wastewater conveyance, storage and treatment system like no other on the planet.

He notes the Army Corps’ proposed tunnel and reservoir system is designed to capture floods up to those triggered by a 500-year storm — a tempest so severe it would be expected to happen, as the name implies, maybe only twice every millennium. That is a standard far beyond what other cities’ wastewater systems are designed to withstand.

The Army Corps’ Wethington said the 500-year threshold reflects the fact that storms are getting bigger, and designing a barrier system that could fail under a lesser storm creates undue risk.

Just as frustrating to study critics is the proposal to capture sewer overflows in reservoirs and then pump that water back to treatment plants once the storm subsides. This is not driven by the need to protect the city’s Lake Michigan drinking water supply. Remember, the Army Corps plan would use the tunnels to divert sewage treatment plant discharges and sewer overflows into the Mississippi basin.

This means the plan calls for spending decades to build a reservoir system that would help protect water quality in the Mississippi-bound canals. The same canals where right now, every day, Chicago flushes fecal-laced sewage discharges. The same canals where signs all along their banks warn the water is not safe for human contact.

Wethington said the proposed reservoirs are the result of consultations with state and federal water quality regulators, but he acknowledged these are just “assumptions,” and ones that are subject to change.

“We took a conservative approach by designing the alternatives to be compliant with all applicable laws and regulations,” he said “Further detailed design and discussions with relevant regulatory agencies may refine some of those assumptions.”

Ridgway said the government might decide to build some projects, such as dams, to withstand a 500-year storm to avoid a catastrophic loss of life, but not to keep bacteria out of waterways.

“It is never used for water quality related stuff,” he said. “Ever.”

Some see the proposal to build the exceedingly expensive, time-consuming tunnels and reservoirs as evidence the Army Corps flubbed its responsibility to develop a long-term solution to the immediate Asian carp problem — perhaps intentionally.

“If you actually wanted to solve the problem,” said Thom Cmar, an environmental attorney and Great Lakes advocate, “you would not have gone about it this way.”

Another controversial assumption is the plan’s approximately $2 billion cleanup of contaminated sediments in canal and river segments that lie east of the proposed dams, where water flows would be reversed toward Lake Michigan. The Army Corps maintains this is needed to meet water laws protecting Lake Michigan.

Critics say contaminated sediments in Chicago waterways are an environmental problem whichever way the water flows; their removal, like that of PCB-laden mud in the Fox River near Green Bay, is a separate issue from stopping the carp.

Yet another factor driving the project’s astronomical cost is that Chicago would not be able to send sewer overflows into Lake Michigan.

All Great Lakes cities — even Chicago — use their lake as a safety valve to alleviate street flooding and basement backups by discharging untreated sewage straight into the lakes after big storms hit.

When exceptionally heavy rains hit Chicago, canal navigation locks along the lakeshore are opened to allow storm water and sewer overflows to spill into Lake Michigan instead of onto city streets and into basements, though even with this practice flooding remains a chronic problem in the Chicago area.

Since 2008, Chicago has discharged more than 31 billion gallons of sewage-laced wastewater back into the lake, according to records provided by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

That’s more than three times what Milwaukee dumped over the same time period.

Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, which has a history of suing Milwaukee over its sewer overflows into the lake, said it would be wonderful to eliminate sewer overflows, flooding and contaminated river sediments in Chicago.

But these things are not about stopping a fish.

“The obligation to solve these problems exists already,” he said. “It is not created by the Asian carp.”

Obama’s ‘solution’ to the problem?

The Army Corps’ study outlines eight long-term solutions to stop the migration of more than a dozen invasive species through the Chicago canals. Asian carp are the species everybody is worried about today, but in its study the agency acknowledged the canals are potential pathways for a long list of unwanted species.

The study, in fact, focused on 10 invasive species poised to use the canals to move out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi River basin. The list includes “VHS,” a fish-killing viral disease that has infested the Great Lakes and could wreak havoc on the South’s catfish farms — the very industry implicated in unleashing the Asian carp on North America.

Beyond the two study options that recommend fully plugging the canals, the corps offered lesser solutions — from continuing to rely on leaky electric fish barriers to using the canals’ navigation locks as sterilization chambers.

The Army Corps acknowledges these alternatives don’t provide the same protection as physical separation. That makes them nonstarters for many Great Lakes advocates, though some acknowledge sterilizing lock chambers might provide an interim solution until physical barriers are built.

The separation option that has attracted the most support from Great Lakes advocates calls for two dams several miles inland from the Lake Michigan shoreline. One dam would be located on the Sanitary and Ship Canal just southwest of downtown Chicago and the other would be built on the Calumet-Saginaw Channel that flows from Lake Michigan south of downtown.

The Great Lakes Commission offered a similar separation plan in 2012, though its estimated price tag was $4.25 billion. That price tag included about $1 billion to build cargo transfer stations to accommodate existing barge traffic. Even at more than three times the cost of the Great Lakes Commission plan, the Army Corps plan includes no cargo transfer facilities.

The 2012 commission plan would be so much cheaper because it doesn’t call for building new reservoirs and instead relies on sewage treatment upgrades so discharges could flow into Lake Michigan. To deal with floodwaters, the Great Lakes Commission plan relies on Chicago’s ongoing tunnel and reservoir construction project — known as TARP — that is designed to reduce sewer overflows and chronic floods, much as the deep tunnel system has worked in Milwaukee.

TARP is not expected to be completed until 2029.

To stop the carp and prevent flooding in the meantime, the Great Lakes Commission study calls for installing dams while keeping canal water flowing toward the Mississippi during big rains. These man-made waterfalls would allow the canals to continue to function much as they do today in terms of carrying away unwanted water.

This is a far from perfect solution because invaders from Lake Michigan could still spill over the dams and into the Mississippi. But it does provide a one-way barrier to stop the carp and other organisms from migrating up the Mississippi basin and into Great Lakes.

Once TARP tunnels and reservoirs are completed, along with the commission plan’s sewage treatment upgrades, the dams would become a two-way barrier. Water on the Mississippi basin side of the divide would flow toward the Gulf of Mexico; water on the other side would flow into Lake Michigan — much like the natural hydrology of the area before Chicago’s ditch diggers went to work.

The Army Corps’ physical separation plan offers no such intermediate solution, despite its much longer development time, fueling critics’ arguments that the agency’s plan was designed, as much as anything, to provide ammunition for cargo shippers and others who don’t want dams in their way.

“It could be read,” said the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Henderson, “as a laundry list of why this can’t be done.”

That appears to be exactly how it has been received by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, which argues that the Army Corps’ separation plan “is not economical, that it takes too long, and that it will not solve the issue.”

“The wrong decision will negatively impact water quality and flood mitigation and result in irreparable economic damages to private sector interests while introducing billions of dollars in taxpayer obligations,” said Benjamin Brockschmidt, director of federal affairs for the Illinois chamber.

It is not surprising that business interests have allied against the physical separation scenarios put forward by the Army Corps. Unlike the Great Lakes Commission plan that allowed for cargoes to pass over the barriers, the Army Corps’ assumes cargoes will no longer flow freely on the canals.

The economic consequences of this are pegged in the Army Corps’ study at $252 million annually. That’s well above the $70 million figure put forward by two transportation consultants hired by Michigan as part of that state’s ongoing lawsuit to force the Army Corps to do more to stop the carp.

The courts have so far denied Michigan’s demand for faster action. Hall, the law professor, notes a big reason why is because the Army Corps was presumed to be working on a solution that will solve the problem.

“This process was the Obama administration’s reason why the courts did not need to get involved,” Hall said of the new plan. “This was the administration’s solution.”

Army Corps has own doubts

At the moment, all that is standing between the fish and Lake Michigan is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, about 35 miles downstream from Chicago’s lakeshore.

The federal government has spent about $101 million to design and build the system. It now costs about $12 million to operate and maintain annually — nearly $33,000 per day. It was always intended to be a stopgap measure to stop the fish, but if the Army Corps’ assumptions about physically separating the watersheds hold, it’s going to have to do the job for a quarter-century or more. This is a big problem.

Federal studies using sonar cameras at the barrier last summer revealed fish as big as four inches routinely swimming right through the electrified swath of canal.

The Army Corps’ response to this new information: More studies.

Henderson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said this is essence of the problem — nobody in the federal government is being held accountable for developing a plan with a “laser-like focus” that will actually stop the carp.

“It’s in no one’s job description,” he said.

During a conference call with reporters on Jan. 6, the day the Army Corps’ study was released, Wethington was asked whether the watersheds could be separated in time to prevent an invasion.

He answered with an audible shrug.

“Your guess,” he said, “is probably as good as anyone else’s.”

About this project

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan is investigating threats to the Great Lakes and the effectiveness of government efforts to protect them during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. This is the first of a continuing series of stories

The problem

It seemed like a great idea at the time. Blast a canal to artificially link Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River-bound Des Plaines River, and Chicago could instantly solve its drinking water and sewage treatment problems. The canal reversed the flow of the sewage-carrying Chicago River, sucking the Windy City’s waste toward the Gulf of Mexico and guaranteeing city residents a safe drinking water source in Lake Michigan. Today the canal is recognized as a prime pathway for unwanted species such as Asian carp to colonize the Great Lakes. But the canal is also trouble for rest of the continent, as ecologically devastating Great Lakes invaders such as zebra mussels—which entered through the St. Lawrence Seaway in the ballast tanks of ocean freighters—have used it to fan out across the rest of America.

7. Midwest Energy News, “Beyond Bulbs: Illinois Raises the Bar on Energy Efficiency”

February 10, 2014

By Kari Lydersen

What happens when the “low-hanging fruit” of energy efficiency runs out?

Illinois is about to find out.

After years of heavy reliance on lighting upgrades and other programs, the state’s two largest utilities, Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) and Ameren Illinois, are now coming up short on meeting state-mandated efficiency goals.

However, Illinois Commerce Commission orders released last month show there are still plenty of opportunities to further cut energy consumption, according to clean energy advocates who are part of the stakeholder group involved in the proceedings.

State law says the two utilities and a state agency that oversees public buildings and low-income energy programs must reduce energy demand by two percent each year. Complicating the situation, the utilities cannot spend more than two percent of the rates paid by customers on energy efficiency projects.

The utilities and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) are required to file three-year plans with the Commerce Commission explaining their revised efficiency goals and how they will be met. (See here the Commerce Commission orders for ComEd, Ameren and the DCEO.)

Higher bars

On January 28, the Commerce Commission released its response to the most recent proposals from ComEd and Ameren, demanding that the utilities step up their efficiency commitments and refile their plans in 30 days.

The commission response was informed by input from an official stakeholders group that includes the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC), the Citizens Utility Board and the Illinois Attorney General’s office.

The NRDC, ELPC and CUB are members of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News.

The commission indicated the utilities will have to agree to more ambitious energy efficiency goals than they had proposed, as experts from the ELPC and NRDC explained. The commission also ordered the stakeholders to develop proposals to further guide efficiency improvements.

Rebecca Stanfield, a Chicago-based policy director for the NRDC, said the commission’s orders should mean ComEd has to increase its energy efficiency goals by about 90,000 megawatt hours more per year for three years.

Ameren will have to cut about 30,000 megawatt hours in demand, and the DCEO will have to boost its energy efficiency goals by 41,000 megawatt hours per year.

Ameren and the DCEO also have efficiency targets for natural gas, which must be boosted about 33 percent and 78 percent, respectively, according to the stakeholders’ analysis.

“The [utilities] tend to lowball what they say they can achieve, so a lot of cases are about getting them to commit to targets that are more realistic,” said Stanfield.

More than just CFLs

For several years, utilities have met efficiency requirements by providing or subsidizing compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for their customers. Since these bulbs use much less energy than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, the investment can be counted as energy efficiency spending.

But Stanfield and ELPC senior attorney Robert Kelter noted that CFLs have become commonplace now, with many customers realizing they are the more economical choice even without subsidies. And federal requirements are also kicking in that phase out production of inefficient incandescent bulbs.

Some utilities have given themselves more credit than they deserve for investing in CFLs, clean energy advocates say. But Stanfield and Kelter said ComEd and Ameren are already moving away from heavy reliance on light-bulb programs to meet their energy efficiency requirements.

“ComEd and Ameren have done an admirable job of reducing their reliance on discounting CFLs,” said Kelter. “ComEd and Ameren are only taking credit for about 40 percent of savings that bulbs generate. They’re still discounting them and selling them, but not adding it to their bottom line the way they used to, which we think is a very good thing.”

“ComEd and Ameren are really leaders,” he continued. “In Michigan, Ohio and Iowa, (utilities) are still spending a lot of resources just discounting CFLs. In Illinois we’re moving beyond that and moving into the next generation of (energy efficiency) programs.”

Smart appliances

The ELPC and NRDC are urging ComEd and Ameren to promote energy efficiency through consumer education programs regarding smart meters and smart appliances that cut wasteful energy use. The commerce commission said the utilities should embrace such programs, and the stakeholders should help craft and oversee them.

The stakeholders are asking the utilities to invest in promoting smart appliances and thermostats that adjust automatically, for example, so that a space isn’t unnecessarily heated or cooled when no one is home. The stakeholders want the utilities to help customers find and buy appliances that fit in with the smart meter and smart grid overhauls already being implemented.

“We wanted a program educating customers on their options out there and working with manufacturers and retailers to promote these products and identify them – so if you go in the store and see a thermostat that would communicate with your smart meter, it’s labeled properly,” and you know to buy it, Kelter said. “It’s a way of jumpstarting a competitive market.”

The utilities could offer discounts on smart appliances like they have with CFLs. But that’s not necessarily the answer, the experts say.

“Just because you discount a smart thermostat doesn’t mean someone will actually program and use it,” said Kelter.

Multiple routes to efficiency

The cap limiting energy efficiency spending to no more than two percent of rate payments was written into the law to protect ratepayers and to make sure utilities didn’t spend too much money on programs that were not ultimately worth it.

But today advocates are generally pleased with how the utilities’ energy efficiency efforts have played out, and there’s significant desire for utilities to spend more than the cap amount on energy efficiency.

Since 2013, state law – efficiency advocates say – requires electric utilities to submit proposals for additional energy efficiency programs that enable spending above the cap. The law requires the electric utilities to present proposals for cost-effective energy efficiency programs to the Illinois Power Agency, which then includes the programs as part of their portfolio of electricity purchased on behalf of the two utilities.

The Commission’s orders issued last week capitalize on that requirement and include directives that require the utilities to shift the tried-and-true CFL and behavior modification programs to the IPA portfolio, thereby freeing up significant dollars to invest in more innovative programs that produce deeper, longer-lived savings, the efficiency advocates say.

ComEd also can spend on projects under its Smart Grid program and other areas that are not considered energy efficiency programs, hence not subject to the spending cap.

For example the Commerce Commission ordered the utilities to do a “voltage optimization feasibility study,” which Stanfield and Kelter said could mean significant energy savings for customers without even changing their behavior.

“Essentially if utilities do a better job balancing electricity put on the grid it will help customers reduce the end use in their homes,” said Kelter. “If you do voltage optimization right the appliances use less electricity when they’re plugged in.”

While such a study would mean substantial gains in energy efficiency, it can and should be funded as part of grid maintenance, not subject to the cap, Stanfield said. The commission also pushed this approach, which could be reflected in the new Smart Grid plan that ComEd is required to file by April 1.

Stanfield said that under its energy efficiency programs subject to the rate cap, ComEd is reducing energy demand by about 0.8 percent. When the programs that the utility runs under the IPA procurement process are added in, efficiency gains reach about 1.4 percent, she said. That is still below the goal of two percent demand reduction, but it shows the importance of finding creative ways to invest in resources that will lower electric costs across the board.

Looking up

The stakeholders also pointed to other aspects of the Commerce Commission orders that give them hope. The commission ordered Ameren and the DCEO to do a study of energy use and waste at large data centers, run by private companies and the state government, respectively. And the commission approved a pilot plan for the DCEO to incentivize combined heat and power (CHP) – the use of waste heat to generate energy – at public buildings.

The commission also asked Ameren to continue to expand an “on-bill financing” program where customers can finance their own energy efficiency overhauls essentially through a loan from the utility paid back with their energy savings. This program should be instituted through the IPA procurement process, the commission said, so that it would not count toward the rate cap.

“Weatherizing a home costs $3,000 to $5,000 – a utility can’t just give you that money,” noted Kelter. “There has to be sharing. The key is to make it easier for customers to finance it through their utility bill.”

Along with developing and funding energy efficiency programs, the stakeholders and the Commerce Commission also have stressed that meaningful evaluation is key. The Attorney General’s office has been involved in these proceedings in part to oversee the evaluation components – which are also paid for by ratepayers.

The commission asked the stakeholder group to come up with a statewide evaluation manual “so that the utilities are all playing by the same rules,” as senior assistant attorney general Karen Lusson said.

“The commission said you have to do a better job in three areas,” said Stanfield, summing up the commission’s orders. “One, save as much energy as you can with the budget, including actually spending the budget. Two, do more innovative programs. And three, you have to consistently evaluate the results and make sure what you claim you saved you really saved.”

Lusson noted that deciding how to allocate resources for evaluation is a challenge given caps on evaluation spending under Illinois law. Newer programs might be evaluated sooner and more rigorously, she noted, and programs run by different utilities and agencies must be evaluated in a uniform way.

“We need to make sure programs are truly cost effective and that we’re ensuring ratepayers are getting what they’re paying for,” she said. “We don’t want to spend money on programs that are not working.”

8. Treehugger.com, “What’s Illinois Going to Do With 1.8 Million Mercury Thermostats?”

February 6, 2014

By Katherine Martinko

The state of Illinois has a real problem on its hands. A revealing article, posted on the National Resources Defense Council staff blog, explains that there are approximately 1.8 million mercury thermostats still being used in homes and businesses throughout Illinois. (The total estimated number of thermostats is 7.7 million.) The thermostats that contain mercury are older models, mostly round or square – the type that many of us would recognize from childhood.

Each one contains four grams of mercury, which means that, collectively, these 1.8 million thermostats contain over eight tons of mercury.

As author David Lennet explains in the article, mercury poses a threat to the environment and to personal health as soon as an old thermostat is disposed of: “If the glass ampoule containing the mercury is broken or crushed during waste handling or disposal, the mercury will be released into the environment, since mercury is volatile at room temperature.” Eventually mercury ends up in waterways, contaminating fish and their predators. Mercury continues to travel up the food chain, which is why there’s a widespread fish consumption state advisory throughout Illinois.

Children must be protected against mercury. It is a powerful neurotoxin that affects child development. Scientists have estimated that thousands of babies are born each year in the U.S. with mercury levels that are associated with loss of IQ. As a result, mercury thermostat collection is part of the Great Lakes protection strategy.

Illinois has tried to encourage homeowners and renovators to use the ‘Thermostat Recycling Corporation,” which was a state-created, non-profit group, but it was not very successful. Now the state is taking firmer action in order to avoid the scary consequences of releasing those eight tons of mercury into the environment. In 2010, the state enacted the mandatory ‘Illinois Mercury Thermostat Collection Act,’ setting collection goals that Lennett describes as “modest” – 15,000 thermostats annually for 2012-2014. At the end of 2014, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) will set new collection goals for 2015-2020.

Collection goals are a good idea, but researchers don’t seem hopeful. An estimated 37 percent of the mercury thermostats will come off the walls by 2020, but that leaves many still unaccounted for. Since the law expires in 2020, and there’s no guarantee of it being extended, the IEPA has a big job ahead, trying to collect as many thermostats as possible in the next few years.

The problem is that many people don’t care, perhaps because they don’t understand the implications of tossing an old thermostat in a Dumpster. It would be a good idea for contractors and planners to get on board, as well as the municipal offices that provide building permits. Perhaps the state government could hire companies to do replacements, and provide basic new thermostats free of charge. Word of mouth and education can also help. If you see an old thermostat in someone’s home, please mention that safe disposal is necessary.

1. The Fiscal Times, “Keystone Pipeline: Job Creator or Environmental Menace?”

February 4, 2014

By Eric Pianin

The Keystone XL Pipeline cleared another major hurdle last week and in the process rekindled a long-simmering dispute over the potential economic benefit of the $54 billion TransCanada project to the U.S. economy.

The petroleum industry, labor groups and many Republican and Democratic lawmakers who favor the Pipeline insist it would generate tens of thousands of well-paying jobs while pumping billions of dollars into a still struggling U.S. economy.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Washington Post last week, “We think that anything that’s going to create jobs, help the country and do it in an environmentally sound way ought to be done.” American Petroleum Institute officials say approval of the full pipeline could “support 42,000 jobs” and “put $2 billion in workers’ pockets during its construction.”

Environmental groups that have battled the project for the past five years say the economic benefit has been vastly overblown, and that once the pipeline is built, there would be fewer than 50 permanent jobs connected with the pipeline in the U.S. and Canada.

Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said derisively that the number of construction jobs generated by Keystone would be comparable to the construction crew of a “medium-sized shopping mall.”

“It’s not a national jobs policy,” Swift said in an interview Monday. “The argument that Keystone XL is something that needs to happen to put Americans back to work is really overblown. We’re not looking at a jobs-creating vehicle of any significance.”

NRDC, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have vigorously opposed the pipeline – warning of the dangers of oil spills, serious damage to wildlife and ground water, and worsening climate change.

According to one estimate the 830,000 barrel a day would add 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere over its 50-year estimated lifespan.

Last Friday, the State Department issued a much anticipated final environmental assessment – one that boosted the case for industry proponents. The report found that the proposed 875-mile pipeline between Alberta, Canada and U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast probably wouldn’t alter global green-house gas emissions.

That’s because even if President Obama were to side with environmentalists and permanently block the pipeline construction, the Canadians would almost certainly continue to develop their oil sands and ship the crude oil across the United States by rail.

“We believe this is the job project that has been sitting on the shelf for way too many years,” said Sabrina Fang, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group. “The president’s own State Department has said in many reports now that this project will create more than 42,000 jobs to build the pipeline – that’s indirect and direct jobs.”

“And this is a great infrastructure project that will enhance our energy security,” she added. “The fact of the matter is – I don’t think many people know – we can be North American self-sufficient in liquid fuels in about a decade if we get more Canadian energy, and combine that with our own U.S. production.”

Almost from the beginning, the tar sand industry has been pitching its pet project as a national jobs generator. In the early going, industry proponents boasted that the Keystone XL would create “hundreds of thousands” of jobs, Swift recalled, while some in the news media speculated that it might bring as many as a million jobs.

Later, oil companies, the API, many politicians and a few unions who urged the State Department to approve the pipeline framed Keystone XL as an economic game changer. They claimed it would be the source of 20,000 “direct jobs” – meaning primarily construction workers – and 108,000 “indirect jobs,” which could mean anything from suppliers to restaurants feeding crew members.

API also cites numbers from the Canadian Energy Research Institute that the pipeline could “support” 117,000 new American jobs associated with oil sands development by 2035.

Last August, Obama pooh-poohed the industry’s claims, saying that in a workforce of more than 150 million Americans, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would be a “blip relative to the need.”

“We’ve seen people mock these job numbers,” Fang, the spokesperson for API, said. “But the fact of the matter is, a job is a job. These are good-paying jobs and if you want to talk about construction work, all construction jobs are temporary jobs.”

2. New Republic, “Evidence Is Mounting that Fracking Causes Birth Defects”

February 5, 2014

By Nora Caplan-Bricker

In his recent State of the Union address, President Barack Obama praised natural gas as “the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change” and vowed to “cut red tape” to help business invest in it. But two studies released this winter bolster long-held fears that the extraction process, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, presents serious dangers for human health—and in particular, the health of the unborn.

One of the studies was conducted in Colorado, where some cities have sought a moratorium on fracking and industry has pushed back, by public health scientists from the Colorado School of Public Health and Brown University. The central finding is a strong correlation between proximity to fracking wells and congenital heart defects. As the number and nearness of wells to a pregnant woman’s home went up, so did the likelihood that her baby would develop a heart problem. Strikingly, “Births to mothers in the most exposed tertile [an exposure level equal to 125 wells within mile of the home] had a 30% greater prevalence of CHDs [congenital heart defects]…than births to mothers with no wells within a 10-mile radius of their residence.”

The authors also saw some evidence that fracking wells upped the incidence of neurological defects, though only at high levels of exposure. They looked for a correlation with oral clefts, low birth weight, and premature birth, but did not find that fracking made them more likely.

A study in Pennsylvania, another state rich in natural gas, had different but worrisome findings. (Authored by researchers from Princeton, Columbia, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is not yet peer-reviewed or publicly available but was presented in January.) As Mark Whitehouse of Bloomberg View wrote last month, “They found that proximity to fracking increased the likelihood of low birth weight by more than half, from about 5.6 percent to more than 9 percent. The chances of a low Apgar score, a summary measure of the health of newborn children, roughly doubled, to more than 5 percent.”

Although fracking has frequently been linked to water contamination, Whitehouse notes that drinking chemicals does not seem to pose the greatest risk during pregnancy. “The researchers found similar results for mothers who had access to regularly monitored public water systems and mothers who relied on the kind of private wells that fracking is most likely to affect,” he writes. “Another possibility is that infants are being harmed by air pollution associated with fracking activity.” Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a public health scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, points out that prior studies have linked the ambient presence of chemicals released during natural gas extraction, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and benzene, to birth defects.

Colorado’s pro-fracking administration and industry groups have already rejected the critical study—as conservative outlets like The Daily Caller were quick to point out. Larry Wolk, executive director and chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, discounted the findings because “many factors known to contribute to birth defects were ignored”—even though the authors acknowledged alcohol use, smoking, and myriad other potential “covariates.”

“I would tell pregnant women and mothers who live, or who at-the-time-of-their-pregnancy lived, in proximity to a gas well not to rely on this study as an explanation of why one of their children might have had a birth defect,” Wolk huffed. But as studies like these continue to emerge, their warnings will be increasingly difficult to ignore.

3. Daily Caller, “Former Obama official: Fracking has not ‘created an environmental problem for anyone’”

February 5, 2014

By Michael Bastasch

Despite accusation by environmentalists, former Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar admits that hydraulic fracturing is safe and has not “created an environmental problem for anyone.”

“From my opinion and from what I’ve seen… I believe hydraulic fracking is, in fact, safe,” said Salazar, who left the Obama administration last year. “We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone. We need to make sure that story is told.”

Salazar also said that he thought President Barack Obama should approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been the epicenter of an environmentalist crusade for more than five years.

“At the end of the day, we are going to be consuming that oil,” Salazar said. “So is it better for us to get the oil from our good neighbor from the north, or to be bringing it from some place in the Middle East?”

Salazar’s remarks come after Obama touted the benefits of increased oil and natural gas production in his State of the Union Address. Booming production will make the U.S. the world’s largest oil and gas producer this year, beating out Russia and Saudi Arabia. This was made possible by fracking.

Fracking involves injecting water, sand and chemical mixtures more than a mile underground to extract oil and gas from previously unreachable shale formations. Fracking has turned states like North Dakota and Pennsylvania into energy powerhouses and dramatically brought down power costs for households and businesses.

“Cheap energy — the revolution that’s going on in America’s heartland on energy — is making sure that America now has a manufacturing renaissance,” Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff told CNBC’s Squawk Box.

“Washington is not talking about this,” Emanuel added. “The biggest revolution equal to the Internet is the energy independence in the United States.”

Environmentalists, however, contend that fracking can contaminate water supplies and harms air quality — though the drilling practice has never been linked to water contamination. Environmentalists have also contended that fracking can cause earthquakes and even birth defects.

“People living in neighboring communities deserve answers about the dangers and protections for their health and safety,” writes Miriam Rotkin-Ellman with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And our country must stop pursuing reckless, ever-expanding fracking unless, and until, we can ensure the health and safety of all Americans.”

Salazar brushed aside environmental activists concerns and touted how fracking is bringing the country closer to energy independence and more energy security.

“We’re creating a secure world for ourselves and for our children,” Salazar said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Ohio or Pennsylvania or California or right here at this convention in Houston,” he added. “Letting people know this kind of information… is very important for us.”

4. The Associated Press, “Groups: Storm Runoff Pollutes N.J. Waterways”

February 5, 2014

By Lindsay Abrams

Nine environmental groups are asking New Jersey officials to do a better job of limiting water pollution caused by storm runoff.

State permits for municipal sewer systems, highways, developed sites and other structures should have tougher standards before they are up for renewal at the end of February, the groups said in a petition to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The petition calls for stronger requirements to capture polluted runoff using “green infrastructure” such as roadside plantings and permeable pavement.

The groups pointed to this week’s storms was an example of how pollutants regularly make their way into New Jersey waterways. As rain and snow melt, they wash oil and grease, pet waste, fertilizer, pesticides, bacteria, trash, and other pollutants into waterways, the groups said.

The state’s permits comply with the federal Clean Water Act and include standards that exceed what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires, said Larry Hajna, a DEP spokesman. He said the department will meet with various groups as it updates its stormwater permit program.

The groups are the American Littoral Society, Clean Ocean Action, Hackensack Riverkeeper, NY/NJ Baykeeper, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, Pinelands Preservation Alliance, Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, New Jersey Environmental Lobby, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

5. NY Daily News, “Harlem Billboard Asks Commuters to Join Battle Against New LG Electronics Headquarters in New Jersey”

February 4, 2014

By Simone Weichselbaum

A new billboard towering over the West Side Highway in Harlem is calling on city commuters to join the ongoing battle against a technology giant in New Jersey.

The message — “Don’t Let LG Spoil the Palisades” — has greeted drivers near the W. 125th St. exit since Friday, alerting readers to check out #stopLG on Twitter.

LG Electronics is slated to put up a 143-foot-tall building in Englewood Cliffs, which sits directly across from Fort Tryon Park in Inwood. Critics charge that the structure would ruin the majestic views of the Palisades — a 700-acre plot of land gifted to the Garden State by the famed Rockefeller family in 1933.

“Commuters should learn that his historic park is threatened,” said Mark Izeman, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, part of the Protect the Palisades coalition.

The non-profit put up the billboard and plans to keep it there for the next month. The group erected a similar sign in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show in January, asking gadget enthusiasts to back their cause.

A lawsuit filed to block the building’s construction has delayed LG’s plans. New Jersey officials had approved the project, but opponents balked, saying the structure is too tall and its scale should be reduced.

“Bikers and motorists need to know that if this building is built, it will dramatically mar the Palisades,” said Izeman.

Meanwhile, the billboard is already turning some powerful heads.

State Sen. Adriano Espaillat (D-Washington Heights) applauded the extra-large poster.

LG’s proposed office tower would be more than just an unwelcome eyesore, Espaillat said. The addition to the Engelwood skyline could also do damage to upper Manhattan’s bank account.

“This project will damage our tourism sector and hurt local businesses,” Espaillat said. “Visitors come from around the world to see the Cloisters and witness one of our last unspoiled views in the city.”

6. Alaska Dispatch, “California Drought: Why Jerry Brown Doesn’t Want US House to Help”

February 6, 2014

By Daniel B. Wood

Gov. Jerry Brown of California is trying to fend off an attempt from Washington to come to the rescue of the state’s worst-ever drought.

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives is set to vote on legislation that would ease environmental measures to let more water flow to California farmers, whose acreage produces fully half of America’s fruits and vegetables. The bill, called The Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act, was introduced by several members of the state’s GOP delegation.

The vote is slated to come just five days after the California Department of Water Resources announced that State Water Project customers – primarily water districts that serve about 25 million people statewide and irrigate about 750,000 acres of farmland – will get no water this year because of dry conditions.

The House bill would roll back many environmental protections for several endangered species; end long-term efforts to restore water flows, and salmon runs, to the San Joaquin River; and replace state water and endangered species laws. The intent is to allow more water to be pumped from the Sacramento Delta – the giant sponge in the state’s midsection that is fed by rivers flowing down from the Sierra Nevada mountains – to farmers in the fertile San Joaquin Valley.

“This bill ends the madness of putting fish before families and creates a solution to ensure consistent water deliveries for our communities when Mother Nature blesses us with precipitation,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California said Monday, in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. He created the bill with fellow GOP Reps. David Valadao and Devin Nunes. “Any other proposed idea to ameliorate the effects of today’s drought would not be felt for over a dozen years. Our communities cannot wait,” Mr. McCarthy said.

But Governor Brown – along with US Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both of California – opposes the bill on grounds that a host of drought-relief ideas is already percolating in the state, and that it sets a bad precedent for the federal government to intrude.

The House measure is “an unwelcome and divisive intrusion into California’s efforts to manage this severe crisis,” Brown said in a statement. “It would override state laws and protections, and mandate that certain water interests come out ahead of others. It falsely suggests the promise of water relief when that is simply not possible given the scarcity of water supplies. [The bill] would interfere with our ability to respond effectively and flexibly to the current emergency, and would re-open old water wounds undermining years of progress toward reaching a collaborative long-term solution to our water needs.”

Senator Feinstein, likewise, is critical of the House bill, saying it “is another irresponsible proposal that puts politics ahead of the needs of California, and candidly, it’s very disappointing. The bill is nothing more than a recycled version of legislation from 2011, and it is profoundly dangerous for California. …[It] undermines state law related to Bay-Delta restoration and endangered species. It overrides the court-approved San Joaquin River Settlement Agreement, which all parties involved still agree with. And it ends any possibility of a balanced solution to restore the Bay [and] Delta.”

Many environmental groups have mobilized in opposition.

“The fact of matter is that the drought is to blame for our low water, not environmental laws,” says Steve Fleischli, water program director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The governor is rightly critical of a bunch of ideas that would be nothing but divisive and not at all proactive in solving the problem.”

Some analysts say for the state to accept the House bill would be to set dangerous precedent in other matters.

“This is one of the firmest statements I’ve ever seen Jerry Brown make, and I don’t think it’s an overreaction because of the precedent it would set,” says Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento. “What would that signal to Washington about issues such as transportation and air quality? It’s a state’s rights issue, not a federal issue. It ignores a lot of thoughtful discussion about rationing and voluntary water use, and it would really annoy people.”

Some agriculture groups support the House bill.

Western Growers Association President and CEO Tom Nassif said in a statement he believes a “bipartisan agreement is necessary and possible.”

“The drought is doing great damage to farmers, farmworkers and many other people who are part of the most productive agriculture state in the country,” Mr. Nassif said. “Federal regulatory decisions made last year in the delta made this situation much worse by failing to pump and store more than 800,000 acre feet of winter runoff.”

Brown, for his part, wants the state to adopt laws to fund projects on drought preparedness, efficiency, water recycling, and that would ensure safe drinking water. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D) is crafting a bill to set a July 1 deadline for state agencies to approve water recycling and stormwater reuse projects.

“California is experiencing an unprecedented dry period and shortage of water for its citizens, local governments, agriculture, and other uses,” the draft bill says. The measures, amendments to a Steinberg bill that is already pending, would expedite so-called “shovel ready” projects that can bring relief, whether this is the last year of drought or just another year in a much longer drought. The proposal would appropriate $11 million of existing state and federal funds for clean-drinking-water programs and direct the State Water Resources Control Board to speed up spending that money to help poor and disadvantaged communities.

Brown, who is up for reelection this year, will have his work cut out for him to craft an emergency drought-management plan that the many interest groups – city officials, farmers, water districts, and environmentalists – can at least live with, if not endorse.

“The conflict reflects the difference between the perceived pro-environmental bias of the state’s Democrat-dominated government and the perceived pro-business bias of the Republican[-led US] House,” says Michael Shires a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. “To find the right balance, the state will have to find a way to make sure the business interests of the state are adequately represented in an atmosphere where environmental interest groups hold the best cards at the negotiating table.”

7. Mashable, “Olympics Not Likely to Be Carbon Neutral Despite Russian Promise”

February 3, 2014

By Colin Daileda

The Russian government has its sights set on the most environmentally friendly Olympics in history — Games so sustainable that officials and media alike are chattering about the possibility that they won’t leave a carbon footprint.

Carbon neutrality is a lofty (some say unattainable) goal that would mean all emissions related to construction, waste, planes, refrigerants and much more would be counteracted because the Russian government had found a way to offset them. And whether it’s been by design or by more conservative claims blown out of proportion, the idea that these Olympics will be carbon neutral is now cropping up around the globe.

The Sochi Olympics, which take place from Feb. 7 to Feb. 23, would be the first to go carbon neutral if that were the case, as this tweet from the head of the Russian Olympic committee suggests:

As far as realizing that goal, officials have announced plans for carbon neutral construction, and the government partnered with the Dow Chemical Company, which has promised to neutralize transportation-related emissions. Government officials have promised to make factories more environmentally friendly and to refurbish construction-ravaged forests with new trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Neutrality is notion with more than a few holes, though, and environmentalists are casting doubt on both the idea of total carbon neutrality as well as the Russian government’s more sober promises around transportation and construction.

“There’s almost no chance these Olympics are going to be carbon neutral,” Robert Engelman, president of the WorldWatch Institute, an environmental research organization, told Mashable.

Allen Hershkowitz, Ph.D., told Mashable something similar. He’s a senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council, which advises organizations such as Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association on their environmental policies.

“Carbon neutral is an aspirational concept,” Hershkowitz said. “It should never be used in a descriptive way.”

How could they be so sure?

According to Hershkowitz, the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during construction and the Games themselves is practically incalculable, because the gas leaks into the air in so many ways. How can you completely offset something you can’t reliably measure? He then rattled off a series of questions that the Russian government has not publicly addressed but, he says, must be answered before it can claim any kind of carbon neutrality.

Is it going to offset the leakage of refrigerants? How much waste is being consumed, and what kind of materials is that waste made of? Is the food waste going to be composted? Is the uneaten prepared food going to be donated? What kind of chemicals will workers use to clean facilities? What kind of fuel are the construction vehicles using? What kind of fuel do the snow-making machines use?

On top of all that, there are the planes. Dow Chemical, the “official carbon partner of Sochi,” has said it will offset travel emissions, which are estimated to hit around 160,000 tons.

Hershkowitz said this is actually one of the easier emissions impacts to measure, because it is possible to approximate how much CO2 seeps out of planes. Below is a chart that does just that, and here is the full-screen version.

The graphic shows how much carbon dioxide is emitted when an average plane flies to Sochi from any nation participating in the Olympics, though the actual number of flights will be a lot more than one per country.

(Graphic)

Russian officials and Dow Chemical will supposedly attempt to offset Olympic emissions in part by upgrading energy-producing facilities with “energy efficient and low-carbon technologies in the areas of infrastructure, industry and agriculture,” according to the company. The upgrades are said to include the ability for many facilities to run on natural gas, and Dow Chemical also plans to help restore damaged Russian ecosystems by supporting the Bikin Tiger Conservation Project.

Doubts, however, surround these plans because they are both vague and likely to take years. Environmental groups also say committees for previous Olympic Games, such as London in 2012, had been more forthcoming about what carbon dioxide emissions they could measure and what they could offset.

Plus, the Russian government has not been particularly reliable in this area. It also promised to not illegally dump construction waste, which can result in carbon emissions depending on what the waste is made of, but construction companies have been caught doing so several times. Officials have also said little about emissions that will come from food waste, construction waste, chemicals, refrigerants, and more.

And environmentalists continue to fret over how much construction has had to be done in the wetlands of Sochi (as opposed to the urban sprawl of previous Olympic venues). Russian officials have had to build more and unearth more ground than they did in London or Vancouver, and experts are saying such efforts have released more carbon dioxide into the air than past Olympics.

Mashable asked Russian officials some of these questions to see how much of the Olympics’ carbon footprint they had measured. But no one replied to multiple emails, and the Russian government has not released any detailed plans that cover which carbon dioxide emissions it has measured and which it can offset. That’s in line with its response, or lack thereof, to environmental inquiries from publications such as Outside, the Associated Press and others.

Even if the Russian government won’t engage environmentalists on its strategy to offset the Games’ carbon dioxide, they would like it to at least publish some specific details about how it plans to go about it.

“I’m not trying to attack Russia,” Hershkowitz said. “I’m just saying [transparency] will affect what we know about the environmental integrity of the Olympics.”

But that is not appearing likely, so environmental experts are left with guesswork.

“My gut feeling is the organizers will try to make it carbon neutral just by buying offsets,” Igor Chestin, head of the World Wildlife Fund in Russia, told Mashable.

That could mean planting trees, purchasing energy from a wind farm, or outfitting more buildings with the ability to run on natural gas.

“One way people claim carbon neutrality is by saying they will offset emissions,” Engelman said. But the problem with offsets, he continued, is environmentalists aren’t sure how much carbon dioxide they cancel out, or how to measure it.

One of the most common ways to try to offset emissions, for example, is to plant trees, which consume carbon dioxide to live. But how many new trees do you plant to offset a certain amount of carbon dioxide, considering the difficulty of calculating emissions in the first place? On top of that, forests die, burn down and get bulldozed, so there’s no guarantee they consume the amount of gas for which they were intended.

“Carbon neutral is a kind of sustainababble,” Engelman concluded. “It’s just next to impossible to be carbon neutral in this world.”

8. Grist, “Will Obama do the Right Thing on Ozone and Smog this Time Around?”

February 6, 2014

By John Upton

Barack Obama has been just as bad as George W. Bush when it comes to curbing ground-level ozone pollution. But soon he’ll have another chance to get ozone regulations right.

Ozone rocks when it’s up in the stratosphere, protecting us from UV rays and skin cancer. But when it’s at ground level, where it’s the main component of smog, it can cause respiratory infections, asthma, and other ailments. Ground-level ozone pollution is produced when sunlight triggers reactions involving the chemicals that are spewed out of factories and tailpipes. Naturally, oil companies and other polluting industries don’t want to be required to rein in this pollution.

In 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, the EPA finalized new rules on ground-level ozone, allowing 75 parts per billion in the air. Clean air advocates and enviros had called for a lower limit of 60 ppb, saying it was needed to protect public health. In 2011, the EPA was poised to tighten the standard, but the Obama White House cravenly quashed the effort, fearing backlash from industry the year before a presidential election. At the time, John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council called this “the most outrageous environmental offense of the Obama administration.”

Under the requirements of the Clean Air Act, the EPA was supposed to revise its ozone rules in 2013, but it missed the deadline. Now it’s being sued by environmental and health groups for its tardiness.

As EPA slowly moves toward crafting new ozone rules, its experts are taking another look at the science. And — surprise, surprise — those experts have found that the current Bush-era rules could be exposing Americans to dangerously high levels of ozone pollution.

From E&E Publishing:

In a draft document released [Monday], U.S. EPA staff say that based on available scientific evidence, the agency should consider tightening its current ozone standard to a level as low as 60 parts per billion. …

In a separate health and risk exposure assessment, agency staff says that setting a standard in the 60-70 ppb range would result in reduced child exposure, lower hospitalization and mortality rates, and reduced risk of lower lung function.

The documents are meant to inform agency scientists and policymakers ahead of a meeting of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee at the end of March. Following that meeting, the agency is expected to release a proposal, although the administration has not specified a timeline.

As Bloomberg BNA reports reports, “A stricter ozone standard would lead to new requirements for emissions controls on sources that emit nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which contribute to ozone formation, including industrial facilities, power plants and vehicles.”

Now that he doesn’t have to worry about reelection, will Obama endorse stronger ozone rules? We’ll be watching.

1. New York Times, “Government Said to Undervalue Coal Leases”

February 5, 2014

By Dan Frosch

DENVER — The federal coal leasing program run by the Bureau of Land Management operates without sufficient oversight or a consistent means of ensuring that fair prices are paid for the leases, a report released on Tuesday said.

<a href=”http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/660666.txt” target=”_blank”>The report</a>, compiled by the <a href=”http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/government_accountability_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org” target=”_blank”>Government Accountability Office</a>, focused largely on the Mountain West, where coal companies have leased land from the federal government for decades. It noted that most coal lease sales since 1990 had only one bidder, and said that the bureau did not always adequately assess the market value of the leases or document reasons for accepting bids below that value.

Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who had requested the review in his previous position as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, called for a temporary suspension of new coal leases in light of the report.

Mr. Markey said that based on an examination of the report, as well as coal leasing documents that have not been made public, recent leases could potentially have yielded an additional $200 million in revenue. The G.A.O. report did not address how much money might have been lost.

“These noncompetitive practices are costing taxpayers from Massachusetts to Oregon, benefiting just a few coal companies who may be leasing public coal resources at bargain basement prices,” Mr. Markey said in a statement.

Interior Department officials said they agreed with the report’s recommendation that the Land Management Bureau be required to expand the methods it uses to assess the value of coal leases. They said the bureau was already making changes intended to strengthen the program.

“The department remains fully committed to ensuring that taxpayers receive a fair return from the development of coal resources on public lands,” said Jessica Kershaw, an Interior Department spokeswoman.

Last year, a report by the Interior Department’s inspector general said that the Land Management Bureau was not abiding by its own rules in assessing the value of minerals beneath federal land, and that undervalued leases were costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

At the time, Interior officials said they agreed with many of the report’s findings and promised to review the leasing program and make changes.

The National Mining Association said the new G.A.O. review showed that the program did not need wholesale change anymore, but more consistency in how the program is run.

The group added that federal coal leases generated $1.2 billion in the 2012 fiscal year.

“There is no basis in this report for claims that there are significant deficiencies in the federal coal lease program that deprive taxpayers of fair value from coal mined on federal lands,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the mining association.

But environmental groups said the new review showed that problems with the program had not been fully addressed, and they echoed Mr. Markey’s call for coal leases to be halted.

“With billions of tons of federal coal in line for lease to big coal companies, Interior needs to push the pause button on any further sales until this deeply flawed program is fixed,” said Theo Spencer, a senior advocate in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program.

The vast majority of the nation’s coal leases are in the mineral-rich Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming. Leases there have drawn sharp criticism over the years from some members of Congress and environmental groups, who say the government has offered the land to mining companies for prices below market value.

2. Reuters, “U.S. not protecting taxpayers on coal exports -report”

February 4, 2014

By Patrick Rucker

Feb 4 (Reuters) – U.S. officials are not doing enough to protect the interests of taxpayers in regard to the millions of tons of <a href=”http://www.reuters.com/sectors/industries/overview?industryCode=4&lc=int_mb_1001″ target=”_blank”>coal</a> being mined from federal land and exported abroad, a government report concluded on Tuesday.

The Interior Department doles out leases and collects royalties when miners tap federal land in coal-rich regions such as the Powder River Basin in eastern Montana and Wyoming.

And while most of that fuel has gone to feed domestic furnaces, government officials have largely ignored the increasing amount that is exported, and taxpayers could be losing out as a result, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said in the report.

Coal exports are generally sold at higher prices than coal sold domestically.

“(The Bureau of Land Management) considers exports to a limited extent,” the GAO said, referring to the agency that is responsible for getting the best deal possible for taxpayers on coal sales.

Wyoming officials have only considered the value of export markets with “generic boilerplate statements about the possibility of coal exports,” the report stated.

Officials from Colorado and other states told the GAO, “they did not consider exports when estimating fair market value because there were few or no coal exports.”

More than 6 million tons of coal were exported from Colorado mines in 2012, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, and about half of that was sold by brokers and traders.

All of the 9 million tons of coal exported from Montana that year was sold through a trading desk.

Early last year, former Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar ordered an investigation into whether miners were wrongly using affiliated brokers to skirt royalty payments.

U.S. taxpayers are due a 12.5 percent royalty on coal sales from federal land, but officials want to know whether miners are clearing their sales at artificially low prices.

The Interior Department said that it is committed to protecting taxpayers, but declined to comment on its investigation into possible royalty shortfalls on coal exports.

COAL REGION

A major hub of coal production is the Powder River Basin, where the black rock can run in 10-story seams and the low-sulfur content has been favored.

Several export terminals are being planned for the Pacific Northwest as a gateway for Powder River Basin coal shipments to Asia at a time when domestic coal demand has slackened.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, who originally called for the investigation into royalties, said he would continue to seek answers about whether taxpayers are being protected on export sales.

“This is an issue that deserves time and attention,” he said in a statement. “I plan to dig deeper.”

Arch Coal Inc, Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy are all leading miners on federal land.

Comments from the mine companies were not immediately available.

“There’s been no meaningful progress to determine if miners are paying their fair share of royalties, but that doesn’t mean people are going to stop pushing,” said Theo Spencer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group advocating clean energy that has sued the Interior Department to release documents on how it values the fuel.

POOR RECORDS

Taxpayers have a stake in coal mined from federal land even before the fuel is sold.

Interior officials organize auctions of tracts and are supposed to seek a “fair market value,” but the standards for those sales are often irregular, the GAO said.

Officials were found to “not consistently document the rationale for accepting bids that were initially below fair market value,” the report stated.

When using comparable sales prices to find a benchmark value, the report says, Interior has used past sales that were five years old when the market was different.

3. ClimateWire, “Key Calif. Senator drought relief bill, seeks to use cap-and-trade funds”

February 4, 2014

By Anne C. Mulkern

A top California Democrat is preparing legislation that would have the state take immediate steps to deal with the drought, including funding projects on preparedness, efficiency, water recycling and ensuring safe drinking water.

Among the finance sources it proposes to use is $40 million from the revenues generated by the state’s cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. The money would go toward programs that the bill says would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. State law requires that the funds further the goals of A.B. 32, the state’s landmark climate law.

State President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D) is developing the draft drought bill in consultation with state Assembly leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown (D), said Steinberg spokesman Rhys Williams. Both chambers of the Legislature are controlled by Democrats.

“California is experiencing an unprecedented dry period and shortage of water for its citizens, local governments, agriculture, and other uses,” the draft bill says. The goal of the measure “is to enact urgency legislation to appropriate funds and expedite administrative actions to increase water supply reliability consistent with the state’s economic and resource protection laws.”

Steinberg’s office didn’t comment on the legislation or release it, pending negotiations with other lawmakers. Steve Maviglio, a Sacramento-based consultant, provided a copy that a Steinberg aide said was legitimate.

The bill seeks to put several provisions in place by July 1, much sooner than usually happens when the California Legislature passes a bill. Typically, a new law wouldn’t take effect until January 2015.

“That would require an urgency clause on the bill, which is to be negotiated,” Williams said. “The intent is to act quickly and decisively, a contrast to anything to we can expect from Congress.”

Action is needed as the state faces a drought that’s the most severe in more than 100 years, environmental advocates said. Some have projected the scarcities could be long-lasting (E&E Daily, Jan. 21).

“This is a historic drought in California, and many communities are suffering,” said Steve Fleischli, water program director with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There’s also no telling when the drought will end.”

Even communities that have some water reserves in place, like Los Angeles and San Diego, could be in trouble if the dryness lasts for a long period, he said.

“This could be the new normal, especially with climate change,” Fleischli added.

Cap-and-trade funds proposed for 4 programs

Under California’s cap-and-trade program, the Golden State’s Air Resources Board (ARB) set a limit on the collective emissions from entities responsible for roughly 85 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas releases. Businesses under the cap must report their emissions and submit permits to cover the amounts. They can buy those either at auction or by trading with others. The program is expected to generate $850 million in the 2014-15 fiscal year.

There already are demands for those funds. Brown in his draft budget request sought to put $250 million of it toward the state’s beleaguered high-speed rail line (E&E Daily, Jan. 14). The governor carved out the other $600 million for renewable energy, energy efficiency and other carbon-cutting programs.

Steinberg in his drought bill wants to use $20 million from the cap-and-trade funds to pay for improvements that increase water use efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by state and local water transportation systems.

Another $10 million from cap and trade would go toward financial incentives for agricultural operations to invest in water irrigation and usage systems that reduce water use, increase water efficiency and increase water supply for other uses throughout the state. Water pumping uses energy that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, the bill noted.

And $10 million in cap-and-trade money would go a grant program for local agencies “to implement residential, commercial, or institutional water efficiency financing programs.” Those can include revolving loans, loan loss reserves or other financing tools, including financing paid back through utility bills “that assist residential, commercial, or institutional customers with the direct installation of efficient toilets, urinals, clothes-washers, showerheads, or other water and energy saving fixtures and appliances and turf removal projects.”

Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips said that he wasn’t bothered by the proposed use of the cap-and-trade revenues.

“Moving water is one of the leading uses of energy in California,” Phillips said. “Increasing water efficiency can substantially and measurably reduce electricity use for water movement. Investing cap-and-trade revenues in water efficiency captures near-term emissions reductions even as it helps improve California’s ability to weather this drought. This bill is, in a word, smart. ”

Fleischli with NRDC agreed on cap-and-trade funds. He also noted that the money Brown earlier sought in the budget from the climate program includes some allocations for conservation.

Money for preparedness

Other provisions of the proposed bill include speeding up funding for water supply projects that are ready to be built. The bill said that at least $200 million should be made available for developments “that provide immediate regional drought preparedness, increase local supply reliability and the delivery of safe drinking water, or reduce water quality conflicts or ecosystems conflicts created by drought conditions.”

The legislation would make $4 million available to the State Water Resources Control Board to provide interim emergency drinking water to disadvantaged communities with contaminated drinking water supplies.

It would accelerate funding and approvals for expanded use of recycled water and stormwater capture projects, Maviglio said.

The state’s recently approved Water Action Plan “calls for immediate investments and regulatory actions to expand use of recycled water (water that is used for one purpose, then cleaned, purified, and reused for another) and for storm water capture (catching and saving water when storms come though),” he said in an email. “This bill spends funds for those types of projects.”

The bill would mandate better monitoring and management of groundwater resources. Right now, there is limited state oversight of groundwater pumping, and there’s concern among water experts that as supplies dry up, water agencies will turn to groundwater supplies. There could be overpumping, some have said, which leads to the land sinking and other problems.

Maviglio, the consultant who provided a copy of the bill, said it would “require state agencies to coordinate and, where possible, consolidate permit processes to cut red tape and speed up drought project approvals.”

The bill has “a pretty good balance for the short term,” Fleischli said, but “a lot more money is going to be needed over the long term to support the projects that will make California more resilient.”

Those could include stormwater capture in Los Angeles, so that when it rains, the water doesn’t run off into the ocean. But that infrastructure would be expensive, he noted.
4. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Washington Rep. Doc Hastings proposes ‘targeted’ changes to weaken Endangered Species Act”
February 4, 2014

By Joel Connelly

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., doesn’t approve of presidents’ designating national monuments and takes a dark view of bills to create wilderness areas, but nothing gets Doc’s ire up more than the Endangered Species Act.

Hastings and a dozen other House Republicans on Tuesday trotted out a series of “targeted reforms” to the 1973 law, sponsored by Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington and signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

“The way the act was written, there is more of an effort to list than to de-list,” Hastings told a news conference.

The 41-year-old ESA has been used to save such species as American bald eagle, has preserved grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and has been deployed to protect dwindling salmon runs in Puget Sound.

Three pods of orcas (killer whales) frequently seen in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands are officially listed as “threatened” under the act.

The Republicans’ proposal would curtail (officially “limit”) the ability of private citizens and conservation agencies to sue to force federal government to protect species. They would also give states greater authority over endangered species.

The proposed reforms constitute “a starting point as we move forward with sensible and targeted legislative proposals,” Hastings wrote on his website. He is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

If environmental groups have any say, the Republicans’ Tuesday news conference will be an ending point.

“It’s not just the Endangered Species Act, but the heart of American environmental law is the ability of citizens to force the government to enforce the law,” said Andrew Wetzler, who directs wildlife programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

If you start taking away citizens’ and groups’ rights to sue, Wetzler argued, “you gut the heart of environmental law.”

“It is Congress’ actions that deprive the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of money to administer the act that has led to the lawsuits Representative Hastings is talking about,” said Wetzler.

The Republicans’ announcement came as federal agencies declared that one species in the Northwest — the Oregon chub — has been saved, and that it can be de-listed from the Endangered Species Act.

The small fish is native to the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It has been classified as “threatened” with a joint effort to protect it by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and private landowners.

“For two decades, this extraordinary partnership that includes federal and state agencies, land owners and other stakeholders has served as a model of how we can use the ESA as a toot to bring a species back from the brink of extinction,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.

“The success we have had with the Oregon chub reinforces that working together, we can recover species that currently are threatened or endangered.”

The Fish & Wildlife Service has run into a buzz-saw of criticism lately with a proposal to de-list Greater Yellowstone grizzlies, a decision that would allow Wyoming and Montana to again allow hunting.

Past efforts to reform the Endangered Species Act have gotten their sponsors into hot water.

In 1995, during the spotted owl controversy, it was revealed that timber companies helped draft a reform proposal put forth by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.

“The Republicans have a sorry record attempting to weaken the act,” said Wetzler. ”Every time they’ve done it, it has backfired on them . . . People love wildlife. They are a fundamental value we want to leave on this earth.”

5. The Globe & Mail, “Both sides spin Keystone review as a win”

February 3, 2014

By Shawn McCarthy

The State Department’s favourable assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline has sparked a backlash by U.S. opponents, who insisted Monday the review opens the door for President Barack Obama to reject TransCanada Corp.’s cross-border permit.

On the face of it, the environmentalists appear to be clutching at rhetorical straws, even as they planned a countrywide vigil Monday night to oppose the pipeline.

But if for reasons of domestic politics or national and international climate policy U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama are inclined take a symbolic stand against what opponents have labelled “the dirtiest oil on the planet,” a rationale could be constructed from last week’s environmental impact statement.

“What happened on Friday we think sets the stage for a rejection,” said Danielle Droitsch, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Building a pipeline like Keystone XL creates significant infrastructure to facilitate the development of some of the dirtiest oil on earth. That is completely relevant to the national policy discussion about where the U.S. is heading in terms of climate leadership and new energy.”

The long-awaited report was hailed in Calgary and Ottawa as a win for Keystone XL. Directly addressing President Obama’s climate imperative, it concluded that the approval of the pipeline would have little impact on the pace or scale of oil sands development, and hence on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

Case closed, said TransCanada chief executive officer Russ Girling and federal National Resources Minister Joe Oliver. Mr. Girling even suggested the White House should cut short a mandated 90-review process, which allows other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, to weigh in on the question of whether the pipeline project is in the national interest of the United States.

But in a conference call Friday, assistant secretary of state Kerri-Ann Jones emphasized that the environmental impact assessment did not amount to a recommendation, and that the conclusion that the project would not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions was subject to a number of assumptions about North American crude market.

The report “presents considerable analysis, but it does not answer the broader question about how a decision on the proposed project would fit into the broader national and international effort to address climate change or other questions of foreign policy or energy security,” she said.

The State Department did present one scenario in which a decision on Keystone XL would be material to oil sands’ emissions – one in which low oil prices made rail transport too expensive and other proposed pipeline projects failed to proceed. It rated that scenario as unlikely.

But climate activists argued Monday that the president should not proceed as if the market will develop as the State Department analysis assumes, but that he should work to achieve a scenario that would limit carbon emissions from the oil industry generally, and the oil sands specifically.

In a blog on Huffington Post, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs slammed the report, saying it “portrays the U.S. government as a helpless bystander to climate calamity” instead of an active, policy-making agent.

The decision on the Keystone XL carries enormous symbolic importance as Mr. Obama prepares for a United Nations climate summit next September. European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard has urged the president to block the pipeline, saying such a decision would send “an extremely strong signal” to the world.

But Michael Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggests in a blog post that the symbolism would be empty showmanship. The State Department report shows KXL will have little impact on carbon emissions. If the president wants to reject the pipeline on climate grounds, “he‘ll need to thread a very small needle” to make the case, Mr. Levi said.

6. The Guardian, “Winter Olympics 2014: a missed opportunity to advance sustainability”

February 4, 2014

By Adam Aston

The Sochi Winter Olympics, which opens 7 February, was meant to be the greenest Olympics ever. The budget was certainly there: Russia has doled out more than $51bn, an all-time record, to make the event happen.

Yet reports of serious environmental problems have been piling up for months. The UN and World Wildlife Fund have called out Russia over construction practices that damaged the region’s pristine natural ecosystems.

And in October, the Associated Press reported it had found mountains of construction debris in an unlicensed landfill, indicating Russia had broken its promise to make the games zero waste. And, ominously, environmental activists have reported being harassed by officials. It’s a discouraging prelude to the games.

Yet I wondered if there might be a silver lining to be found amid the sustainability commitments made by the game’s corporate sponsors.

After all, while the credibility of the Russian organizers’ on these issues has all but melted away, the corps of 10 worldwide sponsors includes major global brands, many of which have made deep, long-standing commitments to sustainability.

My findings? With one dramatic exception, the games’ deep-pocketed sponsors have done too little to promote sustainability as an element of their efforts at Sochi.

The games’ worldwide sponsors are a familiar lot, including six iconic US brands, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and Visa; two Asian electronics giants, Japan’s Panasonic and South Korea’s Samsung; and two European companies, France’s Atos and Omega from Switzerland.

This top-tier level of sponsorship, rumored to cost at least $100m per four-year cycle, is far from trivial. And given the International Olympic Committee’s growing emphasis on sustainability – the past two games in London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 are considered the greenest ever – these sponsorships seem an ideal platform in which to mix a high-profile sustainability push.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. For this exercise, I mined online press material and related documentation and emailed each company. Only Dow replied with detailed information. Here’s what I found:

Dow: Sochi’s “official carbon partner”

In a first for the games, chemicals giant Dow has pledged to offset the organizing committee’s entire direct carbon footprint – including greenhouse gas emissions from operating the games’ venues, as well as from travel and lodging for all athletes, staff and volunteers – as well as the estimated travel footprint of all spectators and media attending the Olympic events and the Paralympic Games, scheduled for March.

Dow estimates it will offset emissions equivalent to 360,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide for the organizing committee, plus 160,000 metric tons for spectators and media. For perspective, the total estimated 520,000 metric tons is equivalent to removing approximately 102,000 cars from US roads, or neutralizing a year’s worth of direct and indirect emissions from 10,800 US homes.

Dow is offsetting these emissions with a mix of completed and ongoing projects, principally in Russia, but also in Brazil and South Korea, which will host the next two Olympics, and other regions. These include farming enhancements, such as low-till farming methods; building efficiency gains via better insulation and other technologies; and industrial upgrades. In the US, Dow is deploying a share of the verified offsets generated from capturing and recycling methane at a waste dump in Georgia.

The broad portfolio of projects, Dow claims, meets international standards and the International Carbon Offset and Reduction Alliance Code of Practice, the global benchmark for offsets. “Dow’s initiative represents a significant step forward in terms of sustainability for one of the world’s main sporting event,” according to a company statement.

GE and turbine power

The only other sponsor with a clear environmental angle to its Olympics pledge is GE. The conglomerate is supplying two very high efficiency “aero-derivative” gas turbines to help power the games. The units, which will provide both base load and peak load power to the Olympics village and venues, feature GE’s latest emissions technology.

Evolved from airplane jet engines, the model is designed to ramp up and down in less than 10 minutes, which makes it well suited to pair with the variable output of wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy systems.

That’s not to say that renewable energy will be powering Sochi. Despite early estimates of promising potential for geothermal, solar, hydro and wind and some building-level projects, there is scant evidence that any substantial new renewables capacity has been built.

Everyone else

From there, evidence of sustainability efforts by other corporate sponsors tapers off sharply. For their part, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, both long-time Olympic sponsors, have focused on health – but details are scant. Coca-Cola Russia said it plans to launch a traveling showcase of activities promoting an active, healthy lifestyle during the Winter Olympics.

A survey of news and press materials of the remaining half dozen top-tier sponsors (Atos, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung, and Visa) turned up no explicit sustainability goals in their Sochi commitments.

To be sure, I hope there are other sustainability efforts afoot that I missed. I welcome information on other programs in the comments below.

Big platform, big responsibility

But the overall direction of the Sochi games is discouraging. It’s a pity that more companies aren’t using the Olympics to up their sustainability efforts, not least because the event offers such far-reaching visibility.

As the Natural Resource Defense Council’s eco-sports guru Allen Herskowitz says, only about a tenth of the public follow sciences, but nearly two-thirds follow sports. This means that sustainability actions in sporting arenas have supersized potential to normalize greener practices.

And, lest we forget, lurking beneath the immediate question of sustainability is a deeper worry about climate change, particularly as it impacts the viability of future winter sports.

In winter playgrounds around the world, climate change is already degrading the seasonal conditions that skiers, boarders and others depend on. In Vancouver 2010, unseasonably warm weather forced the games to resort to extreme measures, such as hauling in stored snow.

Sochi 2014 also has been stashing snow, and is ready to deploy an army of energy-intensive earth-movers and snow-making systems to make ready for the games. It’s good to know Sochi is prepared for a potential shortage of the white stuff.

Still, it would be better to know the games and their partners are working today to avoid climate troubles and warmer winters tomorrow.

7. The Bergen Record, “Environmental groups lobbying Christie administration to strengthen runoff regulations”

February 4, 2014

By Scott Fallon

Nine environmental groups are lobbying the Christie administration to strengthen the state’s runoff regulations as this winter’s heavy snowfall promises to bring a stream of road salt, oil, trash and other pollutants into New Jersey’s already besieged waterways.

With the state’s stormwater permit set to expire at the end of the month, the groups sent a petition Tuesday to the Department of Environmental Protection to require municipalities, highway operators and developers to incorporate “green infrastructure” to capture more polluted runoff.

Alternatives such as green roofs, porous pavement, and cisterns are able to capture more rain or snow and prevent runoff from the start. These practices are gaining popularity around the country including in New York and Philadelphia.

“We’re hoping this begins a conversation with DEP so that we stay ahead of this problem,” said Chris Len, staff attorney for NY/NJ Baykeeper and Hackensack Riverkeeper, two of the nine groups that submitted the petition. “A lot of these green alternatives are much cheaper than traditional ways of stormwater management like retention basins.”

The Clean Water Act requires stormwater permits to be renewed every five years to incorporate new technology and reduce water pollution until all waterways are suitable for drinking, swimming and fishing.

New Jersey has fallen far short of those goals. Ninety percent of the state’s streams and rivers and 95 percent of lakes and ponds are considered impaired due to pollution, most of it from runoff, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

A DEP spokesman said Tuesday that the agency is always looking to promote innovative stormwater control technologies, but couldn’t offer specifics on the petition, which it just received.

Heavy runoff can come at anytime of the year, but melting snow brings some of the most polluted stormwater into New Jersey’s streams, rivers and lakes.

The state has been walloped so far this season. The average snowfall statewide in January was 17.7 inches — 10.6 inches above normal.

One of the biggest pollutants is road salt.

In recent years several North Jersey water companies including United Water, the Passaic Valley Water Commission and water departments in Mahwah, Ramsey and Ho-Ho-Kus have exceeded the DEP’s recommended upper limit of 50 milligrams per liter due to road salt.

The levels are not considered harmful to healthy people, but customers who have high blood pressure and other conditions requiring salt-restricted diets have been told by United Water company to consult their doctors.

So far, there hasn’t been an increase in United Water’s sodium levels this winter, but that may change as the temperature rises, said Steve Goudsmith, a company spokesman. “We’re probably going to see an uptick once everything melts,” he said.

Rock salt is one of the most economical ways to melt snow and ice from roadways. United Water, which serves 750,000 customers in Bergen and Hudson counties, has lobbied municipalities to use other de-icing chemicals like calcium magnesium acetate and potassium acetate in lieu of rock salt.

The other groups on the petition are Delaware Riverkeeper Network, American Littoral Society, Pinelands Preservation Alliance, Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, Clean Ocean Action, New Jersey Environmental Lobby and Natural Resources Defense Council.

8. KPFA, “Pacifica Evening News”

January 31, 2014

[<a href=”http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/99676″ target=”_blank”>Click here to hear Jen Sorenson discuss NRDC’s lawsuit against NMFS to challenge the Navy’s sonar training program</a>]

1. Bloomberg Businessweek, “Keystone Foes Struggle For Silver Lining In U.S. Report”

February 4, 2014

By Mark Drajem and Jim Snyder

Activists fighting the Keystone XL pipeline are digging deep into a more than 7,000-page environmental analysis to marshal reasons President Barack Obama should reject the project.

It’s no easy task.

The report released Jan. 31 increases the possibility that the $5.4 billion Canada-U.S. oil pipeline ultimately wins approval, perhaps as soon as July, according to analysts including Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, LLC in Washington.

“The president has given a test, and the pipeline has passed the test,” Book said.

Environmentalists aren’t giving up and offered a variety of responses, from refuting the report’s conclusions to seizing on elements that may boost their case or criticizing the U.S. State Department and the contractors that wrote the assessment for being too friendly with the oil industry. Some did all three.

TransCanada Corp. (TRP) applied more than five years ago for a permit to build the pipeline through the U.S. heartland, connecting oil sands in Alberta with refineries along the coast of Texas and Louisiana. The 875-mile pipeline would run from the U.S.-Canada border to Steele City, Nebraska. From there it would connect to an existing pipeline network.

Lobbying Battle

TransCanada has increased 0.9 percent since Jan. 30, the day before the report was released, closing yesterday at C$48.27 ($43.42) in Toronto trading.

Its planned 830,000-barrel-a-day capacity has spawned a multimillion-dollar lobbying fight, leaving Obama to choose between angering an ally in Canada or his supporters in the environmental movement.

Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, said in a statement that the report’s conclusions were “laughable.” Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in a blog post on the group’s website that the analysis gave Obama “everything he needs to reject” the project.

The main conclusion of the State Department report is that Alberta’s oil sands will be mined and refined with or without Keystone, contrary to the views of opponents who say blocking it would keep the carbon-heavy crude in the ground. Environmentalists sought to focus on its other findings: that production of oil from Alberta generates more gases linked to global warming; that output there would drop if oil prices fell; and that oil-sands crude can be hard to clean up because it sinks to the bottom of lakes and rivers when spilled.

‘Silver Lining’

“The silver lining is that nobody thinks this is pointing to a specific decision,” Kate Colarulli, who’s helping lead the Sierra Club’s campaign against oil, said in an interview. “This lays important groundwork for showing that Keystone is not in our national interest.”

While the environmental assessment isn’t the final word, it’s important because Obama said in a June speech on climate change that he wouldn’t approve Keystone if it would “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

In a Jan. 31 statement, the White House said that standard remains in place as the approval process shifts into a second stage, one focused on whether the project is in the U.S. national interest.

Agency Review

“A decision on whether the project is in the national interest will be made only after careful consideration” of the State Department report “and other pertinent information, comments from the public, and views of other agency heads,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said.

The report’s estimates of Keystone’s climate impact will be closely evaluated by Secretary of State John Kerry, he said.

“Obviously the Secretary has a long record on environmental issues,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday. “There are a range of factors that are taken into consideration that will be looked at as we undergo the next couple of months of this process.”

Obama has said the decision will ultimately be his. During an interview taped on Feb. 2 and aired on Fox News last night, Obama declined to say how he planned to decide and said the project still faced scrutiny from other U.S. agencies.

The report lists other pipelines and railroads as the main reasons that oil-sands crude will get to refineries with or without Keystone. Critics of the pipeline say evidence offered in the report shows that neither conclusion is as surefire as presented in the report.

Political Opposition

“The conclusion overstates their own analysis,” said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy group opposed to the pipeline.

For example, the report said other proposed pipelines have faced delays and continued local resistance and hurdles posed by government agencies. “Nonetheless, all of the proposed pipeline projects within Canada have faced stringent political opposition and substantial regulatory uncertainty,” it said.

And while rail capacity is ramping up, it would need to rise six-fold to meet the Keystone capacity, Weiss said. The additional cost of shipping via rail may undercut the economic justification for mining the oil sands if oil prices fall to $75 per barrel, the report said.

While the State Department report concluded that this price pressure is unlikely to bite, critics disagreed.

Added Costs

Anthony Swift, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said efforts to address climate change or improve rail safety in the wake of recent crashes would increase price pressures and prevent oil-sands projects “on the margins of economic viability.”

“The added cost of alternatives like rail is likely to prevent many of these projects from proceeding,” Swift said in an e-mail.

At the center of these debates is a research report from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS:US) last year that said oil-sands development depends on “whether sufficient pipeline takeaway capacity will exist.”

“Given the long distances and higher cost of rail, we believe pipeline capacity growth is critical in Canada and the key to sustainably removing congestion in the system,” the research report said.

Goldman Sachs’s conclusion, and other similar reports and industry comments, shows that Keystone is critical, Swift said. Even so, the State Department said in its report that it asked the Goldman Sachs researchers about their findings, and they “clarified that the production impacts they described were not expected to be permanent.”

Contractor Conflicts

In addition to mining the State Department assessment for evidence, pipeline foes are questioning the objectivity of the agency and the contractor hired to perform the analysis, Environmental Resources Management.

Friends of the Earth filed a complaint against ERM with the State Department’s inspector general, saying the company lied about its previous work with Calgary-based TransCanada and had conflicts that should have prevented it from being selected for an impartial analysis.

The inspector general is to release a report soon on the matter, and may prompt the department to re-evaluate some of its findings. The department has addressed potential conflicts of interest and found that third-party contractors don’t stand to gain financially from the project, a State Department official said last week.

Review ‘Integrity’

“I would expect the Department of State to take it seriously, but it doesn’t dictate” a certain response, said Dan Gordon, associate dean for procurement law at George Washington University Law School.

The final environmental impact statement on Keystone “has suffered from a process that raises serious questions about the integrity of the document,” billionaire investor and pipeline opponent Tom Steyer wrote in a Feb. 2 letter to Kerry. Steyer, who hosted Obama at his home for a fundraiser in April, said the study was “on its face defective.”

TransCanada rejected that complaint. “Activists like Mr. Steyer have not liked the answers they’ve received as it relates to five separate U.S. environmental reviews of Keystone XL,” Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said in an e-mail. “So when they don’t get the answers they like (or the facts refuse to support their misguided claims), they attack others or continue misleading people.”

Climate Record

Opponents of Keystone should focus on Obama’s climate legacy and give up trying to discredit the State Department’s report, Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, said.

“The report definitely gives the administration a green light — if it wants one — to proceed with the pipeline,” Sachs said. “At some point, we have to draw a line between what reserves we’re going to use and what reserves we’re not going to use.”

There’s also the chance that something else could trip up the project. For example, the day before the report came out, the Sierra Club petitioned the State Department to link its review of Keystone with that of Enbridge Inc. (ENB)’s proposal to expand its Alberta Clipper pipeline.

Even if Obama approves Keystone, lawsuits will follow and activists are pledging to use civil disobedience to block construction. That means more delays.

“If it takes six years to approve a cross-border pipeline, you’ve done a lot to discourage” future pipelines, Book said in an interview. “Time is the enemy of capital.”

Keystone is already “a grand victory for environmental consciousness,” he said. Their forces aren’t going away if Keystone is approved. “This is the next wave of activism.”

2. ClimateWire, “Keystone XL Clears Major Hurdle, But Opponents See Silver Lining”

February 3, 2014

By Christa Marshall and Evan Lehmann

The State Department’s long-awaited environmental review of Keystone XL on Friday sparked cautious optimism on both sides of the contentious pipeline debate, underscoring the public pressure facing the Obama administration before midterm elections.

Supporters of the $5.4 billion TransCanada project cheered the document’s ultimate conclusion that the pipeline is unlikely to “significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands,” and therefore unlikely to exacerbate global greenhouse gas emissions.

Some environmentalists, however, emphasized that State acknowledged some potential climate change effects for the first time and raised the possibility that in one economic scenario, the pipeline could alter oil production growth in Canada. The deeper climate analysis indicates State’s views may be shifting their way, several said.

Greens further took solace in State’s emphasis that the final supplemental environmental impact statement is just one factor with the department’s next phase of decisionmaking. Under the national interest determination process, Secretary of State John Kerry will play a more active role and consider broader climate issues before making a recommendation to the president. He has no deadline to do so.

The final environmental impact statement “does not answer the broader question about how a decision on the proposed project would fit into the broader national and international efforts to address climate change or other questions of foreign policy or energy security. These are the perspectives that we’re going to be addressing in the next phase,” said Kerri-Ann Jones, assistant secretary of State for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.

The document’s conclusion that KXL likely will not affect oil sands production growth hinges on several considerations. One is that oil by rail already is picking up some of the slack during the pipeline stalemate, with approximately 180,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude now traveling via that transport method. In 2011, the amount of oil carried by rail from western Canada was less than 20,000 daily barrels.

The department also pointed to alternative pipeline proposals, and barge and tanker traffic, as potential alternative options to the northern segment of KXL, which would run from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska before connecting to a Gulf Coast line. The southern part of the TransCanada line went into operation this month and did not require a permit from Obama.

Dirtier crude, but still low impact

Like a draft environmental review last year, State concluded that oil sands crude produces roughly 17 percent more greenhouse gases on a life-cycle basis than the average barrel of U.S. crude refined in the United States. Canadian crude would be roughly 2 to 10 percent more carbon-intensive than heavy crude oil it would replace, said Jones.

Despite that footprint, KXL supporters said the document clearly shows little environmental impact with the pipeline overall and that a final decision should be sped up. Under the national determination process, eight consulting federal agencies such as U.S. EPA have up to 90 days to submit comments to State, even though there is no ultimate deadline for Kerry.

“My view is that 90 days could be truncated significantly,” said TransCanada CEO Russ Girling. “Let’s get this done — it’s time to bring over five years of regulatory review to end.”

Keystone supporters also said State fortified their views about climate change impacts, by concluding that rail-pipeline alternatives to move Canadian crude could produce more emissions than KXL. Because of factors such as additional diesel fuel for rail transport, those emissions from alternatives could be 28 to 42 percent higher than emissiong from the TransCanada line, according to the department.

For Canadian officials who have made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., the findings were a vindication of years of face-to-face meetings with U.S. officials.

“I’m pleased that by respecting and actively participating in the process, our input has been accepted and understood,” said Alberta Premier Alison Redford in a statement.

Environmentalists, however, jumped on new figures and analyses in the document as reason to be “cautiously confident.” The deeper climate analysis shows that the administration has everything it needs to determine the pipeline would “significantly exacerbate” carbon pollution under Obama’s test, they said. Public opposition to spill risks could undermine the growth of rail, they said.

Up to ‘climate champions’ at State?

“We think the wind’s at our back, because it is no longer in the hands of lower-level bureaucrats at the State Department” but instead is with “climate champions” Kerry and Obama, said Kenny Bruno, U.S. coordinator for the Tar Sands Campaign. On a conference call Friday, State official Jones said Kerry had not yet been briefed on the report.

State performed additional modeling after last year’s draft and found one scenario that could slow down production and greenhouse gas emissions in the oil sands. Even though the department said that scenario was unlikely, the conclusion constituted a “critical change” from State’s earlier reviews, said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

For oil sands production to slow, other pipeline alternatives would have to be constrained, and gas prices would have to fall to a range between $65 and $75 per barrel, according to the department. Such a scenario could make many rail options too expensive, according to State.

Further, State concluded that the production, refining and combustion of KXL’s 830,000 daily barrels would produce between 1.3 million and 27.4 million metric tons more carbon-equivalent emissions annually than reference crudes. The department restated that it was likely those Canadian barrels would get produced anyway, but the higher end of the range gave greens a rallying cry that KXL could have equivalent emissions of 7.8 coal-fired power plants under State’s numbers.

“That’s horrendous; it’s the wrong direction for our country,” said Casey-Lefkowitz.

The document also acknowledged challenges to alternative pipeline proposals in Canada, such as Enbridge’s Northern Gateway, which would run to the country’s West Coast, she noted.

There are several proposals in Canada to run major oil pipelines both east and west from Alberta, but all are facing various obstacles. Many First Nations groups in Canada, for instance, yield considerable power to challenge Northern Gateway under the country’s constitution, if it is approved by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Additionally, State said that plans to run oil across Canada’s east — such as via TransCanada’s proposed Energy East conduit — “appear to be a bit more speculative and would incur logistical challenges and potentially permitting issues.”

Environmentalists said they would be holding candlelight vigils this week around the country to keep pressure on the administration.

Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica called the document a “farce,” as it appeared before State could complete a separate conflict-of-interest investigation of a relationship between TransCanada and a State contractor.

In remarks at Georgetown University last year when unveiling his Climate Action Plan, Obama said he would evaluate the pipeline based on whether it significantly exacerbates carbon pollution. He also said in a New York Times interview that Canada could be doing more to mitigate carbon release.

Questions of political timing

Since then, the politics have become more complicated. In a recent interview with Global News, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he would prefer to work jointly with the United States on oil and gas emission reductions and hoped to accomplish this “over the next couple of years.” That constituted a shift for Canada, which previously said greenhouse gas rules on its oil and gas sector would be imminent in a matter of months and not tied to U.S. policy.

The State document also comes at a time of relatively low poll numbers for Obama and a pivotal year for the Democratic Party. The timing of the environmental review increases pressure on the president to make a decision on the controversial project as Senate Democrats enter a difficult election year that threatens to tip control of the chamber to Republicans.

Some analysts believe the timeline of the KXL process is disadvantageous for the administration, which faces few palatable options just as campaigning will be intensifying this spring and summer.

If Obama rejects the 1,179-mile project, he stands to strengthen the GOP narrative that Democrats are more concerned about pleasing environmental allies than about helping American workers, according to some strategists.

That could hurt his party’s political prospects in states like Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and West Virginia, all of which are hosting competitive Senate races that could reduce the Democrats’ control of the chamber. Republicans would obtain a majority by netting six seats.

“A decision further imperils those states,” said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who advised former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman in the last presidential primary race. “If the choices are punt or turn it down, I’m sure those senators would rather him punt.”

On the other hand, if Obama were to approve the pipeline before this year’s midterm elections, he might dampen the attacks of GOP candidates, who accuse Democratic incumbents of restricting fossil fuel development.

“I think it would help the D narrative,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Yeah, because then you go, ‘See, he’s not so crazy.'”

Norquist believes that Obama will reject the pipeline.

Others believe that expanded U.S. oil development, such as that in the Bakken formation in North Dakota, has deflated the need for Canadian crude to strengthen national security. That means that Obama is freer to reject the pipeline because GOP attacks around the use of foreign oil and missed energy jobs have softened, said Roger Ballentine, who led a White House task force on climate change during the Clinton presidency.

“If I were a member of Congress and I was being criticized for turning down this pipeline, I’d turn around and say, ‘What are we going to do with the oil we have?'” Ballentine said.

3. Al Jazeera America, “Keystone Approval Would Set Terrible Example”

February 4, 2014

By Norman Solomon

President Barack Obama will soon have to decide whether to approve the enormous northern portion of the Keystone XL project, which would create a pipeline from oil production in the Alberta tar sands to Steele City, Neb. The southern portion of Keystone, already built, takes oil from there to ports in the Gulf of Mexico.

The president should reject the plan. Approval of Keystone XL would have a grim impact on humanity’s chances of mitigating climate catastrophe. The long-term negative effects would go far beyond the carbon pollution from the transported tar-sands oil.

Greenwashing logic

In his State of the Union speech last week, Obama pointed out that “a changing climate is already harming western communities struggling with drought and coastal cities dealing with floods.” While calling for new standards on “carbon pollution,” he said that “the debate is settled” and “climate change is a fact.”

Savvy backers of the project are therefore eager to lay groundwork for Obama to claim that the pipeline would actually result in lower greenhouse-gas emissions than any of the realistic alternatives. Supporters latched onto the recent State Department environmental review that found no major objections to the project — although the report acknowledged that the project could have a “significant impact” on climate change under certain scenarios, as writer and activist Bill McKibben pointed out. The quest is to effectively greenwash the pipeline, putting a favorable gloss on its mission to pump vast quantities of tar-sands oil from northern Alberta in Canada to refineries and ports on the Texas coast and onward eventually to be burned, sending more carbon into the atmosphere.

Prominent among such rationales is the claim that the mucky oil in Alberta’s tar sands will inevitably reach refineries, one way or another. If that ultra-crude oil doesn’t get pipelined south through the United States, we’re told, it will find its way to Canadian ports, with greater hazards of accidents via road and rail along the way.

The logic is akin to saying that Mother Earth will be in firing-squad crosshairs no matter what, so we may as well line up, take aim and pull the trigger and not worry about our culpability.

The product of such collective reasoning is collective suicide. Although refusal to go along with ecological destruction is no guarantee of a favorable outcome, refusal is a necessary prerequisite for creating one.

Power of example

When deciding whether to participate in a course of action that would be disastrous for the planet’s ecosystem, we should not underestimate the power of example — particularly when the U.S. government is setting the example with a momentous choice. People around the world are rarely convinced by a message that says, in effect, “Do as we say, not as we do.”

In July, when the United States and China announced joint climate-change initiatives, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “I want to underscore that when we make a decision … it ripples beyond our borders.” Imagine what a go-ahead for Keystone XL would convey to the leaders and people of China, India, Brazil and other countries with explosive growth in carbon emissions.

From Beijing to New Delhi to Sao Paulo to other communities around the globe, policy planners and average citizens would hear Obama’s Keystone approval loud and clear as endorsement for their own options to extract, transport, refine, market and burn fossil fuels, unrestrained by concern about the planetary consequences.

On the other hand, imagine the impact if Obama rejected the Keystone project. The ripple effects would begin where mere eloquence leaves off — incomparably more meaningful than any amount of rhetoric about the threat of climate change. The U.S. government would finally be showing an impressive willingness to curtail the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Approaching the cliff

The vehement unity of environmental groups against Keystone XL is stunning. They’ve thrown down a gauntlet, contending that if the tar-sands pipeline is approved, then everything is permitted. They have also noted, quite rightly, how fossil-fuel corporations have tainted the process. As Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, recently said, “The State Department’s environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline is a farce. Since the beginning of the assessment, the oil industry has had a direct pipeline into the agency.”

At the moderate Natural Resources Defense Council, international program director Susan Casey-Lefkowitz was more restrained yet still blunt.

“Even though the State Department continues to downplay clear evidence that the Keystone XL pipeline would lead to tar-sands expansion and significantly worsen carbon pollution, it has, for the first time, acknowledged that the proposed project could accelerate climate change,” she said. “President Obama now has all the information he needs to reject the pipeline. Piping the dirtiest oil on the planet through the heart of America would endanger our farms, our communities, our fresh water and our climate.”

Our climate is fast heading toward a cliff. It’s long past time to slam on the brakes. But approval of the Keystone XL pipeline would floor the accelerator not just for the U.S. but for the entire world.

4. Greenwire, “Enviro Hero Waxman Says He’ll Retire After 40 Years In Congress”

January 30, 2014

By Jennifer Yachnin

California Rep. Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the most powerful legislative voices for environmentalism in history, announced today that he will retire after 40 years in Congress rather than seek re-election.

Waxman, whose portfolio ranges from playing a key role in enacting health care reform to investigating steroid use in baseball, acknowledged legislative gridlock on Capitol Hill but said the partisan climate did not influence his decision to retire.

“The reason for my decision is simple. After 40 years in Congress, it’s time for someone else to have the chance to make his or her mark, ideally someone who is young enough to make the long-term commitment that’s required for real legislative success,” Waxman said. “I still feel youthful and energetic, but I recognize if I want to experience a life outside of Congress, I need to start soon. Public office is not the only way to serve, and I want to explore other avenues while I still can.”

The 74-year-old lawmaker is the last of two members of the “Watergate babies” elected to the House in 1974 to opt to leave Congress. Fellow California Rep. George Miller (D) announced his retirement earlier this month (Greenwire, Jan. 13).

“The amigos are leaving,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) lamented in reference to himself, Miller and Waxman, with whom he was elected to the House in 1974. Baucus, who moved to the Senate in 1978, has been nominated to become U.S. ambassador to China and could be leaving Congress in a matter of weeks.

Waxman became chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in 2007, after Democrats reclaimed control of the House for the first time in a dozen years. He was the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a longtime friend and ally, engineered his ascension on the Energy panel over the top Democrat there, veteran Rep. John Dingell of Michigan.

Waxman, who becomes the seventh Democrat and 17th House lawmaker to announce his retirement, noted of his first campaign: “I first ran for office because I believe government can be a force for good in people’s lives. I have held this view throughout my career in Congress. And I will leave the House of Representatives with my conviction intact. I have learned that progress is not always easy. It can take years of dedication and struggle. But it’s worth fighting for.”

Waxman served six years in the California Assembly before his election to Congress.

Despite Waxman’s staunchly liberal positions, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden of Oregon wished Waxman well in retirement, noting the two served together for years on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

But Walden, speaking to reporters at the House Republican retreat in Cambridge, Md., this morning, asserted that Waxman’s decision is a “clear indication of an underpinning that the House Democrats don’t think they’re going to be wielding the gavels next time.”

In his more than 1,600-word statement explaining his choice, Waxman dismissed such suggestions.

“I am not leaving because I think House Democrats have no chance to retake the House,” Waxman said. “House Republicans have no compelling vision for the future. The public understands this, and I am confident that the Democrats can regain control of the House.”

Regardless of whether Democrats can win the 17 seats they need to claim the majority, Waxman’s 33rd District seat is all but guaranteed to remain in Democratic control.

The seat, which includes parts of Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, gave President Obama 61 percent in the 2012 election, while GOP nominee Mitt Romney took 37 percent.

In his last re-election, Waxman received his lowest-ever winning percentage, 54 percent, against independent Bill Bloomfield, a businessman who self-funded much of his bid. A long line of ambitious California politicians is expected to begin mobilizing to run for his seat. The filing deadline for the June 3 primary is March 7.

Tributes roll in

California Sens. Barbara Boxer (D) and Dianne Feinstein (D) praised their House colleague following news of his retirement.

“What a loss to the American people, such a fierce protector of their health and safety,” Boxer told Greenwire. In a separate interview, Feinstein said: “I’m very sorry. I think he’s terrific.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who served with Waxman in the House, reflected on Waxman’s work grilling tobacco executives over their marketing practices.

“History will remember Henry was one of the important members of the U.S. Congress, going way back to his work on tobacco,” Sanders said.

Even with the ongoing partisan rancor on the Energy and Commerce Committee over issues like environmental regulations and health care reform, Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who came to Congress a dozen years after Waxman, also paid tribute.

“Despite our policy differences, Henry Waxman and I have forged a friendship and respect for one another based on our shared experience as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — a special privilege that for us feels like the best job in Congress,” Upton said in a statement. “Working together over the last three years, we have never allowed our principled differences to prevent us from finding common ground where we can and delivering a number of bipartisan successes, especially in the effort to improve the public health. … We still have much work to do in 2014 and I look forward to building upon our committee’s record of bipartisan success.”

Waxman also garnered praise from environmentalists, who cited his efforts on the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that aimed to reduce smog and acid rain and preserve the ozone layer, as well as his work on greenhouse gas emissions, including greater efficiencies in federal buildings and fleets.

“For nearly two generations, Henry Waxman has been a stalwart champion for our environment and public health,” Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke said in a statement. “In every battle, at every juncture, in every moment that mattered most, Rep. Waxman stood up for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the lands we love and the wildlife we cherish. He embodies public service of the highest order, and we are all the better for his work.”

League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski likewise commended Waxman on his career: “He has been an unparalleled leader in fighting the climate crisis. He has also led the charge on countless important issues over the last four decades, and we will miss him immensely.”

5. Wisconsin Gazette, “Conservationists Warn Of Monarch Butterfly Decline”

January 30, 2014

Conservation experts this week announced that a record low number of monarch butterflies returned this year to wintering grounds in the mountains of Mexico and their annual migration is at “serious risk of disappearing.”

Monarchs, which migrate from Mexico across North America and back every year, have been in serious decline since the 1990s.

Experts believe the widespread use of glyphosate weed killer, sold as Round-Up, in connection with genetically engineered glyphosate-resistant corn and soybeans, may be destroying once-widespread milkweed, which monarchs rely on exclusively for reproduction.

“This news raises a disturbing question that can no longer be ignored: Are our actions causing the rapidly dwindling population of monarchs?” said Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We must urgently review the widespread use of glyphosate, which may be wiping out milkweed plants, essential for the Monarchs’ survival. It would be heartbreaking if we inadvertently destroyed in just a few years the millennia-old miracle of the Monarchs’ unique migration.”

The NRDC said Mexico estimated the winter population of monarchs at 33.5 million individuals. The estimate is a huge drop from a high of 1 billion in 1997 and down from a long-term average of 350 million over the last 15 years.

The decline also also epresents the ninth consecutive yearly measurement below the long-term average, according to the nonprofit enviromental group.

6. San Francisco Chronicle, “California Drought: Jerry Brown’s Declaration Does Not Throw Fish Out With Bath Water”

January 31, 2014

By Peter Fimrite

There has recently been a lot of blog talk and innuendo claiming Gov. Jerry Brown’s drought declaration skirts the California Environmental Quality Act and will allow farmers to bathe their crops in water at the expense of fish.

The declaration does, in fact, state that CEQA guidelines will not apply to the State Water Resources Control Board when they are considering temporarily weakening water quality standards. But the governor’s proclamation has more nuance than what many environmentalists fear.

Black Butte Lake, near Orland

Black Butte Lake, near Orland

Kate Poole, the attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, said the wording makes clear that any change that skirts CEQA would have to “enable water to be conserved upstream later in the year to protect cold water pools for salmon and steelhead, maintain water supply and improve water quality.”

In other words, any relaxation of CEQA or water quality standards must benefit fisheries, she said.

Poole said the primary effect of the drought declaration will be to make it easier for water users within the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project to transfer water. For instance, if the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California wanted to transfer surplus water to the Westlands Water District, they could do it without first having to get special permits, she said.

“Its not that there’s no concern there, but this doesn’t give them carte blanche to do whatever they want,” Poole said. “Look its going to be an ugly water year for many different interest groups, including for fish, fishermen and the environment. That’s all there is to it. There just is not enough water to go around this year.”

Brown may have inspired paranoia about his motives when he was critical of CEQA during his time as Oakland mayor, but Poole said the lack of water is an emergency that unnecessary bureaucratic delay could make worse.

“We’d like more provisions in place to help avoid this when we get into low water situations,” Poole said, “but we are not opposed to the governor’s drought declaration or to the fact that some state agencies are going to have to take some unusual actions this year to help everyone get through the drought.”
7. Kansas City Star, “Invest In Energy Efficiency In KC”

February 3, 2014

By Editorial

For good reasons, cutting energy bills is often a high priority for businesses in Kansas City. If they can reduce their use of electricity and natural gas, companies have more money to funnel to other priorities — such as hiring new employees.

Now a new, three-year program recently endorsed at City Hall could help reinforce needed efforts by large businesses — and the city of Kansas City — to install more efficient lights, windows, and heating and cooling systems.

The positive result could be plenty of savings on energy costs for the private and public sectors. The project has another encouraging goal: Trim harmful emissions by energy producers, such as coal plants, that are leading to climate change.

Kansas City is among 10 cities chosen for the program out of almost two dozen applicants around the country. The City Energy Project is run by two private groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Institute for Market Transformation.

A privately paid employee, based at City Hall, is expected to provide guidance for how the city and local businesses that have expressed interest in the program can use energy more efficiently.

Ultimately, some tax dollars likely will be used to retrofit public buildings. City officials should ensure that these funds can be recouped fairly quickly through projected savings on energy expenses, preferably within four to six years.

After that, the savings could add up into the millions of dollars for the city and for major companies, giving them an incentive to stay and expand in Kansas City.

8. The Star-Ledger, “LG Files To Stop Environmental Groups From Joining Suit Against Englewood Cliffs Headquarters”

February 4, 2014

By Myles Ma

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS — LG Electronics USA hopes to stop two environmental groups from joining an appeal of a decision allowing the company to construct a new headquarters in Englewood Cliffs.

LG filed a legal brief Monday that said a Motion to Intervene in the appeal from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation is the latest in a series of attempts to delay the project.

The groups plan to give evidence and testimony that would “improperly sidestep” a lower court ruling, since LG could not cross-examine them, the brief said.

“The Court should not permit such gamesmanship, especially because the NRDC AND NJCF’S motion is untimely, their interests are adequately represented by the Original-Intervening Plaintiffs, and the current parties are already in the midst of preparing and filing their apellate briefs,” the brief said.

LG will move ahead with its plans for the headquarters, John Taylor, a spokesman for the company, said.

“While LG respects the legal process, we strongly believe the trial court made the right decision based on long-established legal principles that municipalities have the power and authority to best determine local zoning decisions,” he said.

The suit challenges a decision by the Englewood Cliffs zoning board to allow LG to build a 143-foot building on the Palisades cliffs. NRDC and NJCF hope to join residents of Englewood Cliffs, the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and Scenic Hudson in appealing a ruling upholding the zoning board decision.

The height limit at the LG property was 35 feet.

The appeal argues that the variance granted was so great it constituted a rezoning of the LG property. It also said Bergen County Superior Court Judge Alexander H. Carver III should have considered how the building would impact the Palisades.

Opponents have asked LG to redesign its headquarters at a lower height. They argue the building would spoil views of the Palisades.

“By choosing an alternative, low-rise design on its large tract, LG can provide the same amount of office space and the same number of jobs without destroying one of the last remaining natural places in the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan area,” Mark Izeman, senior attorney for NRDC said.

LG started demolition work at the site in November. Opponents, including Larry Rockefeller, whose grandfather established a public trust 90 years ago to preserve the Palisades, protested outside the property.