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A year after an environmental disaster in Texas, chemical company executives face charges

by PennyQuimby58 Posted on September 5, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Harvey struck southeast Texas last August with 130 mph winds and dumped more than 50 inches of rain across the region. In the aftermath of the second-costliest storm in recent American history, a Category 4 nightmare that left at least 88 Texans dead and forced thousands to flee into shelters, government agencies have finally begun reckoning with Harvey’s environmental cost. The storm contributed to the release of more than 8 million pounds of air pollution and more than 150 million gallons of wastewater.

Arguably no city was hit harder by the environmental devastation during the storm than Crosby, a 2.26-square-mile satellite of Houston with fewer than 3,000 residents. Chemicals left in refrigeration trailers at a plant owned by the multinational chemical manufacturer Arkema Inc. in the northeast part of town caught fire on August 31 and September 1, sending toxic clouds of smoke billowing into the air. More than 200 neighbors evacuated their homes, and 21 first responders sought medical treatment for the nausea, vomiting, and dizziness they experienced after exposure to the chemicals.

Along with hundreds of residents, those first responders have sued Arkema in a pair of class-action lawsuits for negligence, charging that the company did not properly safeguard its chemicals or inform the community of the “unreasonably dangerous condition” created by their release. Harris and Liberty counties have separately sued the company. Arkema has fiercely denied any wrongdoing, but now, a year after the disaster, its leaders may have more to worry about than fronting a huge payday for disgruntled residents.

On August 3, a Harris County grand jury indicted the company’s chief executive, Richard Rowe, and the Crosby plant’s manager, Leslie Comardelle, for “recklessly” releasing chemicals into the air and putting residents and emergency workers at risk. “Companies don’t make decisions, people do,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement. “Responsibility for pursuing profit over the health of innocent people rests with the leadership of Arkema.”

“These criminal charges are astonishing,” Arkema responded in a statement. “At the end of its eight-month investigation, the Chemical Safety Board noted that Hurricane Harvey was the most significant rainfall event in U.S. history, an Act of God that never before has been seen in this country.”

The series of fires at Arkema’s plant were far from the only environmental disasters to hit southeast Texas in Harvey’s wake. Matt Tresaugue, who studies air quality issues at the Environmental Defense Fund, says Arkema barely even cracked his top 10 list. More serious, he argued, was the cumulative impact of several lesser-known incidents across the region. But fairly or not, Arkema remains, for many people, the most public example of executive malfeasance in the face of environmental calamity during Harvey. Companies like Valero and Chevron, among many others, were sued over their actions during the hurricane, but only Arkema’s executives face possible criminal penalties.

Arkema was certainly not the only entity at fault during the storm, but in its lack of preparedness and defiant defense of its actions, the company struck residents — and Harris County prosecutors — as eager to prioritize its profits over safety. The firm’s history did not help.

The year before Harvey, Arkema was slapped with a nearly $92,000 fine after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found 10 violations at the Crosby plant related to its handling of hazardous materials. Previous incidents, including the release of sulfuric acid in 1994 that left a 5-year-old girl with severe burns, led one Crosby resident to tell the Houston Chronicle she had “a bitter taste in [her] mouth about Arkema.”

Perhaps most troubling, Arkema has twice before faced civil penalties for improperly storing organic peroxides, the same chemicals that caught fire during Harvey. In 2006, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality cited the Crosby plant for releasing 3,200 pounds of pollutants because a “pallet of organic peroxide was stored inappropriately” and burned up. The state imposed a $20,300 penalty five years later, after finding that Arkema was not maintaining the proper temperature in the devices it used to decompose dangerous gases.

Arkema’s passionate defense of its behavior has led its representatives to quibble over relatively minor concerns. Janet Smith, a company spokesperson, responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones by first criticizing other media companies, such as the New York Times and CNN, for using the term “explosion” to describe what happened last August at the Crosby plant.“The flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey led to a series of short-lived fires at our Crosby plant, but there was no explosion,” she wrote in an email. “We have repeatedly pointed this out to news media covering the incident, but the inaccurate coverage persists.”

Even as residents have begun the process of returning home and paying off storm-related debts, many neighbors still do not know the long-term health effects of exposure to the toxic cloud, because federal investigators could not figure them out, according to a lengthy U.S. Chemical Safety Board report published in May.

The models Environmental Protection Agency staffers used to track how local air and water quality were being affected by the Arkema fires “did not reflect the nature of actual dispersions that occurred,” the CSB found. Combined with “other practical difficulties,” the EPA was unable to draw any firm conclusions about the health threats brought about by Arkema’s plant.

In its public statements soon after the disaster, the EPA was also not clear about the risks posed to residents who were soon forced to evacuate. After testing water samples near the Crosby plant, the EPA announced that the results “were less than the screening levels that would warrant further investigation.” The agency’s inspector general’s office said on August 2 it would investigate how the EPA responded to accidents during Harvey.

The Trump administration played a role, too. Under President Barack Obama, the EPA proposed a series of rules designed to strengthen industry’s reporting requirements to mitigate future chemical disasters. Known as the Chemical Disaster Rule, the proposal was opposed by companies like Arkema and indefinitely delayed once President Donald Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, took office. Pruitt defended his reasoning after the Arkema fires by claiming that terrorists could have exploited the information chemical companies would have been forced to give up under the rule.“What you’ve got to do is strike the balance,” he said, “so that you’re not informing terrorists and helping them have data that they shouldn’t have.”

For now, at least, that rule has been restored. On August 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the EPA’s decision to delay the rule. Calling the agency’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” the court ordered the EPA to let the rule remain until the agency amends its requirements by standard regulatory action. That ruling may only prove temporary given the Trump administration’s commitment to rolling back dozens of Obama-era environmental regulations.

Whether the Chemical Safety Board even exists the next time another environmental disaster occurs is an open question. Embattled former chair Rafael Moure-Eraso was the target of a series of congressional probes into his workplace conduct during a five-year tenure that ended in 2015. Since taking office, Trump has tried to eliminate the agency twice in the White House’s budget proposals, but Congress has restored full funding both times. The resulting uncertainty has impeded “the CSB’s ability to attract, hire, and retain staff,” according to a report from the EPA inspector general’s office in June.

Stopping the next Arkema disaster will require more stringent oversight from federal regulators and a willingness by industry leaders to pony up the cash for frequent safety evaluations and up-to-date equipment. With industry-friendly leaders at the helm of the EPA and a CSB clinging to life, those reforms do not appear likely anytime soon.

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A year after an environmental disaster in Texas, chemical company executives face charges

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Is the government planning a crackdown on Keystone XL protesters?

by EdgarMazure Posted on September 5, 2018

Based on newly released emails, the American Civil Liberties Union suspects the government plans to treat Keystone XL protesters with counterterrorism tactics.

The ACLU sued the Trump administration on Tuesday to turn over more records detailing cooperation between the federal government and state officials in Montana in anticipation of protests against the planned Keystone XL pipeline.

The reason the ACLU is suing? It recently obtained emails through the Freedom of Information Act that provide “substantial evidence of federal preventative measures against Keystone XL protests,” according to the ACLU’s press release. And it’s concerned that government plans to surveil and police indigenous and environmental activists infringe on their First Amendment rights.

TransCanada, the company behind Keystone XL, expects to begin construction on the pipeline expansion next year. The once-dead pipeline project, revived by President Trump, would transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Canadian tar sands through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska, coming within a hundred miles of a dozen tribal lands.

The ACLU obtained emails revealing that federal employees discussed an “interagency team” to “deal with safety and security concerns related to the Keystone XL project.” It also found evidence indicating that the Department of Justice held “anti-terrorism” and “social networking and cyber awareness” trainings in Montana.

These records “suggest that additional documents documents exist, which the government continues to withhold, detailing plans for protests,” the ACLU said in a press release. The organization filed its original records requests in January, after it got its hands on Department of Homeland Security analysis that characterized pipeline opponents as “environmental rights extremists” intent on “criminal disruptions and violent incidents.”

During the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016, Standing Rock activists were watched over by drones and monitored on social media. The company behind that pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, hired the private security firm TigerSwan to launch a military-style surveillance and counterintelligence campaign against the activists, who TigerSwan labeled “jihadists.” Police used tear gas and water cannons against protesters. Some Standing Rock activists now face years in jail.

“Evidence that the federal government plans to treat Keystone XL protests with counterterrorism tactics, coupled with the recent memory of excessive uses of force and surveillance at the Standing Rock protests, raises immense concerns about the safety of indigenous and environmental protestors who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights,” writes Jacob Hutt, who filed the ACLU information requests, in a blog post.

There’s a long tradition of environmental activists facing charges of “ecoterrorism,” a word coined by libertarian activist Ron Arnold in the 1983. As we wrote last month, the term picked up steam in the ’80s and ’90s, and was eventually named the “the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat” by the FBI in 2004. Yet a 2013 study that found “there is no documented evidence of harm coming to humans as a result of actions by radical environmentalists.”

Despite their relatively peaceful protests, it seems that environmental activists are still viewed by the government — and by oil companies — as a threat.

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Is the government planning a crackdown on Keystone XL protesters?

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When Trump tries to bring back coal, these communities pay the price

by DelmarHurtado Posted on August 23, 2018

Christina Zacny has a rare immunological condition, mast cell activation syndrome. “I’m literally allergic to almost everything,” she says. Her symptoms became more severe four years ago when she began going into anaphylactic shock, at one point going into shock thirty times within 3 months.

Zacny grew up down the street from a coal-fired power plant in Wheatfield, Indiana and still lives nearby. She says her doctor suspects that the polluted air and water that has surrounded Zacny for most of her life has exacerbated her disorder. She wears a mask when when the air quality is bad and worries about groundwater contamination from the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station’s coal ash.

So when the Trump administration unveiled its plan to deregulate coal emissions earlier this week, Zacny was stunned. She works evenings at the nearby Blue Chip Casino, and was woken up one morning by an urgent phone call from a friend. “They said you have to go look at the news rights now, you’re not going to believe what just happened,” she recalls. “I was just sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is awful.’”

This spring, groundwater near the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station plant was found to be contaminated with toxic substances.

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its proposed replacement of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan earlier this week. It’s the Trump administration’s latest attempt to resurrect the ailing coal industry. According to a side-by-side comparison of policies by the EPA, the Obama-era rules “shut down coal” while Trump’s plan “keeps coal plants open.”

Critics of the proposed Clean Power Plan replacement, called the Affordable Clean Energy rule, are both skeptical and outraged. Coal-fired power plants are in steady decline, a trend that will likely continue as natural gas and renewables become cheaper energy options. But while the proposal won’t be enough to hearken a coal comeback, it does extend a lifeline to the remaining coal plants that don’t meet Obama-era emissions standards. And that’s life-threatening for the communities closest to coal plants, like Wheatfield.

Earlier this year, groundwater near the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station plant tested positive for toxic substances and two known carcinogens, radium and arsenic. To Zacny, that’s not a coincidence. She lost her father and grandfather to cancer, and several uncles and cousins have had cancer, too.

“I don’t want to lose anyone else,” Zacny says. “I have children that grew up in this area drinking the well water. I want to see my children and family live long lives.”

For now, two of the plant’s four coal-fired generators are slated to shut down in 2023 as part of the utility’s efforts to shift to cleaner energy. Although the utility has said that it plans to stay on track, it’s in the process of reviewing the policy changes announced this week.

Since 2010, some 270 coal plants have shut down, or are planning their retirements, according to the Sierra Club. That’s more than the number of coal plants still open. The organization estimates that shutting these plants down has saved more than 7,000 lives and $3.4 billion in healthcare costs.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan called for a 32 percent drop of carbon emissions below 2005 levels from the electric sector by the year 2030. Despite legal challenges that have kept the Clean Power Plan from being enforced, we’re actually close to hitting that goal — emissions are down nearly 30 percent since 2005.

Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, says that the United States is within a year or two of meeting the targets of the Clean Power Plan. “We have continued to make steady progress in spite of all the chaos created by Trump.”

That’s the good news. The bad is that Trump’s plan, by the EPA’s own estimates, will lead to as many as 1,400 more premature deaths each year. That’s because the new plan rolls back federal oversight and allows states to lay out their own rules for regulating power plants.

“They’re handing off the responsibility for this important program to the states which have in the past already shown that they’re not capable of controlling air pollution, especially pollutants that travel in an interstate manner,” says George Thurston, population health director at NYU School of Medicine’s Human Exposures and Health Effects program. “You need a national coordinated effort.”

And if the 27 states that sued to keep the Clean Power Plan from being enforced choose to relax pollution rules, it will be easier for dirty plants that would have shut down to carry on. Thurston says the people who live closest to these power plants, like Zacny, will wind up paying the price with their health.

In 2012, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the NAACP, and Chicago-based environmental justice organization, LVEJO, published a report that looked at who lives near coal plants across the country. Of those who live within 3 miles of a coal plant, almost 40 percent are people of color and the average person made $18,400 a year. Kandi Mossett, a lead organizer from North Dakota for the Indigenous Environmental Network (and a member of the Grist 50 class of 2016), says that her community has suffered health problems ranging from asthma to cancer as a result of contamination from coal. Now she fears they’ll have to face another battle with the coal industry on top of their efforts to stop fracking for oil.

“In more recent years we’ve been dealing with emissions from fracking as well, and we were hoping to breathe a sigh of relief, if not fresh air, as coal plants were hopefully being phased out,” Mossett said. “Instead, we’re dealing with the nightmare of the fossil-fuel-controlled state potentially being able to regulate itself.”

Handing over power to the states, however, could encourage some to push for stronger emissions standards and carbon dioxide reduction goals. Christy Goldfuss, senior vice president for energy and environment policy at the Center for American Progress, expects to see states that have embraced clean energy to step up. California and Vermont are leaders when it comes to clean energy momentum, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That is extraordinarily important when we have a lack of national leadership,” she says.

Photo credit: Christina Zacny for State Representative

Zacny, a mother of four, is running for Indiana House of Representatives. Her platform focuses on making sure that others like her who live with chronic illnesses have access to healthcare. She would also like to see the Schahfer plant turned into a solar and wind farm, and she’s pushing to legalize industrial hemp that she says can be used to clean up contaminated sites.

“These are long lasting implications that the community is going to have from this [coal plant],” says Zacny. “Whether we transition over to renewable energy or not we still have cancer here.”

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When Trump tries to bring back coal, these communities pay the price

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Trump’s power plan proposal is “about coal at all costs”

by DarellPinto Posted on August 21, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When President Obama unveiled the Clean Power Plan in the East Room of the White House three years ago, he called it “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” Today, that plan, which would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 19 percent in 2030 relative to 2005 levels, will be replaced by the Trump administration’s “Affordable Clean Energy” proposal, which will give states more authority to craft regulations for coal-burning power plants and replaces the “overly prescriptive and burdensome” requirements in the CPP with what they describe as “on-site, heat-rate efficiency improvements.”

These regulations are expected to only decrease CO2 levels by a fraction of the amount that were anticipated under Obama’s plan. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged this will lead to hundreds of more deaths each year, along with sharp increases in the number of hospital admissions, lost work days, and school absences because of the health impacts of dirtier air. Not to mention the fact that increased emissions of carbon dioxide will further accelerate global warming.

“The ACE Rule would restore the rule of law and empower states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide modern, reliable, and affordable energy for all Americans,” said EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler in a statement. Wheeler and EPA air pollution chief Bill Wehrum are both former lobbyists for coal-producing companies that benefit from the agency’s new rule.

The Clean Power Plan faced powerful opposition from nearly the moment it was signed. Several coal-producing states, including Texas and West Virginia, led a group of industry stakeholders to ask the Supreme Court to stay the CPP in January 2016 pending an appeals court’s ruling. The Court agreed to temporarily block the plan and it has been suspended ever since.

Republicans, state environmental officials, and fossil fuel industry titans have urged the Trump administration to replace the Clean Power Plan for the past several months, citing its costs and dubious legality under the Clean Air Act. All 11 Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wrote to former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in January asking him to eliminate the rule. “Not only is the CPP bad policy, it is unlawful,” they wrote. “Congress did not give EPA the authority to transform our energy sector.”

Former agency officials blasted the proposal in a call with reporters hours before the EPA unveiled ACE. Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator who developed the CPP under Obama, called its replacement “galling and appalling.”

“This is all about coal at all costs,” she said. “They are continuing to play to their base and following industry’s playbook step by step.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont and a member of the Environment and Public Works committee, tweeted after the announcement, “Trump is actively destroying the planet in order to enrich his billionaire friends in the fossil fuel industry. We must fight back.”

The savings highlighted in Trump’s proposal — $400 million in annual net benefits with a reduction in CO2 emissions of up to 1.5 percent by 2030 — include a severe human cost, which the agency mentions in the fine print of its 289-page impact analysis.

Because of an increase in a tiny air pollutant known as PM 2.5, which contributes to smog and is linked to asthma and heart disease, the EPA predicts between 470 to 1,400 more deaths and thousands more lost days of school. Depending on how aggressively states make efficiency standards for individual power plants, those numbers could decrease.

“The Clean Power Plan would have reduced particle pollution along with the CO2 benefits by 25 percent by 2030. And we know reduction in particle exposure means saved lives,” said Janet McCabe, the former head of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. The EPA deferred a request for comment on former agency officials’ criticism of the Trump plan to an agency press release about the proposal.

The United States’ level of CO2 emissions actually decreased in 2017, but experts fear that a weakened regulatory scheme with decentralized goals could hike up rates of pollution nationwide. “Environmental regulation in many cases is one of the leading causes of the decline in emissions that we observed over the past twenty years,” said Reed Walker, an associate professor at UC Berkeley who co-authored a recent study that found regulation to be a key factor in reducing emissions in the manufacturing sector, even with increasing output. Under Wheeler and former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, the federal government has started the process of rolling back at least 76 environmental regulations, according to the New York Times. Many of these rules include protections to wildlife habitats and restrictions aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump, who will celebrate the Affordable Clean Energy proposal at a rally in West Virginia, has propped up coal miners with several regulatory decisions. In June, he ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to bail out struggling coal-fueled power plants and, last month, the EPA finalized a rule that relaxes the requirements for storing toxic coal ash. He also announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.

Once the Trump administration’s proposal is formally published, members of the public will have 60 days to comment on it. The EPA also plans to hold a formal hearing.

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Trump’s power plan proposal is “about coal at all costs”

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Zinke blames ‘environmental terrorists’ for wildfires. What the hell does that mean?

by LynOlszewski Posted on August 20, 2018

From California to British Columbia, the West is burning up. While fire experts are clear that climate change is a major factor in making wildfires more frequent and more intense, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke can’t seem to make up his mind about its role. Instead, he has blamed an unusual boogeyman for the fires: environmental terrorists.

“We have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access — that refuse to allow [the] harvest of timber,” he told Breitbart earlier this month. The underlying cause of catastrophic blazes, he said, is the “fuel load” of dead and dying timber in our forests. Whoa there, Zinke!

Fire experts do say that there’s more fuel in Western forests than there used to be, thanks to decades of aggressive fire suppression — and, well, because the warmer weather has been drying everything up.

Understanding Zinke’s bizarre claim about environmental terrorists requires a short history lesson. The concept came from one of the environmental movement’s biggest foes: libertarian activist Ron Arnold, who once told the New York Times that he wanted to “destroy environmentalists.”

Arnold coined the term “ecoterrorism” in 1983 article and later published the book Eco-terror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, which attempted to link the environmental movement with the Unabomber. Arnold used “ecoterrorism” to refer to groups like Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and Earth First! that sometimes engaged in property crimes, like vandalism and tree spiking, to combat environmental degradation and animal rights abuses.

Experts who have studied the phenomenon say “ecoterrorism” is not an appropriate term.

“In my research, I found that 90 to 95 percent of all direct actions, or crimes if you will, perpetrated by these groups do not fall anywhere close to the term ‘terrorism,’” says Donald Liddick, author of Eco-Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements.

A 2013 study that surveyed the acceptance of “ecoterrorism” found that “there is no documented evidence of harm coming to humans as a result of actions by radical environmentalists.” The authors suggest that terms like “obstruction,” “vandalism,” and “sabotage” more accurately described actions labeled as “ecoterrorism.”

Tree spiking, the widely feared practice of boobytrapping trees with metal rods, resulted in only one serious injury. Tree-spiking groups gave ample warning of their actions — they didn’t want the trees to be cut down, after all.

Liddick points out that Arnold had political motivations when he coined the phrase. Arnold is a policy advisor to the climate-denying think tank The Heartland Institute and the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from ExxonMobil and the ultra-conservative Mercer Family Foundation.

The term “ecoterrorism” picked up steam through the ’80s and ’90s, and began to appear in the prosecution of environmental and animal activists. Things took a turn for the weird in 2004: The FBI’s top official in charge of domestic terrorism, John Lewis, named ecoterrorism and the animal rights movement “the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat,” over far-right extremism, the KKK, and anti-abortion groups. (Arnold, it turns out, had asked the FBI to take a closer look at “ecoterrorists” in 2002.) At the time of the FBI’s declaration, no one had been killed in any attacks by these groups, according to CNN.

“To call something terrorism when it doesn’t actually entail a loss of human life is problematic, to say the least,” says Nicole Seymour, assistant professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.

While accusations of “ecoterrorism” have fallen in recent years, the label has been used against activists at Standing Rock, the valve turners, and other pipeline opponents. Zinke’s use of the term didn’t surprise Seymour.

“It’s kind of those boogeymen that the Trump administration and similar folks have been trying to implant in our imagination — these concepts made up to create public panic,” Seymour says.

Seymour sees Zinke’s use of “environmental terrorism” as a sound bite that casts blame off of climate change and onto environmentalists.

Liddick has a different perspective. “Knowing politics as I know politics, I think it’s about lumbering the Sierra,” he says. “Some of the corporate interests want to get the Sierra Nevada softwood and hardwood.”

On Thursday, the day after I spoke with Liddick, the Trump administration announced plans to fight wildfires with more logging and controlled burns on federal land. The timber industry has long used fire prevention as an excuse to clear forests.

So Zinke’s comments didn’t come out of nowhere. But how is all this connected to ecoterrorists? It all goes back to our old libertarian pal Ron Arnold. In addition to coining “ecoterrorism,” he was also the leading force behind the “Wise Use” movement — an anti-environmentalist approach to managing federal lands that emphasizes extraction. Its agenda, spelled out by Arnold in 1988, includes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening all public lands to mining and oil exploration, and clear-cutting old growth in national forests — partly for wildfire prevention, of course. In other words, this tenuous link between ecoterrorism and logging is 20 years old.

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Zinke blames ‘environmental terrorists’ for wildfires. What the hell does that mean?

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Trump has no standards when it comes to vehicle emissions

by AntonetClint Posted on August 2, 2018

President Donald Trump just slashed vehicle mile-per-gallon requirements. That will not only lead to more gas guzzlers on the roads, but more greenhouse gases and pollution-related deaths.

The move stops gas mileage standards from ratcheting up past 2020 levels, nixing Barack Obama’s Administration standard which ramps up to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead, that target will top out at around 37 mpg after 2021.

The Trump administration also announced it was trashing a decades-old waiver that allows California to set its own pollution and gas-mileage standards above the federal government’s. Because California has so many car buyers, automakers follow the state’s guidelines, effectively making California’s higher standards the country’s.

Scrapping current mileage standards is likely to cost Americans billions of dollars, according to Energy Innovation, a pro-clean energy nonprofit. Allowing cars to guzzle more gas will also contribute to a host of pollution-related health problems: heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory disease.

Energy Innovation

Another risk is runaway climate change. By 2035, these changes will likely bump up yearly emissions by 11 percent from where they would be under the Obama standards. But, thanks to the popularity of electric cars, Energy Innovations expects things to take a turn for the better. More EVs on the road could help emissions reverse course by 2040.

Energy Innovation

The Trump administration’s move will also leave your wallet a little lighter. Junking the efficiency standards and the California waiver means we’ll all be buying more gas  — $457 billion more, according to Energy Innovation. It’s as if the Trump administration added a 57-cent tax in 2040. But instead of paying that money to the government so that it can repair roads and build better transit options, we’ll be giving it to the oil industry.

Energy Innovation

None of this is guaranteed. California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra is fighting to keep the standards in place. “We’re ready to file suit if needed to protect these critical standards,” Becerra said in April when the EPA said it might slash them. A few weeks later California and 16 other states sued the Administration.

At the very least, legal challenges could delay the revisions into November, when midterm elections will gauge the public’s enthusiasm for the administration’s policies. The legal wrangling could also reopen the case that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases, giving an increasingly right-leaning Supreme Court the chance to weigh in. In the meantime, all this creates a lot of uncertainty for automakers, as they try to figure out what goals they’ll need to hit seven years from now.

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Trump has no standards when it comes to vehicle emissions

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Hold on to your snowballs: More Americans accept the reality of climate change than ever before

by LilaEspino Posted on July 12, 2018

Seventy-three percent! That’s the proportion of Americans who now think there is “solid evidence” of global climate change, according to a new report released by National Surveys on Energy and the Environment (NSEE). It’s the highest percentage since the survey started in 2008.

Good news? Sort of. Even those who accept the reality of climate change are still hazy on the causes. Only 34 percent of those sampled believed that climate change is due primarily to human activity, as established science indicates. As for the rest, 26 percent thought it was partially due to humans and 12 percent blamed natural causes. Come on, people!

Before you tear your hair out, here’s a quick lesson in the types of climate denial. “Trend deniers” are people who question whether the climate is changing at all — like the infamous snowball-throwing James Inhofe. “Attribution deniers,” on the other hand, question whether the changes can be linked to human influence — more in line with Scott Pruitt’s oh-so-vague climate beliefs.

Evidence suggests that trend deniers are on a sharp decline. Only 15 percent of those sampled in this study believed the climate was not changing at all. “That’s the lowest percentage since we started the survey,” says Barry Rabe, coauthor of the report and professor at the University of Michigan.

This has been a long time coming. Americans are experiencing more extreme weather on a personal level (heat waves, anybody?) and are seeing a growing number of reports about rising sea levels and melting polar ice.

National Surveys on Energy and Environment

But at the same time, attribution deniers are still around — and they present problems for anyone hoping to pass climate legislation.

“Those who are averse to mitigation aren’t as vehemently challenging the science of climate change, as they are the ability of policies to make any difference,” says Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg Institute of Public Opinion and another coauthor of the report.

This has been particularly visible in the Trump administration, where climate denial has taken the form of rejecting human influence rather than rising temperatures more generally. And, by denying the role of humans, the Trump team has absolved itself of making any significant policy changes — well, except for rolling back environmental regulations.

At least we don’t have to waste as much paper showing why a single snowball doesn’t disprove the reality of a warming world. But if you think that climate change is only partially — or not at all — caused by humans, you’re even less likely to take the drastic actions needed to prevent catastrophe.

“In general, having Americans accept the existence of climate change is a necessary condition for policy action,” Borick argues. “But it’s not sufficient.”

Borick and Rabe are hopeful that we will continue see slow movement toward both acceptance and action. The surveys show some hints that trend deniers can become attribution deniers — and that attribution deniers, in turn, may eventually accept the full science of climate change. But, if the last decade is any indication, it’s going to take a while.

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Hold on to your snowballs: More Americans accept the reality of climate change than ever before

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Losing Justice Kennedy puts fundamental environmental protections in peril

by LethaMary9021219 Posted on June 28, 2018

In a letter hand-delivered to President Trump on Wednesday, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement after 30 years on the Supreme Court.

Trump has already hinted at a list of potential replacements — all of whom are likely to side with the court’s now clear conservative majority. Kennedy has been the swing vote for decades. And without his moderating influence, advocates of the environment will face a steep challenge in winning over a majority of the justices.

With time quickly running out before the world locks in dangerous levels of climate change, that’s a frightening proposition. A more conservative-leaning court could make broad modifications to U.S. law that could last for decades. With environmental protections weakened, future presidents who want to take action on climate will have a much tougher time making lasting policy decisions.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, when it comes to climate change and environmental protection, the next Supreme Court justice’s opinions will have consequences that are planetary in scope.

Since the implications of a solidly conservative Supreme Court are so far-reaching, Grist reached out to several environmental law experts to learn which specific rulings and regulations could be most at risk. Responses were lightly edited for clarity.

Massachusetts vs. EPA: Gives the government authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.

Justice Kennedy was in the majority on Massachusetts v. EPA. It would be quite something if a new court, by a 5-4 decision, opted to reverse such recent precedent. But given what we have seen in the last few days [from the Supreme Court], it’s not impossible to see it happening.

—Michael Burger, Columbia University Law School

The Clean Air Act and climate protections are most at risk. Kennedy was the deciding vote on Massachusetts v. EPA, which reaffirmed the Clean Air Act as the most important mechanism for regulating greenhouse pollution economy-wide. We’re one vote away from losing fundamental protections for our climate.

—Kassie Siegel, Center for Biological Diversity

“Waters of the United States” Rule: Provides protection to some wetlands.

The Trump Administration’s proposal to rescind the Obama-era Waters of the United States Rule — which would curtail the federal government’s authority to limit pollution in wetlands and other smaller bodies of water under the Clean Water Act — may well ultimately end up before the Supreme Court. Justice Kennedy’s replacement will influence how we protect our air and water, as well as how we respond to climate change, for generations to come.

—Augusta Wilson, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

Clean Power Plan: Limits greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

I’m particularly concerned about the regulations that the Trump administration will introduce to replace Obama-era climate protections — for example the replacement to the Clean Power Plan. The administration will no doubt be gutting some of these rules and potentially violating statutory mandates in the process. It’s much more likely that the Supreme Court will uphold the replacement rules with another Trump nominee replacing Kennedy.

—Jessica Wentz, Columbia University Law School

​There is a good chance that the new justice will go along with the other conservative justices in narrowly reading the regulatory authority that statutes like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act give to EPA and other federal agencies. This could be bad news if the next President tries to revive something like the Clean Power Plan, which was widely portrayed as pushing the envelope of EPA’s authority — an issue the courts still haven’t decided.

—Michael B. Gerrard, Columbia University Law School

Standing: Allows plaintiffs to bring environmental grievances to court more often.

My main concern is how the newly configured court will interpret environmental groups’ standing to sue to enforce federal laws. Justice Kennedy had a nuanced take on standing, and it is likely that Trump’s nominees will have a more blunt approach, one that seeks to significantly curtail the ability of these groups to get into court.

—Burger

The future for environmental laws or standards:

Litigation is often the only option for those seeking to protect air and water and ensure public input on the value of sensitive ecosystems, endangered species, other wildlife species, and for those wanting to preserve important national landscapes. My general thought is that Kennedy was the last bulwark of reasonableness against the Trump Administration’s environmental onslaught. Every environmental lawyer I know is incredibly fearful of what this retirement will mean for the future of environmental protection in the United States.

—Hillary Hoffmann, Vermont Law School

I think just about any environmental rule that makes its way to the Supreme Court after Kennedy’s successor is appointed will be in jeopardy. We already have four hyper-conservative justices who tend to vote along ideological/party lines — and antipathy towards regulation, particularly environmental regulation, is a core part of that ideology. I have no doubt that Trump will nominate another conservative justice who shares his anti-regulation agenda. Through this justice, Trump will be able to continue advancing his deregulatory agenda for years after he his presidency ends.

—Wentz

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Losing Justice Kennedy puts fundamental environmental protections in peril

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Trump’s new tariffs could make America suck again for coal miners

by MargeneNeudorf Posted on June 28, 2018

One of President Trump’s new policies is making America less great for the very people he promised to make it great for: coal miners and fossil fuel executives.

Back in March, Trump decided to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports — 25 percent on the former, 10 percent on the latter. To no one’s surprise, the two industries in question are pretty overjoyed. You know who’s less enthused? Almost everyone else — particularly U.S. coal miners, who say the levies are dousing China’s appetite for American coal with a bucket of lukewarm water.

And coal isn’t the only sector steeling itself against a trade fallout. Trump’s zeal to boost production in steel country is backfiring on the fossil fuel industry, just as people predicted. Let’s take a closer look:

At the 2018 World Gas Conference on Monday, the CEOs of the biggest oil giants in the world, ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods and Chevron’s Michael Wirth, said the tariffs will likely slow oil and gas growth — right smack in the middle of a pretty historic shale oil and gas boom. The tariffs “run the risk of making [energy] projects less competitive,” Woods said. That’s because the tariffs raise the costs of materials for new pipelines and liquified natural gas facilities.
Last year, Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, agreed to build something called the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub — a multi-billion dollar project composed of an enormous network of pipelines, gas processing facilities, and below-ground storage. If built, the hub would sprawl from Pennsylvania all the way to Kentucky, and it would be the biggest infrastructure project in Appalachia to date. But Trump’s new tariffs, and a possible ensuing trade war, have put the project in jeopardy because they could cost China billions of additional dollars.
America’s coal industry isn’t doing so hot domestically, but coal exports are going through something of a boom right now. Guess what Beijing just put on a list of U.S. products that could get hit with Chinese tariffs, thanks to Trump’s dedication to aluminum and steel? Yep — coal. The tariffs also put a major deal between a big Chinese coal importer and two U.S.-based companies on the rocks. The deal concerned 1 million tons of coal exports per year.

Well, there you have it. Who woulda thunk Trump would be the person to get in the way of his own dumb plan?

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Trump’s new tariffs could make America suck again for coal miners

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Even Scott Pruitt’s friends have given up on him

by FlossieQLWM Posted on June 18, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt may still be clinging to his job despite his ever-expanding list of controversies, but his inner circle of allies is shrinking fast.

Since April, seven key EPA staffers have resigned, four of whom had once worked for him or were longtime friends he brought to the EPA from Oklahoma. And while not directly affiliated with the EPA, Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who has been a key ally of Pruitt’s, recently revealed some cracks in his support. On Wednesday, when Fox News personality Laura Ingraham observed that Pruitt was “hurting the president”and it was time for him to go, Inhofe replied,“I’ve seen these things. They upset me as much as they upset you, and I think something needs to happen to change that.” He suggested that one solution “would be for him to leave that job,” and that the deputy EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler “might be a good swap.”

Inhofe’s connection to Pruitt runs deep. His former chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, became Pruitt’s chief of staff and reportedly wanted to quit the agency, according to an E&E report in early April. So far, he has remained in his position, and the House oversight committee plans to interview him as part of its investigation into Pruitt’s conduct. Four of his former EPA colleagues who have since left have also been asked to appear before the committee.

A turning point in staff loyalty may have occurred in April, when news broke that Pruitt had rented a $50-a-night condo co-owned by an energy lobbyist for six months. After that, a series of stories about his questionable behavior appeared, and one by one, his formerly loyal staff began to exit the EPA.

Here they are:

Samantha Dravis: One of Pruitt’s first and closest advisers, she worked for the EPA Office of Policy and was often seen by his side. She knew Pruitt from her days as general counsel to the Republican Attorneys General Association and president of its affiliate dark-money group Rule of Law Defense Fund, both of which Pruitt chaired during his time as Oklahoma attorney general. On April 20, she officially left the EPA for the private sector after taking a three-month leave from the agency between November and January. Unnamed agency officials told CBS and the Washington Post that her decision had nothing to do with the bombardment of news that came days later about Pruitt renting a condo from the lobbyist and approving inappropriate pay raises for two staffers.

Albert “Kell” Kelly: Two weeks after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fined Kelly for his alleged involvement in a loan that hadn’t received FDIC approval, Scott Pruitt hired his old friend “Kell” at the EPA in 2017 to lead the Superfund Task Force. The former banker’s company had issued three mortgages to the Pruitts and provided a loan to finance Pruitt’s stake for co-ownership of a minor league baseball team, according to an investigation by the Intercept. Kelly, seen as a close confidante of his EPA boss, left the agency in early May (on the same day as another official, Pasquale Perrotta). In a statement, Pruitt praised the “tremendous impact” Kelly had on the Superfund program, which Pruitt has singled out as his personal achievement, adding, “Kell Kelly’s service at EPA will be sorely missed.”

Pasquale Perrotta: Pruitt’s head of security, Perrotta, quit the agency on the same day as Kelly, accelerating his retirement after serving under four EPA administrators. Perrotta came under fire for helping to enable Pruitt’s expansive spending, signing off on regular first-class flights that Pruitt had justified as necessary because of security concerns. The EPA hired Perrotta’s business partner at his private security firm, Sequoia Security Group, for security sweeps when Pruitt arrived.

Liz Bowman: A four-year veteran of the chemical lobby American Chemistry Council, Bowman arrived at the EPA to run its communications team. During Pruitt’s tenure, the press shop has shut out reporters who cover the EPA from events while turning to conservative media to create an echo chamber amplifying Pruitt’s message. Bowman sent her resignation letter as the chief spokesperson for the agency on April 30 and, in early May, assumed her position to handle communications for Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa. Just after her resignation letter, the Atlantic reported that a communications staffer had been reportedly shopping negative stories about another Cabinet member, the Department of Interior’s Ryan Zinke.

John Konkus: Konkus was second-in-command in the press shop, and his departure was announced on May 4, making him the fourth staffer to leave that week. Last year, the aide was tasked with cutting contracts from the Obama years, and reportedly combed through grants and contracts looking for the phrase “climate change.” True to his communications roots, on his LinkedIn page, Konkus frames this experience in a positive light: “Completely reformed the $4B/annual grant award and solicitation process at the agency to adhere to the new EPA strategic plan and better reflect the policies of the Trump Administration.” He also sparked a minor controversy for receiving an ethics waiver to work as a Republican political consultant while at the EPA. A former field office director in Florida for Trump’s presidential campaign, Konkus is headed to another federal agency — this time, the Small Business Administration, where he will be in charge of communications.

Sarah Greenwalt: Another Oklahoma aide from when Pruitt worked as state attorney general, Greenwalt, a senior counsel, announced her departure in early June. She was one of the two aides who received a 53 percent raise from Pruitt, who used the Safe Drinking Water Act to approve the raises after the White House rejected them. She is leaving to become an attorney for the Oklahoma Workers Compensation Commission.

Millan Hupp: Once an employee of Pruitt’s in Oklahoma, Hupp came to the EPA to do his scheduling. She was one of the five staffers interviewed by the House oversight committee for her involvement in finding Pruitt a used Trump hotel mattress and housing with the energy lobbyist, which Democrats say violates federal law forbidding Pruitt from using EPA staff and resources for private gain. The Atlantic quoted an anonymous staffer saying she left because she was “tired of being thrown under the bus by Pruitt.” Hupp was one of the two staffers to receive a raise unauthorized by the White House from Pruitt. Her sister Sydney Hupp also worked at the agency and left last year. She helped Pruitt’s wife, Marlyn, set up a meeting with Chick-fil-A in an unsuccessful bid to own a franchise. She may not have a franchise, but she was responsible for yet another possible violation of federal law.

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Even Scott Pruitt’s friends have given up on him

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