Quote:The Trump administration is proposing significant changes to the way it enforces the Endangered Species Act (ESA), saying they are a needed modernization of decades-old regulations, but wildlife groups say the changes will put endangered animals and plants at risk. The proposal would make it easier to delist an endangered species and would withdraw a policy that offered the same protections for threatened species as for endangered species unless otherwise specified.

Quote:Much of the Republican Party has long denied the science of climate change—that humans are causing the planet to warm. They’ve been less willing, historically, to deny the science of air pollution, which states that breathing in soot is bad for humans. But norms have changed since Donald Trump became president. For the last year and a half, fringe theories once promoted only by tobacco lobbyists and the very far-right have seeped into the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, those theories could soon be reflected in official EPA regulations intended to protect the public’s health..

Quote:Within 24 hours of the explosion at the Husky Energy Inc. refinery, a small team of federal investigators arrived. Their mission, Superior Mayor Jim Paine reassured residents, was to “find out what happened and how we prevent it in the future.” Smoke rises from the Husky Energy oil refinery in Superior, Wis., after an explosion April 26. The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board concluded this month that a faulty valve at the plant caused the explosion. Earlier this month, after a three-month probe, the investigators from the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board concluded that a faulty valve at the plant caused the explosion.

The board plans to issue recommendations that aim to prevent such an accident from happening again at a refinery. But despite the warm welcome in Superior—and wide recognition of its expertise in chemical plant disasters—this small, independent federal agency is teetering on the brink of elimination. The Trump administration has twice in its budgets attempted to shut down the Chemical Safety Board; so far, Congress has rejected the attempts. For the 2019 fiscal year, both the House and Senate have proposed restoring full funding.

Quote:The bind we seem to be in today is that people forget, or ignore, the fundamental purpose of the policy in all the recent moves by President Trump. When he rolls back the Clean Power Plan or the emissions standards for cars, the White House and reporters debate about winners and losers and whether or not the action will deliver the jobs he promised (it won’t), not if it’s remotely consistent with the policy aim of the Clean Air Act — keeping harmful pollutants out of the air. Not only does this remove the context for the debate, it neuters the moral content from the policy. Laws are passed to solve problems. We can argue about the best way to solve the problem, but it’s impossible to have a good faith debate if one side pretends the law was enacted out of malice rather than its actual purpose. 

To take a recent example, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has a specific purpose — to stop using so much oil (with its massive costs in pollution, national security, and economic security) and replace it with bioenergy — an industry where our production capacity rivals Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves. It was explicitly about developing a partnership with farmers to advance technology in biofuels with an eye towards displacing oil use as rapidly as possible with the cleanest possible fuel.

Reinforcing the purpose, the RFS was paired with a significant revision of the fuel economy standards (for the first time in decades), and various provisions to encourage electrification of the transportation sector. Everything pointed toward the central goal of ending U.S. use of oil as quickly as possible and replacing it with energy that did not contribute to global warming. Like most environmental legislation, because it is asking industry to adjust to a new reality, the RFS contemplated a progression, where more and more fuel was blended and the biofuel became more advanced over time.


Again, as usual, the legislation included safety valves and waivers to allow the EPA to give flexibility to those in the supply chain for unanticipated setbacks or if it wasn’t financially feasible to move as quickly as the law contemplated. What the RFS did not anticipate was that years of fervent opposition and furious lobbying would lead an administration to turn those safety valves into a mechanism to undo the very purposes of the legislation — but that’s where we find ourselves today.

For over 10 years now, the RFS has been on the books with a simple mandate to gradually increase the percentage of biofuel blended into our fuel supply. Much of the industry has accepted this arrangement and invested in their facilities to allow them to blend biofuels, at least up to a point. Some of the industry has chosen to gamble, year after year, that this mandate will be lifted and so they have bought credits to comply.

Trump’s EPA, by stretching its authority to give individual waivers to refineries to the limit, has fundamentally undone the purpose of the legislation. As prices have cratered, due to this administratively-engineered glut in RFS credits, the certainty needed to justify investment in advancing biofuel technology will crater with it. And the fact is, there’s no policy rationale for it at all — it doesn’t make gas cheaper for consumers, while it increases pollution. It’s just a gift to an already flush, and heavily subsidized, oil industry. It’s nothing more than an effort to undermine the largely successful  Democratic efforts to find a place for farmers in the clean energy economy. Democrats have noticed the opportunity to run against this stealth attack and so expect to hear about it more. 

Quote:The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reportedly lost 8 percent of its staff in the first 18 months of President Trump's administration due to high numbers of departing staffers and a low number of new hires. The Washington Post reported Saturday that nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA during that time, while fewer than 400 were hired. The agency's employment has shrunk to its lowest levels since the Reagan administration, the Post noted. According to data retrieved by the Post under a Freedom of Information Act request, the EPA has lost as many as 260 scientists, 106 engineers and 185 “environmental protection specialists," numbers which include both longtime veterans of the department and less experienced employees.

Quote:The Trump administration is poised to roll back existing regulations on methane gas as early as this week, the New York Times reported Monday. The proposal would weaken an Obama-era requirement that companies must monitor and repair any methane leaks, according to documents the Times reviewed. The new rule is anticipated to allow for far more air pollution and leaks of the gas. The proposed rule would be the third major step the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made this year to change the way air pollutants are regulated. Since January, the agency has taken strides to roll back two capstone Obama-era rules that aimed to regulate tailpipe emissions from cars and carbon pollution from coal fired power plants.

Quote:With the human drama unfolding at this week’s astonishing Senate Judiciary hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it’s easy to lose sight of the latest changes at the Environmental Protection Agency. But what’s been going at EPA could also affect the lives of millions of Americans for years to come.
The EPA’s scandal-plagued former Administrator Scott Pruitt may be gone, but his agenda of undoing environmental regulations and restricting the role of science is humming along under acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, according to the New York Times.

• On Thursday, we learned that the EPA is planning to eliminate the science adviser’s office under its Office of Research and Development. It’s a role meant to advise the administrator and to ensure the best science is used to inform environmental policies.
  
• Earlier in the week, we found out that the EPA placed the head of its Office of Children’s Health Protection, Ruth Etzel, on leave. It was a move she interpreted as a step to “disappear” her office, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed.
  

These moves are part of a bigger, ongoing reshuffle within the EPA, which agency officials say is meant to “reduce redundancies.” But environmental advocates see an ominous trend. “There’s a disturbing pattern in the Trump administration of ignoring science, boxing out the expertise of career staff, and undermining the mission of agencies that are supposed to protect us,” Kathleen Rest, executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a press release this week in response to Etzel’s removal.

Quote:The culprit turned out to be E. coli, a powerful pathogen that had contaminated romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona, and distributed nationwide. At least 210 people in 36 states were sickened. Five died and 27 suffered kidney failure. The same strain of E. coli that sickened them was detected in a Yuma canal used to irrigate some crops. For more than a decade, it’s been clear that there’s a gaping hole in American food safety: Growers aren’t required to test their irrigation water for pathogens such as E. coli. As a result, contaminated water can end up on fruits and vegetables.

After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration. But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA—responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations—shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years..

Despite this deadly outbreak, the FDA has shown no sign of reconsidering its plan to postpone the rules. The agency also is considering major changes, such as allowing some produce growers to test less frequently or find alternatives to water testing to ensure the safety of their crops. The FDA’s lack of urgency dumbfounds food safety scientists.

Quote:When Mother Jones first reported in December 2017 that the Environmental Protection Agency had hired a hyperpartisan GOP opposition research firm known for its aggressive tactics to handle the agency’s news-clipping work, the politically appointed flacks in the agency’s press office insisted the decision was about saving money and that the hiring had been handled through normal procurement channels. As we reported Thursday, we now know that was not the case. Internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that political appointees in the EPA press office demanded that career staff push through the hiring of Definers Public Affairs—best known for its work for Republican campaigns and recently for its role as Facebook’s attack dog on Capitol Hill, which included attempts to smear George Soros for his critiques of the social-media network.

Now, thanks to another batch of internal emails, we have even more evidence that the motivation for hiring Definers came from the top agency political appointees who were ticked off at the old service because it was collecting too many news clips that portrayed then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt negatively.

Quote:Historically, mesothelioma mostly affects older men exposed to toxic asbestos while they served in the military or worked certain blue-collar jobs. The three women in the support group never held such occupations. This is a testament to the trend that cases of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases are increasing in women and younger adults. Why? Because asbestos still isn’t banned in the United States.

Asbestos imports have quietly soared in recent months. The deadly carcinogen has been found in consumer products such as baby powderand children’s makeup. An alarming report from two nonprofits — the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) — shows asbestos imports rose by nearly 2,000 percent between July and August 2018. The biggest spike was last August, when the U.S. imported 272 metric tons of raw chrysotile asbestos, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Commerce Department.  

In January, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a petition from a coalition of environmental groups and advocacy organizations requesting to close reporting loopholes to ensure all imports and domestic uses of asbestos products are documented. Officials with EWG, one of the nonprofits that co-authored the petition, said the EPA dismissed the need of increased reporting, claiming the agency “is aware of all ongoing uses of asbestos.” But if this was true, we wouldn’t constantly be reading new reports of toxic asbestos fibers found in consumer goods such as crayons sold by Dollar Tree. News like this begs the question: What else is laced with asbestos without our knowledge??