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.