Tag: clean air act
Len Blavatnik

Latest Trump Ruling Risks An American Bhopal Disaster To Enrich Oligarch

Reprinted with permission from DCReport

The weakening of regulations that save us from oil chemical apocalypse appears to have been influenced by a friend of Russian leader Vladimir Putin's oligarchs.

Putin, of course, is the presumed friend of lame-duck and impeached President Donald Trump who is a proven enemy of environmental safeguards.

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Obama Lays Out New Climate-Change Plan

Obama Lays Out New Climate-Change Plan

By Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama declared his new carbon plan “the single most important step” the country can take to fight global climate change as he tried Monday to anticipate and rebut arguments from critics about harm his vision could do to American business.

Speaking in personal terms about his days at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama recalled the smog that made it hard to breathe when he went out for a run and the people who had to stay inside on especially bad days.

“You fast-forward 30, 40 years later, and we solved those problems,” he said. “At the time, the same time, the same characters who are going to be criticizing this plan were saying this is going to kill jobs.

“Despite those scaremongering tactics,” he said, “you can actually run in Los Angeles without choking.”

Obama said he was going “off script” on the remembrances, underscoring the personal importance he attaches to this key piece of his ambitious second-term agenda. The new regulations are designed to cut carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 32 percent between 2005 and 2030, through new regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency administrator insists are “within the four corners” of the Clean Air Act.

Obama said the new regulations were the most significant step “America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.”

But Republicans and business leaders were already vowing to fight him. They say Obama’s clean power plan is part of a radical environmental agenda that comes at the expense of the American people. It could heap billions of dollars in added costs while shifting away from natural gas as a reliable and clean power source, said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.

“To the president, appeasing a fringe environmental movement has overtaken the more responsible path to grow our economy,” said McCarthy, vowing that the House will “consider every option possible to fight it.”

The plan would boost efforts already underway in California and other coastal states to increase the use of renewable power. But for mostly Republican-led parts of the country still heavily reliant on coal, the rules would force a major economic transition that many elected officials pledge to resist.

(c)2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: U.S President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the Clean Power Plan at an event in the East Room of the White House Aug. 3, 2015 in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Congressman Widens Inquiry Into Fracking Waste In Northeast And Midwest

Congressman Widens Inquiry Into Fracking Waste In Northeast And Midwest

By David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News (TNS)

A congressional investigation into the way states regulate the disposal of the often toxic waste generated during the fracking of oil and gas has expanded.

Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-PA) launched the investigation in October by singling out his home state for the inquiry.

Now Cartwright, a member of the House Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs, has broadened the probe to include Ohio and West Virginia. Those states generate waste from hydraulic fracturing as well as accepting waste from other states, including Pennsylvania.

Cartwright’s growing inquiry mirrors the increasing national concern about the disposal of oil and gas waste left over from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

In letters to the heads of the environmental protection agencies for Ohio and West Virginia, Cartwright said fracking waste can “cause harm to human health and the environment” if not properly handled.

Consequently, Cartwright wants the two states to explain how their inspection procedures of oil and gas waste disposal facilities protect human health and the environment.

The representative also is seeking answers to more than a dozen other questions, including the number of inspections or investigations of disposal facilities receiving fracking waste. He also wants to know how the states’ regulators monitor the accuracy of reporting and compliance requirements for handling and disposing of fracking waste.

“The Subcommittee minority is conducting this oversight to determine if state regulations and monitoring of fracking waste are sufficient to ensure accuracy, completeness and compliance with applicable environmental laws,” Cartwright said in the letters.

Fracking is the process of blasting a mixture of water, chemicals and sand down a well to break open shale to extract fossil fuels.

Among other concerns, Cartwright, who was recently elected to a second term, wants to determine whether Ohio and West Virginia are obeying the federal Clean Air Act, which mandates protection from airborne contaminants.

Cartwright cites a 2011 minority staff report of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It identified 29 chemicals found in fracking waste that are possible human carcinogens, and are regulated under both the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act for their risks to human health.

The report identified benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene as being among the chemicals found in fracking products. Each of those compounds is a contaminant under the Safe Drinking Water Act and a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Benzene also is a known human carcinogen.
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(InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is available at http://insideclimatenews.org/.)

Photo: Joshua Doubek via Wikimedia Commons

Supreme Court Limits EPA Authority On Power Plants

Supreme Court Limits EPA Authority On Power Plants

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, in a split ruling, has blocked the Obama administration from requiring special permits for some new power plants, but upheld them for others.

In a dense 5-4 decision Monday, the justices said the Environmental Protection Agency had wrongly stretched an anti-pollution provision of the Clean Air Act to cover carbon emissions in new or modified plants.

But the ruling was confined to only one regulatory provision, and it is not likely to directly affect the broader climate-change policy that the administration announced earlier this month. That policy relies on a different part of the law that says states must take steps to reduce harmful air pollutants, which include greenhouse gases.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority to regulate these gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

The current case focused on one of two methods the EPA can use to accomplish that — its permitting rules.

Under the Clean Air Act, new facilities that are expected to emit more than a certain amount of harmful pollutants must obtain a permit in advance.

When the EPA added carbon dioxide to the pollutants it regulates, the agency also decided to raise the established limits without congressional approval. That’s because carbon dioxide is so plentiful that a literal interpretation of the Clean Air Act could have extended the new rules to thousands of houses, office buildings and shopping malls.

The agency preferred to focus the rules on large industrial facilities. Although that move exempted most businesses from regulation, it also left EPA open to attack from industry lawyers, who accused it of rewriting the law to support its regulations.

This story has been updated.
AFP Photo/Saul Loeb