Hundreds of California residents have been forced to evacuate after a wind-driven wildfire spread overnight as 500,000 people are left without power in the Golden State’s second planned blackout in two weeks.
The National Weather Service (NWS) says winds around the highest areas of Sonoma County have been blowing at speeds up to 70mph, and elsewhere in the region there are winds between 30mph and 50mph.
According to dispatch reports, the Kincade fire spread to about 1,000 acres by 11 pm Wednesday night.
As of Thursday morning, Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, says the blaze near Geyserville has grown to 10,000 acres and has no containment.
The Sonoma County sheriff’s office confirmed that residents had to flee their homes overnight due to the blaze.
Hundreds of California residents have been forced to evacuate after a wind-driven wildfire spread overnight. Embers fly from a tree as the Kincade Fire burns near Geyserville, California, on Thursday
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Dino Grandoni reports for The Lightbulb in the Washington Post
The GOP-controlled Senate voted Thursday to keep a Trump administration regulation on coal-fired power plants that environmentalists and congressional Democrats alike repeatedly have decried as too weak.
So why did Senate Democrats force the vote in the first place?
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) did so to make some Senate Republicans squirm — and to make sure he remains Democratic leader as his party seeks to regain control of the chamber next year.
“We would like to win. Make no mistake about it,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who sponsored the resolution with Schumer, told reporters Thursday. “But if we don’t challenge the other side to put their votes on the board, they could always hide behind the fact that, gee, there was no opportunity.”
In a 53-to-41 vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a measure to throw out the rule on climate-warming emissions from power plants finalized earlier this year by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. The agency’s Affordable Clean Energy rule cuts carbon emissions from the electricity sector by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming. And it replaced the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which sought more aggressive limits on carbon emissions in a way that would have forced companies to switch from coal to lower-carbon energy sources.
With the ink is still drying on the final version of the EPA rule, Schumer turned to a little-used legislative tool to force a vote to repeal the regulation. The Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to review, and potentially reject, new rulemaking from federal agencies.
But it was always unlikely that Schumer, with only 47 Democratic senators, had the votes to win. Only GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is up for election in 2020 in Maine, decided to join Democrats and vote for repeal. Meanwhile, three Democrats — Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — all switched sides and voted with Republicans.
But by pushing for the vote, even a losing one, Schumer showed he is willing to go on offense on climate change — an issue of increasing importance both for fellow Senate Democrats and, according to recent polling, the party’s voting base.
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As BPU officials finalize a new energy master plan, stakeholders debate how big of a role nuclear energy will play
Oyster Creek nuclear power plant
TOM JOHNSON reports for NJ Spotlight Oct. 18, 2019
One of the big unanswered policy questions as state officials finalize a new energy master plan (EMP) is how big a factor nuclear power will play in meeting New Jersey’s future energy needs.
It is an issue that sparked widely varying views in written comments to the state Board of Public Utilities, stoking much interest among stakeholders based on the BPU consultant’s projections that New Jersey’s three nuclear plants may continue operating beyond their current permits, which begin to expire in 2036.
The plants, operated by PSEG Nuclear, a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group, now provide about 90% of the carbon-free electricity in the state. Beginning this past April, utility customers began paying roughly $300 million in annual subsidies to avert the units’ closing. Its owner claimed the units are no longer economically competitive in a market flooded by cheap natural gas.
The consultant, the Rocky Mountain Institute, has been tasked with doing extensive modeling that projects the least-cost options for achieving a 100% clean energy future by 2050. Nuclear energy provides plenty of carbon-free power without any greenhouse gas emissions, but some environmentalists hardly view it as “clean energy.’’
Radioactive waste
“As producers of large quantities of radioactive waste, these plants do not meet the definition of zero-pollution energy sources,’’ the Sierra Club argued in comments submitted to the BPU. ‘’There is nothing in this plan to address the phase-out of existing nuclear plants in New Jersey,’’ the club said.
The Unitarian Universalist FaithAction NJ agreed. It said the new EMP should assume that all of PSE&’s nuclear plants should shut down no later than when their current licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expire (in 2036, 2040 and 2046), and plan accordingly.
In its comments, PSE&G argued the state should acknowledge the important role nuclear will play in achieving the climate reduction goals advanced by the EMP. “Nuclear will be the largest source of carbon-free electricity production for New Jersey for many years,’’ the company said.
While supporting the state’s goals to increase reliance on solar and offshore wind capacity, PSE&G claimed “the continued operation of New Jersey’s nuclear capacity, as long as the plants are capable of operating is required if the state is to achieve its clean energy goals and obligations.’’
Bill Cobau, retired college professor, lives in Charleston, South Carolina’s Harleston’s Village which has seen multiples floods in the past five years due to ocean encroachment. One ruined his floor yet a neighbor’s home recently sold for $1million.
Patrik Jonsson reports for the Christian Science Monitory
As she recalls the flood waters rising once again last month around her Charleston, South Carolina, home, Elizabeth Cooper says she can still hear her mom’s voice on the phone from Iowa.
The home here in Harleston Village – a kind of Colonial-era suburb of mansions and leaning freedmen’s shacks – has seen a slow-motion catastrophe unfold, with six floods in as many years from rain events and hurricanes.
“My mom told me on the phone, ‘Come back to Iowa, we’ll have a beach here soon!’ Ha-ha, right?” says Ms. Cooper, who gave no thoughts to flooding when she bought her house 35 years ago.
To be sure, she says, property values are holding steady for the moment, given the charm of the neighborhood and magnetic pull of the ocean lapping against the city’s world-class waterfront.
But because comedy hints at truth, mom’s joke hit a nerve.
In some ways, the roughly one-foot rise of the Charleston high tide over the past century symbolizes a slow-rolling, real estate emergency that extends far beyond South Carolina.
Yet land-use practices aren’t catching up. Here and in other communities along America’s southeastern coast, the dominant pattern remains coastal development and the rebuilding of damaged dwellings, not an orderly retreat from rising sea levels.
The trend is fueled by age-old human affinity for “blue spaces,” and by government policies that experts say amount to subsidies for risky residences.
“Coastal … real estate development is continuing to be faster than inland, which means we are continuing to put ourselves at risk,” says Susan Wachter, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
About 49 million U.S. homes are within a few hundred feet of a rising coastline. Many houses near the beach are still appreciating faster than ones further inland, despite the prospect of wetter, slower-moving storms and higher water levels, which climate scientists associate with warming oceans. Places like Hilton Head Island could lose nearly half of its livable land in the next 80 years.
“There is over $1 trillion worth of infrastructure within 700 feet of the coast,” says A.R. Siders, a Harvard University social scientist who studies relocation as a solution to climate change. “Even if one-tenth of those people needed to relocate, we are talking about orders of magnitude we have never [seen] before.”
Fast-growing coastal communities
Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Beaufort, and Hilton Head are some of the fastest-growing cities in the region – and also the most vulnerable. The Lowcountry Hazards Center at the College of Charleston says that in 50 years the city will see 15% of properties affected by flooding each year, compared to 1% today.
Yet Charleston County allowed the building of 761 new homes in vulnerable areas over the past decade. A push to annex low-lying marsh islands like Paradise Island and Cat Island may further add to the region’s development – and tax base.
“In terms of price in South Carolina, the economy is doing very well – so is Georgia and North Carolina – and you have a lot of retirees moving into that area,” says Michael Ferlez, an analyst with Moody’s Analytics. “There’s a limited housing stock, construction hasn’t kept pace with it, and it’s also more affordable than a lot of major sort of retiree havens in Florida and the Gulf area. There may not be a lot of room – right now they are building on tiny little bits of land.”
Some signs already point to economic challenges ahead. Plenty of properties are declining in value. In fact, South Carolina is the only state on the Atlantic Seaboard to not show some recent contraction in coastal real estate values. In the 17 coastal states between Maine and Texas, nearly $16 billion has been shaved off land-value appreciation since 2005 by floods and looming sea level rise, according to estimates by First Street Foundation in New York.
Even here in Charleston County, which stretches from the 18th-century downtown to sleepy marsh islands and beach towns, homeowners have lost $266 million in potential value gains.
A question for government
This presents an increasingly urgent conundrum for some 130 million Americans – up 10 million from 2010 – who live in coastal counties, off the beach, behind a levee, or up a creek.
Buyers are becoming more finicky. Just a few miles from Charleston’s hot real estate market, Seabrook Island has seen anemic, 1% year-over-year appreciation. Call it climate gentrification: Better protected – or higher elevation – homes are gaining value while flood-prone homes are selling at discounts that can reach 15% or more.
“The majority of people’s retirement savings is the equity in their house, and if you think about the timeline of [sea level rise] and people’s savings, those things are converging,” says Ryan Lewis, a finance professor at the University of Colorado and co-author of a 2019 study, “Disaster on the Horizon: The price effect of sea-level rise.”
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ERIC WOLFF reports for Politico 10/18/2019 03:40 PM EDT
Biofuel producers and farmers are pressing the Trump administration to rewrite its proposed fix to the Renewable Fuel Standard — and threatening legal action if EPA tries to finalize its supplemental blending rule.
Producers are demanding changes to the proposed rule because they insist it betrays promises President Donald Trump and EPA officials made to them before the proposal was released on Tuesday. They say the main reason they backed EPA’s Oct. 4 announcement of a boost to biofuels was because Trump and administration officials assured them the rule would require large refiners to make up for demand that has been lost to EPA’s expansion of waivers that exempt small refiners from blending requirements under the RFS.
The announcement preceded the release of the proposed rule by over a week, and biofuel backers were stunned when they read the official text.
EPA, however, contends no such promises were made.
“People are not happy,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a leading defender of the RFS, said Thursday. “They feel that once an agreement is reached, they should be standing by that agreement.”
Ernst said she would be meeting with EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler later on Thursday to make the case for the proposal to be reconsidered.
Biofuel producers believe they have a window to get EPA to make substantial changes to the rule, and are mounting a furious push to pressure White House and agency officials. EPA has yet to publish the rule in the Federal Register. Once that happens, the agency plans to accept public comments until Nov. 29 and to finalize the rule by the end of the year. Producers believe there is plenty of time to change course.
Producers and farmers say Trump pledged he would require large refiners to blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol, even after factoring in the impact of the economic hardship exemptions EPA grants to small refiners. The biofuels industry said administration officials led them to believe that the number of gallons assigned to large refiners would be a three-year rolling average of total exemptions, which would make the system self-correcting: If EPA gave out a lot of exemptions, they would be forced to reassign more gallons in future years.
But EPA’s proposal relies instead on the number of gallons DOE recommends that EPA exempt from the blending requirements, which would work out to a far lower reallocation amount. DOE recommended between 2016 and 2018 an average of 770 million gallons for exemption, while EPA actually exempted an average of 1.3 billion gallons.
That change made producers and farmers feel like they were duped.
In addition, EPA publishes the total number of gallons it waives, but DOE’s recommendations are not typically made public out of concern for the confidential business information of small refiners that apply for exemptions. Biofuel producers say they are unwilling to take EPA officials at their word that the final number will be 15 billion gallons.
“There’s no trust left with EPA whatsoever,” said Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol producers trade association. “They are asking us to trust that they are going to follow DOE recommendations on these exemptions when all they’ve done is ignore those recommendations for several years. They’re asking us to make a leap of faith we’re not willing to make.”
Senators grilled USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky over the RFS controversy at an Agriculture Committee hearing Thursday, with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) calling the rule “a bait and switch.”
Censky promised producers would get their full mandate. “I can assure you directly from conversations with the president, the president is insistent that EPA administer this to make sure that we achieve 15 billion gallons,” Censky said. He added that Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue spoke to Wheeler on Friday and confirmed that the agency “very much plans to administer it to make sure that we achieve that 15 billion gallon target.”
Grant Kimberley, executive director of the Iowa Biodiesel Board, a biodiesel trade association in the state, said Trump’s promise that reallocation would be based on actual gallons waived was made during a September meeting with biofuel advocates at the White House. And just last week, at a public event after EPA’s announcement, Trump raised biofuel producers’ hopes when he said EPA would be requiring 16 billion gallons of blending, a volume that exceeds what is allowed under statutory schedules.
“We made decisions based on that September meeting,” Kimberley said.
Small refiner exemptions granted in the last three years have reduced demand for biodiesel by 550 million gallons, Kimberley said, and biodiesel producers and soy farmers have also been particularly hard-hit by Chinese tariffs on soybeans.
On Oct. 3, the day before EPA’s announcement of the rule, the White House, EPA and USDA officials held a briefing call with more than a dozen farm groups and biofuel producers. Administration officials indicated they would not add more than a billion gallons to the 2020 mandate, as a concession to the oil industry. An EPA official promised, however, that the reallocation formula would be based on exempted gallons, according to four biofuel industry participants who were on the call.
Administration officials indicated the extra gallons were taken off the table as a concession to the oil industry. An EPA official promised, however, that the reallocation formula would be based on exempted gallons, according to four biofuel industry participants who were on the call.
Monte Shaw, CEO of Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, an Iowa ethanol producers group not affiliated with the national RFS, said a three-year rolling average of small refiner exemptions “was what we were briefed on the deal — it was specifically asked and specifically reiterated.”
“And that is the only reason you got positive statements from ag and biofuels on Oct. 4,” he added.
Shaw said his group’s board held an emergency meeting the night of the announcement and almost didn’t support the deal. It wound up backing it because of the promise that there would be reallocation of gallons lost to exemptions.
The White House referred POLITICO’s questions about the call to EPA, and the agency rejected producers’ description that a promise was made.
“That is not accurate,” spokesperson Michael Abboud said in a statement. “EPA has consistently stated that it will seek comment on how to and at what levels it projects small refinery relief in the 2020 compliance year. These ranges are informed by the last three compliance years and the statutory discretion provided to EPA by Congress.”
The oil industry has long opposed the concept of reallocation, and trade groups have promised to fight a final rule in court.
“There are no volumes ‘lost’ to [small refiner exemptions] — nothing to reallocate — and government data shows U.S. ethanol consumption nears all-time highs,” said a spokesperson for American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a refiners trade group. “Ethanol producers, refiners, consumers and farmers would be much better served if biofuel interests abandon the ‘[small-refiner-exemptions]-demand-destruction’ red herring and focus instead on seeking resolutions to trade policies that have caused their exports to drop.”
Shaw said biofuel producers will “use every method” to get Trump to fulfill his promise. “I don’t care if they have to do another supplemental rule. This isn’t going to be done by [the statutory deadline of ] Nov. 30,” he said. “Take the time to do it right.”
Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.POLITICO
Federal officials have issued a public health alert for possible E. Coli-contaminated beef in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, including hamburger patties sold at ShopRite.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is issuing a public health alert for beef products derived from imported beef from Ontario, Canada because it may be contaminated with E. Coli, according to a news release.
Federal officials are concerned that some products may be in school or consumers’ freezers. Schools or consumers who have these products are urged not to serve them and throw them away.
E. Coli a potentially deadly bacterium that can cause bloody diarrhea, dehydration, and in the most severe cases, kidney failure. The very young, seniors and persons with weak immune systems are the most susceptible to foodborne illness, according to the release.
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