EPA air quality science panel refuses to be dismissed

Jordan Davidson reports for EcoWatch
Sep. 27, 2019 12:44PM

A group of 20 scientists charged with reviewing the nation’s air quality standards plans to convene and to issue a report on the country’s air pollution regulations, even though the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disbanded their panel.

In a move that is consistent with the administration’s skepticism towards science and expertise, the EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, part of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, in October 2018, as The Hill reported.

When he disbanded the group, Wheeler claimed that the group — made up of some of the nation’s top scientists assigned to review the impact of soot and other microscopic air pollutants on human health — took too long to perform its task, according to Bloomberg Environment.

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Now, in a seemingly unprecedented maneuver, the scientists will meet in Arlington, Virginia Oct. 10-11, one year after they were disbanded, to issue a report on whether or not the current federal particulate matter standard is sufficient, according to Reuters.

The group, which now calls itself the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel wants to make sure there is a documented record of scientific consensus that reaches the EPA decision-makers.

“I’m proud to say that being disbanded is not an obstacle for our panel,” said Chris Frey of North Carolina State University who chairs the panel to the NC State press office. “If anything, being told that we were unilaterally terminated has redoubled my determination to discharge the public service to which I originally agreed.”

Even though Wheeler is a former coal-industry lobbyist, Frey is hopeful that he will consider the independent panel’s recommendations.

“As a group, this panel has more experts, more breadth, depth and diversity of expertise than the chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee,” Frey said, as E&E News reported.

Like Frey, most of the members of the independent panel come from universities and all are unpaid for serving on the panel.

“This is the first time in the history of EPA where the credibility of the agency’s science review process has been so compromised that an independent panel of experts has recognized the need for and will be conducting a comprehensive review,” said Chris Zarba, who will help lead the effort and once served as director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, another board that provides scientific advice to the agency, The Hill reported.

The Union of Concerned Scientists will host the panel since it was troubled that the EPA is operating without the scientific expertise it needs to ensure a particulate standard based on the best available science.

“Reconvening a disbanded pollutant review panel breaks new ground,” said Gretchen Goldman, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, to The Hill. “Nothing like this has ever been done before. Indeed, nothing like this has ever been necessary. But we live in unprecedented times.”

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CalCom Energy’s $100M fund targets California farms for solar-battery systems

In a state facing grid outages, the agriculture sector solar-storage developer sees opportunities in on-site resilience.

JEFF ST. JOHN reports for gtm
September 26, 2019

$100 million fund marks CalCom’s first foray into owning the systems it develops. (Credit: CalCom)
$100 million fund marks CalCom’s first foray into owning the systems it develops. (Credit: CalCom)

In California, it’s not just vulnerable families and critical services that could use battery-backed solar systems to ride through wildfire-prevention power outages. Farms also have critical energy needs, like pumping water to crops on set schedules, or chilling them after harvest, that could face significant disruption under the state’s new wildfire prevention regime. 

CalCom Energy, a long-time solar and energy services provider for California’s agricultural sector, thinks it has a solution. This week, the Fresno-based developer launched a $100 million Agriculture Energy Infrastructure Fund, aimed at combining low-cost solar power-purchase agreements with the backup power of energy storage. 

The fund, developed in partnership with Symbiont Energy and Live Oak Bank, marks CalCom’s first foray into owning the systems it develops, David Williams, CalCom’s chief commercial officer, noted in Wednesday’s press release. But it’s far from CalCom’s first foray into solving the farm-specific energy challenges facing its customers in the state’s Central Valley. 

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Since its 2012 founding as CalCom Solar, the Fresno, Calif.-based company has developed more than 200 megawatts of clean energy projects, largely solar projects for farms and water districts. In fact, it’s one of the largest commercial solar developers in the territory of Pacific Gas & Electric, the Northern California utility now in bankruptcy reorganization under the weight of tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from deadly wildfires started by its power lines in 2017 and 2018. 

Like many California solar developers, energy storage is playing an ever-increasing role in CalCom’s projects, leading it to rebrand as CalCom Energy last year. Changes to California’s net metering regime, including time-of-use (TOU) rates that reduce the value of midday energy and increase its cost in late afternoon and evening hours, have an outsize effect on commercial solar projects like CalCom’s that rely on meter aggregation for valuing their production. 

CalCom also provides metering and billing analysis through its Energy Services management platform, to allow its customers to better manage how they consume electricity in relation to their solar-generated and battery-stored resources. For example, big Salinas Valley grower and shipper D’Arrigo Bros. of California, which has installed about 5.5 megawatts of solar PV through CalCom, has also added two 520-kilowatt batteries at its central cooling facility, to reduce demand charges, shift energy to different TOU periods, and provide backup power to critical loads.

But batteries have become even more critical under the much-expanded wildfire prevention “public safety power shutoff” regimes put in place by PG&E and other California utilities under state regulatory mandate this year. Agricultural customers are huge electricity users, largely to move water — pumping and treating water uses roughly one-sixth of the state’s electricity supply. 

In fact, water treatment plants and other water infrastructure are among the classes of “critical services” that have been earmarked for special treatment under the California Public Utilities Commission’s latest revisions to the Self-Generation Incentive Program, which also included $100 million in incentives for disadvantaged or medically vulnerable customers who live in high-fire-threat parts of the state. 

But farmers are also dependent on steady and reliable electricity to meet water-pumping schedules that are often fixed by law, or by the needs of its crops and the growing season. Solar-plus-storage projects that promise to reduce overall electric bills, as well as provide backup power, are becoming a far more attractive option than installing expensive and polluting backup generators to insure against a crop-ruining power outage. 

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Amazon’s Move to Electric Trucks Is a Very Big Deal. Will other fleet owners follow?

Dan Gearino writes for Clean Economy Weekly

Amazon delivery vans are seen on May 14, 2019 in Orlando, Florida. On May 13, 2019 Amazon announced an incentive program that offers three months pay and up to $10,000 to its employees who quit their jobs to start their own package delivery companies. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Sometimes a company issues a clean energy plan that is gigantic in ambition and seems to have the elements to deliver on its promises—pretty close to the opposite of greenwashing.
 
We saw this last week when Amazon announced that it will aim for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The company is the first signatory of a new initiative it co-founded called the Climate Pledge, in which other companies are encouraged to make the same commitment.
 
The part of Amazon’s plan that jumps out at me is the conversion of its delivery truck fleet to all-electric models. The company will begin using electric trucks in 2021. It plans to have 10,000 electric trucks on the road by 2022 and have converted its entire fleet—projected to be 100,000 vehicles—by 2030.

The trucks will be manufactured by Rivian, a Michigan-based startup in which Amazon is a major investor. Rivian has yet to produce a vehicle for public sale; its all-electric pickup is set to debut in 2020.
This is an opportunity to deal with a stubborn source of emissions. Transportation accounts for 35 percent of carbon emissions in this country, and trucking is 25 percent of the emissions from transportation.

Amazon, one of the half dozen or so largest companies in the world by market value, is so big that its decisions can transform entire industries.

“We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue,” said Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who was under intense pressure from employees to urgently take action on climate change. “We’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference.”
 
By buying 100,000 electric trucks, Amazon would single-handedly create economies of scale that will make it less expensive for other logistics companies to convert their fleets. To run all of those trucks, Amazon will need charging infrastructure, a demand that will accelerate the development of charging systems.
 
“If this starts the ball rolling for FedEx and UPS and the Postal Service and other logistics companies and delivery companies using electricity, it changes everything,” said Costa Samaras, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has written extensively about energy and climate change.
Amazon’s plan is about more than electric trucks. It calls for the company to use 100 percent renewable energy and cut its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030. The cut in emissions is a benchmark toward meeting the net-zero target by 2040. To keep its pledge, Amazon says it will have to offset its emissions. The company doesn’t go into detail, other than to say that the offsets will be “quantifiable, real, permanent and socially beneficial.” An Amazon spokesman had no comment on the offsets beyond what was in the company’s news release.

All of this has another major benefit: It puts pressure on other super-sized businesses to be more aggressive in reducing emissions, Samaras said.
 
One example I’ll note is Wal-Mart, which operates its own large vehicle fleet and competes with Amazon. The company has a plan, called Project Gigaton, to remove 1 billion metric tons of carbon by 2030 by making changes in its operations and demanding changes by its suppliers.
 
Amazon and Wal-Mart have deservedly attracted many detractors for their labor practices and their effects on competing retailers. And yet, if these two companies get into a sustainability arms race, that is bound to have wide-ranging benefits.

(Photo: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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Declassified Whistleblower Complaint at Center of Trump Impeachment Push Is Released

The complaint was filed by an intelligence officer alarmed by details of President Trump’s July 25 calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Allison Quinn Breaking News Reporter for the Daily Beast
Updated 09.26.19 8:56AM ET / Published 09.26.19 8:42AM ET 

A redacted, declassified version of the whistleblower complaint at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Trump was made public on Thursday, revealing the anonymous intelligence officer reported his belief that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election.”

“The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well,” the complaint says,

Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who is testifying before Congress about the complaint, provided a redacted version of the complaint to lawmakers for the hearing and it was released by the House Intelligence Committee minutes earlier.

A copy of the complaint, which was made by an intelligence officer alarmed by President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, can be read here.

Its release comes a day after the White House put out a partial transcript of the July 25 call—in which Trump reminded Zelensky that America does “a lot” for Ukraine before blatantly asking the Ukrainian leader to do him a “favor” and investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The complaint confirms a number of details that have been reported in the last week. The whistleblower writes that Trump spent the call mostly pressing Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and to locate Democratic National Committee email servers supposedly in Ukraine; he also urged the Ukranian president to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and the Attorney General Bill Barr—his “personal envoys,” in the words of the whistleblower—on the matter. 

A Justice Department memo made public this week said Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson interviewed witnesses after the complaint was filed and concluded that “statements made by the President during the call could be viewed as soliciting a foreign campaign contribution in violation of the campaign-finance laws.”

The DOJ memo said that the whistleblower did not listen in on the July 25 call but reported hearing from White House officials that Trump “had made statements that the complainant viewed as seeking to pressure that leader to take an official action to help the President’s 2020 re-election campaign.”

After receiving the complaint on Aug. 12, Atkinson conducted a “preliminary review” and found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate,” the memo said. But Atkinson concluded that the complaint’s allegations “nonetheless appeared credible.”

The complaint was given to Maguire, just weeks into his tenure as acting intelligence chief, and he declined to issue a report on it to Congress. But Atkinson alerted the House Intelligence Committee of the complaint’s existence, and it subpoenaed Maguire for it.

At that point the contents of the complaint were publicly unknown, but in the coming days it was reported first that it involved Ukraine, and then that it was triggered by the July 25 call with Zelensky.

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The call has fueled concerns Trump intentionally withheld $250 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine as leverage in his push for Ukrainian authorities to reopen an investigation into Biden, his potential political opponent in 2020, and investigate claims Ukrainian officials worked to help Robert Mueller. 

“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said to Zelensky in the call. “Whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

The call also turbocharged calls for impeachment. While many Democrats have been calling for impeachment proceedings against Trump ever since the release of the Mueller Report, the whistleblower complaint proved to be the tipping point for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who accused Trump of a “betrayal” of his oath of office in announcing a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday. 

While Trump apparently sought to stifle Democratic criticism by releasing the transcript of his call with Zelensky, even some Republicans seemed to think that plan backfired. 

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called the transcript “troubling in the extreme,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) told reporters “there’s obviously a lot that’s very troubling there” after viewing the whistleblower complaint. 

Trump has admitted both to initially withholding aid and urging the Ukrainian president to look into Hunter Biden, who was an adviser to a Ukrainian firm, he has insisted there was no wrongdoing and no “quid pro quo.” 

House Republicans were apparently concerned enough to join Democrats late Wednesday in voting 421-0 for the passage of a non-binding resolution demanding that the Trump administration release the whistleblower complaint. 

Those on the House Intelligence Committee who have already seen the complaint have suggested that it offers a grim outlook for Trump. 

“I found the allegations deeply disturbing. I also found them very credible,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters late Wednesday. 

“What this courageous individual has done is exposed serious wrongdoing. I think it a travesty that this complaint was withheld as long as it was, there was simply no basis to keep this from the committee,” he said, adding that the complaint “provides information for the committee to follow up with other witnesses and documents.” 

The complaint’s release comes as the man who initially refused to give it to Congress—acting DNA Maguire—is due to appear before the House Intelligence Committee to answer lawmakers’ questions about it.

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Keep your scolding green fingers off my scalding hot tea, please

You may be swallowing billions of tiny plastic particles while sipping a cup of freshly brewed gourmet tea, a new study from McGill University in Montreal suggests.

Emily Chung  reports for CBC News  
Posted: Sep 25, 2019 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: September 25

Many fancier teas now come in ‘silken’ bags instead of paper, and some of them are pyramid-shaped, which is billed as a way to make room for the large leaves in premium teas to expand. (Shutterstock / slawomir.gawryluk)

You may be swallowing billions of tiny plastic particles while sipping a cup of freshly brewed gourmet tea, a new study from McGill University in Montreal suggests.

Many fancier teas now come in “silken” bags instead of paper. Some of them are pyramid-shaped, which is billed as a way to make room for the large leaves in premium teas to expand. 

Nathalie Tufenkji, a professor of chemical engineering at the Montreal university, was surprised to find one such bag in the tea she ordered from a coffee shop one morning.

It looked like plastic, she recalled. “I said, ‘Oh God, I’m sure if it’s plastic it’s, like, breaking down into the tea.'”

So when she got into the lab, she asked her graduate student, Laura Hernandez, to go out and buy a bunch from different brands.

The plastics are made of polyethylene terephthalate (found in plastic drink bottles) and nylon (used in many food bags and pouches) that are approved as food packaging. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

Sure enough, Hernandez’s lab tests showed that when steeped in hot water, the tea bags released microplastic and even smaller nanoplastic particles — and not just the hundreds or thousands Tufenkji had been expecting.

“We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea,” she said.

One cup from a single tea bag could contain 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles, the researchers estimated from their results, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The bits are so tiny — on average, the size of grains of dust or pollen — that the amount in one cup is about 16 micrograms or one-sixtieth of a milligram of plastic. 

But that’s still much more than has been found in other foods and beverages, including tap and bottled water, beer, honey, fish and shellfish, chicken and salt. Tufekji said that’s partly because her study included and counted smaller particles than most other studies. But it’s also because, for most foods and beverages, the plastic is an accidental contaminant. With tea “you’re literally adding plastic into the beverage.”

That may sound unappetizing, but is it a health risk? After all, the plastics are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate, found in plastic drink bottles) and nylon (used in many food bags and pouches) that are approved as food packaging. And the World Health Organization has said the risk from microplastics in drinking water is low, especially if the particles are relatively large.

So far, scientists don’t know what, if any, risks there might be.

“There’s really no research. But this really points to the need to do those studies,” Tufenkji said. “Think of people who drink one or two or three cups of tea a day, every day.”

Collectively, Canadians drink about 10 billion cups of tea a year.

Tufenkji says the potential health risk isn’t the only reason to stick to paper tea bags and loose leaf tea.

“Personally, I would say avoid the plastic tea bags because it’s just another single-use plastic” — something many governments, including Canada’s, are trying to reduce due to the impact on oceans and the challenges of recycling it.

The researchers counted the plastic particles by cutting open bags of tea, removing the tea, rinsing off any pieces that might have come off during cutting, and then steeping the bags in distilled water at 95 C. They then took a sample, let the water evaporate, and counted the plastic particles under an electron microscope, then extrapolated to get the amount in one cup. They also used other instruments to identify the type of plastic in each bag.

The researchers also repeated the experiment with uncut bags that still contained tea to make sure the cutting didn’t cause the bags to shed, and with loose tea leaves, confirming that uncut bags shed microplastics too (although they were harder to count) and the plastic didn’t originate from the tea itself.

In a preliminary experiment, water fleas exposed to the microplastics from the tea bags ‘ballooned’ and showed behavioral changes that suggested they were stressed. 
((Paul D.N. Hebert, University of Guelph))

Finally, they did a preliminary study where they exposed water fleas — tiny freshwater animals distantly related to shrimp — to the microplastics from the tea bags, which are similar in size to their food.

The water fleas didn’t die, but swam “crazily,” Tufenkji said. “It really stresses them out.”

They also changed shape, revealed CT scans performed by McGill researcher Hans Larsson. The study described the exposed water fleas as having a “ballooned” carapace.

Tufenkji said the results point to the need for more studies with other animals.

It also motivates her research group to see if other plastic packaging might be releasing particles into food and beverages.

The study was funded by the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and McGill University.

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Comcast, Cordish in talks with naming rights partner for $50M Esports arena

By John George  – Senior Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
Sep 25, 2019, 6:57pm EDT Updated 11 hours ago

Comcast Spectacor and the Cordish Cos. officially broke ground Wednesday afternoon on the $50 million Fusion Arena, a project the organizations expect will serve as a “global destination” for esports events on the East Coast.

Don’t expect the name of the 3,500-seat arena to be the same when in opens in January 2021.

Dave Scott, CEO of Comcast Spectacor, told the Philadelphia Businesses Journal the company is in discussions with multiple businesses about acquiring the naming rights for the 65,000-square-foot venue.

The plan is for the arena, being built next to the Xfinity Live! complex across the parking lot from the Wells Fargo Center, is to serve as more than just the home of the Comcast Spectacor-owned Philadelphia Fusion of the Overwatch League, Scott said.

“We are going to have concerts and family shows and not just amateur esports events,” he said. “We already have something like 100 dates set.”

Executives of Comcast-Spectacor and the Cordish Cos. were joined by public officials for a groundbreaking of the $50 million Fusion Arena in South Philadelphia on Wednesday.

Mayor Jim Kenney, who was among the guests for the groundbreaking ceremony, said he expects the arena will also host international esports events.

“Philadelphia is already known for its innovate ways to bring people together and the Fusion Arena will do just that,” he said.

Blake Cordish, a principal of the Baltimore-based Cordish Cos., noted the arena will be the “first of its kind venue” for esports in the Western Hemisphere. “It’s a pretty special project,” Cordish said. “We see it as the second chapter in a much larger book.”

Cordish and Comcast Spectacor already teamed up to create the Xfinity Live! dining and entertainment complex and are jointly building an office tower along Pattison Avenue in the stadium complex area. Cordish is also developing a casino — Live! Hotel and Casino Philadelphia — in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex at a site of formerly occupied in part by a Holiday Inn.

Blake Cordish said the projects are creating thousands of temporary construction jobs and will lead to thousands of permanent jobs in Philadelphia. The arena’s developers estimate the project will generate $1 million in economic benefits to the city and state in its first year of operation.

A rendering of the Live! Hotel & Casino in Philadelphia's stadium district.

Among the features of the Fusion arena is a 6,000-square-foot public area with 2,000 square feet of interactive media surfaces hovering 30 feet above the ground surface level. Another 10,000 square feet will be used as the Xfinity Training Center, a broadcast studio and team offices. The arena will also have two balcony bars, club suites with USB ports, flexible loge boxes and private suites.

Architectural firm Populous of Kansas City, Missouri, was hired to design the arena, which Tucker Roberts, president of Spectacor Gaming and the Philadelphia Fusion, said will be “first class for esports and entertainment as well.”

This Sunday, the Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia will host the Overwatch League’s Grand Finals. The event is sold out.

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