WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration on Friday lifted restrictions on the sale of higher ethanol blends of gasoline, keeping a campaign promise to farmers suffering from the trade war with China but drawing a legal threat from the oil industry.
The announcement will allow gasoline stations to sell blends containing up to 15 percent corn-based ethanol, called E15, year-round, ending a summertime ban that President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency imposed in 2011 to reduce smog pollution.
“As President Trump promised, EPA is approving the year-round sale of E15 in time for summer driving season,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a press release.
In a nod to the oil industry, the agency also issued new rules to improve transparency in the market for biofuels credits that refiners must acquire under the nation’s biofuel law, but the steps stopped short of what many refiners were seeking.
The widely anticipated action on E15 is a win for the U.S. farm lobby, which has argued the restrictions on E15 hurt growers by limiting demand for corn-based fuel, without providing tangible air quality benefits. Recent research has found little difference in smog risk between E15 and E10, a 10 percent ethanol blend that is already available year-round.
“We estimate this one change will generate over a billion new gallons of ethanol demand in the next five years,” said Emily Skor, chief executive of biofuel trade group Growth Energy, adding it could also boost the market for American grain by some 2 billion bushels over time.
What news outlets don’t really have a trust problem with audiences?
Ethnic media — media outlets that serve specific cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, or language communities — are pillars in their communities, often rooted for decades and telling the stories of immigration and American life on their own terms. A new report from the Center for Cooperative Media examines the state of ethnic media in and around New Jersey (that definition of ethnic media is theirs), highlighting the work the state’s 119 outlets have already done in building strong ties with their audiences, and the work the outlets need to do to survive in the future.
In a sense, the story of ethnic media is the story of immigration. Historically, the sector was established by and for immigrants, and the sustainability of the sector has largely depended on the immigrants that it serves. Ethnic outlets remain closer to immigrant communities than mainstream outlets both in physical proximity and because those communities serve as the sources of news and the audience. In the same way that local newspapers used to be deeply integrated with the towns they covered, local ethnic media have their fingers on the pulse of communities that were born of diaspora and/or are still welcoming newcomers to this country.
And ethnic media’s been doing the work the rest of the journalism industry is trying to jump on: “Ethnic media are in constant dialogue with their communities, canvassing them for stories by attending events at community centers and churches, speaking with community leaders and elected officials, and taking comments on the content they publish.”
Ethnic media isn’t the antithesis of mainstream media, but the two are often at odds in their treatment of ethnic communities. Stonbely and Advincula’s interviewees pointed out that mainstream media typically does negative coverage of the community, tied to crime, whereas ethnic media celebrates the community’s bonds and heritage more.
Here are some top findings from the report, which calls out the strengths and weaknesses of ethnic media. Again, this is from outlets that are based in New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania but report for widespread communities: 71 percent of the 119 outlets did not do local New Jersey news.
For years he dumped. Now he’s been ordered to clean up his mess.
A state Superior Court judge in Morristown ordered Monday that Joseph Wallace — the man who spent years building a seven-story-tall mountain of dirt and debris on his property in a quiet residential neighborhood in Vernon Township — to halt work and remediate the site.
Citing “clear and convincing evidence of irreparable harm,” Judge Maritza Berdote Byrne ordered Wallace to immediately halt the importation of all material to his property, turn over information about what exactly is in the pile and clean up any material that is considered solid waste.
“Our efforts to tackle the 75-foot soil pile in Vernon are part of our overall commitment to dropping the hammer on polluters across the state,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said.
“Today, we welcome the court order prohibiting the owner from receiving new material, and requiring the owner to test the site and remove all solid waste materials on that property. This is a positive step for the state and the residents of Vernon.”
Neighbors worried about this massive dirt pile for years. Now chemicals linked to cancer have been found, tests show.
Court filings in an ongoing case over a massive dirt pile in North Jersey reveal a potential public health risk.
Since at least 2011, Wallace has had dump trucks bringing material from mostly unknown sources to his property on Silver Spruce Drive, a private road in a quiet residential neighborhood. NJ Advance Media detailed the activity in an in-depth report published in February.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection took Wallace to court after determining in February that he used his property to run an illegal solid waste facility. A consent order with Wallace allowed state officials to come onto the property and test the pile in March.
Results of that testing, released in April, showed the pile to contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs,) polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the pesticide chemical chlordane all at levels above the state’s standard for residential soil.
An ongoing investigation at Cheniere Energy’s flagship export facility in Louisiana is raising red flags for the surging American gas industry.
A carrier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is docked at Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal in Cameron Parish, La., on July 6, 2018. Cheniere was the first U.S. company to export LNG overseas in 2016. Newsy/Kevin Clancy
Jenny Mandel, E&E News reporter, and Jie Jenny Zou, Center for Public Integrity reporter Energywire: Thursday, May 30, 2019
In just three years, a 1,000-acre complex surrounded by Louisiana swampland has become the unlikely epicenter of America’s booming natural gas business.
Sabine Pass terminal is the crown jewel of Cheniere Energy Inc., a Houston company that had a virtual monopoly on U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, until last spring. In November, Cheniere opened a second terminal — eclipsing competitors racing to construct their first sites. The company is in talks to close its third deal with China, worth an estimated $18 billion.
But cracks in Cheniere’s runaway success story have started to show.
Last year gashes up to 6 feet long opened up in a massive steel storage tank at Sabine Pass, releasing super-chilled LNG that quickly vaporized into a cloud of flammable gas. Federal regulators worried the tank might give way, spilling the remainder of the fuel and setting off an uncontrollable fire. It wasn’t an isolated event: Another tank was leaking gas in 14 different places. Both tanks remain out of service over a year later.
Investigators soon discovered that Cheniere grappled with problems affecting at least four of the five tanks at the terminal over the past decade. And officials at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, known as PHMSA, have found the company to be less than forthcoming in the ongoing investigation, noting Cheniere’s “reticence to share [its] sense of what might have gone wrong.”
The leaks are a red flag at a time of unprecedented expansion in the LNG industry, which promotes the fuel as not only safe but also a clean, more climate-friendly alternative to coal. The problem is that natural gas is made up mostly of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth’s atmosphere. Leaks erode the fuel’s climate advantage over coal.
Cheniere spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said workers and the public were never in danger, and last year’s leaks were about one hundredth of a percent of the facility’s permitted greenhouse gas emissions for the year. The tanks, he added, meet “all federal and state safety requirements.” But some other LNG export projects — including Cheniere’s newest terminal in Corpus Christi, Texas — have opted to use more expensive tank designs that offer greater protection against leaks and fires.
Sabine Pass was originally designed for imports. In 2012, Cheniere began converting the facility to handle exports instead, taking advantage of surging gas supplies from the shale drilling boom. The company upended the energy market when it began sending LNG overseas in 2016, quickly turning America into a top seller of the fossil fuel.
Over a dozen U.S. export projects are now in development, including a $10 billion project by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Qatar Petroleum on the Texas side of Sabine Pass. Federal regulations, though, haven’t kept pace. They were written for simpler import and gas-storage facilities, not complex, multibillion-dollar export facilities. In April, the White House directed regulators to update LNG safety rules. But it’s unclear what that will look like — or whether any new design requirements would apply to projects already in the works.
The industry trade group Center for Liquefied Natural Gas said its members — which include Cheniere — support the effort to revamp current regulations. That “goes hand in hand with our industry’s focus on continuous improvement,” spokeswoman Daphne Magnuson wrote in a statement. “We see a bright future for U.S. LNG and significant benefits to the planet at large.”
EPA plans to quickly revamp its guidelines for evaluating whether environmental contaminants can cause cancer or other ailments, a move Trump administration critics fear is part of a broader effort to weaken the basis for regulating a wide range of pollutants.
At issue is a fundamental responsibility of the agency: How to determine whether potentially harmful substances pose an unacceptable risk to human health and the environment.
The outcomes of such risk reviews can then be used by EPA’s regulatory offices and other agencies to, for example, limit the types of pesticides that farmers can apply to their crops or the amount of hazardous air pollutants oil and gas refineries can emit.
EPA sources say the Trump administration is now seeking to revise the standards for that highly scientific process in a matter of months. That timeline, experts fear, makes it impossible to do a thorough job and could take years to fix — leaving millions of Americans at greater risk from unhealthy levels of pollution in the meantime.
Currently, EPA has 166 pages of guidelines for assessing cancer-causing risks and no uniform guidance for evaluating other potentially adverse health effects.
But next week, EPA will ask its influential Science Advisory Board (SAB) for “advice regarding upcoming actions related to an update to the ‘2005 EPA Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment’ and creation of guidelines for non-cancer risk assessment,” the agency said in a Federal Registernotice earlier this month.
Unlike other topics on the agenda for the meeting — EPA’s proposals to increase scientific “transparency,” redefine “waters of the United States,” and manage toxic nonstick chemicals known as PFAS — the agency hasn’t publicly released any background documents or briefing materials on its aims for the risk assessment guidelines.
Rutgers and the NJDEP Team Up to Train Over 2,000 on Proper Underground Storage Tank (UST) Operations
By Casey Sky Noon NJAES Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE)| Rutgers University
Large metal tanks are buried in the ground in the production warehouse.
It sounds like science fiction, but according to the real-world New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), there are over 4,200 sites storing billions of gallons of flammable gasoline in giant tanks buried underground, right here within the borders of the Garden State.
This number includes
hospitals and schools that use oil for heat, mechanic shops and factories that
utilize waste oil tanks, and thousands of gas stations, each storing between
ten and twenty thousand gallons of gasoline.
Out of sight and out of
mind, it is easy to forget the potential dangers posed by the fuel we use
daily. In addition to being highly flammable, liquid leaks and vapor emissions
cause:
Groundwater
contamination
Environmental
pollution
Unsafe
air quality
Standard refined
gasoline contains about 150 different chemicals, many of which are toxic. If
released into the environment, it can kill small species of animals and cause
severe damage to the local ecosystem. In humans, it can cause cancer,
respiratory distress, and other serious health problems.
To protect NJ from the health, safety, and environmental
threats of petroleum pollution, the state updated its regulations to match
federal standards. “The changes are primarily equipment updates, additional
testing, and better forms of leak detection so that operators can more reliably
find smaller leaks faster,” said NJDEP Inspector Jenna DiNuzzo.
The modification that has and continues to cause the most
stir requires every tank system to have a trained and certified Class A/B
Operator assigned to it. The purpose of this regulation is to ensure that those
who own USTs understand how to operate and maintain those systems properly. “A
lot of owners have no idea what is going on at their properties, so now they
are being taught what their equipment does, how it works, and what to do if
certain things happen,” explained Jenna.
With the passing of the new regulations, there came a pressing need for a training program that would give current UST operators the opportunity to earn their Class A/B certification and comply with the updated requirements. While the NJDEP developed the course curriculum and supplied subject matter experts to teach the training, they needed a partner to handle the logistics of scheduling classes and processing registrations.
To fulfill this huge educational undertaking, the NJDEP teamed up with Rutgers Office of Continuing Professional Education to provide focused training on preventing, quickly detecting, and correcting leaking USTs. Together, they hosted over 40 classes in half a dozen locations throughout the state. In just over one calendar year, over 2,200 operators attended the one-day training program, which is now available as an online course.
Joseph Wallace is accused of running an illegal dumping operation 
