After severe weather in 2016 a large penguin colony at the Brunt ice shelf in Antarctica never recovered.
The emperor penguins in the Halley Bay colony have either moved away or stopped breeding after thousands of chicks died when the ice collapsed during bad weather three years ago.
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Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drown Read More »
Steven Mufson reports for the Washington Post | April 24
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In autumn of 2013, a senior executive from a powerful coal company and a lawyer from one of the state’s most influential firms hashed out a strategy for avoiding a serious — and expensive — problem.
The Environmental Protection Agency wanted to clean up toxic soil in the 35th Avenue Superfund site in north Birmingham, where residents, about 95 percent of them African Americans, live in the shadow of massive waste berms, industrial chimneys, and the fortresses of steel, coking and cement manufacturing.
For more than a century, those industrial plants had generated jobs — but also noxious emissions and waste. In 2009, the EPA found elevated levels of toxic chemicals, in some cases three times the amount considered dangerous enough to require immediate removal. In 2013 the agency notified Drummond, the coal company, and four other manufacturers nearby that they would have to spend tens of millions of dollars to dig up and replace the soil on hundreds of residential yards. David Roberson, Drummond’s vice president and top lobbyist, worried that it would cost his company $100 million or more.
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Roberson and Joel Gilbert, a powerhouse lawyer with Balch & Bingham, had fought off environmental rules before. But for this campaign they needed a public face, someone with credibility both with the state government in Montgomery and the black communities in north Birmingham.
Someone who could persuade the people living on contaminated land to protest not the pollution, but the cleanup.
By early 2014, they had chosen Oliver L. Robinson Jr. (D), an African American state legislator and former University of Alabama at Birmingham basketball star.
But that was long before they all turned on each other. Before the guilty verdicts. Before the prison sentences that, so far, only one of them is serving.
Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight
Jersey Central Power & Light has agreed to sharply scale back a nearly $400-million rate increase, under a tentative settlement with state regulators. The rate increase is intended to fund investments aimed at reducing outages caused by severe weather events.
The settlement with the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel and staff of the state Board of Public Utilities would allow the utility to spend $97 million to upgrade its distribution system and make it more resilient during storms.
The state’s second-largest utility proposed a four-year, $387 million infrastructure investment program in July 2018, mostly geared to curbing the number and duration of power outages its 1.1 million customers experience.
JCP&L repeatedly has come under fire for extended power outages that occur within its service territory of 13 counties by customers, local officials and state regulators. Its proposed four-year program mirrored large investments that have been proposed by other utilities, all of which are under pressure from regulators to improve the resiliency of their power grids.
“We are pleased with the settlement,’’ said Jennifer Young, a spokeswoman for FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron-based company and owner of JCP&L. Noting the utility originally proposed a four-year program, Young said the settlement narrows the scope to an 18-month period.
JCP&L settles for a 25% less in rate increase sought to limit storm outages Read More »
#BILLYPENNGRAM OF THE DAY
Still prime gorgeous season here in Philadelphia
(photo via @ehammthebomb)
Cole Rosengren reports for WasteDive
The New York City Council recently voted 38-9 to approve a bill (Intro 1527) that will establish a five-cent “paper carryout bag reduction fee” to accompany the upcoming statewide plastic bag ban.
Following guidelines set forth in the state legislation, the city will receive two cents from every fee “for the purpose of purchasing and distributing reusable bags, with priority given to low- and fixed-income communities.” Customers using various income assistance programs will be exempt from the fee entirely.
The bill was quickly introduced, passed out of committee and brought for a full vote in response to the new state policy passed earlier this month. The paper bag fee, like the statewide plastic bag ban, will take effect in March 2020.
The backers of this particular bill have been pushing for a city bag policy since at least 2013 and appeared to have succeeded in 2016 when the measure passed in one of the council’s tightest votes of the session. Yet a chain reaction of preemption by the state legislature and delayed promises for action from the governor paused any local movement on the policy until this spring. FY20 budget legislation established a statewide ban on plastic bags and offered local governments the option to go further (within certain parameters) and establish their own policies on paper bags.
That fresh opening, along with a shift in council membership and politics since 2016, led to the swift passage of a paper bag fee for the second time. Mayor Bill de Blasio has expressed support for the concept and is expected to sign the bill soon.
Tying plastic bag bans with a fee on alternatives is seen as critical to ensuring that stores and customers don’t just switch to other options — which generally require more resources to produce — with a similar rate of consumption. California, the only other state with an official plastic bag ban, has a 10-cent fee on alternative bags. A bill was recently introduced in San Francisco to raise that city’s fee to 25 cents and set tighter standards on bag exemptions and material composition.
New York City Council passes paper bag fee — again — following a statewide plastic ban Read More »
Jennifer A Dlouhy, Jenny Leonard, and Jennifer Jacobs reporting for Bloomberg
President Donald Trump is seriously considering waiving the requirement that only U.S.-flagged vessels can move natural gas from American ports to Puerto Rico or the Northeast, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The issue was debated during an Oval Office meeting on Monday, following requests from Puerto Rico and pressure from oil industry leaders to ease the nearly 100-year-old Jones Act requirements, according to three people. Although top administration officials are divided on the issue, Trump is now leaning in favor of some kind of waiver, said two of the people, who asked for anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.
The move — which would be fought by U.S shipbuilding interests and their allies on Capitol Hill — has been promoted as essential to lower the cost of energy in Puerto Rico and ease the flow of American natural gas to the U.S. Northeast, where there aren’t enough pipelines to deliver the product from Pennsylvania.
But even inside the Trump administration, there are fierce defenders of the Jones Act, a 1920 law requiring that vessels moving cargo between two U.S. ports be U.S.-built, -owned and -crewed. The law was originally designed to protect the domestic shipping industry and the country’s maritime might, and supporters argue that it’s just as essential today to ensure ships are made in the U.S. Any move to weaken or waive the requirements threatens the U.S. shipbuilding industry and the jobs tied to it, they argue.
That divide was apparent during Monday’s White House meeting, where Jones Act supporters included Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, pushed for waiving the Jones Act, three of the people said.
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Even as the White House weighs waivers, a handful of Trump administration officials have pushed to expand the Jones Act’s reach, two of the people said. They are aiming to effectively revive a Customs and Border Protection bid to revoke rulings allowing foreign vessels to transport some equipment to offshore oil rigs. The agency withdrew the formal proposal in 2017, after the oil industry warned it could cripple production in the Gulf of Mexico.
The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump faces increasing pressure to relax the shipping requirements. Puerto Rico is seeking a 10-year waiver to allow liquefied natural gas to be delivered to the island on foreign-flagged vessels.
And energy industry leaders have pressed for changes to facilitate natural gas and petroleum product shipments between U.S. states. Among them: billionaire oil man Harold Hamm, the chairman of Continental Resources Inc. and a former Trump energy adviser. In January, Hamm complained at a Houston energy conference that the U.S. has been forced to buy LNG from Russia because there are no Jones Act-compliant tankers to transport liquefied natural gas.
Trump Considering Waiving Jones Act Mandate for Natural Gas, Sources Say Read More »
