Investigation into EPA scientist edict sought by 10 senators

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt – Saul Loeb-AFP Getty Images


Georgina Gustin reports for Inside Climate News:

A group of Senate Democrats is calling for an expanded investigation into efforts by the Trump Environmental Protection Agency to effectively push independent scientists off key EPA advisory boards and replace them with scientists from the fossil fuel and chemical industries.
In a letter sent to the Government Accountability Office on Thursday, the 10 senators asked the GAO to investigate a new directive, issued by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Oct. 31, that restricts any scientist who has received EPA funding from serving on the agency’s scientific advisory panels.
Pruitt said the move was intended to clear up conflicts of interest and to rid advisory panel members of financial ties to the agency. But scientific groups, academics and advocacy organizations have all pointed out that it will mean the most experienced scientists—whose qualifications earn them government grants in the first place—will no longer be able to serve in these roles. 
“The double-standard is striking: an academic scientist that receives an EPA grant for any purpose cannot provide independent advice on a completely different subject matter on any of EPA’s science advisory boards,” the senators wrote, “while industry scientists are presumed to have no inherent conflict even if their research is entirely funded by a company with a financial stake in an advisory board’s conclusions.”
Five days after Pruitt issued the directive, The Washington Post reported that he appointed 66 new members to advisory panels, many of them with ties to industries the agency regulates. Several panel members stepped down.
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Fossil fuel emissions may reach an all-time high in 2017


Visitors walk past a sphere featuring national flags at India’s pavilion last week during the COP23 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany. PATRIK STOLLARZ/AFP/Getty Images
Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

Global carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise again in 2017, climate scientists reported Monday, a troubling development for the environment and a major disappointment for those who had hoped emissions of the climate change-causing gas had at last peaked.

The emissions from fossil fuel burning and industrial uses are projected to rise by up to 2 percent in 2017, as well as to rise again in 2018, the scientists told a group of international officials gathered for a United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany.
Despite global economic growth, total emissions held level from 2014 to 2016 at about 36 billion tons per year, stoking hope among many climate change advocates that emissions had reached an all-time high point and would subsequently begin to decline. But that was not to be, the new analysis suggests.
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Will proposed Pinelands rule increase wildfire threat?

 TIM TAI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Homes adjacent to a section of the Pancoast Road firebreak, foreground, inside the Four Seasons at Mirage residential community in Barnegat, NJ, on Friday, Nov. 10, 2017.

Jacqueline L. Urgo reports for Philly.com:

The Pinelands Commission is contemplating proposed changes to its “comprehensive management plan” that Bill Brash, president of the New Jersey Fire Safety Council, a Freehold-based nonprofit, feels could pose a fire hazard by making it more difficult to construct and maintain firebreaks wider than six feet.


Proposed amendments to the commission’s Comprehensive Management Plan would add a requirement that construction and maintenance of any firebreak over six feet wide would need a permit before any work commences.

“There are literally thousands of miles of firebreaks in the Pinelands — most of them well over six feet wide — so this proposed amendment would require a permit for nearly all of them,” said Brash, who insists the measure could slow down the firebreak process in red tape.


A spokesman for the DEP, the agency that oversees the Forest Fire Service, said it is reviewing the proposal but currently has no further comment.
The Pinelands Commission, which manages 938,000 acres in the 1.1 million-acre federally protected lands, is reviewing its overall  management plan and will accept written comment from the public on the matter until Nov. 17, said its executive director, Nancy Wittenberg.

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Changing energy market disrupts pioneers GE and Siemens

From the Financial Times:

As the costs of solar and wind power have plunged, making them cheaper than fossil fuel generation in many parts of the world, the traditional model of the industry has changed. Capital spending on the new technologies has soared. Battery storage is also starting to be a cost-effective solution for supporting the grid, challenging the market for “peaker” gas turbines that are used when demand is at its highest. Yet both groups have taken positions in renewable energy but have stumbled along the way. 


 The result is that GE and Siemens are being forced to drive down costs dramatically in their core power businesses. Siemens is looking to cut thousands of jobs in its power and gas unit. On Monday, new GE chief executive John Flannery will outline his plans for turning round the American group, whose financial position has become so precarious that it has been evaluating a cut in its once rock-solid dividend.


Yet although both groups face a turbulent environment, the immediate outlook is considerably brighter at Siemens, which appears to be better positioned to adjust to the disruption sweeping through the energy industry.


GE’s 2017 has been a disaster. Questions swirled in June when the company announced the departure of Jeff Immelt, chief executive since 2001. Answers arrived in October, when GE reported a fall in earnings for the third quarter and sharply reduced its guidance for the full year. Mr Flannery, who took over in August, described those results as “unacceptable, to say the least”, and said the company needed to “to make some major changes with urgency”.


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Prieto concedes NJ Assembly Speaker post to Coughlin

The months-long political drama involving the Democratic leadership of the New Jersey Assembly is over.

Vincent Prieto of Secaucus announced Thursday that he will not seek the post again in January, effectively handing it to Craig Coughlin of Woodbridge. 


North Jersey loses. Central Jersey wins. 


Brenda Flanagan reports the story for NJTV News:

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Pruitt’s political foxes chowing down in the EPA hen house

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt talks with reporter in Hazard, KY

Career employees at the agency say political appointees are shutting them out of decision-making. They worry that the public will suffer.

Rachel Leven reports for the Center for Public Integrity:
Today’s EPA is wracked with internal conflict and industry influence, and is struggling to fulfill its mission, according to more than two dozen current and former agency employees. A few dozen political appointees brought in under the Trump administration are driving policy. At least 16 of the 45 appointees worked for industries such as oil, coal and chemicals. Four of these people — and another 21 — worked for, or donated to, politicians who have questioned established climate science, such as Pruitt and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

Most of the 46 political appointees working at EPA previously worked for climate change doubters or industry 

Career staff members — lawyers, scientists, analysts — are largely being frozen out of decision-making, current and former agency employees say. These staffers rarely get face time with Pruitt and frequently receive top-down orders from political appointees with little room for debate. They must sometimes force their way into conversations about subjects in which they have expertise.
And that is a big mistake, said one of Pruitt’s predecessors.
Career employees are “very dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, and they will change their ways of how they do that if they’re convinced you really want to accomplish that aim,” said Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush.
One such employee agreed. “I think it’s the fact that we’re not following regular procedures, we’re not sure of what the legal justification is for some of the things they’re asking us to do. We’re just kind of being told ‘Do the opposite thing you did 18 months ago.’ That’s hard to swallow.”
Under Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, the agency already has declined to ban a pesticide linked to neurological damage in children; frozen requirements to reduce water pollution from coal-fired power plants and opened the door to loosening limits on toxic coal waste. The EPA most recently proposed eliminating the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the power sector.
“These rules [being rolled back] aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There are ways to improve things,” said Gordon Binder, who served as chief of staff for then-EPA Administrator William Reilly under President George H.W. Bush. “But Pruitt’s come in with a flyswatter and is slapping them down instead of laying out the problems with a rule and saying, ‘How can we fix it?’”
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