Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 127

The Hidden Good News The Supreme Court Delivered To Environmentalists Today

In a week that’s been chock full of good news for liberal Supreme Court watchers, the justices also offered a ray of hope to environmentalists who were bracing for a loss before the justices leave town.

Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency asks the Court to invalidate EPA regulations targeting mercury emissions. Before Friday, it appeared likely that Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative who asked skeptical questions of the government at oral arguments, would write the opinion in this case.

That’s because the Supreme Court typically tries to distribute work equitably among the nine justices. As a general rule, the Court normally distributes majority opinions among the justices so that each justice writes approximately the same number of opinions for the Court in a given term. It also frequently distributes work equitably by month. So, for example, in a sitting month where the Court hears nine cases, each of the nine justices will write one majority opinion.

Utility Air was argued in March, along with eight other cases. Only one justice, Justice Scalia, has not written a case from the March sitting. That seemed to suggest that Scalia would write Utility Air.

On Friday, however, Scalia handed down the Court’s opinion in Johnson v. United States, a case from the Court’s April sitting. Though Scalia is still the only justice who hasn’t handed down an opinion in the Court’s March sitting, he is now one of only two justices (the other is Justice Stephen Breyer) who has written a total of eight majority opinions this term. All of the other justices have written only six or seven majority opinions.

It is unlikely that Scalia will write a ninth opinion when many justices haven’t even written an eighth opinion.

As of Friday, only two justices, Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have only written six majority opinions. Kennedy and Ginsburg, moreover, are the only two justices who have not written a majority opinion from the Court’s February sitting (although one case still remains in that sitting). Therefore, while it once appeared likely that the very conservative Scalia would write Utility Air, it now appears much more likely that the somewhat less conservative Kennedy, or even the liberal Ginsburg, will write this opinion.

That does not mean that the EPA will necessarily win this case. But it’s still good news for the Earth.

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Anthony KennedyAntonin ScaliaRuth Bader GinsburgSupreme Court

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‘A New Era': Canada’s Oil Country Promises To Become ‘World Leader’ On Climate Change

Last month, the historically ultra-conservative and oil-rich province of Alberta, Canada, did the unthinkable: It elected a left-wing government. And that new government just made one of its first big moves: It announced a serious clamp-down on climate change.

“We need a climate change plan that is bold, ambitious, and will bring Alberta into a new era of responsible energy development and environmental sustainability,” Environment Minister Shannon Phillips said Thursday. “If we get it right, our environmental policy will make us world leaders on this issue, instead of giving us a black eye around the world.”

According to Phillips, the province will double its carbon tax. In other words, it will ask oil companies and other high-emitting industries to pay double what they’re paying now for pumping greenhouse gases into the air.

In addition, Phillips announced the creation of an advisory panel to review Alberta’s entire climate change policy, with the goal of making a preliminary pledge to reduce emissions at the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of this year. That conference is widely seen as the last chance for a global agreement that could feasibly limit global warming to 2°C.

Alberta is home to the tar sands, a type of oil that requires one of the most carbon-intensive extraction processes in the world. The province has come under fire from environmentalists for that process, which produces as much as three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventionally produced oil. Canada is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and about 78 percent of that is produced in Alberta.

Phillips said that the current carbon tax of $15 per ton would double to $30 per ton by 2017. The carbon tax as a whole was set to expire, but instead of letting it, she said Alberta would renew and strengthen it.

Phillips also called the province’s current regulations crafted in 2007 “obsolete,” and said they need to be strengthened for Alberta to be taken seriously around the world.

“If Alberta wants better access to world markets, then we’re going to need to do our part to address one of the world’s biggest problems, which is climate change,” she said. “Now it is time to begin to address those issues.”

You can watch the entirety of Phillips’ comments here:

Prior to the May election, oil-rich Alberta had grown accustomed to having very strong conservative governance. The Progressive Conservative party had been in the leadership there for more than four decades, and the oil industry enjoyed the benefits of that. The Canadian environmental and energy think tank Pembina Institute has described the province’s environmental regulations on the oil industry as very weak. Indeed, because of Alberta’s carbon-intensive tar sands extraction processes, Canada’s energy industry recently became the country’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, surpassing transportation for the first time.

Still, environmentalists cautioned that Thursday’s announcement was just a start to a strong climate policy in Alberta. Dan Woynillowicz, director of policy for Clean Energy Canada, told the National Observer as much.

“Today’s announcement sends a clear and critical message to industry and Albertans: This is a first step,” he said. “Expect more robust climate action to follow.”

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AlbertaClimate ChangeOil SandsTar Sands

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Here’s Which States Are Leaking The Most Natural Gas At The Expense Of Their Taxpayers

Oil and gas operations located on federal and tribal lands leaked $360 million worth of fuel in 2013, money which would have gone in part to taxpayers and tribes in the form of royalties, according to a new report.

Tuesday’s report was commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to track fugitive methane emissions, a term referring to methane released when natural gas is leaked, vented, or flared. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, and is 86 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame.

The report looked specifically at fugitive methane emissions on federal and tribal lands. It found that, on those lands, more than 65 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas was wasted via leaks and venting in 2013, representing more than 1 million metric tons of methane. That means that in 2013, emissions from wasted natural gas on federal lands was about the same as the emissions from 5.2 million cars.

That’s obviously bad news when it comes to climate change. ThinkProgress has reported extensively on the climate impacts of fugitive methane leaks, and Tuesday’s study was no different. It found that, even though natural gas emits less greenhouse gases than coal or crude oil, enough gas is leaking to negate the bulk of its climate benefits.

But it’s also bad for taxpayers and tribes, which are supposed to get royalty payments via the gas derived from their land.

“Every molecule of methane that’s being leaked or flared is a molecule that’s not having royalty assessed on it,” Jon Goldstein, a senior energy policy manager at EDF, told ThinkProgress. “Those royalties are what you use to return to states and tribes to invest in schools, to invest in roads — things that really help impacted communities.”

According to Goldstein, the government is supposed to receive a royalty rate of 12.5 percent on gas produced on federal lands. Half of that percentage goes to the federal government, and the other half goes to the state. On tribal lands, the royalty rate fluctuates — but all the money from that rate goes back to the tribes.

That money is important, because states and tribes risk exposure to potential health and environmental risks when they agree to house oil and gas operations. The biggest reason states and tribes agree to take on these risks, Goldstein said, is money.

“Those resources are supposed to be managed responsibly for the benefit of taxpayers and for the benefit of tribes,” he said. “That’s a problem if there’s waste.”

Some states are wasting more than others, whether it be through old, leaky infrastructure or excess flaring. According to the report, approximately $100 million of the $360 million worth of fuel wasted in 2013 came from New Mexico. Approximately $76.2 million came from Wyoming, and $76.1 million came from North Dakota.

[image error]

ICF data shows the volume and value of gas lost due to flaring, venting, and fugitive losses on federal and tribal lands for the top states in 2013. A portion of this value represents royalties that states and tribes are not able to collect.

CREDIT: EDF.ORG

Not all of that is because those states are the most irresponsible, Goldstein said. States like Wyoming and New Mexico have more gas operations on federal and tribal lands than other states, which means they would likely waste more natural gas either way.

But Goldstein also noted that across states, the correlations between gas produced and gas wasted aren’t perfect. Colorado produces a comparable amount of gas on federal and tribal lands to New Mexico, he said, and yet New Mexico wastes significantly more gas.

With Tuesday’s report, EDF hopes to make a strong case to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is currently considering proposed regulations to minimize fugitive methane emissions on federal and tribal lands. That rule is expected to come out this summer, and EDF is pushing for a suite of requirements for companies that operate on those lands, including regular leak and repair inspections, and capturing emissions from compressors.

With its new findings, the report doubles down on those recommendations.

“It shows the large scale of the problem,” Goldstein said. “It shows that it’s something that needs to be addressed.”

Tags

FrackingMethaneMethane LeaksNatural Gas

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The Future Is Here: Google Is Turning An Old Coal Plant Into A Clean Energy-Powered Data Center

An old coal-burning power plant slated to close in October has been given new life thanks to Google, which recently announced plans to build its first U.S.-based data center in eight years on the grounds of Alabama’s Widows Creek power plant.

“Data centers need a lot of infrastructure to run 24/7, and there’s a lot of potential in redeveloping large industrial sites like former coal power plants,” Patrick Gammons, senior manager of Google’s Data Center Energy and Location Strategy, wrote in a blog post. “Decades of investment shouldn’t go to waste just because a site has closed; we can repurpose existing electric and other infrastructure to make sure our data centers are reliably serving our users around the world.”

Google currently operates — or has plans to construct — 14 data centers around the world, with eight in North America, two in Asia, and four in Europe. Data centers are where Google houses the huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables necessary to power its online operations. Gammons called the data centers “the engines of the Internet” — and those engines require energy to run.

Which is where the Widows Creek plant comes in. The power plant, which first started producing power in 1952, once employed more than 500 workers and was one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) largest power plants, according to the Times Free Press. Today, just one of its original eight generators is still in operation, employing about 90 people. The plant was slated to close completely in October, with the TVA citing a “changing regulatory and economic environment.” The last remaining generator currently creates enough power to supply around 200,000 homes, according to the TVA website.

The data center will eschew the power plant’s history in favor of renewable energy, with Google pledging to run the 350-acre facility entirely off of either solar or wind power (or a combination of both). Google’s data centers in both Iowa and Oklahoma already run entirely off of wind power.

The $600 million project will use the plant’s preexisting electric transmission lines to power the center. Google also announced that it will be working with the TVA to create new renewable energy projects around the area. The company expects that the center will create between 75 and 100 jobs.

This is the first time Google has committed to redeveloping a former power plant, but not the first time it has converted an industrial site. In 2009, Google purchased a paper mill in Finland and spent almost $400 million converting it into a data center. The system is now one of the company’s most efficient, using sea water from the Bay of Finland to cool its equipment. While there are no final plans yet, the Widows Creek plant is located on a river, and Google might look into creating a similar cooling system as it did in Finland.

Construction of the data center is slated to begin in 2016. Google currently uses renewable energy to power 35 percent of its operations, but says that it is “striving to power our company with 100 percent renewable energy.” To make renewable energy more widely available — both for the company and around the world — Google has agreed to fund $2 billion in clean energy projects, from residential rooftop solar to wind farms in Texas.

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Clean EnergyCoalGoogle

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House Votes To Weaken And Delay The EPA’s Climate Rule

The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would delay and weaken the federal government’s proposed regulations on power plant emissions.

The bill, called the Ratepayer Protection Act and sponsored by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), would allow governors to refuse to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. Governors who claim that the regulations would have a “significant adverse effect” on electric bills or grid reliability in their states could opt out of making plans to cut power plant emissions.

“This is a worldwide problem and there’s no reason for the president of the United States to unilaterally punish America for what we’ve already accomplished,” Whitfield said of the carbon rule. “It’s such a power grab, unprecedented, that we are going to take it up on the floor today to delay this radical regulation.”

The bill, which passed 247-180, would also delay the implementation of the Clean Power Plan until all the court challenges surrounding the proposed regulation are resolved. Two of those lawsuits — one from a group of energy companies led by coal company Murray Energy Corp., and the other from a group of 15 states led by coal-heavy West Virginia — were dismissed earlier this year, when a judge ruled that because the rule isn’t yet finalized, it’s too early to be considering legal challenges. But once the rule is finalized, more lawsuits will likely be filed.

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which was proposed last June, seeks to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Under the rule, states will come up with their own ways of meeting target cuts in emissions. The final version is expected this summer.

The White House has promised to veto the Ratepayer Protection Act if it makes it to President Obama’s desk. The bill, the White House said in a statement, “would give governors unprecedented and broad discretion to avoid compliance with the [Clean Air Act], thereby delaying the delivery of important public health benefits.” In addition, to interfere legislatively with the rule before it’s finalized would be “an unprecedented interference with EPA’s efforts to fulfill its duties under the [Clean Air Act],” the White House stated.

Some governors, however, haven’t waited for the bill’s passage to announce their plans to refuse compliance with the Clean Power Plan. On Wednesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) sent a letter to the White House saying that his state wouldn’t be complying with the proposed regulations unless they are “significantly improved.”

“I believe the Clean Power Plan as proposed is a vast overreach of federal power that exceeds the EPA’s proper legal authority and fails to strike the proper balance between the health of the environment and the health of the economy,” he wrote.

Pence isn’t the only one that has vowed to reject the rules. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) also said his state wouldn’t comply with the rule unless it underwent “significant and meaningful changes,” and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) issued an executive order earlier this year prohibiting state agencies from coming up with a plan to combat power plant emissions.

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EPAEPA Climate RuleHouse of Representatives

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This Sci-Fi Novel’s Post-Apocalyptic Future Could Become Reality All Too Soon

Our future selves are all characters in New York Times best-selling author Paolo Bacigalupi’s penetrating and environmentally driven sci-fi novel, The Water Knife, published by Knopf in May and an Amazon Best Book of June 2015.

Note to future selves: don’t move to Phoenix.

Why not? In the future Phoenix is even hotter, drier, and dustier than it already is. Also it is overrun by migrants from Texas — a state that has been left out to dry, literally, after prayers for rain fell on deaf ears — and hordes of others from across the West hoping to make it to the land of plenty, California, or of at least some, Nevada. Known as “Merry Perrys” after former-governor Rick Perry and his happy-go-lucky attitude toward the drought, the Texan migrants are one of many ways Bacigalupi blends the familiar and the inventive to create a world both easy to imagine and hard to fathom.

[image error]

CREDIT: Random House

One small catch. There are border guards everywhere and a general lawlessness throughout the land in which mass murders are commonplace and gated communities are now air-tight. In this near post-apocalyptic world there are basically two kinds of people, the haves and the have-nots: those who have water, and those who don’t. Then there’s Lucy Monroe, an East Coast journalist who decided to leave her comfortable life behind to chronicle the “Cadillac Desert.” She increasing finds herself becoming part of the landscape: someone to be observed rather than an observer.

But the main character remains unspoken throughout most of the book: climate change. Because in the future, it makes no sense to belabor the point. It’d be like arguing that winter doesn’t exist. Or that rivers can’t run dry.

“Is climate change real? Yes,” Bacigalupi told ThinkProgress from his home in Southwestern Colorado. “Do the characters in the novel recognize this? Yes, but they are past this conversation. They are like ‘yeah, wow, shitty climate change — so how do we get across the Colorado River in Las Vegas and past the militias? That’s what I want to know.’”

While the characters are beyond talking about climate change, Bacigalupi thinks it’s an unavoidable topic for novelists writing about the future, and possibly even those writing about the present. Bacigalupi’s debut sci-fi novel, The Wind-Up Girl, won the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards. In the interim since then he also wrote Shipbreaker, an award-winning young adult novel.

“I don’t think you can write honest futuristic fiction without engaging somehow with climate change,” said Bacigalupi. “I think it’s something that is going to intersect with everything about our lives. I’m not actually sure you can really write contemporary fiction without engaging with climate change — if you try to posit that our world is the same as it was yesterday, it’s not true.”

Bacigalupi said he really committed to writing a book about how the future could return the West to its wild ways again when he traveled to Austin in the summer 2011 for a conference and encountered “an epic drought” with all the trappings of a dramatic story: water shortages, electricity outages, and record-breaking heat waves. At the same time, then-governor and two-time presidential candidate Rick Perry was asking Texans to pray for rain.

It occurred to me at that moment that I wasn’t actually standing in the middle of a drought, I was time traveling.

“It occurred to me at that moment that I wasn’t actually standing in the middle of a drought, I was time traveling,” said Bacigalupi, who used to work as an editor at the environmental magazine High Country News. “I had just leapt into the future.”

He said that he decided then he clearly had to write the novel because “we have not yet engaged with reality and the thing that really stood out to me was that the people who can win in the future are the people who can engage with reality.”

And so The Water Knife is divided between Las Vegas, which is surviving due to its merciless water laws and strict water conservation policies, and Phoenix, a city reliant on precarious sources of water that must be pumped and channeled hundreds of miles before arriving. Between these two cities is a separation much starker than the current U.S.-Mexico divide. In this godforsaken space, a hired hand, an intrepid journalist, and a young Texan are caught up in a fast-paced plot to survive, with death coming precariously close to each of them. Their survival depends on discovering the true source of power over the water — a lost document containing mythical water rights that could restore water to Arizona. The only real authority figure in the book is the “Queen of the Colorado”; a ruthless, water-hungry woman who dispatches orders over a cellphone and slinks away in fancy black cars.

The absence of a superficial and politically motivated climate change debate is about the only refreshing thing about the future Bacigalupi creates. The other sources of relief are the large, domed “arcology developments” built by Chinese engineers. They scrape the sky and operate in a closed-loop system, reusing water through filtration processes. To live in one of these futuristic edifices is the epitome of a good life. A techno-fix for the elite. Everyone else is left to deal with the consequences of their forebears’ dependence on fossil fuels and negligence of environmental stewardship.

[image error]

Paolo Bacigalupi.

CREDIT: Random House/JT Thomas Photography

Bacigalupi said that even people with good intentions don’t want to read bad news stories about “how drought is a problem or how another species has died off” — of which ThinkProgress has written many — but that as a novelist he can “give meaning and context to these things.”

Rather than just reading about how Lake Mead is at a record low, his objective with The Water Knife is to make these familiar images and terms “become visceral, powerful and meaningful symbols” in ways they weren’t before.

For these reasons he avoids using terms that can be politicized, like climate change and global warming, in the book.

“I would rather charge up the images so that they become powerful symbols of their own,” said Bacigalupi. “So that when someone sees Lake Mead they see a story about potential Arizona problems. The more you end up using highly charged words, the further away from engagement you sometimes end up getting.”

Four years after his trip to a drought-ridden Texas, the tables have turned in the West: Texas is being slammed by powerful rainstorms while California is imposing drastic water cuts in reaction to a crippling drought.

Rather than negate the underlying themes of his book, Bacigalupi sees this as reinforcing them.

“I thought the California drought was something that I could legitimately push out for a few more years,” said Bacigalupi. “It’s like ‘OK that’s right, that’s the model, that’s what I was expecting. Oh, now it’s here.’ I guess even when you are expecting it you aren’t really expecting it.”

“We only panic when the tiger is right upon us,” he said.

According to the 2014 National Climate Assessment (NCA), the climate tiger will have pounced on the Southwest by 2050, if not before, in the form of megadroughts. The extensive reports says that in the Southwest the “severe and sustained drought will stress water sources” forcing “increased competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers, and ecosystems for the region’s most precious resource.”

These impacts will be especially acute in southwestern cities, which are home to more than 90 percent of the region’s population.

[image error]

CREDIT: National Climate Assessment

Bacigalupi’s last science fiction book, The Wind-Up Girl, was an equally thought-provoking and imaginative take on the near future. Instead of a dried-out world, it envisioned a waterlogged Bangkok where residents eke by in squalid slums protected by massive sea levees. Rather than seeking out water at all costs, they are overrun by it. Instead there is a quest for food — or “calories” — ever more in demand after the collapse of much of the international agro-industrial complex.

Both novels center, at least in part, on the “cascade effect of technology” in which a technology that solves something also creates a second problem. In both books human population and prosperity have expanded to “the edge” according to Bacigalupi, “and now we need a new techno-solution to keep it going.”

In the Wind-Up Girl, the problem is food, and in The Water Knife, it’s water and the era of big dams across the West that allow people to “make the desert bloom.”

“What happens if that surplus isn’t actually real?” said Bacigalupi. “That’s that zero-sum moment. That’s real scarcity.”

While most sci-fi novels focus on these techno-fixes, such as geoengineering to solve climate change, Bacigalupi believes we need “to find some sort of social fix.”

“At some point you have to make human beings think about themselves as globally responsible objects,” he said. “How do you make people start to think of themselves as being more than just a singular node in a singular body?”

The hardest part about being human is that we’re just built for hypocrisy.

Bacigalupi’s next book, which he said he thinks will have something to do with “this sort of mass extinction that we’re ushering the planet through” seems likely to build upon the near-future, and foreseeable, world’s he’s already created.

“Is there a point where you pull too many threads out of the tapestry and it all unravels?” said Bacigalupi. “At what point do you not have enough of the pieces and parts to make the machine run?”

There is an odd satisfaction in reading about some of the worst potential outcomes of the current environmental crisis. One could envision these books being made into successful motion pictures in the vein of Mad Max, Waterworld, or even Avatar. While Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic book The Road — which was made into a successful film — made poetry out of humankind’s devastation of the earth, Bacigalupi’s books bring a sharp sense of reality to nebulous concepts like mass drought, climate change, and just being human.

“The hardest part about being human is that we’re just built for hypocrisy,” said Bacigalupi. “And that’s a tough thing to engage with — ‘I feel really bad that almost everything I do somehow screws up the environment and probably makes the future worse for my children, yet I keep doing those thing because they are so pleasurable.’”

And I will keep reading Bacigalupi’s books.

Tags

Climate ChangeDroughtEnvironmentFictionPaolo Bacigalupiscience fictionThe SouthwestThe Water KnifeWater

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Judge Rules To Temporarily Block Federal Fracking Regulations

Rules for fracking on federal land won’t go into effect Wednesday as planned, after a federal judge in Wyoming issued a temporary block of the rules late Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl’s decision to issue a temporary stay on the rule wasn’t the full injunction that oil companies had called for in court. But the decision does mean that, while the stay is in place — which will be at least a month, the Casper Star Tribune reports — oil and gas permitting on public lands will go on under existing regulations, instead of under the new regulations. Skavdahl’s decision was based partially on the fact that the government hasn’t yet filed records on how the rule was created, so the judge wanted to give the government more time to do so. Afterward, he’d be able to adequately examine the oil industry’s legal argument.

The Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group, praised the judge’s decision, as did Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R), who’s opposed to the federal rules. Oil industry groups, including the American Petroleum Institute, have claimed that the regulations will increase costs and delays on fracking projects.

Environmental groups weren’t as happy, however. The Sierra Club called the judge’s ruling a “setback for our public lands.”

“While these regulations didn’t go far enough to protect public health, they were a first and necessary step in reining in the dirty and dangerous oil and gas industry, and would begin to hold them accountable for the pollution they cause,” the group said in a statement. “Fracking needs more regulation, not less.”

The argument that the fracking regulations, issued in March by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), don’t go far enough is common among environmentalists. The rule forces oil and gas companies to disclose all chemicals they use in fracking operations on public lands such as national forests. Companies are also prohibited under the rule from storing fracking wastewater in open pits on public lands, and periodic testing of well integrity — in an attempt to prevent pollution — will also be required. Some environmental groups acknowledged that the regulation was a good step, but others were more forthright in their opposition, saying that they would rather see fracking banned on public lands.

“Our precious public lands have been sacrificed by the Obama Administration for the short-term profit of the oil and gas industry,” said Food and Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter in a press release that was co-signed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and other groups.

Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell defended the rules after they came out, saying that the regulations’ requirements that wastewater must be disposed of properly and chemicals must be disclosed were important for public safety.

“It’s been four or five years in the making,” she said of the rules “It’s really important that the public be reassured that groundwater is protected, that frack fluids are disclosed in terms of whats in them, and their disposed of properly.”

Lawsuits against the rule were filed almost immediately after the rule was released. The lawsuits that Judge Skavdahl ruled on this week were brought by the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance. Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Utah filed a separate lawsuit against the rule, but the judge combined the two challenges in his ruling. The oil industry lawsuit argued that the BLM didn’t follow proper rule-making procedures in crafting the rule, and the states argued that the BLM doesn’t have the power to regulate fracking.

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House Votes To Reform Toxic Chemical Regulation For The First Time In Nearly 40 Years

Tuesday night, the House passed legislation aimed at reforming the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), the 1976 law that for almost 40 years has dictated how chemicals are managed in the United States. Passed with broad bipartisan support — with the only no vote coming from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) — the bill is a first step toward reforming TSCA, largely considered one of the most ineffective environmental laws in the country.

“Eighty-five thousand chemicals have been introduced into commerce in the United States, and what we know is that less than 1,000 have been well-tested for their human health and environmental effects,” Noah Sachs, professor of law at the University of Richmond and a scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform in Washington, D.C., told ThinkProgress. “I think there’s an assumption that the government must be watching out for these things, and if there were a dangerous chemical out there the government would remove it, but that’s not what is happening at all.”

Advocates for chemical regulation reform point to several shortcomings in the existing TSCA statute. When the TSCA passed in 1976, some 64,000 chemicals that were currently in use were exempted from testing — since then, another 22,000 have been evaluated, but few have been designated as toxic. Crude MCHM, the chemical that spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River in January 2014, for instance, is unregulated. Between 1976 and 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency generated data on just 200 chemicals.

While TSCA gave the EPA the authority to review chemicals, it never provided the agency with a mandate on how it should go about doing it. Instead, it required high burdens of proof for deeming a chemical toxic, calling for its removal, or restricting its use. Under the current TSCA, any time the EPA wants to regulate a chemical, it has to provide a cost-benefit analysis showing that the agency’s alternative chemical is the least burdensome in terms of environmental and health impacts and cost. It has to provide that analysis not just for the proposed alternative, but for every other potential alternative as well.

I think there’s an assumption that … if there were a dangerous chemical out there the government would remove it, but that’s not what is happening at all

Asbestos — which is classified as a known human carcinogen and is banned in over 40 countries — is still legal in the United States due to the high burden of evidence required of the EPA under TSCA. In 1991, the Fifth Circuit found that the EPA, in trying to ban the substance, had failed to provide substantial evidence that a ban was the “least burdensome alternative” as required by TSCA, and rejected the EPA’s cost-benefit analysis. Since 1991, the EPA has not attempted to regulate an existing chemical.

The House bill removes the requirement that the EPA find the least burdensome alternative, and for the first time includes a mandate that the EPA begin testing chemicals for their safety, requiring that the EPA test 10 chemicals per year.

But some environmentalists worried that the bill still doesn’t go far enough in regulating dangerous substances.

“We commend the House for its focus on the need to overhaul chemical policy, but this piece of legislation will not do the job,” Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said in a press statement. “It tips much too far in favor of an industry in serious need of regulation.”

Though the House bill removes the requirement that the EPA provide evidence of a less burdensome alternative — placing more emphasis on scientific evidence during safety assessments — it still requires the agency to “determine whether technically and economically feasible alternatives that benefit health or the environment…will be reasonably available as a substitute when the proposed prohibition or other restriction takes effect.”

It also requires that the EPA show proof of a chemical’s potential risk before testing can even begin, forcing the agency to amass a record of a chemical’s potential impacts before it can order more testing.

“I don’t see why that should be the agency’s task,” Sachs said. “I think it’s putting yet another procedural hurdle in the place of removing dangerous chemicals from the market.”

The House bill also allows chemical companies to request that the EPA test a given chemical — a provision that environmentalists worry will allow industry to dictate the EPA’s agenda.

“It’s a nice way for industry to drive the testing priorities,” Sachs said. “It’s pretty extraordinary that this bill allows industry to set the testing agenda for a government agency.”

The American Chemistry Council — the main trade association for the American chemical industry — was quick to praise the bill’s passage, calling it “a pivotal moment in the years-long effort to reform TSCA.”

Whatever gets passed may be with us for another generation

The Senate is expected to vote on a similar bill before the August recess. That bill is largely considered to be more comprehensive than the House version, as it creates standards for labeling chemicals as either high or low priority for testing. But the bill — which only requires the testing of 25 chemicals over five years and strips states of their right to create their own chemical regulations — has also been criticized by environmentalists and public health officials, who claim that industry interests played too large a role in its drafting.

In March, Hearst Newspapers obtained a copy of a final draft of the bill, before it was seen by a Senate subcommittee. The draft was written in the form of a Microsoft Word Document, and by checking the documents “advanced properties” in Word, the document’s company of origin turned out to be the American Chemistry Council.

“It was clear from the computer coding that the final draft originated at the American Chemical Council itself,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said the day before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee began discussing the bill. “Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I do not believe that a regulated industry should be so intimately involved in writing a bill that regulates them.”

After the House passed its bill on Tuesday, however, Boxer expressed hope that the Senate could pass an amended version of the bill.

“While the House bill could still be improved, I feel it is the appropriate bill to take up in the United States Senate where we can work on just a few amendments to make it better,” she said in a statement.

Sachs, however, hopes that Congress build upon existing momentum to create a reform bill that addresses the gaps in current TSCA.

“Whatever gets passed may be with us for another generation,” he said. “I would like to see a much more aggressive statute, and after 40 years of working under this very weak law of TSCA, I think Congress can do a lot better to pass something more ambitious.”

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A Dutch Court Just Did The Unthinkable On Carbon Emissions

It’s illegal to knowingly ignore the dangers of global warming.

That was essentially the ruling Wednesday from a Dutch court, which ordered the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2020 in order to preserve the low-lying Netherlands and protect its people from the dangers of global warming.

The Hague District Court agreed with the more than 900 plaintiffs, organized by the sustainability advocacy group Urgenda, that the Dutch government has taken “insufficient action against climate change.” The plaintiffs had asked the court to prompt the Dutch government to lower emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, so the court’s decision comes down on the low end of that request.

Environmental advocates lauded the decision, saying that more rulings could be expected in other countries.

“The Dutch court ruling is clear: the government has a legal duty to protect its people against the threat of climate change,” Faiza Oulahsen of Greenpeace Netherlands said in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “Litigation against governments who fail to take climate change seriously will spread around the world.”

According to the statement, a similar lawsuit is being pursued in Belgium and Greenpeace intends on filing a case in the Philippines.

The ruling may be especially significant in the run up to the United Nations climate summit in Paris at the end of this year, where member nations are expected to commit to significant emissions standards in a global effort to avert catastrophic climate change.

“We had thought the legal system would not want to interfere in the political debate. But the scientific case is so strong, and the dangers so high that the court has ruled that the state is failing to adequately protect its citizens from the effects of climate change,” Pier Vellinga, Urgenda’s chairman, told the Guardian.

Last year, the Netherlands and the United States agreed not to fund new coal-fired power plants in developing nations, saying, “We affirm the importance of reaching a global climate change agreement in 2015 that can attract broad and ambitious participation.” And as a member of the European Union, the Netherlands is already party to a binding target reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990.

Still, the Netherlands hasn’t been as aggressive as some other European Union member countries in terms of renewable energy adoption. In 2013, renewable sources contributed to 4.5 percent of all energy consumed in the Netherlands — far below the 14.1 percent EU average.

Wednesday’s ruling puts the Netherlands on a more ambitious schedule, but it is not clear what enforcement mechanisms there will be. The government can appeal the ruling, but has not yet said whether it will do so.

Despite the ongoing political debate in the United States, the scientific consensus for years has been that humans are causing global warming.

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Why The Green Party’s Jill Stein Thinks She Can ‘Speak Truth To Power’ Better Than Bernie Sanders

Nearly four decades ago, Dr. Jill Stein’s foray into politics began with a simple question: “What is making my patients sick?” As she learned about the air pollution, cheap junk food and stressful violence plaguing her Massachusetts community, she vowed to find a way to make a bigger impact.

“That’s when I realized that as a doctor I could best contribute to the health of society by practicing not clinical medicine, but political medicine,” she said, “confronting the mother of all illnesses, our sick political system that must be healed if we’re to hold any hope of fixing these ills that are literally killing us.”

This week, Stein officially jumped into the race for president, running as she did in 2012 on the Green Party ticket. At her campaign launch in Washington, D.C., a small crowd of a few dozen activists and supporters cheered Stein and chanted, “Run, Jill, run!” But they also pressed her on her job creation plan (full employment through a “Green New Deal), her views on nuclear weapons (dismantle them all), and what sets her apart from the 2016 race’s other staunch progressive: Bernie Sanders.

“What Bernie is doing, speaking truth to power, is a wonderful thing,” Stein said. “It’s been done many times before within the Democratic Party. But one only has to look at the inspired campaign of Jesse Jackson to see where that goes. It’s a wonderful flourish, but when it’s over, it’s over. And the party continues to march to the right. These reform efforts within the Democratic Party feel good for those who participate, but at the end of the day, they have not built a foundation for the future.”

Stein said that by running as a third-party candidate, she can stay in the race until the bitter end in November of 2016 rather than getting knocked out in the primary. “And if we were to be eliminated, we won’t be standing and directing everybody to go vote for Hillary Clinton or whatever corporate Democrat becomes the recipient of the Democratic Party nomination,” she added.

But Stein also stressed key differences between Sanders’ political stances and her own.

“We’ve much more closely involved with Black Lives Matter and standing up for communities of color, both here at home and overseas,” she told ThinkProgress. “We also have a much more specific climate agenda. We’re calling for 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030. Bernie is also calling for movement, but he doesn’t have the same sense of emergency we have. And finally, we would not be providing weapons to the Netanyahu government, nor the Saudis, nor the Egyptians. I know Bernie has a weapons industry in Vermont, so he’s in the place that makes it hard for him to stand up on that. But we need a foreign policy based on international law, diplomacy and human rights.”

Though widely praised for his proposals to tax the rich, make college free, and provide paid vacations to all workers, Sanders has faced criticism from the Left in recent years for his vocal support for the Israeli government, airstrikes against ISIS, and sending military aid to Ukraine.

As her campaign revs up, Stein plans to travel the country promoting her platform, which includes universal single-payer healthcare, abolishing student debt, slashing the Pentagon’s budget in half, and “creating police commissions that empower citizens to control their police.” She has vowed not to accept corporate donations. Though she has virtually no chance of winning the presidency, Stein says she can help push certain ideas from the radical left into the mainstream, such as the demand for a $15 per hour minimum wage and stronger rent control.

Margaret Flowers, another doctor-turned-activist who attended Stein’s campaign launch, told ThinkProgress that what happened this week in Congress — with Republicans and Democrats joining together to give the President free-trade fast-track authority — perfectly illustrated the need for a strong third party.

“It speaks to the fact that we live in a plutocracy,” she said. “The two parties did not listen to the biggest coalition ever of labor and environmentalists who stood against fast-track. They don’t listen to the people, but Jill Stein does.”

Philadelphia-based activist Galen Tyler agreed, telling ThinkProgress that “ordinary people are starting to ask, ‘Who really has my interests at heart?’ And Jill’s run will allow us, for the next 16 months or so, for us to be constantly in the neighborhoods talking to people and getting them educated about all these issues — like how the jobs that are being created now are service-type job that don’t pay livable wages and don’t come with healthcare. Jill is at the forefront talking about this stuff and interacting with all sections of the population.”

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