wehrum
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merri ok
congrats, villain 1019 on bringing back acid rain
revolving door
kid killer FORMALDEHYDE KOCH
SEE H & W KURTH elbert lin
pow swamp thang, mofo dingdong ethics no trump 2.0 --> liar
see enviro integrity pjt bs
BROOKE ROLLINS?
CLINT WOODS PJT 2025 MAndy etc
dan simmons IER
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SEP 2020 BLOOMBERG
- Bill Wehrum oversaw air policy earlier in Trump term
- Former official now represents trade groups against agency
Former EPA air chief Bill Wehrum, who resigned amid controversy last year, is now running his own law firm and representing industry trade groups against the agency.
Wehrum filed a petition for review Tuesday on behalf of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, American Petroleum Institute, and American Chemistry Council, opposing a risk and technology review that the Environmental Protection Agency finalized in July.
...
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High Court Ruling Dooms EPA Smog Plan, DC Circ. Told By Madeline Lyskawa Law360 (July 30, 2024, 7:35 PM EDT) --
The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to halt the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's plan to reduce smog-forming emissions across several states is reason enough for the D.C. Circuit to invalidate the rule, several states, industry groups and energy companies argued. In two reply briefs filed on Monday, the states, industry groups and companies cited the Supreme Court's June 27 majority opinion, which said the EPA failed to address the concern that the point at which pollution-control measures could deliver cost-effective air quality improvements in downwind states could shift if upwind states fall out of the "Good Neighbor" smog reduction plan. "EPA should have considered '[w]hat happens — as in fact did happen — when many of the upwind
ates fall out of the planned [federal implementation plan].' EPA failed to answer that critical question. Now, the [federal implementation plan] must be reversed," a six-state coalition led by Utah and Ohio said in its brief. Expressing similar sentiments, the industry group and energy company petitioners, which include Kinder Morgan Inc., the National Mining Association and the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, among others, told the D.C. Circuit in their brief "that error is prejudicial and is by itself reason to vacate the rule." But that wasn't the agency's only error, the industry groups and energy companies said. "EPA also violated its 'statutory duty to avoid over-control,' by imposing 'enhancements' on the trading program for [electric generating units] that will force substantial reductions in statewide emissions budgets without any analysis showing that these reductions will not result in over-control," they said.
"These 'enhancements' also constrain [electric generating units'] ability to keep costs at the level EPA found to be cost-effective — another reality EPA failed to analyze." Since the EPA's nationwide smog reduction plan was finalized, it has faced challenges in the D.C., Tenth, Fourth and Fifth circuits, among others. Although the plan's rollout had been effectively blocked in 12 states in response to other circuit courts pausing its implementation, the D.C. Circuit declined motions to stay it, leading the plan's opponents to file emergency stay applications with the U.S. Supreme Court. While the justices merely considered whether a motion for stay should have been granted by the D.C. Circuit, and not whether the plan itself should be invalidated, the six states further argued in their brief that the "high court's 'resolution ... ultimately turn[ed] on the merits' given the significant harms and equities each side raised."
In reaching their decision, the justices also received and reviewed more than 400 pages of briefing and held more than an hour of oral argument on the applications, the states said. "Thus, this weighty merits issue, though viewed through a 'stay' lens, was treated on par with other 'cases [the court] hear[s]' solely on the merits," the states said, in an attempt to impart greater weight to the justices' decision on the outcome of the case. Wisconsin, which did not join the six states' brief and hardly cited the Supreme Court's decision, conversely argued in a third brief filed on Monday that the D.C. Circuit should remand the EPA's plan
in order for the agency to implement particularized remedies as to the remaining emissions from states upwind of Wisconsin, which the state said have gone unaddressed.
Representatives for the parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. The EPA is represented by Todd Kim, Chloe H. Kolman, Elisabeth H. Carter and Zoe Palnik of the U.S. Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division and Daniel P. Schramm, Kyle Durch and Rosemary H. Kaban of the EPA Office of General Counsel. The states are represented by their attorneys general. Utah is additionally represented by William L. Wehrum of Wehrum Environmental Law LLC and Emily C. Schilling, Kristina R. Van Bockern and Aaron B. Tucker of Holland & Hart LLP. The industry groups are represented by Hogan Lovells LLP, Womble Bond Dickinson LLP, Sidley Austin LLP, McGuire Woods LLP, Steptoe & Johnson PLLC, Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, Bracewell LLP, Baker Botts LLP, Squire Patton Boggs LLP, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, BakerHostetler LLP, Beveridge & Diamond PC, The McQueen Firm PLLC and Shumaker Loop & Kendrick LLP. The case is State of Utah et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency et al., case number 23-1157, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. --Additional
Assistant Administrator, Air and Radiation, EPA hive of scum and villany clint woods?
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6 26
[### Clean Air Chief Bill Wehrum Resigns Amid Ethics ...
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2019/06/26 › top-clean-air-offici...](https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/736290295/top-clean-air-official-plans-to-step-down-from-epa-post-amid-ethics-probe)
Jun 26, 2019 — Bill Wehrum is stepping down as the Environmental Protection Agency's chief air quality official at the end of the month, amid mounting scrutiny over possible ...Read more
Missing: llc | Show results with: llc
High Court Ruling Dooms EPA Smog Plan, DC Circ. Told Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP
https://www.shumaker.com › uploads › 2025/06](https://www.shumaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/High-Court-Ruling-Dooms-EPA-Smog-Plan-DC-Circ.-Told-Law360_CABudzynski-KEGarabis.pdf)
Jul 30, 2024 — The states are represented by their attorneys general. Utah is additionally represented by William L. Wehrum of Wehrum Environmental Law LLC and ...Read more
[### Ex-EPA Air Chief Resurfaces in Emissions Suit, Running ...
Bloomberg Law News
https://news.bloomberglaw.com › ex-epa-air-chief-resur...](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/product-liability-and-toxics-law/ex-epa-air-chief-resurfaces-in-emissions-suit-running-new-firm)
Sep 8, 2020 — Former EPA air chief Bill Wehrum, who resigned amid controversy last year, is now running his own law firm and representing industry trade ...
[### Senators Release Investigative Report Revealing New Ethics ...
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (.gov)
https://www.epw.senate.gov › public › index.cfm › sen...](https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/7/senators-release-investigative-report-revealing-new-ethics-lapses-and-detailing-the-far-reaching-influence-of-industry-law-firm-groups-at-epa-s-air-office)
Jul 22, 2019 — ... law firm at which Wehrum and Harlow worked prior to their tenures at EPA. The report reveals new evidence of ethical lapses on the part of ...Read more
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li 6 26
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 8 yrs 8 mos
- Former Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Jul 2019 - Present · 7 yrs
- Assistant Administrator, Office of Air and Radiation
Nov 2017 - Jul 2019 · 1 yr 9 mos
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[Partner Hunton & Williams LLP
2007 - 2017 · 10 yrs
Washington, DC](https://www.linkedin.com/company/7494/)
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[US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 6 yrs 1 mo
Washington, DC](https://www.linkedin.com/company/4495/)
- Acting Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation 2005 - 2007 · 2 yrs
- Counsel to the Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation 2001 - 2005 · 4 yrs
Education
Widener University School of Law
JD
1993
Purdue University
BS, Chemical Engineering
1986
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DELAWARE
Carper, Whitehouse discover text from 2nd industry Hunton client in EPA ‘DTE Memo’
Submitted News
Updated May 6, 2019,
Sens. Tom Carper, D-Delaware, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, on May 6 urged the Environmental Protection Agency inspector general to open an ethics investigation of EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Bill Wehrum and his deputy chief, David Harlow, after uncovering more evidence of potential conflicts of interest and questionable industry influence.
This time, the conflicts involve the Air Permitting Forum, a second industry coalition housed at Hunton Andrews Kurth that is comprised of several companies for which Wehrum and Harlow have signed ethics recusals.
Wehrum and Harlow were previously lawyers at Hunton Andrews Kurth, and since arriving at EPA, both have signed recusals to avoid potential conflicts of interest related to former clients. Members of Congress recently raised concerns about their involvement with the Utility Air Regulatory Group, a coalition of some of the country’s largest coal-fired utility companies that is represented by Hunton Andrews Kurth and has advocated for countless Clean Air Act positions that would weaken or eliminate regulations for power plant emissions — dismissing everything from the threat of climate change to the harm posed by power plant mercury emissions.
The senators uncovered more evidence of potential conflicts of interest involving yet another organization represented by Hunton Andrews Kurth, the Air Permitting Forum, or “the forum.” Like UARG, the forum comprises individual companies — and while Wehrum and his chief deputy David Harlow are recused from work associated with some of the companies that identified in 2015 as members of the forum, neither Wehrum nor Harlow recused themselves from work related to the forum.
In conducting congressional oversight, Carper and Whitehouse discovered language submitted to EPA by the forum that was subsequently used verbatim, without citation, as part of EPA’s novel argument justifying the “DTE Memo” — a memorandum issued by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that disavowed EPA’s position in litigation against DTE Energy Company and undercut EPA’s enforcement of air pollution requirements under its New Source Review program.
“While it’s promising that so many utilities are abandoning UARG as EPA’s ethically questionable practices have come to light, clearly there is a systemic issue at the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. There appears to be no end to the sham associations housed at Bill Wehrum and David Harlow’s former law firm that now have a direct line to power,” said the senators. “These groups are just another avenue for industry to surreptitiously exert its influence over EPA. We reiterate our call for the EPA inspector general to thoroughly investigate whether Wehrum and Harlow violated ethics rules in their dealings with former clients.”
The Air Permitting Forum is an unincorporated “coalition” housed at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP [Hunton] since 2016. In public comments submitted to an EPA Clean Air Act docket in 2016, the forum described itself as “a coalition of manufacturing companies focused on stationary source implementation issues under the Clean Air Act.” In its 2018 comments on the Clean Power Plan repeal, it describes its members as entities that “are subject to numerous CAA regulatory requirements… ”
[Like UARG, the forum does not have any apparent physical address or even a public website. In the headers for the forum’s public comments, the organization has listed individuals serving in various roles for the forum, such as an “executive director,” “director,” “counsel” and “manager” — but each of these individuals are lawyers employed by Hunton, and their contact information directs to a Hunton email address.
While no formal list of the forum’s members appears to be readily available, in May 2015, several individuals associated with the forum met with EPA staff about Clean Air Act rulemakings. As required, EPA staff docketed summaries of those in the meeting, including a list of attendees representing the forum. In attendance were three attorneys, all of whom would later join Hunton, employees of four companies from which Wehrum or Harlow are recused — Chevron, ExxonMobil, Georgia-Pacific and General Electric — and employees of five additional companies that are not former clients of Wehrum or Harlow — Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Shell and International Paper. Wehrum and Harlow do not appear recused from matters involving the forum.
As was noted in a supplemental letter to the inspector general last month — available at bit.ly/3022QIU — EPA’s plainly inaccurate reading of a 1992 Federal Register notice in the DTE memo is not one that EPA appears to have ever enunciated or recognized prior to the DTE memo. EPA reversed its long-standing New Source Review policy in part based on a unique interpretation of a decades-old EPA preamble to a Clean Air Act rule, which Wehrum and Harlow’s law firm previously deployed in litigation against the EPA. It is now clear from the senators’ oversight efforts that EPA did not merely adopt the legal posture of Wehrum and Harlow’s former clients — EPA adopted their exact words.
In April 2017, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt requested public “input on regulations that may be appropriate for repeal, replacement or modification.” In response to that request, the Air Permitting Forum submitted comments stating, “While historically EPA has recognized that a source must exercise judgment to exclude increases for which the project is not the ‘predominant cause,’ more recent EPA actions reflect the view that all emission increases are presumed to be caused by the change.”
Nearly identical language appears in EPA’s Dec. 7, 2017 memo titled “New Source Review Preconstruction Permitting Requirements: Enforceability and Use of the Actual-to-Projected-Actual Applicability Test in Determining Major Modification Applicability,” the memo that disavowed EPA’s position in litigation against DTE Energy Company, another client of Hunton and of Harlow himself: “Because increased emissions may be caused by multiple factors, the EPA has recognized that the source must exercise judgment to exclude increases for which the project is not the ‘predominant cause.’”
This is not the first time Wehrum appears to have cut and pasted text verbatim from documents provided by his former clients. In 2004, while Wehrum was serving as chief counsel in the George W. Bush administration’s Office of Air and Radiation, EPA proposed mercury emissions rules that also used verbatim text from clients of Wehrum’s former law firm.
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kid killer:
https://theintercept.com/2021/08/19/formaldehyde-leukemia-epa-trump-suppressed/
KOCH
intercept 921
Sharon Lerner
no lnx mANY DOC
a 2017 DRAFT assessment of formaldehyde that was suppressed by the Trump administration found that the chemical causes myeloid leukemia, according to several sources familiar with the document. The draft assessment concludes that 1 microgram of formaldehyde in a cubic meter of air increases the number of myeloid leukemia cases by roughly 3.5 in 100,000 people, more than three times the cancer risk in the assessment now in use. The EPA currently regulates formaldehyde using an outdated set of calculations, finalized in 1991, based on the risk of nasopharyngeal cancer. If the nasopharyngeal cancer and myeloid leukemia risks are combined, the cancer risk could be 4.5 times higher than the current value.
Although the suppressed assessment, produced by a division of the Environmental Protection Agency known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, has grave implications for public health, Trump administration officials, including former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, refused to allow the agency to release the assessment, several sources told The Intercept.
If the Biden EPA permits IRIS to finalize the assessment, which is among the most controversial in the agency’s history, other branches of the EPA will likely set regulatory limits based on the new risk value. IRIS values are used to determine safety thresholds for the amounts of the chemical permitted in air and water, emissions caps from industrial facilities, and guidance for cleanups. Such thresholds also alert exposed people to the dangers they face.
“This is a big, big deal. It could trigger significant interest by the personal injury bar,” said Bob Sussman, who served as the senior policy counsel to the EPA administrator during the Obama administration and deputy EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton. “Even without including the leukemia, the risk is a significant one. With the leukemia, it’s certainly a very significant public health concern.”
Even using the much lower, outdated cancer risk number set in 1991, formaldehyde is already the greatest source of nationwide cancer risk from industrial air pollutants,estimated to cause roughly 18 of the 32 cancers in every 1 million people in the U.S. that are caused by toxic pollutants in the air, according to the EPA’s own data. If the risk values are increased by a factor of four or more, the reported cancer risk from formaldehyde will go up accordingly, revealing previously unrecognized cancer hot spots around the country.
Formaldehyde, mainly used to make plywood, particleboard, and glues, is also a hazard for millions of workers who are exposed to the chemical through the production of resins, wood composite and furniture production, plastics manufacturing, paper production, embalming, foundry work, fiberglass production, building construction, agriculture, firefighting, and the teaching of biology, among other occupations. The general public is exposed to formaldehyde through tobacco smoke, cosmetics, food and water, as well as “off-gassing” from consumer goods, construction materials, and furniture. In 2019, 662 facilities reported releasing 47.7 million pounds of formaldehyde.
In addition to looking at the chemical’s relationships to nasopharyngeal cancer and leukemia, the draft assessment also factored in evidence that formaldehyde causes decreased lung function, allergic conditions, reproductive and developmental toxicity, and sensory irritation.
In part because formaldehyde is so pervasive, a wide range of business interests have attempted to prevent the EPA from finalizing the assessment and publicly acknowledging the connection to leukemia. Until now, the EPA has kept the contents of its assessment under tight wraps. The leaked information provides a window into how the science and regulation around the chemical will finally be updated.
“Just knowing that the IRIS assessment acknowledges that formaldehyde causes myeloid leukemia is huge, regardless of what the value is,” Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said after being told about the main findings of the draft assessment. “But the numbers tell you even more. They set the tone for how the agency will proceed with risk management.”
Assessment Was “Ready to Go”
While the EPA has claimed in court that the formaldehyde assessment did not exist in a form that allowed it to be shared — and used that argument to refuse to release it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the environmental whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER — former EPA officials told The Intercept that the completed assessment not only existed but that it had also been prepared for release in early 2018.
“We had the document ready to go for review within the agency, but we were not allowed to proceed,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, former director of the EPA Office of Research and Development, who retired from the agency in July.“Political leadership did not want me to move it forward.”
Wheeler, the former EPA administrator, was among the Trump appointees who were involved in suppressing the calculation of the myeloid leukemia risk, according to one former agency official who worked on the assessment. “The administrator would not allow us to put out that number,” the former official said, going on to explain how members of the administrator’s office, particularly his chief of staff Ryan Jackson, kept an unusually close eye on the formaldehyde assessment.
“Normally when we’re doing an assessment, they [the staff of the administrator’s office] don’t have access to the guts of it, because it’s deliberative. But they would demand that we give them pieces of the assessment, including what literature we were looking at for dose responses,” the former official said, referring to the precise relationship between exposure and cancer risk. “Then they would share it with ACC,” an acronym for the American Chemistry Council. Although the former official provided no direct evidence of the administrator’s office sending out the segments of the assessment, they said the actions of the trade group made it clear that it had reviewed the unpublished material.
“All of a sudden, after we gave the information to Ryan Jackson, there would be all this targeted activity by ACC that would basically dismiss or disprove whatever mathematical methodology that we were going to be using even though it hadn’t been published yet,” said the former official. If the EPA did share the information with the trade group, the report would be subject to release under FOIA and would not be exempt under the “deliberative process privilege,” contrary to the agency’s claim in the PEER lawsuit.
WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 26: Environmental Protection Agency Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson (R) listens to Administrator Scott Pruitt testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Environment Subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 26, 2018 in Washington, DC. The focus of nearly a dozen federal inquiries into his travel expenses, security practices and other issues, Pruitt testified about his agency's FY2019 budget proposal. (]
Orme-Zavaleta confirmed that Jackson, who now works for the National Mining Association, played a key role in preventing the assessment from moving forward. “The ACC was in contact with Ryan a lot,” she said.
Asked about his role in the formaldehyde assessment, Jackson stated, “Following enactment of the Lautenberg Act, EPA placed formaldehyde though the risk evaluation required in that new law so formaldehyde could be directly regulated by EPA,” referring to the Trump administration’s decision to add formaldehyde to the list of chemicals to be evaluated under the Toxic Substances Control Act. That assessment has also yet to be completed or released. Jackson also stated that “I’m not contributing to anonymous rumors.”
Andrew Wheeler declined to comment. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the ACC wrote that the group “has never had access in any manner to unpublished findings from the formaldehyde draft IRIS assessment.”
Orme-Zavaleta also pointed to other Trump appointees who she said were apparently involved in suppression of the document. Among them was the director of the Office of Air and Radiation, Bill Wehrum, whose input Orme-Zavaleta needed to move the assessment forward. “A couple times we set up briefings for Bill Wehrum. But they canceled those briefings, and I was not given the OK to further the review within the agency.”
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Dunlap Koch email to EPA
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David Dunlap, who served as deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, also helped suppress the assessment, said Orme-Zavaleta. “When we were in the process of coming up with the priority list for IRIS assessments, a lot of those discussions were held during ‘politicals-only’ meetings, so I wasn’t there. But [Dunlap] was, he was our representative. Formaldehyde was on the list of chemicals being considered. And in November, I got back a short list of the chemicals IRIS would assess, and formaldehyde was not part of it,” she said. Dunlap worked for Koch Industries and defended formaldehyde until shortly before he joined the Trump administration in 2018. Dunlap did eventually recuse himself from work on the assessment, though only after formaldehyde was removed from the list of chemicals IRIS would be allowed to assess, according to Orme-Zavaleta. “I only received a copy of his recusal letter after I got the list of chemicals.”
David Dunlap declined to comment on the matter.
“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court.”
Presented with information from Orme-Zavaleta and others about the completion of the assessment in 2017,PEER attorney Kevin Bell expressed anger and frustration. Bell oversees 3-year-old litigation against the EPA over the group’s Freedom of Information Act request for the assessment. In that case, the agency has insisted that it didn’t have a completed version of the document that it could publicly release.
“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court,” said Bell. “They said, ‘We just can’t give you anything like this, because it would be totally full of all sorts of irrelevant things, so that it would totally undermine the deliberative process,’ whereas in reality they had a fully drafted document that was all set to go.”
The EPA declined to comment on Bell’s statement but did provide a broader response, saying that “EPA is committed to ensuring that science is at the backbone of everything the Agency does to deliver on our public health and environmental protection mission, and that we operate in a transparent manner to ensure public trust.” Bill Wehrum did not respond to requests for comment.
Decades of Industry Influence
The suppression of the most recent draft assessment follows many years of interference with government science on formaldehyde. IRIS began updating its original assessment of the chemical in 1997 but almost immediately ran into resistance from industry, particularly around the link to leukemia. A group called the Formaldehyde Council, Inc., which represented companies that used the chemical, began challenging the numbers in the assessment and came up with a cancer risk that was thousands of times lower than the EPA’s. Political appointees in the George W. Bush administration also helped industry postpone the release of the updated document. A 2008 Government Accountability Office report documented those delays and lamented the public health implications of having to rely on an IRIS assessment that was then 18 years old.
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Yet that first assessment, completed three decades ago, is still guiding regulation. In the intervening years, both the International Agency on Cancer Research, or IARC, and National Toxicology Program, whose chemical reviews don’t have the regulatory weight of IRIS assessments, classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen and recognized it as a cause of leukemia. In 2010, the EPA released a draft of the updated assessment, which also found that formaldehyde caused leukemia, but did not finalize it. The ACC was harshly critical of that draft, and the agency sent the report to the National Academy of Sciences for peer review. The external agency confirmed its finding that formaldehyde causes cancer and encouraged the agency to quickly rewrite and reissue its report. But the EPA didn’t complete that work until 2016.
Vincent Cogliano, who directed the IRIS program from 2010 to 2017, said the delays during those years weren’t due to political or industry pressure. “We were really trying to get a very objective assessment released,” said Cogliano, who attributed the slow progress on the assessment in that period to the heavy workload of the small program. While Cogliano characterized some of the science around formaldehyde as complex, he said that no one on the IRIS staff disagreed about the relationship between myeloid leukemia and formaldehyde. “When I left the IRIS program in January 2017, I thought that it was ready to be released,” he said.
And yet more than four years later, the EPA has yet to release the updated IRIS assessment.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Linda Birnbaum, who directed the National Toxicology Program from 2009 to 2019. “Here there is evidence that IARC said that formaldehyde was a known human carcinogen. And we said it was a known human carcinogen and that the data was clear. And more data has come out since then, especially from the National Cancer Institute, yet no word from EPA.”
Formaldehyde was added back on to the list of chemicals being assessed on the IRIS public calendar in March. According to an EPA spokesperson, the IRIS Program anticipates releasing the draft assessment of formaldehyde for public comment and external peer review by September 30, 2022. The agency is widely expected to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on how and whether the agency should combine the cancer risk estimates for myeloid leukemia and nasopharyngeal cancer.
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Orme-Zavaleta said that no one in the Biden EPA expressed hesitation about resuming work on it when she raised the issue in the first weeks of President Joe Biden’s tenure. “I asked them several times. I said, ‘I’m going to unsuspend formaldehyde, are you good with that?’ And every time, everybody said, ‘Fine, do it,’” she said. “It is moving!”
Despite the assurances, those intimately familiar with the history of formaldehyde remain guarded in their optimism that the EPA is finally about to update the assessment of one of the most significant and widespread carcinogens in the U.S.
“For decades, up to now, the industry has pretty much managed to put out all the fires,” said Sussman. “But perhaps something really significant might be about to happen.”
Update: August 19, 2021
This article has been updated with a comment from the American Chemistry Council.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-lawyers-teeing-up-the-supreme-court-climate-showdown/
1/22
as arguments approach in the most significant Supreme Court environment battle of the decade, teams of lawyers are already making their case for how the justices should view EPA’s climate authority.
When the justices take the bench on Feb. 28 to hear arguments in West Virginia v. EPA, they will arrive armed with information from reams of briefs prepared by some of the nation’s leading environmental lawyers.
Those attorneys’ arguments will lay the groundwork in a high-stakes case that has the potential to upend EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants — one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions.
the challenge — brought by Republican-led states and coal companies — asks the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down a Trump-era EPA rule gutting the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
The 2015 Obama rule invoked EPA’s authority under theClean Air Actto set systemwide requirements for power plant emissions reductions.
After the D.C. Circuit ruling, President Biden’s EPA had a clean slate to craft its own rule. The agency had said it would not return to the Clean Power Plan, whose goals have already been met by the power sector, even though the regulation never took effect.
The justices then took the unusual step of agreeing to hear a dispute over a regulation that does not technically exist.
Their ruling in the case, which is expected by next summer, could not only constrain EPA from issuing a comprehensive new carbon rule but also prevent Congress from handing off broad regulatory authority to federal agencies.
Here are some of the lawyers to know in this year’s high court climate slugfest:
Lindsay See
Leading the briefs for West Virginia is Lindsay See, the state’s solicitor general.
The coal-rich state, joined by 18 others, filed the first plea for the Supreme Court to weigh in on EPA’s climate authority. It was followed by three other petitions, which are now consolidated in one massive case.
See has served as West Virginia’s leading litigator since 2017 and previously worked as an associate atGibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, a firm with a prominent Supreme Court practice.
She has appeared once before the nation’s highest bench, in a 2018 case related to a discrimination challenge against an exemption in West Virginia tax law that protected state and local — but not federal — employees from having their pension benefits taxed. West Virginia lost the case.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) and other state lawyers said the D.C. Circuit should not have allowed EPA to regulate power plant emissions under a “rarely used, ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act.” They referred to Section 111(d) of the statute, which served as the basis for the carbon rule.
“Save for a few general factors EPA was to take into account, the lower court told EPA it has ‘no limits’ on the emission-related measures it can impose — on any economic sector or almost any actor,” says the states’ most recent brief, which was signed off on by See.
See is a Harvard Law School graduate and clerked for former D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith.
Paul Seby
One other state has echoed West Virginia’s arguments in a petition and brief led by a lawyer who has been involved in the EPA carbon rule battle since the Clean Power Plan days.
Paul Seby, a shareholder at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP and special assistant to North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem (R), signed off on a brief that said the D.C. Circuit ruling “undermines the cooperative federalism framework carefully crafted by Congress” by finding that EPA — rather than states — can set power plant performance standards.
North Dakota v. EPA is one of the four petitions in the consolidated Supreme Court case.
Seby has argued against EPA carbon regulations before, back when the Clean Power Plan was before the D.C. Circuit. The court held a marathon argument over the regulation in 2016 but never reached a ruling.
Earlier that year, the Supreme Court had blocked the rule from taking effect, which allowed the Trump administration to dismantle it.
Seby holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Diego and a law degree from Lewis & Clark College.
Andrew Grossman
One of the other lead petitioners in the climate case, Westmoreland Mining Holdings LLC, hired Andrew Grossman to make its case to the high court.
Grossman leadsBakerHostetler’s appellate practice and is a frequent conservative commentator on wide range of administrative and constitutional issues.
Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and a former legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He’s also a familiar face on Capitol Hill, having testified several times before the House and Senate Judiciary committees.
In Westmoreland’s petition, Grossman raised what some environmental advocates referred to as a killer question: whether EPA may use Section 111(d) to create performance standards for existing stationary sources under the provision’s “hazardous air pollutants” program.
The justices granted the petition alongside others, but they said they would only consider the second question posed by Westmoreland’s petition: whether EPA’s carbon rule violated the major questions doctrine, which restricts federal agencies from deciding issues of “vast economic and political significance.”
Grossman attended Dartmouth College and theGeorge Mason University’s SCALIA School of Law.
Yaakow Roth
The fourth petition in the consolidated case comes from North American Coal Corp., represented byJones Daypartner Yaakov Roth.
Like the other challengers, the coal company argues that EPA and the D.C. Circuit have taken far too broad a view of federal climate authority under the Clean Air Act.
Roth comes to the EPA climate case with lots of experience before the Supreme Court. He was the brainchild behind an argument that led the Supreme Court to overturn convictions in the New Jersey “Bridgegate” scandal.
He has also fought to preserve restrictive voting laws in Arizona and to dismantle the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.
Roth has clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a federal appeals court judge.
He is a graduate of Harvard University and York University.
Elizabeth Prelogar
Before the Supreme Court agreed to hear West Virginia v. EPA, Elizabeth Prelogar had argued on behalf of the federal agency that it was too early for the justices to get involved.
The solicitor general noted in a brief filed in August that Biden’s EPA has not yet written a new carbon rule and has no plans to revive the Obama plan.
EPA instead intends to issue a new rule “after taking into account all relevant considerations, including changes to the electricity sector that have occurred during the last several years,” she wrote.
Prelogar, who was confirmed in late October, has already made several appearances before the Supreme Court, including in one case in which she argued on behalf of the federal government against abortion laws in Mississippi and Texas.
Since her appointment as acting solicitor general in January, Prelogar has also led Supreme Court briefs in several environmental cases, including one in which the Biden administration backed efforts by the developer of the PennEast natural gas pipeline to acquire state-owned land in New Jersey (Energywire, March 10, 2021). The pipeline company won its case, but the project was eventually canceled.
Prelogar, a Harvard Law School graduate, has previously served as assistant to the solicitor general and has worked in private practice. During a prior stint at the Justice Department, she served on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
She clerked for Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
Prelogar is the second woman to be confirmed as solicitor general. Kagan was the first.
Sean Donahue
Environmental groups that support broad EPA regulatory authority have turned to an experienced Supreme Court litigator to represent them in the case: Sean Donahue.
Donahue has been a go-to lawyer for environmental groups and public health advocates in some of the most high-profile litigation of the last decade, including Clean Air Act and climate cases.
He’s also represented environmentalists in key cases on the social cost of carbon for fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards.
Donahue and his team, including the Environmental Defense Fund’s Vickie Patton, will have a challenging task ahead of them. Several conservative justices have signaled skepticism of doctrines requiring them to defer to agency expertise, and the current case appears to be a coordinated effort to curtail EPA’s regulatory authority broadly.
In an interview, Donahue said once again it may be an environmental case that set an important precedent for administrative law.
"Statutes like the Clean Air Act," he said, "necessarily depend upon expert agencies to apply Congress’ health and environmental directives to complex factual records, developing technologies, about particular industries and pollutants."
Donahue, who works for Donahue, Goldberg & Littleton, clerked for former Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. He’s also a veteran of the Justice Department. He attended Columbia University and University of Chicago’s Law School.
Beth Brinkmann
Another attorney with Supreme Court experience is making the case for electric utilities that want to preserve the D.C. Circuit decision striking down the Trump-era carbon rule.
Before the justices granted the case, Covington & Burling LLP partner Beth Brinkmann led a brief on behalf of Consolidated Edison Inc. and other companies that said Supreme Court review of a nonexistent regulation would run the risk of a “ruling untethered to actual circumstances.”
Moreover, she wrote, the red states and coal companies are seeking relief from the justices even as the power industry has achieved the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 emissions reductions targets more than a decade in advance —even though the rule never officially took effect.
“Those changes, which include reductions in the cost of emission-reduction technologies and increasing consumer preferences for clean power, have only accelerated since adoption of the ACE Rule,” she wrote.
Brinkmann has argued more than two dozen times before the Supreme Court. As former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s civil rights division, for example, she defended the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.
She has also worked in the appellate practice at the firm Morrison & Foerster and as an assistant federal public defender representing indigent criminal defendants.
Brinkmann is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale Law School. She clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.
Elbert Lin
A utility industry group that opposes EPA’s ability to craft rules like the Clean Power Plan has staffed its legal team with an attorney who, at only 43 years old, has already made a significant impact on environmental law at the Supreme Court.
Elbert Lin was the lawyer who secured the unprecedented stay of President Obama’s climate regulatory regime, theClean Power Plan, in 2016while he was West Virginia’s solicitor general.
Lin said in an interview that his interest in environmental and administrative law was born out of necessity when he was West Virginia’s solicitor general. It was during Obama’s second term, and the administration was promulgating many major environmental rules, including the Clean Power Plan.
"Environmental regulations were of significant importance of the state," he said.
Now in private practice at the firmHunton & WILLIAMS Andrews Kurth LLP, Lin is back in the EPA carbon rule litigation, representing America’s Power, a trade association of companies that produce electricity from coal.
Lin, who is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, has also argued key Clean Water Act cases at the high court. He argued on behalf of Maui, Hawaii, in a case over whether a federal permit is required for pollution that is pumped underground but eventually reaches the ocean.
The Supreme Court delivered a new test for determining whether a permit was needed, and a federal judge in Hawaii later sided with environmental groups arguing that Maui should have secured a Clean Water Act approval (Greenwire, Oct. 21, 2021). Legal experts say they are watching to see how other courts apply the Supreme Court’s test.
Lin attended Yale for undergrad and law school, and heclerked for a federal appeals court judge and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Reporters Lesley Clark and Niina H. Farah contributed.
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https://www.ecologylawquarterly.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/48.1_PollackSturges_Internet.pdf
p92 ECOLOGY LAW QUARTERLY [Vol. 48:49
...gue for CWA inapplicability to LWRF or groundwater at all.299 Rather, it
centered on factual disagreement over whether discharges from LWRF reached
navigable waters.300
In comparison, Hunton & Williams filed an opposition to motion for
summary judgment in April 2014 arguing that groundwater was not a navigable
water and therefore not subject to CWA.301 They went on to argue that even if
discharges passing through groundwater were regulable, there remained a factual
dispute about whether pollutants actually reached the Pacific Ocean.302 Until that
filing, the county had not offered an argument that would gut the CWA, but
suddenly such an argument took center stage while the factual dispute became a
secondary issue. With the parties later stipulating to facts that the pollutants did
reach the Pacific Ocean, the county’s counsel ditched the factual argument
altogether, leaving the argument for CWA inapplicability as the only option
available to the county.
On appeal, the attorneys’ arguments only became more extreme. At the
Ninth Circuit, the lawyers argued against classifying groundwater as either a
navigable water or a point source, implying that the last conveyance before the
navigable water must itself constitute a point source.303 At the Supreme Court,
they added that every link in the conveyance chain needed to be a point source
to fall under NPDES, and that groundwater broke that chain.304 Such a reading
would blow a hole in the CWA, allowing polluters to circumvent liability by
simply channeling their pollution through groundwater or any other alleged
nonpoint source.
Given these maximalist arguments, it seems that the county’s advocates
may have had other motivations to push for such arguments. One explanation is
that politically motivated interests identified the dispute as a vehicle to
strategically transform the broader landscape of environmental liability. It is not
clear how Hunton & Williams became involved in this case—this dispute '
appears to be the first time the county hired this Virginia-based firm.305
Hunton
& Williams remains historically well-known for zealously representing clients
from the coal, petroleum, and railroad industries.306 Many of these clients would
have an interest in Maui, with the case’s implications for pipeline leaks, coal ash
ponds, and other sources of pollution leaching through groundwater. For
instance,one of Hunton’s partners, William Wehrum, left the firm for a top
position in the Trump administration EPA.307
:{:{}:
}:
Wehrum represented a number of
oil and coal corporations at Hunton, and when asked at confirmation hearings
about the effects of climate change, he responded that it was a mere
“allegation.”308 But Wehrum’s appointment was not the only connection the
Trump administration had with Hunton attorneys. Record requests show that
EPA political appointees met with Hunton attorneys before the County filed a
petition for certiorari.309
Hunton & Williams, along with its successor Hunton Andrews Kurth, seem
at least in part motivated by economic and ideological interests in the case. The
client county could have disagreed with such tactics. It attempted to do just that
when the County Council voted to accept a settlement offer rather than gut the
CWA.310 Despite the council’s wishes, Maui County Mayor Michael Victorino
announced that he rejected the settlement and that the council did not have
authority to approve such a settlement.311
Mayor Victorino stated that he
opposed the settlement so that the issue of CWA liability could be “clarified once
and for all.”312 He further alleged that compliance would cost $800 million,
while parties to the settlement negotiation argued it would cost only $2.4
million.313 Mayor Victorino’s statements are not exactly convincing, particularly
because the settlement would have ended the legal uncertainty at LWRF. His
position was especially difficult to square with statements by the previous county
mayor in 2009 that the county’s goal was to phase out the injection wells and
“use all of the water that’s produced by our treatment plants.”314
...
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/01/epa-wheeler-fossil-fuels-clean-power-plan-senators-court
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Trump administration is run by fossil fuel allies determined to do polluters’ bidding, U.S. senators are telling the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The group of Democratic senators calls out this extensive fossil fuel industry influence in a recent friend-of-the-court brief filed in a lawsuit challenging the Trump EPA’s replacement of the Clean Power Plan meant to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
Trump’s EPA replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with what it calls the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule,which requires only minimal emissions reductions by individual power plants rather than a systemic approach to cleaning up climate pollution from the power sector. The American Lung Association, which recently reported nearly half of Americans are breathing unhealthy air, is leading the legal challenge to the rule, with support from a coalition of states and cities, environmental and public health organizations, and over 70 Democratic members of Congress
Five Democratic senators — Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — submitted a legal brief that specifically points to the fossil fuel industry’s role in infiltrating the EPA and dictating the agency’s policymaking. The senators describe top EPA officials’ ties to the industry it is tasked with regulating and explain how fossil fuel interests have captured the agency. Within this context, the senators argue that no court could possibly conclude that EPA is engaged in reasoned, unbiased decision-making.
“With former fossil-fuel industry lobbyists and lawyers at the helm, EPA has decided to do nothing about [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the senators write. “The ACE Rule is not the product of reasoned decision-making by EPA that in any serious way grapples with the evidence of harms from climate change.”
Fossil Fuel Ties at EPA
The senators’ brief points out how former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, former top EPA official Bill Wehrum, and current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler are all closely connected to the fossil fuel industry.
Before he was head of the EPA (Feb. 2017 — July 2018), Pruitt was the attorney general for Oklahoma, a state heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry. “Pruitt’s political career was largely underwritten by the fossil-fuel industry,” the senators’ brief notes — the fossil fuel sector poured over $1.25 million in donations to his political campaigns.[twt doc]
as Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt took up fossil fuel companies’ campaigns against environmental regulations and sued the EPA, the agency he would later lead, 14 times, which included suing to stop the Clean Power Plan. In nearly all of these lawsuits there was at least one industry co-litigator that contributed to Pruitt’s campaign or political action committee (PAC).
In addition to suing EPA, Pruitt sent barely edited form letters to federal regulators that came to him directly from oil and gas lobbyists. The senators’ brief mentions one example where a lobbyist from Devon Energy drafted a letter saying EPA was overestimating air pollution caused by natural gas drilling and sent it to Pruitt, who then copy and pasted it verbatim onto official letterhead and sent it to Washington.
Before coming to EPA, Pruitt also served as chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Fossil fuel interests contributed more than $5 million to RAGA’s political arm during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, the senators’ brief notes. And as DeSmog previously reported, Republican attorneys general fighting the Clean Power Plan (including Pruitt) took in over $2.4 million from polluting interests in those election cycles. Republican attorneys general even met privately with fossil fuel companies like Murray Energy and Southern Company at a 2015 RAGA summit, just one week before 27 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan.
The process of repealing and replacing the Clean Power Plan began under Pruitt’s leadership at EPA, and continued with his successor Andrew Wheeler.Wheeler was a top lobbyist for dirty energy interests, including coal company Murray Energy. In lobbying for Murray, Wheeler earned nearly $3 million for his lobbying firm. Repealing the Clean Power Plan was at the top of Murray CEO Bob Murray’s wish list that he circulated among the new Trump administration.
Another chief architect of the Clean Power Plan replacement was Bill Wehrum, former head of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. He resigned in June 2019 amid a congressional investigation into his contact with former industry clients. Prior to assuming his EPA position, Wehrum was an attorney representing fossil fuel companies and trade groups. His clients included big names like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, Duke Energy, Dominion Resources, and Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG). “Wehrum met with UARG and several electric utilities to discuss replacing the [Clean Power Plan] just weeks after he assumed his duties as Assistant Administrator,” the senators’ brief points out.
Furthermore, the brief notes that Pruitt, Wheeler, and Wehrum have all questioned the well-accepted influence of human activity on climate, a view that aligns with the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
'Rampant cronyism, conflicts of interest, and corruption'?
The senators argue that the ACE rule is “arbitrary and capricious” as EPA “rejected well-established scientific and economic research” and “instead embraced self-serving proposals from the fossil fuel industry that will not significantly reduce emissions.” EPA’s obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling and subsequent 2009 “endangerment finding” where the agency itself concluded (based on thorough scientific input) that these greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare.
The ACE rule likely illegally ignores this endangerment finding. “Given its 2009 endangerment finding, the agency needs to explain how a rule that results in essentially zero [greenhouse gas] emission reductions comports with the direction given to it by Congress,” the senators write.
They also argue that EPA is essentially “captured” or run by fossil fuel interests, meaning the agency has “effectively delegated its authority to the fossil fuel industry.”
EPA declined to comment. “EPA does not comment on pending litigation,” an agency spokesperson said.
The senators conclude by questioning EPA’s ability to make unbiased decisions when polluting interests are involved: “The record of this case, and of other regulatory matters of which this Court may take notice, indeed raise the question whether this EPA is even capable of fair decision-making in matters involving the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or whether rampant cronyism, conflicts of interest, and corruption leave EPA under present leadership unable to conform itself to the strictures of [federal administrative law].”
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https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/383661-trumps-epa-quietly-revamps-rules-for-air-pollution
the Trump administration has quietly reshaped enforcement of air pollution standards in recent months through a series of regulatory memos.
The memos are fulfilling the top wishes of industry, which has long called for changes to how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the nation’s factories, plants and other facilities. The EPA is now allowing certain facilities to be subject to less-stringent regulations and is letting companies use friendlier math in calculating their expected emissions.
Environmentalists and public health advocates say the memos could greatly increase levels of air pollutants like mercury, benzene and nitrogen oxides. They accuse the EPA of avoiding the transparency and public input requirements that regulatory changes usually go through.
“All of these, individually and taken together, will result in more air pollution and less enforcement of the Clean Air Act,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.
“These were radical departures of current law when they were proposed a decade ago and they’re just as radical today,” he said, referring to the Bush-era efforts, some of which were unsuccessful, to make changes to EPA air programs.
But for the EPA and its supporters, the memos simply bring the agency back to what the relevant laws and regulations are meant to be.
“They address specific concerns that people have had for years, and just make it much simpler for people to comply — especially for existing [facilities] — to make sure they can maintain their plants and replace worn-out components and those types of things, without the threat of enforcement litigation,” saidJeff Holmstead, a former head of the EPA’s air pollution office under the George W. Bush administration who now represents regulated companies at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell.
Bill Wehrum, head of the air office under EPA chief Scott Pruitt, wrote two of the three EPA memos. He recused himself from the third memo, which Pruitt wrote.
The first memo, issued in December, states that the EPA will no longer “second guess” companies’ calculations of their expected pollution outputafter certain big projects under what is known as New Source Review. Under that program, the EPA reviews the changes made to a facility to decide whether they need to go through the same process as if the facility were newly built.
The December memo effectively means the EPA will usually not take action against a company for its calculations if they turn out to be wrong.
The second memo, issued in January, repeals a Clinton-era policy known as “once in, always in.” Under the previous policy, facilities could never be considered “minor” sources of hazardous pollution if they were already considered “major” sources, and subject to much stricter rules.
Now, facilities can be regulated as “minor” if their emissions drop enough.
The third memo allows companies to use a procedure known as “project netting” when applying for permits for major projects under the New Source Review program. That means companies can use a more industry-friendly emissions calculation when they argue that a particular project would reduce emissions.
President Trump added to the memos last week, signing one himself that formally asks the EPA to use more industry-friendly practices in enforcing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards program, a key Clean Air Act program for air quality nationwide.
John Walke, director for clean air at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the EPA is working to implement the policies the Bush administration failed to finish.
“I think Mr. Wehrum has decided this is likely a one-term administration and he’s going to devote his full resources to rolling back clean air, climate and public health protections in the time available to him,” Walke said.
“The most expedient and hasty way to accomplish those rollbacks is through the regular guidance documents that we have seen so far from EPA,” he said. “Rulemakings take time, they require public notice and input and hearings, and Mr. Wehrum and Mr. Pruitt plainly have no patience for those tedious fodders.”
Walke said that, taken together, the memos could allow polluting facilities to greatly increase their emissions.
The EPA didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The focus among the memos for environmental and health advocates is the one repealing the “once in, always in” policy, and letting “major” pollution sources reduce their emissions and be regulated as “minor” ones.
A coalition of environmental groups sued the EPA to stop the policy change, arguing that it should have gone through the full regulatory process, including analysis of its environmental impact and an opportunity for public comment.Democratic states joined in with their own lawsuit.
“Instead of prioritizing the health of hard-working Americans, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to let major polluters off the hook. That is unconscionable, and it is illegal,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D).
“If the ‘Once In, Always In’ policy is rescinded, children in California and around the country — particularly those who must live near the polluting plant or factory — may grow up in an environment with tons of additional hazardous pollutants in the air they breathe. California will not allow that to happen,” Becerra said.
Two environmental groups opposed to the EPA’s move have put out recent analyses of the change, focused on specific areas of the country.
The Environmental Integrity Project looked at 12 industrial plants in the Midwest and concluded they could increase their pollution to 540,000 pounds annually, a fourfold growth.
The Environmental Defense Fund looked at the Houston area, and said that 18 facilities there could increase their emissions to 900,000 pounds a year, two and a half times current levels.
Holmstead said opponents of the Trump administration’s policy are unlikely to prevail. The Supreme Court ruled in the 2015 Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association case that federal agencies can repeal policy memos with other policy memos and don’t have to go through the full regulatory process to do so.
“I think the environmental groups are going to have a real uphill battle trying to get through court that this is somehow improper,” he said. “That really does fly in the face of the Perez decision.”
As for the increase in emissions, Holmstead said environmentalists are wrong. In many cases, the new policies will allow facilities to carry out projects that reduce emissions, or simply operate under a lower paperwork burden.
“They have yet to come up with any real-world examples of how that might happen,” Holmstead said of the scenarios in which pollution might increase. “These reforms are not going to lead to pollution increases.
“I don’t think that there will be a meaningful impact one way or another.”
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OMFG
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/that-1970s-scourge-acid-rain-is-back/
1970s scourge acid rain is back
Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be…
no lnx
That 1970s scourge acid rain is back
Written by Sarah Okeson / DC ReportOctober 26, 2019
Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be so toxic that it etches paint off cars.
The good news: some naturally reproducing trout were recently found in one body of water in the Adirondacks. Lake Colden had been without such naturally grown fish for 32 years. This revival comes after decades of government work to reduce the toxic air emissions that cause acid rain.
The bad news: Team Trump seems determined to create a comeback for acid rain. That would mean 500 other Adirondack ponds and lakes would continue without naturally breeding fish. Worse, some of the sprawling park’s 2,300 other bodies of water might also become too toxic for other wildlife such as crayfish, salamanders and frogs. And because acid rain leaches aluminum in the soil it also kills trees.
For people in the Northeast, it would also mean more asthma and heart disease as people breathe in air laced with greater amounts of sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas that causes acid rain.
The Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of electric power plants to clean up their toxic wastes.
To understand how Team Trump helps polluters and hurts everyone else, consider the coal-burning Martin Lake Power Plant in east Texas. It spews more sulfur dioxide than any other power plant in America. Last year it spit out 56,198 tons of sulfur dioxide, a 54% increase over 2017.
Acid rain, then and now.(From Environmental Defense Fund)]
Now the Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of this and other power plants to clean up their toxic wastes. Owners who escape these clean-up costs reap bigger profits. The rest of us pay the price: more sickness, shorter lives for some and hundreds of lakes with no fish surrounded by dying forests.
To help polluters escape those costs the Trump administration puts executives, lawyers and lobbyists for polluting companies in charge of various units of the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies. Instead of enforcement of clean air laws, Team Trump runs a protection racket for polluters.
Plant Owners Identified
The Texas power plant is owned by Luminant Generation Co., part of Vistra Energy. One of Vistra’s lobbying firms once employed a lawyer who was hired to head the Trump EPA air office. Vistra is one of nine politically connected polluters being scrutinized by Congressional investigators. In 2018 alone it gave more than $101,000 to members of Congress at a three-to-one ratio favoring Republicans.
The lawyer was Bill Wehrum, who oversaw the Trump EPA’s air policy office until he resigned in June during a federal ethics investigation.Previously Wehrum was a partner at Hunton & Williams where he made $2.1 million. That law firm is now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. A Congressional report dubbed the law firm “industry’s secret pipeline to EPA.”
Vistra Energy paid $140,000 in lobbying fees last year to Hunton Andrews Kurth.
Wehrum was accused of repeatedly violating his ethics pledge and legal duty to refrain from EPA matters involving his former clients. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, in May filed a detailed 14-page complaint against Wehrum with the EPA’s acting inspector general.
Other big sulfur dioxide polluters include DTE Energy Co., represented by Hunton Andrews Kurth in a long battle with the EPA over pollution from its coal-fired power plant in Monroe, Mich. David Harlow, attorney for the EPA Office of Air and Radiation, previously represented DTE for Hunton Andrews Kurth.
Lobbyists As Regulators
Soon after Harlow and Wehrum joined the EPA, the agency changed its position on a core issue in DTE’s case, adopting the company’s view.
A slightly different pro-polluter tactic was adopted for the power plant in east Texas. With former lobbyists for polluters in charge, the EPA made a mistake during the Obama years when it declared that parts of two counties near the Martin Lake plant exceeded the standard for sulfur dioxide emissions.
Trump’s EPA now wants to say the two-county area is “unclassifiable.” That would allow the plant to continue spewing tons of toxic air.
Because of actions assisting polluters, environmentalists fear acid rain is back.
While rain typically is slightly acidic with a pH reading of close to 6, acid rain is sometimes 3.2. That may not seem like much because pH is a scale. But acid rain can be more than 200 times more acidic than pollution-free rainfall.
Acid Rain Effects
EPA infographic]
Today 500 of 2,800 lakes and ponds in Adirondack State Park cannot support the plants and aquatic life that once existed in them.
Worse, acid rain can cause people to develop asthma as they breathe in even small concentrations of sulfur dioxide and the tiny particles it can form in the air. And it’s deadly for trees, trout and turtles.
“The numbers are going in the wrong direction,” said William Janeway, executive director of the Adirondack Council, about rising acidity in Northeast rainfall.
Adirondack, a state park, covers more than six million acres, making it bigger than the combined acreage of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon and the Great Smokies National Parks.
When power plants in the heartland burn coal laced with sulfur the toxic waste goes up smokestacks. Prevailing winds that tend to blow eastward then carry pollution from these coal-burning power plants to the Northeast where much of it falls in rain that kills. Team Trump not only thinks that is fine, it wants more acid rain.
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dingdong
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/climate-expert-literally-dances-after-learning-controversial-epa-air-chief-is-leaving-amid-ethics-probe
Climate expert literally dances after learning controversial EPA air chief is leaving amid ethics probe
Climate expert literally dances after learning controversial EPA air chief is leaving amid ethics probe Image via Wikimedia Commons.
written by Alex Henderson June 26, 2019
In a press release on Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the departure of Bill Wehrum, the controversial assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. And Wehrum’s environmental record has been so abysmal that according to HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery, a climate change activist/expert was dancing with joy in response to the news of his departure from the EPA.
Bendery didn’t mean “dancing” as a figure of speech. On Twitter, Bendery reported on Wednesday that according to a source, the activist — who she didn’t mention by name — was “literally” dancing after learning that Wehrum was leaving the EPA.
As president, Donald Trump has been highly critical of President Barack Obama’s environmental record — trumpeting his love of fossil fuels and insisting that EPA standards were much too severe under Obama’s watch. Wehrum, after being appointed to the EPA, played a key role in rolling back Obama-era environmental policies. And his departure comes in response to allegations of ethics violations. Wehrum’s critics allege that after joining the EPA, he promoted the interests of former clients in the energy sector.
Jennifer Bendery
?
@jbendery
A source tells me a climate change expert in DC was dancing in the halls just now, literally, at this news. https://twitter.com/jbendery/status/1143918986591186944 …
Jennifer Bendery
?
@jbendery
EPA air chief Bill Wehrum abruptly departs amid ethics probe https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-wehrum-epa-air-pollution-ethics-probe_n_5d138699e4b09ad014f9330d?dtt … via @AlexCKaufman
In an official statement, Noah Bookbinder — executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics — asserted, “While not the biggest name to face ethics problems in the Trump Administration, William Wehrum was emblematic of the Administration’s struggles to remain ethical.From almost the moment he took over the EPA, Wehrum appears to have been working to advance the interests of his former clients, apparently violating both his ethics agreement and the Trump Administration’s ethics pledge.”
HuffPost’s Alexander C. Kaufman, in a June 26 article, cites some example of the alleged conflicts of interest on Wehrum’s part — for example, the House Committee on Energy & Commerce is investigating the allegation that Wehrum and a top deputy used their positions in the EPA to help utility companies they had represented when they were with the law firm now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth (which wasHunton & Williams at the time).
Also, Kaufman reports, Wehrum met with the Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG), a former client known for aggressively promoting fossil fuels. That organization, which disbanded in May, was funded by several companies that opposed stricter limits on pollution caused by coal-fired plants.
Rep. Frank Pallone, the New Jersey Democrat who now heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is glad to see Wehrum go — describing his departure as “welcome news.”
“Much like UARG suddenly dissolving in the face of scrutiny,” Pallone told HuffPost, “Wehrum is now suddenly leaving amidst investigations into his potential ethical misconduct — investigations that should and will continue.”
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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/06/huffpost-just-published-a-bombshell-story-about-the-epa/
A top Environmental Protection Agency official gave a presentation last year at a gathering of some of the most zealous deniers of climate science, highlighting the influence a small, fringe movement hawking crank theories now wields in Washington.
Emails HuffPost reviewed reveal Bill Wehrum, the EPA’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, gave a presentation in early February 2018 at an event organized by the Cooler Heads Coalition, an umbrella group of tax-exempt charities and right-wing nonprofits that includes some of the most ardent proponents of climate change denial.
Three other EPA officials―associate administrator Tate Bennett, senior counsel David Harlow and then-spokeswoman Liz Bowman―attended the confab with Wehrum, the emails show.
In an email dated Feb. 6, 2018, Myron Ebell, who has led the Cooler Heads Coalition for more than two decades, offered gratitude for the EPA officials’ attendance at the previous day’s event, and invited the group to the next meeting a month later.
“Thanks Bill, David, Liz, and Tate, for coming to Cooler Heads and for your presentation and taking questions, Bill. It was most useful,” Ebell, who led the Trump administration’s EPA transition team, wrote. “We look forward to seeing any or all of you at future meetings.”
The EPA declined to comment on the nature of Wehrum’s presentation and whether any officials attended other events with the Cooler Heads Coalition.
“EPA takes time to meet with stakeholders on a variety of regulatory issues, this is no different,” said EPA spokesman Michael Abboud.
Ebell did not respond to calls and text messages requesting comment.
The revelation is not surprising from an administration that’s attempting to eliminate or delay, by The New York Times’ estimate, at least 83 environmental regulations, particularly rules to curb climate pollution. The EPA is expected to announce a proposal next week to replace Obama-era power plants rules with a regulation that would, by the agency’s own estimates, allow for enough pollution to cause up to additional 1,400 premature deaths per year by 2030.
“The fact that Bill went to talk to a group like this is the cherry on top of a toxic sundae,” Joseph Goffman, a former senior counsel and associate administrator for climate who served in the Obama-era EPA, said by phone. “It’s the toxicity of the sundae that’s really going to have the damaging impact on people’s lives.”
But the emails show the degree to which top officials at the nation’s leading public health agency have cultivated chummy ties with “fringe conspiracy theorists,” the Sierra Club, which released the records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, said in a statement, calling the relationship “despicable.”
“It removes any illusion that the EPA is acting in good faith to ensure the public trust,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University.
The Cooler Heads Coalition formed in the late 1990s as mounting evidence of global warming began to fracture the industrial alliance that mobilized a decade earlier to downplay the threat of unfettered greenhouse gas emissions. A year before its merger with oil giant Mobil, Exxon gave $95,000 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where Ebell works, in a grant titled “Global Climate Change Program and other support,” according to documents published by the Climate Investigations Center.
Yet as the oil industry started distancing itself from widely debunked scientific contrarians, far-right philanthropists and dark-money groups stepped in to fund the Cooler Heads Coalition’s members. The financiers include the Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the foundations of the oil industrialist Scaife family, the manufacturing scion Bradley family and the Mercers, the Long Island hedge funders who backed President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
That marked a shift from climate denial as a practical means of protecting carbon-polluting industries toward a new ideological fervor, enshrining opposition to climate science as a key part of anti-government dogma, said Riley Dunlap, a researcher and professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University who tracks climate denial groups.
“The Cooler Heads Coalition grew out of the frustration that industry was no longer opposing climate change as much as they thought,” Dunlap said. It’s “really a radical group of climate change deniers.”
The realities of climate change were clear to scientists even before rising seas started to inundate coastal cities like Miami on sunny days and extreme hurricanes and wildfires devastated Puerto Rico, California and Texas in recent years. At least 97% of peer-reviewed research concludes that emissions from burning fossil fuels, industrial farming and deforestation blanket the planet in gases that trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere. A 2015 paper, meanwhile, found significant flaws in the methodologies, assumptions and analyses used by the 3% of scientists who concluded otherwise.
At 70%, the vast majority of Americans understand climate change is happening, and 57% recognize humans are the primary driver, according to polling data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. In October, the United Nations released a dire report warning that, unless world governments slash emissions by nearly half over the next decade, the planet is projected to warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, causing about $54 trillion in damages and killing millions. A month later, the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report by scientists at 13 federal agencies, confirmed the findings.
That’s done little to sway Wehrum.
In January, he said he was still on the fence about climate change, telling E&E News, “I’m trying to figure that out.”
“I’ve had a series of briefings with climate change experts to help me better understand this,” Wehrum told Reuters that same month. “Everybody is still exploring the science of climate change.”
A former corporate lawyer who lobbied on behalf of clients to weaken air pollution rules, Wehrum has ramped up those efforts since joining the EPA, becoming a chief architect of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. He remains in close touch with his former law firm, according to The Washington Post.
“It’s not surprising that Wherum would have been featured at a Cooler Heads Coalition event,” Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center, said by email. “He fits right in with the roster of climate deniers and other charlatans that Cooler Heads has hosted at events over the past two decades.”
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https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg34874/pdf/CHRG-115shrg34874.pdf
refused recusal list months, gave list of cases:
api, afpm, env integrity pjt, km, gas, ga-pac, brick, ultilities
inhofe confirm of wheeler
...
Please provide state-by-state data and a national total for facilities identified in !(c) e. Please provide the potential maximum amount of pollution increases for all 187 hazardous air pollutants as a result of EPA's decision to revoke the "once in, always in" policy. f. How much additional particulate matter, ozone, lead and other criteria pollution will be added to the atmosphere as a result of revoking the "once in, always in" policy? g. Under the new memorandum, have any major source facilities in the power plant source category requested to be re-designated as an area source? If so, please provide a list of all such facilities, also indicating whether EPA has approved the re-designation. h. Under the new memorandum how many major sources facilities, other than facilities in the power plant source category, have asked to be re-designated as an area source? Please provide a list of all facilities, also indicating whether EPA bas approved the re-designation. The January 25, 2018 Wehrum guidance memo builds upon a 2007 proposed rule that addressed the same issue. In that proposal, EPA asserted that, "The environmental, economic, and energy impacts of the proposed amendments cannot be quantified without knowing which sources will avail themselves of the regulatory provisions proposed in this rule, and what methods of HAP emission reductions will be used. It is unknown how many sources would choose to take permit conditions that would limit their potential to emit (PTE) to below major source levels. Within this group, it is also not known how many sources may increase their emissions from the major source MACT level (assuming the level is below the major source thresholds). Similarly, we cannot identify or quantify the universe of sources that would decrease their HAP emissions to below the level required by the NESHAP to achieve area source status." (72 FR 77, ,January 3, 2007). In the 2007 proposed rule, EPA concluded that, "we believe it is unlikely that a source that currently emits at a level below the major source thresholds as the result of compliance with a MACT standard would increase its emissions in response to this rule. However, even if such increases occur, the increases will likely be offset by emission reductions at other sources that should occur as the result of this proposal. Specifically, this proposal provides an incentive for those sources that are currently emitting above major source thresholds and complying with MACT, to reduce their HAP emissions to below the major source thresholds." (72 FR 73-74, January 3, 2007)
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When Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in August 2018, its own estimates said the reduced regulations could lead to 1,400 early deaths a year from air pollution by 2030.
Now, the EPA wants to change the way it calculates the risks posed by particulate matter pollution, using a model that would lower the death toll from the new plan, The New York Times reported Monday. Five current or former EPA officials familiar with the plan told The Times that the new method would assume there is no significant health gain by lowering air pollution levels below the legal limit. However, many public health experts say that there is no safe level of particulate matter exposure, which has long been linked to heart and lung disease.
"Using fake math to hide the death toll from dirty air at the behest of the coal industry is sadly consistent with the Trump administration's complete disregard for public health," Environmental Working Group(EWG) Senior Science Advisor for Children's Environmental Health Dr. Olga Naidenko said in responseto the plan. "This sleight of hand means that more adults may die early and more children may become victims of asthma."
New York University environmental law expert Richard L. Revesz called the proposed change a "monumental departure" from how the agency has calculated air pollution risk under past administrations from both parties.
"Particulate matter is extremely harmful and it leads to a large number of premature deaths," Revesz said.
The new method will be used in the EPA's final version of the Clean Power Plan replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, due to be released in June. The new rule would improve the efficiency of coal plants slightly while also allowing older plants to remain in operation longer, leading both to more climate-change causing emissions and more particulate matter pollution.
When asked if the new method would appear in the final plan, former chemical and fossil fuel lobbyist and current EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation William L. Wehrumsaid the final draft would include multiple approaches and that the agency had not officially changed its methodology.
However, Wehrum also called the focus on the 1,400 number "unfortunate" and said the agency was considering a number of alternative calculations that would lead to lower death tolls. He said the lower figure would be included to show that different assumptions could lead to different results, but said that any new method would be peer-reviewed before being used as the EPA's leading means of assessing air pollution risk.
EPA spokesman James Hewitt echoed that message in a statement to CNN.
"No change to this scientific method will be made unless and until the new approach has been peer reviewed," he said.
The EPA is considering the new method as part of its regular review of air quality standards, which it aims to complete by 2020, CNN reported.
In recent years, studies have shown a growing number of health risks associated with particulate matter exposure, including dementia. Colorado School of Public Health Dean Dr. Jonathan M. Samet told The New York Times that most new studies showed risks at levels of exposure below the EPA's legal limit of 12 micrograms per cubic meter on average per year.
"It's not a hard stop where we can say 'below that, air is safe.' That would not be supported by the scientific evidence," Samet said. "It would be very nice for public health if things worked that way, but they don't seem to."
Revesz worried the new method would be used to roll back other environmental regulations as well.
"It could be an enormously significant impact," he told The New York Times.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/10/02/climate-science-deniers-trump-admin-happer-wehrum-rollins-wynn-simmons
readfearn
here are five folks spearheading the United States government who think that when it comes to climate change, they know better than all of the world’s main scientific institutions.
There’s Donald Trump himself, of course, who famously tweeted that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, and said that a cold snap in the weather overturns a century or more of scientific inquiry.
Then there’s energy secretary Rick Perry, whose fuzzy logic on the science sees him unconvinced that CO2 is the key driver of climate change.
Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, is similarly confused and non-committal about the impacts of burning fossil fuels, as is former coal-lobbyist-turned-EPA head Andrew Wheeler. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said in 2015 that climate change was “irrelevant,” that temperatures were driven by natural cycles and, since then, hasavoided questions about the role of human activity in climate change.
OK, so there are more than five (with Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Jeff Sessions among those who have denied the science in the past), but these five are well positioned to influence the energy and climate policies of the nation.
Wheeler, for example, is driving through cuts to national efficiency standards for motor vehicles and is relaxing pollution rules on coal power plants. Zinke and Perry are aggresively promoting fossil fuel growth with Trump as the climate-wrecker-in-chief. Carson heads an agency that has a role in promoting (or not) climate change adaptation and resilience for homes and properties, particularly after natural disasters.
Remembering not only do these five reject the advice of the world’s major science academies, but also the expertise of the scientists working in their own government agencies.
But while these five might be relative household names with their views well reported, DeSmog presents five lesser-known climate science deniers inside the administration who are also in positions to gut federal action on climate and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies, backed by their own convictions that climate change just isn't much of a problem.
Will Happer
Will Happer, emeritus professor from Princeton University, was once in the running as Trump’s science advisor but has now been appointed to the National Security Council, specializing in emerging technologies.
After news of Happer’s appointment became public, Science, republishing E&E News, characterized the 79-year-old physicist as a “vocal critic of mainstream climate science.”
But Happer is more than a mere critic — he has acted as an enabler and activist against action on climate change for well over a decade.
For years, Happer was chairman at the George Marshall Institute and then, when that was shuttered, he founded the CO2Coalition with former Exxon director, the late Roger Cohen. Both groups took fringe positions on the science of climate change, with Happer claiming that adding more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere will be good for humans.
In 2015, Happer was caught in a sting by Greenpeace when he offered to write a report on the “benefits” of CO2 for a fake oil client and then hide the funding, which would be directed to the CO2 Coalition. Since then, that group has received funding from the foundation of Trump backer and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.
In December 2016, Happer attended a conference organized by conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin. Now he’s on the National Security Council.
Late in 2017, the Trump administration nixed climate change from a list of global threats to the U.S. in the National Security Strategy.
It's safe to say Happer won't be leading any pushes to add it back in.
Bill Wehrum
Bill Wehrum is the U.S. government’s most senior official on air pollution, as the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Wehrum is a long-serving lawyer for the coal industry, as well as petrochemical and petroleum industry groups (such as Koch Industries).
Wehrum’s office is also tasked with looking at regulations to tackle power plant pollution and climate change and recently proposed the Affordable Clean Energy rule as a replacement for Obama's Clean Power Plan.
But as the New York Times reported, Wehrum has been delivering big time for his former fossil fuel industry clients by proposing the new rule, which EPA's own analysis shows would increase premature deaths from pollution.
One former EPA director, Bruce Buckheit, told the New York Times: “They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, ‘Here are the keys to the hen-house.'”
Over a decade earlier, Wehrum was in the same position at EPA as he is now and back then argued against granting California a Clean Air Act waiver to set more stringent pollution standards for vehicles.
Back in power at the EPA, he ran the agency's midterm review of auto emissions standards, which this year recommended rolling back the stricter standards proposed by the Obama administration.
Under question during his confirmation hearings, Wehrum claimed that CO2 emissions as a main driver of climate change, which the government’s own scientists confirm, was to him an “open question." [vid]
Brooke Rollins
Rollins was an aide to Texas Governor Rick Perry before spending 15 years leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which she left in early 2018 to become assistant to the president in the Office of American Innovation (OIA), based in the White House (some wonder what the OIA actually does).
During her time at TPPF, Rollins promoted the work of the organization’s Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate science denier and fossil fuel evangelist whose controversial nomination to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality was ultimately withdrawn.
In August 2018, Rollins appeared at the Heartland Institute’s energy conference alongside that think tank’s new president Tim Huelskamp.
At the conference, Rollins nodded as Huelskamp suggested American schoolchildren’s heads were being “filled with mush” about the dangers of CO2.
When asked if the inner-workings of the White House were as chaotic as some media had claimed, Rollins replied: “Is there chaos? Yes. But I would say it’s like the chaos of my home — having four children in five years.”
Home life was like a “goat rodeo,” she said, and working in the White House wasn’t “much different.”
While at TPPF, Rollins wrote that Trump should exit the Paris climate agreement.
What she's actually doing in her role with OIA remains unclear, but the fact that she appeared at the America First Energy Conference, hosted by a climate science denying think tank, indicates she isn't likely straying from her previous positions on climate and energy.
Todd Wynn
Todd Wynn is director of the Interior Department’s Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs after spending years in pro-fossil fuel industry think tanks, many with Koch network connections.
On Wynn’s CV is his time working at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill where he led that group’s energy task force.
In that position, he fought against state renewable energy mandates and federal regulation of fracking fluids.
Lisa Graves, co-director of DocumentedInvestigations.org, has described Wynn as an “aggressive fossil fuel insider.”
In his new position with the Department of the Interior, Wynn is responsible for “strengthen[ing] relationships between state and local partners and external stakeholders” with Secretary Zinke's office, which, by the looks of it, has already been quite cozy with fossil fuel stakeholders.
An investigation by HuffPost alleged Wynn may have violated an ethics pledge by continuing to liaise with former associates while in his new job.
“Wynn has been a rising star in the influential network of fossil fuel-funded think tanks that push policies and produce pseudoscientific research to muddle the debate on climate change,” the HuffPost report detailed.
Wynn has himself questioned the role that fossil fuel emissions have on warming the planet, suggesting in 2010 that it was “absolutely ridiculous” to claim CO2 was driving climate change.
Daniel Simmons
Who better to lead the Trump administration's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy than a man who once asked for that same office to be closed while barracking for fossil fuels? Daniel Simmons is just that guy.
As reported by DeSmog and others, Simmons spent years working for so-called “free market think tanks,” including the Institute for Energy Research, before joining the Trump transition team and then securing the nomination for the role, located in the Department of Energy.
Simmons has a history of working at organizations that attack programs aimed at encouraging the development of clean energy industries like solar and wind power. But in 2015, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), where he was working, attacked the office Simmons now heads, writing disapprovingly that its role was to “promote and subsidize 'clean energy' as determined by government bureaucrats.”
The office, AEA wrote, “aims to control multiple sectors of the economy, from energy production and transmission to manufacturing and construction.” Cutting the office entirely could “save” the administration more than $9 billion. Simmons himself has claimed that the costs of the Paris climate agreement target of keeping global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius would be greater than any benefits.
Perfect man for the job? In the Trump administration, the answer is yes.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-power-plant-plan-co2-2597454144.html
Trump Power Plant Plan Will Significantly Increase CO2 Pollution
The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to propose a major rollback of the Clean Power Plan, President Obama's signature climate policy.
The replacement will relax rules for coal-fired plants and will very likely increase air pollution and planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
The new plan, as the Washington Post reported, would allow states to set their own coal emission standards or even opt-out altogether, and provides companies incentives to ensure coal plants operate longer. It's a clear contrast to the Obama plan, which was aimed at phasing out coal and transitioning to cleaner power sources to avoid dangerous climate change.
The Trump rule "is projected to release at least 12 times the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared with the Obama rule over the next decade," the Post reported. To illustrate how different the plans are, by 2030, the Trump proposal would cut carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 0.7 to 1.5 percent, or the equivalent of taking 2.7 million to 5.3 million cars off the road. In contrast, Obama's initiative had a goal of slashing CO2 emissions around 19 percent in the same time frame, or the equivalent of taking 75 million cars off the road.
"These numbers tell the story, that they really remain committed not to do anything to address greenhouse gas emissions. They show not merely indifference to climate change, but really, opposition to doing anything about climate change," Jose Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program and an architect of the Obama-era policy, told the Post.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) air office head, William L. Wehrum, was key in developing the power plant plan that would surely please his corporate clients. The former industry lawyer represented a host of coal, oil, gas and chemical companies, and was a George W. Bush-era EPA official.
"They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, 'Here are the keys to the hen house,'" said Bruce Buckheit, an air pollution expert and the former EPA head of air pollution enforcement for Republican and Democratic administrations, to the Times.
Meanwhile, Michelle Bloodworth, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity,which advocates on behalf of major U.S. coal producers, said the new rules would "provide the flexibility to states to develop emissions guidelines that recognize the important role that our nation's coal fleet plays," she told Financial Times.
The new measure, which President Trump will reportedly announce Tuesday during a visit to West Virginia, will be subject to a 60-day comment period.
At a New York fundraiser last week, Trump said that coal was an "indestructible" form of energy and once again criticized windmills, according to Newsweek. Saving the flagging coal industry and ending the so-called "war on coal" was a core component of his presidential campaign.
"Coal is indestructible. You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills," Trump was heard saying in Utica.
...doc]
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https://www.edf.org/media/industry-lawyer-william-wehrum-confirmed-lead-epa-office-air-and-radiation
November 9, 2017) The Senate today confirmed industry attorney William Wehrum to serve as the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation – the person responsible for carrying out our nation’s clean air laws and protecting the health of American communities and families from harmful air pollution.
“Wehrum’s long and troubling record of attacking clean air safeguards calls into question his commitment to protecting American communities from dangerous air pollution and the urgent threat of climate change,” said EDF Director of Regulatory Policy and Senior Attorney Tomás Carbonell. “Wehrum has sued EPA to tear down clear air and climate protections at least 31 times in the last decade. And Wehrum’s record as both a private attorney and an official in President George W. Bush’s EPA demonstrates a repeated tendency to undermine vital protections for public health, clean air, and climate security.”
Since 2007, Wehrum represented many members of the pollution-heavy oil and coal industries that EPA is statutorily required to regulate while working as a lobbyist and attorney at the Washington office of Hunton & Williams. In those 31 lawsuits, he represented clients including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, American Chemistry Council, and Utility Air Regulatory Group.
Wehrum represented major polluters in at least two matters concerning EPA’s Air Office as recently as this summer – defending EPA Administrator Pruitt’s unlawful suspension of oil and gas pollution standards, and attacking urgently needed protections against chemical disasters like those that followed Hurricane Harvey.
Wehrum also spent six years in EPA’s Air Office under President George W. Bush, first as Counsel to the Assistant Administrator and then as Acting Assistant Administrator. Wehrum was the Air Office’s chief legal advisor when it issued some of the Bush Administration’s most harmful and unlawful environmental regulations, including rules that failed to properly protect Americans from mercury pollution and rules weakening New Source Review requirements for new and modified industrial facilities.
Wehrum also flagrantly rejects a core statutory duty of the office he will now lead – the Air Office’s obligation to protect Americans from dangerous climate pollution. In 2013, Wehrum told Law360 that he “continue[d] to believe, that Congress never intended the EPA to address an issue such as climate change under the Clean Air Act” – six years after the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
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william L. Wehrum is an American attorney and government official who currently serves as Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for Air and Radiation. Prior to assuming his current role, he was a partner and the head of the administrative law group at Hunton & Williams.[1]
Wehrum previously served two years as the EPA's Acting Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation during the administration of George W. Bush.[2] He was previously nominated by President Bush in 2006 to become Assistant Administrator of the EPA for Air and Radiation, but his nomination was blocked by Senate Democrats.[3]
References
- Jump up "Top EPA Presidential Nominees Approved By Senate EPW Committee". The White House. October 25, 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
- Jump up "President Donald J. Trump Announces Key Additions to his Administration". The White House. September 8, 2017. Retrieved 23 October 2017.
- Jump up Cama, Timothy (September 10, 2017). "Trump riles Dems with pick for powerful EPA job". The Hill. Retrieved 23 October 2017.
External links
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PA Memos Show Sneak Attack on Air Quality
Behind all the media attention focused on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt's many scandals, the agency has quietly passed a series of four memos since December that have a net impact of reducing air pollution controls to benefit industry, The Hill reported Wednesday.
The Hill's report comes just days before the world celebration of Earth Day on Sunday, April 22. The first Earth Day, in 1970, is often credited with leading to the passage of the Clean Air Act that same year, but now the Trump administration seems intent on rolling back that legacy.
"All of these [memos], individually and taken together, will result in more air pollution and less enforcement of the Clean Air Act," Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association, told The Hill.
What follows is a timeline and summary of the memos in question.
December 7, 2017: The EPA said it would not "second guess" a company's estimates of how much they will pollute after large projects, in part of a process called New Source Review, which the EPA undertakes to issue construction permits.
January 25: The EPA withdrew the "once in always in" policy stipulating that once a pollution source was classified as "major," it would always be subjected to tougher scrutiny. The new policy would allow industrial pollution sources to downgrade themselves to "area" sources of pollution once their emissions fell below certain standards.
Environmental groups have already sued over this rule change in March, saying it would allow industrial polluters in the Midwest alone to release four times the current amount of toxins into the air.
March 13: The EPA declared that, in the process to determine if a new project at an existing pollution source needs to pass a New Source Review, the company can now consider both emissions increases and decreases resulting from the project in step 1 of the process, instead of waiting for step 2 to take emissions decreases into account.
April 12: President Donald Trump signed an EPA memo that adjusted the enforcement of National Ambient Air Quality standards to be more friendly to industry.
The memo directed the EPA to speed up the review process for state plans for reducing smog, determine if existing smog and soot health standards should be altered or eliminated, and make it less difficult for companies to get air-quality permits, Think Progress reported.
The first two memos were written by EPA air office head Bill Wehrum, who also spent two years at the agency under Bush.
Billings told The Hill that the memos were designed to complete President George W. Bush's attempts to weaken EPA regulations, some of which failed.
"These were radical departures of current law when they were proposed a decade ago and they're just as radical today," he said.
Natural Resources Defense Council clean air director John Walke agreed that the new memos were an attempt to complete Bush-era rollbacks.
"I think Mr. Wehrum has decided this is likely a one-term administration and he's going to devote his full resources to rolling back clean air, climate and public health protections in the time available to him," Walke told The Hill.
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-air-quality-pruitt-2561179827.html
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/10/koch-nichols-scott-pruitt-strip-california-waiver-regulate-auto-emissions
...In the weeks leading up to his announcement about the emissions standards, Pruitt had taken a more antagonistic tone towards California, signaling that he might attempt to revoke the waiver that was granted by the Obama administration, per legal mandate, in 2009.
“California is not the arbiter of these issues,” Pruitt told Bloomberg News in March, adding that the state “shouldn’t and can’t dictate to the rest of the country what these levels are going to be.”
With the waiver in hand, California can continue to enforce current greenhouse gas emissions standards, despite whatever the EPA sets as the new national standards for model years 2022-2025. On top of that, any other state can choose to adopt California’s standards, which 13 other states and the District of Columbia currently have.
Because these states represent roughly one-third of the country’s personal vehicle market, automakers would have to decide whether to set up two different production lines for states following the California standards and the rest of the country, or whether to treat California’s targets as a de facto national standard.
Predictably, the automakers, through the powerful Auto Alliance and Global Automakers trade groups, are calling for one national regime, which could result from a grand bargain like the one that Pruitt just scrapped, or could be delivered by Pruitt stripping California of its waiver.
Any attempt at such a repeal would be hugely controversial, and possibly illegal, due to many nuances in the Clean Air Act and the history of its application and enforcement. A waiver granted to California under the Clean Air Act has never been revoked, and has only been denied once.
Notably, that lone denial came in December 2007 when William (Bill) Wehrum, who ran the EPA’s clean air division at the time, convinced then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to reject the state’s request to set its own greenhouse gas standards for vehicles, the very issue at hand today.
(California was later granted that same waiver in 2009 under the Obama administration, after the state sued the EPA, and after the Supreme Court had held in 2007 that the EPA was required to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. For a much more comprehensive background on California’s waiver and Wehrum’s opposition, see this recent Desmog article.)
Today, Wehrum is again the air chief at the EPA, and is again in a position to attempt to strip California of its unique authority to set its own air pollution limits. As Wehrum, Pruitt, and EPA policymakers work to figure out the new national emissions standards for cars and light trucks, they are hearing from groups including the American Consumer Institute and its Koch-tied coalition on the importance of revoking the California waiver.
Who Are the Groups Fighting California’s Clean Air Act Waiver?
The ACI letter to Pruitt, dated March 28, 2018, was signed by representatives from 11 groups, eight of which have known ties to the Koch network, and all of which are routine commenters on conservative issues.
The American Consumer Institute (ACI) is credited with organizing the coalition, and the letter is signed by its President Steve Pociask. The group is best known for opposing net neutrality efforts while being funded by a major internet service provider (ISP) lobby, as journalist Lee Fang detailed for VICE. More recently, Pociask has turned his attention to attacking electric vehicles, writing on Forbes that “the science on electric vehicles does not support continuing California’s waiver.”
Less Governmentis an “organization dedicated to reducing the power of government and protecting the First Amendment from governmental assault,” which was founded and run by Seton Motley, who is also listed as a Policy Adviser to the climate science-denying Heartland Institute. Though Motley and his Less Government org have their roots in telecom and media issues, he has in recent years engaged more on climate and energy issues, signing some anti-wind energy letters organized by the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and writing a bit on electric vehicles.
The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is part of the network of front groups funded by the Koch brothers and their donor network through the Center to Protect Patient Rights (now called American Encore), and Freedom Partners. As the Energy and Policy Institute has described, “TPA essentially exists as a shell for its advocacy, based on its own IRS form 990s: 'The Taxpayers Protection Alliance has given control of the management duties and the daily activities of the organization to MLM Consulting, LLC (MLM). MLM will be responsible for managing the organization and work to support the exempt purposes of TPA. The President of TPA, David Williams, is the sole owner of MLM Consulting LLC.'” Williams signed the ACIletter to Pruitt. TPA has fought clean energy policy in the past using the website SolarSecrets.org and has published white papers arguing against solar energy tax credits.
Consumer Action for a Strong Economy is run by Matthew Kandrach, and has been linked to a number of coalition efforts stemming from the FreedomWorks organization, which was born of a merger between the Koch-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America.
American Commitment is run by Phil Kerpen, a former Vice President of Americans for Prosperity. The organization was founded by Sean Noble, a right-wing operative with close ties to the Koch brothers who also runs the Center to Protect Patient Rights (American Encore), a major funnel for Koch donor network money to front groups.
FreedomWorks was, as mentioned above, born of a merger between the Koch-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE)and Empower America, though it has no known Koch ties at present day. The group was described in a 2012 article in Mother Jonesas “one of the main political outfits of the conservative movement and an instrumental force within the tea party.” It pushes free market policies and has questioned the well-established science linking human activity to a warming planet.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a conservative advocacy group dedicated to “economic freedom” that has received funding from ExxonMobil, Texaco, and the family foundations of the Koch brothers.
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) is an anti-tax group that has received funding from the oil and gas lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, along with various groups in the Koch network such as the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation and the Center to Protect Patient Rights, as well as DonorsTrust.
The 60 Plus Association describes itselfas the conservative alternative to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and receives significant funding from groups connected to the Koch brothers. The group has also received funding from the American Petroleum Institute, and was created by Sean Noble (see American Commitment above). Noble was until recently a consultant for the Arizona Public Service utility company, and has led efforts in Arizona to kill solar-friendly legislation.
Frontiers of Freedom, run by George Landrith, has received significant funding from Exxon, the Koch brothers, and dark money organizations like Donors Trust. In 2015, Landrith launched the Energy Equality Coalition to battle against the federal electric vehicle tax credit. The coalition also includes David Williams of the Taxpayer Protection Alliance and Horace Cooper, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute. Landrith is also a directorof the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR).
The Center for Freedom and Prosperity was once funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and has actively lobbied for more liberalized tax laws, and for less scrutiny towards offshore tax havens.
Seven of the organizations that signed this letter to Pruitt — and five of the actual representatives who signed — also recently penned a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defending “electronic and heat-not-burn” tobacco products (or vaping products), indicating that this network is defending the tobacco industry as well as oil and gas companies.
California and Partner States Fight Back
Nichols has signaled that California will not be retreating from its strong standards.
“California will not weaken its nationally accepted clean car standards, and automakers will continue to meet those higher standards, bringing better gas mileage and less pollution for everyone,” Nichols wrote in a statement emailed to reporters. “This decision takes the U.S. auto industry backward, and we will vigorously defend the existing clean vehicle standards and fight to preserve one national clean vehicle program.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has also said that California is prepared to sue if the EPA moves to weaken the vehicle emissions standards.
“We are going to do everything that can been done to defend these standards,” Becerra toldReuterslast week. “So far, when we have been challenged on environmental standards we have had a good record in court. We haven’t lost a case.”
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to grant California a waiver on air pollution emissions standards if the state has “compelling and extraordinary circumstances,” which California argued a decade ago, and which the Obama administration agreed that it does. To revoke the waiver, the EPA would legally have to prove that those circumstances are no longer there. To satisfy the courts in California's inevitable legal challenge, this would require a comprehensive and scientifically rigorous analysis.
At the BNEF Future of Energy Summit on April 10, Nichols said, “The document that came out a week ago from the administrator did nothing to change the nature of the debate. It expressed Mr. Pruitt's view but there was absolutely nothing new in the way of data or analysis to support that view.”
She did indicate that she would be willing to sit down with the EPA and automakers to look at some “minor adjustments” to the technical changes measuring how companies could comply, but not the targets themselves. She provided an example related to electric vehicles. “Under the 2012 rules [car companies are] responsible for upstream emissions of power plants for charging EVs [electric vehicles]. I don't think that's a great idea. I didn't think so at the time.”
However, “if the whole system is up for reexamination,” said Nichols, “then that's a whole different story … That's a different fight. And we would win it.”
It’s also clear that other states would have California's back and join a legal fight, or start their own. Attorneys general from 11 states said last week in a statement that they would defend California's right to set firm standards.
“By cooking the books on its review of national auto emissions standards, the Trump administration is putting special interests ahead of New Yorkers’ health and wallets,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. “We stand ready to take legal action to block the Trump administration’s reckless and illegal efforts to reverse these critical standards and the gains we’ve made in ensuring cars are more fuel-efficient and less polluting.”
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WEHRUM IS the Trump administration’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation. “Bill,” the first line of his bio at his law firm, Hunton & Williams, boasts, “is well known for his thorough grasp of environmental issues.”
In his Senate confirmation hearing this week, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., put that claim to the test.
The senator produced a large graph for Wehrum from NASA, tracking levels of both greenhouse gas emissions and warming from 1880 through 2005. The lines follow one another fairly closely, including a dramatic upward spike through the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st. “Can you acknowledge,” Merkley asked, “that these lines generally track each other?”
“I’m not familiar with those data. I have no idea what it depicts,” Wehrum answers.
Merkley prods. “But you can see the lines. Do the lines track each other?”
“What’s important, senator, is to know how the data is depicted.”
“Yes it is,” Merkley agrees, “But I’m just asking a question: Can you see those two lines, and do they generally track each other?”
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Wehrum does not answer the question, leading Merkley to give up on his graph-related line of inquiry for another. “What we see is this Koch Brother-inspired determination not to acknowledge even the most fundamental facts. … Why should the American people put into an office of significant influence someone who refuses to look at the facts directly that are so important to the health of this planet?”
“As I said, these are complex issues and very important issues.”
So Merkley sought to make it a little less complex, asking Wehrum whether he acknowledges a series of basic scientific facts about recent ecological trends tied to rising temperatures: the increasing acidification of the ocean, growing snowpacks on the cascade mountains, longer fire seasons. Wehrum, again, does not respond, saying of ocean acidification that he’s aware there “is an allegation,” before being cut off.
As Merkley suggests, Wehrum is in all likelihood not as stupid as his testimony would lead you to believe. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair famously wrote. Wehrum hasrepresented a number of fossil fuel industry interests, from the American Petroleum Institute, Kinder Morgan, the American Forest & Paper Association, and electric utilities insuing the EPA in fighting a number of regulations, some of which his new job would give him the authority to dismantle.
Among his other cases was one in which he represented industry trade associations in fighting Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules that limited how much silica workers can be exposed to on the job, and another challenging Mine Safety and Health Administration regulations. He also worked over a decade ago to try to block California from implementing more stringent vehicle standards. At another point in his confirmation hearing, Wehrum demurred when asked by California Sen. Kamala Harris if he’d pledge not to try to undo the state’s more stringent air quality regulations.
Notably, Wehrum is a major critic of the endangerment finding, a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that gives the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Peeling back that authority is seen as a prize for many industry groups Wehrum has represented, that have reportedly been miffed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt hasn’t moved faster to dismantle it.
Having been at the EPA during the Bush years in the same job, Wehrum might be even better-positioned than Pruitt to take the endangerment finding head on, all with the backing of agency opponents and outsiders now running one of the nation’s top regulators. He’s expected, as well, to act as a kind of bridge between career administrators and Pruitt’s team, helping smooth the path for his boss’s anti-regulatory agenda.
But he has to get confirmed first.
“No one can look at what is happening on the planet and see that there is nothing happening unless you’re deliberately determined to ignore that information,” Merkley concluded Wednesday. “And that makes you, really quite frankly, unacceptable to serve in this capacity.”
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https://theintercept.com/2017/11/13/epa-michael-dourson-nomination-republicans/
MASSIVE CONFLICTS OF interest no longer stand in the way of confirmation to the Environmental Protection Agency’s highest posts, as Scott Pruitt, the EPA’s sworn enemy, demonstrated when he ascended to the agency’s top job. Last Thursday, the Senate confirmed a second highly conflicted EPA nominee, fossil fuel lobbyist Bill Wehrum, who will now oversee air pollution protections despite his clear record of working to undermine those very same protections. With only one Republican opposing Wehrum, the 49-47 vote was a reminder of how little Senate Republicans expect of those who are meant to protect us from environmental threats.
Yet Michael Dourson, the industry scientist Trump nominated to head EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, may be unable to clear even this low bar. Though the Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee voted to advance Wehrum’s and Dourson’s nominations at the same October 25 hearing, only Wehrum’s advanced to the floor of the Senate, an indication that Republicans don’t yet have the votes to confirm Dourson.
Resistance to his nomination is coming from red states that have been directly harmed by chemicals Dourson has defended on behalf of industry. The senators from West Virginia, for example, might have been expected to fall in line behind Dourson. But in a hearing last month, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito questioned the nominee about his involvement with two chemicals that have affected her state: PFOA and MCHM, both of which, Capito said, had “very much touched the lives of my fellow West Virginians.” Capito, who didn’t respond to inquiries for this story, has yet to announce how she will vote.
Dourson was responsible for setting a state standard for PFOA that was thousands of times higher than the EPA’s current safety level. His consulting company Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment also worked on MCHM, one of the chemicals that spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River in 2014, leaving some 300,000 people without drinking water.
West Virginia’s other senator, Joe Manchin, announced his intention to vote against Dourson last month. Though a Democrat, Manchin often votes with Republicans, but not this time. West Virginia is “unfortunately familiar with the dangers that can arise when we neglect to properly comply with and enforce our chemical regulations,” Manchin said in a statement.
Dourson is also facing problems in another red state struggling with chemical contamination: North Carolina. While both Republican senators from the state voted for Pruitt and Wehrum, neither has committed to Dourson. The state is home to Camp Lejeune, the military base where TCE and other carcinogenic chemicals seeped into drinking water, leading to a cluster of cancer cases. As retired Marine Jerry Ensminger pointed out in the Raleigh News and Observer, Dourson’s evaluation of TCE, which was paid for by the American Chemistry Council, calculated a safety level that was less protective than the one set by the EPA. Ensminger, whose daughter died of leukemia at Camp Lejeune, has called on his senators to oppose Dourson, whom he calls a “walking, talking example of conflict of interest.”
North Carolina is also ground zero for GenX, the latest in a family of chemicals known as PFAS to be found in drinking water. DuPont and its spinoff, Chemours, have dumped at least 1 million pounds of PFAS into North Carolina’s Cape Fear River since 1980. GenX and other PFAS are unregulated, which is limiting the state’s ability to clean it up.
While he has stayed mum about whether he will vote for Dourson, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr wrote to Pruitt on October 31, asking him to consider evaluating GenX and the entire class of chemicals to which it belongs, a step that could lead to regulation. Some have suggested that Burr’s support for Dourson may be contingent on whether the EPA promises to help address his state’s water contamination problem. Burr’s office did not respond to inquiries for this story.
In addition to these possible defectors, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is also expected to break with the Republican ranks to oppose Dourson. Collins was the only Republican senator to vote against both Pruitt and Wehrum.
“Susan has been heroic in so many ways,” said Delaware’s Sen. Tom Carper, who has been leading the charge against Dourson in the Senate.
Because Dourson has worked on behalf of industry to defend dozens of chemicals that have contaminated the water and air of Republicans, as well as Democrats, Carper hopes that some of Collins’s colleagues will join her this time.
“We’ve heard from states around the country where lives have been lost because of exposure to toxic chemicals,” Carper told The Intercept.
“I know some of our Republican colleagues don’t feel good about the votes they cast on the floor,” he said. “After casting votes for one troubling nominee after the other after the other, you reach a point where some of the Republicans will say, Enough already. No more.”
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