The following article by Nicole Lewis was posted on the Washington Post website October 23, 2017:
Environmental Protection Agency Administer Scott Pruitt boasted of America’s shirking CO2 footprint, but he neglected to mention that the country is also among the world’s highest emitters. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“We are leading the nation — excuse me — the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions.” — Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, during an interview on Fox News’s “Your World,” Oct. 17, 2017
“We have reduced our CO2 footprint by over 18 percent, almost 20 percent, from 2000 to 2014.” — Pruitt, remarks during an interview on Fox News’s “Your World,” Oct. 17
When the host of “Your World” pressed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on his views on climate change, Pruitt dodged the question and instead spoke about President Trump’s reasons for leaving the Paris climate accords. He expressed frustration that “China and India didn’t have to take any steps with CO2 reductions until the year 2030,” before asserting that the United States was a leader in reducing carbon emissions. Continue reading “EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s claim that the U.S. is ‘leading the world’ in ‘C02 footprint’ reductions”
The following article by Brady Dennis and Juliet EIlperin was posted on the Washington Post website October 3, 2017:
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt shakes hands with miners during an April visit to a Consol Pennsylvania Coal Co. mine in Sycamore, Pa. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
During his seven months in office, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has filled his days meeting with executives from many of the companies he regulates, while all but sidestepping environmental and public health groups. But the face time with industry representatives has extended well beyond his Washington office.
On April 26, for example, Pruitt had lunch with executives from Southern, one of the nation’s biggest coal-burning utilities. They dined at Equinox, a restaurant near the White House, where the baby-carrot-and-red-beet salad with shrimp runs $28. Later that day, Pruitt met with senior leaders at Alliance Resource Partners, a major coal-mining operation, for a dinner at BLT Prime, a steakhouse in the Trump International Hotel, just across from EPA headquarters. Continue reading “Fancy dinners, far-flung speeches: Calendars detail EPA chief’s close ties to industry”
The following article by Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin was posted on the Washington Post website September 27, 2017:
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt (second from left) join President Trump during an event in Cincinnati on June 7. Afterward, Pruitt flew by military jet to New York. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, costing taxpayers more than $58,000 to fly him to various parts of the country, according to records provided to a congressional oversight committee and obtained by The Washington Post.
“When the administrator travels, he takes commercial flights,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said Wednesday, explaining that the one charter flight and three government flights were due to particular circumstances.
The following article by Juliet EIlperin and Brady Dennis was posted on the Washington Post website September 20, 2017:
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Scott Pruitt’s round-the-clock personal security detail, which demands triple the manpower of his predecessors at the Environmental Protection Agency, has prompted officials to rotate in special agents from around the country who otherwise would be investigating environmental crimes.
The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance has summoned agents from various cities to serve two-week stints helping guard Pruitt in recent months. While hiring in many departments is frozen, the agency has sought an exception to hire additional full-time staff to protect Pruitt. Continue reading “At EPA, guarding the chief pulls agents from pursuing environmental crimes”
The following article by Juliet Eilperin was posted on the Washington Post website September 15, 2017:
The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the Brooks Range as a backdrop. (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
The Trump administration is quietly moving to allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in more than 30 years, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, with a draft rule that would lay the groundwork for drilling.
Congress has sole authority to determine whether oil and gas drilling can take place within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres. But seismic studies represent a necessary first step, and Interior Department officials are modifying a 1980s regulation to permit them.
The effort represents a twist in a political fight that has raged for decades. The remote and vast habitat, which serves as the main calving ground for one of North America’s last large caribou herds and a stop for migrating birds from six continents, has served as a rallying cry for environmentalists and some of Alaska’s native tribes. But state politicians and many Republicans in Washington have pressed to extract the billions of barrels of oil lying beneath the refuge’s coastal plain.
Democrats have managed to block them through votes in the Senate and, in one instance in 1995, by a presidential veto.
In an Aug. 11 memo, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acting director James W. Kurth instructed the agency’s Alaska regional director to update a rule that allowed exploratory drilling between Oct. 1, 1984, and May 31, 1986, by striking those calendar constraints.
Doing so would eliminate an obstacle that was the subject of a court battle as recently as two years ago.
“When finalized, the new regulation will allow for applicants to [submit] requests for approval of new exploration plans,” Kurth wrote in the memo.
If the rule is finalized after a public comment period, companies would have to bid on conducting the seismic studies. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in a June 27 memo, obtained by Trustees for Alaska through a federal records request, that this work would cost about $3.6 million.
With oil prices averaging around $50 per barrel, potentially too low to justify a significant investment in drilling in the refuge, it is unclear how much interest companies would have. Some might consider proceeding with those studies to get a better sense of the area’s potential.
The behind-the-scenes push to open up the refuge — often referred to by its acronym, ANWR — comes as longtime drilling proponents occupy key positions at the Interior Department.
Its No. 2 official, David Bernhardt, represented Alaska in its unsuccessful 2014 suit to force then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to allow exploratory drilling there. Joseph Balash, President Trump’s nominee to serve as Interior assistant secretary for land and minerals management, asked federal officials to turn a portion of the refuge over to the state when he served as Alaska’s natural resources commissioner. The state’s plan was to offer the land for leasing.
During a stop in Anchorage on May 31, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said he hoped to jump-start energy exploration on Alaska’s North Slope in part by updating resource assessments of the refuge.
“I’m a geologist. Science is a wonderful thing. It helps us understand what is going on deep below the surface of the Earth,” Zinke said at the time. “We need to use science to update our understanding of the [coastal plain] of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as Congress considers important legislation to responsibly develop there one day.”
The Fish and Wildlife memo notes that the Interior Department asked it “to update the regulations concerning the geological and geophysical exploration” of that coastal area but does not identify who issued the directive.
An Interior official said in an email Friday that the department is “required by law — the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act — to allow for seismic surveys in wildlife refuges across Alaska.”
“Hundreds of seismic surveys have been conducted on Alaska’s north slope — many of them on ANWR’s borders,” the official added.
Both the Clinton and Obama administrations concluded that the department was legally barred from permitting seismic studies in the refuge. And environmentalists have consistently opposed such activity, which sends shock waves underground. They say it would disturb denning polar bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, as well as musk oxen and other Arctic animals.
An increasing number of polar bears are now denning onshore during the winter — when seismic studies would take place — due to diminishing sea ice, and a significant portion of the coastal plain is designated as critical habitat for the bears. The Aug. 11 memo directs the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director to conduct an environmental assessment as part of the proposed rule change because the Endangered Species Act requires federal agencies to show that their actions will not jeopardize or adversely modify critical habitat of a listed species.
“The administration is very stealthily trying to move forward with drilling on the Arctic’s coastal plain,” said Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton. “This is a complete about-face from decades of practice.”
Environmental groups would be likely to challenge any decision to conduct seismic work in the refuge in federal court.
Alaska officials have been working for several years to restart seismic studies on the coastal plain. They say the initial ones, conducted in the winters of 1984 and 1985, were done with outdated technology and do not reflect the area’s true potential. The Geological Survey, which reanalyzed that data nearly 15 years later, estimated that 7.7 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” lie under the coastal plain.
The June 27 memo, sent to Zinke’s energy policy counselor Vincent DeVito, said the department could either assume the existing seismic data is acceptable, reexamine that data with “state-of-the-art” technology or conduct new studies with modern, 3-D technology.
In an interview Thursday, Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner Andy Mack said that recent oil discoveries near the refuge’s western edge suggest there may be more oil there than federal officials identified three decades ago.
“Alaska’s always had an abiding interest in resource development, particularly in oil,” Mack said. “We’re not discounting the existing data, but it’s old, and it’s relatively limited.”
The question of whether Interior can restart the seismic work is a subject of legal dispute. The 1980s studies, which took place along 1,400 miles of survey lines and were financed by private oil firms, were aimed at gathering information for a report the interior secretary submitted to Congress in 1987.
In 2001, Interior solicitor John Leshy issued a formal opinion concluding that the 1983 rule was “a time-limited authorization for exploratory activities in the coastal plain.”
Twelve years later, Alaska sought permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service to launch a new exploration program; Obama administration officials rejected the request, and the state sued.
On July 21, 2015, U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason ruled against the state. “Whether the statute authorizes or requires the Secretary to approve additional exploration after the submission of the 1987 report is ambiguous,” she wrote, but Jewell’s interpretation that she no longer had authority to allow it “is based on a permissible and reasonable construction of the statute.”
Mack said he was not sure whether companies would want to drill in the refuge, but they now are more interested in the potential on land than offshore.
ConocoPhillips, for one, is “actively exploring and focused on new development opportunities” within the neighboring National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, according to spokesman Daren Beaudo. “If ANWR was opened, we’d consider it within our portfolio of opportunities . . . and it would have to compete with other regions for our exploration dollars,” he said.
Yet Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, predicted “very little interest” in drilling in the refuge for the foreseeable future.
“The number of companies that would be open to a meaningful bet on ANWR we could realistically count on one hand, and that would be generous,” Molchanov said.
The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website September 9, 2017:
Update: On Friday, during an interview with CNN, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said that it was inappropriate to discuss the effect of climate change on the intensity of Hurricane Irma.
“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel,” he said. “Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the… place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”
The following editorial by the New York Times‘ Editorial Board was posted on their website September 9, 2017:
Credit: Celia Jacobs
The news was hard to digest until one realized it was part of a much larger and increasingly disturbing pattern in the Trump administration. On Aug. 18, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order from the Interior Department that it stop work on what seemed a useful and overdue study of the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining.
The $1 million study had been requested by two West Virginia health agencies following multiple studies suggesting increased rates of birth defects, cancer and other health problems among people living near big surface coal-mining operations in Appalachia. The order to shut it down came just hours before the scientists were scheduled to meet with affected residents of Kentucky.
The Interior Department said the project was put on hold as a result of an agencywide budgetary review of grants and projects costing more than $100,000. Continue reading “President Trump’s War on Science”
The following article was posted on the TrumpAccountable.org website September 9, 2017:
The EPA took significant steps this week to repeal the Obama Clean Power Plan that seeks to cut carbon emissions from the energy sector by 32% by 2030. EPA Chief Scott Pruitt actively opposed the Clean Power Plan as Attorney General of Oklahoma and now, as the head of the EPA, he faces few obstacles as he dismantles one of President Obama’s signature environmental policies.
President Trump signed an executive order in March requiring the EPA to review the Clean Power Plan with the clear intent of repealing it. Since then the EPA has been reviewing the rule and, according to reporting from The Hill, intends to reverse it later this year. The EPA has quietly filed the repeal policy with the Office of Management and Budget for regulatory review.
While a window for public discussion will open after the new rule is entered into the Federal Register, the “EPA expects that the administrator will sign the proposed rule in the fall of 2017.”
The following article by Juliet Eilperin was posted on the Washington Post website September 4, 2017:
The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience.
In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. According to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations. Continue reading “EPA now requires political aide’s sign-off for agency awards, grant applications”
In a 2-to-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that the EPA had the right to reconsider a 2016 rule limiting methane and smog-forming pollutants emitted by oil and gas wells but could not delay the effective date while it sought to rewrite the regulation.
