ThinkProgress

Pruitt tells climate deniers he’ll stop counting value of lives saved for new rules

Scott Pruitt plans to stop tallying the co-benefits of cutting pollution.

By Philip Newell, Nexus Media    April 13, 2108

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Credit: Gage Skidmore/

Scott Pruitt, still clinging to the helm of President Trump’s EPA, met with allies at the Heritage Foundation Wednesday for what one attendee described as a “deniers’ convention,” according to E&E News. Pruitt told attendees that he is planning to stop counting the co-benefits of environmental protections, The Daily Caller reported.

If Pruitt hangs on to his job long enough to implement the proposal — and it survives inevitable legal challenges — it could be prove critical to his efforts to discredit the science underpinning numerous environmental protections.

In doing cost-benefit analyses of new rules, experts account for auxiliary benefits of those rules. For example, the goal of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — a target for Pruitt — is to reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. But, in prompting utilities to switch away from coal to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar, the measure would also reduce emissions of particular matter, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, saving thousands of lives. These saved lives are counted as co-benefits.

Federal agencies must assign a monetary value to a human life when performing cost-benefit analyses. That valuation varies slightly from agency to agency, but the rough consensus is that an American life is worth a little more than $9 million. That is significant when considering a new rule’s impact on industry. The Clean Power Plan, for example, would cost the coal sector billions of dollars, but it would save the country billions more by guarding public health.

Under Pruitt’s proposal, the EPA wouldn’t deny that the Clean Power Plan could save around 4,500 lives each year — a fact it currently acknowledges. Rather, when tallying up the benefits of reducing pollution, those lives simply would not count. In short, the man charged with protecting Americans’ health believes that, when performing a cost-benefit analysis, the EPA should not consider the value of saving American lives.

The proposal comes on the heels of Pruitt’s plans to prevent the agency from using certain scientific research in issuing new rules. Pruitt’s efforts to restrict the EPA’s use of science draw on plans championed by conservative commentator Steve Milloy, who attended Wednesday’s meeting at the Heritage Foundation. Milloy has close ties to the fossil fuel and tobacco industries.

In recent weeks, Pruitt has come under attack for several potential ethics violations. This week’s announcement could be intended to shore up support among conservative allies, who will pressure Trump not to fire the embattled EPA Chief. Pruitt appears eager to make friends with co-benefits.

Phil Newell writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

HuffPost

Former EPA Aide Accuses Scott Pruitt Of ‘Unethical, Potentially Illegal’ Behavior

Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPost    April 12, 2108

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt directed staff to book travel that allowed him to personally accrue more frequent flier miles, insisting on flying first class on an airline not on the government’s approved list and staying in pricey hotels, according to a bombshell new letter released Thursday by congressional investigators.

The allegations come from Kevin Chmielewski, a lifelong Republican and former Trump aide who served as the EPA’s deputy chief of staff until he was removed for raising alarm over Pruitt’s spending, and are detailed in a six-page letter signed by two senators and three House members, all Democrats. The lawmakers ―Reps. Elijah E. Cummings (MD), Gerald Connolly (Va.), Donald Beyer (Va.) and Sens. Tom Carper (Del.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) ― sent the letter to Pruitt and President Donald Trump.

“He said that when he refused to approve your inappropriate and unethical spending, he claimed he was marginalized, removed from his senior position and placed on administrative leave,” the letter to Pruitt reads.

It adds: “The new information provided by Mr. Chmielewski, if accurate, leaves us certain that your leadership at EPA has been fraught with numerous and repeated unethical and potentially illegal actions on a wide range of consequential matters that you and some members of your staff directed.”

Pruitt allegedly told staff to “find me something to do” in locations around the country to justify spending taxpayer money, according to the letters. Pruitt “frequently stayed in” hotels that exceeded the allowable government per diem by as much as 300 times the cap permitted in exceptional circumstances. On trips to Australia and Italy, the administrator “refused” to stay in the hotels recommended by the U.S. embassy staff there, instead booking more expensive hotels with less on-site security, bringing his personal bodyguards in tow.

Pruitt was reimbursed for these travel expenses when he personally laid out the money for them, though some of his security detail were not fully compensated for their luxury travel, Chmielewski alleged.

Chmielewski told investigators he overheard Pruitt speaking to his landlord, the energy lobbyist who gave him a sweetheart $50-a-night deal on a room in a Capitol Hill condominium. The lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, whose wife co-owns the building, complained that the administrator had failed to pay rent, and that his adult daughter, McKenna Pruitt, damaged the hardwood floors by repeatedly rolling her luggage though the residence while she stayed there during a White House internship.

“We acknowledge the receipt of this letter from Democrats on Capitol Hill and look forward to responding,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in a statement to HuffPost.

The letters put more pressure on Pruitt to resign as a ballooning scandal over accusations of rampant corruption and runaway spending continues into a third consecutive week. In a testament to just how quickly the disparate controversies have mounted, The Washington Post reported earlier on Thursday that Pruitt used four different email addresses, prompting concerns that he has avoided releasing documents requested in public records disclosures.

The allegations come as the Senate is poised to vote to confirm Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist and Republican congressional staffer, as the EPA’s deputy administrator, putting him next in line to take over the agency should Pruitt exit.

Washington Post – Energy and Environment

The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news.

By Chris Mooney       April 11, 2018

 (Levke Caesar/Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

The Atlantic Ocean circulation that carries warmth into the Northern Hemisphere’s high latitudes is slowing down because of climate change, a team of scientists asserted Wednesday, suggesting one of the most feared consequences is already coming to pass.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has declined in strength by 15 percent since the mid-20th century to a “new record low,” the scientists conclude in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature. That’s a decrease of 3 million cubic meters of water per second, the equivalent of nearly 15 Amazon rivers.

The AMOC brings warm water from the equator up toward the Atlantic’s northern reaches and cold water back down through the deep ocean. The current is partly why Western Europe enjoys temperate weather, and meteorologists are linking changes in North Atlantic Ocean temperatures to recent summer heat waves.

The circulation is also critical for fisheries off the U.S. Atlantic coast, a key part of New England’s economy that have seen changes in recent years, with the cod fishery collapsing as lobster populations have boomed off the Maine coast.

Some of the AMOC’s disruption may be driven by the melting ice sheet of Greenland, another consequence of climate change that is altering the region’s water composition and interrupts the natural processes.

This is “something that climate models have predicted for a long time, but we weren’t sure it was really happening. I think it is happening,” said one of the study’s authors, Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And I think it’s bad news.”

But the full role of climate change in the slowing ocean current is not fully understood, and another study released Wednesday drew somewhat different conclusions.

This study, which was also published in the journal Nature, found that the AMOC has slowed over the past 150 years and similarly found that it is now weaker than at any time in more than a millennium.

“The last 100 years has been its lowest point for the last few thousand years,” said Jon Robson, a researcher at the University of Reading and one of the study’s authors. (The study’s lead author was David Thornalley of the University College London.)

The two studies have their differences: The second suggests the slowdown probably began for natural reasons around the time of the Industrial Revolution in 1850, rather than being spurred by human-caused climate change, which fully kicked in later.

But like the first study, the second finds that the circulation has remained weak, or even weakened further, through the present era of warming.

“These two new papers do point strongly to the fact that the overturning has probably weakened over the last 150 years,” Robson said. “There’s uncertainty about when, but the analogy between what happened 150 years ago and today is quite strong.”

The AMOC amok?

The AMOC circulation is just one part of a far larger global system of ocean currents, driven by differences in the temperature and salinity of ocean water. Warm surface waters flow northward in the Atlantic, eventually cooling and — because cold, salty water is very dense — sink and travel back southward at great depths. The circulation has thus been likened to a conveyor belt.

But the melting of Arctic sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheet can freshen northern waters and interfere with sinking. Recent research has in fact confirmed that meltwater from Greenland is lingering on the ocean surface, where it could be interrupting the circulation.

Direct measurements of the circulation are only a little over a decade old. And while those have shown a downturn, that’s too short a time period to detect a definitive trend.

So the new studies sought to infer the state of the circulation from more indirect evidence.

In the first, the authors highlight a curious pattern of ocean temperatures that match what you would expect from a weakening AMOC — namely, a strong warming off the coast of the eastern United States, paired with a cooling south of Greenland, which sometimes been called the cold “blob”:

The cold “blob” was particularly pronounced in the first half of the year 2015. (NOAA)

The research finds that the odd alignment, which has produced regions of record cold and record warmth right next to one another, has been developing since the 1950s and closely matches what a very high resolution climate model predicted would occur.

The study was led by the Potsdam Institute’s Levke Caesar with along with co-authors at institutions in Germany, Greece, and Spain, as well as from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The second study, meanwhile, draws on sediment samples from the deep ocean off Cape Hatteras, N.C., to infer the strength of the current going back well over a thousand years. Because a stronger current can carry thicker sand grains, the study was able to detect a weakening beginning around 160 or 170 years ago when the “Little Ice Age” in the Northern Hemisphere ended. That trend has then continued through the present.

“In terms of this initial drop in the AMOC, it’s very likely that’s a kind of natural process,” Robson said. “It’s very likely, based on other evidence, that human activities may have continued to suppress the AMOC, or maybe led to further weakening.”

Consistent, or contradictory?

Meric Srokosz, an oceanographer at the National Oceanography Center in Britain, noted that the two studies have “somewhat different messages” — but emphasized that neither makes a direct measurement of the circulation.

“Essentially, what view you take of the results depends on how good you believe the models used are and likewise how well the chosen proxies represent the AMOC over the time scales of interest,” he said.

Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, went further, saying that the two studies may not be entirely measuring the same thing.

“I think by applying different methods and looking at different time scales, the two studies focused on different components of the ocean circulation,” she said. “Both of them had to use some kind of approximation or proxy, which inevitably results in limitations and cannot give a complete picture.”

But Rahmstorf argued in an email that, given the difficulties and limitations involved in such work, “I think the overall agreement of the various independent estimates is very good!”

Sharp changes off the coast of Maine

A lobster boat heads out to sea off Kennebunkport, Maine, at sunrise on Aug. 17, 2015. Fishermen in northern New England have been catching record numbers of lobsters, but south of Cape Cod, the lobster population has plummeted to the lowest levels ever seen, in a northward shift that scientists attribute in large part to the warming of the ocean. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)

The authors of the first study believe the shift in the circulation may already having a big impact along the U.S. coastline.

“Of all the U.S. waters, this region has definitely warmed the fastest in the last decade,” said Vincent Saba, a marine biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of its co-authors.

And that has had major effects on fisheries. The Gulf of Maine, for instance, has seen a giant boom in the local lobster industry and crash of the cod fishery.

“A lot of these changes are happening relatively fast, and our fisheries management is unable to keep up,” Saba said. “We’re trying to figure out how to deal with some of these species shifts that we’re seeing.”

It’s not just fisheries: If the slowdown trend continues, it is expected to drive strong sea-level rise against the Eastern Seaboard. Previous research has already shown that from 2009 to 2010, sea level in the region suddenly shot up five inches, thanks in part to a brief slowdown of the circulation.

This occurs, Rahmstorf explains, because the northward flow of the Gulf Stream pushes waters to its right — which means that the ocean piles up against the coast of Europe. But as the current weakens, some of the water flows back toward the United States’ East Coast instead.

As for the future, Rahmstorf predicts the circulation will only weaken further as climate change advances. It may not be slow and steady: There is great fear that there may be a “tipping point” where the circulation comes to an abrupt halt.

This is one of the most infamous scenarios for abrupt climate change, as it is known: Studies from the planet’s history suggest that such a sudden change in the North Atlantic has occurred many times in Earth’s past, perhaps as recently as about 13,000 years ago. But it’s not clear how close the tipping point might be.

“I think in the long run … Greenland will start melting even faster, so I think the long-term prospect for that ocean circulation system is that it will weaken further,” Rahmstorf said. “And I think that’s going to affect all of us, basically, in a negative way.”

Read more at Energy & Environment:

Why the Earth’s past has scientists so worried about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation

Climate change is doing some very strange things to the waters off New England

Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean

For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.

Chris Mooney covers climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change.

Detroit Free Press

Line 5 oil pipeline in Straits of Mackinac dented by ship

By Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press      April 11, 2018

Sixteen sections of underwater oil and gas pipelines in the Straits of Mackinac were found unsupported on the Great Lakes bottom during 2003 inspections — spans of 140 feet or longer, well beyond state requirements for mooring the pipe. Keith Matheny/Detroit Free Press

     (Photo: National Wildlife Federation)

The same “vessel activity” that appears to have damaged submerged electric cables in the Straits of Mackinac last week, causing a leak of 550 gallons of benzene-containing coolant, may have also caused three dents just discovered in the Line 5 oil and natural gas liquids pipeline, also underwater where lakes Michigan and Huron connect.

Canadian oil transport giant Enbridge, who owns and operates Line 5, informed state officials late Tuesday of the dents, characterized as “very small” and posing “no threat to the pipeline,” Gov. Rick Snyder’s office said in a statement Wednesday.

“An anchor strike was the largest risk identified in a previous independent analysis of the Enbridge pipeline, which is apparently what happened in the Straits last week,” Snyder said.

Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy, in an e-mail to the Free Press Wednesday, said the dents were discovered in reviews undertaken following news of damage and coolant leaking from Wisconsin-based American Transmission Co. submerged power cables in the Straits. The cables lie a few hundred yards west of the western-most of Enbridge’s twin pipelines, Duffy said.

“Enbridge took immediate action after learning of the damage to ATC’s cables in the Straits of Mackinac – possibly caused by vessel activity that is under a marine casualty investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard,” Duffy said.

“Following a series of inspections of Line 5 in recent days, we have confirmed dents to both the East and West segments of Line 5. A review of all leak detection systems and available data indicates the structural integrity of the pipelines has not been compromised. We are working closely with the State, the Coast Guard and PHMSA (the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) to provide updates on our inspections and our plans moving forward.”

Duffy added that Enbridge is “taking immediate action to assess appropriate, reinforcing repairs.”

An image from underwater inspections of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac shows an area of missing protective coating and exposed steel. State officials are concerned, because it appears this damage was caused during the installation of anchor supports for the pipeline, without any repair or reporting of the coating damage. (Photo: Michigan Department of Environment)

Line 5 moves 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day through the Upper Peninsula, splitting into twin, underwater pipelines through the Straits, before returning to a single transmission pipeline through the Lower Peninsula and on to a hub in Sarnia, Ontario.

Concerned citizens and environmentalists have called for the decommissioning of the 65-year-old Straits pipelines, stating a spill like the one on Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline near the Kalamazoo River in 2010 would devastate the Great Lakes, shoreline and island communities, as well as the state’s economy.

“Pipelines do not belong in the Straits of Mackinac, period,” said Sean McBrearty, coordinator of Oil and Water Don’t Mix, a coalition of nonprofit organizations, citizens and businesses opposed to oil continuing to flow through the 65-year-old, underwater lines.

“Our state’s economy, tourism, and way of life revolves around keeping our Great Lakes in a pristine condition. There’s simply too much at stake to keep Line 5 in operation.”

Snyder called on Enbridge to accelerate both identification of anchor strike mitigation measures, as well as evaluation of alternatives to replace the Straits pipelines, measures called for in an agreement between Enbridge and state officials last November.

State officials have appeared supportive of a proposal to create a tunnel beneath the Straits, in which to operate a north-south oil pipeline and remove the lines from the water.

“Assuming studies show a tunnel is physically possible and construction would not cause significant environmental damage, the Governor will move to require Enbridge to construct the tunnel and decommission the existing Line 5 that runs under the Straits of Mackinac,” the statement from the governor’s office Wednesday stated.

Mike Shriberg, executive director for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center and a member of the state’s Pipeline Safety Advisory Board, questioned that approach.

“For the first time, Governor Snyder has called for the decommissioning of Line 5, which is the right thing to do,” Shriberg said. “However, pushing forward on the tunnel presumes that it is the best pathway for the state. What we know is that Line 5 is not critical infrastructure and that there are alternatives which do not endanger the Great Lakes.”

Enbridge has raised the anger of state officials over the past year with revelations the company knew a section of the required protective coating on its twin, underwater oil pipelines was damaged in 2014 — but did not make state officials aware of it until August 2017.

Enbridge has also failed to maintain an adequate spacing of anchor supports holding the pipeline on the Straits bottom, as required in its 1953 easement with the state. And amid a state-mandated review of anchor supports last year, Enbridge disclosed that of 48 anchor supports it had inspected, the majority had adjacent segments of the pipelines with missing, protective coating.

Lt. Gov. Brian Calley on Wednesday called for state Attorney General Bill Schuette to initiate legal action on behalf of the state against the ship’s owners and anyone else responsible for the cable and pipeline damage.

“There is no excuse for the ship’s actions, which risked devastating environmental harm as well as the loss of vital infrastructure for communications, electrical power and heat for residents of the Upper Peninsula,” he said in a statement.

“I have asked the Attorney General to begin legal action against the ship’s owners immediately to ensure every member of the maritime community understands the no-anchor zone is vital.”

But Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher Yaw said investigators were not yet ready to identify a particular ship responsible for the damage, and couldn’t yet confirm that an anchor strike caused the damage.

“We’re still investigating any causes,” he said. “That’s still being looked at.”

Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.