Climate 411

Pruitt admits lying, blames others, and leaves behind a cloud of questions: 3 takeaways from today’s hearings

By Elgie Holstein / Published: April 26, 2018

After a month of revelations and allegations about his tenure in EPA and in Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt finally had a chance to provide straight answers to Congress about his mounting ethics problems.  The results were not encouraging:

  1. Caught:

    The top story coming out of today’s hearings is that Scott Pruitt admitted that he lied.

    He told Members of Congress that he knew about his employee raises, despite having told Fox News on April 4 that “I found out this yesterday.”

    CNN reports:

    “Several senior EPA officials reacted in shock Thursday. One EPA official told CNN that a sense of ‘a collective “Oh sh**” came out of EPA HQ’ when Pruitt admitted he knew of the raises.

    Aides for weeks knew that Pruitt had lied in his Fox News interview, but were stunned that he contradicted himself so publicly on Thursday.”

    Added John Roberts from Fox News: “This may be the end of the line.”

  2. Says it not his fault:

    Asked about multiple accusations of ethical problems, Pruitt shifted blame to everyone else: Milan Hupp, Ryan Jackson, Kell Kelly, and anyone else carrying out his orders, and at one point, “the process.”

  3. Dodges the Questions:

     

    Many big questions were left unanswered, including:

    • $43,000 Phone Booth: Pruitt insisted that he asked for a “secure line” because of a single telephone call. What was so important about that incident? And Pruitt went on to admit that such calls are “rare”—if so, why can’t he go to one of EPA’s two other secure phones, as his predecessors did?
    • Illegal Use of Government staff: Pruitt said that he was “not aware” of Millan Hupp spending government time looking for his apartment. Unanswered: Did he ask Millan Hupp—or anyone else on his staff — to look for an apartment for him?
    • Demoting Staff: Did Pruitt tell his chief of staff not to come to travel planning meetings after he raised concerns about Pruitt’s travel?
    • Kell Kelly: Did Pruitt ever inquire why Kell Kelly was banned for life from banking by the FDIC when he hired him?
    • Condo: On the condo lease, why was Stephen Hart’s name originally typed in as “landlord,” but then scratched out and the name of his wife scribbled in?
    • Private Jet: Was it Pruitt who sought to have the EPA pay $100,000 per month to rent a private jet, as Trump campaign staffer and EPA employee Kevin Chmielewski claims?
    • Morocco Trip: Before traveling to Morocco, why was Pruitt’s only briefing before the trip conducted by political staff, not career staff in the agency’s international affairs office, which typically coordinates foreign trips?
    • Oklahoma Travel: As Oklahoma Attorney General, in January 2016 Pruitt traveled to Washington, D.C., costing taxpayers more than $1,000 to meet with the Federalist Society and Club for Growth. Did Pruitt reimburse taxpayers? Did he use taxpayer money for political or personal trips?
    • Enforcement: Why did Pruitt try to end EPA funding for Justice Department Superfund enforcement efforts, and cut EPA enforcement against criminal polluters?
    • Super-polluting trucks: EPA proposed a loophole for super-polluting glider trucks, citing an industry-funded study now being investigated for research misconduct. Will it withdraw the proposal?

There are many more unanswered questions .

Posted in News / Comments are closed

Proof that the Clean Power Plan’s strategy for cutting carbon pollution is the industry standard

By Charlie Jiang / Published: April 26, 2018

The public comment period is just about to close on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s reckless attempt to repeal the Clean Power Plan, and thousands of Americans — including mayors, CEOs, energy experts, and citizens concerned about the threats Pruitt’s actions pose to our children’s health and future — have already spoken out in vigorous opposition to the misguided repeal effort.

There is a lot at stake. The Clean Power Plan would prevent 4,500 early deaths and 90,000 childhood asthma attacks each year. It would cut carbon pollution by 32 percent from 2005 levels, and would substantially reduce other harmful air pollutants from power plants.

By slashing air pollution and helping mitigate the threats of climate change, the Clean Power Plan would secure significant benefits to public health while growing the clean energy economy.

Yet, as Pruitt continues his misguided effort to turn back the clock on lifesaving climate protections, momentum is growing in states and the power sector to slash carbon pollution and usher in a clean energy future.

States and companies are moving away from carbon-intensive sources of electricity generation, and are increasing their use of cleaner technologies — deploying the same cost-effective strategies to cut carbon pollution that EPA relied upon when establishing emission reduction targets under the Clean Power Plan. Pruitt’s attempt to repeal the Clean Power Plan is putting this flexible approach to ambitious and low-cost emission reductions under attack.

Read More »

Posted in Clean Air Act, Clean Power Plan, Economics, Energy, EPA litgation, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Policy, Pruitt / Comments are closed

86 Questions and Counting for Scott Pruitt

By EDF Blogs / Published: April 25, 2018

By Elgie Holstein

Spring has been EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s season of scandal, with each day bringing fresh allegations of the EPA Administrator’s reckless disregard for his boss’s promises to “drain the swamp.”

Worse for the country, he has adopted a sense of entitlement, which appears to have long pre-dated his arrival in Washington.  In so doing, he has broken laws, flouted ethics rules, ignored congressional intent and requests, and sought the trappings of power and prestige.

A maelstrom of scandals throughout the first year of Pruitt’s tenure surfaced questions regarding his first-class flights, a sweetheart condo deal from the wife of an energy lobbyist, unauthorized pay raises for close associates, his penchant for secrecy and love of perks, and the demotion of EPA employees who questioned his spending.

Since then, another flood of stories has generated even more questions:  An EPA inspector general report showing that Pruitt didn’t tell the truth when he said he knew nothing in advance about  the raises. A string of allegations by former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski.  An OMB investigation of his $43,000 phone booth (which the GAO says was illegally paid for, and which, in any case, was unneeded). A meeting with a lobbyist who co-owned the condo he rented.  Questionable insider dealings during Pruitt’s days in Oklahoma.

It is regrettable that each new story brings little surprise at how naturally Pruitt navigates and takes advantage of the swamp. But he has proven himself to be a man who shamelessly advances his own political ambitions and the desires of polluters at the expense of Americans who must watch a public official thumb his nose at ethical behavior while pursuing an agenda that makes our air, water, and land dirtier, and climate change worse.

In all, we now count at least 86 questions that need answering, with more seeming to emerge every day.  As Pruitt prepares to face two Congressional committees Thursday, lawmakers are noticing the scandals unfolding before them.

“If the allegations are true,” notes Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX), “they are troubling, and we should expect higher of any person in public office.”

Representative Flores is right—we should expect better. We should also expect that an individual tasked to lead EPA will prioritize the well-being of families and the environment over the wishes of close friends and industry. Pruitt fails on both accounts.

Two hearings may not be enough to cover all the questions.  But here are ten of the biggest questions to which Americans deserve answers:

  1. Why did Mr. Pruitt tell Fox News he had no prior knowledge of raises given to two staffers he brought from Oklahoma when an EPA Inspector General report now shows that Pruitt signed off on them?
  2. Did Pruitt sometimes pick travel destinations based on his personal desires, and ask his staff to “find me something to do” to justify the use of taxpayer funds, as a former EPA staffer alleges?  How many taxpayer-funded trips home to Oklahoma or elsewhere were justified on the basis of a single hurriedly scheduled meeting?
  3. If Pruitt needs to fly first class for security reasons, why did he fly coachon personal trips home to see Oklahoma football games—when he could not concoct a reason for the taxpayers to pay his way?
  4. Did Pruitt really text his chief of staff to tell him not to come to travel planning meetings after he raised concerns about the Administrator’s travel?
  5. Why were at least five EPA officials (four of them senior)reassigned or demoted, or asking for new jobs after questioning Pruitt’s spending priorities?
  6. Will EPA’s new #2 official, former coal and energy lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, be granted any waivers from his ethics pledge or other restrictions on helping former clients?
  7. Did one of Pruitt’s staffers spend weekshelping Pruitt search for an apartment, contacting agents and touring properties?  For what other personal chores did Mr. Pruitt enlist government workers?
  8. During Pruitt’s December 2017 trip to Morocco to promote natural gas — which is not part of the EPA’s mission — did he discuss Cheniere Energy Inc., which is partly owned by Donald Trump’s friend Carl Icahn?  (Icahn helped promote Pruitt for the EPA job.)
  9. Does Pruitt agree with EPA air chief William Wehrum that the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which protect children from serious harm, “may not be necessary?”
  10. What is the full story behind the lavish home of a lobbyist eventually making its way to a shell company of which Pruitt was a stakeholder? That same lobbyist’s client would receive favorable treatment from Pruitt in the future—were any backroom deals made during the transfer of the property?

As a cabinet-level official, Scott Pruitt is supposed to set an example for public servants.  Instead, he has created a growing cloud of questions about his ethics, his honesty and his fitness for public life.  On behalf of America’s taxpayers, Congress needs to start asking Scott Pruitt questions — a lot of them.

Posted in News / Comments are closed

It’s up to us to protect the Clean Power Plan

By Martha Roberts / Published: April 23, 2018

This week is a crucial moment for climate progress.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is moving ahead in his efforts to revoke the Clean Power Plan, one of our most important efforts to tackle the climate crisis. The Clean Power Plan provides our only national limit on carbon pollution from existing power plants — America’s largest stationary source of carbon pollution.

EPA’s public comment period for Pruitt’s plan to repeal Clean Power Plan will close this Thursday.

Americans have only a short time left to raise their voice to oppose this reckless rollback. You can make your voice heard here.

Here’s what’s at stake

The Clean Power Plan helps us achieve approximately 32 percent reductions in carbon pollution from existing power plants compared to 2005, while also substantially reducing other harmful pollution from power plants.

EPA estimates that the Clean Power Plan would prevent an estimated 90,000 childhood asthma attacks and as many as 4,500 early deaths each year once fully implemented. These public health benefits would be imperiled if Pruitt succeeds in repealing this vital protection.

Public health experts, business voices and local leaders oppose revoking the Clean Power Plan

The American Lung Association joined with seventeen other public health organizations to denounce the Clean Power Plan rollback, calling it “inconsistent with EPA’s core mission of protecting public health and the environment” and highlighting that “the health impacts of climate change demand immediate action.”

Apple Inc. recently urged Pruitt not to repeal the Clean Power Plan, noting it “gives domestic companies a competitive edge” and that based on Apple’s extensive experience as a large energy consumer “the Clean Power Plan provides achievable targets with no adverse impact on [electricity] reliability or resiliency.”

244 mayors from 48 states and territories, representing 52 million Americans, sent a letter to Pruitt stating:

“[W]e strongly oppose the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, which would put our citizens at risk and undermine our efforts to prepare for and protect against the worst impacts of climate change.”

In a recent poll, 70 percent of registered voters in America supported setting strict limits on carbon pollution produced by coal-fired power plants.

We’ve kept a list of quotes opposing the Clean Power Plan rollback, affirming a commitment to combating climate change, and supporting strong action to invest in clean energy solutions. It includes quotes from elected leaders, business leaders, consumer advocates, faith leaders, and more — you can read it in full here.

Even more climate progress is possible

More and more evidence shows that achieving the Clean Power Plan’s goals will be even cheaper than expected. Yet Pruitt’s proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan is using underhanded accounting gimmicks to inflate his estimate of compliance costs.

If anything, lower than expected costs and the alarming pace of climate impacts mean the Clean Power Plan’s targets should be stronger.

Who benefits from a rollback? Pruitt’s political allies

Pruitt has been all over the news lately for his cozy relationships with lobbyists, lavish spending, and other self-aggrandizing abuses of his office. All these reports underscore that his first priority is not the well-being of the American public.

It’s no surprise to hear that organizations that helped fund Pruitt’s political ambitions received extensive contributions from Clean Power Plan opponents, including $25,000 from coal company Murray Energy just one month before the D.C. Circuit Court heard the Clean Power Plan oral argument.

Scott Pruitt built his political career by suing relentlessly to block EPA safeguards — including filing four separate lawsuits to oppose the Clean Power Plan. Pruitt’s proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan would serve his political and financial backers at the expense of the health and safety of American families.

The time to speak up is now

The window for public input opposing this senseless decision will close this Thursday, April 26. Join with Americans across the country to voice your opposition by clicking here.

Posted in Clean Power Plan, EPA litgation, News, Policy, Pruitt / Comments are closed

Administrator Pruitt opened the door to making Houston’s air toxics problem worse

By Tomas Carbonell / Published: April 10, 2018

Residents of Houston, Texas – our nation’s fourth largest city – have long been burdened with a serious air pollution problem.

Between 2013 and 2015, the Houston area reported unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone (“smog”) on an average of over 23 days each year. Last year, the American Lung Association ranked Houston as the sixteenth-most polluted city in the nation for year-round particle pollution.

The city’s massive industrial base – which includes two of the nation’s four largest petroleum refineries and more than 400 chemical manufacturing plants – spews a wide array of carcinogenic and toxic substances like benzene, 1,3-butadiene, and formaldehyde. The Environmental Protection Agency’s latest National Air Toxics Assessment, not surprisingly, found elevated cancer risks in many Houston neighborhoods as a result of these pollutants.

Recent records also show that pollution releases from these industrial facilities in the wake of Hurricane Harvey are also much higher than initially reported.

Yet EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, rather than working to reduce this dangerous pollution, has opened the door to even greater risks to public health.

On January 25th, Pruitt’s EPA abruptly overturned a long-standing policy that was designed to prevent large industrial sources from increasing their emissions of hazardous air pollutants such as benzene. Under the new policy, many industrial facilities that are now subject to tough emission standards for “major” sources would be allowed to become subject to weaker emission standards, or even avoid federal emission limits altogether.

This dangerous new “Air Toxics Loophole” was issued without any opportunity for public comment, and with no consideration of its public health or air pollution impacts.

That’s why, we joined with six other public health and environmental organizations last month to file a legal challenge to the Air Toxics Loophole in a federal court of appeals

Today, we are releasing a white paper that takes a closer look at what the Air Toxics Loophole might mean for emissions of hazardous air pollutants in the Houston-Galveston area. We used EPA’s own enforcement and compliance database, EPA’s most recent National Emissions Inventory (NEI), and a careful review of federal permitting records to identify facilities that might be able to take advantage of the Air Toxics Loophole – and to estimate what the potential emissions impact might be.

The results aren’t pretty. In the Houston area alone, we identified 18 facilities that are potentially eligible to use the new Air Toxics Loophole. These facilities collectively emitted approximately 183 tons (366,000 pounds) of hazardous air pollutants in 2014. If all of these facilities exploited the Air Toxics Loophole to the maximum degree, we estimated that annual hazardous air pollution from these facilities would increase by almost two-and-a-half times – to a total of about 450 tons (900,000 pounds).

Many of these facilities are located in communities that are highly vulnerable to the harmful impacts of air pollution: half are located in areas where more than one in five people live in poverty and where people of color make up more than 30 percent of the population. On average, almost 20,000 people live within three miles of each facility in our dataset.

We aren’t the only ones to point out the potential risks of the Air Toxics Loophole. A report issued by the Environmental Integrity Project last month identified twelve additional facilities across the Midwest that could take advantage of the Air Toxics Loophole – and estimated that emissions from those facilities could more than quadruple to 540,000 pounds per year if they were to do so.

EPA’s own staff have pointed out the risks as well. Under the George W. Bush Administration, EPA floated – but never finalized – a proposal that was very similar to the Air Toxics Loophole. EPA received critical comments from state air regulators and EPA’s regional offices that raised the same concerns about the potential increases in toxic air pollution.

That Administrator Pruitt has decided to plow ahead again despite those warnings, and with no public input and no analysis of health impacts, is unconscionable. The results of our Houston analysis underscore how reckless that decision was.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this EPA has denied the public an opportunity to participate in a major decision that will impact so many lives. Over the last year, EPA has taken a series of actions to roll back important safeguards, often at the demand of industry representatives, with no opportunity for the public to comment. Luckily, courts have been serving as an important backstop and are rejecting agency actions taken with disregard for required administrative procedures.

Let’s hope that the Air Toxics Loophole meets the same fate.

Photo: Manchester Ship Channel in Houston. Credit: Garth Lenz/International League of Conservation Photographers

Posted in Clean Air Act, EPA litgation, Policy / Comments are closed

Cherry blossoms: Predicting peak bloom in a warming world with weirder weather

By Casey Ivanovich / Published: April 9, 2018

USDA photo by Scott Bauer

Every March, Washington D.C. anxiously anticipates the arrival of the city’s world-famous cherry blossoms.

Millions of people flood the National Mall each year to observe the “peak bloom” – defined by the National Park Service as the day when 70 percent of the Yoshino cherry blossoms surrounding the Tidal Basin have opened.

Fluctuating weather patterns render predictions of peak bloom notoriously fickle. Experts consider it impossible to accurately estimate the cherry blossoms’ vibrant debut more than 10 days in advance. And 2018 was no exception with the peak bloom date predictions changing three times.

While bloom forecasting is a historically temperamental exercise, climate change is now further complicating matters.

As global average surface temperatures continue to rise, D.C. has felt the heat. Weather station measurements from the city have recorded a 1.6 degree Celsius per century increase in regional temperature – double the global average warming rate. The warmer winters associated with these increasing temperatures may help explain why between 1921 and 2016 peak bloom dates have shifted earlier by about five days.

A warming regional climate may influence seasonal trends, but blooms are still heavily affected by short term changes in the weather. While 2018 peak bloom was originally projected to occur between March 17th  and 20th – early in the season due to the city’s exceptionally warm February – a major snowstorm and cold temperatures persisting through March delayed the arrival until April 5th.

It may initially seem that heavy snowstorms and colder temperatures are inconsistent with climate change. However, there is a growing body of evidence that shows how changes in atmospheric circulation patterns associated with rapid warming in the Arctic may actually be linked to these dramatic cold snaps in the mid-latitudes. Increased moisture in the atmosphere from a warming world also allows for heavier precipitation events, including snowfall.

These opposing consequences of climate change – hotter temperatures with intermittent cold snaps – make the bloom schedule of D.C.’s cherry blossoms even more complex. But one thing is clear: predictions will certainly not get any easier.

Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Extreme Weather, News, Science / Comments are closed