The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
Last week President Donald Trump’s bid to rescind the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which seeks to regulate emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants, was made easier by a Court of Appeals ruling that put a 26-state lawsuit challenging the plan on hold for 60 days without deciding on the plan’s legality. That decision followed a Department of Justice request—amid objections of 18 states, several cities and other groups—to halt the case. The court also granted a similar request to halt a regulation setting emissions limits for future power plants.
The ruling was a win for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt, who is working on the president’s behalf to review the Clean Power Plan. But it did not give him his desired unlimited hiatus, or “abeyance,” which would have put the case on hold while the EPA decides what to do about controlling carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants—an EPA mandate, under the Clean Air Act, that the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld. Instead, the litigants were given two weeks to submit briefs on whether the Clean Power Plan should be “remanded”—sent back to the EPA in lieu of the court deciding the case.
An EPA spokesperson acknowledged Pruitt’s partial victory.
“Pursuant to the president’s executive order, Administrator [Scott] Pruitt has already announced that EPA is reviewing the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan,” said J.P. Freire. “We are pleased that this order gives EPA the opportunity to proceed with that process.”
Others acknowledged that the court will probably never rule on the Clean Power Plan’s legality and that today’s order probably hastened the regulation’s demise.
“If the court had upheld the rule, it wouldn’t have prevented the new administration from revoking it, but it might have made this effort harder,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a partner at Bracewell and a former EPA air chief (subscription). “At the very least, today’s ruling means that it will not take as long for the administration to undo the Clean Power Plan.” He added that “I don’t think the D.C. Circuit has ever gone ahead and decided on the legality of a rule when a new administration says it plans to rescind or revise it.”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who leads the CPP defense, vowed to fight on in court, stating that “Today’s temporary pause in the litigation does not relieve EPA of its legal obligation to limit carbon pollution from its largest source: fossil-fueled power plants.”
Executive Order Could Expand U.S. Offshore Drilling
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that initiates the process of undoing former President Obama’s restrictions on offshore oil and natural gas drilling. The action could expand offshore energy development by issuing a multi-year review of oil and gas drilling in federally prohibited waters as well as an evaluation of the status of marine sanctuaries. Specifically, the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy instructs the Interior Department to revise the Obama administration’s five-year plan for leasing federal waters and the Commerce Department to refrain from naming or expanding marine sanctuaries and to review existing ones.
At the signing ceremony, Trump emphasized that he is rescinding Obama’s executive action to indefinitely put much of U.S. Arctic waters and some of the Atlantic off limits to drillers.
“It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban. So, you hear that? It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban,” said the president.
But whether the Trump administration can actually reverse this separate offshore drilling ban is unclear. In issuing the ban, Obama used an obscure provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. That act does not explicitly allow a president to get rid of a designation.
Also unclear is the impact of the order, which comes as low oil prices and soaring onshore production have significantly dampened industry demand for offshore leases.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke emphasized that the order won’t immediately open up the outer continental shelf to drilling but that it will trigger a two-year public process to reconsider which areas are suitable for leasing for oil, gas and wind development. He also added that he was uncertain how the plan would take into account melting Arctic ice.
“I have not thought about climate change,” Zinke said. “I’m sure we’ll look at that.”
EPA, DOE Temporarily Spared Big Cuts, But Not Climate Info on Government Websites
A bipartisan government funding deal unveiled Monday by congressional leaders to avert a government shutdown tomorrow would make much smaller cuts in climate and energy programs (subscription) than those proposed by President Donald Trump for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year. Instead of a $247 million cut, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will get a $81 million cut. The deal actually increases clean energy and science funding by $17 million, increases the Department of Energy’s Office of Science funding by $42 million, and increases funding for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a program Trump wants eliminated, by $15 million (subscription). But funding for renewable energy programs was reduced by $808 million compared to the Obama administration’s budget request.
The Trump administration is not waiting for the 2018 fiscal year budget battle to make other cuts reflecting its budget priorities: on the eve of Saturday’s People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities, where tens of thousands of demonstrators sounded warnings about the Earth’s warming climate, the administration began diminishing climate-related information on government websites, deleting, for example, a climate change portal from the EPA website and adding new information about “energy independence.”
Notably, statements that “the evidence is clear” on climate change and that human activity is the phenomenon’s main driver—language that ran counter to the view EPA head Scott Pruitt put forth during an appearance on CNBC in March—were replaced by a message that the EPA website “is being updated.”
A web page on the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s regulation for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel-fired power plants, now routes visitors to an “energy independence” page focused on the Trump administration’s efforts to undo the plan.
“The first page to be updated is a page reflecting President Trump’s Executive Order on Energy Independence, which calls for a review of the so-called Clean Power Plan,” the agency stated. “Language associated with the Clean Power Plan, written by the last administration, is out of date. Similarly, content related to climate and regulation is also being reviewed.”
Although some of the deleted pages are still available through EPA’s search engine, they are no longer organized under a climate-change heading.
President Trump has also reflected his budget priorities with recent energy and environmental post appointments, most recently tapping Daniel Simmons, who has questioned the value of promoting renewable energy sources and curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, to oversee the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Simmons will serve as acting assistant secretary until someone is confirmed by the Senate for the post.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
The U.S.-India climate agreement announced January 25 creates a new agreement between the second- and third-largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world but does not have the strength of the U.S.-China climate deal reached last year. Rather than committing India to cap its emissions, the U.S.-India deal called for “enhancing bilateral climate change cooperation” in advance of the United Nations effort to reach an international agreement on emissions and finance in Paris in December.
Specifically, the deal calls for cooperation on reducing emissions of fluorinated gases and beefing up India’s promotion of clean energy investment. The two countries also renewed their commitment to the U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center, extending by five years funding for research on advanced biofuels, solar energy, and building energy efficiency as well as launching new research on smart grid and grid storage technology.
“It’s my feeling that the agreement that has been concluded between the United States and China does not impose any pressure on us,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, adding, “But there is pressure. When we think about the future generations and what kind of world we are going to give them, then there is pressure. Climate change itself is a huge pressure. Global warming is a huge pressure.”
The agreements have not bridged the gap in the two countries’ perspectives on UN climate talks: the United States wants major emitters to take legal responsibility for climate change action, but India argues that the United States and other developed countries have not followed through on their own pledges and should not demand that developing countries take on new emissions reductions responsibilities.
President Moves to Shut Artic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Drilling
While proposing to open portions of the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas extraction, an Obama administration plan would prohibit energy development on nearly 10 million acres off the Alaskan coast. The administration has also proposed setting aside more than 12 million acres in Alaska’s Artic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, squashing opportunities for oil exploration there.
Less than 40 percent of the refuge currently has the wilderness designation, the highest level of protection available for public lands. The president’s plan would block efforts to drill for oil on a 1.5-million-acre portion of the refuge thought to contain up to 10.3 billion barrels of petroleum.
In a press conference, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said that President Obama has declared “war” on her state. “The fight is on and we are not backing down.”
In a White House blog post, John Podesta a counselor to the president and Mike Boots, leader of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, noted that the United States today is the world’s number-one producer of oil and natural gas and that the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge “is too precious to put at risk” of an oil-related accident. “By designating the area as wilderness, Congress could preserve the Coastal Plain in perpetuity—ensuring that this wild, free, beautiful, and bountiful place remains in trust for Alaska Natives and for all Americans.”
Increasing Frequency of La Niñas Attributed to Climate Change
A new climate modeling study published in Nature Climate Change suggests that by century’s end human-caused climate change will double the frequency of La Niñas—weather patterns associated with a temperature drop in the central Pacific Ocean—resulting in floods, droughts, and other extreme weather events.
Extreme La Niña events might be experienced about every 13 years, rather than every 23 years, as they are now, but not like clockwork, according to lead study author Wenju Cai, a climate scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Aspendale, Australia. “We’re only saying that on average, we expect to get one every 13 years,” said Cai. “We cannot predict exactly when they will happen, but we suggest that on average, we are going to get more.”
The study finds that powerful La Niñas will immediately follow intense El Niños, causing weather patterns to alternate between wet and dry extremes.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
It’s official. Last year was the warmest year in history for the contiguous United States with at least 356 record high temperatures tied or broken, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Average temperatures in 2012 were above the 20th century average by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures also beat a previous record set in 1998 by a full degree, even though 2012 was not an El Niño year. “Well, 1998’s heat was attributed to a strong El Niño, said Meteorologist Matt Mosteiko. “For 2012, there wasn’t one main factor that led to warm temps.”
Researchers on the NOAA study were reluctant to connect specific weather events in 2012 to climate change, but they did describe the data as “part of a longer-term trend of hotter, drier and potentially more extreme weather” to The Washington Post.
While global temperatures for 2012 are not yet available, predictions for temperature increases globally were released. But the United Kingdom’s Met Office downgraded its previous forecast for average global temperatures through 2017. The cut—20 percent—takes the average to 0.43 degrees Celsius above the 1971-2000 average, down from 0.54 degrees. The report led some media outlets to claim “global warming is at a standstill,” but others said that isn’t true. Rather, natural fluctuations in the climate system are currently having a combined cooling effect on the atmospheric temperatures, which is damping the full extent of human-caused temperature rise.
Australia has also been experiencing record-breaking heat of late, which has led to a rash of wildfires in some of the country’s most populous areas. The average temperature on Tuesday reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit—the hottest since record-keeping began in 1911. The extreme heat forced meteorologists to add a new color to their temperature maps to show temperatures near 129 degrees.
Energy in Arctic under Review
Shell Oil has experienced more than a dozen mishaps as it pulls together offshore drilling operations in the Arctic. Just last week off the coast of Alaska, Shell grounded its drilling vessel, the Kulluk. Some reports say the ship’s lifeboats may have leaked diesel fuel.
This series of accidents has led the U.S. Department of the Interior to initiate a review of Shell’s exploration efforts to help guide future permitting in the region. The process, officials have said, is estimated to take 60 days. The outcome could threaten the company’s drilling plans for 2013 during the limited window when weather conditions and regulators allow exploration. “It is troubling that there was such a series of mishaps,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “There is a troubling sense I have that so many things went wrong. It may be that Shell isn’t even ready to move forward in 2013, because of assessments taking place of the Kulluk.”
Cities Adapt as Full Extent of Sandy Relief Remains in Limbo
As the northeastern U.S. continues to recover from Hurricane Sandy, President Barack Obama signed a bill to provide emergency federal aid to the hurricane’s victims in three of the hardest hit states—Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. The $9.7 billion, earmarked mostly to help pay for flood insurance, is only a piece of the $60 billion sought to aid in recovery following the October storm. Lawmakers are expected to weigh in on the remainder of the package Jan. 15. House Republicans asked members to submit amendments to the relief package by Friday.
Some states aren’t waiting on Washington. New York now has a new commission focused on how to cope with worsening storms. So far, the expert panel’s recommendations—still part of a draft report— include measures such as turning industrial shoreline into oyster beds, storm barriers with moveable gates and rail connections between commuter lines.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
