June, 29 2015, 01:30pm EDT
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Supreme Court Decision Threatens Public Health, Won't Revive Big Coal
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with industry challengers, and overturned the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) historic Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which are designed to safeguard local communities against dangerous pollution from power plants. The Supreme Court's decision reversed the Court of Appeal's ruling in a five-to-four decision and sent the rule back to the EPA to provide an additional assessment of the costs of the standards to industry. It instructed the Court of Appeals for the D.C.
WASHINGTON
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with industry challengers, and overturned the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) historic Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which are designed to safeguard local communities against dangerous pollution from power plants. The Supreme Court's decision reversed the Court of Appeal's ruling in a five-to-four decision and sent the rule back to the EPA to provide an additional assessment of the costs of the standards to industry. It instructed the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to determine whether the standards will remain in place while EPA completes the required analysis.
The MATS protections, which were finalized in 2012, require coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of toxic mercury by 91 percent and strongly curtail the emissions of other toxic pollutants, like arsenic, chromium, and hydrochloric acid gas, that are connected with a litany of health problems. These protections are largely aimed at protecting young children and expectant mothers, since exposure to mercury in the womb can lead to lifelong neurological damage and severe delays in cognitive development.
Sierra Club was among the public health, civil rights, and environmental groups who joined EPA in defending MATS against industry's challenges in the Court of Appeals and before the Supreme Court.
In response to the Supreme Court's decision, Mary Anne Hitt, Director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign released the following statement:
"As a mother, I am appalled by the Court's willingness to delay protections that would ensure the right of all children to grow up safe, healthy, and protected from pollution. The protections this court rejected would shield our kids from the lifelong neurological damage brought on by exposure to toxic mercury, and prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 asthma attacks annually.
"Practically speaking, today's decision won't revive the fortunes of Big Coal or slow down our nation's transition to clean energy. Most utilities have long since made decisions about how to meet the standard. Only a few dozen coal plants are still operating today with no pollution controls for mercury and air toxics and no clear plans to install them.
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"However, this flawed decision does raise concerns for our children and pregnant women, as utilities may further delay compliance decisions, or use this as an excuse to refuse to run their pollution controls. That's why the EPA and the Obama Administration must now quickly propose revised safeguards that restores at least the same level of protections. It's time to act to ensure progress made in cleaning up noxious pollution isn't stalled any further, so that children across the America can grow up safe and healthy."
Sanjay Narayan, Sierra Club's Managing Attorney on Mercury and Air Toxics, released the following statement:
"Congress decided more than two decades ago that no child should be born with brain damage or other neurological harm, simply because industrial polluters refuse to pay for pollution controls. But today, five justices of the Supreme Court have decided to make an exception for Big Coal -- the industry responsible for the majority of mercury, arsenic, and acid gas pollution in the United States.
"Today's decision strikes down a rule that would save lives, providing as much as $9 in health benefits for every $1 spent by industry to clean up their toxic pollution. Even while accepting those benefits, the Court chose to give industry's lobbyists another chance to weaken the rule, requiring EPA to address industry's costs -- even though the Agency already did so -- and even though we know that these standards were a tremendous bargain for the American public."
"Given the massive pollution emitted by coal- and oil-fired power plants, and the equally massive public benefits of curtailing that pollution, we expect that EPA will be able to promptly re-instate the rule, and complete the analysis demanded by the five-judge majority. In the meantime, unfortunately, the Court has placed the public at risk of unnecessary deaths, asthma attacks, and neurological damage."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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Key Senate Panel Launches Probe of Big Oil-OPEC Collusion
Illegal coordination between oil companies and OPEC may have cost U.S. families thousands of dollars in higher costs for gas and other necessities.
Jun 27, 2024
Announcing a probe into potential efforts by fossil fuel companies to illegally coordinate with international oil producers in order to fix prices, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Wednesday wrote to 18 oil giants demanding that they turn over communications with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, commonly known as OPEC.
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote to companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, weeks after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources Company of attempting to collude with OPEC.
Text messages, WhatsApp communications, and records from in-person meetings showed that Scott Sheffield tried to collude with representatives of OPEC countries to manipulate oil and gas production worldwide and raise oil and gas prices.
The commission made its discovery while reviewing a plan by ExxonMobil to acquire Pioneer in a $64.5 billion deal.
"The FTC's findings indicate that Sheffield and Pioneer may not have been the only individual or entity engaging in such collusive activities," wrote Whitehouse to the 18 oil giants, citing numerous examples.
"We're talking $500-1000 dollars of extra cost per year to Americans through direct and indirect effects of this conspiracy."
"In view of the findings against Sheffield, I seek to understand whether other oil producers operating in the United States may also have been coordinating with OPEC and OPEC+ representatives concerning oil production output, crude oil prices, and the relationship between the production and pricing of oil products," said Whitehouse.
Whitehouse called on the companies to provide communications between and among companies' corporate and affiliate officers and members of the OPEC Secretariat and OPEC+ concerning oil production output, crude oil prices, and the relationship between the production and pricing of oil products, dating from January 1, 2020 through the present.
The companies have until July 12 to provide the materials, the senator said.
Whitehouse noted that efforts by Sheffield and, potentially, other oil executives, to illegally coordinate oil production and prices with OPEC, may have had major, tangible effects on American families. He cited an analysis by the American Economic Liberties Project which found that "crude oil price-fixing schemes may have caused over 25% of the increase in inflation that hurt so many American families throughout 2021 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic."
"Since the U.S. consumes 7 billion barrels of oil annually, the amount saved by shale oil drillers during their price war with OPEC was $140 billion to $210 billion a year," wrote Matt Stoller, the group's research director.
"Once that price war ended, presumably so did the savings," Stoller continued. "The cost itself is likely a lot higher because pulling shale off the market when demand spiked probably caused prices to increase by much more than $20-30 a barrel. Anyway, we're talking $500-1000 dollars of extra cost per year to Americans through direct and indirect effects of this conspiracy. This cost shows up most obviously in the form of more expensive gas, but higher oil prices increase the price of everything right down to potato chips because of gas being a primary cost in distribution of goods and services. For a family of four, that's two to four thousand dollars a year in higher costs."
Whitehouse wrote in his letter to the oil company that he was "concerned about the possibility that oil and gas companies could be engaging in collusive, anti-competitive activities with OPEC+ that would raise crude oil prices, resulting in higher costs not only for American families, but also for the U.S. government when it acquires crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve."
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Supreme Court Puts Countless 'Lives at Risk' by Ruling Against Clean Air
"With this decision, the Supreme Court has abandoned any pretense of neutrality in cases involving environmental regulations," an expert said.
Jun 27, 2024
Health and environmental groups decried a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday that suspended an air pollution rule with far-reaching implications set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The justices ruled 5-4 in Ohio v. EPA to nullify the rule, designed to protect people in states downwind from smog-forming pollution, until the case can be decided on its merits in federal court, siding with the industrial polluters and upwind states who'd petitioned them to do so.
"With this decision, the Supreme Court has abandoned any pretense of neutrality in cases involving environmental regulations," Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said in a statement.
"The Court's order puts thousands of lives at risk, forces downwind states to regulate their industries more tightly, and tells big polluters that it's open season on our environmental laws," he added.
A coalition of health and environmental groups, including Earthjustice, agreed that the ruling would have devastating effects.
"Today's decision is deeply disappointing," the coalition wrote in a joint statement. "It will result almost immediately in pollution that endangers the health of millions of people."
Initial thoughts on Ohio v. EPA - Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion reflects two longstanding trends in his environmental law jurisprudence: deep skepticism of agency experts and emphasis on state authority over environmental protection. You can read my analysis of these trends…
— Rachel Rothschild (@ProfRRothschild) June 27, 2024
The legal dispute stems from the EPA's 2015 ozone pollution regulations. States were required to issue plans showing compliance, and last year the EPA determined that 23 of the plans were insufficient, issuing its own plan for those states. The agency said that in 2026 alone, the multi-state plan would prevent about 1,300 premature deaths.
The EPA plan set off a flurry of legal challenges by fossil fuel companies, power companies, and related trade associations, as well as upwind states. Some challenges were successful in getting federal courts to temporarily suspend the EPA rules in individual states. However, the consolidated case, Ohio v. EPA, hasn't yet been heard by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and that court denied a request for a suspension of the rule in the meantime.
The plaintiffs then sought emergency relief from the rule at the Supreme Court, arguing that it could cost "hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in costs over the next 12 to 18 months." The Supreme Court normally dismisses such relief requests, but in this case not only accepted the case onto its shadow docket, but took the unusual step of hearing oral arguments, which most shadow docket cases don't have, as they tend to deal with stays and injunctions, and not the fully-fledged merits of a case.
At the oral arguments, in February, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed concern that the case was even before the court, given that it hadn't even been heard on its merits by the D.C. Circuit court.
"What I’m a little concerned about is that really your argument is just boiling down to we think we have a meritorious claim and we don't want to have to follow the law while we’re challenging it," Jackson said to the plaintiffs' legal team. "And I don’t understand why every single person who is challenging a rule doesn’t have the same set of circumstances."
Jackson is one of three liberal justices on the court, but it was in fact conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett who authored what The New York Times called a "spirited" dissent to Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion.
"The court today enjoins the enforcement of a major Environmental Protection Agency rule based on an underdeveloped theory that is unlikely to succeed on the merits," Barrett wrote. "In so doing, the court grants emergency relief in a fact-intensive and highly technical case without fully engaging with both the relevant law and the voluminous record."
Rachel Rothschild, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote on social media that Gorsuch's opinion drew on his "deep skepticism of agency experts and emphasis on state authority over environmental protection."
The conservative justices' aversion to agency expertise was also evident in both its 2022 ruling against the EPA's climate change rules and its 2023 ruling against the EPA's water pollution rules.
The Center for American Progress wrote in February that a loss in Ohio v. EPA would be another "devastating reversal" for the EPA as the agency struggles to assert "the authorities that Congress has explicitly granted it."
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'Environmental Justice Nightmare': FERC Approves Major LNG Export Terminal Despite Biden Pause
"Even with FERC's reckless decision to approve CP2, the project cannot move forward without all federal permits, including those currently paused by the Department of Energy," one climate advocate said.
Jun 27, 2024
In what the Sunrise Movementcalled a "disastrous decision," the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted 2-1 on Thursday to approve a certification for Venture Global's controversial Calcasieu Pass 2 liquefied natural gas terminal. The approval comes despite the fact that the company's first Calcasieu Pass terminal violated its air pollution permits more than 2,000 times during its first year in operation.
While expected, FERC's decision was widely condemned by climate justice advocates and frontline community groups. At the same time, CP2's opponents emphasized that the plant is unlikely to be built while the Department of Energy has paused the approval of LNG exports while it considers their impacts on the climate, consumers, and local communities.
"A rubber stamp from FERC is business-as-usual for fossil fuel projects," Lukas Ross, climate and energy justice deputy director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Thankfully CP2 has a long way to go and we intend to fight it every step of the way. No amount of lobbying will make this project anything other than a climate and environmental justice nightmare."
"We refuse to sink. We are going to fight them here. We are going to fight them at home. This is far from over."
Environmental groups say that CP2 is a "carbon bomb" that would emit 20 times more climate pollution over its lifetime than the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.
"CP2 is a climate catastrophe," the Sunrise Movement wrote on social media. "It would produce more emissions than 46 coal-fired power plants and spew air pollution into marginalized communities."
It is also a key test case for a massive LNG buildout that threatens to raise domestic energy prices and shatter national climate goals.
As 350.org and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibbenpointed out in a Thursday column following the approval:
There's a huge pool of frackable gas sitting in the Permian Basin of Texas. The only way to monetize most of it is to ship it to Asia, persuading the fast-growing economies there to use it instead of wind and sun to make electricity. This scramble has been underway for about eight years, and LNG exports are already a giant industry; if Big Gas gets its way, within a few years American LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico will be doing more climate damage than everything that happens in Europe.
Indeed, while the Virginia-based Venture Global has advertised its project as a boost to European energy security, around 65% of CP2's long-term Supply and Purchase Agreements are with Asia-Pacific oil companies, commodity speculators, or users.
The company also has a history of running roughshod over domestic environmental regulations and dismissing the needs and concerns of impacted communities. Its Calcasieu Pass plant, which is "technologically identical" in design to the proposed CP2, began operating in January 2022. Since then, residents of Cameron Parish, Louisiana, have reported frequent flaring, noise pollution, an uptick in cancer and other ailments, and fishing grounds polluted with dredging material.
"Make no mistake: CP2 is a carbon bomb threatening frontline communities with increased pollution and exacerbating the climate crisis," Allie Rosenbluth, United States program manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement. "Expanding LNG infrastructure jeopardizes the health and safety of nearby communities, undermines efforts to reduce fossil fuel dependency, and drives the climate crisis, economic instability, and conflict."
The one dissenting vote on FERC, outgoing Democratic Commissioner Allison Clements, justified her decision in part due to the project's potential to harm its neighbors.
"The commission has not adequately addressed the project's environmental and socioeconomic impacts, including adverse impacts on environmental justice communities," Clements said.
Following the vote, frontline leaders vowed to keep fighting the plant's construction.
"We refuse to sink. We are going to fight them here. We are going to fight them at home. This is far from over," said Travis Dardar, an Indigenous Cameron Parish fisherman who founded Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (F.I.S.H.) to protest the LNG boom's impact on Gulf fishing.
However, activists also expressed an understanding that FERC was not the most favorable terrain in the fight.
Speaking outside FERC headquarters, Vessel Project of Louisiana founder Roishetta Ozane said it was time to "write off" the agency, according to E&E News.
"We're going to say that FERC is a rogue agency that does not care about communities," she said. "But who can do something while we are here is this administration. We need to continue to put pressure on the Department of Energy."
The DOE announced a pause on LNG export approvals in January while it revises the agency's criteria for what constitutes an export decision in the public interest. Since then, environmental advocates have called for the pause to be made permanent.
FERC's CP2 approval, they say, has clarified the stakes.
"Even with FERC's reckless decision to approve CP2, the project cannot move forward without all federal permits, including those currently paused by the Department of Energy," Rosenbluth said. "This illustrates just how critical the Department of Energy's pause and process to redefine 'public interest' are. President [Joe] Biden and the Department of Energy must listen to frontline communities and do all they can to permanently stop CP2 and all new LNG export terminals."
"If Trump and the GOP triumph, get ready for government of Big Oil by Big Oil for Big Oil until the Earth shall perish, which shouldn't take long."
Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media agreed.
"FERC has always been a rubber stamp for new gas export facilities—that's why we zeroed in on getting the Department of Energy to pause new export licenses and do a proper assessment," Henn wrote on social media. "With today's shameful decision, pressure is on POTUS and DOE to do the right thing."
Kelsey Crane, senior policy advocate at Earthworks, said: "FERC has once again threatened the Biden administration's own climate and environmental justice policies by advancing what could be the third largest fracked gas export project in Southwest Louisiana. If CP2 is constructed, Louisianans will be forced to breathe dirtier air, pay higher energy bills, and lose important livelihoods in the fishing industry. The United States will emit more greenhouse gas pollution and continue delaying the impending, just transition to clean energy."
"President Biden cannot allow this decision to stand and has to stop letting his agencies approve new fossil fuel projects in the Gulf South," Crane concluded.
McKibben wrote, "The only thing standing between CP2 and construction (and the only thing that can prevent the construction of a dozen more of these death stars in the nest few years) is the Department of Energy, aka the president of the United States."
While McKibben said that Venture Global could build CP2 without the export approval, he argued it was unlikely to do so until either the Biden DOE lifts the pause or former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has promised to do so, is elected president.
Because of Trump's pro-fossil fuel stance, McKibben argued that FERC's CP2 decision also underscores the stakes of the 2024 election.
"If Trump and the GOP triumph, get ready for government of Big Oil by Big Oil for Big Oil until the Earth shall perish, which shouldn't take long," he wrote.
While Biden is not guaranteed to extend the LNG export pause if reelected, "at least there will be a fight, and it will be one of the climactic battles of the fossil fuel era," McKibben said.
Speaking outside the FERC hearing, Ozane said the numbers on the climate justice side were growing.
"It was just two to three of us… and now it's hundreds," she told the crowd. "We are building power. We are building people power. We make the difference."
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