Energy & Environment — Biden bolsters environmental reviews

The Biden administration is adding a first set of environmental safeguards back into the permitting process and the president’s recent ethanol move is causing concerns about pollution. 

This is Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk. Subscribe here. 

Biden restores some protections in permitting 

The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to restore some of the environmental regulations governing infrastructure project permitting that were rolled back by the Trump administration.  

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is finalizing its “phase 1” changes governing the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires environmental reviews for projects such as highways or pipelines.  

The Trump administration axed or changed several regulations governing how NEPA is implemented, making changes that it said would speed up the permitting process — though critics argued they came at the environment’s expense. 

The Biden administration this week targeted a few changes made under Trump that it described as causing agency challenges and sowing confusion with the general public.  

Change 1: In its 2020 NEPA regulatory rewrite, the Trump administration got rid of explicit requirements to consider an action’s “indirect” effects — those that happen later on or further removed, but are still reasonably foreseeable. 

It also got rid of the explicit requirement to consider its “cumulative” effects, which refers to how a project’s pollution may interact with other pollution sources to make some areas particularly polluted.  

Critics raised concerns about the impact of this change on communities that already face disproportionate pollution burdens and argued it could hinder the government’s ability to consider the effects of climate change. 

The Biden administration reaffirmed the need to consider the direct, indirect and cumulative impacts, according to a statement from the CEQ. 

Change 2: The Trump administration also sought to make the process more industry friendly by adding language requiring agencies’ “proposed alternatives” to a company’s projects to be based on the company’s goals.  

The Biden administration said that it would instead “give agencies the flexibility to determine the ‘purpose and need’ of a proposed project based on a variety of factors” and work with both companies and communities to try to minimize environmental harms.  

Change 3: The Biden administration also said that it would establish that the NEPA regulations are “a floor, rather than a ceiling,” when it comes to standards for environmental reviews.  

The Trump administration made other changes — like setting a two-year time limit for the most stringent type of environmental review, when they typically take about 4 1/2 years — that have not yet been targeted by the Biden administration. 

However, the White House council said in a statement that it will propose “phase 2” changes that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental reviews “over the coming months.” 

Read more about the changes here. 

DEMOCRATS TARGET ‘FOREVER CHEMICALS‘

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) will be introducing bicameral legislation next week that seeks to ban firefighting foam that contains toxic “forever chemicals.” 

The PFAS Firefighter Protection Act would prohibit the manufacture, import and sale of all firefighting foam that includes these chemicals — also called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — within two years of enactment, according to a copy of the bill exclusively obtained by The Hill. 

Known as forever chemicals due to their propensity to linger in the human body and in the environment, PFAS are most notorious for their presence in aqueous film forming foam (AFFF), used to fight jet fuel fires on military bases and at civilian airports. 

Also present in industrial discharge and a variety of household products, PFAS are linked to kidney cancer, thyroid disease, testicular cancer and other illnesses. 

“PFAS chemicals in firefighting foam jeopardize the health, safety, and well-being of firefighters who have put their lives on the line to protect our communities,” Gillibrand said in a statement. 

“To make matters worse, the runoff from this foam can quickly lead to widespread PFAS contamination in the drinking water of surrounding communities near the facilities where it is used,” she added. 

Will it move? A Gillibrand aide said that her office has been working with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to position the bill for inclusion in an upcoming PFAS package. 

That package, discussed by committee Chairman Tom Carper (D-Del.) in a December hearing, would build upon both the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent PFAS Strategic Roadmap and the PFAS Action Act passed by the House last summer. 

Read more here from The Hill’s Sharon Udasin. 

Biden’s ethanol move prompts smog concerns

The Biden administration’s decision to expand the availability of higher-ethanol fuel to provide relief at the pump to consumers is also likely to lead to new problems with pollution. 

The waiver removes restrictions on selling so-called E15 ethanol blends so that they can be purchased between June and September, which the administration argues could help lower fuel prices. 

But the restrictions were put in place over the summer months specifically because selling those blends, it is feared, would worsen air pollution when temperatures are high. 

Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, uses a cocktail comparison to describe the effect of E15 blends on the environment. 

Ethanol is “basically vodka,” said Becker, and “when you mix an alcohol in with a mixture of gasoline or other volatile chemicals, it makes the mixture evaporate more readily.”  

Increasing evaporability, he said, “defeats everything that we’re trying to do to prevent more fuel from evaporating and getting into the air.” He added that it also increases nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. 

All of this is a negative for parts of the country that already have high ozone levels. 

“That really impacts ozone during the summer time, especially for areas that have high ozone levels,” said Margo Oge, who worked as director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Transportation and Air Quality from 1994 to 2012.  

“I live in Los Angeles, this place can make you feel it,” she added. 

The risks are particularly high for older people and children with immature lungs, Becker said. 

“The administration shouldn’t have done this, and they know they shouldn’t have done this, because this program to reduce evaporative emissions and keep the more volatile gasoline mixtures away from the summer months, has been in operation for decades,” he said. “So EPA has long experience on this issue.”

Ethanol industry trade groups have long argued that concerns about pollution from E15 are unfounded. 

The Renewable Fuels Association has pointed to University of California research suggesting that E15, which is 15 percent ethanol, trends lower for ozone-forming potential compared to E10, which is 10 percent ethanol. They also noted that the summer sale restrictions date back to before the availability of E15, “when it was assumed that ethanol could never constitute more than 10 percent of the gasoline pool.”  

Read more about the issue here.  

WHAT WE’RE READING

• We Analyzed 300 Companies’ Financial Documents to Find Out How Concerned They Are About Climate Change (Time) 
• How Lithuania cut its ties to ‘toxic’ Russian gas (Politico Europe) 
• People of color more likely to be harmed by pesticides, study finds (The Guardian) 
• Natural gas drops as much as 11%, pulls back from more than 13-year high (CNBC)  

And finally, something offbeat but on beat: Measure your power plants in marshmallows 

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Energy & Environment page for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.  

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