#environmental rules

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

President Biden, vowing to restore environmental protections frayed over the past four years, has ordered the review of more than 100 rules and regulations on air, water, public lands, endangered species and climate change that were weakened or rolled back by his predecessor.

But legal experts warn that it could take two to three years — and in some cases, most of Mr. Biden’s term — to put many of the old rules back in place.

“People should temper their expectations about what can be done quickly,” said Kevin Minoli, who served as a lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. He added, “It’s very possible, more possible than not, that some of the Trump rules will still be in effect for a couple of years.”

Mr. Biden has an array of legal tools to reinstate environmental protections that were dismantled by the Trump administration. Gina McCarthy, his top domestic climate change adviser, headed the E.P.A. in the Obama administration and served as the chief author of some of the nation’s most comprehensive climate change rules. She has now reviewed every possible option to restore those protections, according to a White House official who is familiar with her thinking but was not authorized to speak on the record.

But those tools take time. Experts in environmental law who have spoken with top Biden administration officials said the process of rolling back the Trump-era rollbacks would quite likely fall into a few broad categories. In a limited set of cases, Mr. Biden will be able to use his executive authority immediately, for instance to cancel individual fossil fuel infrastructure projects or reinstate federal protections on distinct areas of land and water. 

A surge in ship power

Get ready for a tidal wave of new ships flooding the container shipping scene in 2024, like a wave crashing onto the shore. This wave follows a period of big profits for shipping companies, who spent some of their extra cash on ordering brand-new ships. The scale of this wave is huge, as the capacity of the new vessels ordered is equivalent to 27% of the global fleet, which stood at 8% in October 2020. But here’s the catch: this big increase is happening just when there’s a drop expected in how much stuff needs to be shipped around the world, estimated to be around 3% to 4% for both 2024 and 2025.

And there’s more. Notably, a lot of these new ships are mega-ships, the giants of the sea. But here’s the problem: they’re not very flexible at ports, which makes it harder for shipping companies to choose where to send them. While companies can try moving ships around or getting rid of older ones, the shadow of this big increase in capacity still hangs over their profits and plans for the future.

Impact of environmental rules like the Emission Trade System (ETS)

Regulations for controlling emissions and the costs of compliance are playing a big role in shaping the container shipping scene of 2024. The shipping world is facing some challenges due to the sky-high emission levels caused by using fossil fuels. To shrink the carbon footprint, governments and big global clubs have rolled out some pretty hefty regulations, and one of the stars of the show is the European Union’s Emission Trading System (ETS).

So, from January 1, 2024, ships that want to dock at EU ports will need to pick up some carbon credits. And get this, the share of emissions they’ll need to cover is gonna rise each year, starting at 40% in 2024. And if that wasn’t enough, the EU’s throwing in another trick called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to cut down emissions on stuff coming into the EU. But here’s the kicker: all these rules are gonna cost carriers big time, and they’re already working with pretty tight margins. So, you can bet your bottom dollar that this is gonna mean steeper freight rates and overall costs for customers.

Trump tore environmental rules apart, and the Biden administration is putting them back together.

While Joe Biden’s inauguration as the forty-sixth President of the United States was just a few days ago, he and his advisors began their work months ago. His team has put together a list of more than 100 environmental rules and policies enacted by the Trump administration, all under the umbrella of environmental conversation and climate change, that they wish to review. Most of these, in turn,…

Form committee to monitor pollution along Periyar, SLMC informs NGT

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A report, submitted by the chairman of the State Level Monitoring Committee, recommends that the committee reports directly to the tribunal and have powers to inspect industrial units and other establishments on the banks of the river.

The State Level Monitoring Committee (SLMC) on Solid Waste Management on Wednesday submitted a report before the National Green Tribunal (NGT),…

Excerpt from this InsideClimate News story:

The Trump administration's efforts to undo rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases would lead to a rise in annual emissions of more than 200 million metric tons by 2025 and thousands more American deaths, according to a report from New York University Law School's State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. [The project was funded by Michael Bloomberg.] 

The added pollution would be equivalent to 44 million more cars driven every year or the burning of enough coal to fill more than 1 million railcars, the authors wrote in "Climate and Health Showdown in the Courts."

The report, released Tuesday, homes in on six rules the administration has either tried to suspend or has announced plans to roll back, then calculates the possible damage based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. The regulations include:

The Clean Power Plan, which would cut emissions from electric utilities;

Clean car standards, which would boost fuel efficiency and reduce emissions from passenger vehicles;

Glider truck pollution rules, which would close a loophole used by freight-hauling trucks with super-polluting rebuilt engines;

Methane standards for new and existing oil and gas sites, which would reduce emissions of the highly potent short-lived climate pollutant;

Methane reductions on federal lands, which would reduce venting and flaring of natural gas on property leased to oil and gas companies by the Interior Department, and

Landfill methane rules, which would cut emissions from municipal waste dumps.

So far, the attorneys general, led by New York, California, Massachusetts and Maryland, have been unusually successful in hobbling the progress of the rollbacks the administration has tried to make. The administration has lost 95 percent of the lawsuits brought against its deregulatory efforts, mostly on the environmental front, a far higher rate than in the past, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

Excerpt:

For the most part, Pruitt did not get further than telegraphing the blows he hoped to land against the Obama administration's climate legacy. Amid all of the deregulatory actions by the EPA over the past year, here are the most important moves on greenhouse gas emissions begun by Pruitt that could be reshaped by Wheeler's follow-through.

Repeal of the Clean Power Plan

On the eve of Pruitt's resignation, the EPA finished drafting a replacement for President Barack Obama's signature climate initiative, the Clean Power Plan, and sent it to the White House for review, The New York Times reported. The rules, designed to rein in carbon emissions from electric power plants, were a key target of an executive order Trump signed within weeks of his inauguration. Pruitt never moved forward on the idea that the EPA do away with its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and the environment, the scientific and legal basis for all of its climate regulations. Although Wheeler as a lobbyist supported repeal of the endangerment finding, few expect him to take on that battle, since most of the fossil fuel industry does not want to revisit it.

Future of Fuel Economy Standards

The White House also is reviewing the Pruitt EPA's draft of a new set of regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks. The draft proposes freezing the emissions standards that the Obama administration crafted in an historic deal with automakers in the wake of their federal government bailout in 2009.On this proposal, Wheeler could well decide to take a less confrontational path than Pruitt, who indicated he was prepared to challenge California's authority—enshrined in law since the 1970s—to set its own, stricter air pollution rules. Automakers have repeatedly urged the Trump administration to try to reach an agreement with California.

Legal Battles Over Methane

Wheeler inherits a legal battle over methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is leaking from oil and gas field operations, pipelines and other facilities at rates far higher than the EPA has estimated. Last year, a federal court rebuffed Pruitt's effort to place a two-year hold on methane regulations finalized in 2016 for new oil and gas facilities. The agency's alternative proposal has been under review at the White House since May.Pruitt also sought to forestall EPA regulations over the larger problem of methane leaking from existing oil and gas operations. He cancelled the industry's obligation to provide the agency with the information it needed to proceed with the rulemaking, but the EPA now faces a lawsuit from 14 states and two cities over the issue. As long as EPA's legal obligation to address greenhouse gas emissions stands, it is hard to see how Wheeler's agency will be able to put off addressing methane.

Pruitt's 'Secret Science' Plans

One of the most controversial and potentially consequential initiatives started by Pruitt was his effort to curb the EPA's use of scientific studies. The proposal was met with an onslaught of opposition from the scientific and public health community, forcing the EPA to extend its initial 30-day comment period until Aug. 16, and to schedule a public hearing on the plan for July 17. With the agency still gathering public feedback on the proposal, Wheeler will now have a significant opportunity to reshape the plan.

Thumb on the Scale of Cost-Benefit Analyses?

Another sweeping change that Pruitt initiated was a proposal to overhaul the way the agency weighs the costs and benefits of regulations. Two days before Pruitt's resignation, the EPA agreed to extend the public comment period on this plan until Aug. 13, putting follow-through in Wheeler's hands.

Allowing Science Advisory Board Reviews

According to the Center for American Progress, the sponsors of the bills overturning environmental protections have received an average of $2.3 million in campaign donations from dirty energy industries.

Excerpt:

In the 24 days since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Republican-controlled Congress has already moved to overturn four major rules that the oil, gas, and coal industries spent millions of dollars fighting during the Obama administration. First, Congress eliminated the Stream Protection Rule, which would prevent toxic mine waste from being dumped in streams. Then Congress voted to get rid of a rule that limited bribery and corruption in oil operations around the world. And in the coming days, the U.S. Senate is scheduled to vote to overturn a rule that limits methane pollution when oil and gas companies drill on public lands and to eliminate a rule that increases public input in public lands management decisions.

According to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), Republicans in Congress are using their “precious time” to overturn Obama administration rules that they consider to be “excessive regulations that are killing jobs in America.” Yet, economists have found that the rules that Congress is targeting would either have negligible costs, minimal or positive effects on jobs, or large net economic benefits. The government’s economic analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s, or BLM’s, rule to reduce methane waste, for example, shows that the cumulative net benefits of the rule will be between $740 million and $1.2 billion over a 10-year period.