General
News
Mass.
AG Fuels Debate Over Future Of Natural Gas. According
to E&E News, “Massachusetts’ attorney general asked regulators last week to investigate what the state’s climate goals mean for the future of the natural gas industry, a probe that could stoke conflicts over how swiftly to phase out fossil fuels. Gov. Charlie
Baker (R) issued an executive order in January establishing the state’s 2050 goal of zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions across its economy. His environmental officials are now drawing up policies to achieve the goal. Those strategies are likely to cause
demand for natural gas to ‘decline substantially’ and nearly disappear by midcentury, said the office of Attorney General Maura Healey in its Thursday petition to the Department of Public Utilities (DPU). That will require regulators to take a strong hand
in protecting consumers from mounting power bills, especially those associated with the switch from gas heating to electric technologies, Healey’s office said. A ‘consensus’ has emerged that buildings’ heating and cooling systems would need to switch from
gas to electric sources, wrote the office. But ‘not all ratepayers, particularly low- to moderate-income customers and residents of environmental justice communities will be able to cost-effectively electrify their home heating without additional policy measures.’
Gas distribution companies should be ordered to submit plans detailing how their businesses might evolve to support the state’s decarbonization goals, Healey said. Regulators should draw up rules and laws, with input from energy groups and the public, that
would ‘mitigate unnecessary investment’ in pipelines and other gas distribution assets, Healey added.” [E&E News,
6/8/20
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Judges
Consider Trump Order To Expand Arctic Drilling. According
to E&E News, “The Trump administration’s bid to reopen Arctic waters for oil and gas drilling drew a sharply divided response Friday from federal judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel pressed Justice Department officials and
environmentalists over whether a lower court was justified in restoring Obama-era drilling protections for millions of acres of Arctic waters in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in addition to parts of the Atlantic Ocean. At issue in the appeal is whether
Congress enacted a ‘one-way ratchet’ under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that enables presidents to put a stop to offshore oil and gas development, while not allowing them to roll back such a move. The case before the 9th Circuit could shape separate
litigation over President Trump’s decision to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah under the Antiquities Act. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who leads the Justice Department’s environmental
division and was arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, lambasted a U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska decision that vacated a 2017 Trump order reopening several offshore areas to oil and gas development. ‘Judicial caution and modesty should
have been the watchword here, and yet it wasn’t,’ Clark said. Judges appeared torn over whether the Obama-era order included lasting protections for areas excluded from future oil and gas leases.” [E&E News,
6/8/20
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Air
Pollution From Fracking Killed An Estimated 20 People In Pennsylvania From 2010-2017: Study.
According
to Environmental Health News, “Particulate matter pollution emitted by Pennsylvania’s fracking wells killed about 20 people between 2010 and 2017, according to a soon-to-be-published study. Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the
U.S. after Texas. Between 2010 and 2017, there were 20,677 permitted fracking wells in the state, about half of which had been drilled. Fracking, another name for hydraulic fracturing, is a process of extracting oil and gas from the Earth by drilling deep
wells and injecting liquid at high pressure. One of fracking’s byproducts is particulate matter pollution, also referred to as PM 2.5, which consists of tiny, airborne particles of chemicals that, when inhaled, make their way into the lungs and bloodstream,
increasing cancer risk and causing heart and respiratory problems. Exposure to PM 2.5 kills an estimated 20,000 Americans each year. Previous studies have found that heavily-fracked communities face higher rates of numerous health effects including preterm
births, high-risk pregnancies, asthma, and cardiovascular disease—but this is the first to investigate the direct relationship between the local increase in PM 2.5 caused by fracking and deaths from respiratory and heart issues that can be attributed to that
increase. ‘Our study is not only looking at negative health outcomes, but investigating how fracking actually caused these deaths through increased air pollution,’ Ruohao Zhang, a researcher at Binghamton University who specializes in environmental economics
and the study’s lead author, told EHN.” [Environmental Health News, 6/5/20
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Dead
And Dying Trees Have More Methane In Their Soil, Study Finds. According
to WBUR, “Of all the troubled trees in Chelsea, there’s one that’s taken root in Roseann Bongiovanni’s mind. ‘If I remember correctly, it was on Bellingham Hill,’ Bongiovanni says. ‘They would plant this street tree, care for it, the city would go and water
it, and then maybe a year later they would see that it died.’ This happened over and over, says Bongiovanni, the executive director of GreenRoots, an environmental justice non-profit in Chelsea. ‘This tree would die no mater what the city did,’ she recalls.
‘So after seeing a tree die in the same place multiple times, we started to think, ‘OK, what’s going on here?’’ Bongiovanni suspected that gas leaks were playing a role, not just with that tree, but with many dead and dying trees across the city. And trees
matter in Chelsea, a densely populated city with the highest rate of COVID-19 infection in the state, where urban heat effects and air pollution compromise the health of residents. ‘We’re a community that believes heavily in having more street trees,’ Bongiovanni
says. ‘There are so many different reasons why street trees are really important.’ Street trees cool sidewalks, absorb pollution, and offset greenhouse gas emissions. ‘I can tell you what it feels like to walk down a tree-lined street in the summer and then
walk down a street that had no trees,’ says Madeleine Scammell, a Chelsea resident and professor of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health. ‘That’s the case here in Chelsea. A lot of the streets where there are just no trees, it
is so much hotter.’” [WBUR, 6/5/20
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Earthquakes
Continue To Rock The Basin. According
to the Odessa American, “When Bette Davis said, ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,’ in the 1950 movie ‘All About Eve,’ she could have been talking prophetically about the earthquake-beleaguered Permian Basin of 2020. At least 10 area quakes
ranging from a mild 2.0 in intensity on the Richter Scale to an alarming 5.0 have occurred since Feb. 19 and folks are learning not to be surprised if they’re jiggled about on the sidewalk or wakened by the floors rocking at night. Geologists say the quakes
are ‘induced’ phenomena caused by the high pressure injection of massive amounts salt water into wells for the disposal of fluids used in the hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ of bedrock oil or gas formations. Most of the quakes are coming from depths of
about five kilometers or three miles. There are two salt water disposal wells, both within a mile of Faudree Road and Highway 191, owned by Parks Bell Salt Water Disposal and operated by Oilfield Water Logistics (OWL) Operating of Midland and Dallas. OWL Executive
Vice President Nick Hines said Wednesday that he had been ‘aware of seismic activity’ in the Southern Delaware Basin west of Odessa in Pecos and Reeves counties but hadn’t heard of any around Faudree-191. ‘We don’t put a lot of water down those wells, 5,000
to 7,000 barrels a day between the two at less than 1,000 pounds per square inch,’ Hines said. ‘They’re shallow little standalone wells at least two miles short of the basement range of 15,000 to 20,000 feet.” [Odessa American,
6/8/20
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Scientists Lock Horns Over Climate Change Impact Of Cattle.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “The livestock industry says the standard method of calculating the global warming contribution of methane significantly overstates the impact
of cattle and is calling for policy changes that could slash the emissions counted against the industry. While some scientists are backing the proposed change, others argue it could lead to an overly optimistic assessment of the climate change contribution
of the industry, which committed in 2017 to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. Livestock are the main contributor to agriculture sector emissions. Cows’ gassy burps are loaded with methane, a byproduct of digesting grass. Last year agriculture emissions accounted
for 12.9 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas output, down 5.8 per cent as farmers reduced their stock due to drought. In 1997 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed on a methodology to account for the global warming potential of greenhouse
emissions over a 100-year time frame, known as the GWP100. However, some scientists promote a new accounting methodology known as GWP Star, which counts the global warming potential of greenhouse gases over 20 years. Methane emissions break down in the atmosphere
over 12 years, much quicker than carbon dioxide, which takes 100 years to break down. Tony Hegarty from the Cattle Council said GWP Star could provide a ‘more accurate approximation of the actual warming’ caused by methane over its lifetime.” [Sydney Morning
Herald,
6/8/20 (=)]
Chad Ellwood
Senior Research Associate
Climate Action Campaign
202.448.2877 ext. 119