Congress

 

Things To Watch In The Omnibus Spending Bill [Wildlife Bill, Lands Package]. According to E&E News, “Negotiations have been ongoing over the funding mechanism for the ‘Recovering America’s Wildlife Act,’ a bill that would provide money to states, territories and tribes for conserving, restoring and protecting local wildlife and habitat. Original proposals in the House and Senate — H.R. 2773 and S. 2372 — called for authorizing nearly $13 billion over 10 years, but disagreements about how to pay for the bill could end up lowering the overall price tag and shortening the length of the program. That is, if negotiators are able to agree on a pay-for at all. A bipartisan group of senators have taken over talks on how to reconcile differences surrounding the agreed-upon offset: a new application of the wash sale rule to certain digital assets and commodities. Lawmakers are squabbling over what specific assets and commodities should be included in this overall category. They need to reach an agreement in order for ‘RAWA’ to be included in the omnibus. A failure to find consensus would be a devastating blow for the bipartisan, bicameral legislation that supporters say would represent one of the biggest conservation victories in a generation.” [E&E News, 12/19/22 (=)]

 

Things To Watch In The Omnibus Spending Bill [Interior, Climate Corps]. According to E&E News, “Over the summer, the House passed a minibus spending bill that included $16.6 billion for Interior Department programs for fiscal year 2023. The Senate released, but never voted on, their own Interior appropriations bill, a slightly slimmer, $16 billion measure. Negotiators are likely to agree on investing in wildfire prevention and mitigation funding, a shared priority among members of both parties. The House bill’s fire management budget included $321.4 million for the removal of hazardous fuels such as dead trees from national forests, as the agency tries to chip away at a backlog of such projects that officials say will take years to seriously reduce. The Senate Appropriations Committee proposed $4.4 billion for wildfire suppression, including a $450 million emergency supplemental that lawmakers said makes up for an underestimate of actual suppression costs over the past four years. Outstanding is whether there will be a significant investment in the Civilian Climate Corps, the green jobs training and placement program that fell to the wayside in the final version of the budget reconciliation measure. Democrats are hugely supportive of the initiative while Republicans have spurned it as a waste of money that will discourage private-sector hiring.” [E&E News, 12/19/22 (=)]

 

How Democratic Dissension Sunk Landmark EJ Bill. According to E&E News, “The ‘Environmental Justice for All Act’ was written over the course of several years, drawing on feedback from environmental justice advocates and inspiration from cross-country listening tours and fact-finding missions. It would make significant changes to the nation’s bedrock environmental laws and allow more intensive community input into the siting of fossil fuel projects. It also would vastly expand the power of polluted communities to reject projects that can spike local rates of cancer and respiratory disease and cause long-term pollution. A significant component of the bill deals with ‘cumulative impacts,’ which would require permitting decisions under the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act to account for the cumulative effects of harmful emissions on communities. That turned out to be the stickiest portion of the bill and was a hurdle for some Democrats in oil and gas districts, where activities would be significantly curbed under the legislative proposal. ‘Parts of the bill can’t pass the House,’ a senior House Democratic aide said in October, alluding to opposition among some Democrats. At the time of that statement, environmental justice advocates — including McEachin — were pushing leadership to allow a vote on their bill before year’s end. They had been emboldened by their movement’s success in thwarting efforts to insert a permitting proposal from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) into a stopgap spending measure that might have rendered much of the ‘EJ for All Act’ moot.” [E&E News, 12/19/22 (=)]

 

 

Department of the Interior (DOI)

 

Feds Eye 'Critical' Coming Months For Colorado River Plans. According to E&E News, “Top Interior Department officials Friday urged states to continue negotiations over how to slash reliance on the Colorado River but offered few details on progress, even as the agency’s own experts warn a major reservoir could hit a crisis point as early as this spring. Interior Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Tanya Trujillo, and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton addressed attendees here at the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual conference. ‘Despite the dire conditions we face, we at the department know that we can and must develop new solutions for mitigating decreasing water supplies,’ Beaudreau said, and later added: ‘The coming three months are absolutely critical. ... I’m encouraged by the conversations among the basin states.’ Discussions about how the seven states that claim a portion of the Colorado River — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in the Upper Basin and Arizona, California and Nevada in the Lower Basin — can adapt to rapidly shrinking flows dominated the three-day meeting. ‘Numerous agreements in this basin took years to complete,’ Touton acknowledged Friday as she addressed ongoing efforts to conserve as much as 4 million acre-feet of water in the coming months. Despite the short timeline of less than seven months, she said: ‘We hope a consensus alternative emerges from the basin before the end of January.’” [E&E News, 12/16/22 (=)]

 

Interior's IG Takes Leadership Role For Federal Watchdogs. According to E&E News, “Interior Department watchdog Mark Lee Greenblatt is now head of the pack. As the newly named chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Greenblatt will lead the organization that represents the interests of 74 federal IGs. ‘All of those IGs face challenges and concerns unique to their organizations. As a community, however, we are particularly vigilant with respect to external threats to our independence, which is the core principle that allows IGs to operate successfully,’ Greenblatt told E&E News in an email. ‘Put another way, a threat to any IG’s independence is one that we take seriously across the community.’ Funding, he added, can also be a challenge. ‘For many Offices of Inspector General, their own budgets have not kept up with the growth in their parent agencies’ budgets,’ Greenblatt said. ‘OIGs always have to prioritize their oversight efforts and must often choose between competing projects, but this process becomes more difficult as an agency’s own portfolio and resources grow without corresponding growth for the OIG.’ Greenblatt has served as Interior’s Senate-confirmed IG since August 2019, a position he will retain. He has previously been vice chair of the entity known among inspector general cognoscenti as CIGIE (Greenwire, Jan. 14, 2019). ‘Worst acronym in the federal government,’ Greenblatt acknowledged in a 2019 interview with E&E News.” [E&E News, 12/16/22 (=)]

 

Interior Releases Mosquito Strategy To Save Hawaii Birds. According to E&E News, “The Interior Department released its strategy Thursday for preventing the extinction of a dozen Hawaii forest birds threatened by invasive malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Habitat loss, introduced predators and invasive plants are some of the threats Hawaii forest birds face, ‘but avian malaria vectored by invasive mosquitoes is by far the most immediate threat to the survival of most of the remaining forest birds,’ Robert Reed, the U.S. Geological Survey Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center’s deputy director and co-author of the plan, said in an email. ‘This 5-year strategic plan is focused on moving towards landscape scale mosquito control, bringing individuals of the most threatened species into captivity until they can be released in mosquito-free habitats, and possibly moving birds to higher elevations where they’ll be safer from mosquitoes,’ Reed continued. Nearly 100 percent of the time, after one bite from a mosquito carrying malaria, ‘these birds will roll over dead in a few weeks,’ said Jack Jeffrey, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last refuges for native forest birds in Hawaii. The plan invests more than $70 million over four years, $14 million of which is from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed this year.” [E&E News, 12/16/22 (=)]

 

 

Advocacy

 

Greens Press For Executive Action After Manchin Bill Falls. According to E&E News, “Environmental groups are urging the Biden administration to take executive actions to speed the deployment of clean energy and electric transmission infrastructure after Sen. Joe Manchin’s permitting overhaul failed in the Senate last week. In a letter to President Joe Biden on Friday, the League of Conservation Voters and more than a dozen other groups said the federal agencies could take actions that ‘would not undermine existing environmental protections and requirements for public engagement and input.’ ‘There are numerous, non-damaging administrative actions and approaches to encouraging these projects necessary to meet the U.S. commitment to 50-52 percent reductions in climate pollution over 2005 levels by the end of this decade,’ they wrote. It’s the latest pressure point in an ongoing debate within the Democratic Party about how and whether to overhaul environmental rules so that renewable power developers can fully take advantage of the massive suite of subsidies enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. The missive offers a window into how the party’s backers in the environmental community are thinking about the issue. Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has been pushing a package of reforms that would address transmission backlogs and authorize the contentious Mountain Valley pipeline.” [E&E News, 12/19/22 (=)]

 

Underrepresented Communities Want To See Important Heritage Landmarks Recognized. According to KUNC-Radio, “The Biden Administration has already recognized some new national landmarks in our region. It’s part of the America The Beautiful plan launched in May 2021 to protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030. But some advocates from the Latino community want protections for more sites that are important to them and other underrepresented groups. The Hispanic Access Foundation has created a list of sites that it would like the Biden administration to consider. ‘This is a list of places that have cultural, historical or just recreational ties to the Latino community all across the U.S.,’ said Shanna Edberg, director of conservation programs at the foundation. The sites ‘are facing these dangers of degradation and are located close to Latino communities who are very nature-deprived. ‘We want to make sure that it includes provisions that make sure that these benefits do reach our communities.’ Currently, less than 8% of landmarks represent the stories of underrepresented groups, like Latino and Indigenous communities, according to an analysis by the National Historic Landmarks Committee. Many of the sites on its list reflect Latino history, which is often overlooked, according to Edberg. ‘By protecting these places, by putting up trails and signage in all the languages that users will come in, we can share these histories and tell the stories that have such an important part of American identity,’ Edberg said.” [KUNC-Radio, 12/16/22 (+)]

 

 

30x30

 

Countries Adopt A Sweeping Agreement To Protect Nature. According to The New York Times, “Roughly 190 countries early on Monday approved a sweeping United Nations agreement to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030 and to take a slew of other measures against rampant biodiversity loss, a mounting under-the-radar crisis that, if left unchecked, jeopardizes the planet’s food and water supplies as well the existence of untold species around the world. The agreement comes as biodiversity is declining worldwide at rates never seen before in human history. Scientists have projected that a million plants and animals are at risk of extinction, many within decades. ‘This is a huge moment for nature,’ said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said of the agreement. ‘This is a scale of conservation that we haven’t seen ever attempted before.’ Overall, the deal lays out a suite of 23 conservation targets. The most prominent one, the measure placing broad areas of land and sea under protection, is known as 30x30. Countries also agreed to manage the remaining 70 percent of the planet to avoid losing areas of high importance to biodiversity and to ensure that big businesses disclose biodiversity risks and impacts.” [The New York Times, 12/19/22 (+)]

 

 

States & Local

 

Senate Backs Big Land Transfer For Nevada Military Complex. According to KTNV-TV, “The U.S. Senate has voted for a massive expansion of a northern Nevada naval air training complex that will transfer of a huge swath of public land to the military. The Senate on Thursday approved as part of the annual defense spending bill what is likely to be one of the final steps in yearslong negotiations to designate 872 additional square miles (2,258 square kilometers) of land for bombing and military use to the Naval Air Station (NAS) Fallon, which is 65 miles (104 kilometers) east of Reno. The measure also designates more than 906 square miles (2,347 square kilometers) of land for conservation, wilderness areas and other protected areas, as well as roughly 28 square miles (73 square kilometers) of land and $20 million each to two Native American tribes. Churchill County, where the training facility is located, will also receive $20 million. The Fallon complex is the Navy’s main aviation training range, supporting aviation and ground training, including live-fire exercises. All naval strike aviation units and some Navy SEALs train at Fallon before deployment. The House approved the National Defense Authorization Act last week. It now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature.” [KTNV-TV, 12/16/22 (=)]

 

 

 

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