Congressional leaders are beginning to start thinking about a climate bill again.
Health care legislation has finally started
moving forward in Congress. Shawn Allee reports
the US Senate can now devote some attention to
its unfinished work on climate change:
Transcript
Health care legislation has finally started moving forward in Congress.
Shawn Allee reports the US Senate can now devote some attention to its unfinished work on climate change:
The climate-change bill got a cold reception last year, but Senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman say they’re making headway lately.
Margaret Kriz Hobson tracks climate legislation for the National Journal.
She says the Senate got stuck negotiating a complex carbon trading scheme.
That would have required most industries to trade carbon pollution credits.
Kriz Hobson says the three senators are now focusing mostly on power companies.
“A lot more people are letting them in the door because the proposal that they’re bringing forward would include some benefits for nuclear power, oil drilling in the United States and for more modern technologies for capture and sequestration.”
That last technology would basically bury carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.
That could save money and jobs in states that burn or mine coal.
There are 80,000 chemicals on the market. But the Environmental Protection Agency has only tested 200 of them for safety to humans - and banned only 5.
(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
Congress might make our federal
chemical laws tougher. Rebecca
Williams has more:
Transcript
Congress might make our federal
chemical laws tougher. Rebecca
Williams has more:
There are 80,000 chemicals on the market. But the Environmental Protection Agency has only tested 200 of them for safety to humans – and banned only 5 of the toxic chemicals.
Senator Frank Lautenberg is a Democrat from New Jersey. During a recent hearing, he said the EPA is doing what it can. But its power is limited by the nation’s outdated chemical laws.
“They cannot protect our children with one hand tied behind their back. That’s why I’ll soon introduce a bill that will overhaul our nation’s chemical laws.”
The bill will likely require companies to prove a chemical is safe before manufacturing it or using it. Right now, it’s up to the government to prove a chemical is harming people or the environment before it’s banned.
Some Conservatives in Congress are opposed to this idea. They say this kind of bill would kill industry innovation.
The White House is pushing
a new clean energy plan as
a way to deal with reducing
greenhouse gases. Mark Brush
reports this new plan might
help future climate legislation:
Transcript
The White House is pushing
a new clean energy plan as
a way to deal with reducing
greenhouse gases. Mark Brush
reports this new plan might
help future climate legislation:
The White House says this new energy plan is all about green jobs. There’s more money for so-called clean coal, and for biofuels, like ethanol.
The government had limited using corn for ethanol. The thinking was using food to make fuel was probably not such a great idea.
But the industry has not been able to move away from corn ethanol as quickly as hoped. So now the Administration is saying, corn ethanol can be okay – if the refineries are more efficient.
Lisa Jackson is the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“So this really unlocks the door for advanced biofuel producers, including advanced corn ethanol producers, to make investments and create jobs.”
Allowing more corn to be used for ethanol and investing in new technologies to clean up coal could win the White House some support if and when a climate change bill comes up for a vote.
The Massachusetts election puts the passage of a climate change bill in doubt.
(Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)
The Republican party gained
one seat in the Senate. But
Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts
is apparently having a dramatic
effect on the Senate’s agenda.
Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The Republican party gained
one seat in the Senate. But
Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts
is apparently having a dramatic
effect on the Senate’s agenda.
Lester Graham reports:
For one, forget a climate change bill.
“Things are not looking good for this bill.”
Darren Samuelson is a reporter with GreenWire. He spent the day yesterday talking with Senators of every stripe.
A vote this year on a climate bill that included a cap-and-trade plan to reduce greenhouse gases was already in doubt. Now Senators say Massachusetts taught them it’s all about jobs and the economy.
So the climate change bill will become an energy bill – more drilling, offshore, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more natural gas leases.
Samuelson says, judging on what he’s hearing in the Senate, any chance for a climate change bill comes down to just a couple of things.
“It depends on how much of an emphasis President Obama puts on it in his State of the Union address and just how much the Democrats are willing to give the Republicans.”
But since the Republicans had already decided the climate bill was a jobs killer, the win in Massachusetts makes it unlikely the Democrats can give enough to the Republicans to get it passed.
Lena Perenius and Franco Bisegna are with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council in Brussels, Belgium.
(Photo by Liam Moriarty)
Bjorn Hansen oversees chemical regulations at the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment in Brussels, Belgium.
(Photo by Liam Moriarty)
There are tens of thousands of
chemical compounds on the market
these days. And, for the most part,
unless regulators can prove a chemical
is harmful, it stays there. Now, Europe
has turned that way of doing things
on its head, and the US is showing
signs of moving in that direction, too.
Liam Moriarty has this report:
Transcript
There are tens of thousands of
chemical compounds on the market
these days. And, for the most part,
unless regulators can prove a chemical
is harmful, it stays there. Now, Europe
has turned that way of doing things
on its head, and the US is showing
signs of moving in that direction, too.
Liam Moriarty has this report:
(sounds of a street)
Brussels, Belgium is sort of like the Washington, DC of Europe. It’s here – in the seat of the European Union – that the 27 nations that make up the EU hash out their common policies.
I’m sitting in the office of Bjorn Hansen. He keeps an eye on chemicals for the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment. To give me an idea of how ubiquitous chemicals are in our everyday lives, Hansen points around his office.
“Just us sitting here, you are probably exposed to chemicals, which come from the office furniture, which have been used to color the textile, which has been used to create the foam, the glue under the carpet that we’re sitting – you name it, you’re exposed.”
The big question is whether all this exposure is harming our health or the environment. The answer?
“We, by far, do not know what chemicals are out there, what the effects of those chemicals are, and what the risks associated with those chemicals.”
In the European Union, that uncertainty led to a new law known by its acronym, REACH. That’s R-E-A-C-H. REACH requires that tens of thousands of chemicals used in everyday products in the EU be studied and registered. If a substance cannot be safely used, manufacturers will have to find a substitute, or stop using it. REACH has, at its core, a radical shift: it’s no longer up to the government to prove a chemical is unsafe.
“The burden of proof is on industry to demonstrate safety. And by demonstrating the safety that they think, they also take liability and responsibility for that safety.”
Even for industries accustomed to tougher European regulations, REACH was alarming.
“There were very, quite violent opposition in the beginning.”
Lena Perenius is with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council.
“In the EU, we already had a very comprehensive set of regulations for ensuring safe use of chemicals. And the industry saw that this was putting an unreasonable burden on the companies.”
Corporations may not have liked it, but the measure had strong public support. After several contentious rounds of negotiations, Perenius says the industry feels it got key concessions that’ll make the far-reaching law workable. Now, she says, the industry has come to see the up-side of REACH.
“Now, when we have the responsibility, that gives us a little bit of freedom to demonstrate, in the way we believe is appropriate, how a substance can be used safely.”
Here in the US, there are signs of political momentum building around taking a more REACH-like approach to regulating the chemicals in everyday products. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg recently said he’d introduce a bill that would shift the burden of proof for safety onto chemical manufacturers.
“Instead of waiting for a chemical to hurt somebody, it will require companies to prove their products are safe before they end up in the store, in our homes, and in our being.”
Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson recently told a Senate committee that – out of an estimated 80,000 chemicals in use – existing law has allowed the EPA to ban only 5, and to study just 200.
“Though many of these chemicals likely pose little or no risk, the story is clear – we’ve only been able to effectively regulate a handful of chemicals, and we know very little about the rest.”
More than a dozen states from Maine to California have already moved to toughen safety standards for chemicals. Even the American Chemistry Council has agreed to support more vigorous regulations to assure consumers that the chemicals in the products they use are safe.
As always, the devil is in the details. But the coming reform is shaping up to look a lot like what Europe is already putting in place.
Right now, there are no federal laws regulating offshore fish farming.
(Photo by Randolph Fermer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:
Transcript
Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:
Critics of aquaculture say the practice can spread disease, introduce invasive species, and pollute the environment.
The Ocean Conservancy’s George Leonard says that’s a problem.
“In the absence of an overarching framework, aquaculture continues to move forward kind of in fits and starts here in the US. And we think if it proceeds that way, many of the environmental concerns will kind of fall through the cracks.”
Legislation introduced last week in Congress could change that. The bill would require fish farmers to apply for federal permits before setting up shop. Those permits would set standards to protect ocean ecosystems.
The bill would also provide money to research how aquaculture is impacting the environment.
Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%.
(Photo source: TheSilentPhotographer at Wikimedia Commons)
A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:
Transcript
A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:
When Kathy Colley heard that natural gas drillers were coming to upstate New York, it was kind of like someone had told her that the whole region had won the lottery.
“Here we have this wonderful god given opportunity. This is a blessing.”
That’s because Colley and her neighbors had learned that they had natural gas beneath their land.
New York State’s natural gas was supposed to be untappable- it was too far down, and it was suspended in tiny bubbles in shale rock. But a new technique called hydraulic fracturing made drilling possible in those kinds of shale fields. Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%.
Drillers started moving into New York State last year. But officials there put a moratorium on the practice while regulators debated whether to allow fracturing.
For Kathy Colley, it’s a no-brainer. Drilling means saving a dying regional economy.
“It’s been such a depressed area. It’s struggling. The farmers are dying here. This is a time when it would just give people a life. Billions of dollars. Thousands of jobs. This is an opportunity to get healthy.”
A lot of local officials all across the country feel the same way. Gas drilling can mean tax revenues, and jobs, and economic development.
But some people say that while drilling may bring in some money at first, in the long run it’s a lousy way to develop a local economy.
“It’s an unsustainable form of economic development.”
That’s Adam Flint. He works with the Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition in upstate New York.
“However much gas is under the ground, it is unrenewable.”
And when the gas runs out, the jobs will go. So will the tax revenue. Flint estimates New York would get a couple of decades of gas production before the state’s fields are tapped dry.
That kind of boom and bust cycle is what Wes Gillingham is worried about. Gillingham is a farmer and environmentalist who heads an organization called Catskill Mountainkeeper. I met up with him and his family at his farm house.
He showed me a banjo he had bought cheap in Casper, Wyoming in the 1980s, at the end of an oil boom.
“I had never seen a place in my life that had so many pawnshops. And the pawnshops were just stuffed to the ceiling with really nice stuff- really nice stuff, at really cheap prices, cause everyone was just pawning everything they had.”
He’s afraid the same thing will happen in upstate New York.
“I always think about this when people say, ‘but we need the gas.’ Prices go up, companies come in, they put more rigs out, and there’s this huge influx of money and activity and then when the price drops back down they shut it all down. That has huge impacts on the community.”
And it’s not just the boom and bust. There are also environmental impacts like a legacy of water pollution, abandoned infrastructure, and habitat destruction.
Adam Flint says those kinds of problems would prevent upstate New York from ever developing any kind of stable long-term economy.
“It’s a question of which road to travel. We can have gas production and turn upstate New York into a major industrial zone. Or we can have tourism, agriculture, a green economy, alterative energy, jobs that all those things create. We can’t do both.”
New York state officials are almost certain to approve gas drilling this year – 2010. When they do, there’s a long line of community and environmental groups ready to challenge the state in court.
Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals.
(Photo by Vera Scroggins)
Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:
Transcript
Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:
It’s been about a year and a half since drilling companies first broke ground on natural gas wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the northeastern corner of the state.
The drillers used a recently developed technique called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals.
Right now, fracking isn’t regulated by the federal government – though Congress is considering changing that.
So the process has generated a lot of concerns about pollution – in particular, fears that gas and chemicals could leach out into aquifers and groundwater.
Which is probably what happened in Dimock. Vera Scroggins is an anti-drilling activist who lives nearby.
“It started to happen pretty quickly because as they went down there, as they went through the aquifers they broke through the rock where the gas pockets are, and the gas got released into the aquifers and then it got into the water wells. So people started to notice like blackish, yellowish, bubbly water. So it’s been about 11 months that they haven’t drank their water.”
Since fracking started, Dimock has been plagued with environmental problems – chemical spills and leaks, gas found in drinking water, and fish kills in nearby streams. Dimock residents have filed suit against Cabot Oil and Gas, which controls most of the wells around Dimock.
And Scroggins says state authorities have penalized Cabot for spills and leaks.
“Cabot has been fined several times, even since September. They were closed down for two weeks for three spills in a two-week period. So it’s one accident after another.”
The drilling company says that doesn’t mean the problems were caused by drilling.
Ken Komoroski is a Cabot spokesman. He says the company is looking in to the incidents, but they haven’t found proof that fracking caused any problems.
“The company has not come to any conclusion as to whether or not its operations did cause contamination. It’s possible that it has, it’s also entirely possible that it has not.”
Many gas companies maintain that no one has ever proved conclusively that spills and leaks have harmed anyone. And it is hard to pin down figures on fracking accidents, since there’s no centralized database to keep track of incidents.
But problems have been reported at drilling sites across the country.
Many of the complaints center around the chemicals frackers mix with their pumping water.
Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Eric Goldstein showed me a list of those chemicals at an anti-drilling demonstration in New York City. The list was seven pages long – some 260 chemicals in all. Some seemed pretty harmless. But others were more troubling.
“I’m sure you could find a couple out of the 260 that you wouldn’t mind drinking. But you wouldn’t want to take any naphthalene, for example. Or petroleum naptha. Or any of the things we can’t pronounce here. You wouldn’t want to drink talc. Wouldn’t want to drink benzene. Why don’t we just stop right there. Ethyl benzene. That’s a known human carcinogen.”
Drilling companies say that while those chemicals might be dangerous, they’re used in such small quantities that they’re not harmful to people. And companies say they’ve developed protections that keep the chemicals from leaching out into aquifers. For example, drillers line their gas wells with cement casings to keep fracking fluid contained.
But Vera Scroggins – the activist from near Dimock – says she doesn’t believe companies have figured out how to drill safely.
“As they go along, they’re learning things. So we’re being experimented on.”
Until they’ve learned how to prevent all dangerous leaks and spills, Scroggins says, companies shouldn’t be allowed to drill at all.
Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.
(Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Transcript
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Ten years ago the American natural gas market wasn’t looking too hot.
“In theory, America was running out of natural gas.”
That’s Susan Riha. She’s a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. Riha says underground pools of traditional natural gas were starting to dry up.
But there’s another kind of gas – ‘unconventional’ natural gas. It’s suspended in tiny pockets in shale formations, like water in a sponge. And there’s unconventional natural gas all across the United States, especially in the Western states and Pennsylvania and New York.
But recovering large amounts of natural gas from shale formations was until recently, pretty much impossible.
“In the past, it’s been extremely difficult to get that gas out of that rock. They drill down, but the gas is only going to flow from right where they drill. But people began to put effort in to figuring out how to get this gas out. And maybe starting about a decade ago they began to get economically viable ways of recovering shale gas.”
The technique that drillers developed is called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep, L-shaped wells and blast them full of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals. That solution holds open tiny fissures in the shale so the gas flows out.
The process raises some eyebrows in the environmental community, but we’ll get to their concerns in a second.
First let’s look at the upside.
Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.
And natural gas is a domestic energy source. It burns a whole lot cleaner than coal and oil. A lot of people say it could be a crucial part of the transition to greener energy.
Which is the point Thomas West made when I met up with him at a public hearing on gas drilling. West is a drilling advocate and attorney who represents gas companies in New York State.
“You have to realize that the shale plays, these unconventional resources, have changed the game in the United States. We now have a hundred years of capacity, which means we no longer have to rely on Mideastern oil. Gas is very usable, it doesn’t take much to make it usable, and it has a dramatic impact on air quality.”
But critics say fracking is a mixed bag.
“Things too good to be true, usually are.”
That’s Al Appleton. He’s an environmental consultant, and he says hydraulic fracking can cause all kinds of environmental problems – water contamination, ecosystem destruction, noise and air pollution.
And Appleton says the process is essentially unregulated. In 2005, Congress passed a law specifically exempting fracking from almost all federal environmental regulations.
“Basically what the law said is that things like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Hazardous Waste Materials Act, the Clean Water Act, and other significant pieces of federal environmental legislation were not to be applied to the natural gas industry. So in essence, what your local dry cleaner has to comply to all sorts of regulations, the natural gas industry, they don’t have to follow these.”
Some members of Congress are trying to change that. They’ve introduced legislation to repeal fracking’s exemption, give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the process, and require the industry to disclose what kinds of chemicals it injects into wells. As you might expect, the fracking industry is fighting the bill.
Natural gas well drilling site. (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)
A new drilling technique called
hydrofracking has opened up previously
inaccessible natural gas fields all
over the country and created a boom
in natural gas production. But it’s
also generated a lot of controversy,
since hydrofracking is exempt from
almost all federal regulations.
Samara Freemark reports
that legislation currently moving through
Congress would change that:
Transcript
A new drilling technique called
hydrofracking has opened up previously
inaccessible natural gas fields all
over the country and created a boom
in natural gas production. But it’s
also generated a lot of controversy,
since hydrofracking is exempt from
almost all federal regulations.
Samara Freemark reports
that legislation currently moving through
Congress would change that:
Hydrofracking involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals a mile into the ground to break up rock and extract gas. But since 2005 the technique has been exempt from federal environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.
Now some members of Congress have introduced a bill to restore federal oversight over fracking. Kate Sinding is with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which supports the bill.
“So what has been proposed is known as the FRAC act. And what that would do is restore regulatory authority over hydrolic fracturing which means we would have some federal standards about how to regulate this activity. And it would require the public disclosure of the fracturing fluids that are used in fracturing fluids.”
That’s an important point for fracking opponents, who say those chemicals have contaminated wells and groundwater across the nation.
Congressional leaders are beginning to start thinking about a climate bill again.
