beryllium
www.dw.com
Toxic and radioactive: The damage from mining rare elements
Low wages, water shortage and acidified landscapes: Mining critical raw materials endangers human rights and the environment. Yet the industry is expanding.
www.bayjournal.com
Virginia lawmakers keep coal ash recycling on the table, feds try to loosen regs
Virginia requirements for the disposal of ash produced by coal-burning power plants could soon be more stringent than rules set by the federal government.
EPA staffers are being forced to prioritize energy industry's wish list, says official who resigned in protest.
EPA staffers are spending their days addressing an industry wish list of changes to environmental law, according to a former senior agency official who issued a scathing public farewell message.
EPA staffers are spending their days addressing an industry wish list of changes to environmental law, according to Elizabeth Southerland, a former senior agency official who issued a scathing public farewell message when she ended her 30-year career there on Monday.
Southerland, who most recently served as director of science and technology in the EPA’s Office of Water, said that agency staffers were now devoted to regulatory rollback based on the requests from industry. Companies and trade groups have directly asked EPA administrator Scott Pruitt for some changes. Other requests have come in through public comments in response to Executive Order 13777, which the White House issued in February. That executive order directed federal agencies including the EPA to suggest regulations to be changed, repealed, or replaced.
betsy-southerland-1501702314
Elizabeth Southerland in a family photo.
Photo: Provided by Elizabeth Southerland
The overwhelming majority of the more than 467,000 public responses to the EPA about the executive order urged the agency not to roll back environmental regulations. “I am a PhD chemist, recently retired after more than 35 years of industrial research in material science and chemistry. I am also old enough to remember life before the EPA,” read a typical comment submitted in May. “Do not take us back to those times!”
But Southerland said that a working group headed by EPA associate administrator Samantha Dravis and the agency’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson — both of whom were appointed by Scott Pruitt — cherry-picked industry comments calling for rollback and submitted them to scientists and other career employees at the agency.
“They pulled out the ones from the industry — the coal, electric power, oil and natural gas areas, just them — and sent them around and asked us to respond within one day about whether we agreed with the request for a repeal,” said Southerland.
An internal agency spreadsheet obtained by The Intercept supports Southerland’s account of the EPA’s efforts to prioritize the energy industry’s requests. The document appears to be a response of industry and government groups to executive order 13777 and details the desires of organizations representing electric power, natural gas, oil, and coal to revise, amend, withdraw, and otherwise change more than 20 environmental regulations in various ways.
One entry notes that the American Public Power Association asked the EPA to revise Section 316B Cooling Water Intake Structure Rule. The rule, which was finalized in 2014 after 20 years of scientific work and litigation, requires power companies to minimize the damage to aquatic animals when they intake water to cool engines in their plants. The APPA’s comments, accessible on regulations.gov, describe the rule as “cumbersome” and ask that it be revised.
Another regulation that the document shows the EPA to be reconsidering at the behest of industry is section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which gives states the authority to issue permits for facilities or activities that will impact local water quality. According to the undated spreadsheet, the natural gas and oil industries would be affected.
Agency staffers were also asked to withdraw the 2015 Water Quality Standards Rule, an update of the Clean Water Act that was designed to limit water pollution and protect water quality. The EPA document lists EEI as the source of that request, an apparent reference to the Edison Electric Institute, which submitted public comments in response to the executive order that describe the rule as impinging on states’ “authority to set water quality standards” and asking that it be withdrawn.
The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.
Southerland noted that “states would know better whether it impinges on their ability to set quality standards. But no state has asked” that it be withdrawn.
Other rules the EPA is reassessing include drinking water standards for beryllium — which would affect the coal industry, according to the spreadsheet; guidance for selenium levels in freshwater, which would impact oil and coal; the aquifer exemption under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the National Pollution Discharge and Elimination System, which would affect the oil, coal, and electric power industries.
Although these requests came directly from industry and were delivered to staff by political appointees, Southerland said that EPA career staffers are assessing the requests on their merits. “We said, ‘No, because there’s no new science that would indicate that this report is out of date, there’s no need to change it,’ or ‘There’s no reason to repeal this rule because there’s no new data,’” said Southerland. “Or, in the case of a regulation, we’d say, ‘We found no flaw in the process or technical basis,’ because that’s the normal way of doing things.”
Many of these EPA employees are scientists like Southerland, who holds a PhD in environmental science and engineering. “They’re all super technical people,” she said. “They want to finish their careers and in order to mentally survive this atmosphere they have to have hope.”
Scott Pruitt began to wage war on environmental regulation as soon as he was appointed in February. Among the more than 30 rules and policies he has targeted for delays or elimination since then are the Clean Power Plan, the methane rule, the Waters of the U.S. rule, and a proposed ban of the pesticide chlorpyrifos.
Southerland clarified that this first round of regulatory rollbacks represents only a fraction of the rules the EPA staff is now being asked to evaluate. “These 30 are just the ones that the oil and gas and pesticide people asked for up front,” said Southerland, who described the companies and industry groups that requested these initial changes as having “their own special deal.”
The full range of proposed rollbacks will become apparent in September, when the EPA and other agencies are required to report back on their assessments of regulation. In the meantime, the staff of the EPA is spending their time considering how to dismantle the policies they have helped create — a process that’s both time consuming and extremely expensive.
“The taxpayers are paying for us to now spend enormous amounts of federal employee hours undoing everything they had spent those same federal employee hours building,” said Southerland. “Look at the enormous treasure that these people are having everyone expend for their ideology.”
Keep reading...Show less
A physicist and possible adviser to Trump describes his love of science, and CO2.
Brilliant and controversial, Dr. Will Happer of Princeton says being called a climate denier feels like being labeled a Nazi sympathizer.
Brilliant and controversial, Dr. Will Happer of Princeton says being called a climate denier feels like being labeled a Nazi sympathizer.
by Andrew Revkin
ProPublica, Feb. 15, 2017, 8 a.m.
0 Comments Print Print
Independent Journalism is Fundamental to Democracy
Support ProPublica now.
Donate
search Follow ProPublica
Twitter Twitter Facebook Facebook volumelow Podcast RSS RSS
Email Updates by email
optional
Our Hottest Stories
Most Read
Former ‘Border Czar’ Gives Real Facts About Immigration
Trump Once Told New York City His Net Worth Was Much Lower Than What He Said Publicly
Trump’s Watered-Down Ethics Rules Let a Lobbyist Help Run an Agency He Lobbied
Deleted tweets for Presidential Challenger Donald Trump, R
New York City Set to Pass Sweeping Nuisance Abatement Reforms
Do You Know Someone Who Died or Nearly Died in Childbirth? Help Us Investigate Maternal Health - Pro
Missing: A Boy and The Evidence Against His Accused Killer
Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
Deutsche Bank Remains Trump’s Biggest Conflict of Interest Despite Settlements
The Chosen: Who Trump Is Putting in Power
Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Trump Administration
ProPublica’s ongoing coverage of the 45th President.
This story was co-published with the Huffington Post.
Shortly before President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, his staff confirmed that he had met with two brilliant and pugnacious scientists, each said to be a candidate for the position of science adviser or director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
On Jan. 13, Trump met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with one of them, Dr. Will Happer, an emeritus Princeton University physicist variously hailed and attacked for his enthusiasm about rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that an overwhelming range of scientists see as a profound, if slow-motion, threat to human prospects and to nature.
As you’ll read below, even among foes of curbs on greenhouse gases, Happer is an outlier, insisting the benefits of more carbon dioxide will outweigh any harms.
Shortly after the election, two dozen scientific organizations pressed Trump in a letter to name a science adviser, at the level of assistant to the president. Phone and email contacts with the White House seeking an update on the position and any other candidates have not yet been answered.
In an hourlong Skype interview from his Princeton office on Monday, Happer offered fresh thoughts on science policy. He stuck by his unusual views on the benefits of global warming and the main warming gas, carbon dioxide. He insists warming will be at the lowest end of projections and is captivated by CO2’s plant-boosting properties and its implications for agricultural production. But he also expressed enthusiastic support for fresh investments in science, including climate science, and the need for greatly invigorated science education.
Tune In
Reporter Andrew Revkin, who covers climate, is scheduled to be a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air” show on Feb. 15, 2017. Listen to the show.
Happer’s own research focused on atomic physics and the interactions of light and matter and applications in optics and medical imaging. He has been a longtime member of JASON, the advisory group created during the Cold War to advise the government on defense-related science questions. He directed the Office of Science in the Department of Energy from 1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush.
But his sharp attacks on climate scientists have made him a popular witness at hearings convened by Republican lawmakers aiming to highlight doubts about climate change (explore his 2015 testimony at a Senate hearing and 2010 House testimony to get the idea).
As a result, he’s been a frequent target of environmental groups and scientists focused on slowing climate change. Greenpeace staff, pretending in 2015 emails to represent a Beirut company focused in part on energy, tricked him into agreeing to write reports on the virtues of carbon dioxide. His replies directed hoaxers to pay fees to a nonprofit group he had launched with others to convey the upside of the greenhouse effect. “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love,” he wrote.
Here are excerpts from our interview, edited for clarity and length.
Q: Are you still considered in the running for science adviser or some position in the administration?
A. Well, that’s what people tell me. I don’t know. It’s not something I’m campaigning for. But if I thought I could do some good, I would do it.
Q: Given your time at the Department of Energy, what’s your sense of the importance of basic research and development to make sure people are still testing basics of these different sciences?
Certainly in the long run people still hope that we’ll get better ways to do nuclear fission and nuclear fusion for energy. There’s potentially enormous amounts of energy locked up in the deuterium in the oceans, and there’s a lot of uranium and thorium. It hasn’t been all that successful in either case. In the case of fission energy, there have been these accidents and alarm over what do you do with the waste.
In the case of fusion, it doesn’t even work — not yet. Nobody’s going to fund things like that in the private sector. It’s very long-range research, and if the government isn’t willing to do it, nobody will do it. I wouldn’t invest my money in it. So I would hope that our government and others will continue to work on these things.
One of our problems in climate is that you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’
It’s extremely difficult to maintain that network. They’re always trying to shut it off to get the money for some hare-brained new scheme, new silver bullet.
Q: There’s a March for Science coming up and you’ve commented on it before. You said everyone has the right to express himself or herself but you questioned the utility. I’ve talked to plenty of scientists who question the utility, as well, in such a polarized environment.
But is there a way to invigorate the country’s appreciation of science that’s missing right now? Obama did his annual Science Fairs in the White House, and it’s hard to see that happening under President Trump, but maybe something like that can emerge.
A. Well, I guess where I see the big problem in our country is science illiteracy in the general population. If I were King, I would figure out some way to get better science teaching into the schools, you know, K through 12, and especially middle school and high school. It’s a disgrace that people get out with high school degrees knowing as little as they do. And I think it’s getting worse. I think it was much better in the ‘30s than it is today. And teaching makes a difference.
I often tell the people this anecdote — I once asked Edward Teller [a key architect of the hydrogen bomb] how it was possible that there were all these Hungarians, you know, there was him and Eugene Wigner and Szilard, von Neumann — a real constellation. They were all about the same age, and made enormous contributions to science. It was easy, he said. We all had the same high school teacher in the Fasori Gimnázium in Budapest. So there’s an example. Whoever this teacher was deserves a medal, you know. Nobody pays any attention to him. But at least in Hungarian society, teaching was an honorable profession, so that this really good guy — probably better than most university professors — produced this galaxy of stars. So I think we should seriously think about improving general education.
It’s so difficult to talk to people because their backgrounds are so weak in anything having to do with science.
Q: People say, well, if we had more science literacy — more clarity about climate science for example — then everyone would get more engaged. But people at Yale have studied how science literacy actually is highest in people at the most polarized ends of the discussion over something like global warming.
Science literacy won’t necessarily resolve some of these harsh debates. I wanted to ask you about that. You’ve used the word “cult” in describing climate groupthink and agendas. And I’ve seen it at both ends of the spectrum. When people say action on climate will destroy the economy, that’s kind of an alarmist thing, without a lot of evidence. And at the other end there have clearly been overstatements.
Do you have your own sense of a way to get us out of this alarmist-denier-alarmist-denier rhetoric? Or is it hopeless?
A. I don’t know. First of all, just the term denier to someone like me is extremely offensive because it’s carefully chosen to make me look like a Nazi sympathizer. And you know, I dodged Nazi submarines when I was a kid [on a ship carrying immigrants to the United States] and my father fought against them and my mother worked on the Manhattan Project, and I found it profoundly offensive, you know, and many other people feel the same.
Help Us Track Winds of Change as Trump Confronts Climate Issues
If you see something, say something. ProPublica is eager to get tips on shifts in available government information related to climate change. Read the story.
I think toning down the rhetoric would help a lot. And it has been very uneven — for example under the previous eight years the President and secretary of state kept talking about the deniers, you know, about the baskets of deplorables, the knuckle draggers, the Neanderthals. That was me they’re talking about.
And I think the climate alarmists have been most guilty because they have complete control of the media, they’ve got people like you, they got the President, they got the secretary of state, they hijacked all the major scientific societies. It’s not my side. There’s nobody who listens to us, you know, even if we have crazies saying things, nobody pays any attention, and on the other side if you’re crazy you get the front page of The New York Times. And it’s not because the science is all on their side either. The science is very, very shaky on their side.
Q: Can you dig in on that a little bit? What is the shaky thing? Is it the science itself or the interpretations?
A. What’s not only shaky but almost certainly wrong is the predicted warming. In 1988, you could look at the predictions of warming that we would have today and we’re way below anything [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen predicted at that time. And the celebrated climate sensitivity, how much warming you get for doubling CO2 and waiting for things to settle down, the equilibrium sensitivity, is probably around 1 degree centigrade, it’s not 3 1/2 or whatever the agreed-on number was. It may even be less. And the Earth has done the experiment with more CO2 many, many times in the past. In fact, most of the time it’s been much more CO2 than now. You know, the geological record’s completely clear on that. So nothing bad happened, in fact the earth flourished with more CO2.
Q: One thing that distinguishes the current situation from the Carboniferous Period is there weren’t cities lining coastlines back then.
I’m still trying to find out myself how much of these judgments are a rigorous quantified thing or a value judgement. Basically, how much you value the future gets incorporated into all of these calculations. Even David Roberts, the liberal blogger who popularized the term “climate hawk,” wrote a piece a few years ago that said values often hide behind what look like numerical arguments.
Is what we’re seeing here mostly a debate between people with different value sets about what to do in the face of uncertainty with some risk attendant?
There are many economists and risk analysts — there’s even a Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, which includes people at the Rand Corporation, people I’m sure you know — who say that the uncertainty cuts in both directions. Most of the time when we in society invest in some countermeasure it’s on the basis of the worst-case outcome, not the middle ground.
A. Well you know if you look around the world there are people peddling every risk you can imagine, you know. High-altitude nuclear bursts. The instability of the grid, you know. Cyber meltdown, the year 2000 bug. GMOs. People have been making money on risks as long as the world is existing. And if you subscribe to every one of these people’s worries you might as well shut down, you know, you can’t operate.
In the case of climate, I think that any dispassionate weighing of the facts would give you a negative cost of carbon, you know, that more CO2 is good for the world. I’ve always maintained that. I can explain many reasons for it.
Now this is not to say that irresponsible burning of fossil fuels is good for the world, there are all sorts of real problems there, and one bad thing about the climate hysteria is it distracted people from real problems. You go to Beijing or New Delhi and on certain days you can practically not go outside, the air is so bad. But it’s not CO2. It’s people burning the fields, it’s fly ash from unregulated coal burning, it’s every possible thing, all of which have solutions. You don’t have to live with this stuff. And yet instead of cleaning up the air and making people’s lives better, they jet around the world talking about saving the planet from CO2, which it’s not in danger from.
Q: So you really do see global warming as a non-problem, not as something worth investing in?
A. Absolutely. Not only a non-problem. I see the CO2 as good, you know. Let me be clear. I don’t think it’s a problem at all, I think it’s a good thing. It’s just incredible when people keep talking about carbon pollution when you and I are sitting here breathing out, you know, 40,000 parts per million of CO2 with every exhalation. So I mean it’s shameful to do all of this propaganda on what’s a beneficial natural part of the atmosphere that has never been stable but most of the time much higher than now.
Q: Is there a finding that could emerge related to, say, sea level that could get you more focused or thinking about the downside of the relentless buildup of this gas? Remember, the thing that’s the issue here is the long-lived nature of CO2. So it’s kind of like a ratcheting mechanism. It’s hard to reverse.
A. Well I think CO2 is good. I’m very happy that it’s long-lived. The longer the better. Look, I mean you can already see the Earth greening. [It is.] If you look at agricultural yields, they’re steadily going up. A lot of that is fertilizer, better varieties, but some of it is CO2. So I mean I can’t imagine why you would want to decrease CO2.
Q: This does make you a real outlier. I went to this debate 10 years ago that had Richard Lindzen of MIT, had Michael Crichton and some others who were harsh critics of overstatement about global warming. But none of them said that it’s not an issue, that there’s no sense of a downside to the relentless buildup of this gas toward levels that haven’t been seen in millions of years. Pat Michaels, a Cato Institute climatologist, has never said that CO2 is a good thing in that sense.
So who is with you on this?
A. Well you know, scientific facts, you don’t vote on them. I mean that’s what the climate community seems to think whenever I talk to them, they say look at all the international agreements for what the answer is. But Columbus was an outlier, you know, there’ve been lots of outliers, and many of them were right, you know.
Q: As you look at the world heading toward 9 billion people more or less by midcentury and beyond, all who want a decent life like we have, it doesn’t seem easy to figure out how to do that without a lot more innovation. And I don’t know if that would be an imperative for you if you got into sort of a leadership position in government.
A. I’m certainly for innovation. I mean you have to be realistic. Governments sometimes think that they can dump enough money on some desired outcome and it will happen. And you know, it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true, you know, the major breakthroughs in world history and science have mostly been accidental. But government and society did play a role because at the time the accidental things happened there were smart people who had been trained and knew what to look for who were able to take advantage of them. You discover photographic plates, you know, getting fogged up in your desk drawer as Becquerel did, and start looking at that, and Madame Curie started looking at that, and you discover some kind of strange radiation, from beryllium and radium and you know, Chadwick had enough sense to realize, oh my god this is a completely new particle, it’s a neutron; it goes right through most things. And you know, so over the course of history, even electricity and magnetism, you know, the discovery of Flaherty’s law that was complete accident really, and you know, all of our transformers, everything we do, you know, is based on this sort of accidentally cobbled together beautiful structure of electricity and magnetism, you know, the sort of most convenient form of energy of all is electricity.
So I think the best thing governments can do is try and get the best and brightest people that you can find — honest, best and brightest — train them, and let them do something meaningful. Keep trying, you know. Most things you try, you know, they’re interesting but they’re not big breakthroughs, but every now and then a big breakthrough will come if you have these people out there. Train as many good people as you can afford and make sure that the rest of society works; you have to have people to drive the bus, to do all the other very important and necessary things that have to be done. But a certain fraction ought to be pushing the limits of knowledge.
Q: You mentioned the importance of maintaining systems that give us a clear view of change. And that is an area where Republicans and Democrats have both failed, basically. And this is from stream gauges through to air monitoring and more. If we don’t maintain a consistent view of the planet and resources, then no one can reliably say something new and different is happening that’s consequential.
Are we just doomed always to have politics where that’s always seen as not important?
A. In fact, it’s a huge problem. And especially if it involves important things, you know, like global temperature, rainfall, crops. I’m all for climate science, you know. If I were King, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things and they have this problem of maintenance I mentioned. We’re kind of stingy, and so a satellite goes down and then you have a gap and you’re not quite sure how to calibrate the next one, you know, and it wouldn’t cost that much to have a little bit of redundancy so that didn’t happen in the future. I don’t know what the solution to this is. I always admired Hindu theology because, you know, they had these three sorts of deities — a creator, a destroyer and a maintainer. And our society is mostly creation. We’ve neglected the maintenance that has to go into keeping human society going. And also destruction. Every now and then you have to shut down things that have outlived their usefulness.
Further Reading
The other scientist who met with Trump in January was Dr. David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer at Yale University also known for his conservative views and wide-ranging writing, including indictments of liberal intellectuals for allegedly tainting academia. Gelernter is a prodigious intellect with a provocateur’s style, qualities that may have caught Trump’s eye.
In a recent interview with The Scientist, David Gelernter offered a semi-skeptical view of human-driven global warming, describing it as his “impression as a layman, hearing, reading, looking around, and noticing how greatly the propensity is among scientists — and among many others — to overestimate mankind’s capacity for changing the Earth.”
“My own belief is that global warming is real, that it is happening,” he told the magazine. “After all, the Earth’s climate has oscillated clearly in the past. We expect not stability, but oscillation. The evidence I’ve seen has not convinced me that the cause of this global warming or an appreciable contribution [to it] is human activity. But not until I spend a lot more time with the topic … would I be in a position to give anybody advice on it.”
You can explore a separate interview with Happer in The Scientist that goes over some interesting terrain, including his view that inconsistent government scientific advice — he cited flip-flops in recommendations on nutrition — can fuel public distrust. “If we continue to promote, with government support, things that sooner or later turn out to be wrong,” Happer said, “then the important things that are right — that you would really like the population to pay attention to — get ignored, too.”
Andrew Revkin, who covers the climate, is scheduled to be a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air” show on Feb. 15, 2017.
Like this story? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get more of our best work.
Keep reading...Show less
New Congress on track to block long-sought workplace and public health protections.
Occupational and public health protective policies finalized by the Obama administration are now jeopardized by antiregulatory legislation already passed by the 115th Congress.
BY ELIZABETH GROSSMAN
ShareTweetReddit0StumbleUpon236EmailPrint
Not surprisingly, the historically pro-big business U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports antiregulatory legislation, as does the American Chemistry Council and National Association of Manufacturers. (Craig Bennett/ Flickr)
An estimated 10,000 Americans die from asbestos-caused diseases each year, a figure that’s considered conservative. Asbestos is no longer mined in the United States but it still exists in products here, perpetuating exposure, especially for workers in construction and other heavy industries. In June 2016, after years of debate, the country’s major chemical regulation law was updated for the first time in 40 years, removing a major obstacle to banning asbestos.
Exposure to beryllium, a metal used in aerospace, defense, and communications industry manufacturing, to which about 62,000 U.S. workers are exposed annually, can cause a severe, chronic lung disease. On January 6, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) issued a rule—more than 15 years in the making—that dramatically lowers allowable workplace exposure to beryllium. OSHA says this will prevent 94 premature deaths and prevent 46 new cases of beryllium-related disease per year.
On April 17, 2013, an explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer Company plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people and injured hundreds. In late December—after a four-year process involving public, business, governments and non-profit input—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule designed to prevent such accidents, improve community response to and preparedness for such disasters.
Those three examples are among the occupational and public health protective policies finalized by the Obama administration now jeopardized by antiregulatory legislation already passed by the 115th Congress. It remains to be seen if this legislation will become law and actually used. But, says University of Texas School of Law professor Thomas McGarity, the likely outcome is “that this will make people sick and unsafe.”
“Landscape is grim as it is”
In addition to having the ability to pass antiregulatory legislation, Congress has at its disposal the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Passed in 1996 by the Newt Gingrich-led House, it allows Congress to overturn a regulation passed during the last 60 legislative working days of an outgoing administration. What’s more, it prevents the creation of a substantially similar regulation. It’s only been used once, in 2001, to overturn the ergonomics regulation passed by OSHA under President Bill Clinton.
Add to this the Midnight Rules Relief Act, passed by the House on January 4. It amends the CRA, allowing Congress to overturn multiple regulations promulgated during the previous administration’s last six months, rather than individually as the CRA requires. “This allows the House to pick and choose rules that industry doesn’t like and do it all at once,” McGarity explains.
Also already passed by the House is the Regulatory Accountability Act. It includes a provision that could threaten the change made to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) eliminating the provision that prevented the EPA from banning asbestos. As Natural Resources Defense Council director of government affairs, David Goldston explains, “This bill has a provision that says notwithstanding any other provision of law, costs and benefits have to be considered when writing a rule.” Goldston calls this phrase “dangerous,” as it means putting economic costs to industry ahead of costs to human health as TSCA previously required—a requirement the revised bill eliminated.
And, as if these laws weren’t enough to threaten existing regulations, there’s the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act), also already passed by the House. This law essentially says that an agency rule can’t go into effect unless Congress approves it. Or, as University of Maryland Carey School of Law professor Rena Steinzor explained in the American Prospect, “In a drastic power grab, the House has approved a measure that would strip executive agencies of the authority to issue significant new regulations.”
“If the REINS Act becomes law, then Congressional inaction will supersede previous Congressional action on fundamental bedrock popular health, safety and environmental protection laws,” says Public Citizen regulatory policy advocate Amit Narang.
He also points out that if the administration of Donald Trump declines to defend regulations now under legal challenge, they could also be undone. Among the rules now being challenged is OSHA’s long sought updated restriction on occupational silica exposure.
“The landscape is grim as it is,” says Emily Gardner, worker health and safety advocate at the non-profit citizens’ rights advocacy group Public Citizen, referring to OSHA’s limited resources. “There are nearly 5,000 workers dying on the job every year and OSHA’s not able to respond to threats as they’re happening.” Now, she says, “I’m looking at a Congress that would nearly paralyze rulemaking.”
“Designed to smash the system not reform it”
These laws effectively knock the foundation out from under how agencies like OSHA, the Department of Labor and EPA go about creating the network of regulations needed to implement the intent of laws that protect workplace and public health.
“This is designed to smash the system not reform it,” says Goldston of this antiregulatory legislation.
Not surprisingly, the historically pro-big business U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports antiregulatory legislation, as does the American Chemistry Council and National Association of Manufacturers. On the other hand, it’s opposed by American Sustainable Business Council, which represents more than 250,000 business owners and says the regulations these laws aim to undo are needed to support healthy, thriving workplaces and the economy.
Apart from the CRA, all of this legislation still needs to pass the Senate and be signed by the president to become law. But with a Republicans in the majority and Trump in the White House, vetoes seem highly unlikely.
Keep reading...Show less
Greenland once lost nearly all its ice — and could again.
Two studies illuminate how the northern ice sheet waxed and waned over millions of years.
Two studies illuminate how the northern ice sheet waxed and waned over millions of years.
Alexandra Witze
07 December 2016
Article tools
Rights & Permissions
Joshua Brown/UVM
The composition of Greenland's bedrock suggests that the island's massive ice sheet shrunk millions of years ago.
Evidence buried in Greenland's bedrock shows the island's massive ice sheet melted nearly completely at least once in the last 2.6 million years. This suggests that Greenland's ice may be less stable than previously believed.
“Our study puts Greenland back on the endangered ice-sheet map,” says Joerg Schaefer, a palaeoclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and co-author of a paper published on 7 December in Nature1.
A second paper in the same issue paints a slightly different view of the ice sheet’s past stability2. A group led by Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, found that ice covered eastern Greenland for all of the past 7.5 million years. Experts say the two papers do not necessarily contradict one another: at times, nearly all of Greenland's ice could have melted (as seen by Schaefer's team) while a frosty cap remained in the eastern highlands (as seen by Bierman's group).
If all of Greenland's ice melted, it would raise sea levels by seven metres. Models suggest that Greenland could become ice-free as soon as 2,500 years from now, depending on the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere3.
The latest papers add to a growing understanding of how Greenland’s ice has shifted over millions of years. Both studies used radioactive isotopes of beryllium and aluminium to estimate how long the island's bedrock was exposed to the atmosphere — as cosmic rays pummel rock, they produce radionuclides such as beryllium-10 and aluminium-26. By counting those radionuclides in the topmost rock, researchers can estimate how long the surface was exposed to cosmic rays — that is, not shielded by thick ice.
Schaefer’s team analysed bedrock collected from the very bottom of the hole drilled for the GISP2 ice core, which was completed in central Greenland in 1993. “We just asked the surface, 'Have you been ice free or not?'” says Schaefer. “It clearly told us, 'I have been ice free.'”
Joshua Brown/UVM
Greenland's ice sheet is up to 3 kilometres thick in places.
Hidden history
Because the radionuclide history can be interpreted in different ways, the researchers cannot say exactly when the bedrock would have been exposed, or for how long. “That's a big drawback,” says Anders Carlson, a palaeoclimatologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who has studied ice-sheet history in south Greenland4. “If they could have gotten the timing of when it was ice-free, that would have been really cool.” One possibility, says Schaefer, is that Greenland was ice-free for at least 280,000 years, starting more than 1.1 million years ago.
The second study suggests that most of the ice sheet hung around for all of the last 7.5 million years. Bierman and his colleagues studied radionuclides in marine sediments off the east coast of Greenland, which had been washed off as glaciers ground through the underlying bedrock. Using a similar method to determine exposure ages, Bierman’s team concluded that glaciers eroded eastern Greenland through the entire time period. Model simulations show that if the ice sheet shrinks to about 5–10% of its current extent, it would leave the GISP2 location bare while still coating parts of east Greenland.
Both studies are consistent with Greenland having an ice sheet that grew to full size about 1.1 million years ago, says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who has studied how Greenland's ice persisted through a warm spell 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.
Bierman compares the two papers to the parable of blind men feeling an elephant. “They have the tip of the tusk, and we have a large side of the flank,” he says. “Together they can really inform each other.”
A new class of rapid-access ice drills under development could accelerate discovery by providing more samples from the bottom of the ice sheet, says Michael Bender, a geologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. Earlier this year, he and his colleagues reported the ice at the bottom of a different Greenland ice core, known as GRIP, was at least 1 million years old5. That, too, supports the idea that Greenland's ice has been stable for at least the past million years.
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2016.21098
References
Schaefer, J. M. et al. Nature https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature20146 (2016).
Bierman, P. R., Shakun, J. D., Corbett, L. B., Zimmerman, S. R. & Rood, D. H. Nature https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature20147 (2016).
Clark, P. U. et al. Nature Clim. Change 6, 360–369 (2016).
Reyes, A. V. et al. Nature 510, 525–528 (2014).
Yau, A. M., Bender, M. L., Blunier, T. & Jouzel, J. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 451, 1–9 (2016).
Keep reading...Show less
History reveals Greenland ice might melt much faster than believed.
The huge ice sheet melted several times between ice ages, leading to belief it will melt faster with global warming, with dire implications for sea level rise.
Greenland rocks now buried under 10,000 feet of ice were ice-free for long stretches during the past 1.4 million years, leading scientists to conclude the Greenland Ice Sheet could melt more suddenly than previously believed.
That could raise global sea level far beyond current projections over the next few centuries, including past recent estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The research challenges the prevailing idea that the ice sheet remained relatively intact during the recent geological past, showing even the thickest ice had vanished during warm periods between ice ages.
Columbia University paleoclimatologist Joerg Schaefer, who co-authored the study, said the findings show the Greenland Ice Sheet may be much less stable than scientists thought.
"Over the last 15 years, it looked like we wouldn't have to worry too much about the Greenland ice sheet melting too fast," Schaefer said. "Most of the climate models treated it as a solid ice cube sitting on bedrock. With climate warming, it melts off the top, but it takes a long time. Compared to other ice sheets like West Antarctica, is looked pretty strong and resilient to warming."
New, direct samples of the bedrock pierced that belief.
"These might be the most precious rocks since the moon rocks," he said. "We got the huge privilege of working with these rocks, and cutting-edge isotopic tools, and the surface of Greenland gave us a very clear answer. Unfortunately, the answer is it was ice-free during an important period."
If the ice sheet had persisted across most of Greenland during those warm periods, there was hope that it could stay mostly intact despite the Earth's thickening blanket of greenhouse gases. The new study suggests that, because it mostly melted, there's little doubt the planet's warming trajectory will melt the Greenland Ice Sheet in the centuries ahead.
"We lost the Greenland Ice Sheet during periods of natural forcing, We lost it several times, soit's not reasonable to believe we'll keep that ice sheet in the future with human-caused global warming," he said.
The paper doesn't project a specific timeline for melting, but the findings could have an effect in the coming century. The models currently used to project sea level rise indicate a stable ice sheet. But other factors, including accelerating glaciers or more water at the base of the ice, could push the ice sheet past a tipping point toward a rapid meltdown, Schaeffer said.
Knowing how fast and how much the Greenland Ice Sheet melted under past climate change is crucial to knowing how much sea level will rise in coming decades from ongoing global warming, which is amplified in the Arctic to near twice the global average temperature increase.
"This opens up questions for ice sheet modelers like me, whether we are missing processes in the models we use to project the rate of sea level rise in the next century," said Lauren Gregoire, who studies abrupt climate change at the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment.
"This is right in the middle of the ice sheet. If someone can convince me there was no ice there, it probably means there was not much ice left. That part is really robust and convincing," she said, referring to the location where the bedrock was sampled.
"It's definitely relevant to what's going to happen in the future, it's going tell us the magnitude of sea level change we're going to have in the future, but not how fast."
Analyzing the isotopes created from tiny particles bombarding Earth from space helped the scientists conclude that up to 90 percent of the ice sheet probably melted several times during that span.
The study implies that Greenland was almost ice free for almost 25 percent of the second half of Quaternary, a 2.6 million year geological period marked by relatively regular ice age cycles. Other climate records suggest those ice-free periods were much shorter," said scientist Andrey Ganopolski, who studies ice age cycles at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Although a couple of centuries to a couple of millennia are the fastest meltdown scenarios, according to Florian Ziemen, a climate modeler with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the new study's findings could have implications on for the next 50 to 100 years. Along with raising sea level more quickly than anticipated, cold water from melting Greenland ice could affect Atlantic Ocean currents that regulate the climate in the Northern Hemisphere, he added.
To better assess the timing and extent of the historic melting, the scientists say more samples are needed. A prototype of a new drill that can rapidly penetrate nearly two vertical miles of ice has already been built by a consortium of U.S. scientists, but there's currently no funding for deployment. It is the type of science most at risk if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to cut funding for climate research.
The rock sample is more than 20 years old, but only in the past year have scientists been able to accurately trace the radioactive beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes that stem from the interstellar debris crashing to Earth. The isotopes decay at known rates, so they can accurately show when the rocks were exposed to the atmosphere.
Many parts of the world will be hard-pressed to try and adapt to the 3-4 foot sea level rise projected for 2100 by the IPCC and the IPCC report doesn't account for a potentially rapid meltdown of Greenland ice. That could be a fatal miscalculation, said Jeff Severinghaus, a paleoclimatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study. The new findings mean that policymakers and planners can reject low-end sea level rise projections because the models used for those assumed that the Greenland Ice Sheet persisted during the past 1 million years.
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
