Reuters reports:

The top U.S. environmental regulator on Thursday said her agency would soon comment on the proposed $7 billion Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, adding she was concerned about emissions and potential leaks that could result from the project.

“We have comments we are just about completing on the current environmental impact statement,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said at a Howard University event with youth environment leaders.

Jackson listed concerns about the pipeline including additional greenhouse gas emissions from producing the oil sands; the possibility of leaks on the line; and harmful emissions from refineries in communities along the Gulf Coast that could result from the project.

“This isn’t a little tiny pipeline, this is a pipeline that cuts our country literally in half,” she added. The $7 billion project would take 700,000 barrels per day or more from Canada through six states to refineries in Texas.

The EPA was highly critical of the first two drafts of the EIS that the State Department released, forcing the agency to go back and revise their analyses. Environmental groups have revealed close ties between TransCanada and officials in the State Department and accuse the agency of acting as a cheerleader for the project rather than an independent and objective decision maker.

“The subcommittee’s recommendations and its acknowledgement that changes need to be made are certainly a step in the right direction,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder. “However, until legal shortcomings are fixed and voluntary recommendations become actual requirements, communities will remain without real assurance that their air, water and health are adequately protected.”

The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Shale Gas Production Subcommittee released its report Thursday (pdf), calling for mandatory disclosure of the chemicals injected deep into natural gas wells along with water and sand to fracture rock formations and free up more gas. Critics say the process can lead to groundwater contamination while industry officials maintain it’s a safe process in which the chemicals often must remain secret for proprietary reasons.

The advisory panel also urged industry to move toward best environmental practices and to improve other aspects of drilling operations that have been proven to sometimes cause groundwater contamination.

“I support their call to develop best practices for casing and cementing jobs in fracking operations,” U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, said. “Last year’s BP spill in the Gulf has been largely attributed to faulty casing and cementing, and, as I have repeatedly warned, the consequences of a similar tragedy in an onshore well could be even more catastrophic.”

Colorado regulators and industry representatives have consistently told the Colorado Independent that faulty cement jobs of gas wells and leaks from pipelines and holding ponds are more of a threat to groundwater than fracking itself, making chemical disclosure somewhat of a red herring.

Polis, who also has sponsored legislation aimed at better air-quality regulation of natural gas drilling, said he’s glad the panel report examined other aspects of the drilling process associated with fracking but warned federal regulators should not ignore the potential pollution impacts of the process itself.

“The subcommittee did the right thing in undertaking a broad evaluation of problems like toxic air pollution and faulty well casings, often not considered ‘fracking,’ by the industry,” Polis said. “However, the subcommittee shouldn’t be dismissive of water contamination directly attributed to fracking itself, with an EPA study currently underway, and recent news of just such a case.”

Polis was referring to an old West Virginia case in which EPA regulators found that fracking itself caused contamination of a drinking water well. Industry has long maintained that fracking itself occurs too far below groundwater sources to cause direct contamination.

Overall, DeGette said she was pleased that the panel recommended many of the same things contained in her Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act, which she wrote and has been trying to get passed for several years. Polis is a co-author.

DeGette was particularly encouraged by the panel’s recommendation to end the use of diesel fuel in fracking, which she has targeted as potentially one of the most damaging constituents in fracking formulas. She’s seeking a better definition of diesel fuel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“Over the past several months, my committee has revealed extensive evidence of the use of diesel fuel in fracking projects across the nation,” DeGette said. “This report’s recommendation to cease use of diesel at all is a welcome development as we strive to make the fracking process safer.”

Dan Whitten, vice president for strategic communications for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, said he was happy to see the panel recommend ongoing use of voluntary chemical disclosure websites and independent review of state fracking regulations – a process Colorado is currently undergoing.

“While we will continue to study the details of the report, we are particularly pleased with the recommendation to bolster the role of the multi-stakeholder group STRONGER and the Ground Water Protection Council (GWPC) to work within the state regulatory framework,” Whitten said.

“The report also reinforces ANGA’s prior commitment to disclosure of hydraulic fracturing fluids through the state-based GWPC registry, FracFocus.org. ANGA member companies are committed to the safe and responsible development of our nation’s clean and abundant natural gas supplies.”

And the lone environmental representative on the panel, Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, defended its balance. A group of scientists earlier in the weekquestioned the panel makeup, charging it was weighted too heavily toward industry interests.

“At a time when so much of the debate in Washington is characterized by discord and paralysis, it finds common ground and offers a clear consensus. The public’s right to clean water and clean air cannot be compromised,” Krupp said.

“The subcommittee’s recommendations won’t solve every problem overnight. But if implemented, they would make real progress toward developing this abundant energy source in ways that safeguard public health and the environment. Rigorous, well-designed standards and improved transparency and disclosure can help ensure that shale gas is developed responsibly now and in the future.”

Dead zones come about when oxygen levels are so low that marine life in bottom and near-bottom waters cannot be supported. The gulf’s dead zone has become notorious and has been, at times, an obstacle for Florida’s commercial fishing industry.

According to the Geological Survey study, “state and federal partners serving on the Mississippi River Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force are striving to decrease nutrients transported to the Gulf to reduce the size of the hypoxic zone to less than 5,000 square kilometers (about 2,000 square miles) by 2015.”

Among the major findings of the study was that nitrate transport to the Gulf of Mexico was 10 percent higher in 2008 than 1980, which is in part due to the flow of the water.

From the study:

Nitrate transport during the spring is one of the primary determinants of the size of the Gulf hypoxic zone. At times of high spring streamflow during the period studied, the concentration of nitrate decreased at the study site near where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico, indicating that some progress has been made at reducing nitrate transport during high flow conditions. However, during times of low to moderate spring streamflow, concentrations increased. The net effect of these changes is that nitrate transport to the Gulf was about 10% higher in 2008 than 1980.

Earlier this week, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the dead zone wasn’t as large as had been previously estimated. But, at 6,765 square miles wide, it’s still larger than the state of Connecticut.

The gulf is responsible for about 40 percent of the seafood harvested in the lower 48 states, and the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has conservatively estimated(PDF) that dead zones and harmful algal blooms cost U.S. coastal economies about $82 million a year.

The Geological Survey study examined concentrations and transport of nitrates at eight major study sites in the Mississippi. The results of the study are published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

- Oil spill response

- Clean energy job creation

- A title to “reduce oil consumption”

- A “broader” title, which he’s working on with the Finance Committee, and which will address the utilities sector. No details on whether it’ll include a cap on emissions, but he said it would deal with “pollution.”

More to come…

The move ups the pressure on lawmakers who prefer congressional action to EPA regulation but have been wary of carbon-pricing legislation. With the threat of EPA restrictions growing ever stronger, it’s getting increasingly difficult for these lawmakers to ignore the issue.

Equally important is the utilities sector, some of whose leaders have backed the notion of comprehensive climate legislation. But utility CEOs have been more skeptical of a bill that would impose emissions limits only on power plants.

A Senate aide familiar with the energy and climate negotiations tells me that the utilities are unlikely to sign on to any legislation that does not feature some guarantee that other sectors will be capped down the line, even if only utilities are subject to the cap at first.

But the utilities’ bargaining power is likely to diminish with each new EPA assertion of authority. Faced with a choice between EPA regulation and a bill that will put a price on their carbon emissions — but one that they can help shape — they’re likely to choose the latter.

For an energy and climate bill that’s still facing tough odds, the timing of the EPA’s announcement couldn’t have been better.

In its “2008 Michigan Family Fish Consumption Guide: Important facts to know if you eat Michigan fish,” the Michigan Department of Community Health warns that pre-menopausal women and children should avoid all lake trout and large whitefish from Lake Huron because elevated levels of PCBs and dioxin have been detected in samples taken by the Department of Environmental Quality.

But people who encounter these same fish in restaurants and fish markets across the country are unlikely to know about Michigan’s consumption advisory — commercial fisheries are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration which does not regularly screen for dioxin and doesn’t require that consumers be informed about state consumption advisories.

At Bay City [Mich.]’s Bay Fest over the Memorial Day weekend, representatives from Bayport Fish Co. said that most of their fish is sold to Jewish and Chinese distributors in Chicago and New York City.

According to a report by the university-based Michigan Sea Grant Extension, 60 percent of the commercially caught Great Lakes whitefish come from Lake Huron. In 2000, more than 3.5 million pounds of whitefish were harvested from the lake’s U.S.-administered waters.

TWI’s sister site, The New Mexico Independent, has the story.

In a dramatic move yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew the air quality permit it issued last summer for the Desert Rock coal-fired power plant, which is slated to be built on the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region just southwest of Farmington, N.M. [...]

The EPA found that the permit was issued prematurely, before complete analysis could be conducted of hazardous air emissions like mercury, or the impact of the facility on endangered species, or the impact on soil, vegetation, and visibility in the region. The permit also didn’t adequately examine particulate matter.

You can read the full story here.

Most environmentalists support a 100 percent auction, but the ambitious and comprehensive Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill released last week was largely silent on the issue, leaving open the possibility that some permits might be distributed without an auction. Utilities and pollution-heavy industries tend to oppose an 100 percent auction, which could cost them a great deal. If Obama endorses a partial auction, it would likely be to win over some moderate senators from coal- and heavy industry-reliant states.

The Post piece presents the two opposing arguments:

Keith Trent, chief strategy, policy and regulatory officer for Duke Energy Corp., said utility executives are hoping for a 10-year transition to a 100 percent auction so they can install pollution controls without raising electricity costs too high. He added that emitters would still have an incentive to cut carbon dioxide because of the overall federal cap on carbon emissions: “The cap is what makes the system’s environmental integrity, and you can’t exceed that cap because you need an allowance to do it.”

But environmental advocate Erich Pica, director of domestic programs for Friends of the Earth, said giving utility providers free allowances would be less efficient than rebating the revenue from auctions directly to taxpayers. A 100 percent auction, Pica said, “forces the polluters from Day One to pay for the transition to a clean energy economy, and keeps low and middle-income consumers whole during the transition.”

Given the strong opposition that cap-and-trade has faced, a partial auction would not be a huge surprise. However, it would still represent a major concession by the Obama administration on one of the president’s core agenda items.

As the auto industry decries the White House decision to reconsider California’s push for stricter emission standards, some environmental groups are quick to point out that several automakers have already pledged to meet the proposed guidelines.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Business strategies submitted to Congress, as part of a December bailout debate, by Ford and General Motors would, if achieved, make the companies compliant with California’s proposed emission reforms — the same changes the companies have opposed for years — according to an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Ford, for example, boasted that it would raise its fuel-economy standards 26 percent above 2005 levels by 2012, and 36 percent above the same baseline by 2015. General Motors, for its part, vowed fleet-wide fuel-efficiencies of 37.3 miles a gallon for cars, and 27.5 mpg for trucks, by 2012. (Chrysler, which did not include fuel-efficiency estimates in its report, was not a subject of the NRDC analysis.)

Both the Ford and GM plans — which surfaced during a December congressional debate over whether the Big Three should receive $34 billion in a taxpayer-funded bailout — set the companies on a pace that “easily” meets California’s proposed reforms, NRDC found.

Lawmakers had requested the strategies as proof that the companies could remain viable if they received the money. It wasn’t granted through Congress, but the Bush administration stepped in later with $17.4 billion in Wall Street bailout funding.

Supporters of tighter emission rules say the business plans are evidence that the automakers would be able to comply with California’s proposed changes, which call for a 30 percent reduction in vehicle emissions by 2016. In light of the sinking economy, they add, the move to more fuel-efficient vehicles might also help them sell more cars.

“They need to hold themselves up to a higher standard for their own survival,” said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director at the NRDC and author of the analysis. “They can do it, and they’ve committed to it, in fact.”

Eli Hopson, Washington representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles program, conceded that the conversion between emissions and fuel efficiency is not a perfect science, particularly because California’s standards are derived differently than the national gauge. Still, he said, the NRDC report is good indication that California’s goals are achievable without overburdening the automakers.

“If [the companies] don’t reach the California standard,” Hopson said, referring to their viability reports, “they’ll be pretty close.”

The debate was renewed on Monday, when President Barack Obama — in yet another sharp break from his predecessor — announced that he’ll ask the Environmental Protection Agency to review California’s request to waive federal emission rules in favor of stricter state guidelines. State officials say the changes are necessary to rein in pollution and tackle global warming.

The Bush administration had denied California’s waiver in late 2007, arguing that it would create a confusing set of incongruous state standards that would prove harmful to automakers — a view Obama soundly rejected this week.

“This will help us create incentives to develop new energy that will make us less dependent on the oil that endangers our security, our economy and our planet,” Obama said. “Our goal is not to further burden an already struggling industry; it is to help America’s automakers prepare for the future.”

Many congressional Democrats, environmentalists and state officials agree. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) issued a statement calling Obama’s move “a historic win for clean air and for millions of Americans who want more fuel-efficient, environmentally-friendly cars.”

The California Air Resources Board estimates that tailpipe emissions pump more greenhouse gas into the air than any other source — representing 30 percent of the state’s carbon dioxide emissions. Adding to the urgency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report Monday indicating that it would take at least 1,000 years for the climatic effects of carbon emissions to reverse themselves, even if emissions were halted tomorrow.

Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s more stringent emissions standards, while four additional states have taken steps to install those standards as well. Together, the states represent roughly 47 percent of the country’s vehicles, Hwang says.

But the waivers have sparked an outcry from the automakers, many Republicans and Michigan Democrats, who continue to argue that the new standards would put undue burdens on an already struggling industry.

GM spokesman Greg Martin dismissed the NRDC report Tuesday, claiming that “their numbers were off.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement Monday saying that approving the waiver will “destroy American jobs at the very time government leaders should be working together to protect and create them.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) echoed those sentiments, arguing that “a separate California standard will not only create the “confusing and patchwork set of standards” that President Obama today implied he wanted to avoid, but also, as the California standard is currently drafted, it is discriminatory against U.S.-made vehicles of the same efficiency as the imports.”

Still, Chrysler and General Motors have, combined, accepted more than $17 billion from taxpayers to keep them afloat through March. And Ford, which hasn’t accepted bailout funding, has said it may be forced to do so in 2010 if the economy doesn’t recover. Some observers say the bailouts leave the automakers little room to fight the emission reforms.

A series of toned-down statements from the industry Monday seem to indicate that the companies are well-aware that their powers of persuasion have been vastly diminished. GM, for example, said it “is working aggressively on the products and the advance technologies that match the nation’s and consumers’ priorities to save energy and reduce emissions.”

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents foreign and domestic automakers, said it “supports a nationwide program that bridges state and federal concerns and moves all stakeholders forward.”

“The bailout means that the auto companies work for us now,” said Daniel Becker, who heads the Safe Climate Campaign, an environmental group.

“The current concerns over global climate change should not drive EPA into adopting an unworkable policy of requiring emissions controls,” Johnson said.

In a letter sent Monday to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Boxer blasted Johnson’s argument as not only detrimental to anti-global warming efforts, but illegal. To heed Johnson’s words, Boxer wrote, would only “create further unconscionable delay in efforts to protect America — and the world — from the ravages of unchecked global warming.” From the letter:

The steps we must take to address global warming are a recipe for economic recovery, but Mr. Johnson’s illegal memo will only postpone the steps that will combat global warming, create millions of jobs, and ensure America’s energy security.

The courts are on Boxer’s side. In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that carbon emissions are indeed subject to the Clean Air Act. More recently, the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board reached the same conclusion. “The Attorney General has an obligation to intervene when the actions of the Administration are so clearly outside the law,” Boxer said in a statement accompanying the letter.

The Natural Resources Defense Council issued a statement saying that the sheer absurdity of the ruling should lend hope to those interested in reining in air pollution.

The ultimate consolation, however, is that today’s EPA offense is so ham-handed, so divorced from the law, that it can and should be reversed by the Obama administration with the stroke of a pen.

Obama already has hopes to overturn many of the Bush administration’s “midnight regulations,” and this, no doubt, will be among those targeted. The question is: How long will that take?