Tag Archives: EPA

11 States Sue EPA Over Delayed Soot Pollution Standards

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11 States Sue EPA Over Delayed Soot Pollution Standards – Yahoo! News.

According to Reuters, 11 states filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan federal court on Friday demanding the Environmental Protection Agency review clear air standards for nationwide soot pollution. The lawsuit was prompted after the EPA missed an October deadline for the review. Under the Clean Air Act, the federal agency is required to review clean air standards for pollutants every five years and update the National Ambient Air Quality Standards accordingly.

Here are some facts about soot pollution in the U.S., the health impacts, and the lawsuit itself:

* The Associated Press reported the eleven involved are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

* Soot pollution comes from diesel burning vehicles and power plants and is linked to respiratory illnesses and disease, heart disease, asthma, and impaired lung function.

* The EPA has responded to the lawsuit and said it was continuing to work on proposing the revised and updated standards, noted the New York Times.

* The Obama administration has faced opposition from the GOP and industry representatives who claim that such standards would increase the cost of energy and be detrimental to economic growth in the country.

* ABC News reported the states with the largest number of deaths related to particulate pollution include Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Florida, and Illinois.

* Young children, the elderly, and those with already-existing respiratory problems are the most at-risk in terms of soot pollution.

* A report from Environment California lists California as having the worst rate of soot pollution in the U.S. with the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario area ranked as the worst among metro areas.

* California’s poor performance in terms of soot in the air is attributed to the state’s power plants, diesel burning vehicles, and a growing population.

* Soot is considered particulate matter, a known air pollutant that can range in size from “fine” particles (less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter) and “coarse” particles, which are larger, noted the Clean Air Trust.

* Because of how small soot particles are, often times soot can travel hundreds of miles downwind from the original pollution source.

* According to a report from the American Lung Association, Clean Air Task Force, and Earthjustice, up to 35,700 premature deaths and 2,350 heart attacks could be avoided each year if the EPA tightened its standards on soot.

* Additionally, the economic benefits of reducing soot exposure are estimated to be as much as $281 billion every year.

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Supreme Court to hear case of dream home quashed by EPA

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Supreme Court to hear case of dream home quashed by EPA – Yahoo! News.

The US Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency that some property-rights advocates and business groups say is an example of how onerous federal regulations are spreading throughout the country.

The case examines whether an Idaho couple may seek the help of a federal judge to decide a dispute with the EPA over whether the lot they purchased for a planned dream home is a federally-regulated wetland.

Environmental groups say the couple could have avoided the agency action by working with government officials rather than fighting them.

How much do you know about the Constitution? A quiz

Chantell and Michael Sackett purchased a 0.63-acre lot for $23,000 in 2005 to build a home near scenic Priest Lake in Idaho. After obtaining local permits in 2007, the couple began grading the property with soil and rock in preparation for construction of a three-bedroom house.

But the project came to a halt after EPA officials arrived at the site and informed the Sacketts that the property was a wetland. The regulators said the couple’s efforts to grade the land constituted a form of pollution under the federal Clean Water Act.

The Sacketts disagreed with the “wetlands” designation, noting that a road ran between their property and Priest Lake and that their lot was in a residentially zoned subdivision containing other homes.

The EPA responded by issuing a “compliance order,” requiring them to take immediate action to remove all deposited fill material and restore the lot to its original condition. The order required them to plant new trees and shrubs and to maintain a fence around the lot for three growing seasons.

Fine of $37,500 a day

The restoration would cost an estimated $27,000, according to the Sacketts. The EPA added a potent incentive – the Sacketts would be fined $37,500 each day the couple failed to bring the property within compliance of the EPA order.

The Sacketts asked the EPA to conduct an administrative hearing to examine whether the property really was a “wetland” subject to federal regulation. The agency refused.

That’s when the Sacketts took their case to federal court, hoping a district judge would conduct a hearing to determine whether the EPA had jurisdiction over their land.

The judge threw the case out. A panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals also dismissed the case.

The courts ruled that since the EPA action was merely an administrative order, and not final action by the agency, the Sacketts could not file a federal lawsuit until the agency took enforcement action against them.

The case is important because it raises a question about the scope of federal regulation under the Clean Water Act and what recourse, if any, land owners have once they are threatened with potentially bankrupting administrative orders.

Lawyers for the Sacketts are asking the court to decide whether they are entitled to take their dispute to a federal judge, and if not, whether the agency action violates the Sacketts’ constitutional right to due process.

A $200,000 solution?

One solution suggested by the appeals court was that the Sacketts could apply for a federal permit. If the permit was denied, they could then appeal the denial in federal court.

But lawyers for the Sacketts say this would only allow the Sacketts to challenge the permit determination, not the underlying compliance order. The regulations require the Sacketts to resolve the compliance order before applying for a permit.

Estimates are the permit process could take years and cost as much as $200,000.

“The compliance order has deprived the Sacketts of the only permitted economically viable use of their property,” wrote Damien Schiff, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm that is representing the Sacketts.

“The Sacketts have been afforded no review of the compliance order, but instead have been kept in a state of limbo and uncertainty, never knowing if or when EPA will bring an enforcement action or whether they will ever obtain meaningful review of the compliance order,” Mr. Schiff said in his brief.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, representing the EPA and the Obama administration, said EPA administrative orders are not subject to judicial review.

Why a compliance order is different

A compliance order is a way for federal officials to give regulatory guidance to a property owner and encourage voluntary compliance with the agency’s request, he said.

“Courts have widely recognized that, when agencies issue such communications, a recipient who disagrees with the government’s legal or factual assessments generally has no right to immediate judicial resolution of the disagreement,” Mr. Verrilli wrote.

If they had sought a permit before filling the land, then they could have obtained judicial review of the EPA’s permit determination without facing the risk of fines, the government brief says.

For their part, the Sacketts maintain that there are no wetlands on their lot and that the EPA lacks jurisdiction to file its administrative order against them.

“In this case, the original compliance order was issued in November 2007, and since that time the Sacketts have been afforded no review. There is no post-issuance administrative process and no judicial process that the Sacketts can initiate,” Schiff said in his brief.

“The process that produces the order is entirely secret, with no notice given to property owners like the Sacketts,” he added. “There is not even a ‘probable cause’-type hearing.”

No one else to blame?

Government lawyers say the Sacketts have no constitutional right to an immediate judicial review of an EPA compliance order. They say that despite government threats, no penalties are actually assessed against a noncompliant party until a federal judge determines that a violation has occurred.

In a recent blog, Larry Levine of the Natural Resources Defense Council said the Sacketts had only themselves to blame for their administrative troubles. “They chose to cut corners, and when they got caught, they blamed the EPA,” Mr. Levine wrote.

“The [Sacketts say] they had no reason to believe their property included a wetland and, therefore, never sought a wetland permit,” Levine said. “Yet, in documents secured through the Freedom of Information Act, Chantell Sackett herself described her property as including wetlands and being surrounded by wetlands on three sides.”

 

Ewart: EPA fracking report raises sticky issues

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Ewart: EPA fracking report raises sticky issues.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief . . . it wasn’t the electrical tape.

Buried deep in a U.S government agency draft report into contamination of water wells used by people living near natural gas wells operated by Encana Corp., the Environmental Protection Agency said it had investigated the possibility electrical tape caused the problem.

Electrical tape?

Somebody actually suggested electrical tape had poisoned dozens of wells in a Wyoming hamlet that’s home to 175 people. That’s some wicked adhesive!

There, on page 36 of the highly technical report, after the phrase “additional alternate explanation,” the EPA acknowledges it was asked to consider, among other things, whether the contamination could be linked to use of electrical tape on submersible pumps.

Luckily, just a couple of sentences later, a looming crisis at hardware stores and tool boxes everywhere ended when the EPA clarified “clamps, not electrical tape, were used to bind electrical wires of submersible pumps.”

When Encana responded with a multi-point rebuttal that “strongly” disagreed with the EPA report – it stopped just short of calling the agency incompetent – I could not find a single reference to tape. Presumably that worry is over.

Whew!

Doubts persist about Encana’s competency to hydraulically fracture gas wells safely and/or the EPA’s competency to investigate Encana’s ability to frack wells. Admittedly, it’s largely Encana and EPA raising those doubts.

I don’t know if Encana or the EPA is right, or even if one is more right than the other. The EPA report is a draft with the final version not expected until 2013. The 121 pages of scientific text, charts and myriad footnotes are littered with words like “preliminary,” “likely” and “may.”

Encana makes the case there have been reports of gas in the water around the hamlet of Pavillion dating to the 19th century. It’s why the industry went there in the first place.

Regardless, the EPA draft findings are among the first by government to link fracking to groundwater contamination. Critics instantly decided it confirmed fracking poses environmental risks and it should be severely restricted or banned.

A Los Angeles Times editorial concluded with the warning: “Let’s not get too sold on this fracking thing.”

Of course there are environmental risks to fracking and just about every activity associated with the oil and gas industry, if they are not conducted properly. As for getting “too sold” on “this fracking thing,” it might be a little too late.

The estimates are virtually all new U.S. oil and gas wells are fracked – water laced with chemicals and sand are shot into the reservoir at high pressure – to increase production from so-called tight rock formations.

Fracking has been billed as the holy grail of energy security for countries around the world as it opens new resources.

If the EPA’s draft findings prove accurate, it will be a critical point in the fracking debate; the implications going well beyond rural Wyoming.

If things can go wrong for Encana, the second biggest gas producer in North America, then what about all those companies that do not have “platinum” status for their environmental stewardship from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, as Encana did when CAPP assigned levels to its stewardship program, or an industry group in the United States?

As Dundee Securities said in a research note published Tuesday: “Any negative finding surrounding the contamination of groundwater by hydraulic fracturing is not good for the industry as a whole, regardless of merit or factual argument.”

Encana has provided fresh water to 21 homes in the area since August 2010 and is working to remediate contaminated soil. Nonetheless, it’s opted to fight back. To some, its criticism of the EPA is a classic industry response.

As Reuters’ John Kemp commented: “Encana’s furious response is typical of the combative, no-holds-barred, litigation-driven approach to any and all evidence of environmental problems.”

For Encana, which acquired the Wyoming wells in 2004 in a takeover of Denver-based Tom Brown Inc., it’s determined the stakes, or its issues with the EPA, are significant enough it had to respond forcefully.

The EPA has concerns over the well-bore integrity of some of the 169 wells and earlier practices for handling drilling fluids at the site. Only 44 wells were actually drilled by Encana before it halted new activity in the maturing field in 2007.

One of the industry’s key standby statements on fracking is it’s an established practice that dates to the 1940s. That’s a dangerous gambit. Fracking has been around that long, but the environmental practices in earlier eras hardly stand up to modern scrutiny.

Encana is learning the implications of that scenario the hard way.

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