With help from Alex Guillén and Laura Kayali
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— Face-to-face with state officials on the ground in California, President Donald Trump stuck with his contention that poor forest management was the root cause of the raging wildfires in the state, shortly after Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist.”
— Arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit kick off today over an Obama-era rule setting the first-ever fuel efficiency and emissions limits for truck trailers.
— EPA denied more than 50 requests from oil refiners seeking economic hardship waivers from ethanol blending requirements from 2011 to 2018.
WELCOME TO TUESDAY! I’m your host, Kelsey Tamborrino. Tim Peckinpaugh of K&L Gates gets the trivia win. Former Supreme Court Justice Byron White also played professional football for the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Steelers) and Detroit Lions. For today: What former president is said to have watched some 480 movies in the White House family theater during his time as president? Send your tips, energy gossip and comments to [email protected].
Check out the POLITICO Energy podcast — all the energy and environmental politics and policy news you need to start your day, in just five minutes. Listen and subscribe for free at politico.com/energy-podcast. On today’s episode: In Iowa, corn’s big win
WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE: President Donald Trump visited California on Monday and reaffirmed his belief that the state’s deadly wildfires are the result of poor forest management — despite being face-to-face with state officials who directly connected the flames to established science that says climate change is a primary factor.
Wade Crowfoot, the head of the California’s Natural Resources Agency, challenged the president on his climate change views, as your ME host, Caitlin Oprysko and Carla Marinucci report. “I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means for our forests and actually work together with that science,” Crowfoot told the president, but he also argued that it would be misguided to “sort of put our heads in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management.”
Trump pointedly rejected the climate science that shows global temperatures will continue rising because of increasing greenhouse gases from using fossil fuels. While forest management plays a role, scientists say the drier, hotter conditions and shifting precipitation patterns brought by climate change are a primary factor for recent wildfires.
“It’ll start getting cooler, just watch,” Trump said. Crowfoot then responded that he did not think “the science agrees with you,” to which Trump retorted: “I don’t think science knows, actually.” After the briefing Crawfoot fired back at the president on Twitter, posting a graph of California’s average temperature from June to September, with a trendline showing that figure steadily increasing over the last four decades.
And in an open letter to Trump, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Trump’s refusal to address climate change will only accelerate the devastating wildfires, and called his false comments that it will get cooler “an abandonment of leadership.” Inslee added: “I would urge you to abandon your half-baked theories and engage in good faith about the obvious relationship between climate change and wildfires.”
Trump’s remarks offer a striking split screen to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who hours earlier pitched himself as the only choice to combat climate change. “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” Biden said.
Biden also used remarks Monday to take aim at a central theme of Trump’s campaign, using the same phrasing he’s employed when criticizing Trump’s response to the protests that swept across the country to attack him on his lack of action on climate change. “It’s clear that we’re not safe in Donald Trump’s America. This is Donald Trump’s America. He’s in charge,” Biden said.
The dueling remarks followed the latest figures from NOAA scientists, who said Monday last month marked the second-warmest August on record. The Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest August on record and the globe as a whole had its third-hottest three-month season.
PREVIEW TRAILER — TRUMP ADMIN TO DEFEND OBAMA TRUCK RULE: Judge Justin Walker will make his debut bench appearance on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today during arguments over an Obama-era rule that set the first-ever fuel efficiency and emissions limits for truck trailers. Walker will join Judges Merrick Garland and Patricia Millett for the arguments. The trailer rule was part of a broader regulation for heavy-duty trucks (Reg. 2060-AS16) that the industry otherwise did not challenge and would require new trailers to come with aerodynamic upgrades. But manufacturers argue that their trailers can’t be subject to fuel economy and emissions standards because they don’t have engines.
What a drag: The Trump administration kept the case on ice for years while reconsidering the rule, but frustrated with the lack of action, trailer manufacturers revived the suit. That’s left the Trump administration, backed up by environmentalists, to defend the Obama rule. EPA and NHTSA will argue that trailers may not have their own engines but that they are still significant truck components whose drag accounts for around one-third of a truck’s emissions, and thus can be regulated.
Where things stand: The court stayed the EPA emissions portion of the rule almost three years ago because it was due to take effect starting in 2018. The Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association has also requested a stay on the NHTSA fuel economy portion of the rule, which takes effect in January; the court yesterday “deferred consideration” of that request, meaning it may come up at today’s arguments.
IN DENIAL: EPA denied dozens of requests from oil refineries seeking economic hardship exemptions from ethanol blending requirements under the Renewable Fuels Standard dating from 2011 through 2018, adding to a growing list of ethanol-friendly moves from the administration, Pro’s Eric Wolff reports.
In his denial letter, Administrator Andrew Wheeler said he rejected the 54 petitions largely on the advice of the Energy Department, which determined that the refineries did not suffer much hardship in the years in question. While the letter did mention a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruling from January that voided three refinery exemptions from the biofuel blending rules, Wheeler did not cite the court’s opinion as part of his reasoning.
The Trump administration’s handling of the biofuels waivers has become a major flashpoint in GOP Sen. Joni Ernst‘s reelection race in Iowa. “I’ve been calling for these ‘gap year’ waivers to be thrown out since they were announced,” Ernst said in a statement Monday. “Now, the administration has listened to our calls for action.” A spokesperson for Ernst’s opponent Theresa Greenfield, who has called for Wheeler’s resignation, said the announcement “does nothing to erase the massive economic damage in Iowa caused by Senator Ernst’s vote for a fossil fuel lobbyist to run the EPA.”
Elsewhere, oil-state Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the decision, on top of the Justice Department’s decision not to appeal the 10th Circuit ruling, “all but sounded the death knell on the small refinery exemption program and the thousands of blue collar jobs it helped protect.”
CARPER ASKS OIG TO REVIEW EPA LEGAL BRIEFS: Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) wants EPA’s inspector general to review “potential irregularities” in EPA’s handling of several recent legal challenges. Specifically, Carper said that briefs in several high-profile cases were signed only by political appointees, without career officials as well. “My office has been told by one individual familiar with one of these cases that career attorneys refused to sign at least one of the filings because they likely presented arguments that have no legal merit at all,” Carper wrote. “Any filings that cannot present a colorable legal argument or misrepresent the facts of the case would be a waste of taxpayer resources as would the underlying action.”
“The substance of the letter is clearly undermined by the fact that career DOJ attorneys signed every one of the briefs listed. As with all of our litigation, EPA career attorneys and politically appointed leadership work hand in hand defending the Agency’s actions,” EPA spokesman James Hewitt said in a statement.
SENATE DEMS LOOK FOR PFAS IN APPROPS: New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) led a letter signed by 21 Democratic senators Friday, urging the leaders of the Appropriations Committee’s Interior-EPA subpanel to include measures combating PFAS contamination in the upcoming funding bill for fiscal 2021. The senators call for dedicated resources to research, monitor and clean-up the toxic chemicals, including $2.5 million to support EPA’s regulatory work needed to designate the chemicals as hazardous under the Superfund law, and $2 million to study the relationship between PFAS and Covid-19. House Democrats included some similar PFAS provisions in the Interior-EPA appropriations measure that passed as part of a minibus, H.R. 7608 (116), over the summer.
Speaking of approps: Five House Democrats are throwing their support behind Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) in her bid to lead the House Appropriations Committee, according to two letters shared with Pro’s Caitlin Emma. Kaptur currently serves as the chair of the Energy-Water panel.
FACEBOOK TO REACH NET ZERO EMISSIONS THIS YEAR: The tech giant announced its global operations will achieve net-zero carbon emissions and run only on renewable energy this year. It also aims to reach net-zero emissions for its value chain in 2030, including by using carbon removal technology. The company won’t use offsetting to reach this goal.
A new Climate Science Information Center: Facebook will launch a “dedicated space” on its platform, modeled after its Covid-19 Information Center, to provide users with facts from the world’s leading climate organizations. The initiative will first launch in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.
TRUMP APPEALS LOSS IN CALIFORNIA CAP-AND-TRADE FIGHT: The Trump administration is taking its fight to stymie California’s cap-and-trade linkage with Quebec to the next level. Judge William Shubb of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California tossed Trump’s suit, ruling in July that none of the federal government’s constitutional challenges to the linkage held water. In a court filing last night, the Justice Department said it will take the matter before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.
HALF A MILLION CLEAN ENERGY WORKERS REMAIN UNEMPLOYED: The U.S. clean energy sector added 13,556 jobs in August, according to new analysis from BW Research Partnership, leaving 490,341 clean energy workers unemployed because of the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic, your ME host reports for Pros. The sector added only 3,195 jobs in July after a whopping 106,000 jobs in June.
What’s it mean? “The clean energy economy is not adding jobs at a pace that brings us anywhere near recovery territory,” said Phil Jordan, the vice president and principal at BW Research, in a statement. “The lack of meaningful, sustained job growth in the sector, despite widespread economic reopening across the U.S., suggests that most of the nearly 500,000 job losses are at serious risk of becoming permanent.”
DAIMLER AGREES TO $1.5B DEAL OVER EMISSIONS: German automaker Daimler will pay a total of $1.5 billion to settle allegations lodged by the federal government and California regarding its emissions cheating on more than a quarter-million vehicles sold in the U.S., Alex reports for Pros. The announcement formalizes the terms of a deal Daimler publicly disclosed last month.
— A federal judge on Monday also approved a deal between EPA and motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson to settle allegations of emissions cheating, Alex also reports.
CONNECTICUT SUES EXXON ON CLIMATE: Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil on Monday, alleging the oil company violated the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act by misleading the public on the negative effects its business practices had on the environment. Notably, the Connecticut law has no statute of limitations, allowing the AG to examine all of Exxon Mobil’s “deceptions” dating back decades, the office said. The suit is the latest in a string of state and city-level lawsuits lodged against Big Oil for allegedly deceiving the public about the role their products play in causing climate change. Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton pointed to a previous statement that called such lawsuits baseless and without merit.
CHECKING ON COAL RETIREMENTS: Marked by the expected retirement of AES Hawaii, the last remaining coal-fired power plant in the state, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sierra Club announced today that 60 percent of domestic coal-fired power plants have retired as part of their Beyond Coal campaign. The groups announced 318 out of 530 plants to date have retired, putting the campaign on track to retire all domestic coal plants by 2030.
— “Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say,” via The Washington Post.
— “Google aims to run on carbon-free energy by 2030,” via Reuters.
— “OPEC extends forecast for decline in global oil demand,” via The Wall Street Journal.
— “FERC reverses 40 years of PURPA precedent in ruling on small solar definition, punts on storage question,” via UtilityDive.
— “Climate cases put Big Oil’s behemoth trade group in bull’s-eye,” via Bloomberg Law.
— “A rebuilt Paradise nervously watches the horizon,” E&E News.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
