With help from Annie Snider and Nick Juliano
Editor’s Note: This edition of Morning Energy is published weekdays at 10 a.m. POLITICO Pro Energy subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 6 a.m. Learn more about POLITICO Pro’s comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services at politicopro.com.
— The Interior Department considered using a regulatory loophole to free oil and gas companies from Obama-era drilling safety standards created after the BP oil spill, documents show.
— A Senate appropriations panel today will mark up of the Interior-Environment spending bill for fiscal 2020.
— EPA is threatening to cut California’s highway funding in the latest battle between the state and the Trump administration over air quality rules.
HELLO, IT’S TUESDAY MORNING! I’m your host, Kelsey Tamborrino. American Chemistry Council’s Andrew Fasoli knew J, X, Y and Z do not have designated streets in the District of Columbia. For today: Which president holds the record for watching the most movies in the White House movie theater? Send your tips, energy gossip and comments to ktamborrino@politico.com.
‘PUT IT IN WRITING’: Interior weighed the use of a regulatory loophole to spare oil and gas companies from drilling safety standards that were created in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, Pro’s Ben Lefebvre reports this morning. Emails obtained under FOIA shed further light on the Trump administration’s interest in using waivers before going through a formal rulemaking to delay enforcement of the Well Control Rule. The documents also show that some career employees at Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement had some qualms with the decision, including one staffer who urged the agency’s chief to “put it in writing.”
“While we have discussed the possibility of promulgating a rule that further delays the implementation of the dates of the yet to be effective dates of several provisions of the [Well Control Rule] we are revisiting the entire [rule], please advise the possibility of avoiding that by considering evaluation of departure request of the proposed April 2018 rule,” BSEE Director Scott Angelle wrote in a September 2017 email. Career staff urged him to provide a written directive spelling out how to proceed, but it’s unclear if BSEE followed through with that recommendation.
Environmentalists called the revelation disturbing. “It seems like the administration purposefully relied on a loophole to blow off the public process following the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster,” Oceana campaign director Diane Hoskins said after reviewing the emails.
BSEE issued about 1,600 waivers, also called “departures” from the Obama rules to offshore drillers between April 2016 and August 2018, POLITICO previously reported. The agency has said companies that received waivers maintained the same levels of safety, but environmental groups and House Democrats say the Trump administration has not released enough information about which companies received those waivers and why. Interior in May finalized a rule that rolled back several of the Obama-era safety rules.
FUNDING FIGHTS: Appropriators on a Senate subcommittee could approve fiscal 2020 funding for Interior and EPA today amid larger debates over the chamber’s spending bills. The Senate Interior-Environment Subcommittee will hold a markup on the FY2020 measure this morning, with a full Appropriations Committee markup scheduled for this Thursday. The markup comes as some Senate Democrats take issue with money for domestic programs being spent on the president’s border wall and the administration’s plans to move BLM’s headquarters out of Washington.
ON TAP TODAY: The Senate will vote today, if cloture is invoked, on the confirmation of Daniel Jorjani to become head solicitor for Interior. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), for one, has opposed Jorjani, alleging that he may have lied to Congress.
PHONE A FRIEND: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he would urge President Donald Trump to pair Republican and Democratic FERC nominees, Pro’s Anthony Adragna reports. “He’s been pretty good about taking calls. I think it should be brought to his attention,” Manchin told POLITICO. “This could be all staff-driven too. I’ll give the president the benefit of the doubt.”
FOSSIL FUEL FOR THOUGHT: The House Natural Resources Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee will look at fossil fuel development as it relates to taxpayers and industry during a legislative hearing this morning. The hearing will look at four measures, including H.R. 2711 (116), the Methane Waste Prevention Act of 2019 from Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, and H.R. 4346 (116), the Bonding Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2019 from California’s Alan Lowenthal.
EPA’S NEW THREAT TO CALIFORNIA: The Trump administration is again escalating its confrontation with California, this time with a threat from EPA to go after the state’s highway money. In a letter reported late Monday by McClatchy, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler says the state is behind the curve on submitting State Implementation Plans required by the Clean Air Act. He gives the California Air Resources Board until Oct. 10 to begin rescinding its SIPs that he said “have fundamental issues related to approvability” and begin submitting new ones.
The letter comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the state’s waiver to enforce stricter regulations on automobile emissions. It would take two years from a formal EPA declaration to activate sanctions on federal highway money, an enforcement tool EPA has used rarely in the decades since the Clean Air Act was written.
PENDLEY RECUSED FROM MONUMENT LITIGATION: William Perry Pendley, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, has recused himself from litigation involving Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Bloomberg Environment reports citing court documents. Pendley, the former president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, previously backed abolishing Grand Staircase and the Bears Ears national monuments, Bloomberg Environment reports, adding that the court filing did not mention Bears Ears.
EPA IG OPENS GENX PROBE: EPA’s inspector general is opening a probe into the agency’s role in the contamination of more than 200,000 North Carolinians’ drinking water with a toxic PFAS chemical known as GenX, Pro’s Annie Snider reports. The IG said Monday it would look at what steps, if any, EPA took to verify that chemicals manufacturer DuPont complied with the agency’s 2009 consent order requiring that it not release the chemical into the air or water.
EPA SCIENCE ADVISERS SLAM FIRST TSCA RISK EVAUATION: In a report quietly posted by EPA late Friday, the agency’s external science advisers for chemicals raised major concerns about the first draft risk evaluation the Trump administration completed for a toxic chemical under the major overhaul passed by Congress in the 2016.
EPA’s Science Advisory on Chemicals concluded that the agency didn’t have nearly enough data to decide that the chemical, Pigment Violet 29, posed “no unreasonable risk” to the general population or workers. “The Committee members were in general agreement that the information presented to support the conclusions outlined in the draft risk characterization was not sufficiently robust for this purpose,” the report states.
Wait, there’s more: The science advisers also pressed EPA to send the framework it uses for these risk evaluations, called a systematic review protocol, to the National Academy of Sciences “as soon as practical.” EPA committed to doing this back in January as a part of a deal made with Senate Democrats to swiftly confirm Alexandra Dunn as the agency’s chemical safety chief, but it has yet to follow-through. Public health groups argue that protocol is biased toward industry-backed research.
PERRY PICKS NAMES FOR ADVISORY BOARD: Energy Secretary Rick Perry added several new members to the second installment of his Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, including Marvin Fertel, the retired president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute; Kay Coles James, president of The Heritage Foundation; and Bill Samuels Jr., chairman emeritus of Maker’s Mark Distillery. The SEAB will hold its second meeting on Oct. 2 in Chicago.
CLEAR THE AIR: The Energy Futures Initiative — the clean-energy think tank led by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz — will release the findings of its 12th report today during an event coinciding with Climate Week in New York City. The 12-month study looked at “innovative” technologies for carbon dioxide removal and outlines a 10-year RD&D initiative to bring commercial CDR technologies at gigaton scale “with minimal ecological impacts.”
That 10-year RD&D effort is estimated to cost $10.7 billion, allocated across 10 federal agencies. Arguing that net-zero carbon dioxide emissions is not achievable without negative-carbon technologies, the report outlines “technological pathways and technologically-enhanced natural processes that can remove CO2 from the environment,” including direct air capture; carbon uptake in trees, plants and soils; capture and isolation of CO2 in coastal and deep ocean waters; and carbon mineralization in surface and subsurface rock formations.
YOUTH CLIMATE ACTIVISTS ARGUE VIOLATION OF CHILD RIGHTS: While in New York on Monday for the U.N. climate summit, 16 youth petitioners, including Swedish climate advocate Greta Thunberg, presented a complaint to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. The petitioners, who span 12 countries and ages between 8 and 17, alleged that member states’ failed to tackle climate change and thus violated their child rights. The complaint was filed through the Third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which allows children or adults on their behalf to appeal directly to the U.N.
32 ARRESTED IN D.C. PROTESTS: Climate activists who took to the streets of Washington, D.C., on Monday to block traffic in a call to combat climate change declared the protest a success and said they would return Sept. 27 to mark the last day of the ongoing global climate strike. According to the coalition, which included Extinction Rebellion DC and 350 DC, police arrested 32 people, before later releasing them Monday.
— “Judge temporarily blocks logging in nation’s largest national forest,” via The Hill.
— “Ninth Circuit pick has defended Trump’s environmental rollbacks,” via Bloomberg Environment.
— “Feds to spend $3.72 million to retrain many of Kentucky’s Blackjewel coal miners,” via Lexington Herald-Leader.
— “Oil giants, under fire from climate activists and investors, mount a defense,” via The New York Times.
THAT’S ALL FOR ME!
