With help from Anthony Adragna, Zack Colman, Annie Snider
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— The Trump administration made its rollback of the methane rule for oil and gas wells formal and now at least one environmental groups is set to challenge the move it in court.
— A youth climate group is challenging companies to pressure the Chamber of Commerce to take a more aggressive stance against climate change.
— Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will issue a final environmental review for the Willow oil and gas project in National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska.
GOOD MORNING! IT’S FRIDAY. I’m your host, Ben Lefebvre, filling in for Kelsey Tamborino. It seems that Thursday’s trivia question stumped everyone. There are four former vice presidents who also served as state attorneys general: Aaron Burr, Martin Van Buren, George M. Dallas and Walter Mondale. Today’s trivia question: Which president reportedly had his clothes stolen while swimming naked in the Potomac? 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 podcast: The Energy Department’s newest (and coldest) outpost.
ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING AND LAWSUITS: After much brouhaha, the EPA officially released its final policy amendments and technical amendments to its rules for newly built oil and gas production infrastructure on Thursday, Pro’s Alex Guillen reports. The changes will lift methane emissions rules for new oil and gas wells and remove emissions regulations on the transmission and storage facilities.
The technical amendments decrease the frequency of leak detection requirements from quarterly to twice-yearly and allow companies to meet “certain states’ requirements” rather than the federal rules, among other things. EPA Director Andrew Wheeler and Deputy Secretary Mark Menzes made the annoucement official while stumping in Pittsburgh, Penn., a must-win state for President Trump who is hoping the rule change will appeal to energy workers in the Marcellus Shale.
Industry and environmental groups had their reactions ready to go probably before Menzes finished eating his sandwich, and Earthjustice attorney Caitlin Miller blasted the move as aimed at helping oil companies’ bottom lines and would worsen air quality and hasten climate change: “We will hold them accountable in court,” she said in a statement. Heartland Institute policy adviser Jon Haubert took the line many smaller oil companies are taking, saying the Obama-era regulation had been “a solution in search problem.”
EPA UNION TARGETS WHEELER COMMENTS: The American Federation of Government Employees said in a letter to the EPA chief its filing an unfair labor practice charge against the department over what it contends were false claims Wheeler made to employees about negotiations over a new labor contract. At the heart of the complaint are comments Wheeler made recently to a gathering of employees and then in an EPA press release that the union “traded” a telework benefit widely used by employees for one benefiting only the 7,500 EPA workers the union representatives.
EPA said in a statement that the negotiations around telework were “very well documented” and that the agency will comply will comply with any investigation that results from the complaint.
ME FIRST: KIDS AGAINST THE CHAMBER: A youth-led effort called Change The Chamber is urging major companies to lobby the politically powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce to change its stance on climate change or else risk “your future market.” The student-led coalition of more than 100 groups shared with ME letters it is sending Friday to CEOs of AT&T, Pfizer, Google, 3M, Verizon, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, UPS, Ford and others. The letters contain three asks: work to change the Chamber or quit it, actively lobby for science-based climate legislation and stop funding climate-denying politicians. The groups want the companies to commit to those goals or quit the Chamber by Oct. 10.
“The Chamber and our members continue to focus on advancing real solutions to our climate challenge,” Chamber spokesperson Matt Letourneau said in an email in response to the campaign.
The campaign comes as the Chamber has sought to update its climate stance, in part from members’ pressure that ultimately pushed it to form a Members Task Force on Climate Action, though companies like Apple still left over its climate change stance. But skepticism remains about whether the Chamber has made a concerted effort to support climate goals beyond efforts to back certain energy technologies and endorse permitting reforms. Debra Rowe, the national co-coordinator of the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium who is working with Change the Chamber activists, said the goal is to work with rather than against companies by convincing firms they’d lose younger customers who are more discerning in their purchases and committed to sustainability. “The key is the youth won’t buy it anymore … as consumers, as investors and future investors,” she told ME.
INTERIOR CLEARS ALASKA DRILLING PROJECT: Interior’s Bureau of Land Management is set to issue a final environmental review for the Willow oil and gas project in National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. If the plan is approved, ConocoPhillips may submit applications for a 160,000 barrel a day oil project that would include “up to five drill sites, a central processing facility, an operations center pad, gravel roads, ice roads and ice pads, 1 or 2 airstrips … a freshwater reservoir, an ice bridge across the Colville River to transfer facility modules into the NPR-A, pipelines, and a gravel mine site,” according to a BLM filing.
Environmental groups are…not happy. While most of the attention has been on Interior’s as-yet unfilled plans for the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge, most of the recent regulatory action has focused on the NPR-A. Defenders of Wildlife spokesperson Gwen Dobbs said in a statement the huge project “poses a significant threat to imperiled Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears and their critical habitat, in addition to other wildlife.” BLM defended the project’s economic benefits for Alaska.“It provides for more throughput in the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, ultimately providing for more jobs for Alaskans and creating more revenue for the State,” BLM Alaska State Director Chad Padgett said.
EPA TAKING NEW NOMS FOR SAB AFTER COURT LOSS: EPA has reopened the nomination period for its Science Advisory Board following a judge’s ruling striking down its rule against grant recipients sitting on advisory panels. The Federal Register notice says the spots are still expected to be filled by Oct. 1. The new nominations period will be open for 15 days.
‘SCIENCE’ FINDS WOTUS REWRITE ‘LARGELY IGNORED’ SCIENCE: In an article being published in the journal “Science” today, five academic researchers conclude that the Trump administration’s rewrite of the rule determining which streams and wetlands get federal Clean Water Act protection “largely ignored and oversimplified” the science. The researchers argue that the Navigable Waters Protection rule draws “scientifically unsupported boundaries,” “disregarding or misinterpreting” the body of evidence showing that waterbodies are not connected or unconnected, but rather are connected by different degrees. One of the article’s authors is former EPA Science Advisory Board member Amanda Rodewald, who led the board’s review of EPA’s massive 2015 Connectivity Report that provided the scientific underpinnings for the Obama administration’s WOTUS rule.
BRING ON THE IGS: The developer of the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska is asking the Inspectors General of the Defense Department, Army and Army Corps of Engineers to take House Democrats up on their request for a probe of the Army Corps’ review of the proposed copper and gold mine. In a letter to the three watchdogs Thursday, Pebble Partnership CEO Tom Collier said he believes they will find the allegations by House Oversight Committee Democrats that the Army Corps short-circuited its scientific review to be “false and baseless” and believes a probe would “drive a final stake into these falsehoods.”
OZONE PROPOSAL OPEN FOR COMMENT: The public comment period for EPA’s proposal to retain without revision the current ozone standards begins today and lasts until Oct. 1, according to a Federal Register notice. The agency has also committed to two virtual hearings on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1. EPA’s Wheeler has made it clear he wants it finished before the end of this year — a tight but theoretically possible timeline.
Some facts: It took the Obama administration 198 days between the comment period ending and issuance of its final ozone rule in 2015 and 223 days between the comment period and formal publication. There are 111 days between Oct. 1 and Jan. 20.
MONTANA TV: The League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund is up with a “seven-figure” ad in Montana hitting Sen. Steve Daines over an obscure 2015 vote to a Senate budget bill. At issue is an amendment from Sen. Lisa Murkowski creating a mechanism for facilitating future sales of land, but that didn’t itself sell or transfer any property. Conservation groups nevertheless complained at the time that it marked a first step toward future sales and hit Daines for voting in favor of it.
DIRE STRAITS? Is the White House mulling whether to scale back U.S. naval presence in the Straits of Hormuz, the vital waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to world’s oil markets? President Donald Trump mused on Thursday that we’re maybe spending money for nothing given that the United States is oil-dependence free (ME author note: we’re not). “We don’t have to be there any more,” Trump said at a press conference hailing Israel’s establishing formal diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates. “We don’t need oil, we don’t need anything there except friendship. … We don’t have to be patrolling the Straits. We are doing things that other countries wouldn’t do but we put ourselves over the last few years in a position where we no longer have to be in areas that at one point were vital.” The White House declined to comment as to whether Trump’s comments reflected official U.S. policy.
— ‘Massive poisonous shock’: Scientists fear lasting impact from Mauritius oil spill via Reuters.
— Home of the Oil Sands Eyes Cleaner Future as Hydrogen Superpower via Bloomberg.
— Konrad Steffen, Who Sounded Alarm on Greenland Ice, Dies at 68 via New York Times.
— Coronavirus Projected to Sap More Oil Demand Than Expected via WSJ.
