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Challenges to the Waters of the United States repeal are forcing the White House to defend a more expansive version of the Clean Water Act than it wants the courts to ultimately uphold.
The outgoing Secretary of Energy says Trump won’t face full impeachment and Democrats are “chasing the ghost” in a weekend interview.
California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state-wide state of emergency on Sunday after fires prompted hundreds of thousands to evacuate and utility PG&E cut power to more than two million customers in planned outages.
Welcome to Monday! I’m your guest host Gavin Bade, pleased to be writing my first Morning Energy edition ever. Check out the new 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.
Congrats to Kyle Oliver of Blue Strategies for being first to correctly work out that Max Scherzer was the answer to Friday’s trivia. To show the work: 6 outs in an inning multiplied by 6 umpires on the field is 36, then subtract 9 hitters in a line up to get 27, then add the 4 bases to get 31, Scherzer’s number. If you got Cabrera (13), you think there’s only 3 outs in an inning, and if you think home plate is not a base, you are wrong.
For tomorrow, a trivia question inspired by my home state of Michigan. Lake Michigan water levels hit their highest recorded point this past summer, eroding beaches, docks and even entire houses into the lake. When was the previous record set in Lake Michigan?
WOTUS LAWSUITS PUT WHITE HOUSE IN LEGAL PICKLE: The Trump administration’s rush to repeal the Obama EPA’s controversial Waters of the United States regulation has put it in the awkward legal situation of defending a much more expansive reading of the Clean Water Act than it eventually wants to establish with a replacement regulation.
The WOTUS repeal, finalized last week, forces federal agencies to revert to a 1986 reading of the CWA until any replacement rule is complete. But because of two legal challenges filed against the repeal action, the Trump administration must now defend that earlier version, Pro’s Annie Snider reports.
The administration intends to replace the 1986 reading with one that greatly narrows federal authority. But one lawsuit, brought by the property rights group the Pacific Legal Foundation, argues that the stop-gap rule, relied on for decades, is far too broad.
“The decision to go back to the ‘86 regulations, even on what the administration plans to be an interim basis, continues to raise the same problem” as the Obama rule, said Anthony Francois, senior attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation.
The White House’s strategy is to use the 1986 rules as a legal hedge, so that the Obama-era regulations — much despised by industry and agriculture — are not reinstated if EPA’s forthcoming WOTUS replacement gets tied up in court.
But legal experts tell Annie that it also opens up the risk that the courts will simply uphold the 1986 reading, which was more expansive than WOTUS in some ways and often delivered wins in court for environmentalists.
“Under the ‘86 rule the government almost never lost, and the environmentalists won a bunch, too,” said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School.
PERRY: DEMS ‘CHASING A GHOST’: Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said this weekend he does not expect President Trump to face full impeachment proceedings. “This is as a big a ‘chasing the ghost’ as I’ve seen before,” the secretary said in a Saturday interview. “People so dislike this president in a political way that they will spend whatever it takes, even to the point of giving up their own reputations, to try to harm him.”
Perry acknowledged that he was present for meetings in Ukraine about increasing U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to the Eastern European country, but insisted they were only meant to counter Russian influence, and had nothing to do with former Vice President Joe Biden or his son, Hunter.
“I sat in a lot of those meetings and I know what the goal was. The goal was always to get Ukraine the option of being able to buy competitive gas and not be held hostage by the Russians,” Perry said. “That was always the goal, it’s still the goal and I’ll suggest to you that we’ll be successful at it.”
In a separate interview with the Associated Press, Perry defended his decision to urge the president to call Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, Trump pressed Zelensky to open an investigation into the Bidens, sparking the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
“We had had enough conversations with [Zelenskiy] that we had felt comfortable that he actually was going to do what he said he was going to do when he ran for office, which was have that type of transparency, have that type of anti-corruption efforts,” Perry said during his trip to Dubai. “[I said] Mr. President, call this guy. It’s good for him and it’s good for us and we can go forward in helping supply gas, preferably U.S. gas, to Ukraine. Pretty straight-forward story.”
After Dubai, Perry will travel to Saudi Arabia to deliver the keynote speech at the Future Investment Initiative Conference. He will step down Dec. 1.
CALIFORNIA FIRES, POWER OUTAGES PROMPT EMERGENCY: Gov. Newsom declared a statewide state of emergency on Sunday as wildfires spread through wine country amid the state’s largest ever planned blackout affecting more than two million people.
The Kincade Fire in the Sonoma region prompted evacuation orders for more than 180,000 residents on Sunday — many already without electricity due to planned power shut-offs from utility Pacific Gas and Electric that spanned more than 30 counties and is expected to last until Monday morning.
This was the second widespread power outage enacted by PG&E this year because of high winds to avoid the risk of its power lines swinging into trees and igniting more fires.
The company is already embroiled in the utility sector’s largest ever bankruptcy proceeding, brought on by tens of billions of dollars in costs related to last year’s forest fire season, when blazes ignited by its power lines killed more than 80 people.
The utility warned the blackouts will continue: a third round of so-called “Public Safety Power Shutoffs” are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday this week, again expected to affect millions.
WHEELER RESPONDS TO ASBESTOS OP-ED: EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler panned a New York Times op-ed on asbestos written by two of his predecessors on Saturday, writing in a letter to the paper that the claims of former administrators Gina McCarthy and William Reilly were “misleading.”
In the Oct. 15 op-ed, the two former EPA heads argued the EPA should ban asbestos, but Wheeler said the agency “legally cannot do that in one simple step.”
Energy markets have ‘ready supply’ of oil as US boosts exports, Bloomberg
Climate and energy experts debate how to respond to a warming world, The New York Times
Offshore wind: Emails show bond between NOAA, fishermen against project, E&E News
