Coral Davenport

The plan, which administration officials expect to be finalized in January, is a major victory for a wealthy group of California farmers that had lobbied to weaken protections on the fish, the delta smelt. It also might intensify ethics questions about Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who was the lobbyist for those farmers until just months before he joined the Trump administration.

Federal investigators are looking into whether Bernhardt’s efforts at the Interior Department to weaken protections for the fish violated “revolving-door” rules designed to prevent former lobbyists from helping past clients from within the government. Investigators also are looking into whether he improperly continued lobbying for those farmers even after he de-registered as a lobbyist just before joining the Trump administration.

The delta smelt, an unassuming, fingersize fish with little utility beyond its role as an environmental sentry, has been at the center of California’s water wars for nearly three decades. The “biological opinion” — released jointly Tuesday by the Interior Department and the Commerce Department — reverses scientific findings made a decade ago, which granted Endangered Species Act protections for certain types of West Coast salmon and the smelt.

Those protections ensured that the California rivers and bays in which the fish swim would get preference over irrigation systems in times of drought. Multiple scientific reports have concluded that diverting those waters could threaten water birds and killer whales, harm commercial fisheries and promote toxic algal blooms.

The new biological opinion concluded that those salmon and smelt would not be jeopardized by lifting the environmental protections and rerouting that water. Once finalized, the change propelled by the opinion would allow water to be diverted from fish to farms by the spring of 2020.

In a prepared statement, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that the new findings followed “robust scientific review” and that the changes “will not jeopardize threatened or endangered species or adversely modify their critical habitat.”

“The new operations plan that has emerged includes more nimble and responsive water project operations that both protect endangered fish and allow the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing conditions — like the variable weather in California — to ensure effective and efficient water supply management,” the statement said.

Paul Souza, a deputy assistant director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said on a telephone call with reporters that the interior secretary’s prior lobbying work did not influence the new decision. “There is absolutely no connection,” he said. “We are career professionals. We have led this effort with our teams over the past year, and this is career professional documentation.”

While the delta smelt serves no commercial purpose, decisions affecting its habitat extend directly to the interests competing for California’s water: farmers, fishermen and environmentalists.

“This is the most contested water problem in California,” said Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert with the Public Policy Institute of California. “The fundamental water question is how much water you allocate to the environment and how much you allocate to farms. This tilts the balance to farms. And this was at the directive of the Trump administration.”

Environmental groups again accused the administration of favoring preferred constituents over science.

The conclusion “flies in the face of the best available science, which indicates that stronger protections are needed to prevent the extinction of our native fish and wildlife, like endangered winter-run chinook salmon and delta smelt, particularly in light of the effects of climate change,” said Doug Obegi, an expert in California water law with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

It also brings both Bernhardt and his former lobbying client a big step closer to the outcome they have sought for years.

From 2011 to 2016, Bernhardt lobbied on behalf of California’s Westlands Water District, a state-chartered organization representing about 1,000 large farmers in an area of central California the size of Rhode Island. During those years, Westlands, which was his largest client, paid Bernhardt’s firm $1.3 million.

The group’s chief lobbying goal was to lift federal environmental protections to allow California’s fickle water supply to be used consistently to irrigate Central Valley almond, pistachio and cotton farms. As Westlands’ lawyer and lobbyist, Bernhardt pressed Congress for legislation to weaken Endangered Species Act protections on the delta smelt. He also joined a legal petition asking the Supreme Court to take up a case seeking to weaken those protections.

A New York Times investigation earlier this year revealed that four months after Bernhardt was confirmed as the deputy secretary of the Interior Department in August 2017, he telephoned the top Interior Department official charged with overseeing those protections and ordered him to begin the process of creating a new biological opinion document on the smelt.

In June, scientists working on that process produced a draft biological opinion that largely upheld existing findings: removing environmental protections for the smelt and rerouting the water would severely harm the surrounding ecosystem.

Tuesday’s new biological opinion rejects that draft and appears to be the culmination of Bernhardt’s efforts.

An Interior Department ethics lawyer, Edward McDonnell, did give Bernhardt verbal approval to get involved in the matter, but independent ethics specialists have said that, under the terms of the Trump administration’s ethics pledge, which Bernhardt signed, he should not have been given clearance to act. The pledge’s “revolving door’ provision requires former lobbyists to recuse themselves for two years from any particular matter or specific issue on which they lobbied in the two years before joining the administration.

The now-repudiated draft, obtained by The New York Times, concluded that lifting delta-smelt protections would jeopardize several types of salmon in the Sacramento River, an outcome that the salmon fishing industry has said could devastate the business. The decline of the salmon population would in turn threaten the Southern Resident killer whales, which live off the Pacific Coast.

That draft report was never publicly released, but the scientists working on it were reassigned and replaced, according to a report by The Los Angeles Times.

This article originally appeared in

Trump Administration Moves to Lift Protections for Fish and Divert Water to Farms

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Tuesday moved to weaken protections for a threatened California fish, a change that would allow large amounts of water to be diverted from the San Francisco Bay Delta to irrigate arid farmland and could harm the region’s fragile ecosystem.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who was confirmed by the Senate last month to head the agency that oversees the nation’s public lands and waters, announced the plan Thursday afternoon in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, the vast industrial hub that serves as the onshore base for most companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil industry praised the move. Environmental groups warned that the rollbacks could pave the way for similar crises to happen again.

The weakened safety rules come as the Trump administration has also sought to vastly expand offshore drilling in the nation’s waters. Last year the Interior Department proposed opening almost the entire U.S. coastline to drilling, although Bernhardt recently said the administration may delay those plans while court challenges are addressed.

Among the safety changes put in place Thursday is a significant reduction in the requirement for oil companies to test fail-safe devices called blowout preventers, which are intended to be a last line of defense against disasters like Deepwater Horizon. In the 2010 fire and monthslong oil leak, the failure of a blowout preventer, an immense device resting on the seabed and extremely difficult to access, was at the heart of the crisis.

The new rules include some changes that had been sought by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the oil industry. A bipartisan commission appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the Deepwater Horizon disaster had specifically cautioned federal regulators against following the institute’s guidance, writing in its 2014 report that “API-proposed safety standards have increasingly failed to reflect ‘best industry practices’ and have instead expressed the ‘lowest common denominator.’”

Bernhardt praised the new rule as one that would allow President Donald Trump to continue his policy of aggressively expanding oil production without sacrificing safety.

“Today’s final rule puts safety first, both public and environmental safety, in a common sense way,” he said. “Incorporating the best available science, best practices and technological innovations of the past decade, the rule eliminates unnecessary regulatory burdens while maintaining safety and environmental protection.”

Erik Milito, a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in a statement, “This revised well control rule will help to further manage risks and better protect workers and the environment.”

Environmental groups criticized the changes.

Referring to the fact that the new rules include changes sought by the American Petroleum Institute, Bob Deans, a spokesman for the advocacy group the Natural Resources Defense Council said, “The Trump administration, in other words, wants to hand over responsibility for industry safety to the very entity the commission warned against entrusting with that responsibility.”

After the 2010 disaster, Obama commissioned the bipartisan panel to investigate the cause and recommend policy changes meant to prevent such disasters. Among the key recommendations was the release by the Interior Department of tougher safety regulation on the construction, oversight and operation of offshore oil wells and other equipment, particularly blowout preventers.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was caused in part when the buckling of a section of drill pipe led to the malfunction of a blowout preventer on a BP well known as Macondo.

In Obama’s final year in office, the Interior Department issued new safety rules on undersea wells and blowout preventers. In Trump’s first year of office, he announced his plans to loosen those rules. Those plans were detailed in a 176-page draft published by the Interior Department in the fall, and finalized in the 289-page plan made public Thursday.

In the final rule, the Interior Department noted that the changes were expected to save the oil industry about $824 million over 10 years.

“The changes in the new rule allow for producers to be nimbler, with more adaptive guidelines based on the most up-to-date insights and innovative technology,” said Barry Russell, chief executive of the Independent Petroleum Producers of America.

In addition to reduced testing of blowout preventers — the Obama-era rules required 30-minute tests every 14 days, whereas the new rules reduce that to 5-minute tests every 21 days — the new rules also eliminate a requirement that companies report some of those safety-test results to the Interior Department.

In addition, the new rule removes a requirement for an Interior Department approved independent expert to verify safety measures and equipment used in offshore drilling operations. And it removes a requirement that drilling operators provide real-time data from wells to onshore observers.

The final rule will become effective 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen this week or next week.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/climate/offshore-drilling-safety-rollback-deepwater-horizon.html" id="261c5d85-d3f3-3a76-a66b-8c540f47e41f">The New York Times</a>.

Interior Dept. Loosens Offshore-Drilling Safety Rules Dating From Deepwater Horizon

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday made public its rollback of a major offshore-drilling safety regulation, significantly weakening an Obama-era rule that was put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 people and sent 4.9 million barrels of oil gushing into the sea, causing the worst oil spill in American history.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who was confirmed by the Senate last month to head the agency that oversees the nation’s public lands and waters, is expected to announce the plan Thursday afternoon in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, the vast industrial hub that serves as the onshore base for most companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The loosening of safety and environmental regulations on offshore drilling equipment has been a key piece of President Donald Trump’s efforts to ease restrictions on fossil fuel companies as part of what Trump calls his “energy dominance” agenda.

Trump called for the loosening of the drilling safety rules in the first months of his administration, and the final plan, which will go into effect later this year, is widely expected to adhere closely to a draft proposal released last September.

Among other changes, that plan removed a requirement for independent verification of safety measures and equipment used on offshore platforms. It also removed a requirement that oil companies design their equipment to function in “most extreme” scenarios involving weather, high heat, strong winds or high pressure from within the undersea oil wells, which was a key factor in the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout.

And it removed a requirement that professional engineers certify the safety of the design of some pieces of offshore drilling equipment for new wells.

That draft rule appeared to reflect many of the requests made by the oil industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies on behalf of oil companies. In its public comments on the proposal, the group praised the plan, saying it would further the goal of seeing that “exploration and development is promoted and not unnecessarily delayed or inhibited.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday is expected to unveil its rollback of a major offshore-drilling safety regulation, significantly weakening an Obama-era rule that was put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 people and sent 4.9 million barrels of oil gushing into the sea, causing the worst oil spill in American history.

The delay appears to be an acknowledgment that the court decision is a significant setback for what President Donald Trump has called his policy of “energy dominance” — an effort to rapidly expand oil and gas drilling across the country.

The reason given for the delay was a March decision by a federal judge in Alaska to reinstate an Obama-era ban on Arctic drilling. “Given the recent court decision, the Department is simply evaluating all of its options to determine the best pathway to accomplish the mission entrusted to it by the President,” a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, Molly Block, wrote in an email.

The delay was reported by The Wall Street Journal, quoting the Interior Department’s new secretary, David Bernhardt, as saying, “By the time the court rules, that may be discombobulating to our plan,” adding, “What if you guess wrong?” in reference to the uncertain outcome of the legal appeals process.

The delay is the latest legal stumble in Trump’s effort to roll back environmental protections and increase fossil fuel production. Experts in environmental law estimate that, in its quest to quickly undo existing environmental protections, the administration has now lost about 40 cases in federal courts.

In following Trump’s directive to expand offshore oil and gas drilling to almost the entire United States coastline, the Interior Department released a draft plan last year and was expected to release a final version this year. Oil industry lobbyists and Republicans on Capitol Hill who have worked closely with the administration on crafting the plan said earlier this year that they expected the final plan to be released this spring.

The draft plan called for drilling off nearly the entire U.S. coastline. But the March 30 decision by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska concluded that a ban by President Barack Obama on about 120 million acres of the Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

Environmental groups cheered Thursday’s delay.

“Every single governor from Maine to Florida and from Washington to California oppose offshore drilling off their coast,” said Collin O’Mara, president of National Wildlife Federation. “Republican and Democrat alike.”

The oil industry expressed optimism that the legal case would be resolved quickly and that the plan could then be finalized.

“We are hopeful that an appeal of this case will move quickly and that we can proceed with the important work of exploring for America’s offshore resources without unnecessary delay,” said Erik Milito, a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil companies.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/climate/offshore-drilling-delay.html" id="1375e1e0-c58f-3082-af1c-d881a037aa43">The New York Times</a>.

Interior Department Delays its Plan to Open U.S. Coastline to Drilling

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday confirmed that it will likely delay the release of a long-awaited plan that had been expected to open most of the nation’s coastline for offshore oil drilling, pending the final outcome of a recent court decision that blocks drilling off the Alaskan coast.

The president’s senior advisers are exploring the idea of creating a panel aimed at questioning the National Climate Assessment. According to a White House memo, the group would include William Happer, a Princeton physicist who has asserted that carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that scientists say is trapping heat and warming the planet — is beneficial to humanity.

The climate assessment, a sweeping report issued by the White House itself in November, concluded decisively that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the atmosphere, leading to a raft of harmful effects across the United States and the world.

And Trump announced last week on Twitter that he would nominate Kelly Knight Craft to be his ambassador to the United Nations. Craft said in a 2017 television interview that, on the issue of climate change, she believes there are “scientists on both sides that are accurate.”

“There is no precedent for something like this,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian who has written books on five former U.S. presidents. “Other presidents have attacked policy initiatives, but not science.”

At the same time, more senior Republicans, including those in Congress, are moving in the opposite direction, acknowledging the established science and publicly calling to reduce fossil fuel pollution.

To be sure, some Republicans continue to question, or, more commonly, to remain silent on the issue of human-caused climate change.

But in February, three of the top-ranking Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden of Oregon, Fred Upton of Michigan, and John Shimkus of Illinois, published an op-ed on the website Real Clear Policy in which they said, “climate change is real” and called for innovations to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Similarly, in December, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who is chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in which he acknowledged his acceptance of climate science but also criticized the Paris Agreement and proposals to tax carbon dioxide emissions.

Republican pollsters and staff members said the White House’s efforts to attack the science — that fossil fuel pollution traps heat, warms the planet, and contributes to more severe droughts, heat waves and hurricanes — could backfire and put Trump fundamentally at odds with his own party.

“A lot of thoughtful Republicans have accepted the reality of climate change and are wrestling with questions of policy,” Whit Ayres, a prominent Republican pollster, said.

Ayres noted that many Republicans had concerns about climate change policies like taxing or regulating coal and oil pollution. But he said that questioning the foundational science of climate change could become a political liability.

“There are perfectly legitimate questions to be raised about whether a dollar spent fighting climate change is better spent on health care or education,” Ayres said. “But there are no longer credible questions to be raised about the existence of climate change. If the White House ends up there, that is simply not credible.”

White House officials initially sought to play down the National Climate Assessment by publishing it late in the afternoon the Friday after Thanksgiving. But its dramatic findings — that the impacts of climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end — received a lot of attention around the country.

Analysts also noted that the findings of the assessment could provide legal ammunition to opponents of Trump’s efforts to roll back climate change regulations, since the report makes the case that increasing greenhouse emissions is harmful to humanity.

It was those factors that prompted the White House effort to establish a panel or committee that would question or contradict those comprehensive scientific findings, according an administration official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and who spoke on condition of anonymity, and a former senior White House official with knowledge of the matter.

But the creation of such a panel, should it come about, would put Trump in a highly unusual position.

In particular, experts said, presidents have never sought to undermine the findings of the National Academies of Science, created by President Abraham Lincoln to provide unbiased scientific findings to the country’s leaders. The group played a key role in reviewing the conclusions of the National Climate Assessment.

“If there is one body that has the thorough respect of scientists and policymakers, it is the National Academies,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international relations at Princeton University. “I can’t recall any time that an administration has tried to debunk a review by the National Academy, or where the White House ever tried to ‘re-review’ something the academy has reviewed.”

Critics of the president also singled out his announcement that he would nominate Craft as ambassador to the United Nations, given that her comments on climate change are far outside the mainstream of established science.

“She’s taken this bizarre position,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs during the George W. Bush administration. “She will find that in New York, at the Security Council, climate change is one of the top issues. If the representative of the world’s largest economy and one of the largest emitters doesn’t understand the science of this issue, it makes the U.S. look feckless and irresponsible.”

Craft, currently the U.S. ambassador to Canada, and her husband, Joseph W. Craft III, a billionaire coal magnate from Kentucky, were major contributors to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and donated to his inaugural committee.

A White House spokeswoman declined to speak on the record for this article.

The moves by the White House come as public opinion in the United States and around the world appears to be falling more in line with the science.

Globally, climate change is seen as the top international threat, according to a poll conducted in 26 countries and published this month by the Pew Research Center.

The Trump administration has been criticized by other countries for Trump’s plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement and for his policy moves to weaken Environmental Protection Agency rules.

But the new plans to create the panel and the expected nomination of Craft will sharply deepen that divide, said Sherri Goodman, who served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration.

“It creates a huge divide with our European and Asian allies, and it allows China to claim the mantle of climate leadership,” she said. “China shows up at climate conferences when the U.S. doesn’t and they offer to engage on the science.”

In the United States, polling consistently shows that more than half of Americans now accept that climate change is caused by human activities. While most surveys show that among Republicans, less than half accept that science, the data also reveals a sharp generational divide among Republicans.

A 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center found that just 18 percent of Republicans born in the postwar baby boom accepted the reality of human-caused climate change, but twice that number of millennial Republicans, defined as those born from 1981 through 1996, accepted that science.

In addition, the poll found that 45 percent of millennial Republicans said they were seeing at least some effects of global climate change in the communities where they live, compared with a third of baby boomer Republicans.

That fact is not lost on political analysts.

“For Republicans who believe pollsters, pollsters are telling them, ‘people care about climate,’ ” said Steven J. Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team who now runs a website aimed at casting doubt on the established science of human-caused climate change.

Milloy and other Republican strategists also said that within the White House, millennial Republican staffers were pushing back at the effort to create the new panel.

“If you’re 30 years old and work at the White House, it’s not clear that this effort is a good idea,” said Milloy.

But he added that for Trump’s base of supporters, none of that matters. “People like me, we love the guy.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/climate/trump-climate-science.html" id="cb5f46ca-d808-376d-acd6-8a7a7070533d">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Is Increasingly Alone on One Side of the Climate Science Divide

WASHINGTON — New efforts by President Donald Trump and his staff to question or undermine the established science of climate change have created a widening rift between the White House on one side, and scientific facts, government agencies and some leading figures in the president’s own party on the other.

This month, for instance, three of the top-ranking Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden of Oregon, Fred Upton of Michigan, and John Shimkus of Illinois, published an op-ed on the website Real Clear Policy in which they said, “climate change is real” and called for innovations to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

A Growing Divide on Climate Science: Trump vs. the Rest of the World

But environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers criticized the plan, saying it in effect delayed desperately needed regulation on a clear public health threat from chemicals that are commonly used in cookware, pizza boxes, stain repellents and fire retardants.

EPA officials described their proposal as the “first-ever nationwide action plan” to address the health effects of human-made chemicals known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs. There are currently no federal regulations on the production or monitoring of that class of about 5,000 chemicals, which are manufactured and used in a wide variety of industries and products. Studies have shown that they can linger in the human body for years, causing harmful health effects.

“The PFAS action plan is the most comprehensive action plan for a chemical of concern ever undertaken by the agency,” said Dave Ross, EPA’s assistant administrator for water, in a telephone call with reporters Thursday. Andrew Wheeler, the EPA’s acting administrator, who is now President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the agency, called the plan a “pivotal moment in the history of the agency.”

The American Chemistry Council, an industry lobbying group, voiced support for the plan. “We continue to support strong national leadership in addressing PFAS and firmly believe that EPA is best positioned to provide the public with a comprehensive strategy informed by a full understanding of the safety and benefits of different PFAS chemistries,” it said in a statement.

Critics called on the agency to move more quickly, citing 2016 action by the Obama administration on two of the chemicals that suggested the urgency of the risk.

“While EPA acts with the utmost urgency to repeal regulations, the agency ambles with complacency when it comes to taking real steps to protect the water we drink and the air we breathe,” said Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment Committee.

After a public outcry over tests showing dangerous levels of PFASs in communities around the United States, particularly around military bases and fire stations, the EPA under the Obama administration in 2016 proposed creating a national standard for limiting the levels in drinking water of two of the most prevalent varieties of PFAS chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS.

It also issued a health advisory recommending that water utilities and public health officials monitor levels of the two chemicals in public water supplies and notify the public if the combined levels of those chemicals reached 70 parts per trillion. A draft report released last year by the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that the “minimal risk level” for exposure to those two chemicals should be less than half that amount.

Given the available data on the effect of PFAS chemicals, environmentalists criticized the EPA’s response as inadequate to the threat.

Scott Faber, an expert on chemical policy with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, called it a “drinking water crisis facing millions of Americans.” But the EPA, he said, is “just not treating the crisis the way it deserves.”

In particular, critics of the EPA have sited the role of Nancy Beck, a former lobbyist with the American Chemistry Council, in a slowdown of the agency’s response to addressing PFASs.

Last May, Scott Pruitt, previous administrator of the EPA, convened a summit aimed at addressing the threat of PFAS chemicals, and announced that, as a first step, the EPA would decide whether to set a national drinking water standard for PFOA and PFOS. Wheeler said Thursday that the agency intends to act quickly to begin that regulatory process.

“Our goal is to close the gap on the science as quickly as possible,” he said, adding that the agency is also looking into technology to clean or reduce PFAS chemicals from drinking water.

But Wheeler did not offer a clear timeline of when such a standard might be completed. Such regulatory processes can often take years.

Carper suggested that the EPA’s failure to provide a clear timeline on completing the standard could influence the outcome of Wheeler’s Senate confirmation vote to lead the EPA, although given the Republican majority in the Senate, his confirmation is still likely assured.

“I urge Mr. Wheeler to reverse course and treat this public health threat with the urgency it deserves,” Carper said. “And I ask my colleagues in the Senate to take note of Mr. Wheeler’s lack of urgency in addressing this threat as they consider his nomination to be EPA’s permanent administrator.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/climate/epa-chemical-plan-pfas.html" id="2b8ffd5f-98d9-314f-ab82-0286fcb8b759">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday said it will start work by the end of the year on a long-awaited plan to set national drinking-water limits for two harmful chemicals linked to cancer, low infant birth weight and other health issues.

EPA Will Study Limits on Cancer-Linked Chemicals. Critics Say the Plan Delays Action.

The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.

In addition, Friday’s ruling by the judge, an Obama appointee, has broader implications for Trump’s effort to push drilling across the U.S. coastline and on public lands. Specifically, the Arctic Ocean drilling case could give legal ammunition to opponents of Trump’s efforts to roll back protections for 2 million acres of national monuments created by Obama and President Bill Clinton.

The case adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Trump’s efforts to undo Obama’s environmental legacy. Experts in environmental law estimate that the Trump administration has now lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts.

Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire U.S. coastline.

The White House referred questions on the matter to the Interior Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment.

And although Friday’s court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.

“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why. Just saying ‘energy dominance’ is not enough. Saying ‘I won the election’ is not enough.”

Parenteau predicted that the case was likely to reach the Supreme Court, though probably not for several years.

Both Obama’s efforts to use his executive authority to ban drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and Trump’s efforts to undo that ban, are legally unprecedented.

In using his executive authority to permanently ban drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean, Obama relied on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs how the executive branch uses federal waters for offshore energy exploration. The law includes a provision that lets presidents put those waters off limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades.

In late 2016, as he sought to legally cement environmental protections before Trump, then the president-elect, took office, Obama used what both supporters and critics called a creative and unusual interpretation of that law to set a permanent ban on drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean.

Three months after taking office, Trump issued an executive order rescinding the ban. That made him the first president to seek to revoke a decision by his predecessor to use the law to protect federal waters.

Environmental groups promptly sued the administration over the move. They welcomed Friday’s court decision.

“Since coming into office, Trump has been on an one-man campaign to undo the work of his predecessor,” said Niel Lawrence, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took part in the oral arguments in the Alaska case. “What this opinion confirms is that there are constitutional limits to that.”

Erik Milito, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry and which joined the Trump administration’s case, said, “While we disagree with the decision, our nation still has a significant opportunity before us in the development of the next offshore leasing plan to truly embrace our nation’s energy potential and ensure American consumers and businesses continue to benefit from U.S. energy leadership.”

Experts said Gleason’s decision could affect the legal outcome of Trump’s efforts to roll back certain protections created by his predecessors on public lands.

Just as presidents have used the 1953 offshore-drilling law to protect federal waters, they have used a different law, the 1906 Antiquities Act, put in place by President Theodore Roosevelt, to designate and protect millions of acres of lands as permanent public monuments. Presidents throughout the past century have created such monuments.

While at least two presidents have used their authority to shrink the size of monuments created by their predecessors, Trump has done so at a more drastic scale. In December 2017, Trump cut about 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah: the Bears Ears monument, created by Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, created by Clinton. At the time it was the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.

Already, lawsuits on the issue are making their way through federal courts. Parenteau and others predicted that Gleason’s decision could possibly have a bearing on those cases.

That is because, in the language of both laws, Congress gave the president the right to occasionally designate public lands and waters for protection. However, each of the laws is silent on whether a successor can reduce or revoke those protections.

If Trump’s challengers win in court, the decision could affirm future presidents’ right to set bans of offshore drilling that could be undone only by Congress (as opposed to a later president) and similarly could set a precedent that presidential decisions to expand protections of public land could be revised or reversed only by Congress.

If Trump prevails in court, future presidents could potentially use an executive order to shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors or similarly revoke presidential decisions to protect federal waters.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/climate/trump-oil-drilling-arctic.html" id="8caa83d5-6ea4-314b-a32a-463180e792a0">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Order to Open Arctic Ocean to Drilling Was Unlawful, Judge Rules

WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Donald Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Canadian border.

Although Friday’s court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.

“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why.”

The decision, by Judge Sharon Gleason of U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal of about 125 million acres of Arctic Ocean from drilling “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, where oil companies have long sought to drill. It also has broader implications for Trump’s effort to push drilling across the U.S. coastline and on public lands.

And it adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Trump’s effort to undo Obama’s environmental legacy. Experts in environmental law estimate that the Trump administration has now lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts.

Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published in 2017 called for drilling off the entire U.S. coastline.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department declined to comment, and a spokesman for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Parenteau predicted that the case is likely to reach the Supreme Court.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/climate/trump-arctic-oil-drilling.html" id="d3763938-43bf-3341-ab79-c34572f5b5fe">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — In a legal blow to President Donald Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawful.

Trump's Order to Open Arctic Waters to Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds

The draft plan, which was scheduled to be announced by the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, at a news conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin, would include some provisions designed to strengthen oversight of lead in drinking water. But according to people familiar with the plan, it does not include a pricey safety proposal advocated by public health groups and water utilities: the replacement of 6 million lead pipes that connect homes to main water pipes. The proposed new rule would also more than double the amount of time allotted to replace lead pipes in water systems that contain high levels of lead.

The EPA will promote the new regulations as a step forward in protecting water supplies. Although the new proposal will extend the timetable for replacing lead pipes, it will also include new requirements that all schools and day care centers be tested for lead, and, if elevated lead levels are found, customers would have to be told within 24 hours, not the current standard of 30 days. It will require water utilities to conduct inventories of their lead service pipes and publicly report their locations.

Environmental activists said those moves forward would not make up for the relaxation of standards in other areas.

The slower timetable for the replacement of lead pipes is a “huge weakening change that will swallow up the few small improvements in the proposal,” wrote Erik D. Olson, an expert in drinking water policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, in an email.

The new rule was expected to propose changing a key element of the current rules, which requires that a water system that is found to contain lead levels higher than 15 parts per billion must replace 7% of its lead service lines each year for as long as the lead levels exceed that measurement. The new proposal would instead require water systems with those lead levels to replace 3% of lead service lines each year.

Olson’s group estimates that the loosening of standards could extend the length of time needed to replace dangerous lead water pipes from 13 years to 33 years.

“It means that another generation of American kids will be exposed to dangerous levels of lead from their drinking water,” he said.

A spokesman for the EPA did not respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has made the rollback of environmental regulations a hallmark of his administration, with initiatives to weaken or erase dozens of EPA regulations on climate change, chemical pollution and water quality. At the same time, he has also called attention to the concerns about lead in water that were ignited by the discovery of high levels of lead and other contaminants that poisoned Flint’s drinking water for more than a year. He also frequently emphasizes his desire to promote “crystal-clear water.”

During a 2016 campaign stop in Flint, Trump said: “It used to be, cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now, the cars are made in Mexico and you cannot drink the water in Flint.”

“We shouldn’t allow it to happen,” he added.

Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, announced that he would prioritize removing lead from water. Pruitt stepped down amid a corruption scandal in 2017.

A 2018 report from the EPA’s Office of Inspector General said management weaknesses had hobbled the agency’s response to the Flint crisis and that federal officials should have taken stronger action to correct repeated blunders by state regulators.

Pruitt’s successor, Wheeler, was expected to unveil the proposal, which was initiated under Pruitt, on Thursday. The EPA planned to highlight it as part of Children’s Health Month, which falls in October.

New EPA Lead Standards Would Slow Replacement of Dangerous Pipes

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration was expected Thursday to propose new regulations on lead and copper in drinking water, updating a 20-year-old rule that may have contributed to the lead-tainted water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that began in 2015.

The move, which was widely expected, comes after years of prodding by successive Alaska governors and congressional delegations, which have pushed the federal government to exempt the Tongass, the nation’s largest national forest, from a Clinton-era policy known as the roadless rule, which banned logging and road construction in much of the national forest system. A final rule is not expected until next June.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Forest Service, which comes under the Department of Agriculture, took a step forward and put its weight behind a final decision that would be welcomed by most politicians in the state but dreaded by environmentalists.

The Forest Service announced that it had prepared a draft environmental study analyzing the effects of altering or lifting the roadless rule in the Tongass forest, which includes 165,000 acres of old-growth hemlock, cedar and spruce trees. The study, which will be published this week, analyzed six possible changes to the rule. One option would maintain restrictions in 80% of the area currently protected by the rule, another would open up about 2.3 million acres to logging and construction, and another would lift all roadless rule restrictions from the forest.

The Forest Service, backed by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, called the lifting of the entire roadless rule in Tongass the administration’s “preferred option.”

Supporters in Alaska said such a move would be an economic boon to their state, while conservationists lamented the possible destruction of vast areas of pristine old-growth forest.

“I’m very pleased the administration has listened to Alaskans and is proposing a full exemption from the roadless rule as its preferred alternative,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I thank President Trump, Secretary Perdue, and the team at the Forest Service for their hard work to reach this point — and for their continued efforts to restore reasonable access to the Tongass National Forest.”

Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said, “Alaska’s elected officials are selling out their constituents and robbing future generations by trying to strip protection from one of the most pristine old-growth forests in the world.”

She predicted the plan “would smother vital wild salmon streams with sediment and irreparably harm subsistence hunters.”

Once the study is published, members of the public will have until Dec. 17 to submit comments, which are meant to inform the Agriculture Department as Perdue moves toward a final decision, which is expected in June 2020.

Forest Service Backs an End to Limits on Roads in Alaska's Tongass Forest

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday took a step toward opening up the pristine woodlands of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and road construction, saying it would prefer an end to all road-building restrictions throughout the forest.

Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands regulation at a moment when President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “crystal-clean water.” The proposed new rule would chip away at safeguards put in place a quarter-century ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who implemented a policy designed to ensure that no wetlands lost federal protection.

“They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,” said Blan Holman, who works on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat.

Trump, who made a pledge of weakening a 2015 Obama-era rule one of his central campaign pledges, is expected to tout his plan as ending a federal land grab that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their property as they see fit.

Under the Obama rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and planting certain crops, and would have been required to apply for permits from the Environmental Protection Agency to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those water bodies. Under the new Trump plan, which lifts federal protections from many of those streams and wetlands, those requirements will also be lifted.

A spokesman for the EPA, John Konkus, declined to comment on the plan.

The clean water rollback is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to weaken or undo major environmental rules, including proposals to weaken regulations on planet-warming emissions from cars, power plants and oil and gas drilling rigs, a series of moves designed to speed new drilling in the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and efforts to weaken protections under the Endangered Species Act. This week in Katowice, Poland, at an annual U.N. conference on mitigating global warming, Trump administration officials held an event touting the benefits of fossil fuels.

The proposed water rule, scheduled to be announced Tuesday morning at the EPA, is designed to replace an Obama-era regulation known as Waters of the United States. Tuesday’s unveiling of the proposal is expected to coincide with its publication in the Federal Register. After that, the administration will take comment on the plan for 60 days, and it could then revise the plan before finalizing it next year.

The Obama rule, developed jointly by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about a third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.

But it became a target for rural landowners, an important part of Trump’s political base, since it could have restricted how much pollution from chemical fertilizers and pesticides could seep into water on their property.

The new Trump water rule will retain federal protections for those larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them, and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water, according to a detailed eight-page fact sheet prepared by the administration before the unveiling of the rule and reviewed by The New York Times.

But it will strip away protections of “ephemeral” streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water, or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners, who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants.

Coral Davenport

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