Environmental and Policy Focus
Los Angeles Times - Oct 18
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) Investment Committee will have a new task at its regular meeting Monday along with its main job of trying to boost flagging investment returns: eliminating its coal holdings. CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) are now required by state law to sell their holdings in coal-producing companies. SB 185, which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law this month, requires CalPERS and CalSTRS to sell holdings in companies that receive at least half their revenue from so-called thermal coal—which is ground into a powder and burned in a boiler to produce steam—by June 1, 2017. The immediate financial effect of the bill is negligible, as the thermal coal investments amount to only 0.03 percent of the CalPERS fund and even less in the CalSTRS fund. But the symbolic effect could be large. Backers of the bill anticipate the divestment movement will be extended to producers of oil, gas, and other fossil fuels.
The Hill - Oct 22
Federal experts are blaming the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a major mine wastewater spill in Colorado. Investigators with the Interior Department, who were charged with independently probing the August spill, reported Thursday that the EPA rushed through the engineering work leading up to the incident and did not understand the complexity of the abandoned Gold King Mine. The Thursday report contrasts with one completed in August by the EPA, finding that the blowout of 3 million gallons of dangerous sludge was “likely inevitable.” The heavy metal-laden sludge flowed into a tributary of the Animas River near Silverton, Colorado, turning it bright orange and closing it and downstream rivers for days. The EPA and its head, Gina McCarthy, quickly took responsibility for the spill.
SFGate - Oct 16
California regulators on Thursday closed 33 oil company wells that had injected wastewater into potentially drinkable aquifers protected by federal law. The new closures bring to 56 the number of oil-field wastewater injection wells shut down by the state after officials realized they were pumping oil-tainted water into aquifers that potentially could be used for drinking or irrigation. An oil industry trade group noted that all of the wells closed Thursday had received state permits, even if the state now acknowledges that those permits should never have been issued. More well closures will likely follow.
Contra Costa Times - Oct 21
The Shell oil refinery in Martinez, California has agreed to pay $208,000 in air pollution penalties to settle complaints of 12 violations in 2013, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District announced Monday. The refinery violations included, among others, Shell's discharging excessive quantities of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, and a release of hydrogen sulfide from a biotreatment pond, the air district reported. Shell reported each of the problems, triggering an air district enforcement investigation. Since then, the oil refinery has fixed the problems, officials said.
U.S. News and World Report - Oct 19
Radiation wasn't immediately detected during fly-overs of a burned trench containing long-buried radioactive waste at an 80-acre commercial radioactive waste disposal site in rural southern Nevada, state and federal officials said Monday. The site, operated by US Ecology, was the first commercially operated radioactive waste disposal facility licensed by the federal government, according to an Idaho lab report. Ground testing is scheduled next, headed by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency radiological emergency team to be sent to the site about 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas, according to a spokesperson for the EPA Region 9 office in San Francisco. The EPA said the unknown amount of low-level radioactive waste that burned had been deposited sometime in the 30-year period before 1992, when the facility operator stopped accepting such material. This site was one of six disposal sites in the nation that accepted low-level radioactive waste, which typically includes tools, protective clothing, and parts and machinery from nuclear power plants.
