State
Long Creek dam repair still in limbo
Meridian Star
By Jeff Byrd
Sunday, February 1, 2015 5:00 am
City of Meridian officials said they have been unable to locate funding to
make repairs to a dam at Long Creek Reservoir. The lake, which has been
drained down significantly, won't be refilled until repairs to the dam are
complete.
http://www.meridianstar.com/news/long-creek-dam-repair-still-in-limbo/article_0b4ad336-a9cf-11e4-a380-3bba8ab2b941.html
Goodrich scales back in TMS
Matt Williamson
Enterprise-Journal
February 1, 2015 8:00 am
An oil company that has largely hedged its bets on the success of the
Tuscaloosa Marine Shale by breaking into the oil play early on and in an
aggressive fashion is now dramatically throttling back.
http://www.enterprise-journal.com/news/article_b13cd178-a9d3-11e4-9d7f-3bb1efa20704.html
Goodrich Petroleum cuts oil drilling in La. and Miss.
AP
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Low oil prices mean the driller that has been the
most bullish on an oil region that straddles the Louisiana-Mississippi line
is cutting back.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268748/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=XC5oG5vy
Hancock company pays fine, donates to school bus buy
AP
BAY ST. LOUIS -- A Hancock County company is paying a $5,750 civil fine and
giving the Bay St. Louis-Waveland School District $17,250 toward a school
bus.
http://www.sunherald.com/2015/01/31/6048495/around-south-mississippi.html?sp-tk=BDE298685FE5469E535141776ED117511D8CDBFDF3AA4750ABB3BE8BAACC72FE9FF6556B39A9416AB63D706FC9257D88BFF192AF98045DD75EAD9AB00EBE010CE14FC1006844C7E8323D66C1DEB13B988CCCEC607D9CEF403ACEE5C4DB520D03DBC42AE7511ED3B982AAC60F6BFD54358EB0F7DB
Company demolishing ex-Bryan Foods plant fined over asbestos
AP
WEST POINT, Miss. (AP) - The company that's tearing down the former Bryan
Foods complex in West Point is paying a civil fine for failing to control
for asbestos.
http://www.msnewsnow.com/story/27992390/company-demolishing-ex-bryan-foods-plant-fined-over-asbestos
Officials: MS deer season marginal at best
WLOX
SOUTH MISSISSIPPI (WLOX) -State officials say the 2014-2015 deer season was
marginal at best. Deer hunting season in Mississippi ended on Saturday in
the Hills and Delta Zone, but hunters in the Southeast Zone, which includes
the coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson, are allowed to
harvest legal bucks only from Feb. 1 through Feb. 15 during the extended
season.
http://www.wlox.com/story/27993742/officials-ms-deer-season-marginal-at-best
Mississippi Rep. Alan Nunnelee moves to home hospice
Commercial Appeal
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep Alan Nunnelee's cancer returned, and he was moved to
home hospice, his office said Friday.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/national/mississippi-rep-alan-nunnelee-has-untreatable-cancer_41354456
Former funeral home could become part of Capitol complex
The Associated Press
JACKSON, MISS. — A former funeral home near the Mississippi Capitol could
become the property of state government.
http://www.sunherald.com/2015/02/02/6049884/former-funeral-home-could-become.html
Oil Spill
BP oil spill at issue in two federal court cases next week
The Associated Press
January 31, 2015 at 10:37 AM
Legal battles arising from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill play out in
two federal courtrooms in New Orleans next week. On Monday, trial resumes
in a district courtroom where BP and a minority partner in its ill-fated
Macondo well are trying to fend off billions of dollars in Clean Water Act
penalties, and on Tuesday, appeals court judges consider BP's request to
oust the man overseeing payments to businesses claiming harm from the
spill.
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2015/01/bp_oil_spill_at_issue_in_two_f.html
Millions of gallons of BP oil rests on Gulf floor
Tallahassee Democrat
TALLAHASSEE — When BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April
20, 2010, it spewed 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf
of Mexico before it was finally capped after 87 days.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/millions-of-gallons-of-bp-oil-rests-on-gulf-floor/22729311/
Reporting BP tar balls up to public
Pensacola News Journal
In December, nearly five years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil
spill disaster, a two-man oil spill monitoring team collected
roughly 17 pounds of weathered, sand and shell-filled tar balls from
Escambia and Walton county beaches.
http://www.pnj.com/story/news/2015/01/30/reporting-lingering-bp-tar-balls-public-now/22615095/
High Hopes For a Gulf Rescue
By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill in 2010 has so far
cost the British petroleum company more than $28 billion for cleanup,
claims and criminal penalties. Now a federal judge in New Orleans is
hearing arguments about how much BP should pay the government for violating
the Clean Water Act in the Gulf of Mexico.
Story Photo
Impacts of the BP Oil Spill
That fine in itself could amount to another $13.7 billion, so much money
that Congress three years ago, at the behest of influential Gulf Coast
senators and representatives, enacted a separate law to keep the bulk of it
for the states most affected by the spill.
The flamboyantly named Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist
Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States Act — Restore
Act for short — envisions a windfall of grants and government projects to
revive the coastal wetlands, water and wealth to a better condition than
before the oil spill.
As in all such ambitious programs, though, the challenge will be in the
execution.
"Monumental things can be achieved," says Mark Davis, director of the
Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane University in New
Orleans. "Some may be monumentally good, some may be monumentally
embarrassing."
BP's fortunes have been beyond embarrassing. After losing 11 workers and a
massive drilling platform at its Macondo well 41 miles off the coast of
Louisiana, the company spent an estimated $14 billion cleaning up from the
millions of gallons of oil that gushed into the Gulf for 87 days before the
deep-sea well was plugged.
At the height of the crisis, nearly 50,000 people employed by the company,
government agencies and the military worked to stop the oil's spread. They
toiled on 6,500 boats and laid 2,500 miles of barriers to keep the oil off
the shore. It was a fitting response to the greatest ecological disaster in
the Gulf's history, indeed in any U.S. waters.
Since then, BP has paid $4.5 billion in criminal penalties and $10 billion
to settle claims made by businesses and individuals who say they were
harmed by the spill.
Last September, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier ruled that BP was
grossly negligent in allowing the oil spill to occur, a decision that
quadruples the penalty under the Clean Water Act to a maximum of $4,300 a
barrel. Last month, he determined that the spill dumped 3.2 million barrels
of oil into the Gulf, splitting the difference between a higher figure the
government proposed and a lower one suggested by BP.
On Jan. 20, Barbier began to hear arguments about whether BP should have to
pay the maximum penalty. He will consider BP's past environmental record,
and what the company can afford to pay. After he decides, everything is
subject to appeal, so absent a settlement, the arguments could drag on for
many more years.
Big Money, Bigger Plans
The government's ambitions for the money are huge. It hopes to not only
clean up any remaining damage from the spill, but to go a long way toward
reversing 80 years of man-made degradation along the shores of the Gulf. If
that's successful, it could be an example for how to restore protected
bodies of water like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. If it fails, it
will go down as a missed opportunity of colossal proportions.
One of the Gulf's biggest problems, as for other waterways, is erosion. Its
causes are myriad, from the levees that hem in rivers to oil drilling in
the lowlands to the paving of coastline. The result is that coastal
wetlands are providing less protection against rising sea levels and
storms.
Along the coast of Louisiana, which is losing a football field's worth of
land an hour to erosion, you can see headstones floating above the tide.
Land that used to be farmed or grazed is now underwater.
Louisiana has developed a 50-year, $50 billion plan to fix the problem.
Jerome Zeringue, Louisiana's representative to the federally chartered Gulf
Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council that will decide how to spend much of
the oil spill money, says that if the plan is carried out, the state will
be gaining more land along its shores than it's losing within 30 years. The
money has never been there to do it. But the BP funds provide hope.
"That's the irony," says Zeringue. "As unfortunate as the oil spill was,
it's going to provide us with an opportunity to address this issue of
coastal land loss."
Louisiana wants to use money from the BP settlement to correct the mistakes
made in the 1930s when the Mississippi River was flanked by levees to
protect coastal communities from flooding. The levees channel upstream
sediment down the river and into the Gulf, rather than allowing it to
spread out and replenish wetlands and protect against erosion and the
subsidence of the coast. With the BP money, Louisiana hopes to cut holes in
the levies and divert sediment to the wetlands and build pipelines to
deliver more.
The effect will ripple through the Gulf's fishing economy, since many
species use the wetlands as nurseries for their young, and provide habitat
for migratory birds. Crucial to Louisiana, which is still rebuilding from
2005's Hurricane Katrina, wetlands provide a buffer from tropical storms.
In other states, similar erosion-prevention projects could recover 40 years
worth of lost land, says Susan Ivester Rees, the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers' representative to the restoration council.
Awakening the Dead Zones
One of the biggest problems for water quality in protected bodies of water
like the Gulf of Mexico is agricultural runoff. The nitrogen and
phosphorous in fertilizers and animal waste stimulate the growth of
microscopic algae, which rob coastal water of oxygen and create "dead
zones" that wipe out oysters, crabs and other sea life.
Conservationists have figured out ways to correct the problem: Persuade
farmers and ranchers to plant trees and bushes that can absorb the
nutrients from fertilizer along the rivers that pass through their lands,
prevent livestock from doing their business in them, and teach the farmers
to apply fertilizer only when it's needed and to shift livestock from
pastures before all the vegetation is gone.
When the Agriculture Department gets involved, it offers farmers a deal:
The government will pick up half to three quarters of the costs if they
agree to help.
"Most of the land is privately owned, so we have to work with the people
who own it," says Jason Weller, chief of USDA's Natural Resources
Conservation Service. "They want to do the right thing, but they need a
little help." With BP's funds, Weller hopes USDA can eliminate the problem
of agricultural runoff into the Gulf.
The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council is already sitting on $240
million — part of the proceeds of the government's settlement with
Transocean, the BP contractor that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig. Late
last year, the council began to consider a range of projects on which to
spend the money. They include projects to rebuild wetlands and barrier
islands and to work with farmers and ranchers. There also are proposals to
tackle two other big man-made causes of pollution in the Gulf, stormwater
runoff and sewage.
Among Florida's proposals, for instance, are plans to plant vegetation
along the water's edge, along with oyster beds, to filter runoff; to move
more homes off septic tanks, a major source of pollution in the Gulf; to
centralize sewage treatment systems; and to capture more urban stormwater
runoff, which picks up pollutants as it cascades off roofs and down
streets, and treat it.
The projects the restoration council is considering are good ones,
according to environmentalists. But the activists worry that, already, the
council members are thinking about their employers first, and not the Gulf
as a whole. Courtney Taylor, policy director for the Environmental Defense
Fund's ecosystems programs, was disappointed that so few of the proposals
cross state lines and that the federal agencies did not present a unified
plan, instead offering their own separate ideas.
"Individual proposals may have value," she says. "The challenge is for the
council to add things together to get something bigger."
The council "should not just give every state something to play with, but
look at the Gulf holistically," adds David Muth, director of Mississippi
River Delta restoration for the National Wildlife Federation. "The question
is: 'What projects will make a real difference and what is ready to go?'"
The Ideal Versus the Practical
Public works projects often work more efficiently and are more successful
when a single entity with expertise is running them. But getting the
Restore Act passed required lawmakers to persuade a majority of
representatives and senators to go along. That meant dividing the money up
and allowing many players to have their say.
There was no guarantee in 2011 that the whole Congress would go along when
a bipartisan coalition of Gulf state senators introduced the legislation
with the aim of directing 80 percent of the Clean Water Act penalty funds
back to the Gulf states. Normally, the money would flow into the Treasury
and would be spent as Congress saw fit. The Gulf senators, led by Democrat
Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, made the case that their states should have
more of a say. Rep. Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican who became his
party's majority whip this past June, shepherded the legislation through
the House, and it was included in the 2012 highway bill.
But compromises were necessary. Some members wanted to earmark most of the
money for environmental projects but Landrieu, who lost her re-election bid
last year and will not be around to oversee the law's implementation, won
over conservative colleagues from other Gulf states by allowing the states
to spend a portion of the money on economic development.
Scalise says he hopes that Louisiana, at least, will stick mainly to
environmental projects. "We must not let these funds be squandered," he
says, adding that he is committed "to ensuring that mistakes of Louisiana
history don't repeat themselves and to ensuring that these vital funds will
be used specifically on coastal restoration projects."
Alabama's Richard C. Shelby, the lead Republican sponsor in the Senate,
says he wanted to be certain that people in the states and affected
communities would have a big say in how the money was spent. "I think we
should not put the people making these decisions in a straitjacket, but I
believe most of them will use rational thought and common sense."
The formula Congress settled on still presents an opportunity to do the
type of ecological restoration work conservationists have wanted to do for
years but have never had the money to attempt. But it allows states enough
flexibility that they could undermine that objective.
Thirty-five percent of the money goes directly to the five Gulf states —
Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — and is split evenly
among them. In Florida and Louisiana, parishes and counties along the coast
will control some of the funds. They could use it for environmental
projects but they also could build hotels and coastal resorts, run tourism
advertising, or put money toward helping the fishing industry that was
badly hurt by the oil spill. In fact, they could do pretty much anything
they want, if it can be linked to the health of the coastal economy or the
Gulf.
"Some of the states, particularly the states that didn't have a lot of
environmental impacts from the spill, want this to be like a block grant,"
says Tulane's Davis. "To them, this is like a winning lottery ticket."
The state officials themselves say they value the flexibility but recognize
the environmental needs of the Gulf. "A lot of coordination has to go on to
ensure the different buckets of money are not leveraged against each
other," says Mimi Drew, who is Florida's representative on the restoration
council. "We want to make sure the projects help each other and don't
duplicate efforts."
Another 30 percent of the money is earmarked for environmental restoration.
The restoration council, which consists of representatives of the five Gulf
states and officials of the Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security and
Interior departments, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental
Protection Agency, is developing a plan to guide its work. In August, it
released an initial plan setting five goals: to restore the health of the
Gulf coast, marine species, water quality, coastal communities and the
economy of the region.
The council will solicit projects from the states and from federal agencies
and decide which ones to fund. Each of the states will have a vote, while
the six federal agencies, acting as one, will have veto power.
Yet another 30 percent of the total money will go to the states to spend on
direct impacts from the oil spill. The council will oversee those funds and
approve spending. The Commerce Department's National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration will spend 2.5 percent of the funds on
scientific research. The Treasury Department will award grants to the
states amounting to the final 2.5 percent, for research as well. Additional
penalties, tied to an ongoing assessment of the damage caused by the oil
spill, will be administered directly by federal agencies and spent on
environmental work in the Gulf. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation,
a grant-making organization created by Congress in 1984, is in charge of
spending $2.4 billion of the $4.5 billion in criminal penalties on
environmental work.
Still, from environmentalists' perspective, it's not an ideal setup. It
will be difficult for the many entities charged with spending the money —
from Louisiana parishes to Florida counties to states and federal agencies
— to coordinate to maximize the investment return.
It's easy to envision the money being spent to please political
constituencies or to ease turf battles. Because of the way the voting will
occur, states may conspire to back each other's plans in order to grab a
greater share of the cash. The bulk of the work, ultimately, will be
carried out by contractors, creating a massive oversight job for the
government agencies paying for it.
Still, the council members insist they are attuned to the risks. Teresa
Christopher, the Commerce Department's senior adviser for Gulf restoration,
for instance, says the council is looking closely at ways to leverage its
money with that available from federal agencies and is intent on ensuring
that projects don't overlap. The council plans to measure projects' success
as they're implemented, with the ability to change course if need be, she
says.
A Massive Undertaking
Fixing the Gulf's problems is enormously complex and costly. But if it
succeeds, the impact could have an effect across the country and the world.
Zeringue believes that once Louisiana's projects are underway,
environmental engineering will surpass oil and gas drilling as the state's
top industry.
That expertise, in turn, could be exported to other places willing to spend
the money to restore polluted waterways. Adds the Army Corps' Rees, "I
think that it's a responsibility of all of us down here for anything we do,
we need to develop those lessons and then need to share them nationwide and
internationally. If something works here, there's a distinct possibility it
will work someplace else. If it's a total failure down here, we need to
learn from that and not repeat our mistakes."
Consider the struggle to restore the Chesapeake Bay, where fouled water has
all but destroyed once-thriving oyster and crab industries. An EPA plan to
stem runoff into the bay has met stiff resistance from the states in the
bay's watershed. But success in the Gulf could change that equation. "This
money could set an example of understanding how much these things can cost,
how achievable they are and then doing them, and explaining to
decision-makers and voters and constituents that these are important," says
Brian Moore, legislative director of the National Audubon Society.
Ensuring the money is spent wisely will ultimately fall to Congress and it
will require oversight that focuses on the facts and wins bipartisan
support, something that's been lacking in most congressional oversight
investigations of recent years.
Shelby says he's cognizant of the challenge. "We created this legislation,"
he says, "and we should follow through and make sure the money is spent for
the reasons we intended, to restore the Gulf environmentally and
economically."
If Congress succeeds, the Gulf's restoration could become America's
greatest environmental success story. If it fails, though, there will be
plenty of people to publicize the government's lack of diligence.
"It's too early to say whether it's going to get an A, B, C, D, or F," says
Tulane's Davis. "From people I talk to at the council and others, they
understand this is not just another day at the office. Something bigger is
at stake here."
National
EPA's methane crackdown to come slow and easy
BY NEELA BANERJEE
InsideClimate NewsFebruary 1, 2015
The Obama administration on Jan. 14 announced its long-awaited plan to
control the oil and gas industry's emissions of methane, saying it would in
the next decade cut in half leaks of the potent global-warming pollutant.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/01/255102/epas-methane-crackdown-to-come.html
Biodiesel industry irked at delays in EPA mandate
The Hill
The federal government's delay in implementing biodiesel mandates is
causing business to lay off workers and declare bankruptcy, the industry
said.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/231265-biodiesel-industry-irked-at-delays-in-epa-mandate
Opinion
Upending EPA's science on pollution and asthma
By Joseph Perrone, Ph.D.
The Hill
For years, environmentalists and regulators have cited childhood asthma as
an excuse for ever-stricter pollution rules. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), for instance, uses asthma as a pretext for nearly
every "clean air" regulation issued since the 1970s.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/231341-upending-epas-science-on-pollution-and-asthma
