State
MDEQ encourages safe disposal of used needles, sharps
Meridian Star
City officials in Meridian are making another major move to provide a permanent fix for the area that was effected by the 2015 IHOP parking lot collapse. Since the underground pipe collapse, city officials have spent about $1.5 million to secure the area with fencing and steel metal beams.
http://www.wtok.com/content/news/IHOP-parking-lot-collapse-new-development-418256893.html 3 On Your Side Investigates: What Happened to Sulphur Springs Park? WLBT
The United States Department of Agriculture / Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has financial assistance available to qualified Mississippi landowners wanting to create or restore longleaf pine stands on their land.
http://www.stonecountyenterprise.com/article_3529.shtml Oil Spill
USM set to acquire county research facility Stone County Enterprise
The
Environmental Protection Agency is recommending budget cuts in fiscal 2018 grants to dozens of programs that have historically provided money to Louisiana government agencies and regional organizations, according to an internal EPA memorandum provided to the news media on Tuesday (April 4) by officials with the American Federation for Governmental Employees. The affected agencies are involved in environmental regulation or other environmental activities.
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2017/04/barataria-terrebonne_national.html#incart_river_index What pollutes the urban Mississippi? Lawns, dogs and lots of pavement runoff Runoff into storm sewers, fertilizer among issues.
Star Tribune
The major pollutants that flow from Twin Cities neighborhoods into the Mississippi River can be traced back to three of the characteristics that define cities: lawns, pavements and dogs.
In one of the most the most detailed studies yet of phosphorus and nitrogen in an urban area, researchers at the University of Minnesota tracked where the pollutants come from and where they go in the seven small watersheds that make up the Capitol Region Watershed district in St. Paul.
http://www.startribune.com/what-pollutes-the-urban-mississipp-lawns-dogs-and-lots-of-pavement/417995413/ Controversial Bayou Bridge Pipeline project wins DNR approval; other permits still required The Advocate
WASHINGTON — By most accounts, the Trump administration is running behind many of its predecessors in filling out its ranks. Under secretaries still need confirmation, staff members need to be hired and advisers named.
Ryan T. Jackson Chief of staff to the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Since he started in politics at 18, Ryan T. Jackson had more or less worked for one man: James M. Inhofe, the powerful Oklahoma Republican who is one of the Senate’s most ardent skeptics of climate change.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/dealbook/white-house-staffers-trump-agenda.html?_r=0 Greens, Dem states want court to decide on Obama climate rule The Hill
A bill that would prohibit discriminating against people based on their beliefs about climate change is up for a hearing in the Maine state capital.
Republican Rep. Larry Lockman says his bill would prohibit the state from favoring or penalizing a person based on how they feel about climate change. It's up for a hearing on Thursday before the Legislature's Committee on Judiciary.
Lockman says climate change doubters get treated like "heretics" and they deserve to be protected. He also says his bill would protect people who feel strongly that climate change is real.
Peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists say that the world is warming from man-made forces.
Democrats and environmental groups in Maine say they will fight the proposal, which was referred to committee in March.
http://www.sunherald.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article143030334.html New regs for Thursday: Financial advisers, power plants, consumers The Hill
Litter costs you whether you realize it or not.
Litter clean-up costs in the United States total more than $11.5 billion each year. But that’s not all – 36 percent of business development officials say that litter impacts a company’s decision to locate in a community. That hurts our whole community when we lose potential jobs in our area.
And your personal pocketbook can take a hit, too – a large majority of homeowners say a littered neighborhood would decrease their assessment of a home’s value and influence their decision to purchase a property.
We all have a responsibility to prevent litter. Our choices are often the example which others, particularly young people, choose to follow. We must accept responsibility for our actions and influence the actions of others around us at home and in our city, towns and county.
We all should take pride in how our communities look by doing our part, every day, and put trash where it belongs.
This Saturday, members of communities across Itawamba County will be picking up roadside trash as part of Keep Itawamba Beautiful, organized by Itawamba County Development Council (ICDC). This local variation of the annual Great American Cleanup bands volunteers across the county together in an effort to spruce up their communities.
Last year, there were 161 volunteers, who picked up more than four tons of trash from the county’s roadways.
Keep Itawamba Beautiful is an example of how lasting, positive change happens when people work together. A clean community actually discourages littering and improves the community appearance and quality of life.
We all have a role to play in the prevention of litter. It takes just one person, one school, one business, one organization to positively impact the behavior of others in the community.
Be that one!
http://djournal.com/itawamba/2017/04/05/part-dont-let-litter-trash-county/ The Flawed Case Against Pricing Carbon Trump rescinds a measure that, despite criticisms, captures the harm of climate change WSJ
This week Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency
acknowledged that humans do indeed contribute to a warming climate.
Federal rules are supposed to cost the economy and society less than the harm they prevent. But regulators long lacked any benchmark for the costs of greenhouse gas emissions. Courts have ruled they can’t assume the costs are zero, so in 2010 Barack Obama’s administration, after lengthy study, began estimating the social cost of carbon. It put the future damage, such as from rising sea levels, crop damage and heat-related death, of emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide in 2015 at $42.
Critics argued the Obama administration chose assumptions that inflated that figure. Mr. Trump responded by instructing agencies to use broad regulatory guidance issued in 2003 that allows much less stringent assumptions. Yet most of the criticism of the initial estimates doesn’t stand up. Indeed, equally plausible assumptions would justify a higher figure.
The most widespread criticism of Mr. Obama’s social cost of carbon is that it was derived from complex models that link emissions to atmospheric concentrations to temperature and then to economic damage.
This, they say, yields results that are so uncertain they can’t justify costly and irreversible mitigation measures. Critics also note that actual temperatures seem less responsive to CO2 than models predicted, which the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged in 2014.
But the answer to imperfect models isn’t to ignore them but to improve them. Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who led the Obama administration’s effort, says about 150 reputable studies of climate damage have been released since 2009 and they would appear to justify an even higher social cost of carbon: “The evidence so far is that the damages are greater than we understood” for example due to
heat-related deaths in India.
And uncertainty alone doesn’t justify inaction. Military and terrorist attacks are also highly uncertain, yet the U.S. spends more than 3% of national income to prevent them on the theory that spending nothing makes an attack more likely. Moreover, their consequences are asymmetric: peace in the best case scenario, nuclear annihilation in the worst.
The consequences of global warming are similarly uncertain and asymmetric. One can posit zero or even positive effects, such as fewer deaths from cold in the best case. One can also posit massive and arbitrary destruction from rising sea levels, storms and biological die-off in the worst.
Robert Pindyck, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
argues climate policy should be geared to preventing extreme scenarios rather than the unreliable base-case projections of models. According to his survey of experts, to eliminate even a small risk of a 20% loss of future global income would require a social cost of carbon equal to $80 to $100 per ton.
Another controversy is over the rate at which the benefit of preventing future harm is discounted. As in all of finance, the lower the discount rate, the greater the value in today’s dollars. Federal guidance in 2003 required regulators to discount benefits at both 3% (the real, or after-inflation return, on government bonds) and 7% (the return on private investments). The Obama administration used only 3%. Critics note 7% would have produced a far lower figure. Yet with time, the lower discount rate looks ever more sensible. In 2003 government bonds yielded 2% after inflation; today, just 0.5%.
The most valid criticism of the social cost of carbon is that the Obama administration calculated the harm U.S. emissions cause to the entire world, departing from the convention of considering only harm to U.S. residents, which would slash the $42 cost per ton of CO2 to as little as $3.
There was a logic to this. The harm that carbon dioxide causes to any country, unlike acid rain or mercury, is the same no matter where on earth it originates.
Yet holding the U.S. to a global benchmark could cause high carbon industries to move to countries that don’t adopt the same standard, leaving emissions unchanged and Americans worse off.
That doesn’t sit well with Mr. Trump’s “America first” worldview. Mr. Greenstone responds that had the U.S. ignored the implications for the world in its own climate rules, it wouldn’t have extracted emissions commitments from China in 2014 and the rest of the world in 2015.
If the global cost of carbon is mostly a tool for inducing other countries to cooperate, Mr. Trump could turn this to his advantage. Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely press him this week to abide by the 2015 emissions limits. Mr. Trump could respond that if China subjects all its decisions to the social cost of carbon, the U.S. will do the same.
First, though, Mr. Trump has to decide he cares.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-u-s-needs-a-social-cost-of-carbon-1491418457?mod=e2twe Press Releases
Army Corps of Engineers making 'significant progress' in cleanups WASHINGTON (Army News Service) -- The Army Corps of Engineers has made "significant progress" in the cleanup of chemicals, toxins, radiation and other types of pollution at 5,357 sites across the United States, according to Lt. General Todd T. Semonite.
Of those total sites, 3,513 are now either closed or in a "monitoring status," said Semonite, the corps' commanding general and chief of engineers. He testified Wednesday at a Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing titled: "Cleaning Up Our Nation's Cold War Legacy Sites."
Of those 5,357 sites, the Corps has achieved "response complete" of about 65 percent of Formerly Used Defense Sites, or FUDS, and about 20 percent of Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, or FUSRAP, he said, noting that the highest risk areas are addressed on a priority basis.
"Response complete" means active cleanup actions are complete and only monitoring remains "to ensure no new issues arise."
Asked if additional funding would expedite even more cleanup, Semonite replied in the affirmative, adding that the Corps continuously looks for ways to make its cleanup more efficient and cost-effective.
An example of greater cost-savings and efficiencies, he said, was in fielding the Advanced Geophysical Classification technology at multiple Military Munitions Response Program sites to allow improved discrimination between hazardous unexploded ordnance and harmless scrap metal, without the need to dig up every object.
FUDS AND FUSRAP EXPLAINED
The Corps is involved in four cleanup programs. In his remarks, Semonite explained each of them.
First, as part of the Defense Environmental Restoration Program, the Department of Defense has delegated responsibility to the Army for the FUDS Program. These sites were used by the Defense Department for training, weapons manufacturing and weapons testing.
Some FUDS sites date back to the world wars, he said. For instance, there's a beach in Hawaii that Marines once used to practice landings just prior to the landings on Iwo Jima. That beach is a FUDS site.
The second Corps-run program, FUSRAP, differs from FUDS in that it specifically addresses environmental remediation or control of sites where activities by the Manhattan Engineer District or Atomic Energy Commission were performed during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, Congress transferred FUSRAP cleanup responsibilities from the Department of Energy to the Corps.
Third, the Environmental Protection Agency has been partnering with the Corps for environmental cleanup support at Superfund sites since 1982. The EPA relies on the Corps for its environmental engineering expertise and the Corps provides about $300 million a year in remedial design and remedial construction support.
Fourth, the Corps also supports the Army and Air Force in cleaning up sites on active installations and provides a wide variety of environmental remediation support and technical advice to a number of other federal partners at sites across the country.
WELL-INTENTIONED
People in the 1930s and 1940s were just as committed to making a better America as people are today, Semonite said. "But at the time they didn't understand second- and third-order ramifications of what they'd done environmentally."
He concluded: "The Corps is dedicated to protecting human health and the environment by investigating and, if required, cleaning up contamination and munitions hazards that may remain on these properties."
The great progress made in cleaning up such sites can be attributed to the hard work of the Corps' 3,400 engineers, he continued, adding that he would "pit his engineers up against any" in terms of their "technical expertise and compassion."
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt Speaks at Ag America Conference
04/05/2017
Contact Information:
U.S. EPA Media Relations (
press@epa.gov)
WASHINGTON – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt today spoke to American farmers and agriculture leaders, during the Ag America national conference in Washington, D.C.
“No one has a greater interest in the stewardship of our land and water than our country’s farmers and ranchers,” Administrator Pruitt said to the Ag America attendees. “The EPA is committed to partnering with agriculture producers, and through a cooperative relationship with both the agriculture community and the states, we can ensure federalism is restored so that we can achieve clean air and water across our country.”
The lunchtime event was organized as a discussion moderated by Kentucky Department of Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, who serves as chairman of Ag America.
Wednesday’s event included several dozen agriculture related stakeholders, appointed and elected state agriculture officials and other leaders.
USDA Offers Renewal Options for Expiring
Conservation Stewardship Program Contracts
USDA’s Largest Conservation Program Helps Producers
Improve Health, Productivity of Working Lands
Jackson, Miss, - Acting Deputy Agriculture Secretary Michael Young recently
announced that a contract renewal sign-up is underway for the
Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), USDA’s largest working lands conservation program with more than 80 million acres enrolled.
USDA’s
Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) made several updates to the popular
program last fall. These changes help producers better evaluate conservation options that benefit
their operations while improving the health and productivity of private and Tribal working lands.
“The changes made to CSP are providing even greater opportunities for stewardship-minded
producers across the country to participate and bring their conservation efforts to a higher level,”
said Young. “The new tools and methods for evaluating operations, expanded options to address
the producer’s conservation and business objectives, and the focus on local resource priorities
have resulted in a 30 percent increase in applications for this widely popular program.”
Participants with existing CSP contracts that will expire on Dec. 31 can access the benefits of
the recent program changes through an option to renew their contracts for an additional five
years if they agree to adopt additional activities to achieve higher levels of conservation on
their lands. Applications to renew expiring contracts are due by May 5.
Through CSP, agricultural producers and forest landowners earn payments for actively
managing, maintaining, and expanding conservation activities like cover crops, buffer strips,
pollinator and beneficial insect habitat, and soil health building activities – all while
maintaining active agricultural production on their land. Benefits to producers can include:
- Improved cattle gains per acre;
- Increased crop yields;
- Decreased inputs;
- Wildlife population improvements; and
- Better resilience to weather extremes.
Producers interested in contract renewals or applying for CSP for the first time
should visit
www.nrcs.usda.gov/csp or contact their local
USDA service center to learn more.
###
