Trump Administration Shocks Oil Industry With Biofuel Waiver Decision

By Julianne Geiger - Sep 14, 2020, 5:00 PM CDT

After shocking the oil industry with last week’s extension to a coastal drilling ban offshore Florida, Georgia, and a handful of other states, the Trump Administration said on Monday that is has rejected nearly the vast majority of retroactive biofuel waiver petitions that were pending review, according to a Reuters report.

Biofuel waivers are often given to oil refiners who are otherwise tasked with blending ethanol into their gasoline every year—or purchase tradable credits from refiners that blend with ethanol.

Refiners—especially small ones—have long argued that the requirements are cost-prohibitive. If they can prove economic hardship, they can be given a waiver.

The corn industry, on the other hand, argues that the federal government is in Big Oil’s pocket, and that it doesn’t take seriously enough the biofuel industry. The push-pull between the oil lobby and the corn lobby has created a massive political divide that is evident election after election.

In this election cycle, the blending waivers and blending credits have plagued President Donald Trump, who, like others before him, have been caught between angering the oil lobby or angering the corn lobby—with neither serving as an attractive option.

The disgruntled corn lobby, or biofuel industry, filed suit against the EPA this last January, challenging exemptions that were granted to specific refineries. The court ruled that the three waivers in question were granted unjustly. The problem, according to the court, was that those refineries were not granted waivers in the year prior, and that waiver requests could only be handed down as extensions of prior years.Related: Tropical Storm Sally Forces Drillers To Evacuate Gulf Of Mexico Oil Platforms

The floodgates opened with that ruling, and any refiner that thought they needed a waiver rushed to submit petitions retroactively for years as far back as 2011 to plug the gap, so to speak.

The EPA has finally decided on many of those retroactive petitions, and for refineries, it’s not good news.

Between March and now, 68 petitions from 17 small refineries were submitted for prior years. Of those, 54 have been squarely rejected, in a sign that President Donald Trump is once again assuming the oil industry vote is his no matter what.

Summary of Small Refinery Exemption Decisions Each Calendar Year (EPA.GOV)

Compliance Year	Number of Petitions Received	Number of Grants Issued	Number of Denials Issued	Number of Petitions Declared Ineligible	Number of Petitions Withdrawn	Number of Pending Petitions
2011	41	24	6	3	0	8
2012	40	23	6	3	0	8
2013	29	8	7	0	1	13
2014	27	8	5	0	0	14
2015	27	7	6	1	0	13
2016	29	19	1	0	0	9
2017	37	35	1	0	1	0
2018	44	31	6	2	3	2
2019	28	0	0	0	0	28
2020	3	0	0	0	0	3

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler did not comment on how those rejections would affect the 31 outstanding petitions for 2019 and 2020, according to Reuters.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

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The Secret To Survival For Canada’s Oil Sands

By Haley Zaremba - Sep 17, 2020, 11:00 AM CDT

Globally, there are a multitude of different answers (and even more non-answers) to the economic puzzle of how to account for and financially balance (aka pay for) negative environmental externalities. In Canada, the widely accepted answer to this issue is the polluter-pays principle, a core tenet so simple that a kindergartener could understand it, and indeed, could have written it.  Canada’s Globe and Mail explains it like this: “A central tenet of industrial development is the polluter-pays principle: Those who profit must pay for the mess generated by pulling resources from the ground or turning raw materials into goods. If you want to own the upside, you’ve got to own the downside.”

“The last thing Canadians should want are privatized profits, and socialized liabilities,” the Globe and Mail article asserts. Even in Canada, however, where the polluter pays principle is widely accepted and adopted, there were and are still many companies and projects that have managed to skirt the issue when it actually comes to payment. “There are many examples,” reports the Globe and Mail. “Take the Giant mine, near Yellowknife. It was one of Canada’s oldest gold mines, but after trading through various corporate hands numerous times, the last owner went bust and left behind 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide. Giant is part of a $2.2-billion taxpayer-funded cleanup of eight abandoned northern mines that will take 15 years.”

This conversation is particularly relevant now because the future of Canada’s oil sands depends on it. 

Due to the Albertan oil sands’ naturally occurring crude bitumen - a thick, viscous, and sticky kind of crude oil that is particularly dirty and environmentally unfriendly - the oil sands stand to face huge polluter pays payments if the industry continues to expand, or even just exist as it is now. Canada is at a crossroads - the country’s rhetoric leans heavily on environmental consciousness and combating climate change, but they are simultaneously one of the largest contributors to the fossil fuel industry. “If Alberta, with its population of four million people, were a country, it would be the fifth-largest oil-producing nation,” National Geographic reported last year. “While it produces conventional oil, most comes from the Alberta oil sands, the world’s third-largest proven oil reserve at 170 billion barrels.” The figures come from an article entitled “This is the world's most destructive oil operation—and it's growing.”

COVID-19, however, threw a major wrench in Alberta’s plans. The Canadian oil sector, which has already had a particularly rough few years thanks to a severe pipeline shortage and volatile oil prices, was hit especially hard by the pandemic-fuelled oil price crash, which sent a lot of investors fleeing the scene. And just last week, an investigation conducted by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) spurred by whistleblowers found “consistent evidence of seepage” from tailing ponds (which, according to National Geographic, contain “a toxic slurry of heavy metals and hydrocarbons from the bitumen separation process”) into the groundwater in Alberta. 

Much ink has been spilled about the Canadian oil sector’s future in the wake of the COVID-19 economic crash and the ever-lengthening list of environmental catastrophes associated with the oil sands. The latest is a cautiously optimistic opinion column published by the Globe and Mail this week that gives the oil sands a hopeful - if tempered - prognosis, under the headline “The oil sands have a future, and it includes polluter pays.”

In the column, the Globe and Mail’s editorial board posits that “while companies such as Suncor are losing money this year, they booked multibillion-dollar profits last year, even with relatively low oil prices. There’s no reason to assume the public must subsidize any future cleanup. The oil sands have been mined for more than half a century but only a fraction has been cleaned up.”

In short, the oil sands have been through hard times before, and there’s no reason to assume that they won’t bounce back from these setbacks just as easily. This time, however, polluter pays looks set to be an essential part of making the oil sands a sustainable part of the country’s economic future. “There is a lot of work left to do,” writes the Globe and Mail. “In the oil sands, Alberta and Canada have to make sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated.”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

U.S. wildfire smoke makes its way to Edmonton

A haze has settled in over Edmonton as smoke from wildfires in the U.S.
comes up to Canada. Sept. 16, 2020. (CTV News Edmonton)

Josh Classen CTV News Edmonton Wednesday, September 16, 2020 

EDMONTON -- A bit of a haze settled over the Edmonton region on Wednesday. The Air Quality Health Index was no higher than a two, which is in the Low Risk category. But, it was noticeable and may become thicker over the next few days.
The AQHI is forecast to be a three or four on Thursday. A four is at the low end of the Moderate Risk range and could pose some issues for people with compromised respiratory systems. CTV meteorologist Josh Classen says most people problem won’t have breathing problems on Thursday and it will likely skies will likely “look” a lot like Wednesday. But, Classen says upper wind could carry some thicker smoke towards Edmonton on Friday. “I think Friday’s probably the worst we’ll see. It won’t be anything like the pictures you’ve seen from the US and the Canadian west coast. But, most people will likely notice it the haze.” Conditions are expected to improve over the weekend as a northwesterly wind brings some clearing.

Ed

i

West Coast wildfire smoke is visible from outer space

The wildfires have created columns of smoke as tall as 14,000 miles.

María Paula Rubiano A.September 16, 2020

The photo was taken by NASA’s camera EPIC, which takes pictures of the planet every two hour from NOAA’s satellite DSCOVR. You can spot the plume of wildfire smoke off the west coast of the United States.NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin

Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area woke up to a saturated-orange sky. The smoke particles from the wildfires raging all over the West Coast since August blocked the blue light from the sun, creating the orange and red-tinted spectacle for our human eyes. But a day before hundreds shared apocalyptical-looking images on social media, a NOAA satellite had already captured the devastating scale of the wildfires.

The photo shows a large and dense mass of smoke all over the US' West Coast, all the way down from Oregon to Southern California. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera took the image on September 8th while orbiting the Earth on the DSCOVR satellite operated by NOAA. The ‘wall of smoke,’ as NASA called it, was so thick that the camera circling the Earth nearly a million miles away had no problem in documenting it.

Many factors are driving the violent expansion of this years' wildfires. High temperatures that climbed to three-digit numbers even overnight in July and August, the hottest summer ever recorded that left plenty of dry vegetation ready to burn, fire-suppression practices, and strong winds created the perfect conditions for the fires to spread. Human-induced fires account for the majority of the fires—95%. Still, a lightning storm of 11,000 lightning strikes struck the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-august and ignited over 367 new fires, says Cal Fire’s division chief Jeremy Rahn in a press release.

And despite the reluctance of President Donald Trump to say so, scientists and officials from Washington and California have stated that the fires are a result of the climate crisis. Lynne Tolmanchoff, from Cal Fire, told PBS that two decades ago, firefighters worked between mid-July to early October. Now, the season starts around May and routinely extends to November—sometimes even stretching to December.

The “wall of smoke” is slowly dispersing, recent images show, and it has now started to move over the rest of the country. But the fires are not slowing down. A week after the image was taken, things have only gone worse on the West Coast. This seasons' fires have consumed 4.6 million acres across ten states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). By September 14th, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco had the worst air quality in the world, according to the air quality tracking group IQAir (Portland, Vancouver and Seattle are currently still on top of the list.)

California is by far the most affected state. The wildfires have already burned 3.2 million acres and are still going strong with 28 active fires, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire. 25people have died, and 4,200 buildings have turned to ash. According to Cal Fire, we’re not even in peak fire season. The strong winds and low humidity will continue to feed the fires, particularly in the northeast part of the blaze.

The smoke was so thick and widespread that it was easily visible from 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from Earth. When NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) on NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite acquired the image below, large areas of Oregon, California, and the northeastern Pacific Ocean were obscured by smoke.NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin

In Oregon, ten percent of the state’s 4.2 million people have received orders to leave their homes. The towns of Detroit, Vida, Talent, Blue River, and Phoenix are “substantially destroyed,” said Kate Brown, Oregon’s governor. “It could be the greatest loss in human lives and property in our state’s history,” Brown said in a press conference.

Meanwhile, 15 fires have destroyed more than 681,000 acres in Washington. Last week, in just 24 hours, the fires burned 330,000 acres, which is more than all the area that typically burns between the Fall and Spring fire season, explained Gov. Jay Inslee. The fires destroyed 80% of the buildings of Madlen, and a small child died trying to escape the flames in Okanogan County. “This is an unprecedented and heartbreaking event,” Inslee said last week.

The official death toll for the entire fire is now 35 people, and the high-speed winds that are fueling the fires are expected to continue in the following days.

This scientist thought he’d found the source of all sexual energy

And other strange facts from The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

 

Reich's "orgone accumulator" got him into trouble with the FDA.Public Domain via FDA

FACT: Albert Einstein almost got conned into some serious sexual pseudoscience

By Hannah Seo

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich thought he had discovered the cosmic source of all sexual energy. This energy, “orgone,” was supposedly a life-force of sorts. What’s more, Reich believed that a looser view of sex would free society from the psychological hang-ups preventing people from reaching their orgastic potential.

He even started building and selling “orgone accumulators,” which he said could concentrate a person’s orgone energy when they sat inside them. Unfortunately for Reich, the psychoanalysis community shunned his outlandish claims, and scientists across Europe and America denounced his so-called science.

While Reich is pretty unknown today, at the time he was a huge figure, and his story intersects with a lot of notable figures: Sigmund Freud, J. Edgar Hoover, and even Albert Einstein. There’s also the Wilhelm Reich Museum, located at “Orgonon” in Rangeley, Maine, which was previously Reich’s estate—where he conducted questionable orgone research in the later years of his career. 

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!

https://www.popsci.com/story/science/weirdest-thing-orgone-energy-competitve-eating-beetle-frog-poop/

Meteorite study calls into doubt a popular theory about the early solar system

by University of Tokyo

Asteroid 4-Vesta is the second-largest body in the asteroid belt. Uranium-lead dating and other analytical methods tell researchers which meteorites come from Vesta and also when. Credit: NASA CC0

It is generally accepted that the inner region of the early solar system was subject to an intense period of meteoric bombardment referred to as the late heavy bombardment. However, researchers have found evidence that suggests this period occurred slightly earlier than thought and was less intense but also more prolonged. Such details about this period could impact theories about the early Earth and the dawn of life.

Around 4 billion years ago, the solar system was far less hospitable than we find it now. Many of the large bodies we know and love were present, but probably looked considerably different, especially the Earth. We know from a range of sources, including ancient meteorites and planetary geology, that around this time there were vastly more collisions between, and impacts from, asteroids originating in the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt.

Knowledge of these events is especially important to us, as the time period in question is not only when the surface of our planet was taking on a more recognizable form, but was also when life was just getting started. With more accurate details of Earth's rocky history, it could help researchers answer some long-standing questions concerning the mechanisms responsible for life, as well as provide information for other areas of life science.

"Meteorites provide us with the earliest history of ourselves," said Professor Yuji Sano from the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo. "This is what fascinated me about them. By studying properties, such as radioactive decay products, of meteorites that fell to Earth, we can deduce when they came and where they came from. For this study we examined meteorites that came from Vesta, the second-largest asteroid after the dwarf planet Ceres."

Most asteroid rocks have a complicated metamorphic history. Researchers view samples under powerful microscopes to study this history. Credit: Sano et al.

Sano and his team found evidence that Vesta was hit by multiple impacting bodies around 4.4 billion to 4.15 billion years ago. This is earlier than 3.9 billion years ago, which is when the late heavy bombardment (LHB) is thought to have occurred. Current evidence for the LHB comes from lunar rocks collected during the Apollo moon missions of the 1970s, as well as other sources. But these new studies are improving upon previous models and will pave the way for an up-to-date database of early solar impact records.

"That Vesta-origin meteorites clearly show us impacts earlier than the LHB raises the question, 'Did the late heavy bombardment truly occur?'" said Sano. "It seems to us that early solar system impacts peaked sooner than the LHB and reduced smoothly with time. It may not have been the cataclysmic period of chaos that current models describe."