The hopeful word is circulating that the NC legislature may go home soon. Will it be soon enough for our environment? This week in CIB:
Legislative Watch: Legislative Endgame
A dirty little open secret of most legislatures is that lawmaking tends to get most frantic, least well-reviewed, and often most irresponsible as sessions near their end. With majority leadership having struck a deal on taxes, we appear to be nearing that point of this General Assembly. Rumor has it that Thursday July 25 is the target escape date now. As that still-uncertain final day approaches, however, many of the dark anti-environmental proposals raised during this long year are being crammed into one bill package or another.
Ideally, legislators at this stage would instead slow down and think. Do they really want to check off on a last-moment catch-all bill with sweeping consequences they don’t fully understand? Do they want to risk the EPA taking over the state’s water quality program and imposing stricter and costlier rules on water supply protection? Are more big rock walls in the surfline (“terminal groins”) a benefit or a serious threat to more coastal property owners?
At this stage of the session, important details are subject to such rapid reversals and shifts that we will not attempt to pinpoint bill numbers and projected timing. With the caveat that any point of analysis offered here could be changed in hours, there are some tentative observations worth suggesting.
First, some bad changes are being made–and many could have been worse. Key wetlands protections aren’t repealed outright, but the Environmental Management Commission is instructed to review them from scratch within the next year, putting a critical working conservation program at immediate risk. The cap has not been lifted on the number of “terminal groins” that can be allowed, but financial protections for injured public resources and private property are being weakened. Local governments have not been barred wholesale from protecting their water and land resources, but state rules are being put on a quick-step process to review and likely repeal.
The good news is that even in a session this troubling, environmental advocacy both inside and outside the legislative buildings appears to be having some effect. Conservationists should feel encouraged to keep up their contacts to legislators.
At this point, it seems that possible wins may include important details regarding fracking: The Mining and Energy Commission has not been pre-empted from dealing with trade secrets, there is no authorization for underground injection of fracking wastes, and the moratorium on issuing fracking permits until rules have been finalized and approved by the legislature has not been lifted. On clean energy, the REPS (renewable energy portfolio standard) has not been repealed, and energy development tax credits were not eliminated in the tax bill under consideration now.
But there’s an old cliche about the General Assembly which can be modified to fit this situation: No one’s clean air or water is safe while this legislature is still in session. We won’t know whether bad will turn to worse, or whether some defenses will have held, until the gavels fall.
Conservationists encourage legislators to wrap up the budget, take a deep breath, and head home to ask their constituents whether they really want a broad rollback of protections for clean water and air.
Washington Watch: Senate Confirms McCarthy for EPA
After the longest wait in history for a U.S. Senate vote on a nominee for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy was confirmed last week by a 59 to 40 margin. It was clear that anti-environmental forces’ distress with the Obama climate change agenda was a large part of the reason for the long delay in McCarthy’s confirmation vote.
Conservation advocates nationally celebrated the confirmation of an experienced environmental manager with a deep technical knowledge base and a clear mandate to implement the Obama climate change action plan. McCarthy has spent a quarter-century in several challenging environmental posts at the state and federal levels, including the past four years as head of EPA’s air pollution control programs.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) president Frances Beinecke called McCarthy “one of the most qualified, capable and collaborative leaders” to head the EPA. Beinecke observed that McCarthy will be responsible now for “standing up to naysayers who may try to block President Obama’s climate plan and the special interests opposed to life-saving carbon pollution limits for the nation’s power plants.”
To get a vote on McCarthy and several other stalled Obama appointments, Senate Democratic leaders had to threaten to change the Senate rules to weaken filibusters. In the face of this so-called “nuclear option” threat, Republican leaders negotiated to permit the votes. Under the arcane U.S. Senate rules, a minority of that body (sometimes just a single member) can stall critical votes, often indefinitely.
More details can be found here on Politico and here in the Huffington Post.
Education & Resources: Energy and Water
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) is holding a webinar on the interaction between energy production and water resources, titled “Water-Smart Power: Strengthening the U.S. Electricity System in a Warming World.” It will be held Tuesday, July 30, starting at 1 p.m. For more information and to register, see here.
That’s our report for this week.
