Environmental Groups Join DL and NJ Opposing Army Corps Dredging

On October 30th, as described in this earlier post, Delaware filed a suit to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from dredging the Delaware River for a new shipping channel. New Jersey joined the suit a few days later.

Yesterday, a coalition of environmental groups intervened in the suit, adding their own claims against the project, including alleged violations the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, and Delaware State law. The groups include Delaware Riverkeeper Network, National Wildlife Federation, New Jersey Environmental Federation, Clean Water Action, and the Delaware Nature Society. You can read the groups' press release here, and an article from the Press of Atlantic City here. A hearing on a preliminary injunction is scheduled for December 8th.

Settlement in Gray Wolf Case

Defenders of Wildlife announced Friday that a coalition of environmental groups had reached a settlement with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in their effort to ensure protection for the endangered mexican gray wolf. These groups, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, included Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, New Mexico Audubon Council, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, University of New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, The Wildlands Network, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Wildlands Council.

Mexican gray wolf populations began to drop in the early 1900s due to ranching and development in the Southwest, and entirely disappeared from the wild by the 1970s. After being listed under the ESA in 1976, it was bred in captivity and finally reintroduced in 1998. (You can see a FWS chronology of the wolf's ESA recovery program and its milestones here.)

Just a few years later, in 2003, the Bush Administration handed control of managing mexican gray wolf populations in Arizona and New Mexico to the federal and state "Adaptive Management Oversight Committee," which was led by an official from Arizona Game and Fish. The Committee applied a set of "standard operating procedures, which included the rancher-friendly "Standard Operating Procedure 13" that required it to permanently remove a wolf from the wild (by killing or capturing it) if it killed three livestock in one year. According to Defenders' press release, this was done without regard to "an individual wolf’s genetic importance, dependent pups or the critically low numbers of wolves in the wild." According to this AP story on the case, there are only 50 Mexican gray wolves in the wild now, which is about half as many as the Recovery Plan envisioned by this time.

Defenders et al sued to stop SOP 13 in federal district court in Arizona in May 2008. Last week's settlement, which gets rid of SOP 13, settles the suit. FWS will also reassert control over the Committee under the settlement, as you can read in the press release and in the Arizona Daily Star, here. Arizona wildlife officials responded that the environmentalists are exaggerating--that they never controlled the committee, anyway. At the same time, the Arizona officials intimated that they would be working to make sure that the interests of ranchers continued to be represented in future Committee actions.

Does Kerry-Boxer Improve on Waxman-Markey?

Plus, NGO reactions to the bill and hearings

The Chairman's Mark of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill is huge--923 pages. But the good news for those following the debate is that almost all of the material is derived from the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House last June, with a few changes. The most important differences between the Senate bill and Waxman-Markey are that the Senate bill:

• improves on the GHG emissions reduction goal, from 17% by 2020 to 20% by 2020
• places more emphasis on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which is needed to attract support from coal states.
• specifically allocates allowances to transportation-sector improvements that will reduce GHG emissions.
• increases allowance allocations to utility-scale renewable energy projects
• specifically allocates allowances to energy efficiency programs, including a requirement that allowances going to the states be dedicated to the Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance (REEP) program implemented by State Energy Offices.
• sets floors and ceilings on the price of emissions permits.

Reactions are beginning to come in from the NGO community. Francis Beinecke, president of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), posted her reaction on the NRDC website today, saying she was encouraged by the draft, but that she would still like to see the bioenergy loophole (which treats all use of biomass for fuel as carbon neutral, whether mature trees or crop waste) closed, and would like to see strengthened energy efficiency provisions. (Recall, the original version of Waxman-Markey contained a separate energy efficiency resource standard (EERS) alongside the renewable energy portfolio standard (REPS). Once Dingell (D, MI) and Boucher (D, VA) were done with it, the EERS was folded into the REPS, and made no separate requirements.) Her comments can be viewed here.

[Update: Defenders of Wildlife is choosing to wear rose-colored glasses, announcing that "Sens. Bingaman, Baucus, Whitehouse and Udall champion legislation," here. And EarthJustice makes a statement here.]

The Breakthrough Institute, which put together a spreadsheet of how allowances are distributed in both Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey over the weekend, is unhappy that: "[l]ike its House sibling, the . . . Kerry-Boxer climate bill allocates the vast majority (64%) of the tens of billions annually in emissions allowances created by the bill's cap and trade program to shield energy consumers and industry from the impacts of carbon prices. Just 13% of the value of allowances . . . are invested in clean energy technologies." (The spreadsheet can be downloaded here, and a pie chart of the allowances here.)

ACEEE issued a report, timed to coincide with the start of committee hearings, urging that the place of energy efficiency be elevated in any bill to come out of the Senate.

Unfortunately, its not clear when any such amendments can be made. The bill will move quickly through EPW: Senator Boxer said this morning that she wants the bill to be out of the Environment and Public Works Committee by November 3. If Waxman-Markey is instructive, the bill will get watered down, not strengthened, as it goes through other committees in the Senate (although I would love to be corrected on this). And Senator Inhofe was intoning darkly this morning about what will happen when the bill gets to the floor.