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Allen, Kara[Kara.Allen@mail.house.gov]
Allen, Kara
Thur 10/31/2013 2:47:12 PM
SEEC Daily Clips 10.31.13

Sustainable Energy & Environment

Coalition
3

Top news stories:

On the one-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, Democratic members of Congress call for action on
the carbon pollution which fueled its destructive power. SEEC Co Chair Rep. Paul Tonko led off a full
hour of calls for action from the members of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC).

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline project heckled President Obama during a healthcare speech
Wednesday in Boston, repeatedly chanting "reject the pipeline." The group of protesters were among a
crowd gathered in Boston's historic Faneuil Hall to hear the president mount a defense of the botched
rollout of Healthcare.gov insurance enrollment site. Obama shot back at the shouters.

As a job creator, the Obama administration's Cash for Clunkers program was a sputtering old jalopy that
deserves to stay in the scrap yard, according to a study released Wednesday.

Oil and natural gas lobbyists have spent more than a year urging lawmakers to maintain targeted tax
breaks for extracting and transporting their products, but there are signs of a growing fear within the
industry that impending legislation to overhaul the tax code for the first time in a generation would
eliminate most of those incentives in order to lower the top-line rate paid by all companies.

Nearly a third of the world's economic output will come from countries facing "high" to "extreme" risks
from the impacts of climate change within 12 years, according to a new report.

Energy news:

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U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Thursday that he expects deepening cooperation with Japan
over the high-stakes cleaning up and decommissioning of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

Solar industry manufacturers are rebounding from a two-year slump faster than technology companies
recovered from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

The United States is committed to working with China on the development of new nuclear reactors in
both countries and will also encourage joint bids for projects elsewhere, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest
Moniz said in Beijing on Wednesday.

Today, everything from bank receipts to the batting averages of baseball players can be coded into
megabytes and lines of data. Yet in the United States, the basic infrastructure that underpins these
systems - the grid that feeds them with electrons - remains largely untouched by the computerization
boom of the past half-century.

Regulating hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is often the domain of individual states, but on election
day on Nov. 5, voters in cities in Colorado and Ohio will determine whether cities in their states should
be able to regulate oil and gas development themselves.

Two of the Senate's leading advocates of curbing government support for corn ethanol plan to
introduce legislation to eliminate the federal requirement for corn ethanol. A spokesman for Oklahoma
Republican Tom Coburn confirmed that he and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein are collaborating
on a bill, which they may introduce in the coming weeks. The measure would maintain renewable fuel
standard mandates for advanced biofuels, he said.

Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as
900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.

The report got scant attention in the United States, but its findings could spell trouble for Canada as
government leaders lobby the Obama administration to approve the Keystone, intended to carry
growing supplies of tar sands crude to refineries in Texas.

A Koch Pipeline Co.-owned pipeline spilled around 400 barrels, or about 17,000 gallons, of crude oil in
Central Texas this week, KVUE reported.

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With its abundant dams and rivers that carry more fresh water than any other country, Brazil - big and
bountiful - essentially runs on hydropower. But it turns out that the country can also count on a good
strong breeze.

Climate news:

A federal proposal to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired power plants touched off an
avalanche of testimony at a Wednesday hearing in Denver. The day-long "listening session" by the
Environmental Protection Agency drew more than 300 people, according to agency officials.

FEMA, in fact, expects that the increase in flood risk areas and the number of people who live in them
will continue. And that's without factoring in computer model predictions about the rise of sea levels in
the future.

Much of the world's potential for further economic growth is in countries at "high" or "extreme" risk
from climate change. That's the conclusion of a new Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), which
looked at the impacts of climate change over the next three decades and across 193 countries.

California Governor Jerry Brown's signing of a climate deal with Oregon, Washington and British
Columbia in San Francisco on Monday drew dozens of protesters, claiming that his support of fracking
undermines the climate agreement's potential for progress.

No businesses in Europe relocated production to regions without greenhouse-gas emission curbs

between 2005 and 2012, according to a study for the European Commission on a process known as
carbon leakage.

California is known for its massive water infrastructure in which northern reservoirs, which fill up from
the Sierra Nevada snowpack, supply the populous southern and coastal regions of the state. However
going into a third year of dry winter conditions, many of these northern man-made oases are at
precariously low levels, hovering between one-third and one-half capacity, far less than the average for
October.

After the credit crisis and Great Recession, it seemed ridiculous to have thought that investing in
subprime mortgages was a good idea. As with most market "bubbles," the risk of giving 7.5 million
mortgages to people who couldn't possibly pay them off was somehow invisible to many investors at
the time.

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Environment & Health news:

Shell officials on Thursday said the oil company plans to make another, dramatically scaled-back bid to
find crude in Arctic waters, following a headline-grabbing 2012 season that left the firm with air
pollution fines and embarrassing equipment failures.

Japan's hunts of smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises threaten some species with extinction, an
environmental group said Thursday. Catch quotas are based on data collected as much as 20 years ago
and some species have been overhunted beyond the point of recovery, the Environmental Investigation
Agency said in its report.

Several months ago, scientists warned that tiny microbeads, a common ingredient in facial cleansers,
were flowing into the Great Lakes, with no way to remove the potentially harmful plastic. Now, a new
study provides evidence of the microplastics in the world's largest surface freshwater source -- and gives
scientists a fighting chance to get micro beads out of consumer products.

ClearSign Combustion says it has successfully demonstrated an 80 percent to 90 percent reduction in

NOx emissions by retrofitting a conventional off-the-shelf commercial burner in a system designed to
closely resemble a standard commercial firetube boiler.

Clean water topped women's rights and education when Europe's second-biggest clothing retailer
Hennes & Mauritz AB invited people in an online ballot to vote on what issues need the most support
going forward.

Industry recycling of aluminum beverage containers in the US continued its decade-long upward trend in
2012 with a rate of 67 percent, according to data released by the Aluminum Association, Can
Manufacturers Institute (CMI) and Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI).

It has now been seven months since about 5,000 barrels of oil began flowing through a Mayflower
neighborhood after the Pegasus Pipeline ruptured. Now, a new product claims to rid the water and soil
of its toxic chemicals. Even Mayor Randy Holland is backing the claim.

Chances are, you've eaten a Gorton's fish stick at some point in your life. And now, thanks to a
partnership with the New England Aquarium, the chance that the fish in that stick was sustainably
farmed is much higher.

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Faced with complaints about black clouds of dust swirling into two Chicago neighborhoods, state
environmental regulators are cracking down on one of the companies piling up huge mounds of refinery
waste on the Southeast Side.

The largest coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh will soon be built on the outskirts of the world's largest
mangrove forest, a plan that has environmentalists and others in the country gravely worried.

The paper reports that Tommy Beaudreau, the acting assistant secretary of Land and Minerals
Management and director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is poised to take over Interior's
budget and policy office.

The House Republicans' 16-day government shutdown cost the economy $24 billion, shaved .25 percent
from fourth-quarter economic growth, and damaged the reputation of the United States.

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