******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, March 27, 2019
Interior Nominee Intervened to Block Report on Endangered Species
By Eric Lipton
WASHINGTON — After years of effort, scientists at the Fish and Wildlife
Service had a moment of celebration as they wrapped up a comprehensive
analysis of the threat that three widely used pesticides present to
hundreds of endangered species, like the kit fox and the seaside sparrow.
“Woohoo!” Patrice Ashfield, then a branch chief at Fish and Wildlife
Service headquarters, wrote to her colleagues in August 2017.
Their analysis found that two of the pesticides, malathion and
chlorpyrifos, were so toxic that they “jeopardize the continued
existence” of more than 1,200 endangered birds, fish and other animals
and plants, a conclusion that could lead to tighter restrictions on use
of the chemicals.
But just before the team planned to make its findings public in November
2017, something unexpected happened: Top political appointees of the
Interior Department, which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service,
blocked the release and set in motion a new process intended to apply a
much narrower standard to determine the risks from the pesticides.
Leading that intervention was David Bernhardt, then the deputy secretary
of the interior and a former lobbyist and oil-industry lawyer. In
October 2017, he abruptly summoned staff members to the first of a rapid
series of meetings in which the Fish and Wildlife Service was directed
to take the new approach, one that pesticide makers and users had
lobbied intensively to promote.
Mr. Bernhardt is now President Trump’s nominee to become interior
secretary. The Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing on his confirmation
Thursday.
This sequence of events is detailed in more than 84,000 pages of
Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency documents
obtained via Freedom of Information requests by The New York Times and,
separately, by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental
group that sued the federal government to force it to complete the
pesticide studies.
The documents provide a case study of how the Trump administration has
been using its power to second-guess or push aside conclusions reached
by career professionals, particularly in the area of public health and
the environment.
The decision to block the release of the report represented a victory
for the pesticide industry, which has industry allies and former
executives sprinkled through the administration. Among those with the
most at stake were Dow AgroSciences, a manufacturer of chlorpyrifos,
which is used on dozens of fruits and vegetables, and FMC Corporation, a
manufacturer of malathion, which is used against mosquitoes as well as
chewing and sucking insects that attack a range of crops including
tomatoes, strawberries and walnuts.
Dow, which was recently renamed Corteva, donated $1 million to Mr.
Trump’s inauguration committee. E.P.A. and Interior Department records
show that top pesticide industry executives had regular access to senior
agency officials, pressing them to reconsider the way the federal
government evaluates the threat pesticides cause to endangered species.
A Dow spokesman said the shift in policy was unrelated to the $1 million
contribution. The new approach will result in “a better understanding of
where and how pesticides are being used,” said Gregg M. Schmidt, a
Corteva spokesman.
Spokesmen for FMC and Adama — the other primary makers of the pesticides
being studied — as well as their lawyers and CropLife America, the trade
group that represents them, declined to comment.
Asked if Mr. Bernhardt’s intervention was appropriate or motivated by a
desire to serve the industry’s interests, an Interior Department
spokeswoman said his actions had been “governed solely by legitimate
concerns regarding the legal sufficiency and policy.”
Before he joined the Trump administration, Mr. Bernhardt worked as a
lawyer and lobbyist representing clients including the oil and gas
industry. He was frequently paid to challenge endangered species-related
matters, including one involving a tiny silvery blue fish called the
delta smelt whose protection by the federal government has resulted in
limits on water use by California farmers.
Agency records suggest Mr. Bernhardt, after having had only limited
involvement in the issue, had nine meetings or calls on his schedule
with Fish and Wildlife staff in October and November 2017, and helped
write the letter saying the Interior Department was no longer prepared
to release the draft.
Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, the E.P.A. official at the time who ran the
office in charge of toxic chemicals and pesticides, said the sudden
change in regulatory philosophy was part of a broader trend across the
government after Mr. Trump’s election.
“It is certainly similar to the pattern we saw in toxic chemicals as
well, where the regulated industry had a more sympathetic ear in the new
administration,” said Ms. Hamnett, who left the E.P.A. in late 2017,
after a 38-year career with the agency. “And that resulted in a shift in
approach as to how these issues would be handled.”
Gary Frazer, the top endangered species official at the Fish and
Wildlife Service, whose schedule says he participated in all nine of the
late 2017 discussions with Mr. Bernhardt, and who subsequently directed
his staff to revise the study, said he did not believe the change in
direction was politically driven.
“It was an entirely appropriate role,” he said in an interview, as two
of the agency’s public affairs officials listened in. “There was no
arm-twisting of any kind.”
The endangered species review is required as part of the re-registration
of pesticides, a process that occurs every 15 years.
Experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s
National Marine Fisheries Service were supposed to determine if any of
the pesticides might “jeopardize the continued existence of any
endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or
adverse modification of habitat of such species,” a standard created
under federal law.
Much of the work focuses on questions like whether a wildfire management
program in the Florida Everglades hurt endangered species such as the
American crocodile or the West Indian manatee. The Fish and Wildlife
Service rarely makes so-called jeopardy findings; a 2015 study of nearly
7,000 cases found that only two concluded with a finding that a species
was in jeopardy.
The pesticide industry, as well as groups representing farmers who rely
on its products, began to mobilize as the endangered species review got
underway during the Obama administration.
With Mr. Trump’s election, the industry escalated its campaign. In April
2017, its lawyers sent a letter to Ryan Zinke, then the interior
secretary; Scott Pruitt, then the E.P.A.’s administrator; and the
commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, asking them to “direct that any effort
to prepare biological opinions,” as the process is called, “be set
aside,” arguing that the analysis was “fundamentally flawed.”
The industry’s central argument was that the federal scientists were not
sufficiently taking into account the difference between how the
pesticides could legally be used and how they were actually used.
Staff members at the Fish and Wildlife Service, emails show, did have
access to actual pesticide usage, as well as other information, such as
measurements of pesticide concentrations found in salmon-bearing streams
in Washington State.
But the agency staff — working from dozens of field offices like Hawaii
and Maine as well as the headquarters — generally built its predictions
of a “jeopardy” threat to endangered species by assuming the pesticides
were being used to the maximum extent possible as allowed by their labels.
That is because “unlike most other types of product labels, pesticide
labels are legally enforceable,” according to E.P.A. policy. And
historic usage data, the agency staff said in its documents, is not
sufficient to predict how these pesticides might be used — and cause
harm — in the coming 15 years.
The pesticides, particularly chlorpyrifos and malathion, are “high
toxicity” for all animals, and their effect on endangered species would
be both direct and indirect, via contamination of food sources, for
example, the staff concluded. The E.P.A. has separately considered
banning chlorpyrifos because of potential harm to humans.
The Fish and Wildlife staff cited the San Joaquin kit fox, a tiny animal
that weighs about five pounds, with a slim body, large ears and a long,
bushy tail. Decades ago, it inhabited large parts of California’s San
Joaquin Valley, an area today of intensive farming and pesticide use.
But most of those fox populations are now gone, in part because
pesticides like diazinon contaminated birds and grasses the foxes fed
on, the agency concluded.
The Cape Sable seaside sparrow, another endangered species located
mostly now in Florida, was found to be in jeopardy as a result of
drifting sprays of chlorpyrifos. “For many vulnerable species, a single
exposure could be catastrophic,” an October 2017 summary of the staff’s
findings said.
Agency records show repeated contacts in early 2017 by the pesticide
industry with administration officials. Among those targeted, the emails
show, was Daniel Jorjani, a top Interior Department lawyer who had spent
six years working for groups connected to the billionaire brothers
Charles G. and David H. Koch.
Aaron Hobbs, a onetime lobbyist for CropLife, the leading pesticide
industry trade association, who now works for an affiliate of the
industry-funded group, reached out to Mr. Jorjani and invited him to an
April 2017 meeting with industry officials to discuss the endangered
species effort — shortly after sending the letter asking the agency to
kill the Fish and Wildlife Service’s work. He followed up again in July
in an attempt to set up another meeting.
Top officials from the E.P.A. and Interior and Agriculture Departments
began a series of meetings in June 2017, often involving representatives
from the White House.
Among the other participants in these meetings, the records show, was
Rebeckah Adcock, who until April 2017 had been a director of government
affairs and registered lobbyist for CropLife and who now works as a
senior adviser at the Agriculture Department.
Ms. Adcock joined the discussions even though the ethics agreement she
signed said she would not participate “personally and substantially in
any particular matter” involving CropLife for one year. An Agriculture
Department spokesman said this did not violate that ban because she had
not specifically lobbied on endangered species matters for CropLife.
Even as these meetings were taking place, staff members inside the Fish
and Wildlife Service were wrapping up the enormous task of assessing the
threat presented by these pesticides, email records show.
The team had concluded that chlorpyrifos put 1,399 species — a mixture
of animals and plants — in jeopardy, while malathion put 1,284 of them
in jeopardy and diazinon, a third pesticide that was evaluated, placed
175 species in jeopardy. There are 1,663 species listed as endangered or
threatened in the United States, meaning that two of the pesticides may
be putting most of them in jeopardy. (This information, agency officials
said, was accidentally released in a Freedom of Information response
obtained by The Times. They intended to keep this tally a secret,
because the assessment was not final.)
The agency staff was not recommending that the pesticides be banned.
Instead, they were proposing changes in how the pesticides could be
used, including possible restrictions on their use in areas where
endangered species are found, or at certain times of year, the documents
say.
Lawyers who work for the interior secretary’s office wanted a very
different approach. They advocated abandoning the presumption that use
of a pesticide by a farmer or a golf course might directly cause the
death of or harm to an endangered species, officials said.
Their argument was that because farmers, for example, do not manufacture
the pesticide, their use of it means that any harm caused is an indirect
effect, as defined under federal law. There is a much higher standard of
proof needed to demonstrate that an indirect effect has harmed an
endangered species. The law requires that this harm be shown to be
“reasonably certain to occur.” The revised approach is almost certainly
going to result in fewer plants and animals being judged to be in
jeopardy of extinction as a result of continued pesticide use.
The shift in approach goes far beyond a single Fish and Wildlife Service
analysis. In early 2018, Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Zinke and Mr. Ross agreed to
work toward a new framework for all endangered species evaluations, a
move that CropLife called “a positive step towards solving this
important and complex issue.”
Documents show that the administration does not now expect to make
public any draft results of the revised assessment until April 2020, two
and a half years later than had been planned.
On Tuesday, after this article was published online, three House
Democrats, including Representative Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona, the
chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, sent a letter to
Mr. Bernhardt asking him to release the draft reports immediately.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
