|
| | | | |  | | By Debra Kahn | | | | | 
There's new momentum for a national bottle bill. | Getty Images | PLASTICS POTENTIAL — We've pointed out before that plastic waste (some aspects of it, at least) is an area of environmental policy that could move forward in a split Congress. Thursday's Senate hearing on plastics lent more credence to that theory — specifically the prospects for a national fee on beverage containers to fund their collection and recycling. The Plastics Industry Association said it would support a national program, in theory, with caveats. "There's no doubt that bottle bills work, bottle deposits work," the group's CEO, Matt Seaholm, told the Environment and Public Works subcommittee that oversees waste management. "Would the industry support a bottle bill crafted correctly? I think it would certainly be open to that on a national scale. Again, crafted correctly." Subcommittee chair Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has introduced a national bottle bill before and is working on another, seemed pleased, if wary. "If 'crafted correctly' means we recycle a high amount, certainly my door is open and we'd like to work with you all," he said. Former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck , now president of environmental group Beyond Plastics, called Seaholm's statement "breaking news." The recycling rate for conventional plastic beverage bottles in the 10 states that have bottle bills is 63 percent, she said, compared to 17 percent in non-regulated states. "Having the plastics industry support a national bottle bill and getting the details right would be really helpful," Enck said. That's two key industries expressing interest in the issue, for those keeping count at home. The Can Manufacturers Institute and the Aluminum Association put out a set of principles for a bottle bill in September, alongside environmental groups.
| | | AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH — Another area of bipartisan cooperation: supply chains for critical minerals. Molycorp Minerals LLC's Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave Desert is the U.S.'s best hope of breaking China's hold on critical rare earth elements used in advanced commercial and military technology. The Defense Department's years-long concern about rare earths has dovetailed with the Trump administration's confrontational approach to Beijing, and now the Biden administration's focus on green technology. On Capitol Hill, the effort to strengthen the U.S. supply chain now has bipartisan backing, said Halimah Najieb-Locke , the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for industrial base resilience. “Supply chain risk is something that’s been talked about for years, but it became acute in the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine just compounded it,” she said. Read more from POLITICO's Lara Seligman.
| | | JERSEY SHORE — New Jersey is poised to pass cutting-edge housing regulations aimed at preparing for increasingly worse floods due to climate change, Thomas Frank reports for POLITICO's E&E News. The state Department of Environmental Protection plans to use rainfall projections through 2100 to redraw — and vastly expand — inland flood zones that are subject to development restrictions. They're the first rules in the country to use climate modeling to actually direct development patterns, regulators said. “The significance here is phenomenal,” said Jennifer Coffey , executive director of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions. But developers and housing advocates warn the proposal will increase already-high housing costs. THAT'S ANOTHER WAY OF DOING IT — Florida, in another nationwide first, is forcing homeowners to buy flood insurance even if they're not in high-risk areas, Thomas reports. State lawmakers included the requirement this week in a sweeping insurance-reform bill aimed at shoring up Florida's crumbling market. Dozens of local insurers have gone bankrupt this year or ceased covering property damage amid mounting losses, driving hundreds of thousands of property owners to the state-run insurer of last resort. The point of the bill is not only to make sure people have coverage, but to get them off of the state-run plan and back into the regular market. It also includes provisions long sought by the insurance industry to reduce losses, including one aimed at discouraging policyholders from filing lawsuits to challenge settlement offers they find inadequate. It passed Florida's Republican-led legislature largely along party lines and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) quickly signed it Friday morning. “It’s probably a good idea to mandate people to have flood insurance,” said Paul Handerhan, president of the Florida-based Federal Association for Insurance Reform, a consumer advocacy nonprofit. “It seems like that’s the only mechanism that really drives adoption.” | | | | 
Veteran climate and energy aide Melanie Nakagawa is heading west. | Courtesy Microsoft | NAKAGAWA TO MICROSOFT — Former White House climate aide Melanie Nakagawa is Microsoft Corp.'s new chief sustainability officer, Microsoft announced Thursday. She'll report to company president Brad Smith and will be based in Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. Nakagawa left the White House in August after having served as the National Security Council's senior director for climate and energy since the start of the Biden administration. She previously had stints at the State Department, where she worked with Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and Secretary of State Tony Blinken. Nakagawa said she'd be working on helping Microsoft meet its carbon-, water- and waste-reduction goals and on its climate initiatives with government, NGOs and other companies, including data, AI and carbon removal. She told Long Game she didn't think companies would ease off their sustainability work during an economic slump, citing the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act and the war in Ukraine's "rewiring of Europe towards the clean energy transition." "I think this is a time when you're actually seeing a doubling down by countries and businesses into efficiency, into energy savings, things that are economically beneficial both to companies but also to the planet through smarter energy choices," she said.
| | | TGIF! Hope everyone is staying Covid-free this holiday party season. Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn, and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us at gmott@politico.com, dkahn@politico.com,jwolman@politico.com and aprang@politico.com. Want more? You can have it. Sign up for the Long Game. Four days a week and still free. That’s sustainability!
| | | — Coal use is set to reach an all-time high this year on the back of Russia's war but also demand from emerging economies, the IEA says. — Amazon's plastic use is soaring — from 599 million pounds in 2020 to 709 million this year, according to Oceana.
| | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |  |
|
