EPA

Some leading university researchers "are being purged" from key EPA advisory panels under a rule announced by Administrator Scott Pruitt that bars membership by scientists at the same time they receive EPA grant money, says Science magazine. "It marks a major change in who can serve on the committees, which help steer EPA research and regulations by providing input on scientific questions."

State agriculture commissioner Doug Goehring announced “North Dakota-specific” rules on use of the weedkiller dicamba on GE soybeans in the new crop year. They include a ban on spraying when temperatures top 85 degrees and a total cutoff of dicamba use after June 30.

The EPA rejected a petition by oil refiners to relieve them of the responsibility for blending biofuels into gasoline and diesel fuel, "dealing a blow to billionaire investor Carl Icahn and oil companies that had sought the change," reports Bloomberg. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told farm-state lawmakers a few weeks ago that the agency was unlikely to change the "point of obligation," based on its preliminary analyses.

Climate change will come with a serious price tag, says a report by the Government Accountability Office, urging President Trump to take the phenomenon seriously. The study “says that different sectors of the economy and different parts of the country will be harmed in ways that are difficult to predict,” according to The New York Times.

A Trump administration appointee at EPA has taken an influential role in federal assessment of the risk posed by hazardous chemicals, "making it more aligned with the industry's wishes," reports the New York Times. The new approach includes the EPA decision in March to allow continued agriculture use of chlorpyrifos, an insecticide criticized as a risk to children and farmworkers.

The EPA will soon cut the wait time for permit requests to six months or less, in an effort to trim regulations generally for industry, says Reuters.

With growers reporting dicamba damage to 3.1 million acres of soybeans, the harvest-time question for farmers is how much their yields will suffer from the weedkiller. University of Tennessee weed specialist Larry Steckel says the earlier that soybeans were hit in their lifecycle, the less likely yields will be reduced.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt says the agency will no longer settle lawsuits with environmental groups behind closed doors, arguing that the Obama administration regularly excluded industry and state governments from those conversations while pandering to green activists.

Following an explosion of complaints about crop damage by the weedkiller dicamba, the EPA strengthened its rules for spraying the herbicide onto genetically modified cotton and soybeans. The new guidelines require special training of applicators before they can spray dicamba, limit the time of day when it can be used and bar spraying when winds exceed 10 miles an hour, a reduction from the 15 mph limit this year.

In a comprehensive look at the controversy over the weedkiller glyphosate, FERN in a story with The Nation magazine documents the steps Monsanto took in a concerted spin campaign with scientists and regulators to make sure the world’s most widely used herbicide remained free of any links to cancer. But author Rene Ebersole in the article, “Mass Exposure,” writes that the company's carefully constructed defense of the chemical is coming under increasing pressure, as its methods behind that defense are revealed.

Although EPA administrator Scott Pruitt favors elimination of tax credits for wind and solar power, he isn't calling the shots for the administration, said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the No. 2 state in wind-generated electricity. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin "will be in the room when these agreements are made," said Grassley, a member of the tax-writing Finance Committee, and Mnuchin backs an ongoing phase-down of wind and solar tax credits."

The EPA intends to repeal the Clean Power Plan — an Obama-era effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — according to a document circulated within the agency’s Regulatory Screening Agency.

For years, the EPA has reimbursed the Justice Department for prosecuting Superfund lawsuits “to force polluters to pay for cleaning up sites they left contaminated with hazardous waste,” says the New York Times. Now, with the Trump administration in charge, the EPA may end those payments, which, at about $20 million a year, amount to a quarter of the funding for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department.

A new regulation will restore so-called application exclusion zones intended to protect farmworkers and other people from exposure to pesticides as they are being applied, said the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday. The exclusion zones were created as part of a 2015 agricultural worker protection standard and were reduced in size in 2020 during the Trump era.