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TRUMP DECLARES EMERGENCY IN FLOOD-RAVAGED SOUTH CAROLINA: President Trump issued a disaster declaration for the state of South Carolina on Sunday, ordering federal aid to be directed to the state for recovery efforts in areas that were hit by Hurricane Florence.

News of the declaration came on Monday morning, days after the president issued a separate declaration for North Carolina. The order frees up federal funding to be distributed to state and local governments, as well as some private nonprofit organizations, for emergency protective measures.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long named Elizabeth Turner as federal coordinating officer for recovery operations in areas affected by the storm, which was previously a category four hurricane and was demoted over the weekend to a tropical storm.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen will travel to Raleigh and Kinston, later on Monday, according to a official notice from the agency. Nielsen will meet with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to discuss ongoing response and recovery efforts and tour impacted areas.

MEANWHILE…TRUMP MAKES PLANS TO VISIT CAROLINAS SOON: Trump is planning to visit the hurricane impact zone this week in the Carolinas after Florence made landfall along the coast of North Carolina on Friday.

Waiting for the right time: White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the president will visit the affected areas “once it is determined his travel will not disrupt any rescue or recovery efforts.”

Trump has been monitoring the storm closely and working with state and local officials to encourage residents under mandatory evacuation to follow the advisories and leave their homes.

More than one million people in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had been ordered to evacuate due to concerns about flooding and limited rescue operations. At least 17 deaths have been attributed to Florence.

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POWER COMING BACK FOR RESIDENTS OF CAROLINAS: Utilities are making progress restoring power after Hurricane Florence, which has been downgraded to a tropical depression..

Duke Energy said late Sunday that it restored power to more than 1 million customers in North and South Carolina. About 400,000 of Duke’s customers remain without electricity.

“Crews continue to restore power along main roads and to gas stations, hotels, & grocery stores,” Duke Energy tweeted Monday. “Now that torrential rains and high winds have ceased, crews can repair transmission lines and restore power to essential services like airports.”

But work remains: However, the giant utility expects additional outages over the coming days, and warns some of the most challenging restoration efforts remain in inaccessible coastal areas.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina Emergency Management Division said early Monday that there are less than 20,000 power outages statewide. The storm had left about 170,000 homes and businesses in South Carolina without power.

MORE THREATS FROM FLORENCE…LEAKING COAL ASH AND SUPERFUND CONCERNS: Other threats from the storm remain, with Duke Energy reporting a spill of coal ash after heavy rain wiped out a portion of a landfill used to store the toxic material.

Coal ash is the waste left over from burning coal for electricity production. The waste is typically stored in large containment ponds. Reggie Cheatham, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Emergency Management, said 2,000 cubic yards of coal ash leaked from a storage pond at a closed Duke Energy plant in Wilmington, N.C.

The potential concern: An undetermined amount of the leaked material entered the nearby Lake Sutton, which feeds into the Cape Fear River.

Duke Energy, in a statement Saturday, said it “does not believe this incident poses a risk to public health or the environment.”

Other threats: The EPA said this weekend it is monitoring 41 hazardous Superfund sites that could be affected by Florence, the Associated Press reported.

Some of the country’s most polluted places, including industrial sites, chemical plans, shipyards, and military bases, are located in the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland and Georgia.

TOP OIL INDUSTRY EXECUTIVE AND TRUMP DONOR PREDICTS HURRICANE FLORENCE WON’T AFFECT FUEL PRICES: Florence won’t cause the jumps in fuel prices experienced last year after Hurricane Harvey ravaged the nation’s oil patch on the Gulf Coast.

At least, that’s how Dan Eberhart sees it. Eberhart is CEO of the oil services firm Canary and an ardent Republican donor and supporter of the president.

No direct effect on nation’s oil complex: “I lived through Hurricane Katrina, actually, so this stuff is kind of near and dear to my heart,” Eberhart told the Washington Examiner in between visits with Trump Cabinet members. “But I think it’s going to have less of an impact to the oil and gas industry than Harvey did, simply because the refinery complex is right there on the Gulf Coast.”

A ‘tragic situation’: Eberhart said the storm’s impact on the region is going to be “a tragic situation for a lot of folks, but I think the refinery complex won’t be negatively impacted. So, I don’t expect prices to rise overnight.”

No price spikes as of Monday: Monday morning showed Florence had a minimal effect, if any, on gasoline prices in parts of the Southeast, such as Florida.

The two main pipelines that move refined fuel from the Gulf Coast, through the Southeast, and as far north as New York, were unaffected by the storm, according to pipeline operators.

MASSACHUSETTS GAS EXPLOSIONS CAUSED BY OVERPRESSURED PIPES: Authorities say natural explosions in Massachusetts last week were caused by too much natural gas being pumped into a pipe owned by Columbia Gas.

The overpressure forced the gas to leak until homes.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a news briefing Sunday that the agency “can confirm at this time that this was indeed an overpressure situation,’ the Wall Street Journal reported.

Investigations are coming: “The real question for this investigation is to answer why this occurred,” he added.

The board aims to complete a final report on the incident that could take a 12 to 24 months.

Senators want a hearing: The state’s two Democratic senators, however, do not want to wait. Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren requested a hearing on the oversight and regulation of the nation’s gas distribution system. The senators wrote Friday to the leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee asking for a hearing with federal regulators and the gas distribution company, Columbia Gas.

Sumwalt said Columbia Gas had been in the process of replacing old cast iron pipes with new ones, and it’s unclear if that contributed to the explosions. Columbia Gas said Sunday that it’s “committed to completely replace the natural gas distribution system” in the region, which serves 8,600 customers.

More fallout: There was some good news on Sunday, after Massachusetts officials allowed residents of three communities affected by the gas explosions to return to their homes.

The gas-linked explosions completely destroyed dozens of homes in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover. Twenty-five people were injured in the explosions, and 18-year-old Leonel Rondon was killed.

LEADING CONSUMER GROUP PRODS FERC TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT SECRECY IN NEW ENGLAND: “For too long, decisions about keeping the lights on for New England have been made in the dark,” said Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, after filing a petition with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday.

FERC must ‘require’ openness: The petition asks the nation’s grid regulator to require the association of New England power companies that plan the region’s energy policy to open up their meetings to the public and press. Slocum called New England “an outlier” in keeping planning meetings closed to the public and the press.

The group in question: Slocum is referring to the New England Power Pool, representing all six New England states, that develops energy policy for the region.

US IRAN SANCTIONS RAISE SUPPLY CONCERNS, BUT TRUMP NOT BACKING DOWN: The Trump administration is not backing down from its promise to sanction countries that buy any amount of oil from Iran beginning in November, despite concerns about higher prices.

“Come November 4th, there will be a different set of rules for anyone who wants to engage in economic activity with the regime in #Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a Twitter post Sunday. “Many countries are already taking actions to leave Iran.”

The administration is set to penalize countries who buy Iranian oil by blocking access to the U.S. market and U.S. financial institutions starting Nov. 4.

Prospect of sanctions causes price impact: Iran’s oil exports have been falling in recent months as major buyers such as South Korea and India have reduced their purchases ahead of U.S. sanctions. Brent crude oil prices, the world benchmark, is approaching $80 per barrel on expectations of supply shortages from Iran, which is OPEC’s third largest producer.

Other major oil producing countries are starting to criticize the U.S. for its zero-tolerance policy.

Russian energy minister Alexander Novak this weekend said U.S. sanctions are “unproductive” and “wrong,” in an interview broadcast on CNBC.

“It is better to continue working in the market, Iran being just another exporter that provides stable supplies to the market,” Novak said.

But Russia has cooperated with U.S.-pushed plan: Russia has agreed to cooperate with OPEC on a deal reached this summer, at the prodding of President Trump, to boost production by 1 million barrels per month to respond to supply concerns, overturning a prior production cut agreement, to make up for lost Iranian oil.

The Iranians, it goes without saying, are not happy with that arrangement.

An Iranian official said this weekend that Saudi Arabia and Russia had taken the oil market “hostage” and accused producing countries of turning OPEC into a “U.S. tool,” Reuters reported.

NASA LAUNCHES NEW SATELLITE TO TRACK EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING: The nation’s space agency launched a new satellite over the weekend on Saturday aimed at monitoring the effects of climate change — notably sea-level rise and the fading ice shelf.

The ICESat-2 carries a single instrument, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, which will begin its mission in approximately two weeks after its successful launch on Sept. 15.

Once it is determined that the satellite is fully functional in orbit, it will begin its work gathering data to estimate the annual height changes for Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets to within four millimeters, or the width of a pencil, says NASA.

No mention of climate change, but it’s there: The agency doesn’t mention climate change in announcing the successful launch of the satellite on Saturday. Instead, it says the spacecraft will help to “understand the mechanisms that are decreasing floating ice and assess how that sea ice loss affects the ocean and atmosphere.”

Although the agency’s Earth observation satellite program has become a target of some conservative critics and the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts, the launch demonstrates that NASA can weather the politics of day.

“With this mission we continue humankind’s exploration of the remote polar regions of our planet and advance our understanding of how ongoing changes of Earth’s ice cover at the poles and elsewhere will affect lives around the world, now and in the future,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

CALIFORNIA TO LAUNCH ITS OWN ‘DAMN’ CLIMATE SATELLITE: Gov. Jerry Brown used the last day of his global climate conference last week to announce that California will be launching its own climate-change tracking satellite.

Taking action while ‘under attack’: “With science still under attack and the climate threat growing, we’re launching our own damn satellite,” Brown said on Friday. “This groundbreaking initiative will help governments, businesses and landowners pinpoint — and stop — destructive emissions with unprecedented precision, on a scale that’s never been done before.”

State officials are partnering with the San Francisco-based company Planet Labs to build the satellite, which will be designed to measure carbon dioxide emissions and other heat-trapping pollutants that are causing global warming, according to Brown’s office. There is no word, yet, on how much the Golden State’s spacecraft will cost.

JOHN KERRY SAYS TRUMP LEAVING PARIS DEAL AMONG MOST IRRESPONSIBLE PRESIDENTIAL ACTS EVER: Former Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement was one of the “single greatest acts of irresponsibility” ever committed by a U.S. president.

“For the president to stand up to the American people and say this is too much burden, we have to get out of Paris and withdraw America leadership from an issue that is life or death, is one of the single greatest acts of irresponsibility by a president of the United States anywhere at anytime,” Kerry said during a speech on the closing day of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, where about 4,000 city, state, business, and world leaders gathered to demonstrate their will to combat climate change.

The U.S. is isolated: All countries of the world except the U.S. under the Trump administration have committed to the Paris agreement, under which nations set their own nonbinding targets for reducing carbon emissions. Trump argued the U.S. committed too much compared with other countries.

Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris agreement under President Barack Obama, accused Trump of making the decision to reject it without supporting facts or evidence.

Tracking the progress: The U.S. is on pace to meet two-thirds of the its carbon emissions reduction goals under the Paris agreement even without Trump, but would fall short of the pledge to lower the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

AL GORE BLAMES CLIMATE CHANGE FOR FLORENCE’S SEVERITY, ATTACKS DENIERS: Former Vice President Al Gore said Friday that climate change is making Hurricane Florence, and other extreme weather events, more destructive, and criticized people who “deny the reality.”

“Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation and we’ve got to connect the dots between the cause and the effect,” Gore said during a speech at the Global Climate Action Summit.

More climate summit happenings: Scroll down to the bottom of this page to learn more about developments from the summit, which includes over two dozen nonprofit foundations vowing to spend $3 billion in new money over five years on measures to combat climate change.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES CARBON MANAGEMENT RESEARCH PROJECT: Columbia University is betting big on the promise of developing technologies to combat climate change by removing, storing, and — putting to another use — carbon dioxide emissions.

Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy announced Monday a new initiative to study the policy, financial and economic potential for carbon management, better known as the the process of carbon capture, storage, and sequestration.

The project will be led by Julio Friedmann, the CEO of Carbon Wrangler and a former Obama administration official who was the principal deputy assistant of the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy.

The promise of carbon management: Columbia’s Earth Institute is already conducting research into the removal and sequestration of carbon. Carbon capture technology removes carbon dioxide from a power plant’s exhaust, so as to not release it into the atmosphere. The carbon can be cooled and injected as a liquid underground. Some technologies can use the captured carbon for other energy uses. Scientists say expanding the technology is key to fulfilling the Paris climate deal’s carbon reduction goals.

What needs to be improved: Friedmann will focus on improving the financing of projects, which are expensive, so they can be attractive to investors, he told Axios.

“CGEP’s interdisciplinary focus, global network, and strong track record make it the ideal place to make further progress towards a new carbon economy,” Friedmann said in a statement.

RUNDOWN

Axios Energy: the essential and unappreciated risk we all take

Wall Street Journal Shell lays out targets to reduce methane emissions

IndyStar As towns grapple with climate change a new tool can save them money

New York Times California had its own climate summit. Now what?

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