Exit from Paris Climate Accord works for manufacturers

As the U.S. goes in a different direction than the countries that remain committed to the Paris Climate Accord, domestic manufacturers should feel some regulatory relief.

Manufacturers, particularly small to medium-size ones, were undoubtedly thrilled with President Trump’s decision in early June to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord given their prior entreaties to the administration to kill the Obama Clean Power Plan.

The Paris agreement committed the U.S. to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), which was the objective of the Clean Power Plan. The latter was opposed by groups such as the National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA) and the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) in comments to the U.S. Department of Commerce in March.

The NTMA/PMA comments said the power plant rule would result in a major electricity price increase for metalworking manufacturers. Those comments were submitted in response to the Trump administration’s memorandum of Jan. 24, “Streamlining Permitting and Reducing Regulatory Burdens for Domestic Manufacturing.” It directs the secretary of commerce to conduct outreach to industry concerning the impact of federal regulations on domestic manufacturing.

The Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan the Environmental Protection Agency finalized under the Obama administration in 2016, and a federal appeals court is deciding its fate. But the appeals court decision may be moot because Trump had already issued an energy independence executive order on March 28 telling the EPA to review and, if necessary, revise or rescind several regulations that may place unnecessary, costly burdens on coal-fired electric utilities, coal miners, and oil and gas producers.

To date, the EPA has not issued any statement on the Clean Power Plan. An EPA spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail asking if the agency would be making a determination on the Clean Power Plan anytime soon.

OSHA Delays One Rule, but Silica Still in Effect

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it was indefinitely delaying implementation of its electronic injury reporting requirement. That requirement would have forced employers with at least 250 employees and employers with between 20 and 249 employees working in certain high-risk industries to submit their OSHA 300 Logs, 301 Incident Reports, and 300A Annual Summaries to OSHA through an online portal that would allow, with very limited exceptions, public access to that information.

Metalworking sectors are included in the 20- to 249-employee category and have to submit only the 300A form electronically. The deadline for electronic reporting was July 1. The elimination of that deadline was another example of the Trump administration’s stated efforts to reduce regulatory burden, especially on manufacturers.

However, the administration’s “regulatory relief” efforts go only so far. In terms of impact on manufacturing facilities, the bigger looming requirement has to do with the OSHA silica rule, which has a compliance deadline for general industry of June 2018. The sector with the largest number of affected workers is foundries, for example.

The Trump OSHA has not announced any changes either to the rule itself or the compliance deadline. However, OSHA pushed back the June 20, 2016, silica compliance deadline for the construction industry.

The American Foundry Society says the silica final rule is technologically and economically infeasible. In comments it submitted to the Commerce Department in response to the Trump January memorandum, the AFS said, “The rule will cost our industry alone more than $2.2 billion annually—more than $1 million per foundry and more than 50 times OSHA’s inaccurate analysis.”

That rule requires companies to measure the amount of silica dust that workers are exposed to if it may be at or above an action level of 25 μg/m³ (micrograms of silica per cubic meter of air), averaged over an 8-hour day. Worker protection must be put in place if exposure exceeds 50 μg/m³, averaged over an 8-hour day.