Cabinet approves National Program on promotion of intensive animal husbandry www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar/MONTSAME/ At its regular meeting on December 26, the Cabinet approved a National Program on promoting the development of intensive animal husbandry.

Entrepreneur 2018 selects top national entities www.montsame.mn

Promoting top entities and businesspeople who contribute to the national economy, the Entrepreneur Ceremony took place on December 21, 2018 for the 22nd year organized by the Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MNCCI).

MNT 60 billion sell-off case to be reinvestigated www.zgm.mn

Independent Agency Against Corruption (IAAC) held its monthly meeting yesterday and presented the progress of some notorious cases involving Parliament Members, including the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Development Fund (SMEDF) and MNT 60 billion sell-off of public service positions.

Oyu Tolgoi mine to draw electricity from domestic sources www.zgm.mn

Cabinet, at its regular meeting yesterday, authorized Minister of Energy Davaasuren Tserenpil and Director General of the Energy Regulatory Commission Tleikhan Almalik to sign the agreement on establishing a power plant near Tavan Tolgoi deposits that will supply electricity to Oyu Tolgoi project.

Tenkhleg Zuuch forecasts housing oversupply to exceed 5,400 households by 2021 www.zgm.mn

According to a study conducted by Tenkhleg Zuuch LLC, a total of 6,607 household accommodation were available in Ulaanbaatar as of 2018. Research institutions noted that the housing oversupply will prolong further due to low purchasing ability of households. While 24,773 household apartments were commissioned in 2013 when the eight percent mortgage loan was introduced; however, the number dropped to 12,277 households in 2017. As for 2018, about 12,000 household accommodation is expected to be built, of which 20 percent are already sold.

Trump's EPA to maintain Obama-era coal plant curbs, with a twist www.mining.com

The Trump administration is poised to propose maintaining Obama-era restrictions on mercury pollution from power plants, responding to opposition from electric utilities that have already spent billions of dollars to meet the requirements.

At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to propose changes that may make it harder to toughen mercury emissions standards in the future by disavowing the legal justification for the regulation and altering the way its health benefits are measured. The proposal reflects a balancing act for the Trump administration, which has struggled to address a rule loathed by coal producers

The proposal reflects a balancing act for the Trump administration, which has struggled to address a rule loathed by coal producers, viewed warily by EPA officials who object to how it was justified and yet has already been complied with by power companies.

“We’ve been in compliance for a number of years now, the equipment is operating and it is effective. We really see no reason at all to roll back the requirements," said John McManus, senior vice president of environmental services at American Electric Power Company Inc. “Retired plants aren’t coming back, and we see no reason to turn back the controls that are running on our existing plants.”

The 2012 rule prompted a wave of coal-fired power plant closures and drew the ire of a powerful foe: coal magnate Robert E. Murray, who has spent years crusading against the regulation in court. His coal company, Murray Energy Corp., argues its domestic sales have suffered as a result of the standards.

But power companies such as Duke Energy Corp. have implored the EPA and White House to leave the mercury standards intact. Utilities have already spent some $18 billion installing required technology to fulfill the requirements and satisfy April 2015 compliance deadlines that have long since passed, industry trade groups told the EPA this summer.

For instance, AEP has invested nearly $8.8 billion on environmental equipment retrofits at its coal-fired power plants since 2000, with much of that equipment contributing to its compliance with the mercury rule. The utility-owner has retired 7,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation from 2011 through 2016 as part of its effort to meet the more stringent mercury rules. Mercury emissions from its plants have dropped 95 percent since 2001.

Coal-fired power plants are the largest U.S. source of mercury, a metal that is converted in soil and water into a neurotoxin that can lower IQ, cause motor function deficits, damage the nervous system and lead to more heart attacks.

“More mercury in the air means more mercury in the water, which means more mercury in the fish, which means more mercury in people who eat the fish,” said Janet McCabe, an acting assistant administrator of the EPA’s air office in the Obama administration. “That is especially problematic for young children, pregnant women and the babies they are carrying.” The EPA is set to propose keeping the mercury limits in place while simultaneously withdrawing an assertion the requirements are “appropriate and necessary”

The EPA is set to propose keeping the mercury limits in place while simultaneously withdrawing an assertion the requirements are “appropriate and necessary” — a legal benchmark under the Clean Air Act.

The change would arm the rule’s opponents with ammunition for another lawsuit challenging the mercury standards in an effort to win a court-ordered repeal. It’s not clear any such litigation would prevail; a 2008 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on another mercury rule sets a high bar.

Although the EPA is ensnared by the partial government shutdown, it has enough leftover funding to continue operating, at least this week. The agency is expected to issue the proposal as soon as Wednesday.

The EPA also is set to recalculate the cost and benefits of the mercury rule in a way that dramatically shrinks its estimated potential health gains — a change that could prevent the EPA from making the mercury pollution requirements more stringent in the future.

At issue are the broad health benefits that spring from regulations — not just those that directly flow from reducing a pollutant explicitly targeted by individual rules. In the case of the mercury rule, for example, the technology utilities employed to curtail mercury emissions also pared the amount of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide belched out of their power plants, which the EPA said would reduce asthma attacks, heart attacks and premature deaths.

Those “co-benefits” of the mercury rule were an essential figure in the Obama administration’s calculation of the its ultimate price tag. Although the EPA estimated it would cost industry $9.6 billion annually to install necessary technology, it said health benefits from reducing mercury and other non-targeted pollutants were worth nearly 10 times more.

As much as 89 percent of the 2012 rule’s health benefits came from reducing fine particulate matter — beyond the toxic air pollutants the measure actually targeted, according to the EPA.

Now, under President Donald Trump, the EPA is set to assert that because it is leaning on its Clean Air Act authority to regulate hazardous air pollutants, it is improper to consider the health benefits of paring other pollution.

The EPA may argue that pollutants regulated under other programs can’t be used to “justify a regulation that is only supposed to be about hazardous air pollutants,” said Jeff Holmstead, an assistant EPA administrator under former President George W. Bush.

By disregarding co-benefits, the new proposal is set to conclude that the rule’s costs exceed its benefits. Environmentalists say the change could preclude the agency from counting these benefits to justify the cost of toughening requirements in the future.

The Trump administration approach would limit “the EPA’s ability to recognize the full range of benefits that result from pollution control,” said Joe Goffman, a former senior counsel in agency’s air office. The result is “to limit the reach of the Clean Air Act as a tool for regulating air pollution and protecting public health.”

The mercury standards have been the subject of litigation for years. After they were imposed in 2012, the coal industry sued, ultimately forcing the EPA to revisit its conclusions. The Obama administration reinstated the regulation in 2016 and Murray Energy sued to block it, but a federal appeals court delayed the case so the Trump administration could reconsider the rule.

Koreas hold groundbreaking ceremony for railway project www,apnews.com

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean officials attended a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday for an aspirational project to modernize North Korean railways and roads and connect them with the South.

The ceremony at the North Korean border town of Kaesong came weeks after the Koreas conducted a joint survey on the northern railway sections they hope to someday link with the South.

The ambitious project is among a variety of peace gestures agreed between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in as they push ahead with engagement amid a stalemate in larger nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

But beyond on-site reviews and ceremonies, the Koreas cannot move the project much further along without the removal of U.S.-led sanctions against the North.

During his three summits with Moon and a meeting with President Donald Trump in June, Kim signed vague statements pledging a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing how and when it would occur. But followup nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled for months over the sequencing of the denuclearization that Washington wants and the removal of international sanctions desired by Pyongyang.

About 100 South Koreans, including government officials and lawmakers, attended the ceremony. They were greeted by North Korean officials including Ri Son Gwon, who heads an agency dealing with inter-Korean affairs. Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and officials from China, Russia and Mongolia also attended the ceremony, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

The Seoul government plans to conduct further surveys on North Korean railways and roads before drawing up a detailed blueprint for the project. Actual construction will proceed depending on the progress in the North’s denuclearization and the state of sanctions against the country, the ministry said.

“We plan to hold detailed negotiations with the North to coordinate on the specific levels we want to achieve in the modernization of railways and roads and how to carry out the project,” said Eugene Lee, the ministry’s spokeswoman.

Even if the North takes concrete steps toward denuclearization and gains sanctions relief, some experts say updating North Korean rail networks and trains, which creak slowly along the rails that were first built in the early 20th century, could take decades and massive investment.

Seoul said it received an exemption to sanctions from the U.N. Security Council to proceed with Wednesday’s ceremony as it involved the usage of South Korean transport vehicles and goods. The Koreas’ joint survey of North Korean railways in November, which also required U.N. approval, marked the first time a South Korean train traveled on North Korean tracks.

The Koreas in December 2007 began freight services between South Korea’s Munsan Station in Paju and the North’s Panmun Station to support operations at a now-shuttered joint factory park in Kaesong. The South used the trains to move construction materials north, while clothing and shoes made at the factory park were sent south. The line was cut in November 2008 due to political tensions over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The Kaesong factory park was shut down under the South’s previous conservative government in February 2016 following a North Korean nuclear test and long-range rocket launch.

You can now own Putin’s limo! Russia to begin mass producing Aurus cars www.rt.com

Mass production of Russia’s new Aurus limousine, developed for the presidential motorcade, will begin in the eastern region of Tatarstan. The first vehicles will roll off the production line in 2020.
The project will be implemented at the production facilities of Russia's automobile company Sollers in the special economic zone of Alabuga, Tatarstan Republic, according to the Trade Minister Denis Manturov.

Mongolia's Tax Collectors are the Real Winner in National Lotto www.bloomberg.com

Mongolia’s effort to get its citizens to pay taxes by enrolling them in a lottery is delivering a big payout -- for the government.

Seismic activity in UB increases by 200! www.news.mn

Seismic activity is relatively low in and around the Mongolian capital as compared to the western parts of the country. This year, a total of 873 mini-quakes occurred in Ulaanbaatar – mostly too small to be felt – however, this represents an increase of 200 on 2017. The epicentres have been in Emeelt, Khustai and Avdar Mountain. Furthermore, seismic activity has been increasing in Mungunmorit and Dzuunkharaa, a town in the Selenge province.