superfund 2

broke main 3/18

merri ok

see cascade

===

metaphor or precedent?

===

-=-=

-=-=

an 10 26

Trump’s next golf makeover comes with Superfund toxic sludge

-=-=

-=-=

trump epa fail pruitt wheeler wright

trump-s-epa-claimed-success-superfund-cleanups-climate-change-went-n1242435

ymail 6 24

These bills aim to make polluters pay

Climate superfund legislation is gaining traction in state legislatures across the country. How do the bills fit into the broader movement to hold Big Oil accountable?

EXXONKNEWS

JUN 27

Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.

As communities across the United States grapple with the rising costs to protect residents and infrastructure from the worsening impacts of climate change, some state legislators are targeting a potential new source of resilience funding: fossil fuel companies.

Sometimes called “polluter pays” bills or “climate superfund” bills, a new wave of state legislation aims to make oil companies bear a portion of the expenses necessary to adapt to climate impacts and recover from climate disasters fueled by those companies’ greenhouse gas emissions. The bills are quickly gaining momentum in statehouses: Vermont passed one into law in May, another in New York awaits Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature, and similar proposals are under consideration in California, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Oil and gas companies have generated the majority of the world’s climate pollution, the bill sponsors argue, and therefore they should help pay for the damage that pollution is inflicting on communities. While each state’s legislation has unique features and different mechanisms to determine how much oil and gas companies would pay, they all draw inspiration from the federal Superfund program, first enacted in 1980 and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, which makes polluters pay to clean up hazardous waste they’ve dumped into the environment.

State climate superfunds established by these bills would function similarly by making fossil fuel companies pay for a portion of the damages caused by their greenhouse gas emissions.

“States and municipalities are suffering enormous costs from the damage associated with climate change and the money they have to spend now to prepare for the consequences they're going to face in the future, at the same time as fossil fuel industry actors are posting record profits from creating these harms,” said Martin Lockman, climate law fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and associate research scholar at Columbia Law School. While the superfund bills would not cover the full amount states will spend on climate adaptation, he said, communities “are looking for any tools that they have available to make sure that the people who are profiting from causing them harm pay for [that] harm.”

So how exactly do the bills work, how do they interact with the growing number of distinct state and local lawsuits seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for climate deception, and what challenges will they face? Here’s what you need to know.

How climate superfund bills work

All of the currently proposed climate superfund bills would assess a dollar figure that companies owe to the fund based on the amount of emissions attributed to the fossil fuels they sold over a set period of time: 2000 to 2018 in New York’s case, or 1995 to 2024 in Vermont’s for example. The costs of those emissions, or how they are proportioned among companies, are calculated using attribution science — a growing field also tapped for climate accountability lawsuits. Those calculations rely on companies’ self-reported data to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“It's looking at something they already did, and saying ‘this had a negative effect and now you have to clean up the mess you made,’” said Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that supports a climate superfund bill in California that was recently shelved by its author but could be reintroduced later in the year.

Some of the bills direct a state agency to conduct a cost assessment of the climate harms companies’ emissions caused during a set time frame. In Vermont’s case, the state’s Agency of Natural Resources will have until the start of 2027 to conduct that assessment and determine each company’s appropriate share of the costs.

Those costs could include some portion of the estimated $1 billion response and recovery costs incurred after major floods devastated Vermont last summer, or the price of fortifying roads, bridges, and floodplains to lessen the damage caused by rain storms intensified by climate change. The agency will also help determine which resiliency programs — programs that could help municipalities, businesses, and farms in Vermont adapt to climate impacts — will be covered.

The law “is a common sense manifestation of a very well-established principle of American environmental law, which is that the polluter pays,” said Christophe Courchesne, assistant professor of law and director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic at Vermont Law School, which voiced its support for the bill before it passed. “It's not new, even as the application of this policy to climate damages is new, and is an extremely important concept that we certainly hope will be a model to other states.”

Other bills have already set a total cost that would be divided up by companies — like New York’s, which would require the oil majors to pay into a $75 billion fund that could be used for projects such as air conditioning schools or upgrading roads, bridges, subways, and stormwater drainage systems to account for more extreme weather. Still, that $75 billion is nowhere near the total costs New York faces for climate adaptation; in 2021, the city estimated it would cost $100 billion just to “recalibrat[e] our sewers for storms like Ida.”

Proponents of the bills say their popularity reflects growing public demand for polluters to pay; polling last year found that 70% of likely voters supported making fossil fuel companies pay for climate disasters including wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The science is more than clear on the outsized impact these companies have had on the climate crisis,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communication director for Fossil Free Media, one of the groups behind that poll. “​​It's time for them to pay their fair share, and this is one step in the right direction, but still not nearly enough.”

“Very complimentary, parallel tracks”

The bills come at the same time that dozens of state and local lawsuits to hold Big Oil accountable for climate fraud and damages are steadily advancing through the courts. So how do the two mechanisms interact?

The two tracks have some fundamental differences and aim to accomplish different things. Unlike the bills, the lawsuits center on disinformation, not pollution. They accuse the companies of engaging in deceptive behavior, citing evidence that the fossil fuel industry has misled the public for decades about the harms their products cause. Through the courts, the cases aim to stop companies from lying to consumers and hold them accountable through a range of remedies, including paying for the damage their deception has caused.

Lawsuits can also help address past disinformation by forcing defendants to set the record straight. A Minnesota lawsuit brought against Exxon, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute under the state’s consumer protection laws, for example, seeks to make the companies “disclose, disseminate, and publish all research previously conducted directly or indirectly… that relates to the issue of climate change,” and “fund a corrective public education campaign in Minnesota relating to the issue of climate change, administered and controlled by an independent third party.”

Similar remedies came out of lawsuits brought against the tobacco industry by U.S. states and territories for misleading consumers about the connection between smoking and cancer. Through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, major tobacco companies were made to fund the Truth Initiative, a public education campaign that has drastically reduced youth smoking rates.

Discovery, the process of obtaining evidence for trial, can also produce internal company documents that shed further light on the industry’s deception about its products for legislators and the public — and can help inform a response. Such documents were obtained through litigation against the tobacco and opioid industries and made publicly available.

The climate superfund legislation, on the other hand, “does nothing to prevent [companies] from continuing business as usual if they want to,” said Coulter. “It's just saying that the business that you conducted has caused damage and you need to pay for that.” That’s why the bills and lawsuits, she emphasized, are “very complimentary, parallel tracks,” which together can both make the fossil fuel industry pay for a share of its pollution and bring an end to continued deceptive acts.

A similar dual strategy was applied in California, where the California Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act of 1991 taxed manufacturers of products containing lead to fund evaluations and medical services for children who were exposed. In 2019, 10 California cities and counties were still able to recover a court settlement from lead paint manufacturers after they sued the companies under public nuisance claims.

“This is how our democracy works,” California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta recently told Politico when asked about the relationship between California’s proposed superfund bill and the accountability lawsuit his office brought against Big Oil companies last year. “Different leaders elected to do their jobs think about the authority that they have, the jurisdiction that they own, and the action that they can take to solve a problem that affects their constituents.”

Legal battles ahead

The bills will likely implicate many of the same major oil companies facing climate deception lawsuits in state courts, including Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP. The industry’s lead trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, has already expressed its strong opposition to the bills, calling them “a punitive new fee” that “represents yet another step in a coordinated campaign to undermine America’s energy advantage and the economic and national security benefits it provides.”

Legal experts expect API and others to challenge the laws in court.

In March, API sent a letter to Vermont lawmakers claiming that the state's bill “retroactively imposes costs and liability on prior activities that were legal” and “violates equal protection and due process rights by holding companies responsible for the actions of society at large.”

But experts and advocates refute those claims. “This bill is premised on a well-established, reasonable approach to assigning liability for pollution harms,” said Courchesne, of Vermont Law. “These issues around due process and the retroactivity of liability have been litigated and those laws have been upheld.”

Big Oil’s public communications have sought to shift the blame for climate change to consumers for years, despite growing evidence that the companies intentionally mislead the public about the harms their fossil fuel products cause.

While the superfund bills don’t rely on that evidence of deception like the lawsuits do, there is still plenty of precedent for laws that hold producers liable for their pollution, Lockman explained. “If you buy a product, and the company that made that product was dumping toxic chemicals into a river and killing off species, is the consumer responsible for that?” he asked. “Generally, as a society and a legal system, we’ve decided that it’s OK to hold the most immediate actors responsible for the pollution they’re causing.”

===

LOBBYING (KOCH)

peak 2006 $?

i'm guessing chlorine?

2006

Hired Firms Total Reported by Filer Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer)

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 -

Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock - $240,000

PricewaterhouseCoopers - $140,000

Accord Group - $120,000

Crowell & Moring - $40,000

Federal Policy Group - $40,000

Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc - $30,000

Terpstra Assoc - $25,000

King & Spalding - $0

$635,000

---

Issues Lobbied By American Forest & Paper Assn, 2006

Issue Specific Issues

Taxes 7

Trade 5

Natural Resources 4

Energy & Nuclear Power 4

Environment & Superfund 4

Clean Air & Water 4

Chemical Industry 2

Fed Budget & Appropriations 2

Manufacturing 2

Postal 2

Transportation 2

Hazardous & Solid Waste 1

Science & Technology 1

Government Issues 1

Immigration 1

many pages

Lobbying Firm Hired Total Amount* Client Lobbyist

Accord Group $120,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Robert F Hurley

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Mary Coulombe

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Anne Divjak

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Juanita D Duggan

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Alexis Englert

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Jacob Handlesman

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Donna A Harman

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Tim Hunt

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Sharon H Kneiss

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 David Koenig

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Suzanne Madden

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 W Henson Moore

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 William R Chip Murray

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Lori Perine

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Patrick Rita

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Brett Smith

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Deann Stish

American Forest & Paper Assn $4,760,000 Elizabeth VanDersarl

Crowell & Moring $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Steven P Quarles 

Crowell & Moring $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Richard E Schwartz

Federal Policy Group $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn James F Carlisle

Federal Policy Group $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Jayne T Fitzgerald

Federal Policy Group $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Tim Hanford

Federal Policy Group $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Kenneth J Kies

Federal Policy Group $40,000 American Forest & Paper Assn Robert J Leonard

Revolving Door Profile    Former Member of Congress

---

peak 2009 but pretty steady several pages

Clients Lobbying on Environment & Superfund, 2020

Filter results

Client Subsidiary (Lobbied For) No. of Reports

Southern Co - 28

Starbucks Corp - 22

BP BP America 21

Environmental Defense Fund Environmental Defense Action Fund 19

Microsoft Corp - 18

Business Roundtable - 17

Duke Energy - 17

Lennox International - 16

Northern Dynasty Minerals Pebble Limited Partnership 16

Royal Dutch Shell Shell Oil 16

Exxon Mobil - 15

3M Co - 14

Bayer AG Bayer Corp 13

Edison Electric Institute - 13

Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration Inst - 12

Americans for Carbon Dividends - 12

Chemours Co - 12

Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions - 12

CropLife America - 12

FirstEnergy Corp - 12

Groupe Danone Danone North America 12

Honda Motor Co Honda North America 12

Honeywell International - 12

PepsiCo Inc - 12

PG&E Corp - 12

PG&E Corp - 12

Santa Clara Valley Water District - 12

American Beverage Assn - 11

Covanta Holding Covanta Energy Corp 11

Daikin Industries Daikin America 11

Dow Inc - 11

Interstate Natural Gas Assn of America - 11

American Forest & Paper Assn - 10

Bipartisan Policy Center Bipartisan Policy Center Advocacy Network 10

International Paper - 10

McDonald's Corp - 10

Plastics Industry Assn - 10

TRC Companies - 10

World Wildlife Fund - 10

Ameresco Inc - 9

Growth Energy - 9

Recycling Partnership - 9

Advanced Biofuels Assn - 8

Alcoa Corp - 8

Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound - 8

Aluminum Assn - 8

America's Power - 8

American Assn for Justice - 8

American Electric Power - 8

American Fuel & Petrochem Manufacturers - 8

...p3

---

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=1999&id=D000021833

==

hive?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/trump-put-a-koch-official-in-charge-of-americas-drinking-water

Of all the federal agencies that fall under Donald Trump’s purview, none embodies the administration’s unofficial mandate to do the exact opposite of its stated mission quite like the Environmental Protection Agency. For the last two years, the E.P.A.—which, as a reminder, is supposed to be protecting human health and the environment—has done everything in its power to turn the planet into an ashtray and convince Americans that toxic chemicals are actually totally fine to drink, breathe, and otherwise ingest, all in an effort to help companies secreting those chemicals maximize their profits. Which is to say, we probably should have seen this one coming:

The Trump administration has placed a former Koch Industries official in charge of research that will shape how the government regulates a class of toxic chemicals contaminating millions of Americans’ drinking water—an issue that could have major financial repercussions for his former employer.

David Dunlap, a deputy in E.P.A.’s Office of Research and Development, is playing a key role as the agency decides how to protect people from the pollution left behind at hundreds of military bases and factories across the country. ..He spent the previous eight years as Koch Industries’ lead expert on water and chemical regulations, a position that typically includes helping companies to limit regulatory restrictions and liability for cleanups.

Dunlap was hired in October, according to previously undisclosed documents. Since then, he has been extremely busy, having reportedly been involved in high-level meetings that preceded the agency’s decision not to set drinking water limits for chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which “have been linked with kidney and testicular cancer, as well as other ailments.” (In a statement, David Ross, EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water, told the Hive: “Despite what is being reported, EPA has not finalized or publicly issued its PFAS management plan, and any information that speculates what is included in the plan is premature. The agency is committed to following the Safe Drinking Water Act process for evaluating new drinking water standards, which is just one of the many components of the draft plan that is currently undergoing interagency review.”) 

According to Politico,Dunlap has been able to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing in which his prior work experience might come up because Trump has not officially nominated anyone to run to office. (Dunlap’s official bio on the E.P.A. Web site declines to mention any of his employers during his “more than 30 years” working for “private industry, trade associations and as an environmental consultant.”) Currently, Koch subsidiary Georgia-Pacific, a paper and pulp conglomerate, is facing at least one class-action suit related to chemicals now under Dunlap’s purview.

Koch’s various environmental crimes against humanity are laid out in several high-profile lawsuits over the past 20 years. According to Bloomberg, “Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties, and judgments” between 1999 and 2003, such as for dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of aviation fuel into a Minnesota wetland. “You want an independent, hardheaded scientific review of these issues; you don’t want somebody who is already taking the industry party line,” Erik Olson, who heads up the Natural Resources Defense Council’s public health work, told Politico. “There’s a legitimate threat there and, from my perspective, the conflicts of interest that [Dunlap] has having worked as a regulatory compliance director at Georgia-Pacific raises questions about whether he can make those objective decisions or should be recused.”

Dunlap, of course, is unlikely to be replaced by someone without a host of conflicts of interest given that the guy currently running the E.P.A., Andrew Wheeler, is a walking, talking conflict of interest, having served as a coal-lobbyist prior to taking over the top job from departed Grift King Scott Pruitt. It is, in other words, par for the course. Here’s a few other actions Trump’s E.P.A. has taken over the past two years:

• Argued coal plants should regulate themselves;
• Announced plans to roll back mercury regulations;
• Made it easier to release methane into the air;
• Tried to suppress a report showing “most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments”
• Pushed for asbestos to make a comeback; and
• Claimed a little radiation might actually be good for you.

You know, policies the Forgotten Man was hoping Trump would push through when they voted for him in 2016.

===

ref

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/04/former-koch-official-runs-epa-chemical-research-1136230

no lnx

Former Koch official runs EPA chemical research

Previously undisclosed documents obtained by POLITICO show David Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately upon arriving at EPA in October.

By ANNIE SNIDER 02/04/2019

The Trump administration has placed a former Koch Industries official in charge of research that will shape how the government regulates a class of toxic chemicals contaminating millions of Americans’ drinking water — an issue that could have major financial repercussions for his former employer.

David Dunlap, a deputy in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, is playing a key role as the agency decides how to protect people from the pollution left behind at hundreds of military bases and factories across the country.

President Donald Trump has not nominated anyone to run the office. That effectively allows Dunlap to avoid the Senate confirmation process while overseeing a central part of EPA's work that could impose cleanup costs on companies that have used the chemicals, including major Koch subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. The paper and pulp conglomerate is already facing at least one class-action lawsuit related to the chemicals.

Previously undisclosed documents obtained by POLITICO show Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately upon arriving at EPA in October. He had spent the previous eight years as Koch Industries' lead expert on water and chemical regulations, a position that typically includes helping companies to limit regulatory restrictions and liability for cleanups.

Democratic lawmakers and environmentalist say the prevalence of administration officials who came from the chemicals industry contributes to its hands-off approach to the chemicals, which are appearing in drinking water supplies across the country to rising public alarm. Known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, the chemicals have been linked with kidney and testicular cancer, as well as other ailments.

Both Republicans and Democrats have urged a stronger approach from acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler — who faces a confirmation vote in the Senate Environment Committee Tuesday — but he has stopped short of using all the tools in the agency's arsenal.

Just last week, POLITICO reported the agency has decided against setting drinking water limits for the two most well-understood chemicals in the class in a forthcoming plan for the chemicals, and the new documents show Dunlap was involved in high-level meetings preceding that decision.

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said Dunlap’s hiring adds to his concerns about the Trump administration's handling of the issue.

“Coming on the heels of Mr. Wheeler’s failure to commit to setting a drinking water standard for PFAS, this potential conflict of interest within the agency paints a bleak picture about EPA’s priorities on chemical safety with respect to these particular substances. I look forward to learning more about Mr. Dunlap’s role in the development of EPA’s PFAS management plan,” Carper said in a statement.

Dunlap’s ethics agreement bars him from “participating in any particular matter involving specific parties” related to Koch Industries, but the agency’s ethics officials have typically taken a narrow interpretation of such prohibitions. And while Dunlap voluntarily recused himself from work on formaldehyde, which Georgia-Pacific produces, the agreement includes no mention of PFAS.

Koch Industries spokesperson David Dziok said that Dunlap worked on a broad set of issues related to water and chemicals during his time with the company, but that "PFAs were not part of the portfolio he managed."

Dunlap did not respond to a request for comment. EPA did not answer specific questions about Dunlap’s involvement in the agency’s work and his potential conflict of interest.

Dunlap's calendars, obtained by POLITICO under the Freedom of Information Act, show he participated in at least nine PFAS meetings in his first six weeks on the job, including an Oct. 22 briefing with Wheeler, chief of staff Ryan Jackson and other top political officials. At the time, agency leaders were writing a wide-ranging chemical management plan in which they decided not to set a drinking water standard for the two specific chemicals — PFOA and PFOS. That plan has been under review at the White House since December.

While those two older chemicals are no longer used in the U.S., EPA estimates that there are between 5,000 and 10,000 similar chemical compounds, used in everything from nonstick cookware to water resistant jackets to microwave popcorn bags. Industry has argued that the newer compounds are less dangerous to human health, but scientists say there is reason to worry that the entire class of PFAS compounds poses a risk. Public health advocates are pushing EPA to regulate the chemicals as a class, arguing that evaluating each one individually will take decades, if it happens at all.

The calendars also show Dunlap helping to shape EPA's approach to these newer compounds that are still in use.He participated in an Oct. 31 call with career staff in his division on two chemicals, GenX and PFBS, for which they were preparing health assessments. Research has shown those new chemicals can also be dangerous, and that those dangers may be greater when people are exposed to them in combination with other chemicals, as they often occur in drinking water. Environmental groups have said the chemicals should be evaluated together to account for those risks, but EPA took the opposite approach when it released the GenX and PFBS health assessments two weeks later.

Then on Nov. 5, Dunlap was scheduled to join a call with staff scientific leads to discuss the next slate of chemicals for which they would prepare health assessments. Dunlap's former employer has a stake in which chemicals EPA focuses on: A company spokesperson said Georgia-Pacific may still be using PFAS in its products, as it has in the past, but she would not say which specific chemicals it uses. There are very few legal requirements for companies to tell the public or regulators which chemicals they use in their processes and at which factories.

In response to questions about Dunlap's role, an EPA spokesperson said, "Addressing PFAS is an Agency-wide effort with David Ross, the EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water, serving as the EPA staff lead on addressing PFAS."

However, the research overseen by Dunlap lays the groundwork for any regulatory decisions Ross is coordinating. EPA officials have underscored the importance of research to their PFAS work in a number of public presentations, including briefings to the agency's Science Advisory Boardand at meetings in affected communities.

[Exclusive: Trump EPA won't limit 2 toxic chemicals in drinking water

By ANNIE SNIDER]

Georgia-Pacific, which manufactures products like Brawny paper towels and Dixie cups, has not only used PFAS in some of its food packaging products, but has also owned facilities where the chemicals were disposed, creating a cleanup liability that could prove costly.

:{:{}:

}:

The company is already facing a class-action lawsuit from citizens in the town of Parchment, Mich., where last summer state officials discovered the chemicals in drinking water at concentrations as much as 26 times higher than EPA’s recommended limit. That contamination was traced to a paper mill that Georgia-Pacific previously had a stake in.

Georgia-Pacific spokesperson Karen Cole said the company believes that “only a very small percentage of our food wrap and related products — if any” contain the chemicals today, and noted that PFOA and PFOS were phased out of use in food wrappers "several years ago." She said Georgia-Pacific does not apply the PFAS itself, but gets paper from a supplier that in some cases has previously treated it with PFAS.

“We are currently evaluating past manufacturing practices to better understand any potential previous use of these materials,” she said by email.

In his LinkedIn profile, Dunlap describes himself as the “lead and subject matter expert” on water and chemicals issues for Koch’s entire suite of companies during his eight years there. Even if he did not directly manage the company's work on PFAS, it would be “hard to believe that he had not touched any decisions on PFAS with that broad of a scope of responsibilities," said Erik Olson, who leads the Natural Resources Defense Council’s public health work.

Olson said Dunlap’s oversight of EPA’s research on the chemicals raises red flags. “You want an independent, hardheaded scientific review of these issues; you don’t want somebody who is already taking the industry party line,” he said.

According to federal disclosures, Koch Industries spent at least $90,000 in 2018 lobbying on issues related to chemicals. TheAmerican Chemistry Council, the chemicals industry’s largest lobbying group, which Georgia-Pacific has worked through in the past to influence policy on toxic chemicals, spent $9 million last year lobbying lawmakers, EPA and other agencies, including on PFAS issues.

The Food and Drug Administration governs the use of chemicals in food wrappers, and has approved 21 PFAS blends for such use, according to Tom Neltner, the chemicals policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund who has conducted research on paper mills’ use of the compounds. But he said the greater liability that paper companies like Georgia-Pacific may face comes from manufacturing waste that contains the chemicals, such as leftover paper trimmings.

That waste can end up in landfills or compost that is used to grow fruits and vegetables, Neltner said.

"There's a legitimate threat there and, from my perspective, the conflicts of interest that [Dunlap] has having worked as a regulatory compliance director at Georgia-Pacific raises questions about whether he can make those objective decisions or should be recused," he said.

Moreover, Georgia-Pacific may well have cleanup responsibility for other sites like the one in Michigan. During the time it operated the manufacturing plant, from 2000 to 2015, Georgia-Pacific closed a landfill that had also been used by other companies, including at least one that the company says it believes used a 3M-patented PFAS. The class-action lawsuit filed by citizens alleges that Georgia-Pacific did not properly close the landfill to prevent the chemicals from leaching into nearby water. Georgia-Pacific is currently working with the state of Michigan to trace the chemicals' movement through groundwater.

Under the Superfund law, a company can be held liable for cleanup even if it wasn’t primarily responsible for the contamination.

==

===

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/

kilpatrick ---

Comprehensive Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or “Superfund”) imposes strict, joint and several liability on responsible parties for remediation of contaminated properties.As compared to other federal environmental programs, the CERCLA program was a significant point of emphasis during the Trump Administration.  Notably, both Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrators, held that a key task of the federal EPA is addressing hazardous waste sites and controlling hazardous substances.  Both Pruitt and Wheeler, during their tenures as head of EPA, prioritized the de-listing or partial de-listing of NPL sites by seeking action through private party settlements and remediation, often concentrating on “brownfields” that were ripe for redevelopment.  In addition, both oversaw the convening of experts in a Superfund Task Force, commissioned to develop improvements and streamline the CERCLA process to obtain better and faster results.[[1]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftn1)

However, despite continuing action during the past four years, not all has remained rosy for CERCLA.  The number of unfunded sites continued to increase, resulting in the Biden Administration inheriting34 unfunded Superfund sites, the greatest backlog in 15 years. This backlog is particularly significant because a  2020 EPA study found that a disproportionate number of people of color lived within three miles of Superfund site. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report identified 945 Superfund sites that are vulnerable to climate change impacts such as hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and rising sea level, approximately 60% of all Superfund sites.  As a large number of  Superfund sites located near Environmental Justice communities are also  potentially impacted by climate change, they are also ripe for action under the Biden Administration’s climate change and Environmental Justice initiatives.

From its beginning, the Biden Administration has highlighted Environmental Justice as one its highest priorities to address throughout the federal government’s regulatory programs.  On January 21, 2021, it  issued Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government | The White House. On April 7, 2021, EPA Administrator Michael Regan issued a memorandum, affirming EPA’s Commitment to Environmental Justice. Among other actions, EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) has issued a series of memoranda of how OECA will advance  the agency’s Environmental Justice goals through enforcement tools.   On July 1, 2021, Larry Starfield, Acting Assistant Admistrator of OECA, issued a memorandum regarding.  Strengthening Environmental Justice Through Cleanup Enforcement Actions (epa.gov) (Memorandum).  The Memorandum prioritizes three areas where OECA’s enforcement tools may be used to address concerns faced by communities overburdened by pollution: (1) Early Action and Expedited Cleanup Actions; (2) Robust Enforcement and Oversight; and (3) Increased and Enhanced Community Engagement.

Early Action and Expedited Cleanup Activities.

The Memorandum recommends that EPA should act to speed the response to hazardous substances in communities overburdened by pollution.  This could include utilizing CERCLA §106 or Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) § 703 orders seeking an injunction or other action, including orders for interim relief for acute threats, if EPA finds an actual or threatened release that may present imminent and substantial endangerment to human health and the environment.  In less “emergency” situations, the Memorandum recommends several actions to expedite cleanups including speeding up (or bifurcating) the Remedial Design/Remedial Action (RD/RA) negotiations and limit the time of such negotiation to one year, with the possibility of issuance of unilateral administrative orders when negotiations fail or do not result in a timely settlement.  The Memorandum recommends involving Regional Counsel when a potentially responsible party (PRP) requests extensions or misses deadlines; however, notably, the Memorandum does not highlight delays that are often caused by EPA.   Anyone who has been involved in the negotiation and evaluation of CERCLA agreements, assessment, remedial design or remedial action has experienced  long delays caused by  EPA’s review and approval process despite the private party’s attempts to move the process along. It may take more than this Memorandum to significantly accelerate EPA’s standard review practices.

Robust Enforcement and Oversight.

The “robust” enforcement and oversight component of the Memorandum focuses on both EPA oversight and a new emphasis on community “involvement” in enforcement.  First, the Memorandum recommends increased oversight of a potentially responsible party’s compliance with a Consent Decree or other enforcement instrument when “overburdened communities may be adversely impacted by noncompliance.”  This oversight may include increased compliance reviews, including assurance that institutional controls are in place and monitored on a regular basis and determination whether the institutional controls are having the intended effect or if new institutional controls are needed.  With regard to increased community involvement in enforcement, the suggested measures focus on the potential need to address “unintended adverse impacts”  on overburdened communities such as odor, dust, traffic or noise.  EPA recommends further evaluation to see if the actions implementing the remedy are having or could have unintended adverse impacts on a community and, if so, whether enforceable language should be included in the Consent Decree or other agreement to minimize such adverse impacts. Interestingly, EPA hints that it may require the inclusion of a “Supplemental Environmental Project” in  Consent Decrees or other agreements, stating that EPA should “consider inclusion of provisions in settlements or agreements that provide for the performance of a specified project in the event of noncompliance with the Consent Decree or other enforcement instrument.[[2]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftn2)  The Memorandum also suggests that “advanced monitoring equipment” may be needed to demonstrate compliance with remedial goals and that information, along with a detailed schedule of compliance obligation, should be provided to the impacted community.

Community Outreach.

The Memorandum encourages EPA to engage the impacted community in a “proactive, transparent and consistent manner” throughout the cleanup and enforcement process to build trust in an impacted community.  Most of the recommendations in the memorandum are common sense and consistent with best practices for engaging with a community. The Memorandum recommends better communication with affected  communities by improving the accessibility and effectiveness of the communications about remediation activities.  EPA should ensure that it is sharing information with the community in language and a format that is designed for the specific community and should convey site specific information and the benefits of the remedial actions at the site as well as the responsible party’s compliance status. The Memorandum also suggests increased involvement of EPA attorneys with regard to community involvement, including attending public meetings to better understand community needs and concerns and address those concerns in the enforcement instruments with PRPs.

So what does all this mean?Maybe a lot or maybe very little in practice. EPA may want to consider the following.

First, most of the announced policies already exist in EPA’s playbook. Further, expedition and focus on CERCLA cleanups has been a key goal of EPA for the last four years.  EPA may simply need to rigorously implement their current policies generally and that effort will capture improvements in Environmental Justice responses across the country.

Second, delays in CERCLA response actions arise from many considerations.  One not uncommon cause of delay is the time that EPA, or more frequently EPA’s contractor, takes to act at a particular site. The Memorandum provides no recourse for affected communities or private parties to challenge the government’s pace of action.  The policy does recognize this delay with respect to federal facilities, but not sites where EPA has the lead. Further, it is also true that EPA often is slow to act because EPA staff is overburdened with obligations. The Memorandum does not reflect new budget or staffing decisions to address these issues. Finally, science-based decisions require comprehensive and defensible data -- the Memorandum makes no mention or suggests no alternatives to collecting, analyzing, sharing and seeking peer reviewed decisions based upon the science. Importantly, Environmental Justice schedules should respect the science first.

Third, the Memorandum seems to suggest that they are making these policies up de novo when many relevant state cleanup programs already have been up and running for years. For example, in Massachusetts the state’s cleanup program has for years had a vigorous public involvement program for communities to be informed about and participate in cleanup decisions.[[3]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftn3)  EPA should seek to adopt best practices from around the country rather than re-inventing new wheels.

Fourth, while Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) may indeed provide useful alternatives for actions at particular sites, there must still be a nexus between the SEP and the CERCLA release that is being addressed. Notably, SEP review and approval at EPA’s Regional offices has not, in the past, necessarily proved to be an efficient and prompt process. Once EPA works out the mentioned legal challenge to SEPs, resolving those pre-existing impediments are likely to provide the most relief for overburdened communities.

It is certainly a good thing if EPA is adopting a sense of urgency in implementing its obligations under CERCLA to address threats to human health and the environment. It has all of the necessary tools already at its command. Let’s see how it goes.

---

[[1]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftnref1) The Task Force evaluation resulted in a 2017 Recommendations Report with five priorities:  (1) expediting remediation; (2) invigorating responsible party cleanup and reuse; (3) encouraging private party investment; (4) promoting redevelopment and community revitalization; and (5) engaging partners and stakeholders.  The Trump Administration appeared to take many of these recommendations to heart, prioritizing, remediating and delisting over 50 sites, entering into aggressive settlements with private parties to fund the work.

[[2]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftnref2) EPA notes that such a provision may be limited by current DOJ policies and a regulation that are now under review at the Department of Justice.

[[3]](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cercla-epa-sharpens-cercla-enforcement-5859476/#_ftnref3) See 310 CMR 40.1400 : Public Involvement- General Approach.

===

===

icn 121

activists Eye a Superfund Reboot Under Biden With a Focus on Environmental Justice and Climate Change

BY: DAVID HASEMYER & LISE OLSEN

The EPA’s program for cleaning up the nation’s hazardous waste dumps has a backlog of sites that lack funding—the largest in 15 years.

==

icn 1020

trump's EPA Claimed 'Success' in Superfund Cleanups—But Climate Change Dangers Went Unaddressed

BY: DAVID HASEMYER, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS AND LISE OLSEN, TEXAS OBSERVER

As work stalled on hardening Superfund sites against climate-related weather extremes, budget cuts continued and a backlog of sites awaiting cleanup ballooned.

=

battered, Flooded and Submerged: Many Superfund Sites are Dangerously Threatened by Climate Change

BY: DAVID HASEMYER, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS, AND LISE OLSEN, TEXAS OBSERVER

The Obama administration directed the EPA to focus on climate-related threats. Now, the Trump administration refuses to even use the word.

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27072020/toxic-superfund-epa-sea-level-rise-climate-change

==

Climate Change Threatens 60% of Toxic Superfund Sites, GAO Finds

:{:{BY: PHIL MCKENNA}:

Hundreds of polluted sites face an increased risk of inundation from sea level rise, flooding exacerbated by global warming, or wildfires, Congress’s watchdog warns. Read More}:

==

thehill

controversial husband and wife political duo is leaving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) D.C. office after nearly two years working there during the Trump administration.

Henry Darwin and his wife Veronica will leave Washington and return to their home state of Arizona, EPA head Andrew Wheeler wrote in an internal announcement sent to staff Friday afternoon obtained by The Hill.

Henry Darwin joined EPA as chief of operations under former Administrator Scott Pruitt and was promoted to deputy administrator under Wheeler last July.

While negotiating his job at EPA in May 2017, Henry Darwin also pitched a role for his wife, who he called a “legitimate environmental professional," according to internal emails obtained by ABC.

"It would help our financial decision immensely," Darwin wrote to EPA Chief of staff Ryan Jackson in the email. "If not out of the question, I would be happy to forward her resume and references (which I would suggest you check - everyone loves her almost as much as I do)."

The former Arizona state official’s wife Veronica Darwin was later hired to be a senior adviser to the administrator for Land and Emergency Management.

Pruitt later came under fire for using his position at EPA to try to get jobs for close acquaintances, including a clerking internship for his daughter at the White House and a job for his wife opening up a Chick-fil-A franchise.

Wheeler in his email Friday said Henry Darwin will be stepping down from his role and will once again take the title of assistant deputy administrator at EPA. In the role he will “concentrate on the deployment of EPA’s Lean Management System (ELMS)” which he will do from Arizona.

“Given the amount of time he already spends traveling to the regional offices to deploy ELMS, his relocation to Phoenix should not impact his ability to help us become even more effective in carrying out our very important mission. In addition, Henry will be here at headquarters on a regular basis,” Wheeler wrote.

Wheeler announced Veronica Darwin left the agency on Aug. 9.

“While at EPA, Veronica managed implementation of the Superfund Task Force recommendations, and led other Administrator priorities like children’s health, and the development of the action plan for lead. These key initiatives will remain Administrator priorities, however Veronica’s leadership will be greatly missed,” wrote Wheeler.

When contacted, EPA did not provide details about the nature of the departures. An EPA spokesperson later hailed Veronica Darwin's 18 years of professional experience.

"Veronica Darwin has spent more than 18 years working extensively on environmental waste issues that included roles as a compliance officer at EPA’s Region 9 office (7 years) and as deputy division director for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s Waste Divisions Program (total of 8 years)," EPA spokesman Michael Abboud said.

"To only refer to her as Henry’s wife does a disservice to Veronica, but the incredible work she has done her whole career."

This story was updated Monday at 11:15 a.m.

===

===

https://weather.com/en-CA/canada/science/news/2017-12-20-epa-scott-pruitt-lean-superfund-sites

Superfund Cleanup Process Raises Questions

By Marcus Stern  

December 20, 2017  

TWC Canada

The Environmental Protection Agency is hoping a business management system can help accelerate cleanup at toxic waste sites across America, but some agency insiders are worried it might also help polluting companies avoid a full cleanup.

Last summer, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt hired government efficiency expert Henry Darwin to instill across the agency a management philosophy called “lean,” pioneered by Toyota to minimize waste on the factory floor.

Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey credits Darwin’s “lean” with transforming his state government by getting it to think of itself as a company focused on its customer.

A training video for Arizona government workers makes clear just who that customer is, and it could raise some eyebrows.

“Let’s say, for example, your job is to write environmental permits,” explains the video’s narrator. “So your widget is a written permit. Who’s your customer? If you think it’s the general public because they benefit from clean air or water you’d be wrong. Who actually needs and uses the permit? It’s the industrial facility that can’t legally operate its business until the permit has been approved.”

Taxpayers might expect agencies such as the EPA to unreservedly safeguard the environment and public health. Nicole Darnall, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, believes the general public is shortchanged when state or federal agencies view themselves as businesses and the industries they regulate as their customers.

“Government’s mission is bigger than delivering a product at the lowest possible price,” she said. “Investors benefit when more products are sold. However, taxpayers do not always benefit when more environmental permits are issued. Some may, but others may not, especially those with autoimmune or respiratory sensitivities.”

The shift in emphasis toward industry concerns has already surfaced at an open-pit sulphur mine in California called Leviathan. The EPA’s remediation project manager there left the agency last summer after she was told that “lean” principles were going to be instilled at the site, requiring her to curb her demands for more access to data about the extent of the pollution, she said.

“I just felt sick to my stomach,” said the former remediation scientist, Lynda Deschambault, who eventually became one of hundreds of EPA employees accepting early retirement packages this year.

BP, the parent of the company responsible for the cleanup, acknowledged that it had proposed “leaning” Leviathan to the EPA in hopes of accelerating progress there.

It is unclear how extensively or quickly “lean” will be implemented at some 1,300 sites that are part of a cleanup program known informally as Superfund. They were placed in the program because they pose a threat to public health and nature. An EPA official in Region 8, which includes the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, said, “We anticipate that this will be rolled down to us next year with some expectations to use 'lean' within the EPA Region 8 Superfund program.” Officials at other regions did not respond to questions about whether there are plans to use “lean” at any of their sites.

The EPA public affairs office repeatedly declined to answer questions for this story. Nor would it provide information or allow interviews of agency employees. Agency officials were approached privately; some agreed to talk on the condition their identities not be disclosed because they do not have permission to speak publicly.

“The No. 1 thing we’re all watching out for is ‘lean’ just a means for them to short circuit health protection,” one employee said.

Darwin didn’t respond to numerous attempts to reach him by email and phone. Under Darwin’s approach, however, the public is viewed as an investor who expects a return on investment in the form of positive outcomes.

Jumpstarting Superfund Cleanups

During the campaign, President Trump vowed to “get rid of” the EPA in almost every form. By selecting Pruitt as its administrator, Trump put the EPA into the hands of a bitter critic who has sued the agency more than a dozen times. Pruitt’s sympathies for the industries the EPA regulates has highlighted a tension inherent in many government activities: how to keep the public safe without unduly disrupting industry.

Pruitt prefers a softer approach to enforcement than former President Obama. Pruitt prefers to guide violators back into compliance rather than hammering them with investigations and fines. He also is considering shifting some of the agency’s enforcement responsibilities to the states, where thin regulator ranks are already overburdened.

Pruitt has also vowed to jumpstart cleanup at many of the more than 1,300 Superfund sites, which include some of the nation’s most toxic landfills, mines and chemical plants posing an immediate threat to public health and the environment. Cleanup at many has been delayed for decades by sharp disagreements over how clean is clean, litigious arguments that pit the bottom line of corporations against the health and well-being of communities.

The promise of an end to decades-long delays might cause many to cheer, environmentalists included. However, Pruitt’s approach – “lean” management practices designed to streamline the drag on businesses and playing a more direct role himself in settling long-running disputes – may give them pause.

A shift in emphasis toward industry concerns has already surfaced at Leviathan Mine, a Superfund sulphur mine nestled in the bucolic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range about 20 miles south of Lake Tahoe.

(Wikimedia Commons)

At a Glance

• EPA insiders are concerned that the streamlining process called "lean" is a cover for polluting companies.
• The customer in this process isn’t who you might think.

For one thing, money won’t be a factor in how Pruitt reinvigorates Superfund. The Trump administration wants to cut the program’s budget by almost a quarter next year from $1 billion to $762 million.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s call for the EPA’s overall budget to be slashed by 30 percent. The EPA recently announced it would not require mining companies to demonstrate they can pay for the cleanup before digging. And in October, Pruitt vowed to repeal a rule limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, assuring Kentucky coal miners, “The war against coal is over.”

These actions have stoked mistrust among stalwarts of environmental protection who believe the EPA is abandoning science in its rush to downsize and deregulate the agency.

“You don’t have EPA anymore,” said Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor who helped reauthorize Superfund as an aide to a New Jersey congressman in 1986. “You have an occupied country, like Poland and France in World War II.”

But the EPA’s new focus on efficiency and streamlining – everything from permits to Superfund sites – has given hope to the industries the EPA regulates.

Jeffrey A. Bolin has been with Michigan-based Dragun Corporation for 28 of its 29 years. The company was founded in 1988 by the-late James Dragun (rhymes with ray gun) after he left his job as a soil chemist with the EPA “because he thought it was shifting from science to being more of a political arm,” according to Bolin.

“Dr. Dragun pushed us that the data and the science drive the decisions and outcomes,” Bolin said. “We’ve been a company that gets in and gets out and lets companies get on with their business. Our clients are the regulated community.”

The EPA’s primary customer is the public, he said, but that industry also is a customer and its needs should be considered, too. “Thus, approval by the EPA is protective of ‘the public’ and serves the ‘other customer’ as well,” he wrote in a follow-up email.

A 2012 report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company said “lean” techniques can help government agencies eliminate “unnecessary touch points and wait times,” improve coordination and standardize work “to reduce variations in processes and performance.”

Bolin is heartened by Pruitt’s vow to break the impasse at Superfund sites.

“My understanding is that Scott Pruitt will have direct involvement with those sites,” said Bolin.

Under the current system, he added, actual cleanup is delayed until there is a final plan in place, which in many cases takes decades because of litigation, the lengthy regulatory process and the EPA’s tendency to get bogged down in minutiae. The EPA is very “process-obsessed,” he added.

Pruitt’s “direct engagement” can resolve these conflicts, Bolin believes.

“That should be a good thing in the big picture of cleaning up the environment and taking care of the most important exposure to human health and the environment,” he said.

It could also mean picking winners and losers in fierce battles over how far contamination extends from a toxic-waste site; frequency, type and duration of monitoring; and how clean a site ultimately must be before it’s deemed to be clean enough.

“If you get a senior person involved from the agency, you get a compromise and more common-sense thinking to get resolutions,” said Matthew Schroeder, a senior environmental engineer at Dragun. “Having Pruitt involved in the decision-making would bring that to some of these sites on the priority list.”

Earlier this month, Pruitt released a list of 21 toxic waste sites in need of “immediate and intense action.” (The Leviathan Mine in California was not among them.) In announcing the list, the EPA said, “The administrator decided his engagement on these specific sites can facilitate substantial progress in the near-term and move the site closer to completion of cleanup.”

Earlier this year, he created a Superfund task force to streamline the cleanup process.

"I have charged the Superfund Task Force staff to immediately and intently develop plans for each of these sites to ensure they are thoughtfully addressed with urgency," Pruitt said in a statement.

After releasing a34-page report with recommendations in July, the task force was turned over to Henry Darwin’s wife, Veronica Garcia, whom Pruitt also hired. Since then, she has been schooling the task force in principles of “lean” management, according to sources within the agency.

'Lean' at Leviathan

One of those Superfund sites is the Leviathan Mine, a 250-acre, open-pit sulfur mine nestled in the bucolic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range about 20 miles south of Lake Tahoe. Mining activities there date to 1863 but ceased in the early 1960s after sulfuric acid oozing from the pit caused substantial ecological damage downstream to tribal and federal lands in Nevada, including recurring fish kills.

In 1977, Atlantic Richfield Company bought the mine. It’s since been turned over to the state of California. But because of ARCO’s prior ownership, it is liable for the cleanup costs of Leviathan. In 2000, BP bought ARCO, acquiring the responsibility for Leviathan as part of the deal. That same year, the EPA made Leviathan a Superfund site, partly at the behest of the Washoe tribe, whose lands in Nevada were contaminated by acid runoff from the mine.

For the past 17 years, Atlantic Richfield – under BP’s management – has been underwriting much of the cleanup effort at Leviathan. Water treatment systems have been installed, reducing much of the acid runoff. But the systems can’t operate during winter because Leviathan is at an elevation of 7,200 feet and subject to the cold and snow. Heavy rain events and snow melts can overwhelm the systems, resulting in sulfuric acid runoff.

Meanwhile, EPA, the tribe and Atlantic Richfield have been haggling over a long-term plan to manage the pollution generated by the site. After 17 years, they are still two years away from coming up with a permanent plan.

A key issue in the final cleanup plan is how far the contamination extends downstream from the mine. The farther it extends, the costlier the ultimate cleanup will be for Atlantic Richfield.

In 2014, the EPA assigned Lynda Deschambault, a chemist with a strong commitment to environmental protection, to be the remediation site manager at Leviathan. Science and a love of nature have guided her work, she said, citing the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generation.”

When she took over the site, she was a 17-year veteran of the EPA. Before that, she had spent 17 years as a chemist and lab director in the environmental laboratory industry.

As part of her duties, she organized meetings with stakeholders, such as the Washoe tribe, and pressed ARCO to share environmental data it was gathering to ensure testing was being done in places of concern to the tribe and other local stakeholders.

This past June, Deschambault went on vacation. When she returned she found her professional world turned upside down, she said, explaining that her supervisor at EPA’s southwestern regional offices told her ARCO had asked the EPA to “lean” cleanup activities at Leviathan.

As part of the “lean” process, her supervisor wanted her to curtail her efforts to get Atlantic Richfield to do additional testing, she said. The supervisor urged her to stop scheduling meetings and requesting information from ARCO workers, she added, and quizzed about her willingness to be more conciliatory toward Atlantic Richfield with an eye toward reaching a quicker final remediation plan.

Fueled by her commitment to science and the land, Deschambault pushed back.

“After a little research, I said, ‘Whoa, this is not appropriate for the scientific risk part that we’re in the middle of. How about if we do that during the remedial design?’ And they were, like, ‘No, we have to do this now.’”

Deschambault argued that Atlantic Richfield needed to collect more data and provide quicker access to the data. To her, that’s the part of the process that needed to be “leaned” – getting the data necessary for a decision and making it available for scrutiny as quickly as possible.

She believed Atlantic Richfield wasn’t testing some areas to keep costs down. She also felt Atlantic Richfield was slow-walking requests to share data.

Now, she felt like her bosses were telling her to roll over for Atlantic Richfield in the name of “lean” management principles.

“I told them I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to cut corners on the scientific assessment part,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘It’s already been decided. And we’re going to bring in another (remediation site manager) with some “lean” experience and have a meeting with you and she’s going to take over.’”

Details of these conversations could not be corroborated. Public affairs officers at the agency’s regional headquarters in San Francisco declined to discuss the matter and officials involved in the conversations did not respond to attempts to reach them.

Instead of rolling over, Deschambault said, she became one of some 400 EPA employees who accepted an early retirement package offered to more than 1,228 senior career agency employees in an effort to slash the agency's workforce. She was replaced, she said, by someone who had worked for 19 years at an environmental engineering consulting firm whose clients included mining companies. That official didn’t respond to inquiries.

BP, in an email reply, said, “We are confident that applying LEAN strategies at Leviathan would accelerate progress on the site and would provide important learnings that could be applied to other sites around the country. Atlantic Richfield is eager to work with the EPA to demonstrate the benefits of a LEAN approach to reach a final remedy that is protective of human health and the environment.”

In early November, Dana Barton, EPA’s regional supervisor for the Leviathan site, traveled from her offices in San Francisco to Gardnerville, Nevada, to meet with representatives of the tribe in its council chambers to explain the “lean” process.

According to several people who participated in the meeting, Barton portrayed the “lean” initiative at Leviathan as arising from an earlier meeting in Washington between Pruitt and representatives of BP. The company wanted to “lean” the site in an effort to facilitate final remedies and Pruitt had agreed, Barton was quoted as saying. Barton didn’t respond to inquiries.

“They weren’t ramming it down our throats,” said one of the local stakeholders. “I was getting ready for that to happen but it didn’t sound like that.” He questioned whether the southwestern regional officials themselves really believed in the approach, saying it sounded like they were being forced to adopt it by officials in Washington.

Nonetheless, he added, he told them “lean” is “a waste of time when we don’t have time to waste.”

In an emailed statement, BP wrote of its subsidiary, “Atlantic Richfield did not discuss the LEAN concept with Administrator Pruitt,” adding instead that “it was initially proposed for Leviathan during a discussion with Region 9” EPA officials, a reference to the southwestern region. BP stressed that ARCO isn’t trying to “avoid or minimize any of the substantive requirements” of the Superfund law.

“The LEAN approach does not result in an outcome that is less protective,” BP said in the statement. “LEAN is about improving process, not changing outcomes. The purpose of LEAN is to streamline activities that are unnecessarily complex or cumbersome in order to reach a beneficial outcome more effectively and efficiently.”

Apparently, that’s not a problem at BP. The company doesn’t use “lean” in its own operations, the company acknowledged in its statement.

Marcus Stern is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported for Copley News Service, ProPublica and The Weather Channel, among other news organizations. He can be reached at marcus.stern@comcast.net.

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/superfund-sites-climate-disaster-2641394009.html

climate crisis has put at least 945 designated toxic waste sites at severe risk of disaster from escalating wildfires, floods, rising seas and other climate-related disasters, according to a new study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), as the AP reported.

The country's most contaminated spots that pose an imminent threat to human health or the environment are designated Superfund sites. That means cleaning them up is a national priority. The EPA has identified more than 500 contaminants at Superfund sites, including arsenic, lead and mercury.

...

However, the GAO found that efforts to secure the toxic waste have weakened as the Trump administration plays down their threat, according to the AP.

Senate Democrats responded to the report in a letter to the EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler demanding an explanation for agency leaders' "failure to embrace addressing climate change as a strategic objective," according to the Washington Post.

"We believe that EPA's refusal to implement GAO's recommendations could result in real harm to human health and the environment as the effects of climate change become more frequent and intense," the lawmakers wrote to Wheeler, as the Washington Post reported.

The GAO report looked at 1,571 Superfund sites and found that six out of 10 are vulnerable to extreme weather caused by the climate crisis. The GAO produced an interactive map that shows each of the 945 vulnerable sites. It is color-coded to show if the site is threatened by wildfires, hurricanes, storm surge, sea-level rise, or coastal and river flooding, as the Verge reported.

The study recommended that the EPA start incorporating the climate crisis into its decision making for toxic waste sites and its risk assessments for the Superfund sites.

The EPA however has continued to deny the climate crisis as a threat to the Superfund sites, according to the GAO report. The EPA does not include the climate crisis in its agency-wide policies, which stops the EPA from tackling the risks at contaminated sites as the planet heats up and extreme weather events increase in frequency, duration and intensity, as Inside Climate News reported.

The EPA issued a statement that was largely dismissive of the report. The statement also managed to avoid mentioning climate change.

"The EPA strongly believes the Superfund program's existing processes and resources adequately ensure that risks and any effects of severe weather events, that may increase in intensity, duration, or frequency, are woven into risk response decisions at non-federal [National Priorities List] sites," EPA Assistant Administrator Peter Wright said in a statement Monday, as the AP reported.

The GAO decided to look into the safety of Superfund sites after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 brought record rains to Houston and caused one toxic site to spring a leak, as BuzzFeed News reported. Floodwaters there eroded an "armored cap" that sealed off dioxins and other toxins linked to cancer and nerve damage. In the wake of the storm, officials tested that water sediment. They found that dioxin levels in the sediment were 2,000 times above what the EPA allows, according to the Houston Chronicle.

"We can no longer ignore the fact that the climate crisis is here and it's in our backyard," Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat and one of the members of Congress that pushed GAO to investigate the issue, said in a statement emailed to BuzzFeed News. "This report underscores that protecting our communities requires us to demand that the EPA incorporates climate change into its cleanup plans for current and future Superfund sites."

The EPA's refusal to take the climate crisis into account has not only angered lawmakers, but also baffled experts.

"The report raises critical issues that are not being addressed," said Nancy Loeb, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law, who was not involved in the GAO study, to the Washington Post. "It's a huge shortcoming not to take climate change into consideration."

no lnx

related/ taGS

EPA: Houston Superfund Site Leaked Toxic Chemicals After Harvey ... ›

Superfund: National Priorities List (NPL) | Superfund | US EPA ›

Floods and firestorms can spread toxins from Superfund sites - The ... ›

Superfund sites in the United States - Ballotpedia ›

Superfund sites warning: At least 60% of Superfund sites vulnerable ... ›

toxics climate crisis public health lead mercury andrew wheeler superfund site chemicals

===

EJ

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/trump-administration-to-house-immigrant-children-by-toxic-dump/

==

===

nader hour corp crime reporter 8/13/18

==

From Dow’s ‘Dioxin Lawyer’ to Trump’s Choice to Run Superfund

By Hiroko Tabuchi and Tryggvi Adalbjornsson

July 28, 2018

The lawyer nominated to run the Superfund toxic cleanup program is steeped in the complexities of restoring polluted rivers and chemical dumps. He spent more than a decade on one of the nation’s most extensive cleanups, one involving Dow Chemical’s sprawling headquarters in Midland, Mich.

But while he led Dow’s legal strategy there, the chemical giant was accused by regulators, and in one case a Dow engineer, of submitting disputed data, misrepresenting scientific evidence and delaying cleanup, according to internal documents and court records as well as interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the project.

The lawyer, Peter C. Wright, was nominated in March by President Trump to be assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency overseeing the Superfund program, which was created decades ago to clean up the nation’s most hazardous toxic waste sites. He is already working at the agency in an advisory role as he awaits congressional approval. If confirmed, Mr. Wright would also oversee the emergency response to chemical spills and other hazardous releases nationwide.

E.P.A. officials pointed to Mr. Wright’s expertise in environmental law and his tenure at Dow as valuable qualifications. The White House on Saturday referred questions to the E.P.A.

He spent 19 years at Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical makers, and once described himself in a court deposition as “the company’s dioxin lawyer.” He was assigned to the Midland cleanup in 2003, and later became a lead negotiator in talks with the E.P.A. It was during his work on the cleanup that the agency criticized Dow for the cleanup delays, testing lapses and other missteps.

Image

Part of the Dow Chemical site in Midland, Mich., in July.CreditLaura McDermott for The New York Times

For more than a century, the Dow complex manufactured a range of products including Saran wrap, Styrofoam, Agent Orange and mustard gas. Over time, Dow released effluents into the Tittabawassee River, leading to dioxin contamination stretching more than 50 miles along the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and into Lake Huron.

Dow, which merged with rival DuPont last year, is among the companies most affected by Superfund cleanups nationwide, E.P.A. data shows. The combined company is listed as potentially having responsibility in almost 14 percent of sites on the E.P.A.’s list of priority Superfund cleanups, or 171 locations nationwide.

Mr. Wright has pledged to recuse himself from cleanups related to his former employer, a move welcomed by even one of the administration’s congressional critics.

Still, his appointment “raises all kinds of red flags, and it makes his job more difficult in the sense that he will be watched every second,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who led the E.P.A. under President George W. Bush and who has criticized the agency under the Trump administration.

In recent months, the E.P.A. under its former chief, Scott Pruitt, has been beset by ethics investigations, and an earlier choice to run the Superfund program, a former banker with no experience in toxic cleanups, ultimately resigned. Mr. Pruitt himself stepped down this month, having launched major regulatory rollbacks at the E.P.A. while striking an industry-friendly stance that his successor,  Andrew Wheeler, is expected to continue.

Dow finally came to terms with the E.P.A. in 2010, during the Obama presidency, and a cleanup is underway that cost Dow $24 million last year. “Peter was notable for his professionalism, candor, cordiality and grace under pressure,” said Leverett Nelson, an E.P.A. regional counsel who worked with Mr. Wright on that agreement.

E.P.A. officials also stressed that Mr. Wright’s recusal wouldn’t restrict him in the job, since he would still be able to work on the vast majority of Superfund sites. They also credited Mr. Wright with helping to hammer out the eventual cleanup agreement in Michigan.

In a statement, a Dow spokeswoman, Rachelle Schikorra, described Mr. Wright as “a highly skilled and conscientious attorney who provided valuable guidance to Dow on environmental compliance matters for almost 20 years.” She said Mr. Wright retired last month and the company had no role in his nomination. Mr. Wright referred all questions to the E.P.A.

Image

The E.P.A. and Mr. Wright’s team at Dow reached an agreement to clean waterways near Midland, Mich., in 2010. River decontamination is progressing, and officials cannot yet say when it will be complete.CreditSammy Jo Hester/Mlive

Biggest Accomplishment

The Superfund program began in 1980 as an ambitious effort to fix thousands of toxic sites — factories, chemical dumps, abandoned mines — left scattered across the American landscape in the age of industrialization. It grapples with profound complexities: Companies disappear or change hands, and the science on toxicity and cleanup methods is often contested, making progress contentious and uncertain.

Mr. Wright, who was on a high-level team at Dow negotiating the Midland cleanup, has pointed to his work on the site as his biggest accomplishment. In a 2017 email to the E.P.A.’s chief of staff, made public last month as part of an environmental group’s lawsuit, Mr. Wright called it “the most controversial matter and the single most publicly successful matter that I have worked on at Dow.”

But the progress came after years of pushback.

In one instance, in 2006, an independent testing company hired to validate Dow’s data on contamination levels rejected the numbers over incomplete information, which increased the risk of “false negatives” that might leave contaminants undetected, according to a deposition given by a technician at the lab in 2008.

The E.P.A. also said in an August 2007 memo that “Dow has frequently provided information to the public that contradicts agency positions, and generally accepted scientific information.” A Dow newsletter mailed to residents in 2004 stated that few health effects were associated with dioxin exposure, citing a health study of Dow workers that the E.P.A. took issue with.

During the years Mr. Wright helped lead the Midland negotiations, the E.P.A. criticized Dow for its slow cleanup. “E.P.A. is concerned with Dow’s lack of progress in addressing the significantly elevated levels of dioxin and furan contamination in the Saginaw Bay watershed,” a separate June 2007 E.P.A. memo stated, referring to two groups of chemicals.

Ms. Schikorra maintained that there was no scientific consensus that dioxin caused adverse health effects in people at today’s environmental levels. She declined to comment on the specifics of the E.P.A.’s other complaints.

Mr. Wright has supporters beyond Dow. A group of environmental lawyers at the American Bar Association, where Mr. Wright was an active member, cited his “well-recognized personal integrity” as exemplifying “the highest standards of the legal profession” in a letter of support sent to the E.P.A. in February.

Along the Tittabawassee River, there was disbelief among some residents that a Dow lawyer who worked on the Midland cleanup was set to take over the Superfund program. “It’s nuts,” said Joel Tanner, a Saginaw resident who is a member of a community group set up by the E.P.A. that advises the cleanup. “Dow are the ones who fought it all the way.”

Image

The convergence of the Shiawassee and Tittabawassee Rivers into the Saginaw River. A nearby site once registered some of the highest dioxin levels recorded downstream from Dow. CreditLaura McDermott for The New York Times

Negotiating the Cleanup

The banks of the Tittabawassee have been home to Dow for decades. Internal documents have suggested that Dow was aware of dioxin’s risks as early as the mid-1960s. In the 1980s, Dow pressured the E.P.A. to change a report that had linked dioxin contamination to Dow’s Midland complex, according to testimony later given by agency officials.

Mr. Wright went to Wabash College in Indiana before graduating from law school at Indiana University. He worked as an environmental lawyer, including seven years at the agrochemical giant Monsanto, before joining Dow in 1999, according to his LinkedIn page. He was assigned to the Midland cleanup in 2003, the year after Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality alerted residents to “the presence of significant concentrations of dioxin” in local soil.

Conflicts with the E.P.A. began early.

In 2004 and 2005, state and federal officials discovered Dow contractors collecting soil samples in the local watershed without telling regulators, which violated a Dow license, according to documents released to a local environmental group, Lone Tree Council, under the Freedom of Information Act. The unauthorized sampling not only prevented regulators from verifying Dow’s results, officials said, but could enable Dow to identify hot spots — high contamination areas — in order to downplay them when designing cleanup plans.

Mr. Wright was one of two Dow representatives on a May 2005 phone call with the E.P.A. and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality instructing the company to abide by the rules. Later, Michigan fined Dow $70,000 for the unauthorized sampling.

Around that time, the E.P.A. became concerned that Dow was presenting misleading scientific evidence. In a memo, it expressed concern over Dow’s newsletter to residents at the time, as well as statements by Dow that wild game — deer, turkey, squirrel — was safe to eat, despite a Dow study showing elevated levels of dioxin in the animals. Michigan’s health department warned people of the risks of eating the meat.

In 2005, Mr. Wright separately wrote about dioxin risk in a legal journal. His article, which appeared in an American Bar Association publication, described dioxin as “highly toxic to a variety of animal species but not to humans.”

In an email, Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, disputed that assertion, saying “it ignores much of what was known and generally accepted by 2005.” The World Health Organization has identified dioxins as carcinogenic to humans, and also links them to reproductive and developmental problems, as well as damage to the immune system.

Mr. Wright also participated in a May 2006 meeting with researchers and regulators about a Dow-funded study at the University of Michigan that eventually found that living on dioxin-contaminated soil was not associated with higher dioxin levels in the body. E.P.A. officials said they believed the study “was initiated at the request of Dow in order to downplay the risks of exposure,” according to an August 2007 memo.

Dow provided a grant of more than $15 million to conduct the study, Ms. Schikorra confirmed. She said Dow was not involved in any aspect of the study.

Image

A warning at the Imerman Memorial Park in Saginaw.CreditLaura McDermott for The New York Times

A Dispute Over Data

Dow’s problems with the independent lab testing company started in 2006.

That year, Priscilla Denney, a senior environmental engineer on Mr. Wright’s team, warned Dow that the company, hired to validate its testing of contaminants, had rejected the company’s data, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit she later filed against the company.

The lab, Project Enhancement Corporation, ended its contract with Dow, citing a “breakdown” in the testing procedure, according to the termination letter it sent to Dow.

In Ms. Denney’s whistle-blower suit, she claimed that the way Dow was submitting data to outside labs for validation had been changed while she was on maternity leave, making it impossible for a third party to check Dow’s results, particularly those that showed no levels of contamination.

But her concerns about Dow’s data were ignored and she was demoted in retaliation, she said. A local court later dismissed the case, saying in part that she did not have standing to sue because she had not reported her concerns outside the company.

The company said at the time that Ms. Denney was wrong and that she had not been demoted. Mr. Wright, in a deposition, said he helped investigate Ms. Denney’s concerns.

Documents show Dow submitted the data to regulators in February 2007 without mentioning the lab dispute. That December, the E.P.A. asked for information on the data dispute, according to emails. A few weeks later, it temporarily broke off negotiations. Mr. Nelson of the E.P.A. said this week that he did not recall Ms. Denney’s concerns affecting the talks.

Ultimately, Mr. Wright’s team reached a cleanup agreement with the E.P.A. in 2010. River decontamination is progressing, although officials cannot yet say when it will be complete.

“The bottom line is that after 35 years, there’s still a mess that needs to be cleaned up,” said Dave Dempsey, an environmental activist who was an adviser in the 1980s to then-Gov. James Blanchard. “Dow has been effective in playing the game.”

Image

Travis Maxson fishing on the Tittabawassee. “I don’t eat anything I catch,” he said, citing concern about dioxin contamination.CreditLaura McDermott for The New York Times

The Legacy in Michigan

As Mr. Wright moves toward a new job in the nation’s capital, he leaves behind a legacy in Michigan.

Today, a picnic bench sits near a stretch of waterfront that was once the site of the highest levels of dioxin contamination found downstream from Dow — 1.6 million parts per trillion, or 1,600 times a federal cleanup standard. Dow has pushed ahead with the cleanup, stabilizing the banks, dredging the river bed and capping contaminated sections with concrete.

Still, there are reminders of the risks. Signs posted along the water warn, “Some fish in the Tittabawassee River have harmful amounts of chemicals.”

“I don’t eat anything I catch,” said Travis Maxson, a restaurant worker who was fishing for bass one weekday from a grassy bank.

Some residents carry with them a lifetime of doubt about choices they made.  Alice Buchalter, a virologist-turned-gymnastics coach, settled with her husband on the Tittabawassee a half-century ago. “We thought that we had moved to paradise,” she said.

Soon after his 70th birthday in 2004, her husband, a physician, was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died just four months later. Shortly before his death, elevated levels of dioxin were found in his blood.

With her background in science, Ms. Buchalter knows it is difficult to link any single case of cancer to a specific cause, and the American Cancer Society maintains that studies have not found a clear link between dioxin and the cancer that killed her husband.

Still, she said, “Maybe we should have been smarter about living three miles down the river from a chemical plant.”

Image

Alice Buchalter lives with doubts about her decision a half-century ago to settle along the Tittabawassee.CreditLaura McDermott for The New York Times

Correction: July 31, 2018

An earlier version of this article included a picture of an industrial site that was identified incorrectly. It showed the Midland Cogeneration power plant in Midland, Mich., not a Dow Chemical site in Midland. It has been removed.

Hiroko Tabuchi is a climate reporter. She joined The Times in 2008, and was part of the team awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She previously wrote about Japanese economics, business and technology from Tokyo.

no lnx

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

}:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/climate/dow-epa-superfund.html

==

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/scott-pruitt-lobbyist-house.html

thehill

Scott Pruitt

once purchased a house from a top lobbyist in Oklahoma with the help of a shell company, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Two business associates involved in the 2003 purchase are now aides to Pruitt at the agency: Kenneth Wagner, a senior adviser at the EPA, and Albert Kelly, who runs the agency's effort to redesign the Superfund program.

According to the Times, the home, which was seen as a prime property because of its proximity to the state Capitol building, was purchased for $375,000 from a retiring telecommunications lobbyist.

But that price was $100,000 less than the lobbyist, Marsha Lindsey, had paid for it just a year before. The shortfall, according to the Times, which examined the records, was picked up by Lindsey's company, telecom giant SBC Oklahoma.

The company, now a subsidiary of AT&T, lobbied on a number of matters including a deregulatory bill that would allow it to raise rates and an effort to reopen a decade-old bribery case. According to the Times, Pruitt sided with the company on both matters.

Pruitt, then a state senator, intended to use the residence as a place to stay while Oklahoma's legislature was in session. During this time he also rented out a room to another Republican state senator, Jim Dunlap.

Wagner, who was a partner at the private legal practice where Pruitt worked, was a co-investor in the shell company that purchased the residence.

Kelly wasn't involved in the shell company but ran the community bank which issued the mortgage for the residence. Kelly was later barred for life from the banking industry by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) because the agency had “reason to believe that [Kelly] violated a law or regulation, by entering into an agreement pertaining to a loan by the Bank without FDIC approval.”

The two now hold top positions at the EPA.

In 2005, the company owned by Wagner and Pruitt sold the residence for $95,000 more than it had paid just two years earlier.

Dunlap told the Times that he had no knowledge that Pruitt had purchased the residence from a lobbyist. He said he was under the impression that Pruitt had purchased it from a group of lawyers.

“This was a place where you slept and had dinner,” Dunlap told the Times. “It was all above board.”

The Oklahoma deal is only the latest in a series of stories raising ethics issues involving Pruitt.

Pruitt was reported earlier this month to have been living in 2017 in a Washington, D.C., condo partly owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist at a rate of just $50 per night, which he and others have insisted was market value.

The EPA chief also came under fire after it was discovered that two top aides received raises after the White House declined to approve the pay hikes.

When asked about the Oklahoma house deal and Pruitt's business relationship with his top appointees, an EPA spokeswoman told the Times that the dealings "were ethical" and that Pruitt's stake in the company "was a simple real estate investment.”

“Mr. Wagner and Mr. Kelly left high-profile positions in law and banking in Oklahoma, to serve in the administration,” the spokeswoman said in an email to the Times.

“They are dedicated EPA employees who have earned the respect and admiration of EPA career employees across the country. They serve the country professionally, and transparently — and are committed to ensuring the programs they work on are successful.”

==

==

hewitt OC pruitt

Washington Post repeatedly allowed Hugh Hewitt to write columns praising Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt without disclosing that Hewitt’s law firm does work before the agency. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt told Media Matters that Hewitt would no longer write about Pruitt. 

Hewitt is a conservative radio host who also works as a host for MSNBC and a contributing columnist for TheWashington Post. Off air, he is a partner at the law firmLarson O’Brien.

That law firm position presents numerous potential and real conflicts of interest for Hewitt’s media roles. Larson O’Brien stated in a May 5, 2017, press release that the firm will be opening a Washington D.C. office and “is currently representing clients before the US Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.” The press release touted Hewitt’s relocation to the Washington area as a reason for the firm to “have a permanent presence in the District”:

Larson O’Brien is currently representing clients before the US Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Larson O’Brien partner Hugh Hewitt recently relocated to the Washington area where he hosts an award winning radio show during the morning drive-time hours. “With Hugh moving to Washington and our significant client work in the Capital, it made sense for us to have a permanent presence in the District,” said Stephen Larson.

Politicoreported on May 7 that Hewitt brokered a meeting between Pruitt and lawyers at Larson O’Brien concerning efforts of the firm’s client Orange County Water District to get the EPA to devote resources to cleaning up a polluted site in the district. From the report, which is based on “emails released by EPA under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club”:

Hewitt, a resident of Orange County whose son James works in EPA’s press office, emailed Pruitt in September to set up a meeting between the administrator and the law firm Larson O’Brien, which employs Hewitt and represents the Orange County Water District. Pruitt had been planning to meet with the lawyers in California a month earlier, but cancelled the trip to undergo knee surgery.

“I’ll join if the Administrator would like me too or can catch up later at a dinner,” Hewitt wrote in his Sept. 18 message. Hewitt added that the issues surrounding the Superfund site were “Greek to me but a big deal in my home county.”

Pruitt’s aides responded within minutes and quickly confirmed an Oct. 18 meeting for the lawyers and a project director.

Six weeks after that meeting, on Dec. 8, the Orange County North Basin site appeared on Pruitt’s list of 21 contaminated areas to address. A month later, Pruitt proposed listing the site on EPA’s National Priorities List, a move that could make it eligible for long-term federal cleanup funding from the federal government if the responsible polluters cannot be identified and forced to pay for its remediation.

Politico noted that Hewitt has been a vocal defender of Pruitt on MSNBC. Several journalists have criticized MSNBC for the blatant conflict of interest; The New York Times’ Michael Barbarotweeted: “Um, it's not okay for a cable news contributor to ask the EPA administrator for favors like this and still be on TV talking about him. At. All. CC: @MSNBC.”

Hewitt’s conflict of interest problem has also extended to The Washington Post, which repeatedly allowed Hewitt to praise the EPA and Pruitt in opinion columns for the paper.

Hewitt himself referenced his work on issues related to the EPA in the Post. On January 4, 2017, he wrote: “I’ve worked for real estate developers on huge projects for three decades. My law practice was built on helping them figure out and comply with complex statutory and regulatory regimes and knowing how the Environmental Protection Agency, Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked.”

The following are instances in which the Postallowed Hewitt to discuss the EPA without disclosing his conflict of interest:

• On January 19, 2017, Hewitt praised President Donald Trump’s nomination of Pruitt, writing, “Discount the rhetoric. ... Pruitt’s not a ‘climate denier.’”
• On March 1, 2017, Hewitt wrote: “Trump’s repeated calls in many places for regulatory reform had been foreshadowed earlier Tuesday with an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency and its new and very able director, Scott Pruitt, to move quickly to roll back the ruinous, overreaching ‘Waters of the United States’ rule of the Obama years.”
• On July 4, Hewitt wrote that Pruitt has become one of “the domestic policy stars of the Trump administration.”
• On August 19, Hewitt called Pruitt and several other Trump administration officials “committed reformers” who “are in strong and stable positions now as staffing of political appointees accelerates.”
• On September 19, Hewitt praised the Trump administration and Pruitt for “pursuing ambitious and much-needed rollback agendas.”
• On February 22, Hewitt wrote: “The United States is out of the one-sided Paris accord while open to steps toward genuine protection of the climate. The EPA is refining its rulemaking process in ways that rule-of-law conservatives hope will conform the agency’s new rules to the designs and ends Congress intended for them, reversing the warped power grabs of the administrative state they had become.”

The Post did not disclose that Hewitt’s firm works on issues related to EPA regulations in those pieces. The paper has also not been consistent in disclosing that Hewitt’s son works for the EPA. According to his LinkedIn page, James Hewittjoined the agency in July 2017. Hewitt's July 4 and September 19 columns disclosed that connection while his August 19 and February 22 columns did not.

In an email to Media Matters, Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt wrote: “I was disturbed to learn this morning that Hugh Hewitt had intervened with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt on behalf of Hewitt’s law firm as he was writing about Pruitt in a column for The Washington Post. Hewitt, who has not written about Pruitt since September, has agreed not to write about him going forward and has assured us that similar incidents won’t occur in the future.”

The Washington Post also employs megalobbyist Ed Rogers as a contributor despite countless conflicts of interest relating to Roger’s lobbying firm. Over the years, the Posthas repeatedly allowed Rogers to tout his clients’ interests without disclosure.

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/09/scott-pruitt-trump-reagan-epa-gorsuch-burford-superfund-scandals

The Environmental Protection Agency's chief, a science skeptic with a taste for luxury goods, entered office hellbent on slashing government red tape — but slowly became embroiled in scandal over alleged mishandling of government funds amid extraordinary efforts to keep the activities of a public agency secret.

Not Scott Pruitt, the Trump administration's current EPA chief: Anne Gorsuch Burford, who ran the EPA under Reagan from 1981 to 1983, and resigned after being cited for contempt of Congress following a scandal involving document shredding, secrecy, and the Superfund.

A year into Pruitt's tenure at EPA, some of the parallels between the two are striking.

Burford (mother of Neil Gorsuch, the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice) came into office in the early 1980s a fierce critic of government regulation, openly antagonistic to environmental laws and the EPA's core mission, bragging that she'd slash clean water regulations down from a six-inch stack to one just a half-inch tall. During her time at EPA, its budget dropped nearly a quarter and, as The New York Times once wrote, she “caused a hemorrhage of its best professional staff.”

Pruitt similarly is known for his hostility to the EPA long before he took office. In January, he touted cutting EPA's staffing to “Reagan-era” levels and hung posters around EPA celebrating plans to scrap the Clean Power Plan (Mother Jones compiled a long list of Pruitt's regulatory rollbacks in areas including: pollution from the oil, gas, and chemical industries; greenhouse gases; pesticides; and smog).

They both slowed the EPA's efforts to enforce America's environmental laws. During Burford's first year, enforcement actions fell 60 percent. For his part, Pruitt has overseen a halving of civil penalties and fines for polluters during his first year, and once inflation is accounted for, penalties on Pruitt's watch have been up to 68 percent lower than under previous administrations.

While Pruitt's science skepticism extends to both climate change and evolution, Burford is best remembered for her rejection of the science on tobacco, once famously smoking Marlboro cigarettes during a meeting with environmentalists on carcinogens. Burford, who died of cancer at age 62, was a two-pack-a-day smoker when she ran Reagan's EPA.

Pruitt's climate skepticism took on a similar indifference to risks when he recently questioned whether climate change is “necessarily a bad thing.” In a February 6 television interview, he asked: “Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or the year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

(For the record, scientists predict that climate change will bring with it sea level rise that could leave cities and entire nations underwater, severe storms, drought, wildfires, wildlife extinctions, and a long list of other harms).

Burford's taste for luxury goods remains a memorable part of her public image — she's often described as favoring fur coats; for Pruitt, it's first-class travel (the difference being that Pruitt's airborne extravagances are on the taxpayers' dime).

Keeping the Public Out

Both Burford and Pruitt have made headlines for their approach to secrecy at the EPA. Burford famously refused to hand over Superfund records to Congress, at the direction of President Reagan. The agency later admitted it had shredded documents in a scandal that ultimately cost Burford her job.

She remained brazenly unrepentant. In 1982, immediately after being cited for contempt and facing the possibility of up to a year in jail, Burford told reporters: ''What happened tonight, if pursued to its conclusion, wouldn't do anything. It would not produce the documents, it would not decide the issue of separation of powers. It would only send me to jail for a much-needed rest.''

While Pruitt isn't accused of shredding documents or potentially criminal activity, his approach to government transparency ranges from simply hostile to downright bizarre.

Federal law requires EPA to allow the public to access many EPA records — but Pruitt's EPA has left 94 percent of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests still waiting for processing, an analysis by the Project on Government Oversight revealedlast month.

“The FOIA process isn’t optional,” Sen. Tom Carper wrote in an email to Politico, responding to those findings. “The American people are entitled to know what government officials, including Mr. Pruitt, are doing with their time and taxpayer money.”

A record number of lawsuits have been filed against Pruitt's EPA over its response (or non-response) to FOIA requests, with 46 lawsuits launched in 2017, more than double the previous record. While the EPA has blamed a backlog left by the Obama administration for delays, watchdogs say that Pruitt's EPA has refused to make public information that's normally readily available, like the Administrator's schedule and travel records, forcing journalists to file FOIA requests to access basic information.

Watchdog groups are also pursuing a lawsuit against Pruitt's EPA for failing to keep records required by law. In one case, EPAsaid it had kept no notes on its deliberations as it wrote a roughly 36-page report on recommendations for the Superfund program, which the groups argue violates public record-keeping laws.

Pruitt's personal secrecy and security measures are even more unusual. In September, the Washington Post reported that Pruitt spent $25,000 in taxpayer money on a “secure, soundproof communications booth.” He dropped another $15,780 on high-tech locks and alarms for his office (prior agency chiefs say they kept their doors unlocked). But it's his personal security detail and his first-class flights that have run up the costliest tab for American taxpayers.

Pruitt took members of EPA's law enforcement team — formerly chasing criminal polluters — and turned them into his own personal round-the-clock security detail. He brings them with him on his travels both domestic and international. Other recent EPA chiefs have used security details when they traveled, but the 24-hour team is a first. Pruitt has argued that his first-class flights are for unspecified “security” reasons (Time headlined its coverage: “EPA Head Says He Needs to Fly First Class Because People Are Mean to Him in Coach”).

It's not just the airfare that's expensive for taxpayers. An E&E investigation found that Pruitt's security detail ran up a tab of $832,735.40 in salary and travel costs — in just three months.

His security expenses have also raised ethics concerns. On Tuesday, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Tom Carper (D-DE) wrote to the EPA, demanding documents related to a contractor hired to sweep Pruitt's office for electronic surveillance and describing their concern that the $3,000 contract may have breached federal conflict of interest rules.

Superfund

Government secrecy isn't only worrisome because, at least in theory, a democracy should be answerable to the people — the information that U.S. agencies hold can be extremely valuable.

In February, Ryan Zinke's Interior Department lost two senior U.S. Geological Survey officials after they resigned, citing a request by Zinke for confidential and commercially valuable oil and gas data before it was publicly available. “These assessments have the potential to move markets in a big way,” Kate Kelly, a former Interior Department official, toldMother Jones.

Which brings us back to the Superfund program, which is tasked with cleaning up America's most polluted sites and last year had a budget of $1.1 billion in appropriations. The program also has been hit with a series of scandals on Pruitt's watch.

In January, an Associated Press investigation found that Pruitt's EPA had been lauding cleanups at seven contaminated sites as Trump-era successes — but that the actual work at those sites had been “completed years before Pruitt was confirmed as the agency's chief.” The program is run by Albert “Kells” Kelly, a close friend of Pruitt and, as The Intercept reported in December, a banker who was banned for life from the banking industry. Kelly came under fire last month over his investments in fossil fuel companies, including Phillips 66, which is partly responsible for cleanup of Superfund sites in Oregon and Louisiana.

Under Burford, Superfund became one of EPA's most controversial programs for very different reasons. Democrats suspected that her EPA was only funding clean-up work in districts where Republicans were up for re-election. With Reagan's backing, Burford refused to hand over Superfund documents to Congress, claiming executive privilege and touching off a major battle between the branches of government.

A look back at history highlights the importance of the House of Representatives in preventing public corruption by agency heads. In late 1982, Burford became the first cabinet-level official ever cited for contempt of Congress, after she refused to turn over Superfund documents that the House had demanded. She resigned roughly three months later (an event followed by more scandal over whether Reagan's Justice Department had improperly refused to pursue jail time or a fine against its former EPA chief).

This week, an effort by House Democrats to bar Pruitt from flying first class was blocked by Congressional Republicans. But if control of the House shifts following mid-term elections, it's likely Pruitt would face a less friendly Congress as his second year at the EPA concludes.

Burford's legacy at EPA not only included a Colorado Superfund site that likely was prevented from receiving funding for cleanup due to political reasons, but also a mass resignation of roughly 20 EPA officials caught up in the scandals. One of her subordinates wound up serving a six month sentence for perjury.

It's still too early to know whether any parallels between Pruitt and Burford will continue — it's entirely possible that Pruitt could be cleared in the ongoing investigations and prevail in the lawsuits against his agency. The Trump administration also brings a level of unpredictability unmatched in the Reagan era.

But if Pruitt continues along the path Burford blazed, he may not like where that trail leads.

TAGS:

Scott Pruitt

Donald Trump

EPA

Anne Burford

Anne Gorsuch

US Environmental Protection Agency

Ronald Reagan

==

capt maIN 3/18 not complete?

===

mod is sorta metaphorical, but is a kind of corrrection/balance, repair of commons

defunded in 90's

pruitt swamp things

---

===

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/24/donald-trumps-pick-for-epa-enforcement-office-was-a-lobbyist-for-superfund-polluters/

RESIDENTS OF HOOSICK FALLS, New York, recently took comfort in EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s announcements that the agency will be prioritizing the Superfund program. This small village northeast of Albany is one of eight sites the EPA last year proposed adding to the National Priorities List, as the list of polluted sites covered by the Superfund is known, because the community’s drinking water had elevated levels of PFOA, which has been associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, and thyroid disease, among other health problems.

Since the contamination was discovered in 2014, “there’s been a lot of fear,” said Rob Allen, the mayor of Hoosick Falls. Testing has shown many people in Hoosick Falls, including Allen’s four children, have elevated levels of PFOA in their blood. Allen and others in the town are still awaiting the official Superfund designation, which they hope will help speed the process of cleaning up the pollution and securing a new water source. “We need all the help we can get,” he explained.

Since 1980, Superfund has been the federal government’s answer to the worst cases of toxic pollution. The program assesses giant environmental messes, ranks them according to the hazard they pose to the environment or human health, and if they’re dangerous enough, adds them to the list and arranges to clean them up. At its best, Superfund removes environmental pollution so sites can be used again and measurably alleviates health dangers. According to one 2011 study published in the American Economic Review, babies living near Superfund sites that had yet to be remediated had a 20 to 25 percent increased rate of birth defects. After the cleanups, the rates of birth defects dropped.

But Superfund’s progress has slowed to a near halt in recent years, in part due to a lack of funding. A tax on polluting industries originally paid into a fund for the cleanups (hence the name Superfund) expired in 1995, leaving regular taxpayers to pick up the tab when the government can’t identify a polluter — or when a polluter doesn’t have enough money to pay.

Since then, as fewer cleanups have been completed, the number of people exposed to dangerous pollution has climbed. In 2010, there were 75 Superfund sites where the government had yet to bring toxic exposure to humans under control. By last year, that number was up to 121, according to the most recent EPA data.

[

The Hoosic River runs through the village of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., on Jan. 21, 2016.

 ]

Pruitt announced his plans to emphasize Superfund on a visit to a lead-contaminated public housing site in Indiana in April. On May 22, he reiterated his commitment to the program by announcing a new Superfund Task Force, which will “provide recommendations on how the EPA can streamline and improve the Superfund program.” In an accompanying memo, the EPA administrator once again promised to restore Superfund and the EPA’s land and water cleanup efforts “to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.”

But Pruitt’s pledges to protect human health and the environment by focusing on Superfund are belied by his own priorities and personnel choices for the program. One of the administrator’s stated goals for Superfund, to reduce “the administrative and overhead costs and burdens borne by parties remediating contaminated sites,” is shared by groups responsible for the pollution, including the Federal Recycling and Remediation Coalition, a group of companies and trade associations that may be directly affected by EPA’s cleanup rules.

On May 15, the lobbying firm Barnes & Thornburg LLP submitted specific ideas on behalf of FRRC. Among their suggestions: limiting EPA’s review of materials at each stage of a Superfund cleanup; eliminating a requirement that recyclers must notify recipients about chemical constituents in recycled materials; and rescinding a rule restricting the burning of certain paints and solvents.

Albert Kelly, whom Pruitt announced May 22 as his choice to chair the Superfund Task Force, is an Oklahoma banker who has no prior experience with the program or with environmental issues at all, according to his résumé. Kelly, who has donated twice to Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma, has spent the past 33 years working at Spiritbank, which is headquartered in Tulsa, and most recently served as its chairman. The “core competencies” listed on his résumé, which The Intercept obtained by FOIA, include motivational speaking, business development, and “political activity.”

Meanwhile, Susan Bodine, whom Trump nominated on May 12 to be assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, does have plenty of experience with environmental issues — though most of it representing polluting industries. According to her LinkedIn account, from 2009 until 2015, Bodine was a partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the same firm that is representing FRRC, the group of industries directly affected by EPA cleanup rules. While at Barnes & Thornburg, Bodine represented the American Forest and Paper Association from 2011 to 2014. Member companies in that industry group have hundreds of EPA enforcement actions against them, including violations of the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.

Bodine’s close ties to these companies make her a poor choice to lead the enforcement office, according to Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. “She is the classic revolving door appointment,” said O’Donnell. “The office of enforcement is responsible for everything — clean air, clean water, toxic waste — the core of our environmental protections. Companies will cut corners if they think they won’t get caught.” Bodine’s nomination comes while the Trump administration is blocking efforts to disclose waivers granted to former lobbyists working in federal agencies and the White House.

Because the enforcement office handles negotiations between the companies responsible for the pollution and the EPA, Bodine would be in a position to decide how extensive some cleanups are — and how much polluters have to spend cleaning them.

Bodine’s past lobbying could also compromise her role with the Superfund program. Seven of the companies that belong to the American Forest and Paper Association are named as responsible parties in dozens of Superfund sites, according to the EPA website. International Paper, one member of the group Bodine represented — whose CEO met with Pruitt last week to discuss jobs, according to a tweet from Pruitt — is a responsible party in 12 Superfund sites.

===

===

MAIN capt 318

broken 3/18 ?  ...RESIDENTS OF HOOSICK FALLS, New York, recently took comfort in EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s announcements that the agency will be prioritizing the Superfund program. This small village northeast of Albany is one of eight sites the EPA last year proposed adding to the National Priorities List, as the list of polluted sites covered by the Superfund is known, because the community’s drinking water had elevated levels of PFOA, which has been associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, and thyroid disease, among other health problems.

Since the contamination was discovered in 2014, “there’s been a lot of fear,” said Rob Allen, the mayor of Hoosick Falls. Testing has shown many people in Hoosick Falls, including Allen’s four children, have elevated levels of PFOA in their blood. Allen and others in the town are still awaiting the official Superfund designation, which they hope will help speed the process of cleaning up the pollution and securing a new water source. “We need all the help we can get,” he explained.

Since 1980, Superfund has been the federal government’s answer to the worst cases of toxic pollution. The program assesses giant environmental messes, ranks them according to the hazard they pose to the environment or human health, and if they’re dangerous enough, adds them to the list and arranges to clean them up. At its best, Superfund removes environmental pollution so sites can be used again and measurably alleviates health dangers. According to one 2011 study published in the American Economic Review, babies living near Superfund sites that had yet to be remediated had a 20 to 25 percent increased rate of birth defects. After the cleanups, the rates of birth defects dropped.

But Superfund’s progress has slowed to a near halt in recent years, in part due to a lack of funding. A tax on polluting industries originally paid into a fund for the cleanups (hence the name Superfund) expired in 1995, leaving regular taxpayers to pick up the tab when the government can’t identify a polluter — or when a polluter doesn’t have enough money to pay.

Since then, as fewer cleanups have been completed, the number of people exposed to dangerous pollution has climbed. In 2010, there were 75 Superfund sites where the government had yet to bring toxic exposure to humans under control. By last year, that number was up to 121, according to the most recent EPA data.

[

The Hoosic River runs through the village of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., on Jan. 21, 2016.

 ]

Pruitt announced his plans to emphasize Superfund on a visit to a lead-contaminated public housing site in Indiana in April. On May 22, he reiterated his commitment to the program by announcing a new Superfund Task Force, which will “provide recommendations on how the EPA can streamline and improve the Superfund program.” In an accompanying memo, the EPA administrator once again promised to restore Superfund and the EPA’s land and water cleanup efforts “to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.”

But Pruitt’s pledges to protect human health and the environment by focusing on Superfund are belied by his own priorities and personnel choices for the program. One of the administrator’s stated goals for Superfund, to reduce “the administrative and overhead costs and burdens borne by parties remediating contaminated sites,” is shared by groups responsible for the pollution, including the Federal Recycling and Remediation Coalition, a group of companies and trade associations that may be directly affected by EPA’s cleanup rules.

On May 15, the lobbying firm Barnes & Thornburg LLP submitted specific ideas on behalf of FRRC. Among their suggestions: limiting EPA’s review of materials at each stage of a Superfund cleanup; eliminating a requirement that recyclers must notify recipients about chemical constituents in recycled materials; and rescinding a rule restricting the burning of certain paints and solvents.

Albert Kelly, whom Pruitt announced May 22 as his choice to chair the Superfund Task Force, is an Oklahoma banker who has no prior experience with the program or with environmental issues at all, according to his résumé. Kelly, who has donated twice to Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma, has spent the past 33 years working at Spiritbank, which is headquartered in Tulsa, and most recently served as its chairman. The “core competencies” listed on his résumé, which The Intercept obtained by FOIA, include motivational speaking, business development, and “political activity.”

Meanwhile, Susan Bodine, whom Trump nominated on May 12 to be assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, does have plenty of experience with environmental issues — though most of it representing polluting industries. According to her LinkedIn account, from 2009 until 2015, Bodine was a partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, the same firm that is representing FRRC, the group of industries directly affected by EPA cleanup rules. While at Barnes & Thornburg, Bodine represented the American Forest and Paper Association from 2011 to 2014. Member companies in that industry group have hundreds of EPA enforcement actions against them, including violations of the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.

Bodine’s close ties to these companies make her a poor choice to lead the enforcement office, according to Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. “She is the classic revolving door appointment,” said O’Donnell. “The office of enforcement is responsible for everything — clean air, clean water, toxic waste — the core of our environmental protections. Companies will cut corners if they think they won’t get caught.” Bodine’s nomination comes while the Trump administration is blocking efforts to disclose waivers granted to former lobbyists working in federal agencies and the White House.

Because the enforcement office handles negotiations between the companies responsible for the pollution and the EPA, Bodine would be in a position to decide how extensive some cleanups are — and how much polluters have to spend cleaning them.

Bodine’s past lobbying could also compromise her role with the Superfund program. Seven of the companies that belong to the American Forest and Paper Association are named as responsible parties in dozens of Superfund sites, according to the EPA website. International Paper, one member of the group Bodine represented — whose CEO met with Pruitt last week to discuss jobs, according to a tweet from Pruitt — is a responsible party in 12 Superfund sites.< [bunch of tweet code]  Bodine also lobbied for Saint-Gobain Containers, a division of Saint-Gobain, one of two companies blamed for contaminating the drinking water in Hoosick Falls, New York. She represented the company from 2010-2014 while she was a partner at Barnes & Thornburg.

That connection would make it inappropriate for her to weigh in on a decision about Hoosick Falls, according to Judith Enck, the former EPA regional administrator for region 2, who oversaw EPA’s work at Hoosick Falls before stepping down in January.

“Once you’ve represented a company, even if it’s not directly on PFOA, you should recuse yourself because there’s the appearance — and likely the actuality — that there’s a conflict of interest,” said Enck.

In a written statement provided to The Intercept, Saint-Gobain emphasized that it does not want its property in Hoosick Falls to be designated a Superfund site.

Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics opposes the proposed listing of our McCaffrey Street facility in Hoosick Falls, New York, on the National Priorities List. In our view, the Hazard Ranking System score for the site is based upon several errors and unsound assumptions that result in a far higher ranking than actual conditions at the site merit. We have made good progress with the State of New York in remediating the facility and the potentially impacted water supply wells around it, thereby eliminating any potential health or environmental hazards. Further involvement from the Federal Government, if confirmed as an NPL site, could potentially slow this effort.

It’s important to remember that Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics is not a chemical company. We do not and never have manufactured PFOA. The PTFE we use comes from suppliers who in the past incorporated PFOA into some of their products. These suppliers and the US EPA forged an agreement to eliminate PFOA by 2016 in order to reduce the impact on the environment. Despite this, because we are an integral part of the communities where we operate, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics has paid for bottled water for affected residents, funded engineering design studies, and funded granular activated carbon (GAC) filtration systems and Point-of-Entry (POET) filtration systems where applicable.

Susan Bodine, Albert Kelly, International Paper, the American Forest and Paper Association, and the EPA did not respond to requests for comment.

Enck, who said that a federal Superfund designation would help delineate the plume of underground contamination in Hoosick Falls and bring additional resources to the cleanup, is also concerned because the final decision about the proposed Superfund sites, which was expected in March, is overdue. “Every expectation is that the Saint-Gobain site will be listed,” she said. “But we cannot rest easy until it happens.” If she is confirmed, Bodine could potentially have a say about the site’s designation, according to Enck.

“A senior EPA official is always able to weigh in on important agency decisions,” said Enck. “She would likely be in the room when the future of the Saint-Gobain site is discussed.”

Other EPA watchers are more concerned about Pruitt’s ability to fulfill his promise to improve the program with fewer resources. “The real threat right now is funding,” said Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. Trump’s budget, released yesterday, calls for cutting the EPA by 31 percent — more than any other agency. The White House document proposed cutting about 30 percent of the Superfund program’s almost $1.1 billion budget, which is itself a reduction from about $2 billion in 1999, according to a 2015 GAO Report.

In testimony before a Senate hearing on Superfund in 2014, Bodine said she didn’t think most problems with the program were due to funding. Instead, she blamed some of the delays in cleanups on community members who block access to sites. “If the agency can’t get access to the site, they can’t do the cleanup,” she said, adding that she believed the agency was doing its best.

A confirmation hearing for Susan Bodine is expected shortly and the new Superfund Task Force is due to issue its recommendations by the end of June.

==

... tout record eg ~ cpp

Only one of the five items on Pruitt's list sounds like an achievement on behalf of the environment and human health: "Cleaning up contaminated sites."

He's referring to EPA's Superfund program. Despite his rhetoric, Pruitt showed his true commitment to cleaning up the most polluted communities in the nation when he picked his friend and former banker, Albert "Kell" Kelly, to run the Superfund Task Force. Kelly has zero experience in the areas of environmental cleanups, policy, science or law and federal banking regulators have banned him for life from working in the banking industry.

Among Pruitt's other "achievements" are gutting a critical program to curb industrial and agricultural pollution in streams, which an EWG analysis found could imperil the drinking water for up to 117 million Americans.

"On behalf my colleagues in the environmental community, I express my sympathy to the dedicated EPA staffers who have to walk by Pruitt's banners every day," said Cook. "I guess he didn't want to fall behind Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke in the self-aggrandizing flag competition."

EWG has come up with its own list of the most significant "achievements" of Pruitt's first year....

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/pruitt-doj-funding-2490534277.html

Pruitt Threatens to Cut Funds for DOJ Environmental Litigation, Spends $58K on Taxpayer-Funded Flights

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt—who made a career out of suing the agency he now heads over clean air, water and climate safeguards—is trying to stop the enforcement of existing pollution-control laws by cutting off major funding for the Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD), the New York Times reported.

According to the Times:[?]

[ENRD] lawyers handle litigation on behalf of the E.P.A.'sSuperfund programseeking to force polluters to pay for cleaning up sites they left contaminated with hazardous waste. The E.P.A. reimburses the Justice Department for that work, paying more than $20 million annually in recent years, or enough for 115 full-time employees, budget documents show.

But Mr. Pruitt has signaled that he wants to end those payments, potentially carving a major hole in the division's budget, in a little-noticed line in the E.P.A.'s budget proposal in the spring.

Notably, Pruitt said that cleaning Superfund sites was a priority. He said in July, "There is nothing more core to the Agency's mission than revitalizing contaminated land."

Since taking the job, Pruitt has made several moves to suspend environmental regulations, including protections against toxic wastewater, oil and gas pollution as well as climate pollution. The conservative Republican has close ties to the fossil fuel industry and infamously denies that carbon dioxide is a "primary contributor" to climate change.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported another instance of the EPA boss using taxpayer money for his own interests—he spent $58,219.19 on four military and private flights between February and August.

The most expensive was a $36,069 trip on June 7. Pruitt and several staff members traveled from Andrews Air Force Base to Cincinnati to join President Trump, the Post reported, citing congressional oversight committee records.

"When the administrator travels, he takes commercial flights," EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told the paper, adding that the administrator is the face of the agency and has an obligation to get around the country.

The EPA inspector general is already investigating the former Oklahoma Attorney General's frequent trips back to his home state amid speculation that Pruitt is really focused on a future run for Oklahoma senator or governor. Records show that the administrator's airfare for these trips cost more than $12,000, with most of that covering travel to and from Oklahoma.

Earlier this week, the Post reported that the EPA spent nearly $25,000 to construct a soundproof communications booth in the administrator's office.

Additionally, Pruitt has enlisted an 18-member security detail, costing the EPA $832,735.40 in the first quarter of 2017, records published by E&E News show.

==

===

http://www.alternet.org/environment/protecting-superfunds-polluter-must-pay

It has been almost 40 years since the nation heard the cries for help from Love Canal, where a school and neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic dump filled with 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children were sick, parents were scared and families lost their homes.

I know, because my children, my family and my home were among them.

The Love Canal crisis created public awareness and a scientific understanding that the chemicals people are exposed to in their everyday environment can cause serious harm to their health, especially to pregnant women and young children.

This understanding of the serious risks of living near pollution was the impetus to creating the Superfund program in 1980. The program gives communities power to hold corporations responsible for cleaning up contamination. Today, a pending action by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt threatens to strip that power away.

That’s why on Tuesday, a People’s Task Force on the future of the Superfund program released a series of recommendations to, as the task force puts it, “place public health as a priority” over “private interests and money.” The task force is comprised of representatives of 25 Superfund sites and 70 environmental organizations..

The cornerstone of the Superfund program is the “polluter pays” principle.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill knowing that other sites similar to Love Canal would have immediate resources to reduce and eliminate people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. It worked well for 20 years under presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush and Clinton, who all supported the program and the tax that funded it.

Then in 1995, Congress allowed the tax to expire, and by 2003, the entire financial burden of cleaning up the worst orphan toxic sites fell to the taxpayers. As a result, the number of toxic sites cleaned up went from an average of 85 a year down to as few as eight a year today.

Pruitt says Superfund is his priority. As the “mother of Superfund,” as I am often called, I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m terrified.

How can Pruitt call Superfund a priority if he’s proposing cutting the program’s budget by $330 million without advocating for the polluters’ tax to be reinstated?

There are 1,300 sites on the Superfund list. Of those, 121 sites don’t have human exposure to toxic contaminants under control. There are another 187 sites where groundwater migration of waste isn’t under control.

Nearly 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site; 46 percent are people of color and 15 percent live below the poverty line.

Pruitt is forming a special Superfund task force, but his directive sounds eerily like a plan to expand the Superfund Alternatives program, and that would be a disaster.

Superfund Alternatives removes mandatory citizen participation and access to information and resources provided by Superfund. Under the program, technical assistance grants that allow citizens to hire their own experts to review data and plans are awarded by the polluter rather than the EPA.Under Superfund Alternatives, responsible parties agree to clean up a site to avoid the stigma of being listed on the National Priority List. The program benefits the polluter while punishing the victims. It gives power to corporations, takes it away from communities harmed by the toxic sites, and weakens EPA oversight.

The alternative approach also allows a company to avoid flagging a National Priority List site as a liability in its financial papers. This can have a significant impact, especially if the company is being sold.

If the polluter is cleaning up the site under Pruitt’s watch, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the cleanup will be as minimal as possible. The result will be partially cleaned-up sites being used for other purpose—and on a path back to where we started 40 years ago.

Institutional controls were supposed to prevent land that is too contaminated for residential use from ever being used for homes and schools. At Love Canal, those institutional controls failed in the 1950s to stop construction of the 99th Street School.

Under Pruitt’s direction, families like those recently evacuated from contaminated public housing in East Chicago, Indiana, might still be there, getting sicker.

If Pruitt truly wants to protect people around Superfund sites, his first steps should be to advocate for reinstating the “polluter pays” tax to provide funds to adequately clean up sites.

He should hold polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for cleanup costs and collect triple damages from polluters who force EPA to go to court. He should also continue the technical assistance grants that provide communities with the information they need to understand their cleanup options.

Pruitt must protect the power of communities to hold polluters responsible, because after 40 years, it is painfully clear that we can’t count on corporations.

Lois Gibbs is the founder and executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ).

===

==

superfund regs led to frack water fail?

CF Correction: epa blew frack call b/c bound by superfund regs? nb desmog role

Back in 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a startling announcement, shaking up the battle over fracking in one of the nation’s highest-profile cases where drillers were suspected to have caused water contamination.

Water testing results were in for homeowners along Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, where for years, homeowners reported their water had turned brown, became flammable or started clogging their well with “black greasy feeling sediment” after Cabot Oil and Gas began drilling in the area. The EPA seemed to conclude the water wasn’t so bad after all.

“The sampling and an evaluation of the particular circumstances at each home did not indicate levels of contaminants that would give EPA reason to take further action,” EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a press release.

The drilling industry crowed. “The data released today once again confirms the EPA’s and DEP’s [Department of Environmental Protection] findings that levels of contaminants found do not possess a threat to human health and the environment,” Cabot said in a statement.

“It’s obviously very good news for the folks who actually live there and pretty squarely in line with what we’ve known up there for a while now,” Energy in Depth told POLITICOPro. “It’s not very good news for the out-of-state folks who have sought to use Dimock as a talking point in their efforts to prevent development elsewhere, but I’m sure they’ll be working hard over the weekend to spin it differently, notwithstanding the pretty clear statement made by EPA today.”

Now, a newly published report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry(ATSDR), part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), puts EPA’s testing results into an entirely new light.

The water was not safe to drink after all, the ATSDR concluded, after a lengthy review of the same water testing results that EPA used back in 2012.

“ATSDR found some of the chemicals in the private water wells at this site at levels high enough to affect health (27 private water wells), pose a physical hazard (17 private water wells) or affect general water quality so that it may be unsuitable for drinking,” the ATSDR’s health consultation—launched in 2011 and published May 24—concludes.

The new report lists 10 contaminants, including arsenic, lithium and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether, that are “chemicals of health concern,” at the levels found in Carter Road wells, found that five homes were at “immediate risk of fire or explosion” because of methane in their water and another dozen showed lower, but still worrisome, levels of methane and found that the water was laced with elevated levels of metals, salts and total dissolved solids.

The underlying data isn’t new to the residents of Carter Road. The EPA provided it to them individually back in 2012, which is why the EPA’s announcement that the water was safe was so baffling at the time.

“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet—I’m over the thresholds—and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” Nolan Scott Ely, one of the Carter Road homeowners, told ProPublica when EPA made its announcement. “I’m confused about the whole thing … I’m flabbergasted.”

Opposite Conclusions?

So how could two different agencies look at the exact same data and come to opposite conclusions?

“Although the same data set was used, the EPA as a regulatory agency specifically looked at whether or not it was required to take action under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as Superfund, which governs responses to environmental emergencies,” StateImpact, a National Public Radio project, explained. “The ‘health consultation’ looked at the entire data set from a public health standpoint, assessing whether or not it was safe to drink the water.”

In other words, EPA’s findings, which seemed to show that the water was “safe” and which were promoted by drillers as proof that nothing was wrong in Dimock, instead represented a very carefully parsed legal finding that the water did not reach Superfund levels of contamination for the specific substances EPA focused on.

And the EPA’s 2012 findings had left out some of the very contaminants that had caused locals the most concern—including the natural gas or methane, itself. “EPA’s investigation does not include an evaluation of the risk posed by elevated levels of methane—which continue to exist in some homes in Dimock—and which, at extreme levels and if unaddressed, can lead to explosions,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Kate Sinding wrote in a blog post at the time.

The EPA’s strained official interpretation of the data perhaps shows why EPA staff remained concerned even after the agency dropped its Dimock investigation in July 2012, just months after its testing results had been announced in March and April.

In 2013, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that EPA’s own staff had disagreed with the agency’s public statements that the water shouldn’t be considered hazardous. An internal EPA Powerpoint presentation, later obtained and published by DeSmog, showed that agency scientists had concluded that the drilling and fracking process “apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.”

The ATSDR’s new report very specifically notes that it does not look at whether the water hazards stem from drilling or pre-date Cabot’s arrival in the area. In part, that’s because of a lack of pre-drilling testing for gas and other common fracking-related chemicals in the water. “It is important to note that methane was not assessed in residential water wells prior to the initiation of natural gas drilling activities in the Dimock area,” the ATSDR wrote.

Cabot Oil and Gas emphasized their belief that methane in the water was “naturally occurring” and pre-dated their arrival in a statement provided to StateImpact. “This data is consistent with thousands of pages of water data collected by both Cabot and the Pennsylvania DEP and does not indicate that those contaminants detected have any relationship to oil and gas development in Dimock,” Cabot said.

The ATSDR report does often note when substances discovered in the Carter Road water are known to be associated with hydraulic fracturing or drilling industry activities, but does not reach any conclusions about whether the chemicals came from Cabot’s operations.

“It’s not their job to look at who caused whatever contamination there is,” Bryce Payne, a Pennsylvania environmental scientist, told E&E News. “It’s their job to see if there are health implications. They did that and concluded there are health implications.”

The new report is also limited to data from four years ago—and conditions have changed, the ATSDR noted, in part because a state moratorium on fracking along Carter Road was briefly lifted after the EPA dropped its investigation and locals quickly reported more changes to their water, including higher levels of methane.

Cabot Oil Settles

In August 2012—right around the time that EPA abandoned its investigation—Cabot Oil and Gas announced it had settled the vast majority of lawsuits against it by Carter Road residents for an undisclosed amount of money and under terms that barred the plaintiffs from speaking negatively about their experiences with the company.

This March, a federal jury handed down a $4.24 million verdict to the remaining two Carter Road families, concluding that the water was in fact contaminated because of the negligence of the drilling company. Cabot has begun the process of appealing that verdict.

But while the legal filings and agency reports continue to stack up, the problem on Carter Road remains the same as it has for many years now.

While those who settled with Cabot had water treatment systems installed by the company, locals familiar with those systems say that even the treated water seems too contaminated to drink and the water treatment systems break down frequently.

The ATSDR’s report provides recommendations that water should have been treated to address dangerous contamination levels—but those recommendations are not binding and the agency noted that while the state government collected samples more recently, the ATSDR did not have access to the newer data.

Community organizers are still calling for the federal government to resume an active role, arguing that the groundwater remains undrinkable.

“We’re demanding that they reopen the investigation,” Craig Stevens, a local organizer, toldDeSmog after the March verdict was announced, “and also get water to these people.”

http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/03/dimock-water-unsafe-fracking/

===

===

11-H2997 on Sep 21, 2011

Bill Sponsorship: Superfund Common Sense Act 

Source: H2997/S1729 

Congressional Summary:Amends the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) to exclude manure from the definition of "hazardous substance" and "pollutant or contaminant" for purposes of such Act. Defines "manure" to mean:

1. digestive emissions, feces, urine, urea and other excrement from livestock;
2. any associated bedding, compost, raw materials or other materials commingled with such excrement from livestock;
3. any process water associated with such items; and
4. any byproducts, constituents, or substances contained in, or originating from, such items or any emissions relating to such items.

Amends the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 to exempt from notification requirements releases associated with manure.

Opponent's Comments (Jim Ruen on AgProfessional.com, Oct. 3, 2011): Since when can a fertilizer dealer operate without concern for environmental regulation and impact? Let's face it, we aren't talking about Ma and Pa Kettle with their six milk cows and three sows here spreading a load of manure on the back 40. We are talking about CAFO units with thousands of animals and tens of thousands or more tons/gallons of manure. While a few maybe spreading on their own land, most are selling it to area farmers. At a time when fertilizer dealers and companies have to be conspicuously careful with how they handle product, why shouldn't mega-livestock operators be equally regulated as they sell their "waste" product for its nutrient and soil building value. Since when do commercial N, P and K producers or handlers get a free ride from the EPA...or Congress?

---

• Topic: Environment
• Headline: Sponsored ending considering manure as pollutant or hazardous
• Headline 2: Stop considering manure as pollutant or hazardous 

Participating counts on AmericansElect question 8.

• Headline: Sponsored ending considering manure as pollutant or hazardous (Answer: B)
• Headline 2: Stop considering manure as pollutant or hazardous (Answer: B)
• AmericansElect Quiz Question 8 on Environment: Which of the following statements comes closest to your personal view?
  • A: Natural resources exist for the benefit of humanity
  • B: Natural resources exist for the benefit of humanity, but should be somewhat protected
  • C: Natural resources should be mostly protected, but also exist for the benefit of humanity
  • D: Natural resources exist on their own and should be completely protected
  • E: Unsure

J. Steven Griles served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior from 2001 until resigning in 2004. In 2004, the DOI’s own inspector general called Griles a “train wreck waiting to happen.” Prior to joining the Bush administration, Griles was a coal industry lobbyist. Griles was the highest ranking member of the Bush administration to be sent to prison during the Abramoff scandal. He was sentenced to a ten months imprisonment after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice. Days after his guilty plea, he would marry his DOI subordinate Sue Ellen Wooldridge, who was part of an ethics scandal involving the purchase of a home with ConocoPhillips lobbyist. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Griles served in the Reagan administration’s DOI then became a coal industry lobbyist with National Environmental Strategies, Inc. Griles continued receiving payment of $284,000 a year from the coal lobbying firm as he served as DOI Deputy Secretary. While at the DOI, he arranged multiple meetings with former oil and gas industry clients and even awarded $2 million in federal contracts to a former client.Griles advised Jack Abramoff on using members of Congress to pressure the DOI and gave him information on internal decision making within the agency. Before his conviction, Griles left the White House to become a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge

Deputy Chief of Staff for Sec. Gale Norton

• Purchased $980,000 home with J. Steven Griles and a ConocoPhillips lobbyist.

•Delayed $500 million pollution cleanup for ConocoPhillips.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge was the Deputy Chief of Staff for DOI Secretary Gale Norton. During her time at DOI where she provided the agency with ethics advice, Wooldridge became romantically involved with J. Steven Griles. Wooldridge went on to the Department of Justice as an attorney in charge of environmental and natural resources. Wooldridge and her romantic partner and once-superior Griles purchased a $980,000 home in March 2006 in South Carolina along with a third buyer: Don R. Duncan, a lobbyist for ConoPhillips. Less than a year after the three purchased the home, Wooldridge delayed $500 million pollution cleanup of a superfund site run by ConocoPhillips. Three days after Griles plead guilty, Wooldridge and he were married.

http://thinkprogress.org/report/interior-scandals-under-bush/

==

==

RFK: Superfund has gone bankrupt. The Superfund itself, which was raised through a small tax on the chemical and oil industry, was used to clean up orphaned sites -- sites where the responsible party could not be found. But more importantly, it was used to leverage recalcitrant polluters to clean up their own sites, because Superfund includes a triple-damages provision. That gives the EPA power, when a polluter drags its feet, to say to the polluter, “Okay, we’re going to clean up the site ourselves, and then we’re going to charge you triple.” And 90 percent of the Superfund sites that have been cleaned up in America have been cleaned up as a result of that threat. Without that threat, Superfund just becomes a welfare program for corporate lawyers, who can argue forever and ever about who’s responsible and what kind of cleanup should result. So today, with Superfund bankrupt, you’re not going to see many Superfund sites really cleaned up. And if they are cleaned up, it’ll be with taxpayer money, which is absurdly unjust.

rfk2: B2 admin

took pwer from states to limit offshore drill, 

b2 refused to support Superfund

(hid as reform) but 1:4 Us ppl live near one 112  10c bbl cheap b/c excluded from

liability under cost recovery 112 normally epa can clean site then charge 3x to

polluter, so big leverage ; w/o tax, no cleanup; oct 03 fund went bankrupt,so cost

shifted to public.

---

DC called himself a "pretty good environmentalist"

got rid of superfund (1 in 4 am live within bike ride from site that was blocked/orphaned?) 31, shift burden to us; cut value of human life by 1/3; cut protection of 1/10 by declaring not wetland and _

---

strat ignor:

B2 got rid of superfund (i in 4 am live within bike rid from site that was blocked/orphaned?) 31, shift burden to us; cut value of human life by 1/3; cut protection of 1/10 by declaring not wetland and _ strat ignor

DC once sorta ok on green, but only 1 of 16 ~ ESA; 1 of 26 suppoprt RR ~ Clean water act; ~ superfund, safe drink act; ~ cit suit ~ chem 50

Norton: lead co lobbyist (superfund); prop rights maybe homesteader get right to pollute and make noise; slavery got bad rap; colo AG

Sansonetti corp law in Wyo for extraction ~ superfund then coal lobbyist peabodt and arch etc; pal of DC; rep mining ind ~ Clean air act, promised to uphold in confim hearings but no 56

cafo killed billion fish 1991 in NCaro; aftr Hurr Floyd kiled 30k hods and spread sludge, epa cleaning up, than b2 granted immun from CWA, CAA and superfundin ret for small # to vol mon

SUPERFUND 2K LISTED, 840 CLEANED on track to be done in 15 yrs; 1993 broad consensus on streamline incl CoC, but gop filibuster scuttled b/c no wins before 94 election; then let funding src run out from co. so taxpayers had to pick up.

40-50's Hooker chem dumped 352 mill pounds of haz waste into Love canal [nb gmu guy referred to as mythical?]

DC as sen voted against cit right to sue chemical; haliburton Supefund in MIssouri

partially treated sewage cd be blended and put in rivers; then untreated radioactive waste; 2003 1st time since CWA pollut worse 205

by 1980 mil and dept energy biggest polluters some of

CEI lost on arsenic but won on superfund 227

18B waste in farm bill cd be used to help sm farmers and clean up

req US co in Mex to use US green std  strategic irnorance

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Michigan

What is Superfund?

Superfund is the name given to the environmental program established to address abandoned hazardous waste sites. It is also the name of the fund established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, as amended (CERCLA statute, CERCLA overview). This law was enacted in the wake of the discovery of toxic waste dumps such as Love Canal and Times Beach in the 1970s. It allows the EPA to clean up such sites and to compel responsible parties to perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-lead cleanups.

How Superfund Works

The Superfund cleanup process is complex. It involves the steps taken to assess sites, place them on the National Priorities List, and establish and implement appropriate cleanup plans. This is the long-term cleanup process. In addition, the Agency has the authority

• to conduct removal actions where immediate action needs to be taken;
• to enforce against potentially responsible parties;
• to ensure community involvement;
• involve states;
• and ensure long-term protectiveness.

The blueprint for these activities is the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP), a regulation applicable to all federal agencies involved in responding to hazardous substance releases.

Over the past 20+ years, we've located and analyzed tens of thousands of hazardous waste sites, protected people and the environment from contamination at the worst sites, and involved others in cleanup.

Who Implements Superfund

EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) in Washington, D.C. oversees the Superfund program. The Office of Emergency Management within OSWER is responsible for short term responses conducted under the authority of Superfund. The Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation, and the Federal Facilities Response and Reuse Office, also within OSWER, have the lead for managing the long-term Superfund response program, the latter for responses involving Federal Facilities. In addition, OSWER manages the federal Brownfields program.

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/

==

wiki

Superfund is the common name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), a United States federal law designed to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances.^[1] Superfund created the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and it provides broad federal authority to clean up releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment. The law authorized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to identify parties responsible for contamination of sites and compel the parties to clean up the sites. Where responsible parties cannot be found, the Agency is authorized to clean up sites itself, using a special trust fund.

[edit] History

CERCLA was enacted by Congress in 1980 in response to the threat of hazardous waste sites, typified by the Love Canal disaster in New York, and the Valley of the Drums in Kentucky.^[2]^

The EPA published the first Hazard Ranking System (HRS) in 1981, and the first National Priorities List (NPL) in 1982.^[3] The implementation during early years has been criticized as being ineffective due to the Reagan administration's laissez-faire policies. During his two terms, 16 of the 799 Superfund sites were cleaned up, and $40 million of $700 million in recoverable funds from responsible parties were collected.^[4]^

The Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA), made several important changes and additions to CERCLA including increasing the funding of Superfund to $8.5 billion and providing for studies and the use of new technologies.^[5]^

In 1994, the Clinton administration proposed a new Superfund reform bill, which was seen as an improvement to existing legislation by some environmentalists and industry lobbyists. However, the effort was unable to gain bipartisan support.^[6] Until the mid-1990s, most of the funding came from a tax on the petroleum and chemical industries, reflecting the polluter pays principle, and Congress yielded to corporate pressure.^[7]^

[edit] Provisions

CERCLA authorizes two kinds of response actions:

1. Removal actions. These are typically short-term response actions, where actions may be taken to address releases or threatened releases requiring prompt response. Removal actions are classified as: (1) emergency; (2) time-critical; and (3) non-time critical. Removal responses are generally used to address localized risks such as abandoned drums containing hazardous substances, and contaminated surface soils posing acute risks to human health or the environment.^[8]^
2. Remedial actions. These are usually long-term response actions. Remedial actions seek to permanently and significantly reduce the risks associated with releases or threats of releases of hazardous substances which are serious, but lack the time-criticality of removal actions, and include such measures as preventing the migration of pollutants and neutralizing toxic substances. These actions can be conducted only at sites listed on the EPA National Priorities List (NPL) in the United States and the territories.^[9]^

A potentially responsible party (PRP) is a possible polluter who may eventually be held liable under CERCLA for the contamination or misuse of a particular property or resource. Four classes of PRPs may be liable for contamination at a Superfund site:

1. the current owner or operator of the site;^[10]^
2. the owner or operator of a site at the time that disposal of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant occurred;^[11]^
3. a person who arranged for the disposal of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant at a site;^[12] and
4. a person who transported a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant to a site, who also has selected that site for the disposal of the hazardous substances, pollutants or contaminants.^[13]^

The CERCLA also enabled the revision of the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP).^[14] The NCP provided the guidelines and procedures needed to respond to releases and threatened releases of hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants. The NCP also established the NPL. The NPL, which appears as Appendix B to the NCP, primarily serves as an information and management tool for the EPA, and helps the EPA prioritize sites for cleanup. The NPL is updated periodically.

The identification of a site for the NPL is intended primarily to guide EPA in:

• determining which sites warrant further investigation to assess the nature and extent of the risks to the human health and environment;
• identifying what CERCLA-financed remedial actions may be appropriate;
• notifying the public of sites which EPA believes warrant further investigation; and
• notifying PRPs that EPA may initiate CERCLA-financed remedial action.

Inclusion of a site on the NPL does not itself require PRPs to initiate action to clean up the site, nor does it assign liability to any person. The NPL serves primarily informational purposes, notifying the government and the public of those sites or releases that appear to warrant remedial actions.

Despite the name, the Superfund trust fund lacks sufficient funds to clean up even a small number of the sites on the NPL. As a result, the government will typically order PRPs to clean up the site themselves.^[15] If a party fails to comply with such an order, it may be fined up to $25,000 for each day that non-compliance continues. A party that spends money to clean up a site may sue certain other PRPs under the CERCLA.^[16] A related provision allows a party that has reimbursed another party's response costs to seek contribution from other PRPs, during or after the original lawsuit. An "orphan share" is the share of waste at a Superfund site that cannot be collected because the PRP is either unidentifiable or insolvent.^[17]^

[edit] Procedures

Map of Superfund sites in the contiguous United States. Red indicates currently on final National Priority List, yellow is proposed, green is deleted (usually meaning having been cleaned up). This map is as of March 2010.

Upon notification of a potentially hazardous waste site, the EPA conducts a Preliminary Assessment/Site Inspection (PA/SI) which involves records reviews, interviews, visual inspections, and limited field sampling.^[18] Information from the PA/SI is used by the EPA to develop a Hazard Ranking System (HRS) score to determine the CERCLA status of the site.^[19] Sites that score high enough to qualify for the full program then proceed to a Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study (RI/FS). The RI includes an extensive sampling program and risk assessment in order to define the extent of the site contamination and risks. The FS is used to develop and evaluate various remediation alternatives. The preferred alternative is presented in a Proposed Plan for public review and comment. The selected alternative is approved in a Record of Decision (ROD). The site then enters into a Remedial Design phase and then the Remedial Action phase. Many sites include Long-Term Monitoring and 5-year reviews once the Remedial Action has been completed.

...

As of November 29, 2010, there are currently 1,280 sites listed on the National Priority List, an additional 347 have been delisted, and 62 new sites have been proposed.^[23]^

Approximately 70 percent of Superfund cleanup activities historically have been paid for by parties responsible (PRPs) for the cleanup of contamination. The only time cleanup costs are not borne by the responsible party is when that party either cannot be found or is unable to pay for the cleanup. For those sites, the Superfund law originally paid for toxic waste cleanups through a tax on petroleum and chemical industries. The chemical and petroleum fees were intended to provide incentives to use less toxic substances. Over five years, $1.6 billion was collected, and the tax went to a trust fund for cleaning up abandoned or uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. The last full fiscal year in which the Department of the Treasury collected the tax was FY1995. At the end of FY1996, the invested trust fund balance was $6.0 billion. This fund was exhausted by the end of FY2003; since that time funding for these orphan shares has been appropriated by Congress out of general revenues.^[24]^

^----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Minnesota

koch, fmc

===

sci corrupt

1980:The Superfund Compromise is being floated, This was (initially) a proposal to limit the number of hazardous waste sites that would be cleaned up, but it was amended out of recognition because of public hostility. A Bill extending the Compromise was only passed in Aug 1986 after five years of long and bitter inactivity during (Reagan's First term) See legal outline 

    Only six dumps were cleaned up during the first five years of Superfund, and it went into limbo after September 30 1985 when its revenue sources dried up, The new compromise became a Bill for Renewal, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency to identify for future action 1,600 of the nation's worst sites by 1988. [The agency's national priority list was about half that size.] 

    The compromise bill also gave citizens living near toxic sites the right to sue polluters to force a cleanup if EPA is not acting against a dump and to require chemical companies to inform communities about emissions of ''acute hazards'' from their plants.]

See US News & World Report article from the 1980s. 

...

==

1980 Nov: Ronald Reagan is President Elect. 

President Carter's "Superfund" clean up legislation [Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA)] was enacted during the Reagan transition period. It provided for an initial $1.6 billion Superfund. 

    However the Reagan Administration during 1981 and 1983 tried to load more of these costs back on the industries that had caused the problems in order to balance the Federal Budget. The Administration also delayed the funding of the regulatory agency (ATSDR) which would have Superfund oversight. 

    CERCLA gave EPA primary responsibility for identifying, investigating, and cleaning up hazardous waste sites, but the Act also authorized the establishment of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Register (ATSDR) under the Department of Public Health...

to assess the presence and nature of health hazards to communities living near Superfund sites, to help prevent or reduce harmful exposures, and to expand the knowledge base about the health effects that result from exposure to hazardous substances.

However deregulating zealots now controlled all of the political positions in the Reagan White House, and at the main agencies. So nothing happened in real terms until a crisis developed in mid 1983.

...

   One of Carlo's puff pieces says about this period:

He was integral in writing the enabling legislation that established theAgency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) within the Department of Health and Human Services, a primary group addressing the effects of environmental contaminants.

These ATSDR laws passed in 1980, but were suppressed during most of the first Reagan term between 1981 and 1983 — so nothing much happened at this time. 

    Only in the approach to Reagan's second term — after the Secretary of the Interior James Watt had been fired, and the EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch (Burford) and twenty of her top staff had been forced to resign over non-enforcement scandals — did the Reagan administration take this problem seriously. 

[ As an Assistant Professor in Arkansas, Carlo does not register in the dioxin literature from this period, so his claim to have written the ATSDR legislation is dubious... to say the least]

CDC on Toxic Exposure Prevention    ATSDR on dioxins

==

The scandals of a do-nothing Reagan EPA culminated in the weeks 9-to-25 March 1983 with the resignation of administrator Anne Gorsuch-Burford, John A Todhunter (over dioxins), John Hernandez (over lead), Rita Lavelle (Superfund cleanup), Robert M Perry (General Counsel), and 15 other high-ranking EPA officials; "Taking the axe for the Reagan Administration".

---

---

1983 Mar 25: Following the March 25 1983 resignation of the EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford the EPA became paralysed by on-going scandals. 

    The first term of the Reagan Presidency was consumed by public rage at the lack of any reasonable regulatory activity by the Federal Government agencies, mostly because they were stimied by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which was part of the White House's Office of Managment & Budget (OMB). 

    Over this five-to-six year period, a group of about 20 top EPA officials were forced to progressively resign... mostly because they sought to block measures to clean up toxic waste dumps under the Superfund laws, but some through obvious corporate bribery.

[The OIRA was run by Jim Tozzi who excelled in blocking any meaningful regulatory activity by the main agencies. Tozzi later helped establish the lobby group MBS /Federal Focus Inc, and in the 1990s he joined forces with Thorne Auchter andGeorge Carlo in a number of ventures for Philip Morris and the cellphone industry. Tozzi's staff at the OIRA also left the White House at the end of the Reagan Presidency to set up the EOP Group, which lobbied for the tobacco and chemical industries withSteve Milloy and Bonner Cohen (both associates of Carlo also).]

1983 April 19: While the 1980 CERCLA Act gave Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) primary responsibility for identifying, investigating, and cleaning up hazardous waste sites, it also authorized the establishment of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Register (ATSDR) to assess the presence and nature of health hazards to communities living near Superfund sites, to help prevent or reduce harmful exposures, and to expand the knowledge base about the health effects that result from exposure to hazardous substances. 

    After two years of Reagan Administration stalling, the ATSDR was created as an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services on April 19, 1983

--