webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Earth Justice

see ARSENIC COAL ASH ZELDIN

==

oops see also one word

GGL 5 26

[### Trump administration aims to roll back limits on toxic ...

The Hill

https://thehill.com › policy › energy-environment › epa...](https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/epa-toxic-wastewater-coal-fired-power-plants/)

22 hours ago — It is the latest step that President Donald Trump's administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and coal-fired power and ...Read more

AI Overview

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is facing intense scrutiny over policies that roll back federal limits on toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and mercury from industrial polluters.

U.S. Senate (.gov) +3

Controversial Actions and Impact:

Sierra Club +2

Earthjustice +3

U.S. Senate (.gov) +1

Criticism and Responses:

Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan (.gov)

Earthjustice +2

:{:{}:

Lee Zeldin Intends to Allow More Heavy Metals ... - Sierra Club}:}:

Jun 30, 2025 — Lee Zeldin's proposal to allow coal companies to dump more heavy metals into our waterways defies all common sense.

Sierra Club

McClellan and Tonko Send Letter to Administrator Zeldin Urging ...

Jul 23, 2025 — McClellan and Tonko Send Letter to Administrator Zeldin Urging EPA to Retract Proposal to Weaken Pollution Standards * “It is the ...

Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan (.gov)

WATCH: In Senate EPW Hearing, Kelly Presses EPA on Lead ...

Apr 29, 2026 — Sen. Kelly shows EPA Administrator Zeldin how close the hazardous lead and arsenic smelter is to an elementary school during an EP...

---

HILL

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved Thursday to roll back limits that require coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers through polluted groundwater, saying a three-year-old rule is unduly costly for the energy industry at a time when energy demand is spiking.

It is the latest step that President Donald Trump’s administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and coal-fired power and empower fossil fuels as a primary energy source to feed the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers.

In its proposed rule, the EPA said a 2024 rule under President Joe Biden misjudged the effectiveness and cost of the regulation, and had the effect of shutting down coal-fired power plants at a time when energy demand is spiking.

Changing the rule is critical to making electricity more affordable and reliable, while advancing the economy, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement.

mma 6 23

Right-wing media are attempting to discredit mainstream coverage and reactions around the Supreme Court’s recent decision to limit bodies of water protected under the Clean Water Act.

On May 25, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of wealthy Idaho couple Michael and Chantell Sackett in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, after a 14-year legal battle in which they fought to do construction near protected wetlands without a permit. All nine justices ultimately agreed they could do so, however, their reasoning differed and concurring opinion on the scope of the case was split 5-4.

Five conservative justices ruling for the majority decided that definitions previously laid out in the 51-year-old Clean Water Act were the problem, considerably narrowing the scope of which bodies of water must be protected. According to the environmental law nonprofit EarthJustice, which filed anamicus briefin the case, the new decision means that “as many as half of the 118 million acres of wetlands in the U.S. are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act, embracing the decades-long demands of mining companies, the fossil fuel industry, reckless developers, and other big polluters.” 

Mainstream media coverage of the ruling rightfully highlighted this serious outcome. Democratic lawmakers including Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called out the decision’s radical implications and suggested it was driven by a partisan conservative agenda. Other experts pointed out that the majority decision ignores the best available science on how pollutants move through ecosystems.

In response, right-wing media celebrated the decision and slammed its critics, claiming that the unanimous ruling was intentionally being ignored to mislead the public and fit the narrative that conservative, Trump-appointed justices were making controversial decisions. In reality, the outcome of Sackett v. EPA was nothing if not controversial. Even Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh opted to side with the court’s three liberal justices, saying the majority’s decision to redefine what is protected under the Clean Water Act went against scientific evidence.

Right-wing media attacks focus on the majority’s decision to gut the Clean Water Act

Right-wing media attempted to expose those who called out the very real impacts of gutting the Clean Water Act and implied that the only decision that mattered — and the only one that should be publicized — was the unanimous ruling in favor of the Sacketts. Suggesting otherwise, according to them, was a gross misrepresentation of the ruling.

These allegations started on May 25 in response to Schumer’s tweet attacking the “MAGA Supreme Court” for the decision to “erode our country’s environmental laws,” adding that “this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands.” Twitter users accused Schumer of lying by highlighting the unanimous ruling in favor of the Sacketts, and even added a community note clarifying the decision. Echoing the online backlash, right-wing media including Fox News and Newsmax piled on Schumer as well.

Right-wing media also attacked The Washington Postand Bloomberg for not highlighting the unanimous decision more prominently, or even falsely stated that this was not even mentioned.

Why the 5-4 split between the concurring justices matters

It’s true that all nine justices ruled in favor of the Sacketts. Specifically, they found that the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA did not have jurisdiction over this particular property. But despite what right-wing media say, the differences in their reasoning are important.

Initially, the Sacketts filed a lawsuit against the EPA because the agency ordered them to remove sand and gravel fill from the lot where they wanted to build a house, arguing that it was on protected wetlands and they would need to return the area to its natural state. The couple brought the case to the Supreme Court for the first time in2012 after lower courts sided with the EPA, maintaining that the property was subject to the Clean Water Act and the Sacketts did indeed need permits to continue construction. The Supreme Court at the time ruled in favor of the Sacketts’ right to challenge the EPA’s order.

Aided by the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity, both of which were founded by the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers, as well as other industry groups, the Sacketts managed to get their case in front of the Supreme Court for a second time. They were represented by thePacific Legal Foundation,which has received funding from the fossil fuel industry and its allies and also fought to weaken the Clean Water Act back in 2006.

This time, five far-right justices didn’t just rule in favor of the Sacketts — they went so far as to adopt the narrowest possible definition of which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, completely changing how the law has functioned for the past 51 years. Kavanaugh, along with three liberal justices, argued that this decision went too far. Though they wrote a concurring opinion, he and three other justices fundamentally disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s reading of the law, which would not protect wetlands unless they have a “continuous surface connection” to bodies of water. Kavanaugh explained why that doesn’t make sense in his concurring opinion (citations omitted):

“Because of the movement of water between adjacent wetlands and other waters, pollutants in wetlands often end up in adjacent rivers, lakes, and other waters. Natural barriers such as berms and dunes do not block all water flow and are in fact evidence of a regular connection between a water and a wetland. … The scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that wetlands separated from covered waters by those kinds of berms or barriers, for example, still play an important role in protecting neighboring and downstream waters, including by filtering pollutants, storing water, and providing flood control. In short, those adjacent wetlands may affect downstream water quality and flood control in many of the same ways that adjoining wetlands can."

Right-wing media’s gripes ignoring the concurring opinion and framing the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling as key to the case are completely bad-faith attempts to gaslight the public into thinking that the decision was less controversial than it actually was. This narrative directly benefits the industries that were so keen to help gut a bedrock environmental law while refusing to accept clear scientific evidence that is inconvenient to their bottom line. AsEarthjustice puts it, the effort was part of “a coordinated push by industry polluters that want to blow a hole in the Clean Water Act, bulldoze cherished wetlands, and contaminate the country’s streams with waste from mining, oil and gas, and agro-industrial operations as they see fit, just to maximize their profits.”

This isn’t the first time this court has delivered a victory to polluters. In June 2022, the court’s conservative majority issued a devastating ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that severely limited the EPA’s power to make power plants cut the toxic pollution that is driving the climate crisis.

3 wins

Judge rules that Dakota Access Pipeline must be shut down and emptiedMatthew Rozsa / Salonan 720

==

nat am pawnee frack

https://earthjustice.org/features/insider-briefing-lawyers-for-the-seventh-generation

https://earthjustice.org/our_work/tribal-partnerships

Earthjustice is honored to partner with Indigenous communities, including some of the 574 federally recognized Indian and Alaska Native tribes, Native Hawaiians, state recognized tribes, Indigenous NGOs, and unrecognized tribes as they fight to preserve and protect their air, earth, water, and way of life. This work necessarily is informed by the complex legal, cultural, and political issues unique to tribal and Indigenous people in North America.

Listen to a conversation with attorneys Gussie Lord and Stefanie Tsosie on their work.

Earthjustice attorneys have long represented tribes and Indigenous clients in seminal environmental cases.

We recognize that traditional land and wildlife management practices are critical tools for addressing the onslaught of climate change. We fight federal laws and policies that impair or destroy the resources necessary to practice traditional Indigenous cultures. And we elevate the voices of our tribal and Indigenous clients and partners on the front lines of environmental degradation and destructio

==

320

D**ecision expected soon on Dakota Access Pipeline challenge**

Our fights go forward, with some adjustments for the pandemic. Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman delivered a powerful argument over the telephone on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe this week as part of our long-term effort to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline. The notorious oil pipeline crosses the Tribe’s ancestral lands and poses a significant risk of an oil spill....

https://earthjustice.org/blog/2019-september/tongass-national-forest-victory-old-growth-climate

Major Victory for Alaska’s Majestic Trees and for the Climate

Protecting trees, particularly old-growth trees in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, is a win for local communities and for the climate.

By Jessica A. Knoblauch | March 12, 2020

A recent court victory halted a timber sale on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska.

A recent court victory halted a timber sale on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02022018/arctic-oil-gas-lease-sale-violated-nepa-environmental-rules-petroleum-reserve-lawsuit

earthjustice

==

==

Jenny Harbine, the lead attorney in Earth Justice's case [PDF] against the Administration, joins us to explain the new lawsuit, as well as the one the same group filed against the Obama Administration in 2014, which led to the moratorium in the first place.

"Trump made a lot of campaign promises to his cronies in the coal industry," she tells me. "But the President has a legal obligation, that courts have enforced for decades, to engage in rational decision-making, to make decisions that are based on science. And here it couldn't be clearer that the directive that came down from Trump [to lift the moratorium] last week, was based solely on politics, and not on science."

She explains how the policy not only "flies in the face of the reality we all face as a nation and a world on climate change," but also how Trump's various claims at attempting to help coal miners is as likely to ultimately harm them, by keeping the federal government from investing in investing and retraining workers for the now-unstoppable renewable energy future.

"Trump's short-sighted attempt to revive a dying coal industry through subsidized leasing" is little more than "an attempt, really, to line the pockets of coal industry executives" while causing "real harm to real people and communities that are depending on the federal government to look after our interests," Harbine explains, adding: "I fear that those workers will be left in the dust."

==

http://earthjustice.org/about

http://earthjustice.org/about/our_history

eg news http://earthjustice.org/blog/2015-december/hogwash-from-the-pork-industry

6/16 congress:

attacks on our environment are extremely widespread. As of today, appropriations bills include dangerous riders that would:

==

Earthjustice was founded in 1971 as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. In 1997, the group changed its name to Earthjustice to better reflect its purpose of acting as legal advocate for the environment.

Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm "dedicated to protecting magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment."[1] The group focuses on enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions, and communities.

Contents

  [hide] 

Targeted coal plant proposals

Trustees

Accessed December 2013: [2]

Earthjustice Board 2007/2008

Accessed September 2008: [3]

Group details

Locations: Headquarters in Oakland, CA; regional offices around the U.S.

Group website: Earthjustice

Contact: info [at] earthjustice.org

Resources

References

  1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ "About Us", Earthjustice website, accessed February 2008.
  2. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Earth Justice Trustees, organizational web page, accessed December 21, 2013.
  3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Directors, Earthjustice, accessed September 17, 2008.

Related SourceWatch Articles

External links

Categories: 

==

http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-inside-story-of-shells-push-to-drill-in-the-arctic/

yeoman

Last May, four months before the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell suspended exploration in offshore Alaska, Christopher Putnam needed to get something off his chest.

Putnam is 44, originally from Texas, a trained wildlife biologist who also served as an Army infantry sergeant during the Iraq War. For almost six years, he has worked in Alaska for the U.S. Fish and WildlifeService,protecting marine mammals. It has been his job to ensure that Shell’s plans to drill more than 60 miles offshore in the Chukchi Sea — the wild Arctic water between Alaska and Siberia — wouldn’t harmPacific walruses, particularly the juveniles, calves, and nursing mothers that dominate the Chukchi during the drilling season.

Putnam’s relationship with Shell had always been amicable — until the company began insisting that walrus protection should take a backseat to economics and efficiency, and making it clear that it would fight any regulatory speed bumps placed in its way. That kind of determination made Shell a regular caller at the White House: Company president Marvin Odum was a guest there at least six times in the administration’s first two and a half years, and lobbyist Sara Glenn visited even more frequently, according to a 2012 *New York Times*article. In light of his “all of the above” strategy to foster energy independence, President Obama obliged by creating a task force to help clear Shell’s path through the bureaucracy, the Timesreported.

Odum met in 2014 with then-presidential counselor John Podestato discuss Chukchi drilling, though the exact details are unknown. The following year, Putnam began noticing leaders within the USFWS’s parent agency, the Department of the Interior, discussing in conference calls how to accommodate Shell’s demands. “Some people were working on various options — how we could interpret our regulations in such a way that were favorable that would allow Shell to do what they wanted to do,” he says. “When there’s discussion about changing the meaning of the regulations specifically to accommodate a company like Shell, then that started to become concerning for me.” By law, rule-making is a public process. “These discussions that were taking place behind the scenes, with no input or public accountability, were getting to the point that I simply wanted to put on the record that I had concerns.”

In a May 26 email, Putnam unloaded. “Shell has clearly stated that they think minimizing disturbance to walruses is irrelevant,” he wrote to his then-boss, Mary Colligan, who is now the USFWS’s Alaska assistant regional director.“Shell insists it is not they who must comply with federal regulations, but we who should change the regulations to accommodate Shell.”

Putnam then addressed the “voices” within the Interior Department that he says wanted to reinterpret the rules without involving the public. “I think it would be disingenuous, mendacious, and unethical,” he wrote. “Such a course of action may even be illegal.” If Shell were successful at skirting walrus-protection measures, what would come next? Would oil companies quietly try to lift industrial noise limits in the Arctic? Or weaken measures protecting denning polar bears? “Where,” he wrote, “would it end?”

After Shell received its approvals and started drilling in July, its first well came up dry, leading the company to withdraw from offshore Alaska “for the foreseeable future.” In its September pullout announcement, Shell laid some of the blame on the “challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment.”

But an Audubon investigation based on government documents — some filed in court and others obtained by Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, through the Freedom of Information Act — points to a regulatory system that, while tougher than before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, still cut corners and stretched its own capacity in order to accommodate Shell’s drilling timeline. While USFWS scientists fought to protect marine mammals, they did so under crushing time constraints and at the expense of other conservation efforts. Meanwhile, at the Interior agency tasked with approving Shell’s oil leases and exploration plan, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), decision makers authorized overtime, weekend, and holiday work to deliver Shell a speedy decision, while failing to keep pace with climate and ecosystem science.

These findings mirror, in part, a new investigative report, released Dec. 7 by Interior’s Inspector General’s office. It detailed how some BOEM employees considered the agency’s timeline so aggressive that, in the words of one professional, a keyenvironmental analysis was “absolutely compromised” and “full of errors.”

These efforts to accommodate a multinational energy company happened under the watch of President Barack Obama, who is reviled, ironically, by drilling advocates and eager to cement his legacy as a climate warrior.

Shell declined several requests for interviews for this article. “This story is not relevant anymore,” wrote spokesperson Curtis Smith.

In fact, though, the story is just as relevant as ever. In October’s third-quarter earnings call, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden emphasized that while the first foray proved unpromising, “there are of course other potential prospects in our Chukchi leasehold, as well as other areas offshore of Alaska.” And after the current leases expire in four years, there could be more to come. A BOEM draft plan calls for new Arctic lease sales starting in 2020. Legislation pending in Congress at press time would requireregular sales starting in 2023, even as new science cautions against Arctic drilling. Things might be quiet off the Alaskan coast right now, but that tranquility could very well prove temporary.

When Shell won the vast majority of the drilling rights in the 2008 Chukchi lease sale — aka Lease Sale 193 — it called its $2.1 billion acquisition a victory for energy independence. “This is an opportunity to develop a proven and prolific basin to supply energy security for North America,” company vice president Annell Bay told reporters.

Conservationists couldn’t imagine a worse place to drill, a place more fertile, more unspoiled, more vulnerable to climate change. Along with walruses, the Chukchi teems with polar bears, ringed seals, and bowhead and beluga whales. “Coming from the Lower 48, you don’t see areas like this, that are untouched by development,” says Leah Donahey, senior campaign director for the Alaska Wilderness League. Donahey recalls flying over the Chukchi in 2011 and watching thousands of belugas swimming below her. Inland she saw bears running on the tundra, and massive herds of caribou. There were no roads, no infrastructure — “just these small communities and then vast ocean.”

Those communities rely on the ocean’s bounty: Subsistence hunting of marine mammals feeds many native Alaskans. “If we don’t have the animals to provide for our nutritional needs, we won’t survive,” says Faith Gemmill, executive director of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), a grassroots organization. “It’s not just about food security. We’re talking about our entire way of life.” In Iñupiat villages, during traditional whale hunts, she says, “the stories are taught. The values are taught. Knowledge is passed down from the elders to the younger people.”

Even before Shell bought its leases, REDOIL and the Alaska Wilderness League joined other groups, including the National Audubon Society, in suing the Bush administration to stop the sale. The 2008 lawsuit, filed by Earthjustice, noted that rising temperatures are already stressing polar bears and walruses. (The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole.) The Interior Department, said the plaintiffs, was selling leases without fully gauging the impacts on climate change, the likelihood of a spill, or the damage to wildlife caused by the deafening air guns used during seismic surveys. Nor, they added, did the government adequatelyconsider harm to Steller’s and Spectacled Eiders, both threatened ducks.

It was the first of several hard-fought legal cases over drilling in the Chukchi — cases that continue today, outlasting Shell’s pullout announcement.

As the litigation meandered through the courts, two disasters gave ammunition to critics of Arctic drilling. First, the BP oil spillexposed lethal flaws in the regulatory system. It prompted new safety regulations and President Obama’s dissolution of BOEM’s predecessor, the Minerals Management Service, where staffers infamouslyaccepted gifts from, and indulged in sex and cocaine with, their energy-industry contacts. Second, Shell itself threw the perils of Arctic drilling into focus when it suffered a series of setbacks during its first season of exploration in 2012, culminating in the grounding of the drill ship Kulluk on Sitkalidak Island as it was towed through the Gulf of Alaska during a storm.

In January 2014, the Ninth Circuit issued a key decision in Earthjustice’s lease-sale challenge — and highlighted the government’s efforts to help clear Shell’s path. The judges noted that BOEM based its environmental analysis on the “lowest possible amount of oil that was economical to produce.” By estimating just 1 billion barrels, the agency lowballed the possible impacts on habitat, climate, and bird populations. “BOEM considered only the best case scenario for environmental harm,” the court wrote. The decision led BOEM to revise its studies. For the environmental impact statement (EIS) finalized in February 2015, it chose a new and more reasonable estimate of 4.3 billion barrels — and, based on that, calculated a 75 percent chance of “one or more large spills” during the 77-year Chukchi production cycle.

BOEM maintains that such an accident would probably not be “catastrophic” in scale; ....