EJ 2

12/17 trumplandia

new belated tag e j 419

MERRI OK

// DEI?

pjt 2025 mandy g ~ EJ

see morano BS

ZELDIN EPA // trump DEI BS XO

AI 3 DATA CTR METHANE BURN EMISSIONS

see benzene formaldehyde leukemia kid killer

see black lung COAL HVY METAL DRINK WATER

ALSO BRINGING BACK BLACK LUNG TO FORGOTTEN TRUMP BASE

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OIL WELLS LA PBS 5 26

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MMA How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2025 | Media Matters for America 5 26

How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2025

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 05/27/26

Environmental justice coverage — reporting that connects the harmful effects of pollution, environmental hazards, or policy decisions to socially marginalized communities — remained nearly absent from corporate broadcast TV news last year, even as environmental risks and pollution exposure affected communities across the country.

In 2025, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired just 2 environmental justice segments combined, a further decline from recent years and the lowest level recorded since 2018. The absence of environmental justice reporting is not a gap in topic coverage, but a failure to explain how environmental risk is distributed across vulnerable communities. Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents, pollution, and regulatory changes, but these were typically framed as isolated environmental hazards rather than examined through a justice lens. This coverage failed to explain how environmental harms can compound existing vulnerabilities tied to poverty, racial discrimination, rural isolation, and other forms of social and economic marginalization.

This distinction is critical: Environmental hazard coverage — such as reporting on industrial accidents, fossil fuel infrastructure, and public health harms — describes what happened. Environmental justice coverage explains that environmental harms do not impact all communities equally. Certain communities are more at risk than others, and that is a question of exposure, power, and accountability. Without that lens, coverage can document the hazard while obscuring the conditions that made some communities more vulnerable, leaving audiences with an incomplete account of who is harmed, why those harms persist, and who benefits when the causes remain unnamed.

Environmental justice is also distinct from climate justice. While climate justice focuses more broadly on unequal climate impacts and equitable climate responses, this analysis uses a narrower environmental justice standard focused on the “development, implementation, and enforcement of protective environmental laws, regulations, and policies” and whether environmental harms or risks disproportionately affect specific communities by race, color, national origin, or income.

Key findings}:

- Corporate broadcast networks aired 2 environmental justice segments in 2025 across ABC, CBS, and NBC. This represents a sharp decline from 2024, when these same networks aired a total of 7 environmental justice segments.

- CBS and NBC each aired 1 environmental justice segment. ABC aired 0 environmental justice segments in 2025.

- Separately, PBS NewsHour aired 3 environmental justice segments in 2025. (NewsHour is included to contextualize coverage of environmental justice for comparison purposes only. PBS is excluded from our corporate broadcast totals due to differences in funding structure and program format.)

## How corporate broadcast networks covered environmental justice in 2025

Environmental justice coverage has fallen from 19 segments in 2021 to just 2 in 2025, continuing a multiyear erosion in both frequency and depth. What began as a limited, but measurable, area of reporting has narrowed each year, with networks offering fewer segments about how environmental harms disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

Combined broadcast news environmental justice segments aired 2020-2025| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025* |

The 2 segments aired in 2025 constitute the smallest total recorded since this study began and reflects a yearslong pattern in which environmental coverage has become increasingly detached from questions of equity, exposure, and systemic risk.
Corporate broadcast news networks' environmental justice segments aired 2020-2025| Network | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |

ABC	0	2	2	2	3	0
CBS	1	13	5	4	3	1
NBC	3	4	5	3	1	1

ABC did not air any environmental justice segments in 2025. CBS and NBC each aired 1 qualifying segment.

On April 22, 2025, CBS Evening News aired a segment examining cuts to an Environmental Protection Agency program designed to reduce pollution “in minority and low-income communities,” explicitly linking federal policy decisions to disproportionate environmental harm and public health impacts.

Video file

:{Video

Citation

From the April 22, 2025, episode of CBS Evening News

On May 15, 2025, NBC Nightly News aired a segment investigating pollution from artificial intelligence infrastructure, reporting that industrial emissions and environmental impacts from data centers were harming nearby Black communities.

Citation

From the May 15, 2025, episode of NBC Nightly News

These segments demonstrate that environmental justice reporting remains possible within broadcast formats, but in 2025 this lens was nearly absent.

## Environmental justice stories broadcast networks missed

Broadcast networks aired coverage of some environmental stories in 2025 that contained clear environmental justice dimensions, but the segments were not framed through that lens. Across coverage of policy, emerging technologies, and industrial disasters, reporting did document environmental harm — but it rarely explained how that harm was unevenly distributed or why certain communities faced greater exposure.

#### Trump administration environmental actions

In 2025, the Trump administration advanced a series of disastrous environmental policy changes, such as workforce reductions at the Environmental Protection Agency, which included eliminating the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and regional environmental justice divisions; regulatory rollbacks; and a proposed repeal of the endangerment finding, which underpins federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That proposal came to fruition in February of this year, when the EPA finalized a rule overturning the endangerment finding.

These policy changes have direct environmental justice impacts. Communities of color and low-income communities are often located in proximity to environmental hazards and rely on federalsupport to address environmental harm.

For example, the Trump administration terminated $180 million in congressionally authorized funding supporting projects focused on “environmental justice” and “environmental and public health challenges that local communities identify as priorities, from watershed cleanups to air-quality monitoring, stormwater infrastructure, remediating lead and asbestos poisoning, and reducing childhood asthma," before a federal court ruled the termination unlawful.

These kinds of cuts, alongside weakened regulatory authority, can mean fewer inspections, delayed cleanup, and weaker enforcement, compounding exposure in areas where residents already face elevated risks.

Broadcast coverage of these developments largely failed to provide this context, leaving viewers uninformed about how changes to environmental enforcement and regulatory authority could affect vulnerable communities already facing disproportionate pollution exposure.

#### Pollution from emerging technology infrastructure

The expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centers has introduced a new set of environmental risks. These technologies require large amounts of electricity and water and can contribute to emissions, particularly when powered by fossil fuel-based energy systems. Data centers can also be “disruptively noisy,” to the point where some residents living near them have reported sleep disruption and headaches. This is consistent with findings from public health researchers: Noise pollution is linked to poor sleep, learning and mental health issues, heart disease, and even hypertension.

These impacts are largely borne by marginalized communities. One study found that “nearly half” of U.S. data centers are “in census tracts with above-median environmental burdens, such as air pollution, park access and water pollution,” while many others were located in communities with “social vulnerability indicators, such as poverty and lower education levels.” State-level reviews show that new facilities are frequently sited near low-income communities and communities of color.

This pattern raises clear environmental justice concerns. The environmental burdens associated with data centers — including increased nitrogen oxide pollution and heavy water use in drought-prone regions — are often concentrated in communities that already face higher exposure to environmental hazards but are “desperate for economic development.”

Despite these risks, broadcast news coverage in 2025 rarely examined the uneven distribution of these impacts. Only one segment, aired by NBC, reported that pollution from artificial intelligence infrastructure could harm a nearby Black community.

#### Industrial pollution and disasters

Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents throughout the year, including refinery explosions, chemical plant fires, a lithium plant explosion in California, oil leaks along the Gulf Coast, and manufacturing plant accidents. Events like these pose immediate risks to the surrounding communities, including exposure to toxic chemicals, degraded air quality, and potential long-term health effects.

These incidents would have been excellent opportunities for networks to discuss environmental justice. Industrial facilities are “more likely to be located in low-income communities of color,” where residents face multiple other stressors that could make them more vulnerable to the health impacts associated with chemical exposure. The risks associated with these facilities are not limited to acute events such as explosions or leaks; they are part of ongoing patterns of exposure shaped by “land-use decisions, regulations, and market-based forces.”

Broadcast coverage of these events typically focused on the immediate impacts, such as evacuations, injuries, and air quality warnings. For example, after an explosion and subsequent fire at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery in October, coverage across broadcast networks emphasized the explosion, emergency response, and safety conditions, but it failed to examine the effects that long-standing pollution burden caused by the refinery had on the surrounding communities. Reporting rarely extended beyond the incident itself to examine the historical factors that shape industrial siting or the cumulative risks faced by residents.

## How PBS NewsHour covered environmental justice in 2025

PBS NewsHour aired 3 environmental justice segments in 2025, more than the combined total of ABC, CBS, and NBC, but still a small number given the scope of environmental harms affecting socially marginalized communities throughout the year.

Segments that met our criteria for environmental justice coverage explicitly identified how environmental risks affect marginalized communities and connected those impacts to broader systemic conditions.

(NewsHour is included to contextualize coverage of environmental justice for comparison purposes only. PBS is excluded from corporate broadcast totals due to differences in funding structure and program format.)

## How broadcast networks can improve or center justice in their environmental reporting

Environmental justice coverage continued to decline in 2025 even as pollution events, industrial accidents, AI infrastructure, and environmental policy changes affected vulnerable communities across the country. There’s no shortage of opportunities to tell these stories. But environmental reporting often stops before asking the questions that would make those stories complete.

#### Ask who is impacted, and why

Stronger coverage would begin by treating unequal exposure as a key detail of the story, rather than an optional follow-up. When a refinery explodes, a chemical plant burns, a water system fails, or federal protections are weakened, the central questions should include who is most exposed, what risks those communities already face, and what public or private decisions shaped those conditions.

All this matters because environmental harm is not distributed randomly. As mentioned above, industrial facilities are frequently concentrated near communities with less political and economic power. Aging infrastructure, weak enforcement, land-use decisions, and regulatory rollbacks can turn already overburdened communities into places where residents breathe polluted air, drink unsafe water, face higher health risks, or struggle to recover after disasters.

In majority-Black Birmingham, Alabama, residents living near a former coke plant and a federal Superfund site lost EPA funding for an air-monitoring program meant to help document the pollution they breathe every day.

Reporting that stops at the agency announcement, for example, rather than examining who relied on the funding or protection being cut, misses the larger public-interest question: Why are vulnerable communities repeatedly placed in harm’s way?

#### Draw on diverse sources

A stronger environmental justice framework would also broaden the range of sources included in environmental coverage. Official statements, company responses, and emergency briefings are necessary but not sufficient. Grassroots organizations, environmental health researchers, legal advocates, former regulators, and local public health officials can often provide the context needed to understand how exposure compounds over time. Community members should not just appear as witnesses after a disaster; they’re often the people with the most direct knowledge of recurring pollution, complaint histories, health concerns, and enforcement failures.

#### Connect policy to material outcomes

Environmental justice reporting also requires outlets to connect policy decisions to material outcomes. Regulatory rollbacks, permitting and zoning decisions, enforcement changes, and infrastructure development can determine where pollution is allowed, which violations are addressed, and whose complaints are taken seriously. Coverage that reports these decisions without explaining their consequences leaves viewers without a clear understanding of the stakes.

This approach would not require every environmental story to become a long investigation. It would require networks to consistently incorporate context into the reporting they’re already doing.

A chemical spill can be reported as a breaking news event while also noting who lives nearby and whether the facility has a history of violations. A refinery explosion can include emergency response details while also explaining the pollution burden surrounding the facility. A story about federal environmental cuts can identify which communities depend most on federal programs. A report on new energy or technology infrastructure can examine not only economic benefits, but also who bears the environmental costs.

Broadcast networks have the reach and resources to make those connections visible. Doing so would give audiences a fuller account of environmental risk and strengthen accountability for the industries, institutions, and public officials that shape exposure. Without that context, environmental harm is too easily presented as isolated, unavoidable, or disconnected from power. That’s why environmental justice should not be treated as a niche topic or a special frame reserved for rare segments. It must become a basic standard for reporting on pollution, public health, infrastructure, and environmental policy.

## Methodology

### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2024

06/17/25 11:19 AM EDT

### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2023

04/03/24 9:59 AM EDT

### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2022

03/16/23?

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NO LNX

How Trump's DOJ is quietly protecting billionaires — and destroying poor neighborhoods

Sabrina Haake May 08, 2026

The barely- acknowledged silver lining in Trump’s war in Iran is that it has pushed 30% of the world’s economic power into a race toward renewable energy. Market volatility of fossil fuels, already complex, has become so intolerable due to the oil chokehold in the Strait of Hormuz that nearly 60 nations are mapping out their accelerated plan to abandon fossil fuels.

Legacy cities, built around heavily polluting industries from 1940-1970, inherited dystopian realities, including toxic brownfields, disappearing populations, poverty, declining birth rates, and diminished life expectancy from airborne particulates. Study after study has shown that people of color, many of whom live in legacy cities, face disproportionate health problems from pollution including benzenes, coal ash, airborne particulates, industrial waste, and lead. One study showed that a 10 mile difference in where someone lives can make a 33 year difference in life expectancy due largely to differences in air, soil, and water quality.

As we watch our coastlines sink while fires, droughts and floods increase in intensity, it is only a matter of time before courts begin to compensate victims of mass environmental injury. While legacy cities, comprised of poor and/or black majorities, would make ideal class-action plaintiffs, the best way to avoid a forced national restructuring of the energy map is for state lawmakers to relieve legacy cities from state-sanctioned monopolies that have harmed them for decades.

Republicans should not have a monopoly on energy

Enter the utility monopoly, comprised predominantly of white, mid-to-upper wealth, males. Thirty-four states have created regulated energy monopolies under which competition is eliminated in exchange for “heightened state control”; these controls are exercised to guarantee regulated utilities a certain rate of return on their capital investments, regardless of injuries and pollution caused along the way. The statutes guarantee that the more power plants utilities build, the more financial rewards for their investors, regardless of whether or not those projects injure public health. Even project overruns, where a projected $5 billion plant ends up costing $10 billion, results in greater profits to shareholders, while 100% of the overrun costs are paid for by the consumer.

There is no industry in the free market economy of United States — other than the energy industry — where a given, controlled, highly lucrative ROI is legally guaranteed.

Utility monopoly states have established public utility monopolies to control local electricity production and distribution. Through public utility commissions (PUCs), they govern and regulate monopolies conceived as vertically integrated businesses, meaning the monopoly provides service from front (generation) to end (the consumer meter.) The entrenched array of state-controlled monopolies throughout the U.S. resulted in increased reliance on coal and coke powered facilities that leach chemicals toxic to human life in predominantly black, brown, Asian, and poor communities.

Follow the Money

The Trump administration is fighting climate progress in unprecedented ways. This month, Trump’s Justice Department sued Minnesota to block a state-level lawsuit against oil companies, arguing that the well-pleaded lawsuit is an attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This action follows a 2025 executive order directing the DOJ to protect energy production from state-level climate lawsuits, and complements Trump’s relentless efforts to increase reliance on fossil fuels to enrich and protect his deep-pocket fossil fuel donors.

While litigation winds through the federal courts, states could take matters into their own hands by transferring green energy generation to legacy cities and away from monopolistic utilities. The policy change would bring a profound economic shift by offering sustained economic opportunity to poor people, people of color, and others who live next to industry that ravages its host. This is an economic restitution approach based on evidence that black, brown, and poor citizens are disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution, toxic brownfields, and airborne particulates linked to living in legacy cities.

Redress is not suggested — nor recoverable — for decisions made in the 40s and 50s about where to site polluting industry. Demographics have shifted, and many entities have engaged in corporate shell games designed to insulate them from misdeeds of their corporate forbears.

But today there is no shortage of alternative energy firms with green energy expertise to share with municipalities in exchange for a share of the profits, if only they were not barred by artificial market constraints of Public Utility Commissions. It’s not hard to draft a 30-year lease where the energy developer provides expertise and equipment, and the city provides land, tax and permitting incentives. Over time, shared profits would gradually shift to the city while private investment is recovered.

Environmental justice would benefit the planet

Bringing energy autonomy to legacy cities would present a viable and sustainable economic justice model. Exempting legacy cities from PUCs, or state restraint, as compensation for decades of pollution and diminished life expectancy seems like a win-win, especially compared to the potential devastation of a well-funded class action.

A simple exemption for legacy cities would free 48 cities to set up green utilities through public-private ventures of their own choosing, and would soon provide cash-strapped cities more than enough money to enhance city services and possibly pay dividends to residents. Instead of drowning in debt, legacy cities could soon pave roads, buy municipal EV fleets for police and fire, and provide the kind of early education that gives urban youth a real chance at succeeding.

The war in Iran hits home how absurd it is to extract limited fossil fuels and export them around the globe when wind and solar power exists in everyone’s back yard. Black, brown, and poor communities disproportionately poisoned by fossil fuels own the wind and sun as much as anyone else, and should not have to sue the richest defendants in the world just to get their fair share. As long as we inhabit a spinning ball that circles the sun, we will have all the wind and solar energy we will ever need.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

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MMA PJT 2025 4 26

Research and development

- From the budget: “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, woke environmental justice work, radical climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.” Office of Management and Budget, *Budget of the United States Government*, [4/3/26]

- From Project 2025: “Notify Congress that EPA will not conduct any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization. This priority should be underscored in the President’s first budget request.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

Environmental justice

- From the budget: “The Budget continues the full elimination of EPA’s radical diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and instead restores civil rights protections for all Americans. This elimination puts an end to taxpayer funded programs that promote divisive racial discrimination and so-called 'environmental justice' grants to organizations that advance discriminatory and radical ideological projects.” Office of Management and Budget, *Budget of the United States Government*, [4/3/26]

- From Project 2025: “Returning the environmental justice function to the AO [Office of the Administrator], eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.” … “As a threshold matter, there is an opportunity to redefine EJ as a tool for the agency to prioritize environmental protection efforts and assistance to communities in proximity to pollution or with the greatest need for additional protection. Allocations of agency resources, increased EPA enforcement, and/or agency distribution of grants should be based on neutral constitutional principles.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

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an 11 25

Seven states are one flood away from a toxic sludge site spilling into the community.

Mother Jones reported Friday, "Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for 80 percent" of the sites. "Most of this risk is already locked in."

More than 5,500 toxic sites across the U.S. could face coastal flooding by 2100, threatening to spill contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods within the lifetimes of Generations Alpha and Beta, new research warns.

Scientists at the University of California found that a wide range of hazardous facilities are vulnerable, including sites handling sewage, toxic waste, oil, gas and other pollutants that are not fully protected from sea level rise and severe flooding.

"After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80 percent of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100," the report said.

The project examined 47,600 coastal facilities in the U.S., finding that about 5,500 are at risk of frequent flooding that could send toxic materials into nearby communities.

Current environmental safeguards do little more than delay the danger. Future generations will be forced either to build stronger containment systems that can withstand flooding or face the consequences.

“Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7 percent of sites) in the long term," the scientists found.

Read the full study at Nature Communications.

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politico

Sitting duck’? Meet an EPA environmental justice staffer.

By Sean Reilly, Ellie Borst | 06/04/2025

The Trump administration’s gutting of diversity programs highlights a seeming paradox of vows to deliver clean air, land and water for “every American.”

Swati Rayasam, an EPA environmental protection specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, was notified in February that she was being placed on administrative leave with a potentially permanent layoff due to environmental justice-affiliated work for the agency. Sharada Prasad

Swati Rayasam knew her job at EPA would be upended. She just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

“You are receiving this email because you have been identified as an EPA employee working in ‘environmental justice’ or a diversity, equity, and inclusion position and/or office,” the Feb. 6 message read.

Rayasam, an environmental protection specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, was immediately placed on paid administrative leave. Now threatened with a potentially permanent layoff, she’s one of hundreds of EPA employees facing dismissal or reassignment in a purge without precedent.

For Rayasam, it likely spells the end of a career begun only a year and a half ago. But the episode also highlights a seeming paradox at the heart of the Trump administration’s agenda as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin highlights the importance of clean air, land and water for “every American.”

That, says Rayasam, is exactly what her job entailed.

With a background in ensuring that the laws apply “to all the people that live in this country,” she said in one of several video interviews with POLITICO’s E&E News, “I really saw the opportunity at the Office of Environmental Justice to make that a reality.”

Zeldin has axed Raysam’s job, as part of a drive to abolish EPA’s entire Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.

That’s in line with President Donald Trump’s day one executive order to end initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, which Trump has characterized as a form of reverse discrimination. Zeldin has described the move as “elimination of forced discrimination programs.” At EPA and other agencies, the administration has proceeded with implementation of the White House’s directive at striking speed.

Trump’s and Zeldin’s stances represent “the larger political discourse … and a fundamental misunderstanding of what environmental justice is,” Rayasam said.

Trump’s executive orders, for example, skate over the abundant studies showing that people of color and low-income communities are more likely to face exposure to dangerous pollution. By Rayasam’s description, environmental justice is woven by law into the work of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, perennially swamped with reviews of new chemicals before they can go on the market.

That misunderstanding has left her, a public health scientist focused on chemicals policy, as “just a sitting duck,” she said.

Instead of doing a job where she mostly worked in tandem with the chemicals office, Rayasam now sits in limbo as her agency ID card gathers dust.

Her plight is emblematic of the whiplash accompanying the transition from President Joe Biden’s administration, which put an unparalleled emphasis on environmental justice, to Trump’s.

‘Too much work’

Her looming ouster results from Zeldin’s insistence that EPA circumscribe its activities only to those authorized by statute.

By his reading, that means EPA needs to reassign at least 100 staffers elsewhere within the agency to help clear the backlog of new chemicals awaiting review by the chemical safety office.

Major amendments passed to the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2016 created a new requirement for regulators to make a safety determination on each new chemical before it is allowed into the market, which industry trade groups complain has created significant wait times impeding the nation’s innovation and manufacturing capabilities.

The new TSCA amendments also require the agency to rein in dangerous uses of some of the most notorious industrial mainstays, such as asbestos or formaldehyde. The statute spells out the factors EPA must consider when deciding which existing substances will be prioritized for review, including consideration of “potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations.”

Rayasam said that’s a “pretty explicit” example of a statute mandating environmental justice practices, and factoring in population and exposure variability is a relatively new priority for EPA.

That’s where the environmental justice office staffers stepped in, she said.

“EPA has always had too much work,” Rayasam said. “So [the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights] provided a breath of fresh air, to be able to say … ‘You have all these people working to assist [the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention] on a specific thing that we’re trying to achieve. Not just because the administration thinks it’s important, but because the statute and statutory amendments actually call for it.'”

Take formaldehyde, for example.

It’s a compound fiercely defended by industry trade groups as critical for sterilizing medical devices and for the production of various building materials or consumer products.

But inhalation of its fumes can lead to cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and other serious long-term illnesses. Communities surrounding formaldehyde manufacturing plants are among the populations at risk for associated chronic illnesses, according to EPA’s final risk evaluation for formaldehyde.

Part of Rayasam’s job was to make sure EPA’s scientific assessments considered the impacts on largely overlooked — and highly exposed — communities in chemical risk assessments, such as formaldehyde exposure for people living in mobile homes.

“All the work that I did was also in the interest of EPA using the best available, most robust science that considered all the communities that it was required to consider, including [potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations],” she said.

‘An ounce of prevention’

Environmental justice, according to a 1998 EPA definition, “means that no group of people should bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harms and risks, including those resulting from the negative environmental consequences of industrial, governmental, and commercial operations or programs and policies.”

According to Zeldin, environmental justice is “the desire is that these people or communities that have been left behind deserve and need attention to be able to remediate and deal with an environmental issue.”

“I couldn’t possibly agree with that definition more,” he said at a conference in March.

But Zeldin works for a president who has methodically razed decades of work to weave environmental justice into the fabric of the federal government’s day-to-day business.

And during various media appearances, Zeldin has blamed the Biden administration for losing sight of that core bipartisan goal and has targeted environmental justice work “as an excuse to fund left-wing activists” who diagnose what the problem is instead of on direct remediation of the issue.

In response to questions, EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran reemphasized Zeldin’s past comments, adding, “the Trump EPA is focused on providing clean air, land, and water for every American regardless of race, gender, creed, and background. … And we’ll do it without wasting billions in taxpayer dollars on left-wing activist giveaways.”

But Rayasam said Zeldin’s assessment overlooks the importance of preventing exposures before they happen.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” she said.

Raised in Durham, North Carolina, Rayasam grew up about an hour’s drive from Warren County, a primarily Black enclave where 1982 landfill protests are seen as a pivotal force in launching the environmental justice movement nationally.

She got degrees in biology and global health, then worked for almost five years in a program on reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco. She started at EPA in November 2023.

“People thought I was going to come in like a hammer, basically, for EJ communities,” Rayasam said. “The first thing I would say to literally anybody is ‘You guys have a mountain of work, and I’m just here to try to figure out how to help you get it done. I’m here to pitch in, I would never ask people to modify anything that I was not willing to put my own skin in.'”

Joining Rayasam on the calls with E&E News were attorneys from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a worker advocacy group representing her and other idled environmental justice staffers in a complaint filed in April with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an ostensibly independent agency charged with enforcing federal workforce safeguards.

The complaint seeks to force EPA to put them all back to work partly on the grounds that federal law limits administrative leave to no more than 10 days per year. The special counsel’s office is now investigating, according to Laura Dumais, staff counsel for PEER.

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

In February, Trump fired the office’s chief, Hampton Dellinger, a Biden administration appointee who had been contesting the push to cashier thousands of probationary workers throughout the government. In Dellinger’s place, Trump named Jamieson Greer as acting head. Greer, who is also serving as U.S. trade representative, quickly dropped the inquiry into the firings. Trump last week said he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former right-wing podcast host, to lead the office.

“It really looks like the OSC is now under new management,” Dumais said. “It just really highlights the importance of an OSC that’s not controlled directly by the executive branch.”

*Sean Reilly and Ellie Borst can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70 and eborst.64.

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OMFG

MMA

In his first 100 days as EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin has used his frequent Fox appearances to shape the climate discourse

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Harrison Ray

Published 05/16/25

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has used his many appearances on Fox News and Fox Business to become one of the most visible members of the Trump administration so far. A Media Matters analysis found that Zeldin made at least 36 appearances on cable news during his first 100 days as EPA administrator, with 35 of those occurring on Fox networks — the most of any Trump Cabinet official.

Appearing on networks that are friendly to Trump’s agenda has allowed Zeldin to push climate-related misinformation and shape the discourse around environmental issues as he emerges “as one of the most devoted public champions” of Trump’s quest to “demolish the Biden agenda.”

Staples of Zeldin’s Fox appearances have included promoting rollbacks of environmental safeguards, hyping cuts and the elimination of programs at the EPA, and pushing the campaign to claw back congressionally allocated climate funds. He has also appeared on Fox to defend Trump’s orders to boost coal and muddy the waters on the root causes of the Tijuana River sewage issue.

## Zeldin appeared twice as much as Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, in half the time.

Lee Zeldin is far outpacing his recent Trump administration predecessors in cable news appearances.

During the first six months of his tenure, Trump’s first-term EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, appeared 15 times across cable news — Fox News (12 appearances), CNN (2) and MSNBC (1).

Andrew Wheeler, who served as Pruitt’s deputy and assumed the top spot after Pruitt resigned amid scandal, appeared only 3 times on cable while serving in the position, all on Fox.

## Zeldin is using Fox to push misinformation about climate funding

Fox News has aired more than 50 segments amplifying Zeldin’s false claims that $20 billion in federal climate grants allocated by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act were mired in waste, fraud, and abuse. In fact, the network's coverage has been largely informed by Zeldin while Fox has omitted important details of the story reported by other news outlets that challenge his claims.

The administration tried to freeze the IRA funds, using the claims of waste and fraud, but a federal judge chastized the agency for failing to provide “credible evidence” for the claims. Even after the EPA was rebuffed in court, Zeldin’s public campaign to demonize the climate grants — many of which were intended to reduce climate and air pollution and mobilize public and private capital in underserved communities — and their recipients has continued undeterred on Fox networks.

## Here’s how Zeldin is using Fox appearances to shape the discourse around a number of environmental issues.

##### Environmental protections

On March 12, Zeldin announced sweeping measures to undo environmental protections and radically reshape the agency’s mission in what he has proudly called the “largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.”

As part of these actions, Zeldin has redefined the mission of the EPA. Rather than focusing on the agency’s twin tenets of environmental protection and public health, Zeldin has promised to fulfill “President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.” And he has used Fox networks to promote and justify this shift.

Zeldin has claimed on Fox programs that current environmental protections need to be rolled back because they are "suffocating the economy” and that they have nothing to do with environmental protection but rather are part of former President Joe Biden’s “green new scam.” Zeldin’s arguments neatly position environmental safeguards into a pre-existing Fox News narrative that demonizes all climate action.

On the March 16 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, host Charlie Hurt reflected this characterization of regulations back to Zeldin, saying: “Green New Deal things have nothing to do with actually cleaning the environment or clean air or clean water. It more has to do with spending money on pet projects that benefit basically, like, political supporters of the Democrat party.”

Such claims discount the role of environmental protections in public health and corporate polluter accountability. For example, Zeldin wants to loosen wastewater regulations for coal and other steam-powered power plants and relax limits to the amount of mercury and other toxic metals power plants can emit. Zeldin claims these regulations “improperly targeted coal-fired power plants,” even though coal plants emit “the vast majority of mercury and other toxic air pollution.”

The EPA also wants to make it easier for manufacturers to release more particulate matter, or soot, even though “exposure to these tiny particles has been linked to asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes and other ailments.” In fact, one analysis, based on a 2024 report from the Environmental Protection Network that assessed the public health benefits of various EPA regulations, found that the targeted rules “were set to save the lives of nearly 200,000 people in the years ahead.”

Environmental justice

Zeldin is redefining environmental justice efforts as “forced discrimination programs” in order to nix it as part of Trump’s executive order on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences.”

To that end, he has closed the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and signaled that he is “eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental justice offices and positions immediately,” leaving under-resourced grassroots environmental justice groups to take over these efforts. Hundreds of environmental justice grants are being canceled as well.

On Fox, Zeldin has repeatedly suggested that the EPA previously used terms like “environmental justice” to “justify spending money not on actually directly remediating challenges to land, air, and water in America, but to funding left-wing activist groups.”

Zeldin used similar language in Fox coverage when he announced the closure of the EPA museum, calling it “another tribute to environmental justice” and saying: “What's amazing is over the course over this last administration, all this talk about environmental justice and climate change, it was really to justify giving out tens of billions of dollars to their friends through self-dealing conflicts of interests, unqualified recipients.” Zeldin’s closure of the EPA museum was covered by at least 5 other Fox News programs.

Tijuana River sewage issue

The Tijuana River sewage issue is one of the first specific environmental issues Zeldin discussed on Fox News. Every year, billions of gallons of sewage and toxic industrial waste flow down the Tijuana River, across the U.S.-Mexico border, and into the Pacific Ocean. It is a complex, decades-old, transjurisdictional issue that environmentalists and governments at the local, state, and federal level have been grappling with for years.

Zeldin has predominately characterized this issue as Mexico’s failure to stop pollution from crossing the border, while largely ignoring Mexico’s efforts to improve the problem and other progress made by the Biden administration.

For example, in March 2024, federal funding was secured to make the repairs and updates needed at California’s South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant. And in December, Biden approved $250 million in additional funding “towards the full repair and expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant,” which is expected to be functional in the next five years.

In January 2024, Mexico began rehabilitating a shuttered wastewater treatment plant, the San Antonio de los Buenos plant, and on April 28 of this year, the plant started treating waste again. Taken together, the improvements to the U.S. waste treatment plant and the wastewater infrastructure in Mexico are “intended to eliminate up to 90% of untreated wastewater reaching the coast.”

Fox News has aired at least a dozen segments on the issue, many of which have been shaped by Zeldin’s framing.

## Here’s how Fox personalities are responding to Zeldin’s deregulatory efforts.

Zeldin's Fox-heavy communications strategy has allowed him to dodge tough questioning and push misleading talking points with limited rebuttal. Fox hosts have rarely probed the consequences of cutting climate and environmental programs and rolling back safeguards, instead echoing his argument that previous government climate initiatives “didn’t really have anything to do with protecting the environment.”

Here are three examples of Fox News and Fox Business hosts teeing up Zeldin to talk about deregulation of environmental protections, efforts to boost coal, and “media attacks” on his actions.

On Sunday Night in America, host Trey Gowdy set up Zeldin to push the narrative that the protections he’s rolling back were part of a political agenda rather than pertinent to public health and safety:

> TREY GOWDY (HOST): We all want clean water and air, period. But regulation has gotten out of control, and it’s used to advance political agendas. Lee Zeldin aims to change that. He recently terminated a $2 billion grant that started doling out money after Harris lost. He joins us now. Welcome to you, Mr. Administrator. Have you already identified areas of regulation which do nothing to advance safety or health, but simply advance a political agenda?

On the April 1 edition of Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business program, Kudlow hosted Zeldin to discuss the EPA’s efforts to “grow the economy” and slash “red tape.” Kudlow congratulated the administrator on his recent deregulatory actions: “Thirty-one rule changes in one day at EPA. That's probably a world record, Lee Zeldin.”

Kudlow went on to reflect Zeldin’s characterization of environmental protection as radical: “A lot of the Biden stuff didn't really have anything to do with protecting the environment. It had to do with their radical Green New Deal climate change stuff. I mean, protecting the environment is very important. ... But this stuff has nothing to do with that.”

On April 10, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo asked for Zeldin’s reaction to Trump’s so-called “clean coal” plan. She also applauded the agency for stripping grants from environmental justice projects and gave him a platform to respond to recent reporting from Politico on his shift from “‘pro-climate Republican to ‘one of the Trump disruptors”:

> MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): You’ve said that the EPA is already reinvigorating America’s clean coal industry?

LEE ZELDIN (EPA ADMINISTRATOR): … At EPA just over four weeks ago, we announced what amounted to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the country. Just one agency was able to do that. Why? Because at the end of the Biden administration in 2023 and 2024, there were all sorts of regulations coming out. And as it related to the coal industry, the Biden EPA was trying to strangulate the coal industry out of existence.

…

BARTIROMO: I mean, look, you've been doing so well. I love the fact that you're taking costs out while also opening up the spigot of opportunities in energy. Your interview with Laura Ingraham recently was fantastic as you walked us through the building. Now the EPA is refusing to give Oregon an $85 million Biden-era grant meant to fund environmental justice projects in the state. You have uncovered lots of things that aren't exactly what they seem, Lee. These actions ramp up media attacks on you. Politico wrote this: “From pro-climate Republican to one of the Trump disruptors, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin's attacks on his agency’s spending and regulations have made him a rising star in the Trump cabinet but left some former colleagues mystified.”

Methodology...}:

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OMFG ALSO BRINGING BACK BLACK LUNG TO FORGOTTEN TRUMP BASE

AN 7 25

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision Friday to eliminate its scientific research arm drew horrified responses from public health experts and climate advocates, who warned that the Trump administration is targeting the foundation of the department's work to shield Americans from hazardous chemicals, toxic pollution, and drinking water contaminants.

"This is grim news," said Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "For decades, the EPA's Office of Research and Development has produced the science that underlies the regulations and technologies that protect us from innumerable hazards."

"You can't put a number on the lives that it has saved. Now Trump and Zeldin are killing it," Gaffney added, referring to the president's handpicked EPA administrator.

Since taking charge at the EPA, Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to implement President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at gutting the agency's staff and freeing oil and gas corporations from regulatory restraints.

The agency will soon have 12,448 employees, after starting the year with more than 16,000. Staffers at the targeted research office—which had more than 800 employees as of earlier this week—reportedly learned of what one public health expert called "the ultimate Friday night purge" through the EPA's public press release.

IFrame Content

In the statement, Zeldin said the elimination of the Office of Research and Development would help "ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment."

But scientists said the closure of the research office would have the opposite impact, leaving the agency's ability to protect the environment and public health badly compromised.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "it is absolutely devastating that Trump officials would shut down this office in its entirety."

"Science, data, and research underpin all of EPA's work, from protections from harmful chemicals to air quality standards to safe drinking water. It's hard to see how EPA can fulfill its mission without its scientific research arm," said Goldman. "The nation enjoys a cleaner environment thanks to the decades of high-quality research coming out of this office. Our nation cannot let this stand. Members of Congress must act."

In his public messaging, Zeldin has deemphasized the EPA's fundamental responsibility to protect the environment, instead casting the agency as a promoter of "energy dominance"—the slogan Trump administration officials have used to describe the president's commitment to boosting fossil fuel drilling.

Earlier this year, Zeldin boasted about launching "the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history," targeting power plant rules, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, and other regulations.

"Out in the open, Zeldin's EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies," The New Republic's Kate Aronoff wrote in a recent column.

"Among the broader suite of regulations Zeldin's EPA has promised to roll back," Aronoff wrote, "is one that would require coal-fired power plant operators to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, limiting their ability to freely discharge toxins like mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, and bromide and to threaten local drinking water supplies."

NOW READ:'Like an open fire hose': Trump ripped as cracks show in MAGA media

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How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2024

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 06/17/25 MMA

Corporate broadcast news coverage of environmental justice declined in 2024. ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined total of just 7 environmental justice segments, compared to 9 such segments in 2023. This continues a multiyear trend of declining airtime dedicated to stories about how environmental racism, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation disproportionately harm vulnerable communities.

Environmental justice refers to the disproportionate impact of environmental harms — such as air and water pollution, toxic exposure, or policy neglect — on communities that are already socially or economically marginalized. These include Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income populations that are more likely than other groups to live near industrial facilities, aging infrastructure, or fossil fuel extraction sites and bear the brunt of pollution to the air, land, and water.

Media Matters reviewed morning and evening newscasts on corporate broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC from January 1 through December 31, 2024. Segments were coded as relating to environmental justice if they included coverage of environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards and identified a specific marginalized community as affected. For the first time, the study includes weekend morning and evening news programs and ABC’s GMA3. Weeknight and weekend episodes of PBS News Hour were reviewed for comparison but are not included in the segment total.

## Key findings

- From January 1 through December 31, 2024, corporate broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a total of 7 segments about environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards that included a mention of a socially marginalized community. This marks a continued decline from 9 such segments in 2023 and 12 in 2022.
- CBS and ABC each aired 3 environmental justice segments in 2024 while NBC aired just 1.
- PBS News Hour aired 11 environmental justice segments in 2024, which is more than the combined total from the three corporate broadcast networks. Weeknight and weekend episodes of PBS News Hour were reviewed for comparison but are not included in the segment total.
- Corporate broadcast networks also failed to cover several major environmental justice stories, including the water funding crisis in Jackson, Mississippi; the Supreme Court’s decision to halt EPA ozone protections; ongoing pollution monitoring failures along the Houston Ship Channel; and the growing barriers to black lung compensation in Kentucky.

## How corporate broadcast networks covered environmental justice in 2024

In 2024, corporate broadcast networks aired just 7 segments about environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards that also identified how those issues affected a socially marginalized community. This continues a multiyear trend of declining environmental justice coverage.
...

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MTA 5 25

Legal Victory in Louisiana: Fifth Circuit Revives Environmental Justice Lawsuit

In a significant development for environmental justice, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on April 9, 2025, that a lawsuit challenging discriminatory land use practices in St. James Parish, Louisiana, can proceed. The plaintiffs—community and faith-based groups—allege that the parish has systematically placed hazardous industrial facilities in majority-Black neighborhoods, disproportionately affecting residents' health and cultural heritage. The court's decision allows the case to move forward, offering hope for communities seeking accountability and change. McGlinchey Stafford PLLC+2Center for Constitutional Rights+2Louisiana Law Blog+2 Center for Constitutional Rights+2Louisiana Law Blog+2McGlinchey Stafford PLLC+2

On Earth Day 2025, Harris County, Texas, unveiled its first Climate Justice Plan, a product of a two-year community-driven process led by the Office of Sustainability and the nonprofit CEER (Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience). The plan addresses critical areas such as flood and grid resilience, clean air and water, and focuses on five key themes: ecology, infrastructure, economy, community, and culture. Funded by over $700,000 in foundation grants, it reflects local priorities and promotes community-led solutions like tree planting and storm hubs. While the document does not lay out a detailed implementation strategy, it includes early action suggestions for county leadership, with actions to be considered for the FY 2026 budget. Houston Chronicle

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New York State Awards $2 Million in Environmental Justice Grants

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) announced on April 24, 2025, that approximately $2 million in Environmental Justice Community Impact Grants will be awarded to 21 community-based organizations. These grants aim to support projects that address environmental and public health concerns, build community consensus, set priorities, and improve public outreach and education. Since 2006, DEC’s Office of Environmental Justice has awarded nearly $17 million to 257 projects to help support communities facing a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges. Department of Environmental Conservation

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EPA Cancels Environmental Justice Grants Amid Administrative Changes

In a controversial move, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the cancellation of 781 environmental justice grants issued during President Joe Biden’s tenure, totaling over $1.5 billion. These grants were primarily intended to support projects mitigating climate change impacts, such as wildfire smoke protection and coastal flooding defenses in vulnerable communities. The cancellations have drawn criticism from local officials and former EPA advisers, who warn that the move will severely harm public health efforts and environmental progress, particularly in marginalized communities. The Washington Post

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Illinois Sues Roxana Landfill Over Environmental Violations

The Illinois Attorney General's Office filed an 11-count lawsuit against the Roxana Landfill in Madison County, citing multiple violations observed between 2019 and 2023, including litter on the property, exposed waste, and air pollution. The suit seeks to halt further violations, enforce corrective measures, and impose significant fines. State legislators support the legal action, crediting it as a vital step toward accountability and environmental protection. The Telegraph

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icn

2 25

Activists across the United States say they’re preparing to take the federal government to court after President Donald Trump unveiled a series of executive orders that seek to undo much of his predecessor’s climate and environmental justice legacy.

The executive orders, which Trump signed just hours after his second term began, target some of President Joe Biden’s key accomplishments, including the Justice40 Initiative. That program, which many advocates hailed as a major breakthrough for the environmental justice movement, directed federal agencies to deliver at least 40 percent of the “overall benefits” of their environmental and energy spending to “disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment.”

Many government websites put up during Biden’s term, including the official Justice40 page and the White House environmental justice page, have been removed since Trump took office.

Other Biden initiatives that the Trump administration moved to reverse include:

Two executive orders that directed federal agencies to explicitly take environmental justice into account when spending funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the Inflation Reduction Act;

One executive order that set a national goal to dramatically increase the sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. by 2030;

And one executive order that established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, as well as offered federal assistance to struggling coal communities as the country transitions to cleaner energy sources.

More of our coverage of the biggest story on the planet:

A White House memorandum ordered a halt to federal assistance and a review to align spending with Donald Trump’s priorities. The order throws doubt into a wide range of programs that help protect Americans from disasters, provide access to clean drinking water and affordable energy and help protect ecosystems, among many other issues.

The new head of the U.S. Department of Transportation issued sweeping memos this week, directing the department to “identify and eliminate” nearly all initiatives relating to climate change, racial equity, gender identity, DEI or environmental justice implemented during the Biden administration.

Environmental advocates in North Carolina are angry after 10 utilities and power companies, including Duke Energy, sent a letter to the newly confirmed EPA administrator asking to weaken environmental regulations over coal ash and natural gas.

As Trump Targets Biden’s Environmental Justice Initiatives, Activists Gear Up for Legal Fights

BY KRISTOFFER TIGUE, KEERTI GOPAL, MARIANNE LAVELLE

Those who have worked to combat climate change for years believe they are well-prepared to challenge executive orders that would leave vulnerable communities more exposed to pollution.

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Reset or Purge? Trump EPA Dismisses Agency Science Advisers - Inside Climate News

Reset or Purge? Trump EPA Dismisses Agency Science Advisers

BY MARIANNE LAVELLE

Critics fear the unusual clean sweep of panels is meant to ease the planned rollback of climate and environmental policy.

All members of the Environmental Protection Agency’s boards of outside advisers on science and clean air were dismissed in a letter emailed late Tuesday, an unusual step the Trump administration said was aimed at depoliticizing the panels.

Panel members expressed disappointment and confusion at the assertion in the letter signed by James Payne, a career EPA attorney Trump installed as acting administrator. Critics charged the Trump administration with politicizing the process by eliminating the current independent advisers and clearing the way for them to be replaced with hand-picked appointees.

“This is not about good governance, this is about rigging the system for polluters; corruption at the expense of the American people,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Similar efforts to remake science advisory panels came during the first Trump administration, with EPA leaders changing the eligibility rules for serving on boards. The result was fewer university researchers on the panels and more industry consultants and scientists who were supportive of Trump’s deregulatory efforts, like University of Alabama in Huntsville atmospheric scientist John Christy, taking seats.

A number of the now-dismissed panel members had two to three years remaining in their terms. It was not immediately clear who would be appointed as replacements on the advisory panels, both of which are required under federal law. Trump’s choice to head up the Environmental Protection Agency, former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin, won Senate confirmation on Wednesday, the day after the dismissals.

An EPA spokesperson said the move was in line with the agency’s purpose.

“EPA is working to update the Science Advisory Board (SAB) and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) to ensure that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission,” the spokesperson said in an email. “The decision to reset these federal advisory committees emphasizes the importance of SAB and CASAC to EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment and seeks to reverse the politicization of SAB and CASAC made by the previous Administration.”

The dismissed chairs of both of the boards disputed that characterization.

“I was not appointed as a political appointee, but as a scientist that studies air pollution and health,” said Jeremy Sarnat, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health who had only begun serving as chair of the CASAC in October. He said the Clean Air Act, passed on a bipartisan basis more than 50 years ago and implemented under administrations of both parties, had been “one of the most successful public policies that has ever been enacted globally,” in part because of procedures that require the agency to rely on the best science.

“I know that so many other facets of American life and society have been politicized, and I hope that the CASAC and the advisory boards can remain above that and that the new administrator will adhere to the principles and practices, which have really worked so well for decades,” Sarnat said.

Kimberly Jones, an engineering professor and associate provost at Howard University, who has served as chair of the Science Advisory Board since 2023, said she was disappointed in the administration’s decision.

“It does seem to signal a shift in the decades-old accepted facts about how science should occur,” Jones said. “We should not be writing or interpreting science to meet anybody’s objectives. We should be independent, doing our best job to evaluate the science as scientists. This seems to go counter to that understanding.”

Although EPA’s science advisers are not decision-makers, their advice becomes important when the agency’s policy decisions face legal challenges. EPA’s 2024 decision to strengthen the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for fine particulate matter, for example, was bolstered because it was in line with the advice the agency received from the CASAC. Conversely, weak ozone standards passed during the first Trump administration were successfully challenged in court in 2021, in part because the EPA had received contrary recommendations from outside advisers.

It is not the first time there has been a clean sweep of scientific advisers. Biden’s EPA chief, Michael Regan, installed a new slate at CASAC when he took office in 2021 based on the findings by the GAO and others that the selection process had become compromised.

H. Christopher Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who served as head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development during the Biden administration, said the circumstances are entirely different now. “This is really just a flat-out purge of the current membership,” he said.

Frey said the Trump administration seemed to be following the conservative policy platform Project 2025, which called for “resetting science advisory boards” at EPA.

“The administration seems to be wanting to promote loyalty and compliance with its policy agenda, but that’s not the mission of a science advisory board,” Frey said. “So if that’s the goal, it’s an inappropriate interference in an external, independent expert advisory board, and it’s also just setting more precedent for this to happen every time.”

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RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing Highlighted His Inconsistency But Overlooked Climate and Environment

BY KEERTI GOPAL

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination is approved, he would oversee health at a time when environmental impacts loom large.

Global Warming Set the Stage for Los Angeles Fires

BY BOB BERWYN

A new attribution analysis found that climate heating caused by burning fossil fuels significantly increased the likelihood of extreme fire conditions.

Amid Paused Solar Funding, EPA Floats Workforce Reductions

BY JAKE BOLSTER

Solar for All, its funding paused by a Trump executive order, would be just one of the programs to lose support if the agency goes through with mass-firings.

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morano BS

DDSB

ONLY 1 Radio station? 10 24

Climate Change Narrative Continues To Fall Apart | NewsRadio 740 KTRH

NewsRadio 740 KTRH - iHeart

"This is a campaign cause" said Marc Morano, publisher at Climate Depot, "It doesn't really matter what's true and what's not, it supposed to be ...---

NASA spending millions on DEI even as budget crisis emerges | NewsRadio 740 KTRH

fox the five

KTRH Local Houston and Texas News

The Climate Change Narrative Continues To Fall Apart

B.D. Hobbs

Oct 21, 2024

Just when the left thought it was safe to freak out about the weather, scientists are now expecting a cooler than average La Nina, and that is pouring a lot of cold water on the left's climate change narrative.

"This is a campaign cause" said Marc Morano, publisher at Climate Depot, "It doesn't really matter what's true and what's not, it supposed to be science. But this about a narrative, and it's about activists."

So, with that said, then what about the narrative the left likes to use on warming oceans?

"The claims that they're claiming for record heat in the oceans are a temperature change of 3 and half thousandths of one degree" Morano told KTRH, "They're not even measurable in real world data."

The reality is, the left's climate change narrative is melting.

NewsRadio 740 KTRH - iHeart

Marc Morano of The Climate Depot says this DEI push by NASA has caused them serious problems. "They have budget shortfalls in every main area that ...

ExxonMobil’s Echo Chamber

Inhofe’s source for his assertion? A discredited, ExxonMobil-funded study by an Exxon-funded advocacy group that was based on discredited studies by other ExxonMobil-funded organizations.

Inhofe rested his argument on previous congressional testimony by Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), a shoestring, mom-and-pop operation that is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. “Of course we do and it is only natural,” Alford wrote on NBCC’s website. “The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel…. [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend.”

One of NBCC’s closest economic friends is ExxonMobil, which has donated more than $1.14 million to the group since 2001.

What did the company get for that money?

In 2015, NBCC commissioned a report that claimed the Clean Power Plan would “inflict severe and disproportionate economic burdens on poor families, especially minorities.”

In fact, unchecked climate change would more than likely hurt those communities most, and investments in energy efficiency under the plan would ultimately lower electricity bills across the country.

How did NBCC arrive at its upside-down assessment? The Union of Concerned Scientists took a close look at the report and found it was based on several flawed fossil fuel industry-friendly studies. Two of those bogus studies were produced by ExxonMobil grantees: the Heritage Foundation, which received $340,000 from ExxonMobil between 2007 and 2013, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which received $3 million between 2014 and 2016.

The Chamber study, which came out just days before the EPA released a draft of the Clean Power Plan, was debunked not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and The Washington Post. Among its many faults, the Chamber study—which was co-sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute—wildly inflated the cost of the plan and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

ExxonMobil Spreads its Money Around

But there’s more than just the fact that ExxonMobil financed deliberately flawed studies to try to derail the Clean Power Plan. The company also is a major supporter of a number of Senate EPW Committee members, including Inhofe, who are adamant climate science deniers.

Inhofe has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, which has donated $1.85 million to his campaign war chest over his long career in Congress, more than twice than any other industry.Three oil and gas companies are among the senator’s top 10 corporate contributors: Koch Industries, Devon Energy and …ExxonMobil.

Six of the other 10 Republicans on the EPW Committee also are on ExxonMobil’s donation list, including Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the current committee chairman. Roughly half of the $119,500 ExxonMobil contributed to the seven senators over the last decade went to Barrasso and Inhofe, the committee’s previous chairman.

Then there’s ExxonMobil’s link to Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general before President Trump tapped him to run the EPA. From 2012 through 2013, he chaired the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA)and afterward served on the organization’s executive committee. From 2014 through 2016, ExxonMobil gave RAGA $160,000 in three annual installments.

Just a few weeks after the company made its 2016 donation of $50,000,Pruitt and then-RAGA Chairman Luther Strange, at the time Alabama’s attorney general, co-authored a National Review column attacking a coalition of state attorneys general investigating ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies for misleading investorsand the general public about climate change. Parroting ExxonMobil’s argument, Pruitt and Strange charged that the coalition was violating the company’s first amendment right to free speech.

“The debate” over climate change, they wrote “is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

Inhofe Upstaged

In this case, Inhofe’s counterfactual comment didn’t make it into the ensuing media coverage. Along with nearly everything else that was said during the two-and-a-half hour marathon, it was eclipsed by a bombshell dropped by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. The Rhode Island Democrat revealed that during a February 2016 radio interview, Pruitt said Trump would be “more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama, and that’s saying a lot.” Whitehouse read Pruitt’s remark aloud and asked him if he recalled making it.

“I don’t,” Pruitt responded, “and I don’t echo that today at all.”

“I guess not,” Whitehouse replied.

Not surprisingly, that embarrassing nugget was the story. There was no way that Inhofe’s rambling, ExxonMobil-sponsored falsehood could compete in the media with red meat like that. But overshadowed or not, Inhofe provided yet another incontrovertible piece of evidence that—despite ExxonMobil’s statements to the contrary—the company is still very much engaged behind the scenes in trying to stymie any government attempt to seriously address climate change.

Posted in: Climate Change, Energy, Science and Democracy, Scientific Integrity

Tags: disinformation

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maloney 2017 oversight feature EJ, dem woman rep spoke up for it, but this is reminder of nbcoc alford and other renta-tomsand BS studies:

NBCoC MISI BS study:

ref 3

404 --> WB https://blog.ucsusa.org/john-rogers/new-flawed-study-of-the-clean-power-plan-how-the-misi-study-gets-it-so-wrong-759

JUNE 12, 2015,

no lnx many

an op-ed in yesterday’s Investor’s Business Daily uses a new study to make unsubstantiated claims about the economic impacts of the proposed Clean Power Plan on vulnerable communities. Since the op-ed didn’t provide a link to the actual analysis, we hunted it down and took a look behind the headlines. And when we did, we found that the foundations of this new “analysis” are shaky indeed.

A house built on sand

The new study, conducted by Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) on behalf of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), purports to look at a range of EPA regulations, but focuses on the Clean Power Plan (CPP).

energy-clean-power-plan-black-chamber-of-commerce-study-cover-not-science

But here’s the first of the study’s fatal flaws: it depends, as it explicitly says (p. 21), on the findings of seven other studies, which it lists. But those seven include:

Three studies that came out before the EPA published the draft CPP, meaning they don’t actually study the CPP as proposed—even though that’s the supposed focus of the NBCC/MISI analysis

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One that was just (self-described) “preliminary analysis” from the United Mine Workers of America, a group you’d be hard-pressed to characterize as an unbiased voice in this debate

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Three other studies funded by other fossil fuel interests who oppose the Clean Power Plan

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Two of those studies were the focus of a recent UCS webinar showing how such studies use bad assumptions and get used to sow confusion and spread disinformation about the CPP.

One of those, done byIHS on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is the report most cited in this new work, even though it was one of those that came out before the draft CPP, and even though there was, as the Chamber itself admitted, “a big difference” between what they’d modeled and what EPA put forth (which the new study doesn’t acknowledge).

The flaws in the study by Energy Ventures Analysis (EVA) for Peabody Energy (the largest U.S. coal company) are also clear. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has pointed out that, unlike other studies, EVA’s didn’t even show a business-as-usual case, meaning that any CPP results were floating in a vacuum, without reference to a base case of shifting energy costs and other economic factors.

Ignoring the bedrock

Equally telling are the studies that didn’t make NBCC/MISI’s literature review:

The EPA’s own cost-benefit analysis, which showed investments in energy efficiency under the Clean Power Plan will ultimately generate savings on electricity bills nationally

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Studies from academic sources, which show the CPP delivering widespread health co-benefits by reducing harmful air pollution from power plants

One by the NAACP that has documented the costly and disproportionate impacts of power plant pollution on “low-income communities and communities of color”

Another recent analysis by researchers at the University of Maryland suggesting the CPP will lead to a net increase in jobs.

But you wouldn’t glean any of that from the new NBCC/MISI report. No, it follows in the footsteps of previous misleading studies by exaggerating the costs and ignoring the benefits of climate action.

The elephant in the neighborhood

And that brings up another of the study’s fatal flaws: it forgets about climate change. In the op-ed, the only mention of “mitigation” is about avoiding the supposed impacts of the regulation. And even in the study itself, nary a word.

If you ignore the benefits side of the cost-benefit equation, it's hard to come up with anything but bad news. But when you take a solid look at both sides of the equation, you see a pretty impressive net-positive.

Hard to believe, I realize. But somehow the author makes it through the entire study without mentioning global warming. This, a purported study of a regulation, but it doesn’t even acknowledge the incredible amount of science behind the need for just such a regulation. All it’s got is one mention of “warmer climates” and the importance of air-conditioning… which, it turns out, we’ll need more of as the climate warms.

And who is going to be disproportionately affected by that warming climate and other impacts? In many cases, the same vulnerable populations that the new study is supposedly defending.

On the other hand, that grievous omission isn’t entirely surprising, since the author of the study has claimed—despite the wealth of information very much to the contrary—that more carbon dioxide is actually a good thing. Not so much.

Poor science, bad policy

It all adds up to a study that Juan Declet-Barreto of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls:

“…a cynical attempt at co-opting the Latino and African American communities into rejecting the most significant controls to power sector air pollutants and toxics affecting their health and communities.”

The Clean Power Plan is about the fundamental need to address climate change, including on behalf of those who are least equipped to deal with its impacts. A study of the CPP that forgets that isn’t worth the electrons it’s printed on.

Poor science may make for good headlines, but it definitely makes for bad policy.

JOHN ROGERS is a senior energy analyst with expertise in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies and policies. SEE JOHN'S FULL BIO.

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The EPA’s own cost-benefit analysis, which showed investments in energy efficiency under the Clean Power Plan will ultimately generate savings on electricity bills nationally
Studies from academic sources, which show the CPP delivering **widespread health co-benefits by reducing harmful air pollution from power plants
One by the NAACP that has documented the costly and disproportionate impacts** of power plant pollution on “low-income communities and communities of color”
Another recent analysis by researchers at the University of Maryland suggesting the CPP will lead to a net increase in jobs.

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renta tom tamales:

reuters

...As part of the campaign, API has partnered with a number of black and Hispanic business groups, including the Virginia, Florida and North Carolina Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce and South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce.

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A Pew Research poll published in January showed that 56 percent of Hispanics and 54 percent of blacks opposed offshore drilling, compared to 48 percent of white people.

The Interior Department in January announced a proposal to open up nearly all U.S. offshore waters to drilling, triggering a backlash from coastal states that rely on tourism.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a Senate panel in April that he is likely to scale back the proposal following meetings with coastal governors. Shortly after he unveiled his offshore drilling proposal, Zinke offered an exemption for Florida after he held a private meeting with Republican Governor Rick Scott.

The oil and gas industry is keen to pursue seismic testing in areas they believe hold the largest reserves along the southern Atlantic coast and to Florida’s eastern Gulf shorelines.

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The API campaign published op-eds in local newspapers this week, including one by Stephen Gilchrist, chair of South Carolina’s African American Chamber of Commerce. In it he touts API’s major talking point that oil and gas exploration jobs offer locals an average salary of $116,000 without requiring a college degree....

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https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/fueling-dissent/

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FUELING DISSENT

How the oil industry set out to undercut clean air

After casting doubt on climate change for decades, industry consultants have turned their attention to air pollution

Illustration by Robert Fresson

by Jie Jenny Zou

Tom Dart of Guardian US contributed reporting

December 12, 2017

SAN ANTONIO, Texas ― On sunny days, when his classmates at St. John Bosco Elementary School run out to play, Gabriel Rosales heads to the school nurse for a dose of Albuterol. The fine mist opens his airways, relaxing the muscles in his chest. Without it, recess could leave the 9-year-old gasping for breath. He gets a second dose at the end of the day before heading home.

Over the past year, Gabriel’s asthma has worsened. Visits to the emergency room, shortened trips to the park, and reliance on inhalers have become his new norm. “It got to the point where I couldn’t even leave him with anybody,” said his father, Gabe, who works as a consultant to the National Association of Public Employees, a workers’ advocacy group, and a seasonal field director of the Bexar County Democratic Party. “One time he almost looked blue.”

Gabriel’s health is deteriorating alongside air quality in San Antonio, where oil and gas development, a hotter climate and a growing population have combined to spell misery for a city that once boasted clean air compared to other Texas metropolitan areas. Part of the problem lies southeast of the city in the Eagle Ford Shale, a 400-mile-long hub of hydraulic fracturing that unleashes microscopic particles and smog-causing, ground-level ozone.

The state’s environmental regulator — the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — hasn’t made things better.In fact, it’s followed in the footsteps of Big Oil’s biggest lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, which has forestalled progress on ozone for decades. Using consultants also hired byAPI,the commission has spent millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to undercut scientific evidence linking particulate matter and ozone with bronchitis, asthma and premature death.

Read more about API's history of climate denial and its ties to the White House ]

Air quality is the new frontier for climate-change skeptics long tied to API. The institute has fueled uncertainty on climate by producing what critics call misleading scientific and economic studies. Now, by attempting to discredit established research on ozone and fine particles, API and its cadre of doubters are trying to undermine the Clean Air Act — the landmark U.S. law credited with saving millions of lives. Working in concert with other free-market groups, they’re taking their message to Capitol Hill. API officials did not grant interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity.

Residents of San Antonio’s low-income, mostly Latino neighborhoods — like Hillcrest, where Gabriel Rosales lives — bear the brunt of poor air quality even if they aren’t in ozone hot spots, said Mario Bravo, an outreach specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “They have less access to health care,” Bravo said. “They have less access to transportation to get to the health-care providers.”

‘A lot like climate’

In June, two peer-reviewed studies trumpeted a conclusion at odds with years of solid science: fine-particle pollution long linked to premature death and chronic illness isn’t as dangerous as health advocates contend. If true, the findings would call into question health benefits claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has set ever-tightening air-quality standards.

There was a catch, however. The articles — which were published within a week of one another — appeared in Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, two journals favored by industry consultants alleged to promote pay-for-play science. And both studies were funded by API, a trade group that has spent $40 million since 2013 to lobby Congress on topics ranging from taxes to global warming.

Twitter

“Our study is published...air quality does not kill. $600 million of EPA junk science up in smoke,” climate-change skeptic and Donald Trump acolyte Steve Milloy tweeted in June, linking to the Regulatory Toxicology article. During a congressional luncheon a month later, the former coal executive took credit for conceiving the study before turning it over to friend, S. Stanley Young, and two other statisticians, who authored the final article. No mention of Milloy’s involvement is made in the publication.

Read more about how Big Oil is trying to sow skepticism of science among judges ]

Some of the same data were used in the Critical Reviews article published by Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., which also disputed the link between fine particles and mortality. Cox, a biostatistician from Colorado, started consulting for API in 1988. Cox disclosed that his paper “benefitted from close proofreading and copy-editing suggestions from API” but denied in an interview that his findings were influenced.In November, he was named the next chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, drawing criticism from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The science on particle pollution, much like the science on global warming, is exhaustive and widely accepted, with thousands of studies pointing to serious health implications. The World Health Organization notes that particulate matter “affects more people than any other pollutant,” with effects observed at even “very low concentrations.” The particles — found in automotive and industrial exhaust and smaller than one-fifth of the width of a strand of hair — form a toxic mix with ozone that lodges deep in the lungs. Unlike Cox, most researchers are no longer fixated on whether this form of pollution is fundamentally dangerous; they worry instead about whether it can cause — not just exacerbate — chronic illness.

Attacking the science is one way of undermining the Clean Air Act, said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates for more protective air-quality standards. The Clean Air Act is routinely hailed as one of the most cost-effective federal laws, even by business groups. In 2015, the EPA estimated that the law will have saved the U.S. economy $2 trillion by 2020 while costing $65 billion to implement. About 85 percent of the act’s benefits come from reducing fine-particle pollution, which raises the risk of early death. Opponents of the law “deny that air pollution is deadly … or even harmful in order to try to pretend that no benefits are delivered,” Walke said.

Steve Milloy

Milloy’s July luncheon at the Rayburn House Office Building — billed as a “congressional staff and media briefing” — was little more than a plug for his latest book, “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA,” which condemns the “echo chamber of deceptive science” on ozone and fine particles. The event was hosted by Myron Ebell, who chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-skeptics’ group that began as an alliance of free-market think tanks. “It’s a lot like climate,” Milloy told the audience. “This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

“It’s a lot like climate... This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

Reached for comment, Milloy said the study is not an attack on the Clean Air Act but part of his 20-year effort to expose the EPA’s “garbage-in, garbage-out” air pollution research. He denied having any formal ties to API. “I am very, very disappointed in the American Petroleum Institute and all the oil companies for not defending their products, for leaving the science to people like me,” he said.

Young, who authored the study, stood behind its findings and disputed the idea that industry funding presents ethical conflicts. His study data are publicly available, he said, but the EPA isn’t as transparent. Ebell agreed, accusing the agency of using “junk science” to justify air-quality and greenhouse-gas regulation.

Despite their misgivings about the EPA, all three men have become tethered to the agency. Earlier this year, Ebell oversaw the EPA transition for Trump, leading a group that included Milloy. Young was named to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board in October.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, complained that such appointments have become all too common. “These people were fringe fanatics and industry stooges fighting on behalf of the industry a propaganda war against science,” he said.

Milloy and Ebell were listed among the authors of a $2 million plan to amplify uncertainty in climate science — as revealed in a 1998 API memo leaked to The New York Times. Both say the memo grew out of an API brainstorming session that never resulted in concrete action, with Milloy calling it “just a big joke.”

Years before, API had refuted the very concept of global warming under President Charles DiBona, who joined the institute shortly after a stint as energy policy advisor to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. White House communications show that DiBona regularly met with then-API President Frank Ikard, a close friend of Nixon’s, before becoming Ikard’s deputy in 1974.

“You heard that a scientific consensus now exists,” DiBona said during API’s annual meeting in 1996. “This claim is beyond misleading; it is dead wrong.” He borrowed an analogy from MIT physicist Richard Lindzen, who likened climate models to Ouija boards. By 2003, a group of scientists funded by API had turned out the first of several studies characterizing the warming trend as a natural phenomenon.

The same year, however, the United Nations was holding its ninth conference on climate change — focusing on how to mitigate warming. In 2001, an international consortium of scientists had delivered its third report on the trend, reaffirming findings that climate change was real and manmade.

Reached by phone recently, DiBona declined to answer any questions about the organization he led for 18 years. Months after retiring from API in 1997, DiBona joined the board of Halliburton, an oilfield-service company then headed by future vice president Dick Cheney. DiBona is now an API honorary lifetime director and an advisory chairman for a mining investment company based in the Cayman Islands.

In recent years, fringe views espoused by API have found a receptive audience in U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), whose climate-denial credentials rival those of Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Since Smith became chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in 2013, the panel has handed out dozens of subpoenas — many to scientists at regulatory agencies and environmental groups — aiming to debunk climate research.

Smith — whose district includes San Antonio — has opened the committee’s hearing rooms to Cooler Heads Coalition events such as Milloy’s book promotion and briefings that urged the United States to drop out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. In February, he reissued a controversial subpoena to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is investigating ExxonMobil’s historical knowledge on climate change. Since he joined Congress in 1989, Smith’s top campaign donors have been from the oil and gas sector, which gave him at least $764,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Smith did not respond to requests for comment.

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In 2016, Influence Map, a nonprofit environmental research group, estimated that ExxonMobil had spent about $27 million on “climate obstruction” lobbying and advertising campaigns. That amount was dwarfed by the $65 million API spent on similar efforts, the group found. ExxonMobil is one of the oldest and largest API members.

‘Tired, old industry argument’

In July, the House passed a bill targeting what its proponents called “job-killing regulations” — namely, bedrock air-quality standards. Its lead author was Rep. Pete Olson, a Republican from the ozone-plagued Houston area. All but four of the 229 “aye” votes were cast by Republicans, Lamar Smith among them.

Under Olson’s bill, states would have until 2025 to meet the EPA’s latest ozone limit, which was supposed to take effect in October. The agency, which is legally required to update air standards to keep pace with evolving science, would be obligated to review rules for pollutants once a decade, as opposed to once every five years.

The 2017 bill is the latest iteration of a proposal Olson first floated in 2015, seeking to delay regulation of ozone. The same day his bill passed, 144 trade groups, including regional offshoots of API, pledged their support in a letter to Congress. Oil and gas interests have been Olson’s top political contributors, donating more than $1 million to his campaigns since 2007. A Senate version of the bill has not come up for a vote.

In an email, Olson’s office wrote that the congressman “believes the Clean Air Act is critically important” but has “fundamental concerns” about Texas’ ability to meet tighter standards. Pollution control, the email said, “can be done rationally and with an eye on our economy.”

By law, the EPA is not allowed to consider cost when setting ozone standards, but that hasn’t stopped API and other industry groups from injecting economics into the policy debate. Much like scientists for hire, economists have provided API with grist to challenge regulations. Armed with seemingly authoritative studies from firms such as NERA Economic Consulting, the institute has recast issues such as action on climate change as reckless moves that could tank the U.S. economy. NERA, whose clients include API collaborators such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Chemistry Council, was co-founded by Irwin Stelzer, an economist who works at the Hudson Institute, a free-market think tank.

Such studies, like the NERA report Trump cited when he announced the U.S. exit from the Paris climate agreement earlier this year, can be “extremely misleading,” often tallying every conceivable cost and ignoring every possible benefit, saidBen Franta, a Stanford University researcher investigating API’s climate activities. Because data underlying these reports are proprietary, Franta said, in many cases they can neither be verified or debunked. What’s left are unsupported arguments: “New ozone rules could be the most expensive ever,” reads an API webpage linking to dozens of NERA findings.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has taken a tack similar to API’s. Since 2013, the TCEQ has paid NERA more than $870,000 for economic research on ozone — a topic the firm studied earlier for API. More than $2.2 million in taxpayer funds have also been spent on contracts with Gradient — a consultancy previously hired by API to question the benefits of a stricter ozone limit. The TCEQ declined to comment on this story but on its website describes its mission as protecting the “state’s public health and natural resources consistent with sustainable economic development.”

Anne E. Smith, a managing director at NERA, did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment. She was among several industry-friendly voices at a 2015 TCEQ ozone workshop in Austin led by Michael Honeycutt, the agency’s director of toxicology. Other speakers included Gradient scientists, the editor of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, industry toxicologist Michael Dourson and air researcher Robert Phalen, known for saying the air “is a little too clean for optimum health.”

The group’s findings were later referenced by Honeycutt at a House Science Committeehearing, where he argued against a tighter EPA ozone standard. Honeycutt said the risks posed by the pollutant were “small” and any change could discourage people from “outdoor exercise.”

Speakers at the Austin workshop have risen to prominence in the Trump administration. This fall, Honeycutt, Anne Smith, Dourson and Phalen were all named to key EPA science positions as either advisers or staff. Their fringe views on ozone — championed by API — have alarmed public-health advocates and run counter to the EPA’s own findings. The agency strengthened its ozone standard in 2015 after reviewing more than 1,000 new studies.

Economics has long figured into API’s strategy to derail ozone rules. In 1971, the newly formed EPA set the ozone standard at 80 parts per billion, but in 1979 took an unexpected U-turn and weakened it to 120 ppb — angering industry and environmentalists alike. The latter called the reversal scientifically indefensible and accused the EPA of prioritizing economics over health. API promptly sued the EPA, with President DiBona claiming the relaxed standards would still cost “billions of dollars without significantly improving the quality of the environment or the health of the public.”

Spurred by lawsuits from the American Lung Association that compelled it to update air standards based on the latest science, the EPA reverted to its original 80 ppb ozone limit in 1997. The cap is now at 70 ppb, though even that number may not be protective enough, as some research has found health effects at 60 ppb.

Nonetheless, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt — a former Oklahoma attorney general with deep ties to oil and gas — tried to keep the 70 ppb standard from taking effect. He backed off on the delay after 16 state attorneys [teAm BLUE] general sued the agency in August. In a lawsuit filed this month, however, environmental groups accused the EPA of failing to enforce the rule.

Pruitt had put forth what Dr. Greg Diette — a lung specialist at Johns Hopkins University who has testified in favor of tighter ozone standards — calls “a tired, old industry argument. They say, ‘It’s going to put us out of business,’ and it doesn’t,” Diette said. “All this stuff always comes down to who has to pay.”

But not all costs are economic. High ozone days are the hardest for Diette’s patients. “It can be terrifying — it’s the sensation of not being able to breathe,” he said. “Some feel as if they're going to pass out. Some feel as if they're going to die.”

Asthmatics can do little more than hide indoors in an air-conditioned environment. The only other option, Diette said, is to move.

Relocating isn’t possible for the Rosales family of San Antonio, who are uninsured and struggling to keep up with the cost of Gabriel’s medications. The air he breathes is expected to degrade further as oil prices rebound and drilling picks up in the Eagle Ford.

===

Dangerous urban heat exposure has tripled since the 1980s, with the poor most at risk

Cascade Tuholske, Columbia University; Chris Funk, University of California Santa Barbara, and Kathryn Grace, University of Minnesota

Hot, humid population centers are becoming epicenters of heat risk as climate changes worsens. It’s calling into question the conventional wisdom that urbanization uniformly reduces poverty....

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/pipeline-plans/

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'Triumph for environmental justice': Oil companies scrap pipeline plans amid grassroots pressure

Pax Ahimsa Gethen [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Julia Conley and Common Dreams July 04, 2021

Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee and northwest Mississippi celebrated a grassroots victory on Saturday after two oil companies canceled plans to build a pipeline that would have run through wetlands and several low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.

Valero and Plains All American Pipeline had long planned to construct the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have been 49 miles long and linked two pipelines that transport crude oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

The two companies announced they were canceling the project "due to lower U.S. oil production resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic," but opponents of the pipeline noted that the announcement followed grassroots organizing by climate action advocates, homeowners, and elected officials at the local and federal levels.

"This is a win for the entire community of Memphis, Tennessee, but especially those in the Black community who fought it courageously," Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, tweeted.

Community members in Memphis neighborhoods including White Chapel, Westwood, and Boxtown objected to the pipeline project, which would have run over the Memphis Sand Aquifer—leading to fears that an oil spill would pollute the drinking water of about one million people.

Local organizations Protect Our Aquifer and Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) led rallies and garnered the support of former Vice President Al Gore and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), while the Memphis City Council weighed an ordinance to make it harder for the companies to begin construction.

MCAP leader Justin J. Pearson organized canvassers and lobbied the city council, and called Friday's announcement "an extraordinary testament to what Memphis and Shelby County can do when citizens build power toward justice."

A representative of the two oil companies sparked local outrage when they said South Memphis, where the Boxtown community was established in the 1860s by people who had been enslaved, had been identified as "the point of least resistance."

"We've shown them that we aren't the path of least resistance," said Pearson. "We are the path of resilience."

Lawyers for the two companies began legal proceedings against local landowners who refused to make deals with project officials; they planned to invoke eminent domain against the property owners.Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case in New Jersey that a company could use eminent domain to build a natural gas pipeline on state land.

"Their playbooks are the same everywhere," Pearson said on Twitter on Friday. "Find the poor. Appease the rich and politically powerful. Misinform the community. Make local leaders afraid to stop them. Exploit the poor. Reap billions in profits from the deaths of the poor and marginalized."

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which helped landowners fight the two companies in the legal battle, called Friday's announcement "a triumph for environmental justice."

"We are so inspired by the people of Boxtown, Westwood, and White Chapel, and the work of our amazing partners MCAP and Protect Our Aquifer, for showing what is possible when a community stands together," said Amanda Garcia, director of the SELC's Tennessee office.

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More Harm to Communities Already Under Siege

For communities long polluted by industry, which are disproportionately poor and of color, the Trump administration's changes promise particular devastation. Such communities already suffer higher rates of illnesses from asthma to cancer, life-altering effects such as low birth weight and cognitive child development, and daily insults to quality of life in diesel exhaust, soot penetrating into homes and contaminated yards and playgrounds.

If the administration has its way, NEPA implementation guidelines would be rewritten so that even in neighborhoods already densely packed with toxic industries, a proposed facility need only assess its own pollutants, not how much they combine and compound those of nearby facilities to worsen the overall quality of air, water and land.

To make sure residents cannot complain about such compounded damage, the Trump administration is trying to severely limit the opportunity for mothers, fathers, seniors, teens and community leaders to speak directly to the government.

The rollout of the proposed changes is a case in point. Despite the sweeping environmental risks Americans currently face, with air pollution that kills 100,000 people per year and 77 million Americans drinking tap water in violationof health regulations, the White House Council on Environmental Quality allowed only two hearings on the proposed changes to NEPA before the close of public comment period March 10, in Washington, DC, and in Denver. By way of comparison, The Washington Post reported that major issues involving NEPA usually get around nine hearings.

One community leader who did get into the Washington hearing called out the cynicism of the Trump administration for its scant public scheduling. Belinda Joyner of Northampton County, North Carolina, who has spoken out against dumping in her lower-income African American community by a wood pellet facility, industrial-scale hog farms and a part of the proposed Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, told the CEQ panel, "You act like you're listening, and I'm not going to say you're not. But we see the results of these hearings."

In Denver, indigenous Americans spoke out strongly against the destruction of NEPA. Seventeen-year-old Navajo Najhozhoni Rain Ben drove seven and a half hours to say to the CEQ panel, "We shouldn't be talking about this. We should be implementing plans for the future. This is not for the future. This is for profit." Musician and spoken word artist Lyla June Johnston, also Navajo, drove six hours from Santa Fe to tell the panel that the proposed changes were "a slap in the face to our democracy — a slap in the face to the integrity of our mother earth."

The Modern Need for NEPA

NEPA originally was conceived amid growing public awareness and outrage in the 1960s over river and lake pollution, pesticide poisoning of birds, highway proposals that would blast communities apart, and tanker oil spills that fouled beaches and wiped out wildlife. There is no less need for it today as climate change is already slapping America and the world in the face with more devastating storms, chronic coastal flooding, deadly heat waves, western and Alaskan wildfires and acceleration of species extinction.

There is arguably even more of an immediate need for NEPA in communities that were dumping grounds long before the concept of climate change, even before the signing of the act itself. It has been proven beyond coincidence that — similar to the tobacco industry marketing to vulnerable populations — toxic industries and builders of massive infrastructure projects target locales where they assume residents will offer the least political resistance.

That significantly explains the shameless shoehorning of petrochemical plants into Louisiana's Cancer Alley in predominantly African American areas. That explains the routing of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline through lands and over waters indigenous Americans consider sacred, and the Atlantic Bridge pipeline protested by Joyner. It explains the concentration of industry in heavily Latino and African American Southeast Chicago, which is dealing with an endless siege of dust and neurotoxic contamination from coal ash, lead, and manganese dust.

That explains the ramrodding of roads through redlined communities and why people of color drove or flew hundreds and thousands of miles for the only two hearings offered by this administration. They said the NEPA, especially in a White House that is also hollowing out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of the last tools standing between them and a wholesale hostile invasion by industry.

Hope in the Courts

There is a glimmer of hope that the U.S. courts will determine that President Trump and his industrial partners are reaching too far in the rewrite of NEPA, as it relates to environmental racism. Take the Atlantic Bridge Pipeline, which is in the public eye for its upcoming Supreme Court case on whether it can transect the hallowed federal Appalachian Trail.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia recently vacated a Virginia state permit for a compressor station along the pipeline because developer Dominion Energy did not adequately assess its environmental impact on the historic African American host town of Union Hill. The town was founded by free African Americans and formerly enslaved people. The federal courts have also sent other fossil fuel projects and Trump administration oil and gas leases back to the drawing board for their inadequate consideration of environmental and climate impacts.

"Five years ago, Dominion told us that there was going to be a compressor station in Union Hill and there was nothing we could do about it," Chad Oba, president of a Union Hill coalition protesting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline compressor, said in The Hill. "That's not fair, and it's not American. This is a win for a group of citizens who were committed to protecting their community and never ever gave up."

Such victories give hope that this is one rollback the Trump administration may not ultimately get away with. The assault on NEPA is so sweeping and blatant in its turning control of the environment over to industry, it is sure to receive a massive court challenge from environmental groups and environmental justice advocates. If communities like Union Hill refused to give up, there is no reason for anyone opposed to the rewriting of NEPA to throw in the towel, either. There is still time before the March 10 deadline for public comment.

Recently, Union of Concerned Scientists colleague Adrienne Hollis interviewed Mildred McClain, an environmental justice leader in Savannah, Georgia, about the importance of NEPA. McClain recalled how the act gave her community a voice against the dumping of nuclear waste and unchecked widening of the Savannah River for container ships.

"If it had not been for NEPA," McClain said, "the community would not have been a part of the process."

It's important to recognize that taking communities of color out of the process is a major goal in the administration's efforts to gut NEPA. When President Trump announced the rewrite, he was — by no small coincidence — flanked by a nearly all-white phalanx of supporters as he claimed with a straight face, "We're maintaining America's world-class standards of environmental protection. We have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water on Earth. And for our country, the air is, right now, cleaner than it's been in 40 years."

For the past two generations, NEPA has offered a powerful tool for the protection of the nation's environment. If the Trump administration succeeds in ripping it apart and turning environmental reviews over to industry, we will risk the dirtiest air and water of any developed nation on Earth, cementing this nation as a hotbed of environmental racism.

The deadline for public comments on the proposed changes to NEPA closes this Tuesday. Submit your comment today.

Reposted with permission from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/highly-hazardous-pesticides-investigation-2645202101.html

Poor people in developing countries are far more likely to suffer from exposure to pesticides classified as having high hazard to human health or the environment, according to new data that Unearthed analyzed.

The analysis shows that the world's top five pesticide makers are making billions, accounting for more than 36 percent of their income, from chemicals that are proven to hazards to humans and the environment and are contributing to the precipitous demise of bee populations, as Unearthed reported.

The researchers found that the sale of these highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), disproportionately occurred in poorer nations, which often have fewer regulations than industrialized nations, according to The Guardian. In India, for example, sales of HHPs were nearly 60 percent, while in the UK it was just 11 percent.

The report from the investigative team at Unearthed focused on the practices of Bayer, BASF, Corteva (formerly Dow and DuPont), FMC and Syngenta, which are continuing to sell HHPs like neonicotinoids and glufosinate that have been banned in other parts of the world, according to the produce industry publication Fresh Produce Journal.

Unearthed dove into data collected by Phillips McDougall, the leading agribusiness analysts, from buyer surveys that concentrated on the best sellers in the top 43 pesticide buying countries, as The Guardian reported.

While regulations have stopped the sale of certain pesticides in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, it has hardly slowed down chemical companies, which sold $4.8 billion worth of products containing HHPs in 2018,as The Guardian reported. guk] Bayer called the analysis "misleading" but did not offer proof of that assessment.

Since the investigation focused on just 43 countries, it covered less than half of the companies' global sales. That suggests that the companies actually made billions more from pesticides that regulatory agencies have said pose hazards like acute poisoning or chronic illness in people, or high toxicity to bees and other wildlife, according to Unearthed.

The investigation found that pesticide manufacturers sold the majority of its highly hazardous pesticide in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India, where experts say the risks posed by using these chemicals are greatest, according to Unearthed. The biggest market for HHPs were for corn and soya crops.

About a quarter of sales were from products known to be human carcinogens or dangerous to reproductive health.Another 10 percent were toxic to bees. An additional 4 percent of chemicals sold are acutely toxic to humans. Every year, nearly 200,000 suicides are linked to pesticide poisoning, almost entirely in developing countries, according to The Guardian.

"This investigation shows that there is a huge disconnect between what those companies are saying in the international policy arena and what they are actually doing," Meriel Watts, a senior science and policy advisor to the Pesticide Action Network, said to Unearthed.

Baskut Tuncak, the United Nations' special rapporteur on toxic substances and human rights, told Unearthed, "There is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture."

"Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment, or accumulate in a mother's breast milk, these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely, and should have been phased out of use long ago," Tuncak said....

earth justice 220

suing to stop the coming plastics surgeLouisiana regulators recently approved air permits to build what would be one of the largest plastics plants in the world, even though it would dump 800 tons of toxic pollution into a local community and contribute to the worldwide plastic pollution crisis. We’re representing people in St. James Parish, a region that’s already surrounded by industrial plants an

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see urban heat island

Hottest Places in a City Are Often Low-Income Neighborhoods

EXTREME WEATHER

Nail salon workers suffer chemical exposures that can be like working at a garage or a refinery

Lupita D. Montoya, University of Colorado Boulder and Aaron Lamplugh, University of Colorado Boulder

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1019

https://www.propublica.org/

In a Notoriously Polluted Area of the Country, Massive New Chemical Plants Are Still Moving In

Data from an EPA model indicates that communities along the lower Mississippi River corridor already face severely elevated cancer risks from industrial activity. Massive new chemical plants are slated to be built there anyway.

by Lylla Younes, Al Shaw and Claire Perlman Oct. 30, 12 p.m. EDT

POLLUTER’S PARADISE

Welcome to “Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse

by Lylla Younes, ProPublica, and Tristan Baurick and Joan Meiners, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate Oct. 30,

I’ve Investigated Industrial Pollution for 35 Years. We’re Going Backwards.

Decades ago, Mark Schleifstein and his colleagues exposed environmental threats coming out of industrial plants all along the Louisiana section of the Mississippi River. A lot of those plants never went away, and even more are moving in.

by Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate Oct. 30, 12 p.m. EDT

Why Louisiana’s Air Quality Is Going From Bad to Worse, in 3 Charts

Welcome to “Cancer Alley.”

by Lylla Younes Oct. 30, 12 p.m. EDT

How We Found New Chemical Plants Are Being Built in South Louisiana’s Most Polluted Areas

ProPublica and The Times-Picayune and The Advocate investigated the potential cancer-causing toxicity in the air. Using EPA data, public records requests and more, we found that some of the country’s most toxic air will likely get worse.

by Lylla Younes and Al Shaw, ProPublica, with Michael Petroni Oct. 30, 12 p.m. EDT

919 desmog

Chinese giant Wanhua Chemical officially withdrew its plans to build a $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing complex in St. James, Louisiana, in the heart of the already industrialized Cancer Alley. The news bought relief to opponents of the plant.

“I’m glad they won’t be coming,” Eve Butler, a lifelong resident of St. James Parish, told me in a call. “I live straight across the river from where the plant was going to be built.” Butler was part of a group of residents, local community groups, and environmental advocacy nonprofits that took part in a concentrated battle to stop the Wanhua plant from being built.

===

renta //EJ

819

https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/oil-industry-enlists-minority-groups-publish-pro-drilling-op-eds

As part of a partnership with the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest oil and gas lobbying organization in the U.S., Black and Hispanic business groups have been placing op-eds in local newspapers touting the benefits of offshore drilling, as Reuters recently reported. Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be opposed to offshore drilling than white Americans, according to a Pew poll conducted in January. The op-ed campaign is part of an industry-driven effort to make offshore drilling look more broadly supported and to shift minority opinion by enlisting groups that purport to represent communities of color.

Op-eds push oil industry statistics but fail to disclose oil industry connections

Media Matters identified six newspapers in the Southeast that have published op-eds by minority business leaders or political leaders who argue in favor of increased offshore oil and gas drilling along the Atlantic Coast. Most of these minority authors are affiliated with the Explore Offshore alliance, which they mention in their pieces -- but they neglect to disclose that Explore Offshore is a project of API and that many of the talking points and statistics they cite in their op-eds come straight from API materials.

API announced the Explore Offshore alliance on June 6, billing it as a “bipartisan coalition representing a diverse group of community organizations, businesses, and local associations across the Southeast that support safe and responsible expanded U.S. access to oil and natural gas through advanced technologies.” The minority business groups in the coalition are highlighted on the Explore Offshore homepage, while most other coalition members are listed in less prominent places on the website -- an indication that API wants to highlight Black and Hispanic participation. The minority groups in the coalition include the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce, the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the North Carolina Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce, and the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, plus one minority religious organization, the Hispanic Pastors Association.

Florida:

In Florida, The Palm Beach Post and the Tallahassee Democrat published a pro-drilling op-ed written by Julio Fuentes, president and CEO of the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The Tampa Bay Times published a like-minded op-ed co-authored by Miriam Ramirez, a former member of Puerto Rico’s Senate and a co-chair of Explore Offshore Florida, a state affiliate of API's national Explore Offshore coalition.

Fuentes and Ramirez and her co-authors took figures from API’s one-pager about the benefits of drilling in Florida’s waters. Fuentes wrote (emphasis added):

Continued offshore development would put more than 56,000 Floridians to work and add $4.5 billion per year to our economy.

API's one-pager says (emphasis added):

Employment in Florida due to spending by the Eastern Gulf offshore oil and natural gas industry is projected to reach over 56,000 jobs.

…

Contributions to Florida’s state economy due to spending on Eastern Gulf [Outer Continental Shelf] oil and natural gas exploration and development activities could be nearly$4.5 billion per yearby the end of the forecast period.

Ramirez and her co-authors wrote (emphasis added):

Economic studies show that the industry’s spending would bring Florida $1.3 billion per year in government revenue within 20 years of opening up the area for oil and natural gas development.

API's one-pager says (emphasis added):

Florida could see a 37.5% share of the Eastern Coast bonuses, rents and royalties generated which are projected to reach $1.3 billion per year within 20 years.

The Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which Fuentes runs, receives support from Duke Energy and Florida Power & Light, two large utilities that are building natural gas-fired plants in Florida. The chamber and the two utilities have backed anti-environment campaigns in the past. In 2016, the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce joined Duke, Florida Power & Light, and other power companies in supportingAmendment 1, a deceptive, utility-backed ballot measure designed to restrict consumer access to rooftop solar power in Florida. The Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce also receives support from Florida-based, third-party energy supplier Liberty Power, a company that recently paid a settlement to New York state for engaging in deceptive practices and is the subject of a cease-and-desist complaint filed by Connecticut’s Office of Consumer Counsel for allegedly deceiving consumers.

The other Florida minority group that's part of API's Explore Offshore alliance, the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce, has fossil fuel ties as well. It is closely affiliated with the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which has received extensive funding from fossil fuel interests including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. The National Black Chamber notoriously led minority opposition to the EPA's Clean Power Plan, which would limit pollution from power plants. Eugene Franklin, president of the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce, served on the board of directors of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. Both the Florida chamber and the national chamber supported the pro-utility Amendment 1 in 2016.

South Carolina:

In South Carolina, The Post and Courier and The Greenville Newspublished a pro-drilling op-ed by Stephen Gilchrist, chair of the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce and chair of Explore Offshore SC, the South Carolina branch of API's Explore Offshore coalition. Gilchrist also apparently relied on API statistics in his op-ed, writing (emphasis added):

Offshore development could … add $3.8 billion to our state budget per year. This could create 34,000 much needed jobs in the state

But Gilchrist appears to have gotten one of those API talking points wrong by a factor of 20. He claimed that offshore drilling could add $3.8 billion to South Carolina's budget each year, but API’s South Carolina one-pager claims the $3.8 billion would come in over a 20-year period (emphasis added):

Employment due to offshore oil and gas development activities on the Atlantic Coast in South Carolina could reach over 34,000 jobswithin 20 years

…

The cumulative effect on the state budget from 2020-2040 is projected to be over $3.8 billion.

Gilchrist has cultivated questionable alliances that many African-Americans in South Carolina would not be comfortable with. In 2015, Gilchrist invited Donald Trump to an event for Black entrepreneurs that was co-hosted by the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce. The crowd at the event was “predominantly white,”according to The Post and Courier. In late 2017, Gilchrist invited his friend Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor and white nationalist sympathizer, to a minority business roundtable sponsored by his group.

Virginia:

In Virginia, the Daily Press published an op-ed co-authored by former state Del. Winsome Earle Sears, an African-American, who now serves as co-chair of Virginia Explore Offshore, API's Virginia coalition. Like her cohorts in other states, she drew talking points right from API materials. From her op-ed (emphasis added):

With the exploration and potential for development of offshore energy resources, Virginia could gain 25,000 jobs, many with an average salary of $116,000 — more than double the commonwealth’s average. We’re also projected to attract $1.5 billion per year in private investment

From API’s announcement of its Explore Offshore coalition in Virginia (emphasis added):

By 2035, the oil and natural gas industry could create over 25,000 new high-paying jobs in Virginia

Offshore development could result in $1.5 billion in private investment into Virginia ...

The average salary for oil and natural gas exploration and development jobs is $116,000.

The Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which is part of API's Explore Offshore coalition, joined a number of oil and gas trade associations in signing a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management urging the agency to allow more offshore drilling. The Virginia Hispanic chamber has also partnered with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest and most powerful utility.

Conservative groups with anti-environment agendas and fossil-fuel ties have a history of trying to co-opt minorities

API is mimicking a well-worn strategy in which polluters target minority and low-income communities with industry-funded research and disinformation about energy. For example, in recent years, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Heartland Institute, among many others, have waged a campaign to hinder the growth of solar energy at the state level. That effort has included the false claim, often advanced via minority politicians and front groups, that net-metering policies designed to make rooftop solar power more accessible would harm minority and low-income people.

Fossil fuel industries and their allies, including the National Black Chamber of Commerce, also targeted minority groups with misinformation about the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which, if fully implemented, would have prevented thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of asthma attacks each year.

These tactics are especially insidious because research consistently shows that minority and low-income communities suffer disproportionately from the burning of fossil fuels and the impacts of climate change. The third U.S. National Climate Assessment, released in 2014, found:

Climate change will, absent other changes, amplify some of the existing health threats the nation now faces. Certain people and communities are especially vulnerable, including children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color.

In early 2018, EPA scientists published a study in the American Journal of Public Healththat found people of color in the U.S. are exposed to more air pollution than white people are, with African-Americans exposed to the most. A number of other studies have documented the negative health effects of air pollution on minority and low-income communities. A joint report released in 2017 by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force found that natural gas facilities in particular are harmful to Black Americans:

[M]any African American communities face an elevated risk of cancer due to air toxics emissions from natural gas development: Over 1 million African Americans live in counties that face a cancer risk above EPA’s level of concern from toxics emitted by natural gas facilities.

The air in many African American communities violates air quality standards for ozone smog. Rates of asthma are relatively high in African American communities. And, as a result of ozone increases due to natural gas emissions during the summer ozone season, African American children are burdened by 138,000 asthma attacks and 101,000 lost school days each year.

Blacks and Hispanics also suffer disproportionately from climate change impacts such as extreme weather. Just last year, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria devastated African-American and Latino communities in Houston and Puerto Rico.

Polls have shown that nonwhite people in the U.S. are more concerned about climate change than white people are. A 2015 poll of African-Americans found that 60 percent of respondents ranked global warming as a serious issue, while a 2017 survey of Latinos found that 78 percent of respondents were worried about global warming.

Surveys have also documented strong support among minority groups for clean energy solutions. A 2015 poll found that 66 percent of African-Americans believed that using more renewable energy would create new jobs, and 57 percent believed that shifting to clean energy would decrease their energy costs. A separate poll conducted in 2015 foundthat 84 percent of Latinos believed that the U.S. should mandate greater use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power.

Clearly, minority communities understand the risks of climate change and want clean energy solutions to mitigate those risks.

But API has chosen to partner with minority business groups to erode support for clean energy solutions and promote pro-fossil fuel arguments that would harm the very communities these organizations purport to represent. And, in a decision that demonstrates just how out of touch Explore Offshore is with minority communities, API recruited former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), a confederate apologist, to be a national co-chair.

Newspapers in the Southeast and around the country should not be letting oil industry allies spread propaganda and claim to represent minority interests. Op-eds that more accurately represent Black and Latino aspirations would point out that these communities have the most to lose from expanded offshore drilling and the most to gain from a shift to clean energy.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/west-virginia-bets-big-on-plastics-and-the-backing-of-trumps-administration/

no lnx

West Virginia’s industrial might has faded, but as 2020 approaches, the state has two resources that could be crucial to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and tries to make good on his pledge of “American energy dominance” — Republican votes and abundant natural gas.

It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.

West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.

And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.

By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.

The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.

But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.

“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.

The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.

Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.

If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”

Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”

Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.

In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.

John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”

Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”

From its start where two tributaries meet at a wedge of parkland in Pittsburgh, the Ohio River surges north, then south, then west past high banks that have been the stage of every era of American industrial development. Thousands of feet below the river are thick layers of salt and seams of shale and hard rock that encompass eons of geological evolution.

Few regions of the country have been endowed with such a rich repository of water, land and minerals, or have seen natural resources so grossly mismanaged, than the three states and 50 counties along the first 180 miles of the Ohio. Forests fell to the mills that provided the first burst of manufacturing wealth in the 18th century and that produced gaping tracts that poured great gouts of mud into the river.

...

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https://www.ecowatch.com/african-americans-extreme-heat-exposure-2639313007.html

...Using data from the Killer Heat Report, we asked what effect the extreme heat days would have on African Americans. My colleague Dr. Kristy Dahl, a co-author of the report, examined the average number of days with a heat index above 105°F in counties where African Americans make up 25 percent or more of the population (which is about twice the national average) vs. those counties that are less than 25 percent African American.

Then, she further refined the data by including the average number of days with a heat index above 105°F, both historically and in midcentury. What was discovered was shocking and sadly serves as proof and an example of the above statement related to at-risk populations.

Where do we live, and are we at risk?

Counties in the Southeast have the highest concentration of African Americans. Not a surprise for those of us who are from the South, but interesting, nonetheless.

As it happens, those same areas are also where the map "lights up" for increased extreme heat days.

...

https://www.ecowatch.com/east-chicago-lead-crisis-2638802111.html

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How ‘Freeway Revolts’ Helped Create the People’s Environmental Law 6/19 see Environmental Justice and Environmental History.

black panthers and sierra club

Fumes from Petroleum Tanks in this City Never Seem to Go Away. What Are the Kids Here Breathing?

BY: SABRINA SHANKMAN

As an idyllic coastal town embarks on an air monitoring program, child care providers, the mayor & our reporter begin a quest for answers.

https://insideclimatenews.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7c733794100bcc7e083a163f0&id=2d40acf798&e=06876ede6b

AGW //INEQUALITY (and increases?)

reverse matthew: poor get poorer/ EJ 1st and worst, tho did not cause

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22042019/climate-change-inequality-gdp-equator-africa-russia-norway-canada

human lives and livelihoods, as well as a country's GDP. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

A few countries in cold climates, including Canada, Norway and Russia, likely benefited economically from global warming in past decades, while poorer countries closer to the equator suffered economic losses, a new study says.

The findings suggest that climate change exacerbated global inequality, causing the most economic harm to those who did the least to cause it.

But what the future will look like is less clear. Research has shown that over the long term, just about every part of the world will suffer as global temperatures rise.

The study looked at each country's per capita GDP—the per-person value of the country's economic activity—over several decades from as early as 1961 to 2010, and then used climate models to estimate what each country's GDP would have been without the influence of global warming.

"India, for example, has approximately 30 percent lower per capita GDP today than if global warming had not occurred," said Noah Diffenbaugh, the study's lead author and an earth sciences professor at Stanford University. "In India there are hundreds of millions of people living below $2 a day. A 30 percent reduction in per capita GDP is substantial. That is the order of magnitude of the economic impacts during the Great Depression here in the United States."

When the authors compared their findings across countries, they found the greatest harm to GDP in poorer countries closer to the equator, while a few northern countries showed a GDP gain compared to the model of a world without global warming. The study looked at changes from 1961 to 2010 for those countries with available data, and also from 1991 to 2010 when more national data was available. The United States showed a loss of less than 1 percent, according to the study.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did not discuss the mechanisms by which climate change affects these countries' economies, though studies have shown how drought and increased temperatures have worsened living and working conditions in countries closer to the equator.

"Researchers and policy makers have been saying for many years that the greatest, most acute impacts of global warming are falling on populations least responsible for creating that global warming," Diffenbaugh said. "We have quantified the effect."

GDP Losses Reflect What Countries Are Seeing

The study matches what is being observed in countries around the world, said David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute's International Climate Initiative.

"The findings here really are very much in line with what we have been seeing on the ground in terms of the impacts that particularly vulnerable countries have been facing and especially those that are lower-income countries," Waskow said.

"We need to do a lot more to tease out what are the exact mechanisms that are leading to this loss of GDP," he said. "I think we would have hunches, a good sense of what those mechanisms are, but obviously one wants to tie the pieces together."

One recent study showed that even in the United States, economic disparities are projected to grow between warmer, relatively low-income regions in the south and cooler, relatively wealthy regions in the north. The specific drivers of the disparities identified in the study were agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy use, human mortality and labor.

Questions About the Rich-Country Impact

Other experts in climate economics have questioned the strength of some of the conclusions.

Solomon Hsiang, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, said "the finding that warming should have already harmed economic opportunities in poor countries is extremely important and almost definitely correct," but he questioned whether the study could support a conclusion that rich countries had benefited, as well as some of the methods used in the analysis. He noted that previous research suggests that cold-climate countries might benefit from warming initially, but that the long-term harm means a net loss over time.

Wolfram Schlenker, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and the university's Earth Institute, also said he thinks the study's conclusions may be overstated. "A hot year might temporarily reduce GDP in a year, but it might rebound in future years," he said.

The study's methods and data, Schlenker said, offered certainty that "is only slightly higher than a coin toss."

Diffenbaugh said that, even when accounting for economies that rebound in years following an abnormally warm year, the study found a 66 percent probability that global warming has increased country-level inequality globally. "That is statistically quite different from the flip of a coin that comes up half heads and half tails," he said.

Published Under:

Global Climate Treaty

Climate Change

Environmental Justice

Phil McKenna is a Boston-based reporter for InsideClimate News. Before joining ICN in 2016, he was a freelance writer covering energy and the environment for publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian, Audubon and WIRED. Uprising, a story he wrote about gas leaks under U.S. cities, won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the 2014 NASW Science in Society Award. Phil has a master's degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was an Environmental Journalism Fellow at Middlebury College.

....

===

see appalachia, EJ sacrifice zone to plastic/chem alum, pipelines?

===

deripaska kty alum plant (no direct link?)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/somethings-rotten-in-the-state-of-kentucky/

mcconnell

omfg

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-fossil-fuel-deregulation-2634118702.html

Jake Johnson

Just a week after a chemical plant explosion killed one worker and spewed thousands of pounds of dangerous pollutants into the airin Crosby, Texas, President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to visit that city Wednesday to sign executive orders to speed up approval of pipelines and other fossil fuel projects.

In coming to the location of a deadly fossil fuel-related explosion to sign an order that would gut states' power to protect residents from the hazards of oil and gas pipelines, Trump is adding tasteless insult to the injury he is inflicting on our planet," Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

"Trump's support for the fossil fuel industry reflects a real disdain for public safety and a livable climate for generations to come," Hauter continued. "Expediting pipelines means more petrochemical buildout in places like Appalachia, and more disasters waiting in the wings — not to mention climate catastrophe."

According to the Houston Chronicle, Trump will appear at the International Union of Operating Engineers International Training and Education Center in Crosby, where he will deliver a speech about "how he plans to aid the United States' booming domestic oil and gas production."

While the full details of Trump's forthcoming executive orders have not yet been made public, a White House official told the Chronicle they will be geared toward helping oil and gas companies avoid "red tape."

"With oil industry cronies and swamp monsters filling the ranks of his administration, it's no surprise that Trump is once again taking an action championed by climate deniers and fossil fuel companies," Rachel Rye Butler, climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. "This executive order is nothing but an attempt to trample people's rights to protect their air, water, and climate from polluting oil and gas pipelines."

"This is particularly appalling given that many parts of the country are reeling from climate disasters—like the historic flooding in the Midwest that has much of the Keystone XL pipeline route underwater," Butler added. "Instead of creating jobs in the rapidly growing green energy economy, Trump is putting fossil fuels on life support at the expense of our climate and communities."

The president's move to expand fossil fuel production in Texas and across the nation — including TransCanada's Keystone pipeline — comes as the international scientific community warns carbon emissions must be slashed drastically and quickly to avert planet-wide climate catastrophe.

Oil Change International (OCI) estimated in a report published earlier this year that Trump's Big Oil-friendly agenda has put the U.S. on track to account for 60 percent of global growth in fossil fuel production between 2019 and 2030.

"If not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the rest of the world's ability to manage a climate-safe, equitable decline of oil and gas production," OCI's report warned.

Trump EPA Withdraws Clean Air Policy Opposed By Fossil Fuel ... ›

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https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/26-environmental-rules-being-rolled-back-in-the-trump-era

26 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back in the Trump Era

Posted July 12, 2018, 4:05 AM

President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda has pushed at least 26 environmental regulations issued during the Obama administration out of the queue.

Some have been revoked completely, while others are in the process of being replaced by less stringent rules under the Trump administration.

Follow this list of Environmental Protection Agency regulations compiled by Bloomberg Environment staff to stay up-to-date on the regulations that Trump introduces, rescinds, or is in the process of overturning.

Overturned

Requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions leaks | Story
Rule that limits toxic emissions from industrial facilities | Story
Rule that prohibits hydrofluorocarbons as replacements for ozone-depleting compounds | Story
Proposed rule to reduce air pollutants from sewage treatment plants

In the Process of Being Overturned

The Clean Power Plan regulating carbon emissions from power plants. A replacement plan has been drafted| Story
Standards for limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified, and reconstructed power plants | Story
Emissions rules for power plant startups, shutdowns, and malfunctions | Story
Rules to allow methane leaks to go unrepaired during unscheduled or emergency shutdowns at oil and gas facilities and guidelines that reduce emissions from existing sources | Story
Rules aimed at cutting landfill methane emissions | Story
Air pollution permitting reviews are eased | Story
Update to a rule that would reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas | Story
Proposed amendments to rules on how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities | Story
Changes to fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks made between 2020 and 2025 | Story
Emissions standards for trailers and glider kits | Story

In the Process of Being Overturned

Suspended Waters of the U.S., also known as WOTUS, clarifying which waters are covered by the Clean Water Act | Story
Delayed rule regulating toxic discharges from power plants into public waterways by two years | Story
Proposed rule rolling back groundwater protections for certain uranium mines

Overturned

Proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate pesticide | Story
Narrowed scope of a federal law requiring safety assessments for potentially toxic chemicals | Story
Removed copper filter cake from the “hazardous waste” list.

In the Process of Being Overturned

Two programs that limit children’s exposure to lead paint | Story
Rule aimed at improving safety at facilities that use hazardous chemicals | Story

Overturned

Proposed rule directing mines to prove they can pay to clean up future pollution | Story
Federal rules regulating coal ash waste from power plants. States were granted oversight of the waste | Story

In the Process of Being Overturned

Limiting the studies used by the EPA for rulemaking to only those that make data publicly available | Story
Changing the way cost-benefit analyses are conducted under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, among other environmental regulations | Story

===

EJ ACW

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has quickly become a powerful voice in the Democratic Party, and a new video showing a speech she delivered in a hearing on the importance of environmental protection and the threat of climate change makes clear why.

Addressing the charge that environmental concerns are “elitist,” she dispatched with the attack quickly.

“One year ago, I was waitressing in a taco shop in downtown Manhattan. I just got health insurance for the first time a month ago,” she said. “This is not an elitist issue — this is a quality of life issue.”

She continued: “You want to tell people that their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint whose kid’s — their blood is ascending in lead levels. Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist. You’re telling them, that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos? People are dying! They are dying! And the response across the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment five minutes before a hearing in a markup? This is serious! This should not be a partisan issue.”

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-harvey-trump-epa-response-2630918498.html

Andrea Germanos

President Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Texas state officials rejected an offer from NASA scientists in 2017 to use their state-of-the-art flying laboratory to evaluate air quality in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, new reporting by the Los Angeles Times reveals.

"This is disturbing," said Lina Hidalgo, judge for Texas's Harris County.

Harvey brought historic rainfall, catastrophic flooding and triggered potentially dangerous environmental and public health impacts: Houston's many refineries and petrochemical released pollutants into the air and waters, and area residents began to complain of worrisome smells and toxic sights near the facilities, as well as symptoms including headaches. The EPA asserted that the air quality posed no threat.

NASA, it turned out, was in a good position to gather data on air quality in the area with its DC-8. The jet, whose ability to ability to gather data dwarfs that of the EPA's air pollution plane or the hand-held devices used by Texas state officials, was already set up for testing because of a scheduled six-hour test flight to Lamont, Oklahoma on Sept. 14.

The response to NASA's offer? Thanks but no thanks.

Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun reported for the Times:

On Sept. 9, David Gray, the EPA's deputy regional administrator in Texas and leader of the agency's emergency response, wrote to NASA and Texas officials that he was "hesitant" to have the jet "collect additional information that overlaps our existing efforts" until he learned more about the mission. He noted that media and nongovernmental organizations were releasing data that was "conflicting" with the state and EPA's.

The NASA scientists offered assurances that their fact-finding would not get in the way, but noted that the data would eventually be seen by the public. Texas and the EPA were unmoved.

The state-level response came from director of toxicology Michael Honeycutt, who now heads EPA's Science Advisory Board and is known for expressing views well out of the reach of mainstream science, such as the idea that lowering ozone would be bad for public health.

On Sept. 11, Honeycutt wrote in an email to NASA and EPA officials that state data showed no sign for concern, and "we don't think your data would be useful for source identification while industry continues to restart their operations."

Gray agreed with Honeycutt: "EPA concurs with your assessment and we will not plan to ask NASA to conduct this mission."

Associated Press reporter Frank Bajak noted that the new investigation adds weight to his own news agency's previous reporting showing that "Texas environmental regulators had little interest in exposing most post-Harvey industrial contamination."

Reacting to the reporting on Twitter, Dr. Chelsea Thompson, a research scientist in atmospheric chemistry, wrote, "It's worth noting that, over a year later now, all of us involved are still stunned by how this played out."

...

---

On February 21, the New Orleans City Council unanimously voted to uphold approval of Entergy's proposed natural gas power plant, which faces a growing number of lawsuits, and passed a resolution to impose a $5 million fine on the company for its role in a paid-actors scandal.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/05/10/entergy-natural-gas-power-plant-new-orleans-astroturfing-campaign

Before the vote, in nearly three hours of often emotional testimony mostly against the plant, many contended that the $5 million fine was not a sufficient punishment. This was in light of the council's commissioned investigation, which concluded the company "knew or should have known" that a subcontractor was paying actors to support its proposed power plant at council meetings.

Entergy New Orleans, the company that recently won approval to build a controversial $210 million natural gas power plant in the city, confirmed that actors were paid to show support for this project at public meetings. Though Entergy claims it was unaware of the situation, a public relations firm it hired had paid freelance actors to testify in favor of the project at public meetings.

On May 10, Entergy released its finding from an internal investigation revealing that the public affairs firm The Hawthorn Group, which it hired to organize “grassroots support” for the natural gas power plant, in fact paid actors to voice and show support for the plant. The Hawthorn Group in turn hired a company called Crowds on Demand to “pay individuals that it recruited to appear and/or speak at those two meetings.”

“This activity was undertaken without our knowledge or approval, and I can say unequivocally that it would not have been approved had we known,” Entergy General Counsel Marcus Brown said in a statement. “We do, however, recognize that we ultimately are responsible for the actions of those who act on our behalf, and we are taking immediate steps to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

Earlier this week, The Lens, an investigative journalism site, reported that actors were paid $60 to show up at the meetings, and up to $200 to read a statement at two recent public meetings when critical votes regarding the plant were held.

At one meeting in October last year, 50 people wearing orange shirts that read “Clean Energy. Good Jobs. Reliable Power” filled seats in an auditorium, preventing many residents who oppose the project from getting into the room. Entergy plans to build the natural gas power plant in New Orleans East, which is home to majority African-American and Vietnamese communities, raising concerns of environmental racism. Proponents claim the plant would address New Orleans’ energy outage issues, while critics say they could be solved for less money by fixing the city’s ailing transmission system.

The Lens reported that the actors had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and were instructed not to speak to the media or tell anyone they were being paid to attend.

Before the admission, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of opponents of the power plant, including members of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, the Sierra Club, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and 350 New Orleans, in order to void the actions taken at the two meetings, one a city council meeting and another a utility commission meeting.

The opponents also sent a letter to the Louisiana Attorney General, Buddy Landry, calling for an investigation into who paid for the fake participants, and possible legal and ethical violations.

Renate Heurich of 350 New Orleans testifying against the gas power plant on March 8, 2018.]

Renate Heurich of 350 New Orleansdoesn’t believe Entergy didn’t know the company’s money was going to paid actors at the public meetings. “I think the corruption goes much deeper than that,” she told me. “Why else would anyone on the council vote ‘yes’ on a project that has no value for the residents of New Orleans?”

At the March council meeting before the vote for the plant was held, Heurich pleaded with the council not to invest in a fossil fuel infrastructure project in a city already plagued by the effects of climate change. “The vote for the plant, clearly wasn’t based on logic,” Heurich said. “The only one who benefits is Entergy.

Astroturfing — secretly paying for efforts to create the illusion of grassroots support — is nothing new, but proving a company like Entergy may be involved can be challenging.

Hawthorn, however, has a history of astroturf campaigns on behalf of the energy industry, as pointed out by the Energy and Policy Institute. In 2009, the company, paid by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, hired a subcontractor to create the illusion of grassroots support against climate change legislation, which involved forging letters from minority groups such as NAACP’s Charlottesville chapter. And sometimes paid support can take another form — such as the fact that Entergy's foundation donated more than a million dollars to at least nine charitable organizations that testified on the plant's behalf, without always disclosing those donations, at the same public meetings now under scrutiny.*

Brendan DeMelle, DeSmog’s executive director, wrote about a 2014 astroturf effort made by communications firm Edelman on behalf of TransCanada for the Energy East tar sands export pipeline (a project ultimately killed in 2017). Documents obtained by Greenpeace outline a “grassroots advocacy” campaign plan to build support for TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, as well as to undermine public opposition to oil and pipelines generally.

Entergy’s claim that it didn’t know about the astroturfing effort made on its behalf sounded disingenuous to members of the coalition against the plant whom I spoke with after Entergy released its findings.

Happy Johnson testifying at a New Orleans City Council Meeting against Entergy’s proposed natural gas power plant. FLAnked by 2 cops about to pull him out?!

Happy Johnson, author and humanitarian and an outspoken opponent to the gas plant, hopes in light of Entergy’s admission the permit will be reconsidered. According to Johnson, at the next council meeting on May 24, opponents plan to make their case to the newly seated city council that the permit needs to be revoked. “With this kind of trickery, I hope the new council will do the right thing and take another look,” Johnson said.

===

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

guk 219

Europe / Continent's most deprived areas 'hit hardest by air pollution'

https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/09/institute-index-disparate-devastation-hurricane-florence?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=beb9c55e-7905-4282-b570-2e160043e723

Gallons of rain Hurricane Florence dropped on the Carolinas: at least 8 trillion

Number of people killed in the disaster: at least 37

Conservative estimate of the financial damage caused by the storm: $17 billion

Of the 18 North Carolina counties that have been officially declared disaster areas, number where the percent of the population that's nonwhite exceeds the statewide average of 31.5 percent: 9

Percent of the population that's nonwhite in Robeson County, one of the hardest-hit areas and a center of the state's Native American population: over 67

In North Carolina, number of times higher the proportions of African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians living within three miles of an industrial hog operation are, respectively, than the proportion of whites: 1.54, 1.39, 2.18

Minimum number of lagoons — massive open-air pits where hog waste is stored — that were overtopped by the flooding, sending feces and urine into downstream communities: 21

Minimum number of lagoons at imminent risk of spilling waste: 89

Tons of toxic coal ash held in open-air pits at Duke Energy's shuttered H.F. Lee power plant near Goldsboro, North Carolina, that were completely submerged by Florence's floodwaters: 1 million

Percentage points by which the concentration of people of color living within three miles of coal-fired power plant exceeds their presence in the overall U.S. population: 3

In U.S. counties that experienced at least $10 billion in damages from natural disasters between 1999 and 2013, the average increase in wealth for white people, according to a study released last month: $126,000

The average decrease in wealth for nonwhites: $10,000 to $29,000

According to the same study, the disaster-related increase in the black-white wealth gap during that period in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston: $87,000

Rank of Florence among the wettest storms to ever strike the East Coast, with the wetness linked to warmer ocean waters due to climate change: 1

If nothing is done to address the problem, the number of people worldwide that the World Bank estimates will be driven to extreme poverty by climate change and related extreme weather events: 100 million

===

https://www.alternet.org/environment/rainforest-action-network-why-defending-indigenous-rights-integral-fighting-climate

Even as the Trump administration rolls back regulations meant to protect Americans from pollution, the EPA recently released a report that finds that people of color are much more likely to breathe toxic air than their white counterparts. The study’s basic findings—that non-whites bear a higher burden in terms of pollution that leads to a range of poor health outcomes—is supported by other similar studies, and underpins the issue of environmental injustice that impacts many politically marginalized communities.

It’s these communities that are hardest hit by the climate crisis––even though they are the least responsible for causing it. In addition, these communities, by design, are most imperiled by environmentally devastating extractive industries like coal mining, tar sands, fracked gas, and more. Let’s be clear: Climate change isn’t just a scientific issue—it’s an issue of racial inequity, economic inequity and cultural genocide.

Indigenous peoples around the world are quickly becoming the generation that can no longer swim in their own waters, fish in their rivers, hunt their traditional foods or pick their traditional medicines. The climate isn’t just changing the landscape—it’s hurting the culture, sovereignty, health, economies and lifeways of Indigenous peoples around the world. Yet despite the immense impacts climate change and fossil fuel industries have on Indigenous cultures and ways of life, Indigenous communities are tremendously resilient.

This was strikingly clear at the 17th Protecting Mother Earth conference, where tribal leadership and environmental activists called for a unified front to help find solutions. Hosted by the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Nisqually Indian Tribe and Indigenous Climate Action, the conference provided a space for hundreds to come together to share lessons, celebrate victories, and build stronger alliances to defend and protect land, water, the climate, and Indigenous rights. "...

https://www.ecowatch.com/oil-refinery-jesse-marquez-explosion-2593339618.html

Regulatory ‘Burden’? A Mere $2,000 Would Have Saved This Man’s Neighborhood

By Meghana Kuppa

The exasperation was apparent in Jesse Marquez's voice recently as he testified at a public hearing in Washington DC, about a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposal to roll back a safety rule that would make the chemical industry more accountable for public health.

Marquez was 17 years old when he and his family witnessed a massive explosion right in front of their house in the LA community of Wilmington. The explosion occurred at the Fletcher Oil and Refining Co., located across the street in the city of Carson, California, where Marquez and his family were living at the time. Four oil tanks exploded, and one tank roof top flew 700 feet into the air, landing in the middle of the street intersection. All seven members of his family suffered from burns ranging from 1st degree to 3rd degree.

"The fire burned for a day and a half, and after two days, the police said it was okay to go back. We were so terrified, none of us wanted to go back to the house," said Marquez.

The refinery was eventually shut down by governmental regulatory agencies due to numerous continuing violations.

Déjà vu gripped Marquez in the spring of 2015, when he heard about an explosion at ExxonMobil's oil refinery in neighboring Torrance. The explosion occurred just a few miles down the road from the explosion he had lived through 46 years earlier. The blast narrowly missed a tank of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid, which if released, would have lethally gassed thousands of people.

Shaken by news of this new explosion and many others over the years, Marquez began researching steps the oil refinery could have taken to avert it. His research disclosed that if the refinery had spent just $2,000 on a gas leak detector, ExxonMobil could have found the gas leak that triggered its explosion and the explosion at the Fletcher Oil refinery in Carson could have also been prevented.

For years, Marquez has been advocating for stronger safety protections both in California and nationally. Recently, after the Trump EPA postponed a new final rule that would require ExxonMobil and other companies to take basic steps to prevent future chemical releases, Marquez and other members of communities affected by chemical disasters traveled to Washington to testify before EPA. (Editor's note: The EPA is accepting written comments from the public only until Aug. 23. Send in your comment today.)

At the hearing in June, Marquez and other community members urged the EPA not to roll back the 2017 Risk Management Program amendments (also known as the Chemical Disaster Rule), which would force chemical companies to evaluate and strengthen their safety practices and reduce harm from any disasters they fail to prevent.

Some of the protections the EPA wants to rescind or weaken would require chemical industries to do the following:

Find safer alternatives to hazardous chemical processes and evaluate investing in worker training and safety before a disaster happens
Conduct independent third-party audits every three years.
Include root-cause analyses in all incident investigations.
Investigate near misses, including cases like fires, explosions, accidental releases of listed chemicals, and overall strengthen important investigation requirements to ensure they happen and that there is a public meeting so communities receive a report soon after an incident occurs.
Coordinate and share information with first-responders and engage in notification and response exercises and preparation before an emergency is in progress; and implement stronger community access to information, and many other such precautionary measures.

Even while Marquez and others are fighting the rollback, the Chemical Disaster Rule remains suspended under the current administration. After receiving petitions by oil, chemical and other companies, the agency has twice delayed the effective date of these life-saving protections, most recently until February 2019. Scientists, community groups, environmental and health groups represented by Earthjustice are suing to get the amendments back on track.

There have been at least 48 disasters, and counting, since the original effective date of the amendments. Communities and first responders across the country remain in danger as the EPA reconsiders the rule—and as hurricane season has begun, many facilities along the Gulf Coast are experiencing elevated risk, making action to implement these amendments even more urgent.

At the June EPA hearing in DC, Marquez—whose experiences in surviving a refinery explosion helped motivate him to found the Coalition For A Safe Environment, an environmental justice advocacy organization—testified about how industries keep fenceline communities in the dark when it comes to industry hazards. He spoke of incidents where patients were treated for typical asthma attacks, when they did not know they were actually suffering from exposure to a toxic chemical. The Risk Management Program amendments would require refineries and chemical manufacturers to make safety information more accessible to fence-line communities and hospitals.

"There is no acceptable trade secret when it comes to the lives of residents in bordering communities," Marquez said.

Marquez's advocacy work on the Risk Management Program amendments has opened his eyes to the ways politics and industry money can influence environmental regulation, he said. That's why he believes that organizations like the Coalition and Earthjustice play an important role in keeping the regulators honest.

"I've learned that they [the EPA] cannot be trusted; it requires the public to always be on guard," he said. "It's important to belong to community-based organizations who have other [bigger] networks…that way, we can assure that we are always being protected, the truth of how catastrophic incidents impact residents is known and the availability of low cost off-the-shelf safety products."

To read Marquez's full testimony or listen to audio from him and other community advocates from around the U.S. who made the journey to Washington DC, to urge the EPA not to weaken chemical disaster protections, click here.

2.5 Million Homes, Businesses Totaling $1 Trillion Threatened by High Tide Flooding

Study Finds Coastal Municipalities May Lose Huge Sums in Property Tax Revenue

WASHINGTON (June 18, 2018)—Accelerating sea level rise in the lower 48 states, primarily driven by climate change, is projected to worsen tidal flooding, putting as many as 311,000 coastal homes with a collective market value of about $117.5 billion today at risk of chronic flooding within the next 30 years—the lifespan of a typical mortgage—according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released today. Roughly 14,000 coastal commercial properties assessed at a value of roughly $18.5 billion also are at risk during that timeframe. By the end of the century, homes and businesses currently worth more than $1 trillion could be at risk: as many as 2.4 million homes—roughly the equivalent of all the homes in Los Angeles and Houston combined—valued at approximately $912 billion and 107,000 commercial properties assessed at $152 billion.

The analysis uses property data from the online real estate company Zillow combined with a peer-reviewed methodology developed by UCS for assessing areas at risk of frequent flooding. Using three sea level rise scenarios developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), UCS determined how many residential and commercial properties along the entire lower 48 coastline are at risk of becoming chronically inundated from high tides, flooding an average of 26 times per year or more, in the coming decades even in the absence of major storms. The core results in the report are from the high sea level rise scenario—an appropriately conservative projection to use when estimating risk to homes, which are often the owner’s single biggest asset.

“What’s striking as we look along our coasts is that the significant risks of sea level rise to properties identified in our study often aren’t reflected in current home values in coastal real estate markets,” said Rachel Cleetus, an economist and policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS, as well as a report co-author. “Unfortunately, in the years ahead many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality. In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively.”

The consequences of chronic flooding of properties in specific communities could translate not just into eroding property values, but also into unlivable houses and falling tax revenues that fund schools, roads and emergency services in those places. The properties at risk by 2045 currently house roughly 550,000 people and contribute nearly $1.5 billion toward today’s property tax base. These numbers jump to about 4.7 million people and $12 billion by 2100. Municipalities are looking at even deeper revenue declines when commercial property, sales, and other business tax losses are factored in.

“For some communities, the potential hit to the local tax base could be staggering,” said Kristy Dahl, senior climate scientist at UCS and report co-author. “Some smaller, more rural communities may see 30, 50, or even 70 percent of their property tax revenue at risk due to the number of chronically inundated homes. Tax base erosion could create particular challenges for communities already struggling with high poverty rates.”

According to the analysis, states with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about 1 million homes or more than 10 percent of the state’s current residential properties, New Jersey with 250,000 homes, and New York with 143,000 homes. States that could lose the most in home property values by 2100 are Florida at $351 billion, New Jersey at $108 billion, and New York at nearly $100 billion. Decreases in property values also mean a lower property tax base. Florida, New York and New Jersey will see the biggest hits to their annual property tax revenue with municipalities losing about $5 billion, $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion total respectively.

“Not all affected communities will share the same experience,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, senior analyst in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS and report co-author. “Some may see sharp adjustments to their housing market in the not-too-distant future; some could see a slow, steady decline in home values; and others could potentially invest in protective measures to keep impacts at bay for a few more decades. In any case, by knowing how much time they have before a significant number of properties will be regularly flooded, communities can start planning and implementing responses now, while they still have a range of options from which to choose.”

Economic consequences could also hit some communities harder than others. Nearly 175 communities would expect to see 10 percent or more of their homes at risk of chronic flooding by 2045, with nearly 60 of those communities experiencing poverty levels above the national average. Additionally, of the roughly 75 communities with 30 percent or more of their property tax base at risk, about one-third of these have poverty rates above the national average. The places that could be hit hardest in this way include communities in: Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Similarly, communities with large African American or Hispanic populations—many located in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Texas—could also be at an inherent disadvantage in taking steps to prevent or recover from chronic flooding, due to longstanding social and economic inequities.

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18052018/atlantic-coast-pipeline-natural-gas-civil-rights-environmental-justice-epa

Afederal court has invalidated a key permit for the Atlantic Coast pipeline project, a step that could give civil rights advocates more time to build their environmental justice case against the $6 billion project to carry natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Opponents of the Atlantic Coast pipeline allege the Dominion Energy-led project would have a disproportionate impact on people of color living along its route.

A group of community and statewide advocacy groups in North Carolina, along with the national Friends of the Earth, filed a complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's External Civil Rights Compliance Office on Tuesday asking the agency to overturn North Carolina state permits for the pipeline and for a newenvironmental justice analysis of it.

On the same day, a three-judge panel in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permit for the pipeline, known as an "incidental take limit." The judges ruled that that permit, designed to limit the number of threatened or endangered species that could be harmed or killed during the pipeline's construction and operation, was too vague and could not be enforced.

...

aha EJ is proxy for everything

[https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/26/16916742/hunters-point-shipyard-toxic Data faked on cleanup Bayview Hunter's Point] chem/ radiation [https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-april-20-2018/ (interview audio]) 4/18 see [https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Chemicals#Articles.2FReports Chemicals].

===

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/20/earth_day_2018_ending_plastic_pollution

We speak to Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, who has led 20 expeditions around the world to research plastic marine pollution, and Priscilla Villa of the #BreakFreeFromPlastics movement.

:{:{}:

cracker EJ houston and gulf exxon

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/04/concerned-citizens-st-john-louisiana-cancer-alley-pollution-fight

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/9/how_an_alabama_town_is_fighting_against

Uniontown, Alabama, have lived with the Arrowhead landfill, which is twice the size of New York’s Central Park, have protested shipments of toxic coal ash—the residual byproduct of burning coal—from a massive spill in Kingston, Tennessee, believed to be the largest coal ash disaster in U.S. history. For two years, nearly 4 million tons of coal ash was also shipped by rail from a mostly white Tennessee county to Uniontown. Coal ash contains toxins, including arsenic, mercury and boron, that can affect the nervous and reproductive systems and cause other health problems. According to the EPA, people living within a mile of unlined coal ash storage ponds have a one-in-50 risk of developing cancer. In 2013, some Uniontown residents filed a complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This week, the EPA dismissed the claim, saying there was “insufficient evidence.” We speak with Ben Eaton, vice president of Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice and a resident of Uniontown, Alabama; and with Mustafa Santiago Ali, former head of the EPA’s environmental justice program.

https://www.ecowatch.com/african-americans-air-pollution-2509714660.html

African Americans Disproportionately Suffer Health Effects of Oil and Gas Facilities

African American communities face a disproportionate risk of health issues caused by gas and oil pollution, according to a report issued Tuesday by two advocacy groups.

The report from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Clean Air Task Force noted the importance of Obama-era U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that finalized standard for methane and ozone smog-forming volatile organic compound (VOCs). The report states that if the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations continues, the situation for African Americans will worsen.

The study found oil and natural gas facilities were built or currently exist within a half-mile of more than one million African Americans, exposing these communities to higher risks of cancer due to toxic emissions. "African-Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than Caucasian Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in fence-line communities than the average American," the report said, referring to neighborhoods near to gas and oil facilities.

Counties located in the Gulf Coast Basin are home to the most counties with oil refineries and higher percentages of African Americans. Michigan, Louisiana and Tennessee, the report found, have the highest percentage of African American residents living in oil refinery counties. Texas and Louisiana, both in the Gulf Coast Basin, were home to the largest African American individuals at risk for cancer, with nearly 900,000 living in areas above the EPA's level of concern.

"The effects of oil and gas pollution are disproportionately afflicting African Americans, particularly cancer and respiratory issues, and the trend is only increasing," said Dr. Doris Browne, the National Medical Association President.

The report also found that oil and natural gas industries violate the EPA's air quality standards from natural gas emissions-related ozone smog in numerous African communities, causing more than 130,000 asthma attacks among school children. This results in more than 100,000 missed school days each year.

Defending the environmental protections finalized during the Obama administration and advocating for additional protections against pollution from the oil and gas industry will help improve the health of many African American communities, the study noted.

But the Trump administration has already begun to dismantle Obama-era EPA steps taken in 2016 that aimed to clean up toxic air pollutants such as benzene, formaldehyde and sulfur dioxide. It is also taking aim at 2016 EPA actions that address the 1.2 million existing sources of methane pollution and other airborne pollution. The White House claims these regulations are unnecessary industry burdens. The Trump administration's moves are being challenged in courts around the country.

"What this administration is discovering as it attempts to undo vital health and environmental protections is that these sensible standards cannot simply be wished away, only to the benefit of the oil and gas industry," said Sarah Uhl, program director of short-lived climate pollutants for Clean Air Task Force.

...

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-harvey-sierra-club-2479986746.html

chem toxic facilities

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/half-global-population-could-face-unknown-climates-mid-century

Billions of people across the world could see climates they’ve never experienced before by the middle of the century, a recent study says.

Using a measure of climate ‘familiarity,” the researchers show that the tropics in particular are likely to experience conditions that are virtually unheard of for the region in the present climate.

But keeping global temperatures rise below 2C° above pre-industrial levels could help keep the climate “familiar” within this century, the researchers say. That means people alive today could see the benefits of mitigation within their lifetimes.

Signal-to-noise

While climate change research often focuses on how many degrees temperatures have warmed or the projected change in annual rainfall, a relatively recent approach is to consider the “time of emergence.”

The weather we experience every day is a combination of the long-term trend of climate change—the “signal”—and the short-term fluctuations of natural variability—the "noise." The time of emergence is the point when the signal becomes clear above the noise.

Taking this idea in a slightly different direction, the new Nature Climate Change study focuses on the magnitude of emergence, rather than the time. In other words, showing how much future climates are going to differ from the highs and lows that people currently experience.

This approach can help pinpoint where climates are likely to change beyond what people have to cope with at the moment, says lead author Dr. Dave Frame, director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington. He tells Carbon Brief:

A couple of degrees of warming in a place which is used to lots of climate variability is likely to be easier to cope with than the same level of warming in a place which is used to a really regular climate.

Carbon Brief spoke to another of the study’s authors, Dr. Manoj Joshi from the University of East Anglia, about the study at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna. You can see him explaining the findings in the clip below.....

===

http://www.alternet.org/environment/has-moment-environmental-justice-been-lost

Given how President Donald Trump has taken aim at the Environmental Protection Agency with regulatory rollbacks and deep proposed budget cuts, it may come as no surprise that the Office of Environmental Justice is on the chopping block.

This tiny corner of the EPA was established 24 years ago to advocate for minorities and the poor, populations most likely to face the consequences of pollution and least able to advocate for themselves.

It does so by acting as a middleman, connecting vulnerable communities with those who can help them. It heads a group that advises EPA officials about injustices and another that brings together representatives from other federal agencies and the White House to swap proposals.

When it works, all the talk leads to grants, policies and programs that change lives.

In the Arkwright and Forest Park communities in Spartanburg, South Carolina, residents were living near contaminated industrial sites and a landfill — and dying of respiratory illnesses and cancer at extraordinary rates. They used a $20,000 environmental justice grant from the EPA as seed money to form partnerships with local businesses and government agencies. Those alliances, in turn, helped bring more than $250 million in infrastructure, community health centers, affordable housing, environmental cleanups and job training to the area.

Trump’s budget proposal would effectively eliminate the office and the $2 million it takes to operate it. An EPA spokesperson suggested in a statement that the agency doesn’t need a special arm devoted to environmental justice to continue this work.

“Environmental justice is an important role for all our program offices, in addition to being a requirement in all rules EPA issues,” the statement said. “We will work with Congress to help develop and implement programs and continue to work within the Agency to evaluate new ideas to properly address environmental justice issues on an agency-wide basis.“

In theory, this is right. Federal agencies are required to consider the impacts of environmental and health-related decisions on the poor and minorities anyway — President Bill Clinton mandated they do so in an executive order. But, in practice, that order was vague and didn’t carry the force of law, leaving each president to decide how little, or how much, to do.

Now, with the Office of Environmental Justice’s fate in doubt, it’s become achingly apparent that well before Trump, those who purported to champion environmental justice — primarily Democratic legislators and presidents — did little to codify the progress and programs related to it, even when they were best positioned politically to do so.

“We haven’t done enough,” acknowledged Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Booker and other Democrats are racing to file bills that save the Office of Environmental Justice and similar initiatives on an emergency basis, though they know they have little chance of success.

“There’s no time like the present for doing what is right,” Booker said. “We can’t wait.”

"First steps"

That’s when residents in the town of Afton in Warren County, North Carolina, mounted mass demonstrations against a landfill where the state planned to dump contaminated soil. The dirt was laced with toxins calledpolychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, a now-banned substance that even then, the EPA knew to cause birth defects and potentially cancer.The concept of environmental justice began bubbling up toward the end of the civil rights movement. But it wasn’t until 1982 that it began to really take hold.

“We know why they picked us,” the Rev. Luther G. Brown, pastor of Coley Springs Baptist Church, said at the time. “It’s because it’s a poor county — poor politically, poor in health, poor in education and because it’s mostly black. Nobody thought people like us would make a fuss.”

The protests and subsequent lawsuits didn’t stop the landfill; in the years since, the site has actually expanded. But the uproar was enough to spark Congress’ attention.

In 1983, a government report found that three of the four landfills it examined were located in some of the region’s poorest or predominantly black communities. In 1987, a more expansive survey by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice found that nationally, hazardous waste facilities were more likely to be located in predominantly minority communities.

“These were invisible problems in invisible communities until they organized themselves and started to have their own dialogue with EPA,” said Vernice Miller-Travis, a former member of the advisory council convened by the Office of Environmental Justice.

Pressure was mounting for the government to act.

In 1990, the EPA took a look at its policies, for the first time examining environmental risks through the lens of race and class. It issued a report in 1992 that found that “EPA should give more explicit attention to environmental equity issues,” collect better data, revise its enforcement and permitting programs, and communicate more with communities of color.

It’s worth noting, this was a hot moment in American politics. President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, was defending his place in the White House against a young Democratic governor named Bill Clinton. The tenor of the debate was radically different from the most recent election; these candidates argued over who was a better environmentalist.

Bush announced the creation of the Office of Environmental Equity, which would evolve into today’s Office of Environmental Justice. Its purpose in the 1990s was the same as it is today: Listen to communities, get their concerns in front of policymakers, funnel grant money into local projects. “We have been negligent,” Clarice Gaylord, the office’s first director told the St. Petersburg Times. “Now we will have to focus more on how we affect people.”

Bush lost the election, but his replacement pushed forward on environmental justice, moving the mission beyond that one EPA office.

Clinton signed an executive order in 1994 requiring federal agencies to consider environmental justice in all of their policies. He established policies that would allow people the right to participate in decisions that impacted them and ordered an analysis of health and environmental impacts for projects seeking federal permits. He also declared environmental injustice a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — the same law that sought to end segregation in schools. Now, communities could ask the EPA to investigate environmental discrimination. EPA could strip violators of funding until they got in line.

“I think it’s important for people to understand that this is a first step,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner said at the time. “There are many, many more steps to come if we are really going to address the problems that these communities are raising.”

In hindsight, this might have been the time to take additional steps.

For the first six years, lawyers were unclear on exactly how much power the executive order gave the EPA to enforce environmental justice via existing laws, like the Clean Air Act. A legal opinion eventually resolved that issue, but a broader problem remained: The executive order was more of a philosophical guide than a rigid list of requirements. Some have wondered, looking back, whether the language directing administrations to enforce environmental justice “to the greatest extent practicable” could have been stronger or more specific.

Those invested in environmental justice would soon learn just how much rode on the sitting president.

Fickle justice

George W. Bush didn’t approach environmental issues like his father.

In addition to walking back arsenic standards for drinking water and refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the younger Bush’s administration began to erode environmental justice programs.

Clinton’s executive order required every federal agency to consider the health and environmental impacts policies had on minority and low-income communities. Under Bush, the focus shifted to ensuring protections for “all people.” The EPA inspector general rebuked that position in a 2004 report, saying that reversing the emphasis on vulnerable communities had led to confusion, a lack of consistency and “return[ed] the Agency to pre-Executive Order status.”

In 2006, the inspector general found that the EPA wasn’t conducting environmental justice reviews of its policies and programs, nor had it developed a framework to do so. The EPA office charged with policing environmental discrimination ground to a halt, amassing a backlog that stretched for a decade.

The weakness of the executive order prompted Democratic legislators to sponsor bills almost every year to legally establish the advisory groups created under the executive order, force the EPA to abide by the IG report recommendations, and give citizens the right to sue under Title VI for environmental discrimination. The bills were often championed by Democratic heavyweights — Sens. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and Reps. Hilda Solis and Mark Udall — but even when Democrats held the most power in Congress, they never came close to passing.

“There’s not been an environmental justice bill that’s ever been put to a floor vote,” said Albert Huang, director of environmental justice at the National Resources Defense Council.

“Politically, it’s a very attractive issue to introduce legislation around because it threads so many needles: civil rights, environment, social justice, low-income — so many issues,” said Huang. “But for those same reasons, it’s a lightning rod for moderates and conservatives because those issues are viewed as the most progressive and liberal of each of those topics.”

By 2007, it was becoming clear that the promise of environmental justice was stalled. The United Church of Christ updated its toxic waste report and found that 20 years later, little had changed.

Then, Barack Obama was elected.He’d promised in his campaign to “resurrect” civic environmental responsibility and to prioritize remediation efforts in “neglected communities so that living daily with extreme environmental pollution and health risks will be a condition of the past.”

His administration raised the profile of the Office of Environmental Justice, audited the Office of Civil Rights and eliminated a backlog of cases against polluters (though it drew criticism from those who said it hadn’t done enough).

It also took a laundry list of other incremental steps: developed strategic plans for environmental justice and enforcing civil rights, issued a case-resolution manual to guide investigations, and created a compliance toolkit to help state agencies stay within the bounds of the law. The administration added a senior adviser for environmental justice, who participated in high-level meetings at the EPA and advocated for vulnerable communities in major budget and policy decisions.

But the Obama years also featured plenty of missed opportunities.

Talia Buford covers disparities in environmental impacts for ProPublica.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/3000-people-will-die-because-california-lawmakers-extended-cap-and-trade

===

http://www.alternet.org/environment/3-ways-climate-change-will-have-unequal-economic-impacts-across-us

recent study confirms what many have known: Climate change won’t impact all U.S. states equally.

The report's 12 authors, some from the University of Berkeley and Princeton University, published the study in the journal Science, where they investigate the different economic gains and losses states across the United States will see in 2088 to 2099.

The sectors the researchers analyzed, including crime and labor, will see their damage value increase with the global mean temperature. This translates to a 1.2 percent loss in gross domestic product (GDP) per every Celsius degree increase, on average, the study says. Some states will benefit from climate change as their typically brisk temperatures increase while warm states see loss as their climates worsen.

The study relies on economic losses from the past, which could shift with changing technologies. It also does not look at how migration patterns may change in the future as popular locations like Arizona and Texas become less appealing as a result of their climbing temperatures.

County-level median values for average 2080 to 2099 impacts. This map shows median total direct economic damage across all sectors. Courtesy of "Science," Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States.

Here, three main takeaways from the study.

1. The mortality rate will shift

Fewer cold-related deaths will hit the Northern states as they warm. Already-hot Southern states, in contract, will have more deaths. Maps in the analysis show increases of 40 to 80 deaths per 100,000 in the Southeast while deaths in the Northeast will decrease by roughly 20 to 60 per 100,000.

The study determines that if temperatures increase past 2.5 degrees Celsius, the U.S. will experience “excess mortality” from the changes in agricultural production and labor supply—a sector largely made up of Latinx immigrant farmers who are paid some of the lowest wages in the U.S., per United States Department of Agriculture.

The U.S. mortality rate will increase by 0.5 deaths per 100,000, as the decrease in the North and increase in the South should nearly level out.

2. Economic loss will be greatest where many people of color live: the South and Midwest

The South, however, is home to most of the nation’s poorest Black communities. The Midwest is too. It’s also where the majority of poor Native American families live.Northern and Western will see fewer losses—or even benefits, as noted above. The same does not hold true for the Midwest or South.

In the South, people have already felt what these impacts will look like: $1 billion+ hurricanes from which the federal government won’t help states rebuild. The Midwest doesn’t have hurricanes, but it does experience severe flooding and powerful wildfires.

In the Southwest, home to Latinx border communities, GDP loss will range from 10 to 15 percent. The same goes for Florida.

3. This translates to greater income inequality

The authors told The New York Times that “climate change tends to increase pre-existing inequality.” As noted above, the nation's poorest regions will see some of the worst impacts.

The richest counties will likely feel the least amount of damage as a percentage of their county income. The poorest ones will likely be most damaged, but their data is less definitive, as The New York Times shows.

Check out The New York Times breakdown of the study to visualize these effects in maps and charts here.

CA 2016

Asian Pacific Islander Caucus: The Asian Pacific Islander Caucus continues to be a solid supporter of environmental justice policies in 2016. Six of the nine (67 percent) Caucus members received perfect scores, and the average score was 95 percent, a repeat of the Caucus’ scores in 2015.

Black Caucus: The Black Caucus score was similar to last year, with a slight decrease. The average score last year was 89 percent, versus 87 percent this year. Last year, 3 members scored 100 percent, and there are 4 perfect scores this year. Assembly Members Thurmond, Jones-Sawyer and McCarty have received perfect scores two years in a row, and are joined this year by former Assembly Member Hall. New Chair Assembly Member Holden, Assembly Member Weber and Senator Mitchell have had consistently strong scores. However, low scores from other members have pulled down the overall Caucus average. Latino Caucus: The Latino Caucus remains the largest caucus with 22 members, having added one more caucus member in 2016. 50 percent (11 members) received perfect scores, up from 38 percent (8/21 members) in 2015, and had an average score of 94 percent.

ASSEMBLYMEMBERS CAUCUS TOTAL SCORE AB 197 (E. Garcia) AB 1066 (Gonzalez) AB 1550 (Gomez) AB 1787 (Gomez) AB 1937 (Gomez)

Summary of bills included in CEJA’s 2016 EJ Scorecard

AB 197 (E. Garcia)

SUPPORT

Transparency at Air Resources Board and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction: Ensures benefits

of California climate policies, including greenhouse gas emissions limit, reach into disadvantaged

communities, and gives Legislature greater oversight over implementation of these policies, including

adding two members of the legislature to the ARB as ex officio nonvoting members and providing that

voting members of ARB be appointed for staggered 6-yr terms. Signed by the Governor.

AB 1066 (Gonzalez)

SUPPORT

Agricultural Worker Overtime: Overtime requirements regarding hours, meal breaks, and other working

conditions including specified wage requirements, extended to include agricultural workers, with phase-in

period from 2019-2022. Signed by the Governor.

AB 1550 (Gomez)

SUPPORT

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund Investments: Increases set aside of climate investments to low-income

households and areas directly adjacent to overburdened communities. Signed by the Governor.

AB 1787 (Gomez)

SUPPORT

Public Comments Translation: Provides at least twice the allotted time to non-English speakers during

public comment during hearings to allow for translation. Signed by the Governor.

AB 1937 (Gomez)

SUPPORT

Environmental Justice in Power Plant Siting: Requires utilities actively seek projects not located in

environmental justice communities and seek renewable energy projects that benefit environmental justice

communities. Signed by the Governor.

AB 2222 (Holden)

SUPPORT

Transit Pass Program: Would have established the Transit Pass Program to provide free or reduced-fare

transit passes to specified pupils and students. Held in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

AB 2616 (Burke)

SUPPORT

Environmental Justice Seats to Coastal Commission: Requires one member of the Commission resides in

and works with environmental justice communities. Signed by the Governor.

AB 2722 (Burke

and Arambula)

SUPPORT

Transformative Climate Communities Program: Creates the Transformative Climate Communities

program, which will fund large-scale climate projects in environmental justice communities. Signed by the

Governor.

SB 32 (Pavley)

SUPPORT

2030 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets: Sets new climate pollution reduction target of 40 percent below

1990 levels by 2030. Signed by the Governor.

SB 215 (Leno and

Hueso)

SUPPORT

Transparency at the Public Utilities Commission: Reforms the Commission’s ex parte communication

rules, including requiring disclosure of private meetings with utility executives, and makes it easier to

disqualify a commissioner for bias. Signed by the Governor

SB 1000 (Leyva)

SUPPORT

Planning for Healthy Communities Act: Integrates environmental justice into statewide land use policy,

requires cities and counties consider and include environmental justice in their General Plans. Signed by

the Governor.

SB 1263 (Wieckowski)

SUPPORT

Ensure Sustainable Drinking Water: Increases oversight necessary to prevent continued growth of

unsustainable small water agencies in California. Signed by the Governor.

SB 1318 (Wolk)

SUPPORT

Drinking Water Infrastructure: Would have prohibited a Local Agency Formation Commission from

authorizing a city or a district to extend drinking water or wastewater infrastructure or services until it had

extended those services to all disadvantaged communities in its area. Held in Assembly Committee.

SB 1387 (de León,

Allen, and Lara)

SUPPORT

Environmental Justice Seats on South Coast Air Quality Management District: Would have added two

new environmental justice seats to the District. Died on the Assembly Floor

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/04/03/youth-color-lawsuit-los-angeles-drilling-discrimination-oil-industry

After Los Angeles Youth Sued City for Discriminatory Drilling Practices, the Oil Industry Sued Back

By Ashley Braun • Monday, April 3, 2017 - 03:58

Boy playing basketball at Beverly Hills High School next to a covered oil derrick

“Every time I go to school,” 18-year-old Brandon Molina told DeSmog, “I walk by these oil drilling sites. They’re around my school. So, it’s something that I see every day.”

These youth groups, which also include the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition and youth members of the Center for Biological Diversity, first filed suit against the City of LA in November 2015.

In many ways Texas, where the Keystone pipeilne would terminate, is the heart of the American oil and gas industry. Not surprisingly, activists there are routinely harassed by law enforcement and corporate security for nothing more than keeping tabs on the industry. In East Houston, the city’s industrial hub and most polluted neighborhood (Houston itself is one of the most polluted cities in the country), environmental activist and community organizer Bryan Parras has been questioned by the police on several occasions and once was contacted by a Coast Guard special agent assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Houston. The organization he helps run with his father, Texas Environmental Justice AdvocacyServices [10] (or TEJAS), has been closely watched. Parras frequently takes activists and journalists on what he calls “toxic tours” – a survey of the neighborhood’s refineries, chemical plants, and shipping ports. He’s made a point of documenting the air pollution caused by the flaring at the refineries that flank the neighborhood. He says the images “compel people to action.”

They’ve also made Parras a subject of interest for industry and law enforcement. He is routinely questioned by the police orharassed by security representatives from Valero Energy, a major refining company and one of the industries Parras monitors. In 2013 Parras got a text from a friend, Tish Stringer, saying that an agent had visited her home and wanted to know about her relationship with him. The Coast Guard special agent, David Pileggi, told Stringer he’d been tipped off by Valero.

“It’s nothing new,” Parras says. “Since 9/11 we’ve been harassed repeatedly and pulled over for taking pictures or video of the facilities.”

In an emailed statement, Bill Day, vice president of communications at Valero, said the Houston refinery is designated by Homeland Security as “critical infrastructure” and therefore must meet enhanced security requirements. “One of those requirements,” he wrote, “is that when we see people taking photos or video of our facilities, we ascertain the purpose of that activity and then report it to DHS.” According to Shauna Dunlap, media coordinator for the FBI’s Houston Division, photographing and videotaping of critical infrastructures “can be a precursor of potential criminal activity.” The Joint Terrorism Task Force, she says, is “obligated to look into each and every suspicious activity report.”

This kind of surveillance and intimidation, Parras says, is particularly chilling in an area with a large number of undocumented residents. Not only are they vulnerable to threats of deportation, but also they’re quite literally at the crossroads of environmental destruction and the risks associated with climate change. East Houston is home to a disproportionate number of the city’s largest sources of industrial pollution, four major highways, and the shipping channel that feeds into the Port of Houston. If built, theKeystone XL pipeline would terminate in East Houston; Valero has a contract with TransCanada to receive most of the oil. “On the basis of location alone these neighborhoods appear far more vulnerable to health risks than others in Greater Houston,” a 2006 study commissioned by the mayor’s office concluded. In addition, rising sea levels threaten to inundate the heavily industrialized shoreline. “It puts us at even higher risk because we’re on the coast,” says Parras. “All these facilities are right on the water.”

In many ways, for activists like Parras the last line of defense lies in taking photos, documenting the impacts of industrial pollution, and simply bearing witness. TEJAS hasn’t even engaged in civil disobedience or direct action, he says. Still, his organization is on Valero’s watch list. TEJAS organizers have been followed and photographed or videoed by Valero security personnel. Local teachers who joined Parras on one of his toxic tours were bullied into deleting photos and video they had taken of the refinery. Journalists he has shown around have been threatened by Valero that they’ll be reported to the FBI.

===

omg

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/10/headlines/epa_official_resigns_amid_push_to_defund_environmental_justice_office

Meanwhile, a top official at the EPA has resigned in protest of a Trump administration proposal to entirely defund his office. Mustafa Ali helped found the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice in 1992 and served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Ali told InsideClimate News, "My values and priorities seem to be different than our current leadership and because of that I feel that it’s best if I take my talents elsewhere."

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/321018-state-legislators-take-steps-to-criminalize-protests

Republican state legislators across the country are advancing bills that would criminalize or penalize some public protests just a month after millions of Americans took to the streets in opposition to President Trump.

In North Dakota, where protesters occupied land around an unfinished section of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, Gov. Doug Burgum (R) on Thursday signed four laws that would stiffen penalties against protests. The measures increase sanctions for offenses related to riots and broaden the definition of trespassing, allowing law enforcement officers to issue citations and fines.

The new laws, passed under emergency provisions that allow them to take effect immediately, came just hours after a protest camp near the pipeline was evacuated.

Senators in neighboring South Dakota on Thursday passed a bill that would allow the governor to create a "safety zone" in emergency situations. Anyone who entered the zone would be fined.

Legislators who backed the measure specifically cited the Dakota Access project and possible protests against the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which will run through South Dakota. Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R), who sponsored the legislation, said it was needed to deter “professional agitators.”

“Certainly, the Keystone XL pipeline would be a likely prompt to these types of demonstrations,” Daugaard told reporters at a press conference last week.

Native American tribes objected to the legislation, which they say improperly targets them.

Minnesota lawmakers say cracking down on protesters who block access to highways is among their top priorities this legislative session. On Wednesday, two legislative committees voted to increase penalties for protests that block access and to make protesters liable for costs incurred by police responding to their demonstrations.

The Minnesota legislation follows protests against the shooting deaths of several black men by police. Those protests blocked roads leading to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Legislators in Indiana and Iowa have also considered bills to criminalize blocking streets during protests.

Arizona Republicans have introduced a measure to expand racketeering laws, which target organized crime groups, to include rioting. The bill would allow police officers to arrest and the seize the assets of those who organize protest events.

Civil libertarians say the measures are unconstitutional overreactions to a historic era of protests.

“Robust protest activity is a sign of the health of our republic. Our democracy is literally designed for citizens to get out in the streets and make their voices heard to their legislators,” said Lee Rowland, a senior attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

“To see legislators in these states make it a priority not to listen to the voices of their constituents, but to silence them, is deeply troubling and fundamentally un-American.”

One measure in Tennessee goes so far as to give civil immunity to a driver who hits a protester blocking traffic.

The legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Matthew Hill (R), comes after a car hit volunteers helping protesters cross a street in Nashville as they demonstrated against the Trump administration’s orders blocking immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Hill’s measure passed its first test in a state Senate committee earlier his month. Hill did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

A similar bill failed in the North Dakota legislature earlier this month.

Republican-led legislatures in Michigan and Virginia have already rejected their own measures increasing penalties on protests.

Rowland, who has been following state legislatures for about a dozen years, said the measures represent a “fairly unprecedented level” of action against protestors. The wave of bills come after high-profile protests including the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Women's March on Washington, which took place the day after Trump’s inauguration.

The women’s march drew more than 3 million participants in cities across the nation. It attracted more people to Washington’s subway system than Trump’s inauguration, the city's transit authority reported.

EJ 2

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