President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on the most ambitious environmental justice plan ever offered by the nominee of a major political party. His Build Back Better agenda included a commitment to invest 40 percent of his $2 trillion clean energy plan into communities living on the front lines of poverty and pollution.
At the same time, his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, co-authored the Climate Equity Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), outlining ways the next administration can operationalize environmental justice across the agencies. After a summer of historic protests that saw some 15 million to 26 million people take to the streets to take a stand against racial injustice in policing, it’s almost certain that the incoming Biden administration will take bold action to address the intersecting crises of environmental pollution and racial inequality.
But this mandate for anti-racist policy raises a question: How, in the first place, will a Biden administration identify the most polluted and impoverished communities across the country?
Read more…
Photo credit:Andrew Harnik/AP
Day: December 8, 2020
Martha Romero felt that she had to send her daughters to safety.
She had seen air pollution grow worse in recent years as the truck traffic near her San Bernardino neighborhood increased so she made the difficult decision to send her three daughters to live with her mother, whose home is farther from the worst of the fumes and dust from the unending parade of trucks moving to and from nearby warehouses. “Unfortunately, we cannot keep them in an air bubble,” she said.
A coalition of local organizations is leading the fight against the expansion of the San Bernardino International Airport to accommodate Amazon’s burgeoning logistics needs with a complex that will bring more flights, more warehouses and even more truck traffic and pollution to her area. The coalition has an unusual ally: Xavier Becerra, the attorney general for the state of California, and the choice of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Opposing the airport expansion plan is the work of the environmental justice bureau Mr. Becerra created in 2018, the first of its kind. Its focus: the unequal effect pollution and other forms of environmental damage have on health in the most vulnerable communities. While local officials, understandably, want to promote economic development, the bureau created by Mr. Becerra is saying that environmental justice needs to be part of the equation.
Read more…
Photo credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images
The Trump administration on Monday declined to tighten controls on industrial soot emissions, disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates.
In one of the final policy moves of an administration that has spent the past four years weakening or rolling back more than 100 environmental regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency completed a regulation that keeps in place the current rules on tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, instead of strengthening them, even though the agency’s own scientists have warned of the links between the pollutants and respiratory illness. In April, researchers at Harvard released the first nationwide study linking long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and Covid-19 death rates.
Read more…
Photo credit: Dane Rhys/Bloomberg
As the world heats up, cities with heat-trapping asphalt and little tree cover have left residents sweltering and breathing in more air pollution.
Asphalt is releasing hazardous air pollutants into communities, especially when hit with extreme heat and sunlight, according to research published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. Researchers found that asphalt in California’s South Coast Air Basin emitted more secondary organic aerosols in the summer than gas and diesel motor vehicles combined.
Read More
Photo credit David Becker | Reuters
People who live near the most toxic sites in America say they saw a level of attention they hadn’t seen in decades under Trump. But what happens now? Read more.
Photo by M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO
60+ environmental justice leaders and organizations are calling for action and equity for their ‘Sacrifice Zone’ communities. They released an open letter calling for “an immediate and sustained response to inequities causing Covid-19 to infect and kill a disproportionate number of people subjected to systemic racism and the denial of self-determination throughout the United States.” COVID-19 has exacerbated the equities throughout society, including unequal accessibility to health care and the industry and pollution that impacts mostly low-income and minority communities. Read More
Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
The economic impacts of Covid-19 have allowed the Trump administration to continuously cut US environmental regulations. This week, Trump continued to derail our current environmental regulations by cutting environmental reviews for infrastructure projects. These cuts will not only result in increased rates of pollution and contamination with great public health risks but will likely have a disproportionate impact on low-income and minority communities. It is extremely concerning that the Trump administration aims to rollback so many environmental regulations that will have negative health impacts on our communities, especially while we are currently experiencing a global health crisis. Read More
Nuclear power plants are among the many other industries that will be receiving regulatory relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among some of the proposed changes are longer work days and work weeks for some employees because of shortage in available staff. Some employees may be permitted to work upwards of 12 to 16 hours a day or 86 hours a week. Additionally, repairs, inspections and replacement of equipment might go undone during the pandemic. The NRC has assured that safety and security at facilities will not be compromised; however, with the proposed changes and limited staff, the risk of accident is higher than normal. Read More.
By Sharon Franklin
On January 2, 2020, Ellen Knickmeyer, Matthew Brow and Ed White of the Associated Press, reported that the Trump Administration has built up the biggest backlog of unfunded toxic Superfund Sites. There are 34 sites that are “shovel ready” to be cleaned up, only the agency does not have the funds to do it. The 2019 figures were quietly released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the winter holidays. CHEJ has been asking for this list since July of last year.
Congress created the Superfund program in 1980 after the Love Canal episode and other notorious pollution cases to provide funds to pay for cleanup of abandoned contaminated sites where no responsible party was identified. The intent was to hold polluters responsible for cleanup costs or provide taxpayer money when no responsible party can be identified. The trust fund was financed by fees, referred to as the “Polluter Pays Fees,” that were charged to companies that used hazardous chemicals. Unfortunately, EPA stopped collecting the fees in 1995 and the fund ran out in 2003. Since that time, the cleanup of Superfund sites has been paid for by the American taxpayers. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) has prepared a bill to reinstate the fees, but he has not yet introduced the bill to Congress.
Meanwhile, communities like St. Clair Shores, Michigan are not getting their Superfund site cleaned up. Violet Donoghue, a resident of St. Clair Shores said, “There hasn’t been a sense of urgency.” She further said the-at the last word from EPA was that soil would be removed from the front of her house. “Now when they say they’re cleaning it, I say, ‘OK, give me the date’”. Meanwhile, toxic PCBs have poisoned some local soil, water and fish. St. Clair is one of the 34 Superfund sites where cleanup projects have languished for lack of funding in 2019.
In early 2019, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told a Senate environment committee, “We are in the process of cleaning up some of the nation’s largest, most complex sites and returning them to productive use.” However, this does not include the 34 unfunded projects in 17 states and Puerto Rico as noted by two former EPA officials who worked on Superfund. “They’re misleading Congress and the public about the funds that are needed to really protect the public from exposure to the toxic chemicals,” said Elizabeth Southerland former Director of Science and Technology in the Water Office. Judith Enck, former EPA Regional Northeastern Administrator called the unfunded sites a “regulatory failure.”
When the EPA was asked how funds were spent, and why the agency didn’t ask Congress for more funding to deal with the growing backlog, EPA spokeswoman Maggie Sauerhage stated that EPA’s Superfund program “will continue to prioritize new construction projects based on which sites present the greatest risk to human health and the environment.” Sauerhage also stated in an email, “Further, the agency maintains the authority to respond to and fund emergencies at these sites if there is an imminent threat to human health and the environment.” EPA did not directly respond to questions about the backlog of 34 unfunded Superfund cleanup projects which was posted on its website on December 26, 2019. The information about these sites can be found here.
The large number of unfunded sites makes clear the need to introduce Pallone’s bill to Congress and to reinstate the polluter pays fees.
Photo Credit: 2015 The Macomb Daily File Photo Clinton Township, MI
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today vacated a permit to build a compressor station for the proposed Atlantic Coast gas pipeline, citing a Virginia state board for inadequately assessing its environmental justice impacts on the largely African American community of Union Hill. Read more.