“It took courage for Senator Cassidy to vote against Trump,” Sharon Lavigne, the founder of the faith-based grassroots organization RISE St. James, said about the Louisiana Republican after the impeachment hearing of the former president. “He voted with his conscience, not his party. Now he has to find the courage to honor his oath as a doctor and [...]
By: Kristen Millstein, Communications Intern In the summer of 2016, I traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I was in high school and had not spent significant time outside my California bubble. Pine Ridge was like a different world. While there, I learned from tribal leaders about the continual violation of their [...]
Each well drilled using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas production creates tens of millions of gallons of wastewater, called produced water or brine. In Ohio, much of that wastewater is disposed of in underground injection wells, including waste from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As the number of injection wells grows in Ohio, [...]
President Joseph Biden Jr. has promised to up the ante for environmental justice (EJ) communities by “rooting out the systemic racism in our laws, policies, institutions, and hearts.” Although a complete rollout of Biden’s plan has not yet been revealed, his campaign plans and initial actions allow for some educated analysis as to what industry [...]
In the report, Superfund Underfunded: How taxpayers have been left with a toxic financial burden, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group analyzed data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to generate a report on the state of cleanup since the initial funding mechanism, the Polluter Pays Tax on culpable corporations, expired in 1995. “Millions of Americans [...]
In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), informally called Superfund. The Superfund program was given the authority and funds to hold polluters responsible for cleaning up contaminated waste sites or clean up the sites themselves if no responsible party can be found or afford the cleanup. These toxic waste sites [...]
By: Ruth Rodriguez, Communications Intern Nina Morgan is a Climate and Environmental Justice Organizer with the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP) in Birmingham, Alabama. Morgan fights for communities located near heavy industry that are suffering from pollution-related illnesses like asthma and cancer. These communities have been unlawfully restricted to these unsafe areas due to [...]
WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden has yanked back the health assessment of a notable “forever chemical,” alleging the document was compromised by “political interference” in the final days of the Trump administration. The EPA announced Feb. 9 that it was removing from its website the toxicity assessment for PFBS, or [...]
When three 775-foot-tall smoke stacks at the Navajo Generating Station came tumbling down in December, sending plumes of dust into the sky and thundering reverberations off the mesas of the Arizona high desert, it marked the end of an era. The federal government was instrumental in engineering the rise of the 2,250-megawatt coal plant 45 [...]
When a massive fire broke out at the Intercontinental Terminals Company in 2019, a thick plume of smoke blanketed parts of east Harris County for several days. Hospital admissions for asthma increased by about 65% compared to the same time in 2018, according to county data. A Deer Park 911 dispatcher named Brandy fielded calls [...]
