Categories
Homepage

Huffington Post releases a series on the North Birmingham Superfund site

The Huffington Post has concluded a three part series on the environment and public health crisis that has taken over the 35th Avenue Birmingham Superfund site. The three articles cover the history of the Superfund site and examine the current health crisis that remains for residents still exposed to contaminants left by a legacy of production in North Birmingham.
Read Part One
Read Part Two
Read Part Three

Categories
Homepage

Climate Strikes Continue

Today marks the second Friday of the Youth Climate Strikes that are taking place in over 150 countries worldwide. Students across Virginia have gathered in Richmond to join in and participate, along with the millions of other individuals across the globe, in speaking out against climate change and the need for immediate political action. Read More.

Categories
Backyard Talk

Youth Climate Leader Sends Powerful Message: How Dare You!

On September 20th more than 4 million people around the world took to the streets to join the global climate strike movement. People of all ages from across the globe came together to share a message: The planet is in a climate emergency, and we will not sit by and do nothing. A recap of many of these strikes was put together by the Earth Day Network: “Change is coming, whether they like it or not:” Youth climate strikes break records worldwide
On Saturday September 21st, the United Nations hosted its first-ever Youth Climate Summit in New York City bringing together hundreds of youth climate leaders from around the world to discuss climate solutions for the future. The Earth Day Network prepared a summary of this event and included several notable quotes. “Change rarely happens from the top down,” climate activist Bruno Rodriguez said at the summit. “It happens when millions of people demand change.”  Youth student climate leader Greta Thunberg from Sweden said, “Together and united, we are unstoppable. This is what people power looks like. We will rise to the challenge.”
The Summit was part of a weekend of events leading up to the U.N. Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit on Monday September 23rd. The summit was a call to action in the face of the worsening climate crisis. On its website, the UN defined climate change as the “defining issue of our time and now is the defining moment to do something about it.”
Leaders from 65 counties attended the summit and more than 100 business leaders were there. The UN prepared a summary of the commitments and actions taken by the attendees. In closing the meeting, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, said “You have delivered a boost in momentum, cooperation and ambition. But we have a long way to go.”
Youth leaders urged action not more promises.
Perhaps the most powerful statement at the summit was delivered by youth activist Greta Thunberg.
  “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now, is where we draw the line.”
Listen to Greta’s full statement here.

Categories
Homepage

Tropical Storm Imelda leads to a wake up call for the Texas chemical industry

The eastern coast of Texas has proven to be a vulnerable spot for natural disasters, tropical storms, and facility pollution. In the wake of tropical storm Imelda, the Houston and Baytown areas have reported a release of tens of thousands of pounds of pollutants due to the power outages, shutdowns, and storage tank failures caused by the storm. After the facility failures following Hurricane Harvey, legislators and industries have called for more stringent regulations and technology on storage tank in order to prevent future failures from approaching storms. Read More.

Categories
Homepage

New Jersey faucet filters keep out lead contamination

New Jersey officials announced Monday, September 23, that EPA approved faucet filters have effectively made water in Newark, NJ safe to drink from lead contamination. The state is now waiting for the Trump administration to pass the Clean Water State Revolving Fund that will allow states to reallocate funds to address public health problems. New Jersey has been able to replace more than 900 of the 6,500 homes in Newark that have requested lead service line replacements. The passage of the bill will allow the city to be able to further replace the 18,000 privately owned service lines throughout Newark. Read More.

Categories
Homepage

The United Nations meets to discuss the future on climate change

On Friday, millions of individuals stopped work in schools and offices to take to the streets to participate in the worldwide Youth Climate Strike. Youths across the world voiced their concerns of rising global temperatures and increased health effects in an effort to demand action from global political leaders. Today these leaders have gathered in New York at the Climate Action Summit to discuss what steps need to be taken to lower global greenhouse emissions and stall further climate change destruction. Read More.

Categories
Homepage

CHEJ Joins Falls Church Climate March

Just down the street from CHEJ’s headquarters was our local Falls Church City Climate march. Over one hundred people joined others across the globe to speak up and out about the urgency of really addressing our climate crisis.
Today is the Global Climate Strike, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. As people took to the streets in Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia, we host a roundtable discussion with youth activists organizing marches in the United States — in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis — ahead of next week’s U.N. Climate Action Summit. We are joined by Xiye Bastida, a 17-year-old climate justice activist originally from Mexico who is an organizer with Fridays for Future New York and a student at Beacon High School in New York; Katie Eder, a 19-year-old climate justice activist who founded the Future Coalition, where she is currently the executive director; Juwaria Jama, a 15-year-old and first-generation Somali from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who is with U.S. Youth Climate Strikes and is the co-state lead for the Minnesota Youth Climate Strike; and Isra Hirsi, a high school junior and executive director of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike, daughter of Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

Categories
Homepage

Michigan takes action to collect PFAS across the state

The state of Michigan has approved a $1.4 million budget for the collection of PFAS containing substances in fire departments and airports across the state. A survey conducted in 2018 found that 326 out of 762 fire departments in the state use PFAS Class B AFFF (aqueous film forming form). The PFAS liquid will be collected and solidified for safe storage in a hazardous waste landfill in Belleville, MI. Read More.

Categories
Backyard Talk

Superfund Reinvestment Act – Making Polluters Pay for Pollution

By Liz Goodiel, CHEJ Science and Tech Fellow
Take a moment and imagine your dream home. Maybe your dream home is set on a beautiful ocean front with large windows that overlook the rolling waves and the pink summer sunsets. Perhaps your dream home is located in the mountains, surrounded on all sides with towering trees where you can step outside and instantly breathe in the fresh pine. Or maybe your dream home is right where it is now, filled with family, laughter and memories. Wherever your dream home is, you worked hard for it. You managed the home repairs, paid the bills, supported the family, and you made a house a home. 
 
Now take a moment to imagine that an uninvited visitor came and damaged that home. The house that you worked so hard for is now broken, the windows are shattered, the front lawn is destroyed, and your house now has a gaping hole that you didn’t ask for. What is even more unfair is now that outsider isn’t even going to pay to repair your home. He is going to drive away, with the rubble in his rearview mirror, and leave you to clean it up. This visitor damaged your property, so why isn’t he going to be the one to pay for the repairs? Why has he left you standing there to figure out how to fix what is broken? You’re left with your checkbook in one hand and a hammer in the other, forced to undertake the repairs that will take a lot of time, money and hard work. 
 
Across the United States, nearly 53 million Americans are overwhelmed by contamination and health concerning pollution in their own communities created by corporations and facilities. To combat this problem, the Superfund program was created in 1980 to manage the cleanup of the most toxic waste sites where the responsible party was not identified or went out of business. Throughout the course of the program’s history, Superfund has received its funding in two different ways. The first is through budget appropriations the Environmental Protection Agency receives yearly based on the federal budget sourced by American tax dollars. The second source of funding was through polluter taxes, also known as the Polluter Pays Fees. Polluter Pays Fees were taxes enforced on companies that produced chemicals, oil, or other hazardous waste. These fees were designed to make polluters monetarily responsible for the cleanup of any damage they created in the process of production.
 
The Superfund tax fees ended in 1995, relieving polluters of the responsibility to pay for the cleanup of contaminated sites. The sole success of the Superfund program currently relies on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget which is currently at its smallest in two decades. Polluters are not required to pay for the damage they have created and, in effect, American’s have been forced to compensate for this loss in the form of tax dollars. In the last two decades, American tax dollars have paid for more than $21 billion in Superfund site cleanup. Polluters have torn down the “dream home” and walked away, leaving the residents behind to pay for the mess they didn’t ask for nor create.
 
In July of 2019, Representative Earl Blumunaer of Oregon proposed the Superfund Reinvestment Act (H.R. 4088) to bring the cleanup burden back to polluters. Sponsors of the bill include Representatives Gerry Connolly (VA), Jerry McNerney (CA), Terri Sewell (AL), Raul Grijalva (AZ), Matt Cartwright (PA) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.). The proposed bill will require polluting companies to pay an excise tax of 0.12 percent on the amount of a company’s modified environmental tax taxable income that exceeds $3,735,000. In other words, for a company that makes over $3,735 million in net income, each additional profit will be taxed at a rate of 0.12 percent. For example, if a company that makes an additional $10,000 over the $3,735 million threshold, its taxable amount will be equivalent to the cost of one cheese pizza ($12.00). If a company does not meet the threshold of $3,735 million, it is not required to pay any additional tax. 
 
Currently, polluters escape billions of dollars in cleanup costs for damages they created. With Representative Blumenaur’s proposed legislation, the cleanup burden will be transferred from American taxpayers back to the parties responsible for pollution. Polluters are the ones responsible for creating unhealthy hazardous sites, why are they not the ones responsible for cleaning it up?

Categories
Homepage Water News

NC got an ‘F’ for unsafe school drinking water.

North Carolina was among 22 states that got an “F” grade for not getting rid of lead from school drinking water, according to Environment America Research & Policy Center and U.S. PIRG Education Fund. This week, Environment North Carolina released a back-to-school toolkit that gives the public information on how to get the lead out of schools. Read more.