For the last two years of the Obama administration, Jacob Carter built data models at the Environmental Protection Agency that showed how extreme weather events amplified by climate change threatened hundreds of the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps, known as Superfund sites.
President Barack Obama had made combating climate change the EPA’s No. 1 priority, and Carter was a true believer, working on plans the agency’s regional administrators could use to safeguard those sites.
But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, everything changed at the EPA. Trump was a climate change denier, and soon the words “climate change” were excised from agency policy. It didn’t take long for the knock on Carter’s door.
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Photo credit: Karen Ducey
Day: October 9, 2020
To date, what we know about the petrochemical plant under construction in Beaver County has come from its owner, Shell Chemical Co.
That won’t always be the case. When the plant starts producing its plastic pellets sometime in the next few years, it will put information into the world, through air and water emissions.
A number of local environmental and citizen groups are mobilizing to scoop up that data and shift the information and, they hope, the power dynamic between the multinational company and its Beaver County neighbors.
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Photo credit: Andrew Rush / Post-Gazette