Author: CHEJ Intern

By: Leija Helling, Community Organizing Intern
On Monday afternoon between Zoom meetings, I set out for a walk around my Boston neighborhood and opened the front door to a hazy sky. The air felt thick and smelled like a backyard barbecue. I stood in confusion for a moment, and then in disbelief: wildfire smoke.
News headlines confirmed that smoke from wildfires in the Western U.S. and Canada had taken the jet stream to the east coast and settled over major cities like Boston and New York. Never before had I seen the Boston city skyline blurred out, a reddish haze covering the athletic fields at my university campus, or a deep orange sun. Air quality alerts had been issued across the upper east coast, warning people to stay indoors, especially children, the elderly and those with respiratory and cardiovascular health conditions. I’d been hearing horror stories about the unprecedented wildfire season tearing across Oregon, California, and British Columbia, but to see fires 3,000 miles away affecting air quality in my home city so significantly provoked new feelings of shock and urgency.
Folks on the west coast know intimately how intense, long-lasting, and dangerous wildfire seasons have become in recent years. But for western fires to cause the worst air quality New York City has seen in 15 years, to bring unhealthy PM2.5 levels to swaths of the east coast, highlights just how far the effects of corporate negligence and industry-fueled climate change reach. With extreme heat and dry conditions fueling fires that have already burned at least 1.3 million acres across 13 western states, it’s clearer now than ever that reactionary band-aid solutions won’t be enough. When PG&E, California’s largest power company, cuts costs by leaving flammable brush around their power lines, they start fires that wipe entire towns off the map. These are the consequences of corporate greed. And to fight, we must take power into our hands.
This spring and summer, the infrastructure plans debated by Congressional leaders have offered a glimmer of hope that, if we come together and make our voices heard, we can indeed hold big industries accountable for the harm they cause. For instance, President Biden’s infrastructure proposal includes measures to make sure polluters, not the public, pay to clean up toxic waste sites from industry. But the infrastructure negotiations have also demonstrated the massive obstacles we’re up against. Big industries, especially chemical, oil and gas, hold excessive amounts of power in our political process. As long as Senators’ votes can be bought by big oil, our system will allow corporations to keep putting people’s lives at risk for the sake of profit.
From worsening wildfires to the 40-year backlog of Superfund toxic waste sites, there are a whole lot of corporate messes worth getting mad about right now. Let’s channel that anger toward naming names, building local power, and calling on our elected leaders to fight for the people they’re supposed to represent. Right now, I’m fighting to #MakePollutersPay alongside people across the country who live, breathe, and raise families while industry’s toxic dumps sit in their backyards. It’s about time to start holding polluters accountable for their actions.
Photo Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty

By: Tony Aguilar, Community Organizing Intern
Time and time again, it seems as though legislation always swings in the direction of big industries–especially the chemical, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical industries–rather than in the direction of the general public. A small number of pharmaceutical companies have been allowed to control the market on drugs and thereby control the prices, making it more and more difficult for Americans to get the drugs that they need. Toxic chemicals continue to pollute our environment and harmful drilling practices like hydraulic fracturing often go unchecked and unchallenged by our government. In a nation where the government is supposed to be of the people, for the people, and by the people, something seems to have gone awry.
The answer to why or how this has happened is probably clear to many by now. These industries have become so large and powerful that they seem to have a stronghold on the government. So, what exactly is at stake here for the American people? Well, in addition to all of the environmental damage that these industries are doing to the planet, they are also putting the lives of millions of Americans at risk in order to make more money. Not only are these industries putting lives at risk for the sake of money, but at the thousands of sites across the country where toxic chemicals are polluting communities, the government cannot seem to find it in the budget to clean up these sites and protect public health. Laws that hold polluters responsible for the cleanup continue to give these industries the benefit of the doubt.
Any work to clean up areas where people are being exposed to toxic chemicals is done at a snail’s pace and the government agencies that were created to help protect us from environmental harms often take the side of industry as well.  Recent evidence has been uncovered showing that the EPA, the nation’s defense against environmental dangers, has even approved some chemicals that have been shown to be harmful to humans and the environment to be used in hydraulic fracturing–again, giving the oil and gas industry the benefit of the doubt without taking every precaution to ensure public safety. Many chemicals that are released into our environment and our communities have been related to public health hazards yet they are approved by the EPA on the grounds that the evidence is incomplete or that a causal connection cannot be made between the chemicals and illnesses in humans. Rather than erring on the side of caution, the government gives polluting industries every opportunity to make a profit, while disregarding possible risks to public health.
The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 was created to hold polluters accountable for their pollution by charging a tax on polluting companies that would be used to clean up areas of waste and toxic contamination. Since this “polluter-pay” tax expired in 1995, the average number of cleanups completed per year fell from 71 to just 12, leaving more toxic chemicals in our air, water, and soil posing a threat to communities all over the country. 
Despite these grim circumstances, there is still hope in our future. These industries have a daunting power that seems insurmountable, but we as the People, have a power that is not to be taken lightly. Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan includes a provision to reinstate this “polluter-pay” tax which would result in more money for the government to clean up communities that have been affected by decades of industrial pollution. This is just one effort in the fight to shift the priority onto the people, where it always should have been, and away from profit-hungry industry. 
Although this signals a glimmer of hope, we as the people need to make sure we exercise our power as the chemical, oil and gas industries are sure to do everything in their power to ensure that the polluter-pay tax does not make it into legislation. This new bill will be yet another test of where America’s priorities truly lie.
Photo Credit: Stuart Villanueva/The Daily News file photo