“Dawn told me about the illegally dumped nuclear waste, that there had been instances where it had gone off-site, which were documented, that when West Lake was unregulated it had received all kinds of toxic chemicals, including paint and jet fuel,” says Ferdman. “I told her, ‘No offense, but I’m going to be fact-based and objective. If 25 percent of what you’ve told me is true, we have a big problem.’ And unfortunately it all turned out to be true.”
“Last week brought more bad news: Mr. Pruitt is proposing to end a decades-long agreement with the Justice Department that funds the E.P.A.’s lawsuits against polluters responsible for creating hazardous waste sites. Neither Congress nor the courts will have the final say. The decision rests with the Trump administration.
Since the Reagan administration, the E.P.A. has reimbursed the Justice Department for the cost of suing companies as part of the Superfund hazardous waste site cleanup program. In communities like the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Times Beach, Mo., the Justice Department sued polluters to force them to pay the cost of relocating residents. More recently, the E.P.A. covered the upfront costs of suing the W. R. Grace chemical conglomerate in the small town of Libby, Mont., where hundreds have died from asbestos poisoning, and compelling General Electric to clean up decades of PCB pollution that ravaged the Hudson River.
But in its budget proposal, the E.P.A. said it no longer intended to reimburse the Justice Department for Superfund litigation costs.”
After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, the EPA confirmed 13 of Houston’s Superfund sites were flooded or completely underwater. Gibbs says thousands more sites are vulnerable to violent storms, and politics make it unlikely that many of them will be ever be remediated.
“We’ve seen it time and time again, going back to Katrina or Superstorm Sandy. They’re just not being taken care of. The reason is because the responsible parties — the companies that are responsible for these sites — don’t want to pay the money to clean them up.
“And the EPA, our environmental protection agency at the federal level, doesn’t want to push those big corporations around because that’s how people get elected to office here in the U.S.”
Read more
A Superfund site in Vermont will be redeveloped with solar panels. This is a redevelopment idea we can live with. While the land is being reused we can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Read more.
As unprecedented hurricanes assault coastal U.S. communities, residents and experts fear the storms could unleash contamination the EPA has tried to keep at bay.
“The problem is that you could see a lot of waste that was supposedly ‘under control’ getting mobilized into waterways and spreading throughout the community,” Olson said. Working with the NRDC and other environmental groups, local residents did their own water testing and “found widespread contamination around Superfund and RCRA sites.” Read more
Bobby Griffin found the clusters of shiny silver mercury globules scattered across his San Jacinto riverfront property on Tuesday, a few hundred yards from the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a Superfund site that was inundated during last week’s storm.
Public health officials are investigating a case of dangerous liquid mercury that appears to have washed or blown ashore here, east of Houston, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Read more.
‘Dreamers’ who marched down the street from our offices in Falls Church, Virginia. Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Since the Obama administration began DACA in 2012, 787,580 people have been approved for the program, according to the latest government figures. To be eligible, applicants had to have arrived in the US before age 16 and have lived there since June 15, 2007.
What does DACA do for them?
DACA recipients have been able to come out of the shadows and obtain valid driver’s licenses, enroll in college and legally secure jobs. They also pay income taxes. The program didn’t give them a path to become US citizens or even legal permanent residents — something immigrant rights advocates have criticized.
The Trump Administration and newly-appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claim to desire to return Superfund cleanups “to their rightful place at the center of the EPA’s core mission”1, however their actions speak differently: their proposed budget includes a 30% cut in funding to the Superfund. In April, Pruitt assembled a Task Force to provide recommendations for the future of Superfund, chaired by Albert Kelly, a prior bank chairman with no environmental experience. On June 22nd, the report was released and the recommendations it contains raise major concerns decreasing cleanup oversight, privileging corporate interests over public health, and a lack of community involvement.
In response, CHEJ has prepared a point-by-point rebuttal of the key recommendations of Pruitt’s report. We intend to share this document with members of our coalition to serve as a guide in the on-going process of organizing together in the pursuit of Superfund reform and Environmental Justice.
Read our response to Pruitt’s plan for Superfund here:
Response to the EPA Superfund Task Force Report (1)
Now that its quorum has been restored, one of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission‘s top priorities will be breaking the logjam of natural gas pipeline projects needing approval that built up over the six months since the body was last able to perform its duties.
The U.S. Senate brought FERC back to fighting shape earlier this month with the confirmation of commissioners Republicans Robert Powelson, a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission and president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, and Neil Chatterjee, a senior energy policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The two men, along with sitting Commissioner and acting Chair Cheryl LaFleur, a Democrat, give the five-member agency the three commissioners it needs to decide on any action requiring a vote.
While there’s a lot for the commission to catch up on, from projects to policy and regulatory matters, gas pipeline proposals are likely to be at the top of the list for quick action, said David Wochner, a partner at K&L Gates LLP and the firm’s policy and regulatory practice area leader.
“Pipeline infrastructure in the natural gas space … certainly provides one of the best opportunities for a newly constituted FERC,” Wochner said. “It’s an opportunity to really advance President Trump’s infrastructure initiatives, which obviously he talked about all through the campaign.”
There are five projects that are ready to be reviewed by the commission:
· The $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a Dominion Energy Inc. project
· The $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline — a joint effort between EQT Midstream Partners LP, NextEra Energy Inc. subsidiary NextEra US Gas Assets LLC, Consolidated Edison Inc. subsidiary Con Edison Transmission Inc., WGL Holdings Inc. unit WGL Midstream, and RGC Resources Inc. unit RGC Midstream LLC
· The $2.2 billion Nexus Pipeline, a DTE Energy Co. and Enbridge Corp. venture
· The $1.8 billion Mountaineer Xpress Pipeline, a TransCanada Corp. project
· The $1 billion PennEast Pipeline, a joint effort between Southern Co. Gas subsidiary AGL Resources, New Jersey Resources Corp. subsidiary NJR Pipeline Co., PSEG Power LLC, South Jersey Industries Inc. unit SJI Midstream, Enbridge Corp., and UGI Corp. subsidiary UGI Energy Services LLC
All have received their final environmental impact statements from FERC and are waiting for commissioners to decide whether to issue certificates of public convenience and necessity. Those certificates, issued under Section 7 of the federal Natural Gas Act, convey the power of eminent domain to the project owners to use as they construct a pipeline along a right-of-way approved by FERC.
Wochner said he thinks the Nexus and PennEast projects are the best candidates to be handled first, saying they’re both significant infrastructure projects that should be prioritized.
Dena Wiggins, president and CEO of the Natural Gas Supply Association, said there’s no FERC meeting until September, so that would be the earliest any project could be aired in a public meeting. She said the projects could be certified “notationally,” meaning the members can vote on paper — outside of a meeting — and issue a certificate that way. But she added that’s unlikely.
“For big orders, usually staff makes a presentation to the commissioners,” Wiggins said. “Sometimes commissioners will want to make public statements.”
While the pipeline projects have made it through most of the FERC process so far, Kelly Martin, deputy director for the Sierra Club‘s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, said that won’t be the end of the story.
“There is major pushback from communities around use of eminent domain, especially in Virginia and in West Virginia,” Martin said. “There are landowners that don’t want their land taken through the use of eminent domain when there’s no public good in the state where they are, or any need.”
In fact, both the Mountain Valley and Nexus pipelines are the subject of new lawsuits, both targeting FERC’s authority to grant eminent domain powers to pipeline companies.
Ohio residents are suing FERC and Nexus Gas Transmission LLC, the company created by DTE and Enbridge to develop the project, alleging the pipeline will primarily export gas, disqualifying it from meeting the “necessity” component of a FERC certificate of approval. The plaintiffs say exporting gas is not a public use for purposes of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment and is beyond the scope of the Natural Gas Act and FERC jurisdiction in cases involving eminent domain.
Separately, Virginia residents are suing FERC and Mountain Valley LLC, the company created to carry out the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, in another Fifth Amendment takings clause constitutional challenge to the eminent domain provisions of the Natural Gas Act.
Eugene Elrod, a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP, said the lawsuits show that landowners and other parties are looking for new ways to stop pipeline projects.
“If the lawsuits are successful, they would have far-reaching effects, because all pipelines that get certificates of public convenience and necessity from FERC need to exercise this power of eminent domain to condemn the property over which the pipeline will run,” Elrod said.
Martin said groups like the Sierra Club could also ask FERC to reconsider any authorizations granted on climate change or cumulative impact grounds.
“A major concern for us is the climate impacts of methane, which is released at the drilling site, from the pipelines along the way and then from a power plant, if that’s the end use,” she said.
–Additional reporting by Adam Lidgett, Michael Phillis and Keith Goldberg. Editing by Philip Shea and Katherine Rautenberg.
By Juan Carlos Rodriguez Law360, New York (August 14, 2017, 8:48 PM EDT) —
“The whole thing has so little to do with the core missions, which is protecting citizens and the environment we live in.” said Lois Gibbs, founder of the Virginia-based CHEJ. “It really is like a blueprint for redevelopment and investors, not ‘how do we protect the environment, how how do we make responsible parties pay.’”
Gibbs pointed to a section in the report that encourages private investment as an example of this redevelopment blueprint, and said the report does not lay out how companies that were already reticent to get involved with clean-ups would change their minds, particularly with the Trump administration’s proposal to slash the Superfund budget, which could hamper federal enforcement.
“Why is company X suddenly going to play differently than they played in the past?” Gibbs said. “There is no money to use as leverage.”
Read the whole story here:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/skeptics-voice-concerns-epa-plan-worst-toxic-waste-sites/