The Department of Transportation announced $905.25 million will go to 24 projects in 18 states as part of its Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) grant program, established back in 2015. For the first time since then or ever before, the department is finally considering the impact of these projects on race and the environment.
“These timely investments in our infrastructure will create jobs and support regional economies, while helping to spur innovation, confront climate change, and address inequities across the country,” said Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a release, noting that grants were considered by how they would address climate change, environmental justice and racial equity for the first time in USDOT history.
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Category: News Archive
The clouds of vapor in Katrina Randolph’s salon that lingered after she and her stylists worked on customers’ hair in tight quarters all day made her uneasy.
“I knew we were inhaling everything that we’re using during the day,” Randolph, owner of Tré Shadez Hair Studio in Capitol Heights, Maryland, told EHN. “Even when we would turn on the vent, or the AC, it wouldn’t calm it totally down.”
After looking into the health effects of common chemicals in salon products, she upgraded her salon’s ventilation system and started making hair oils out of essential oils.
“There’s definitely not enough information out there for us” to stay safe, she said. Randolph is one of almost two dozen Maryland hairdressers who took part in a recent pilot study looking at phthalate exposure for hairdressers. The study, published last month in Environmental Science and Technology, found that levels of metabolites—substances formed from the breakdown of chemicals—for one kind of phthalate were 10 times higher amongst Black and Latinx hairstylists than in Black and Latinx office workers.
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Photo Credit: Elvert Barnes/flickr
Last Saturday, just as a historic heat wave hit the Northwest, thousands of people took to the north fork of the Coeur d’Alene River in Shoshone County, Idaho.
Groups on inner tubes and unicorn floaties and kayaks and rafts floated the crystal-clear waters after parking wherever they could find space along stretches of road lining either side of the river.
Some park their RVs for weekend getaways throughout the summer on private property rented along the river in this county of about 12,600 people. Others set up canopies and barbecues on any beach or rocky “sand bar” they can find. Locals say litter and trespassing can be common problems.
Meanwhile, kids splash each other as they run up and down the shores playing in the shallows — shallows that, in many places, are highly contaminated with toxic levels of lead, arsenic, mercury and more.
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Photo Credit: Samantha Wohlfeil/Inlander
(CNN)President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a bill repealing a Trump-era rule that rolled back regulations on methane emissions — a particularly potent greenhouse gas believed to contribute significantly to the climate crisis — from the oil and gas industries.
The President described the bill as an “important first step” to cut methane pollution and said it “reflects a return to common sense and commitment to the common good.”
“(President Barack Obama) in 2016 and I put in place a rule that required that companies capture methane leaks from the wells they were digging,” Biden said before signing the bill. “Well, guess what, they didn’t.”
Photo Credit: Evan Vucci/AP
After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes.
An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.
Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels.
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Photo Credit: Guardian Design/Getty Images
When people learn they are exposed to toxic chemicals, they wonder what it means for their health and often want to take protective action.
We’ve heard this in our conversations with residents of PFAS-affected communities, and in their public talks—calls for medical screening to learn about potential effects on their own and their families’ health. However, people exposed to PFAS often face significant hurdles in getting screened for health effects from the exposure. And that needs to change.
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Photo Credit: Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Cancer/flickr
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new $50 million fund to identify and address low-income neighborhoods and communities of color who have been disproportionately affected by climate change, pollution, and the covid-19 pandemic.
The EPA said on Friday that the environmental justice initiatives will use allocated dollars from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed by Democrats in Congress earlier this year, for underserved communities through a range of local programs.
“We know how important it is to put funding to work in environmentally overburdened, economically underserved areas, and today we’re excited to let our communities know that thanks to the [American Rescue Plan], help is here,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “EPA is drawing on its many years of experience working with communities and organizations that strive for environmental justice to ensure these funds will deliver real-world results for those who need it most.”
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Photo Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
One of the bipartisan infrastructure deal’s pay-fors is reviving longstanding questions over who should pay to clean up some of the nation’s most contaminated land.
The White House released a framework on Thursday for its $579 billion bipartisan infrastructure deal. Included within the pay-fors of that plan is a line item to “reinstate Superfund fees for chemicals,” a potential restoration of excise taxes that expired in the mid-nineties.
Lawmakers in favor of bringing back the “polluters pay” tax model, including Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), applauded the provision. But industry representatives said that with few details to go on, questions remain on whether the revenue scheme should apply more broadly so that companies aren’t financially responsible for sites that they otherwise wouldn’t be liable for under the Superfund law.
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Photo Credit: Stephen Hilger/Bloomberg News
After a four-year pause related to executive branch inaction, and with the transition to the Biden-Harris administration, we finally have new data from the federal government on the severity of the climate crisis. And it offers a grim diagnosis.
Drawing from more than 50 contributors from various government agencies and academic institutions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Indicators report confirms that climate change is making life harder for Americans in new and challenging ways.
Heat waves are occurring more often in the United States. Their frequency has increased from an average of two heat waves per year in the 1960s to six per year during the 2010s. Global temperatures are rising: 2016 was the hottest year on record, and the 2010-2020 was the hottest decade ever recorded. And sea levels are rising along most of the U.S. coastline, by as much as 8 inches in some locations.
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Photo Credit: Aude Guerrucci/Reuters
Toxic chemicals in beauty products commonly used by and marketed to Black people and other people of color could be contributing to racial health inequities.
So say researchers and community groups studying chemicals in consumer goods, arguing that the term “environmental justice,” which has gained prominence in recent years to describe how communities of color bear larger pollution burdens, should be expanded to include exposure from toxic beauty products.
Just as communities of color often are located in more polluted areas due to discriminatory zoning and housing policies, centuries of racist and sexist beauty standards favoring straight hair, for example, have pushed Black women and feminine people, in particular, to use products containing harsh chemicals that could harm their health.
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Photo Credit: Claudine Hellmuth/E&E News (illustration); Freepik (phtotos); American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (text)