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
Category: News Archive
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)
As the sun set, more than a dozen young people carried a wooden bridge toward a narrow section of the Mississippi River. The bridge allowed the group to cross more easily from their camp to where the immense oil pipeline was being built on the other side.
They were cited for trespassing – but they had symbolically laid claim to the marshy landscape.
That same day, Dawn Goodwin’s voice was soft but forceful as she spoke into the camera: “I’m calling on you, Joe Biden, to uphold our treaties, because they are the supreme law of the land.”
Goodwin, an Ojibwe woman and environmental activist, was recording a livestream from a picturesque camp site amid northern Minnesota’s natural beauty – where she and dozens of others had come together to protest the construction of the Line 3 pipeline.
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Photo Credit: Sheila Regan/The Guardian
Four years of President Donald Trump have cost America dearly. We lost our global leadership on addressing climate change and saw the struggle for environmental justice thwarted here at home. President Joe Biden has defined both of these objectives as cornerstones of his legacy, but a huge interstate methane gas pipeline now being rammed through the Appalachian Mountains threatens to undermine the progress his administration has promised.
The 42-inch diameter Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) would run 303 miles from West Virginia to Virginia, and it is one of the biggest U.S. gas pipelines in process. The pipeline’s climate impact is estimated to be equivalent to about 23 typical coal plants, or more than 19 million passenger vehicles. That does not include a proposed 74-mile extension of the pipeline into North Carolina.
Methane gas is a climate change double whammy. It’s a fossil fuel and, when burned for energy, releases the planet-warming greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But methane itself is a very potent greenhouse gas, and when some of it inevitably escapes into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing, we get further warming.
Photo Credit: Bob Brown/AP
The Air Resources Board has launched a series of stakeholder engagement workshops to inform the next update of California’s Climate Change Scoping Plan, the regulatory framework guiding the state’s policy priorities. While the plan will not be finalized until the end of 2022, frustrations have already risen among dairy and bioenergy interests over an apparent shift away from dairy digesters and biomass plants for agricultural and forest waste.
“I was really concerned with the presentation from the California Energy Commission, particularly the exclusion of any new biomass and no mention whatsoever of biogas,” said Julia Levin, executive director of the Bioenergy Association of California, during an overview webinar for the scoping plan last week.
In its presentation, the commission did not project an increase in bioenergy in California. She called that troubling, since the state is trying to develop a plan with “critically needed but aggressive climate change goals.”
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Photo Credit: Dairy Cares
Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are widely used in cosmetics produced by major brands in the US and Canada, a new study that tested for the chemicals in hundreds of products found.
The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, detected what the study’s authors characterized as “high” levels of organic fluorine, an indicator of PFAS, in over half of 231 makeup and personal care samples. That includes lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, foundation, concealer, lip balm, blush, nail polish and more.
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Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
A retired special education teacher from Louisiana who led a successful grassroots campaign to stop construction of a toxic plastics plant in America’s Cancer Alley has won the 2021 Goldman prize for environmental defenders.
Sharon Lavigne, 68, organised marches, petitions, town hall meetings and media campaigns after elected officials gave the green light to the construction of another polluting factory in St James parish – a majority-Black community already blighted by heavy industry and exorbitant cancer rates.
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Photo Credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize
I have fond childhood memories of going to dollar stores with my mom. It was what we could afford.
We’d pick-up the few items we needed and sometimes I’d get to pick out a toy, make-up, or a food item as a treat. Little did we know that some of those low-cost products may have contained toxic chemicals.
This was my norm growing up, as is it the norm of many children today.
Over the years I became more aware of the systematic environmental injustices that people of color and low-income families face every day. I grew up more likely to be exposed to poor air quality because of my zip code. My family was often only able to afford highly processed foods or lower quality products that may have contained harmful chemicals.
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Photo Credit: Dollar Tree, Inc.