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Marathon to fund projects in southwest Detroit to settle refinery emissions violations

Detroit – Marathon Petroleum Co. will invest more than $ 500,000 in community projects and will pay the state nearly $ 82,000 in fines under an emissions agreement signed this week to resolve emissions violations.

State Department of the Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy on Wednesday released the final terms of their agreement with the southwest Detroit refinery that includes an expected $ 539,000 investment in environmental protection for the neighborhood at 48217.

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Photo Credit: Paul Sancya/AP

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COVID Amplifies Environmental Injustice in Chicago

Southwest Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood is one of the city’s most polluted neighborhoods and has also been ravaged by the novel coronavirus, Grist reports, yet another stark instance in which the pandemic has illuminated and exacerbated existing environmental injustices.

The immigrant-rich neighborhood has been pummeled by COVID-19. At one point last November, one in nine Little Village residents had a confirmed case of COVID-19 and residents in two of its ZIP codes were 15 times more likely to die from it than those living in the overwhelmingly white Near Northside neighborhood just over half-a-dozen miles away.

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Photo Credit: Max Herman/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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The US ignored Louisiana’s ‘cancer alley’ for decades. Will Biden finally take action?

For five years I have fought against the polluters who have poisoned our community in Louisiana’s “cancer alley”, or as we call it now, “death alley”. And for decades our fight has been ignored by the US government.
This makes President Joe Biden’s decision to reference “cancer alley” earlier last week, as he signed new climate and environmental justice orders, a meaningful and great moment. But for me the distance between seeing Mr Biden address our problems directly, and anything actually coming to fruition, is a long gap. And I will have to wait to see some direct results.
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Photo Credit: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

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Two Biden Priorities, Climate and Inequality, Meet on Black-Owned Farms

Sedrick Rowe was a running back for Georgia’s Fort Valley State University when he stumbled on an unexpected oasis: an organic farm on the grounds of the historically Black school.

He now grows organic peanuts on two tiny plots in southwest Georgia, one of few African-American farmers in a state that has lost more than 98 percent of its Black farmers over the past century.

“It weighs on my mind,” he said of the history of discrimination, and violence, that drove so many of his predecessors from their farms. “Growing our own food feels like the first step in getting more African-American people back into farming.”

Two of the Biden administration’s biggest priorities — addressing racial inequality and fighting climate change — are converging in the lives of farmers like Mr. Rowe.

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Photo Credit: Matthew Odom/The New York Times

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Michigan approves Great Lakes oil pipeline tunnel permits

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Michigan’s environmental agency said Friday it has approved construction of an underground tunnel to house a replacement for a controversial oil pipeline in a channel linking two of the Great Lakes.

The decision, a victory for Enbridge Inc., comes as the Canadian company resists Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s demand to shut down its 68-year-old line in the Straits of Mackinac.

Enbridge disputes her claim — echoed by environmentalists and native tribes — that the pipeline segment crossing the 4-mile-wide (6.4-kilometer-wide) waterway is unsafe. But Enbridge had earlier sought to ease public concern by striking a deal with Whitmer’s predecessor, Republican Rick Snyder, in 2018 to run a new pipe through a tunnel to be drilled beneath the straits connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.

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Photo Credit: Carlos Os0rio/AP Photo

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Biden climate plan: Environmental justice ‘writ large’

With the stroke of a pen, President Biden brought nearly half a century of environmental justice activism to its culmination yesterday.
Biden signed an executive order that promises a governmentwide approach to the disproportionate pollution burdens faced by many communities of color. But many advocates say Biden’s success on confronting environmental justice will be judged on how the order is implemented.
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Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/picture alliance/Consolidated News Photos/Newscom

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Court rules against fast-track of Trump EPA’s ‘secret science’ rule

A federal judge in Montana late Wednesday ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to fast-track a controversial rule about how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers scientific evidence, endangering its future under the Biden administration.
The Trump EPA had characterized the rule, which would restrict the use of studies that don’t make their underlying data publicly available, as procedural, allowing it to go into effect immediately.
Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee, disagreed, determining that the rule was substantive and ordering that it can’t go into effect until Feb. 5.
Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Asbestos At The Mill And In The Black Neighborhood Around It

An estimated 2,200 tons of asbestos are buried in a mound behind the five-acre former Carolina Asbestos Company in downtown Davidson. It’s the leftover byproduct of the company that made shingles, automotive brake linings and other asbestos products from 1930 to about 1970.
While the factory was up and running, sometimes asbestos floated in the air into surrounding yards. Over the years, it also ran onto neighborhood streets and into a stream downhill from the factory. And some was moved around town intentionally — carried from the mill to fill in people’s yards and driveways. Longtime resident Marvin Brandon knows that firsthand.
“They could go over and get the asbestos, put it in the trunk of the car, bring it home, spread it out on their driveways and crush it up, just break it up, or drive over it to break it up. Because I remember my dad doing it several times,” Brandon said.
Asbestos also may have been used to help fill in what’s now the town-owned Roosevelt Wilson Park, off Griffith Street. Sections of the park these days are surrounded by orange fencing and warning signs while the town awaits an EPA cleanup.
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Photo Credit: David Boraks/WFAE

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Newark and New Jersey officials reach settlement in yearslong lawsuit over lead contamination of city drinking water

The city of Newark, New Jersey, resolved yearslong litigation Tuesday in connection to its water crisis, in which city drinking water was contaminated with illegally high levels of lead.

Officials from the city and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) reached an agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Newark Education Workers Caucus, which sued city and state officials in June 2018 for ongoing violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, including their failure to address the lead crisis on a timely basis.
A New Jersey federal judge signed an order Tuesday approving the settlement.
Around the time the lawsuit was filed, quality reports published by the city found drinking water in parts of Newark to be unsafe for 18 months. In 2018, according to the city’s water quality report, lead levels at several sites were above 47 parts per billion; federal EPA guidelines say lead levels should fall below 15 parts per billion.
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Photo Credit: CNN
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Biden to place environmental justice at center of sweeping climate plan

President Biden made tackling America’s persistent racial and economic disparities a central part of his plan to combat climate change Wednesday, prioritizing environmental justice for the first time in a generation.

As part of an unprecedented push to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and create new jobs as the United States shifts toward cleaner energy, Biden directed agencies across the federal government to invest in low-income and minority communities that have traditionally borne the brunt of pollution.

“Lifting up these communities makes us all stronger as a nation and increases the health of everybody,” Biden said.

Biden signed an executive order establishing a White House interagency council on environmental justice, create an office of health and climate equity at the Health and Human Services Department, and form a separate environmental justice office at the Justice Department. The order also directs the government to spend 40 percent of its sustainability investments on disadvantaged communities.

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Photo Credit: David J. Phillip/AP