Read the story of William Sanjour, who blew the whistle on the EPA and throughout his career.
How long does it take to fight the good fight? How long can one stand in the arena and continue the battle? For some whistleblowers, it can be decades, and William Sanjour is a case in point. For half his life, he has been a whistleblower and a whistleblower advocate. He was the point man in a court case that reverberates to this day, and he outsmarted many people who tried desperately to silence him.
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Category: News Archive
When Joe Biden delivered his first speech as president-elect two weeks ago, he focused on his mandate to “marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.” Climate change was high on that list. After another year of unprecedented climate disasters, Biden will enter office with the most ambitious plans of any incoming president to wean our country off fossil fuels.
To deliver on his promises of “getting climate under control,” Biden will need to follow the prevailing science that suggests the United States achieve about a 45 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas pollution by 2030. He can’t afford to wade through years of congressional gridlock to get there. Instead, he will have to exploit the broad powers of the executive branch, using existing law to get as close as possible to the target.
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Photo credit: C-Span, Zuma
When it comes to letting Reserve Management Group close its General Iron plant on the North Side and move the metal-shredding operations to the Southeast Side, we understand that Mayor Lori Lightfoot has a problem. She has to worry about keeping businesses in the city. Jobs and tax revenues are at stake.
But because this is Chicago, and because General Iron has shown its operations continue to pollute the city’s air, she also has to take environmental justice into account when considering this move. Though not confined to Chicago, environmental injustice has been endemic here. Systemic racism, in the form of disinvestment in neighborhoods where people of color live, leaves those communities less able to resist when dirty industry decides to move in.
Photo credit: E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune
Donald Trump is using the dying embers of his US presidency to hastily push through a procession of environmental protection rollbacks that critics claim will cement his legacy as an unusually destructive force against the natural world.
Trump has yet to acknowledge his election loss to president-elect Joe Biden but his administration has been busily finishing off a cavalcade of regulatory moves to lock in more oil and gas drilling, loosened protections for wildlife and lax air pollution standards before the Democrat enters the White House on 20 January.
Trump has yet to acknowledge his election loss to president-elect Joe Biden but his administration has been busily finishing off a cavalcade of regulatory moves to lock in more oil and gas drilling, loosened protections for wildlife and lax air pollution standards before the Democrat enters the White House on 20 January.
Photo credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Environmental justice has found its way into President-elect Joe Biden’s transition plan as a “key consideration” for policy-making, and advocates are cautiously optimistic. And though a divided Congress is likely, they suspect an infrastructure bill — long promised but never delivered under the Trump administration — is a potential avenue for investing in communities that have borne the brunt of pollution and environmental racism.
These “frontline” communities, whose populations are predominantly Black or other people of color, are those that experience the first and worst consequences of climate change and other environmental problems.
The new administration’s ability to allocate 40 percent of clean energy and infrastructure investment benefits to these communities, as Biden called for in his campaign plan, will likely depend on whether Republicans retain control of the Senate following two Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia. Even with the potentially split legislature, however, those who have worked alongside Biden’s campaign or in previous administrations are convinced that the president-elect’s best chance to invest in environmental justice is through targeted infrastructure spending.
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Photo credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Nov. 16, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced the first round of grantees from his “Earth Fund,” which has committed to ultimately channel $10 billion to climate change-related causes and groups. In this first crop, 16 organizations will receive a total of $791 million, making Bezos the world’s biggest backer of climate activism. In one day, he single-handedly boosted the total amount of climate-related philanthropic funding available in the US by around 11%.
But the list of recipients is raising some objections—both because of its potential to greenwash Amazon’s own climate accountability, and because it significantly favors well-funded Beltway institutions over grassroots groups that arguably need the money more.
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Photo credit: Reuters / Francis Mascarenhas
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the selection of the California Office of Planning and Research’s Strategic Growth Council to receive $200,000 for trainings to communities to address air quality and COVID-19 – the respiratory disease shown to disproportionately impact individuals exposed to higher levels of air pollution.
“EPA is working to improve the environment and public health conditions of low-income and minority communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the COVD-19 pandemic,” said EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator John Busterud. This grant assistance will provide meaningful tools for those Californians in the greatest of need.”
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The 2020 hurricane season, which brought destructive storms from Central America to the Gulf Coast of the United States and beyond, has proved to be one for the record books.
The storms began before the hurricane season officially kicked off, with the formation of Tropical Storm Albert in mid-May, two weeks before the official start of the Atlantic season on June 1.
In August, midway through the six-month season, scientists upgraded their outlook to say 2020 would be “one of the most active seasons,” and said they expected up to 25 named storms by the time it was over. By November, even that upgraded expectation was exceeded: There have now been 30 named storms — 13 of them hurricanes — breaking a record set in 2005, when 28 storms grew strong enough to be named. Fifteen that year became hurricanes.
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Photo credit: Marco Bello/Reuters
The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies in a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
That sets up a potential sale of leases just before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has opposed drilling in the refuge, to try to reverse them after the fact.
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Photo credit: Christopher Miller for The New York Times
President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will pay more attention than the Trump administration to the concerns of people with higher-than-average chemical exposures as it decides whether those chemicals should be regulated, attorneys said.
In last month’s final presidential debate, Biden described the health fears faced by “frontline” communities—generally those in poor areas with a predominantly minority population that live near oil refineries and chemical manufacturers.
“It matters how you keep them safe,” he said. “You impose restrictions on the pollution.”
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Photo credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images