The Trump administration’s new Dirty Water Rule seeks to strip the Clean Water Act’s protections from an overwhelming number of our waterways and return our water to levels of pollution we last saw before the Clean Water Act’s enactment in 1972.
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CLEAN WATER IS essential for life, but most people in the developed world don’t think much about the water they use for drinking, food preparation, and sanitation. In developing nations, however, the search for safe drinking water can be a daily crisis. Millions of people die each year, most of them children, from largely preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation.
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In what environmentalists hope is a major shift in state energy policy, Governor Larry Hogan voted to reject a permit necessary for a fracked-gas pipeline known as the “Potomac Pipeline.” During the Maryland Board of Public Works’ semi-monthly meeting, January 2nd Hogan and the other members of the board unanimously rejected a right-of-way easement for the project, which is proposed by a subsidiary of notorious energy company TransCanada.
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Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.
Natural disasters cost the world $155 billion this year, and several of them struck the United States particularly hard. Michael and Florence, the California wildfires and a volcanic eruption in Hawaii are all on that list, according to the Zurich-based reinsurance company Swiss Re. But it doesn’t match what happened in 2017. That was the costliest weather year in U.S. history, with more than $300 billion in damage, Woods Hole Research Center senior scientist Jennifer Francis said in an essay published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Read More.
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In 1978, Lois Gibbs was a young mother with a child in a school that was found to be built over a toxic chemical waste dump site. Lois gained international attention and incredible momentum in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as she led the fight for environmental justice for children and families affected by the environmental disaster identified with the neighborhood where it occurred, Love Canal.
“I was waiting on someone to knock on my door and tell me what to do, to explain how I could help,” says Lois of the early days of revelations about the infamous Love Canal dump.
“But no one ever came to my door. So I did something on my own.”
Her persistent activism led to passage of the “Superfund” toxic waste site cleanup legislation.
Lois went on to found the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which has helped more than 10,000 grassroots organizations with technical, organizational or environmental education. She appears in the 2018 HBO movie Atomic Homeland and was named a “top environmentalist of the past century” by Newsweek magazine. She also has been honored with a Heinz Award and the Goldman Prize for her groundbreaking environmental work.
On this 40th anniversary of the Love Canal tragedy, Lois shares how she dealt with being called “a hysterical mother with a sickly child.” She explains the moment she most clearly saw democracy at its best, and the key to success for today’s environmental activists.
“Average people and the average community can change the world,” Lois says.
Hear how she did it, and how you can, too, on this episode of “We Can Be.”
In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century. The trade-offs, while often out of public view, are real — frighteningly so, for some people — imperiling progress in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink, and in some cases upending the very relationship with the environment around us. Mr. Trump enthusiastically promotes the changes as creating jobs, freeing business from the shackles of government and helping the economy grow. Read more NYT.
Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson, and U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan unveiled the Trump Administration’s Federal Lead Action Plan to Reduce Childhood Lead Exposures and Associated Health Impacts (Lead Action Plan). <Read more.>
A water treatment plant in Tucson is replacing more than 56 tons of activated carbon to address newly-discovered perfluorinated compound contamination from the nearby Superfund site. “The fact that we have a treatment plant there at all is entirely driven by the Superfund site,” said Tim Thomure, director of Tucson Water.
The 10-square-mile Tucson International Airport site was designed as a Superfund in 1983. Superfund sites are considered some of the most contaminated places in the county. The water treatment plant was set up 11 years later to address the groundwater contamination. “The main process that we use is designed to remove TCE and 1,4 dioxane,” Thomure said. But with the recent discovery of perfluorinated compound contamination, the plant decided updates were needed to have specific management of perfluorinated compounds and other carcinogenic contaminants.
Excitement is building among environmentalists as Washington prepares for the arrival of new lawmakers elected by the #PeoplesWave. Led by New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, these insurgents promise to infuse new energy into the movement for climate justice.
By Ben Ben Ishibashi, People’s Action Network
Ocasio-Cortez, through a series of high-profile public protests and statements, has focused the minds and hearts of activists, and laid down a gauntlet for the Democratic Party.
Now is the time, she says, for a Green New Deal that confronts climate change head-on with bold solutions that can fundamentally alter our nation’s course on both the environment and rising income inequality through a real commitment to renewable energy.
Last month, she led over a thousand young people in three simultaneous sit-ins at Democratic leadership offices on Capitol Hill to demand action on climate change.
“This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation,” she said.
36 members of Congress have already joined her call to action. On Friday, more than 300 local officials signed an open letter of support, adding to the thousands of young people from the Sunrise Movement who helped coordinate the Capitol Hill protests.
But what exactly is a Green New Deal? More importantly, what should it be?
At People’s Action, we often find ourselves at the front lines with those most affected by environmental injustice. We know that a new energy economy must go far beyond simply replacing fossil fuels.
We welcome this new influx of excitement and resources to the fight for environmental justice. We invite new lawmakers to join us in working to pass and implement policies that address our needs for a just and equitable energy transition – to an economy that is not only 100 percent renewable, but also 100 percent just: an economy that puts those most affected by our climate crisis, people of color and the working class, at the center of our new economy.
At present, the Green New Deal is a proposal – a statement of intent, really – to create a Select House Committee with House members who have never taken money from the fossil-fuels industry. This committee will draft legislative language for the Green New Deal by March 1, 2020.
Goals include a dramatic expansion of renewable power to meet 100 percent of national power demand through renewable sources, upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, agricultural transportation and other industries, and making the U.S. a global leader in the creation and export of “green” technology, industry, expertise, products and services.
In order to be 100 Percent Just, any Green New Deal must include truly renewable fuels, democratizing the grid, and an end to “sacrifice zones” where Black and Brown communities disproportionately bear the human costs of dirty energy extraction.
Good green jobs must be created both for communities that have survived decades of disinvestment, as well as those communities that now depend on extraction.
We have an opportunity – indeed, an obligation – to transform our energy economy so we can not just meet the challenges of climate change, but also transform our economy overall to put people and planet before profits.
A 100 Percent Just Green New Deal goes far beyond good intentions: it frames justice and equity as necessary components that make this project strategically possible. It mandates that dirty energy pollution end by the earliest date, spelling out clearly and intentionally how this happens.
It must include a plan for investment and reparations for communities that have been sacrificed on the altar of polluter profits. And this commitment to equity must be part of the structure of the plan – from the very first resolution, establishing the first House Select Committee, all the way through to final bill language and commitment to follow through with jobs, training, accessibility and investment for working class people and communities of color.
This means a 100% Just Green New Deal not only mandates that we stop burning fossil fuel for energy by 2030, but that we fully end the extraction fossil fuels and other forms of dirty energy by 2025, and do so in a way that doesn’t leave extraction workers or their communities in the lurch.
A 100% Just Green New Deal will mandate that we phase out fossil fuel energy, but will also require that that this starts with the closure and reclamation of the dirtiest power plants, located in the communities most overburdened by pollution.
We must commit to and adopt the principle that the residents of sacrifice zones that have most borne and bear the burdens of dirty energy now become the first to receive benefits of the new, democratic and non-extractive economy.
A 100% Just Green New Deal doesn’t just offer a blanket promise of good green jobs and training for everyone, it will ensure that jobs training programs and investments in job creation are targeted and available first to the communities that need them most.
The Green New Deal, in its current form, aspires to some of these things, but not all of them. We know this is a work in progress, and welcome this influx of new energy, but we know there is much more work to be done.
For the United States is to position itself globally as a green technology leader, we must push for the kinds of broader restructuring of international trade and global economic structures that will lay the ground for a truly equitable, just and transformative global economy.
Finally, any 100% Just Green New Deal must include the voices of those who are directly impacted. The people who are closest to the problems of sacrifice zones, the consequences of extractive industries and the private monopoly control of energy, must be invited into the process of drafting and proposing solutions that flesh out this bold new framework.
Their voices must be heard, and it is up to our new lawmakers to put their vision, needs and priorities at the heart of this exciting new process from its beginning through to the end.
A panel of federal judges has rejected permits for the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline to cross two national forests and the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, finding that the U.S. Forest Service “abdicated its responsibility” and kowtowed to private industry in approving the project. <Read more>