Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), and Tom Carper (D-Delaware) announced the formation of an environmental justice caucus on Monday. Read more here.
Tag: cancer
A portion of Libby’s asbestos cleanup has been completed, with the EPA removing that area from the list of federal Superfund sites. Read more here.
CHEJ was involved in three of the United States field Tribunals in Athens and Youngstown, Ohio and in Charlottesville, VA. Lois Marie Gibbs served as a Juror in all three field Tribunals. These field hearings provided the basic information for the large Tribunal held in Oregon. This is an incredible victory which provides yet a new tool in the tool box for communities to fight back against Fracking.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal released its Advisory Opinion, recommending a worldwide ban on hydraulic fracturing, the extreme oil and gas extraction technique known as ‘fracking.’ The Tribunal found that the materials, and infrastructure of fracking inherently and necessarily violate human rights. The specific rights violated include the rights to life, to water, to full information and participation, and especially the rights of indigenous people, women and children. Governments have an affirmative obligation to protect the rights of their citizens, according to internationally recognized human-rights Covenants and Declarations. When governments fail to adequately regulate harmful oil and gas industry practices, they fail to meet their human rights obligations. And when governments fail to take measures to prevent the advance of climate change and its impacts on the rights to life, liberty, and security, they are failing to meet their internationally recognized human-rights obligations. Widespread government failures have created a global “axis of betrayal,” according to the international court, in which governments and fossil-fuel industries collude – at great cost to people and the planet – in human-rights violations to their mutual profit.
The Special Session was conducted for five days in May of 2018. Four Preliminary tribunals had been conducted in the months prior to the Plenary hearings. The Pre-tribunals included rich oral testimony from Australia, the US states of Ohio and Virginia, and other places, supporting documentation, and findings from those Pre-tribunal’s local judges. All materials and reports from those Pre-tribunal hearings, all the Plenary session’s oral testimony and arguments, all Plenary session reports, amicus curiae briefs and full documentation are available, in both video and text formats, on the website for the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. The full text of the Opinion is attached. It is also available on the website for the PPT Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change and on the Jurisprudence page of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal website at their headquarters in Rome.
Deep gratitude to all who have taken this long journey with us to get this opinion finalized, and contributed in big and small ways along the way! Now the work of getting these important findings out to the world begins….
Peace and Blessings,
~Simona
Simona L. Perry, PhD
Cell 240 599 6655
Google Phone USA +1 912 289 1158
Harris County has sued Intercontinental Terminals Co. for failing to prevent a massive chemical fire that burned for more than 60 hours last week and spewed an unknown volume of hazardous chemicals into the air and nearby waterways. Read more …
Why? Recent national studies show that flood buyout monies benefit whiter communities. Other reports reveal that federal disaster recovery dollars benefit higher-income people and how, after a disaster, income inequality is exacerbated and the gaps between the haves and the have-nots grows wider. Read more.
Environmental groups and Louisiana residents of a rural, majority-black area on the Mississippi River filed a records request Monday seeking answers to why St. James Parish officials “basically changed the black district into the petrochemical district.”
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The NRDC hopes its new research into municipal pollution can help organizers push for sound, equitable policy.
Read more.
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.
The Tonawanda Coke plant near Buffalo, NY, closed its doors this past Sunday marking a huge victory for the local residents who have fought for years to shut down the facility. Read more here.
“It’s sending the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit,” Vitti said then. “And that hurts my heart and it angers me and it frustrates me that I can’t fix it right now.”Nikolai Vitti, is the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Read more.